How Uberflip segmented verticals to find the right users for their product

How many times in your life do you come up with a great idea, one that you can be proud and excited to show people?

Today’s guest had that. He was excited about it and he started showing it to people, but the feedback that he got helped him realize, “Wait, this is a cool idea, but it’s not a great business.”

So then he and his cofounder asked themselves an important question, one that changed everything for them, one you’ve seen me talk about in many of these interviews here on Mixergy. The question was, “What’s the pain that our users have that we can create software to solve?”

So they started talking to users. In fact, they segmented their users and you’ll find out why. Once they started talking to different segments of users, they hit on it–an idea that led to a company called Uberflip.

Randy Frisch is the cofounder of that company. Uberflip is a CMS for content marketing. I’ll explain what that really means in this interview.

Randy Frisch

Randy Frisch

Uberflip

Randy Frisch is the co-founder at Uberflip which is a CMS for content marketing.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the fast-talking founder of Mixergy.com. I know, I need to slow down my intros. Mixergy, of course, is the home of the ambitious upstart.

Get this. You’re about to meet a guy who started out with a really cool idea. How many times in your life do you come up with a great, cool idea, one that you can be proud and excited about and waiting to show people? He had that. And he was excited about it and he started showing it around to people, but the feedback that he got helped him realize, “Wait, this is a cool idea, but it’s not a great business.”

So then he and his cofounder asked themselves an important question, one that changed everything for them, one you’ve seen me talk about in all these–not all, many of these interviews here on Mixergy. It changed things for a lot of other companies. The question was, “What’s the pain that our users have that we can create software to solve?”

And they went back and they asked themselves that and then they realized asking yourself that is not really the way to go. So they started talking to users. In fact, they segmented their users and we’ll ask him why. They started talking to different segments of users and then they hit on it–an idea that led to a company called Uberflip.

Randy Frisch is the cofounder of that company. Uberflip is a CMS for content marketing. Now, I hate these three letter things like CMS. Let me tell you what it means. Imagine you have a lot of great content and you want to show it, like a video or text and you don’t just want to throw it up on YouTube and have YouTube’s crazy wrapper on it. You don’t want to just put the PDF up on the site and hope that people can see it. You want to make it look nice.

So you go to Uberflip and what Uberflip will do is turn that PDF into something that feels like a magazine, something that’s easy to flip through and a little more pleasurable or take that YouTube video that you put and embed it in a way that looks nice and presentable to your audience. That’s the way it is in a nutshell. We’re going to talk more to Randy about how he built his company, talk to him about how he found his users’ pain and talk to him more about what makes Uberflip so incredible. I know I’ve understated it, Randy.

But I should also say that this interview is sponsored by two incredible companies. The first is a scheduling calendar that will allow you to schedule with as many people as you want. It’s called Acuity Scheduling. I’ll tell you more about them later. And the second is a hosting company. If you hate your hosting company, if you want your website to stay up, if you want the phone number of your hosting company for when you have trouble, you’ve got to check out HostGator. I’ll tell you more about them later.

First I’ve got to meet Randy. Randy, good to have you here.

Randy: Great to be here, Andrew. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Andrew: You and Yoav considered yourself dating. What did it mean when you guys were introduced and you considered yourselves dating?

Randy: Yeah. You alluded to some of Yoav’s past. He had built some amazing technology and was looking for fits in market but was also looking for someone who enjoyed doing that. On my side, I was really looking to get into the technology space. What I had done before had nothing to do with that. I had been in other businesses before and I knew fit was really important. If I wanted to build something big, I didn’t want to go at it alone. Yoav was in the same shoes. If Yoav was going to go down that path, he wanted someone who he’d spend a lot of time with and so did I.

So, what we did is we spent about three months together in some shared office space really just kind of hacking away at the groundwork technology he had to say, “What’s a market that would work really well and can we see eye to eye?”

Andrew: What’s the technology that you had that was so good you wanted to keep having conversations about it?

Randy: Yeah. That was a small part of what we do today, which at that point was the whole business. That was the idea of how do we take a PDF and make it into a better experience? The easiest analogy–I’m a big storyteller, so the story I always used to tell to get people to understand it was why are we really sending out PDFs? When you challenged yourself on that, you needed something that you could understand in parallel.

So, the example I would give was, “Would we ever attach a video, a 50 megabyte file to an email we were going to send out, ask someone to download that video, open it up in QuickTime or some sort of media player like Windows Media Player–I wouldn’t even have to go further than that. People would chuckle and they’d say, “Of course I wouldn’t do that. I would send out a YouTube video.” I’d say, “Well, of course you would because you’d want insights. You’d want to know how far they made it into that video.

When I took that story back to a document like a PDF and said, “Why are you making all those mistakes with a document? Why are you making people attach a big bulky file, download it, open it up in Adobe reader, have no insights?” They got the idea. It was this big problem.

Andrew: Actually, that was the original idea. Was it? Or was this a later version of that idea?

Randy: That was the beginning of realizing that we could take this problem that we were at that time really focusing on media publishers with and take it to other segments.

Andrew: So, before that–here’s how I understand it. Tell me if I’m wrong. You had this idea of taking a PDF, not forcing people to download it, not forcing them to scroll the way they might through a webpage, but making it more of a flipping experience, like a real magazine, but online. Am I right?

Randy: Absolutely. That was the original.

Andrew: That was the idea that–tell me if I’m wrong in forcing your story into this–what I understand is that that had a purpose but when you took it to venture capitalists, they said, “This thing is not big enough. We want you to think a little bit bigger.” Am I right?

Randy: Absolutely. There were a lot of reasons. In the moment, obviously you’ve got your big idea, you’re stuck on it. But when you actually get some ideas from VCs, a lot of them are in the market. They’ve got a good feel of what’s going on. They were pointing to a lot of problems with our model, such as who would own it one day, could it stand alone? We took that feedback to heart. This was, in a way, our first go. We realized that there were some holes in that, but we knew that the technology had legs. To your point, it was just, “Where could we use that?

Andrew: Okay. And when you go back and look at it, what do you think was missing from it, this version pre the big change where you’re starting to really get into your customers’ heads? What was missing from it?

Randy: I think we were looking more at the moment as opposed to where an industry was going. People did want a better way to engage in that format of content. It didn’t really look at where that industry was going. Was that industry going down the path that we could support or was it going to become much more complex, different formats. This was the media publishing industry. I still don’t think that industry knows where it’s going today. This is about five years ago.

Andrew: I see. You’re saying, “Look, we’re going to take all the content that used to be in magazines and was flappable and nice and presentable and we’re going to make it into not what they do now, which is a website, but a nice package that’s easy to view, that’s fun to flip through.” But they at the time were thinking more about the iPad experience, with videos, with their own app and all that stuff.

Randy: Absolutely.

Andrew: I see. That’s the challenge where their future as they envisioned it was different from your future as you envisioned it and frankly, they never got to where they envisioned.

Randy: Absolutely. I’m no longer in any way an expert on that industry, but we’ve seen it evolve so much. Just as a consumer, I’ve seen it evolve in terms of the App Store being the place you went to find content, to the Apple Newsstand, which later–I don’t think anything came of it and now I heard there’s this new Apple News app that I’m yet to open on my iPhone.

Andrew: I know.

Randy: There’s definitely an opportunity there. Someone’s got to disrupt it. I think it came back to the idea that our passion wasn’t in that industry. We weren’t really big on media agencies and media publishers. I didn’t enjoy, to be honest, selling to those guys. It was a tricky sale.

Andrew: I kind of get the feeling that you started out going after media because they just needed this. They needed a better look. You had a better look. You weren’t thinking so much about what they wanted and where their heads were.

Randy: You know, I think it was that we had a piece of technology that we knew they wanted it in the moment, so why not go after it? But we didn’t really think about what that path was. It was only when we started to think about potential paths and potential other users for that technology that I remember this whiteboard. We were sharing an office. It was three of us in this office. I remember this whiteboard where I had five different industries where I thought they could use the solution. As much as we were generating revenue from the media publishers, all I could think about were some of the other ones.

Andrew: Who were some of the other ones that you had?

Randy: Some of the other ones, looking back–I don’t have a photographic memory, but that whiteboard I can fully envision. There was accounting. There were a lot of opportunities in financial documents and things like that that we looked at. Legal documents was a whole other area that we got excited about.

But we kept coming back to marketers. I don’t know if it was the opportunity or the opportunity maybe as I alluded to before more so paired with passion. I went to school wanting to be a marketer, taking marketing courses. My first job was in marketing. Yoav, on a very parallel mindset, was all about designing for the web. He had built a lot of products to just simplify really complex things, which is something that he always said. Marketers needed an easier way to do it.

Andrew: So, when you created these groups of people and you put it up on the whiteboard, did you start calling them up and having conversations with people in each of those groups or were you just thinking to yourselves?

Randy: So, I started with some conversations absolutely. I went out and I remember some people I met under the legal framework who gave some good advice. But one of the things that we realized quickly was with the two of us there, we weren’t going to be able to validate a couple of these industries as quickly as we wanted.

That’s kind of where the dating that we started off–we got to the point where, “If we’re going to add people to the team, we can’t date anymore.” It’s kind of like having kids. You’re going to get to that point. You’re going to get serious. You’re going to bring other people on. They’re going to be dependent on you. My biggest fear as an entrepreneur is the responsibility to others. That’s what keeps me up at night.

So, we said, “Listen, if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to put it some of our own money,” which we later did, “We’ve got to formalize this relationship.” So, that’s when we started to work more closely together. We put some money in back to that point in terms of that list, the first few hires we had were some sales people who were going to take the solution we had, kind of put lipstick on a pig in some cases and dress it up for different industries and say like, “I’ve got this solution. Will it work for you?”

I think we started to see the most engagement from marketers, which were, at that point, a very small set of our users to date, but when we started to talk about things like eBooks and we started to talk about things like brochures and catalogs, to a degree, more so some of the whitepaper content, people started to get really excited, saying, “I could use a lot of that feedback and those metrics. I could use better distribution channels for some of this content when it comes to social media. So, there started to be some interest in what we had.

Andrew: Interesting. So, it wasn’t that you talked to them first, understood their problem, went back and retooled the software and presented it to them. It was you had the software. You said, “I think this could work for these five industries. Let’s get some sales people to go and try to sell and see which is most excited and then we’ll zoom in on them.”

Randy: Absolutely.

Andrew: That was the second one.

Randy: Exactly. I guess I’m not trying to be cliché, but it was kind of that lean mindset. Let’s not build this whole thing and then take it to this market and see if we were right. Let’s just put it out there. Let’s create some landing pages, edit some email copy, change the pitch of what these guys are going to say on the phone. There were little things that we could do, such as pricing packages that we were able to just call the pricing package something different. It was the exact same offering. But by calling the pricing package something different, I remember we were able to better relate to people that we had the right solution.

Andrew: Give me an example.

Randy: So, back then we were media-focused out of the gate. So, our packages talked about e-pub documents or something like that was the vocabulary. I can’t remember exactly what we called it. But then we created this other package called Firmdox. Firmdox was more as we were kind of testing with legal and financial accounting. It was designed to provide this level of trust in things like that. Whereas with marketers, we went with eBook. We talked about eBooks and how many eBooks did you get. It’s really just framing the conversation for a better outcome.

Eventually, as we went deeper and deeper in this marketing, the big problem we had was we had the wrong brand. It was in 2012, late 2011, but 2012 that we ultimately branded the company Uberflip so that it still gave us a little bit of flexibility as a brand but it actually allowed us to speak more to a marketer, who was more curious about that.

Andrew: Previously the company was called Mygazines?

Randy: Yeah, it was previously called Mygazines, which was a fun brand in itself.

Andrew: What do you mean?

Randy: Well, it played off the media publisher in a fun way. But I’m just remembering back now to those times where we were trying to position ourselves and we’d have to start the call, “I’m calling from this company, but we have nothing to do with magazines. Here’s what we can do for you.” So, eventually you get to that point where you don’t want to rebrand at all, let alone more than once. So, you’ve got to really kind of play that properly.

Andrew: Mygazines existed for two years before you joined up according to my research.

Randy: Yeah. Absolutely. That was kind of the technology that Yoav got left with after a more original venture that had a whole bunch of stories on its own. Yoav would be a great interview on his own with you.

Andrew: I’d love to. It seems like he created–was it like the Napster of magazines?

Randy: Exactly.

Andrew: Anyone could upload a magazine to it.

Randy: Exactly. It was upload that magazine, create your own custom magazine. There’s a lot of technology out there today that sounds a lot like this in terms of where they’ve gone. They had a huge spike of engagement, but as I mentioned, ran into some legal challenges and didn’t have the backings of the YouTubes of the world that we’ve seen get through those challenges in the past and that resulted in that founding group kind of scattering and Yoav stuck with it, stuck with the technology, altered it to be less of an end user consumer play, more of a B2B play and by building in those tools, building in those analytics, it gave us the opportunity to pivot the way we did that was very B2B-focused.

Andrew: Why didn’t you guys–once you decided to change course, why didn’t you say, “Let’s pick one of these five different categories that we have up on our board and create marketing that fits just for that? So, we’re either going to be Firmdox or we’re going to be eBooks, but we’re not going to be both of those and three other things at once?”

Randy: Yeah. For clarity, we didn’t do it for long. I would say that we kind of played those different segments for four to six months, some of them we asked early on. I remember education was one that we had a lot of opportunity with being PDFs, but very quickly we realized, “We’re not going after education.” That was a beast. It was really hard to sell into. We were able to kind of eliminate that.

So, I think to be completely honest, I think it was a lack of experience on our end and not wanting to pick one path and knowing that we could accomplish it by narrowing that we had that opportunity to jump to right out of the gate.

Andrew: If you could do it differently, how would you do it instead, the niche part of it? Would you pick up front? Would you start making phone calls? It seems like you’re happy with how things turned out.

Randy: I’m happy with how things turned out. It’s so easy to look back and jump to–I think I come back to the fact that we landed on the one that we were most passionate about. That’s not to say that we couldn’t have gone into one of these other verticals and had a ton of success. The roadmap of what we would need to build out to accommodate those users would have been very different.

But I think we just naturally got pulled to the solutions that excited us. The example I always talk about as we were starting to build what we did was PowerPoint. I was that marketer even in university who looked like the most impressive student only because I could make a PowerPoint do amazing things, right? You remember those presentations where it felt like it was a video or something like that.

Andrew: Yeah.

Randy: I had no coding skills. I had no design skills. I couldn’t even use Photoshop, let alone Flash or anything like that. But I was able to talk this solution that was built for me as that marketing hungry creative guy and make amazing things happen. I was like–when I played with the solution we had, I was like, “This is amazing what I can do. Put this in the hands of a marketer, they’re going to have a blast.”

They only get that asset out of the fact. There are so many interactive elements that we could take into account. Later on as we talk to customers to find out more about their challenges, we started to hear more of those problems that marketers had is they didn’t have that user-friendly solution to do what they needed to do on a day to day basis.

Andrew: Okay. So, you guys started to build those.

Randy: Yeah. We didn’t build it right away. I remember this survey. We did a survey. So, we went to the sub-segment of users that we had that were marketers and we said, “If we were to build one thing for you in the next year, what would it be?” We used Survey Monkey, I believe, or something of that sort.

The feedback that came back was we were creating all these individual content assets. We called them flipbooks. They said, “We don’t really have a place to store all of them.” So, they came back to us with that. We kind of realized we could whip that up in like no time. At this point, as you alluded to, we had spoken to VCs. They had pushed us to think bigger, think about a really big problem. We said, “That’s a good problem. But we can fix that too easily, which means someone else will fix it. People will fix it themselves.”

So, we said, “If we did this, what else would you want that page to look like?” So, we got feedback that it would be great to have my latest blog post on there. It would be great to have a link to the latest videos, perhaps even a widget with our latest tweets. So, we kind of had our head up our ass, as I like to say, the first vision of this new idea that we had had the flipbook, the PDF in the center of the page and the rest of it was kind of like little widgets surrounding it on the outside.

So, naturally, you think about your solution as being gold and we’ll tack on all this other stuff. That sat on a wireframe for maybe a day and a half before we started to realize, “Maybe the document isn’t always the most important asset.” The fact that they’re telling us that they need all these other links on the page too, like where are those links living? The more we probed with people, we started to hear that they had this same problem for every format of their content.

Ultimately what it came down to was content was basically living in the silos, as we call them today. You think about it, you go to a lot of companies’ websites and you see that. We get to a company’s site and we get there and we look for information and we have this one tab called the blog, right? Format from the 1990s that’s still amazing today, but it’s long-form content.

Now, if we want to find videos, they probably don’t live under the blog in most cases. They live under another tab, maybe under a resource tab or something like that called webinars or videos or maybe a podcast like this. But when we thought about it, what people were telling is, is they wanted to join everything together. They didn’t want it to be organized by format because who comes to a website and says, “I’m going to learn what you guys do by watching videos or by looking at infographics.

Andrew: Okay.

Randy: No. You say, “I’ve got this problem. How can you as a company solve it for me?” So, what we started to realize was people were just kind of dipping their toes into the modern day buzzword of personalization. “How do I start to tell better stories, better paths?” That really allowed us to have a better vision on what we wanted to accomplish.

Andrew: Let me clarify that in a moment. But first, I should do a sponsorship message for my sponsor, which is called Acuity Scheduling. What do you guys charge for your product?

Randy: It really depends. Our solution starts at about $1,200 a month.

Andrew: And you want people to call you for a demo, right?

Randy: We want to get them on the phone. I know where you’re going with this. This is a huge challenge and these solutions are amazing.

Andrew: Let me explain Acuity Scheduling to you because you’ve never heard of it before. You tell me if you have any questions. I’ll tell it to you the way I would someone in my audience. That way you can ask any questions that would come to them. So, you’ve got an expensive product. People don’t just want to sign up and trust all their data to it. They want to talk a person and ask some questions and see if it really makes sense for them.

They click the demo button on your site. Here’s where Acuity comes in. You can take the calendars of all your different sales people. Maybe have one on the East Coast who works earlier in the day and one on the West Coast who’s available later in the day. Maybe you have someone who’s available on weekends and just loves to talk on the phone over the weekend.

You take all their calendars and you put it into Acuity Scheduling. You also want to know some questions, like all their availabilities and put into Acuity Scheduling. You also want to know a few things before you get on the phone with someone, like what’s the company they’re with. You might want to know how many people are at the company. You might want to see some of their content. So, you have a list of questions. Well, you can pop those into Acuity Scheduling too.

What you have on the outside after you do that is one embed code that you can put onto your site where after somebody clicks a button that says, “Request a demo,” they can see the availability of all your different sales people together. They pick the time that makes sense for them. Then that goes onto the calendar of the person who happens to be available at that time, on the calendar with answers to the important questions that you need, with their name, with their company name, with their phone number, etc.

And because it’s Acuity Scheduling, what they do is they connect with so much different software. I’ve never seen another calendar software that has more integrations. You can also say, “Let’s add them to our CRM.” So, you get that person’s contact information, you add them to your CRM and say, “Maybe what we want to do is send some emails ahead of time to prep them for the call. Maybe we want to send some emails afterwards to just follow up with some of the things that we know are important.”

Acuity will let you plug in to your email system, let you plug in to your contact management system, etc. Maybe you want to send them a text message ahead of time because you find that people are going to show up if you send them a text message. Acuity will do that.

All right. Where am I so far? What do you think?

Randy: I’m already sold. The most precious thing that any of us have these days in a startup or large company, for that matter, is time. Finding time in the day is impossible. I’ll give you a great example. Today I had someone who last-minute yesterday wanted to meet with me. I actually wanted to meet with them from outside the company. He shot me an email, I guess last night, suggesting a time.

By the time I got into the office this morning, I didn’t sit down until like 3:00 in the afternoon. So, he’s wondering if we’re meeting at 4:00 or not. I didn’t see the email. He eventually phoned me and got me and I said, “We’ll make time at 3:30. Come on in.”

If I could have just linked him to my calendar in that fashion or had a part of my signature or something of that sort, first of all I get that meeting that’s important to me, I respect his time more. I’ve had so many times where I’ve been in sales roles myself, even in our own company, where if you can’t nail down that meeting on the first go, the frustration of trying to find it, you almost sometimes give up. You almost start to say, “Is it worth it?”

Andrew: Yeah. I’ve given up.

Randy: “Do I really want to try this hard to make this happen?”

Andrew: Right. I have all these other things and I’m going to go back and forth with you? I think I’m just going to email you and say, “Let’s try back when the schedule is lighter,” which means, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to talk to you.”

Randy: Exactly.

Andrew: Here’s another issue. So you can create, by the way, a simple calendar just for yourself that would be Uberflip.com/RandyCalendar or Uberflip.com/Randy and people can book themselves with you. But imagine you start to see that people over and over again ask you the same question, like “What were you doing? Where’d you go to school? What is Uberflip?”

You can also program in an email that goes ahead of time to them that says, “By the way, you might want to see this great example of how Uberflip and here’s my LinkedIn profile in case you want to look up what I did before and if you want to friend me on Facebook, here’s the way to do it.” Whatever it is that you want to do, you can do all that. If you find that people afterwards ask you the same question, boom, you add that to the post-meeting email.

All that and so much more available at AcuityScheduling.com. And if you want to get more free time than anyone else, I urge you to check out AcuityScheduling.com/Mixergy. They’re going to give you such a generous starting package that will allow you to try it for free for so long, that basically you’re going to know by the end if you love it or not, if it’s changing your business or not, if it’s growing your sales or not. I’m really grateful for them for sponsoring.

Cool, Randy. I like that we were talking at a time when you were actually evaluating something like this.

Randy: Absolutely. I will definitely have–our VP of sales is leading this one. I’ll have him take a look at Acuity, for sure.

Andrew: Have him check out their tech support if he has any questions. You’ll be amazed by how fast and helpful they are. They asked me how to code a different landing page because I had this whole idea in mind.

But back to your story–it sounds like what you’re telling me is they didn’t want just this flip experience that you initially wanted to create for them. They wanted you to create a content management system. They wanted to create something like WordPress, something like HubSpot, essentially.

Randy: Yeah. It’s funny. You use that scary acronym, CMS, at the beginning of the intro. It’s funny. We actually shy away from that. We find as much as we are somewhat of an alternative to this CMS for marketers who need to manage content on a day to day and get those experiences out the door, there are all these terrible views of what a CMS means, right? You kind of hinted at it yourself. It’s this scary word. We’re told all these terrible things about it.

But I think part of that is that it’s almost a case of the prisoner’s dilemma. If people have read that book or are aware of it, it’s this concept that you have this leading solution out there in the market and it continues to own the market because it’s selling to the old school user, right?

So another great example may have been our smartphones. For a long time, Blackberry ruled the world because all people cared about was security. But the buyer wasn’t us as individuals. It wasn’t you and I, Andrew. It was the IT department. Once BYOD came into place, people cared about security, but not to the same degree. It gave the iPhone the opportunity to kind of lay the groundwork in terms of building all the other stuff that people cared about and before you know it, they catch up on those capabilities of the security.

If you remember from day one, everyone was like, “Companies will never allow this thing.” A year or two later, it was no big deal. Apple had figured it out. I think that’s the education we have to do.

Andrew: So, BYOD meaning bring your own device. That’s what allowed the iPhone to get into enterprise. What’s the difference for you guys? What’s going to–not going to, I know you guys are doing well and we’ll get into the numbers in a bit–but when you essentially are creating a content management system that in many ways looks a lot like a blog or like a support site, what do you do to change people’s minds and say, “Hey, this is what we built. I know it’s similar to what you think you already have, but it’s better.”

Randy: Yeah. I think we had an opportunity of the landscape really changing. We all know that the marketer is taking more and more control over website experiences, over content management. When we think of the CMS, we think of the traditional way websites were managed. They were managed by the web team, the IT team. They are the gatekeepers to what goes on to our website. That worked back in the day when–

Andrew: I get it. But what are you giving them that’s different?

Randy: Well, we’re giving them control. We’re giving them control to actually make those changes without having to code it all, without having to work–

Andrew: Can’t they make a change to a WordPress site without coding?

Randy: It really depends. There are changes to simply thinking about the template we have and how it works for, as we said with a blog earlier, long-form content. But there’s a lot of new formats of content that have become important that there are starting to be some templates from WordPress, but it’s beyond just the look and feel, it’s also how it integrates.

When you were talking about Acuity earlier, one of the things that you were so amazed about with them is how it integrates into the rest of your stack, into your CRM, perhaps I don’t know if you alluded to, but marketing automation platforms. Content management, email nurturing, the whole content marketing platform that we care about today, it’s not a one-point solution. It’s made up of various tools that need to work in tandem.

Andrew: Give me an example of a company. Maybe that’s an easier way to visualize it. So, there’s a company out there. Maybe give a name.

Randy: Yeah, sure. Why don’t we talk about Booker?

Andrew: Booker.

Randy: Really cool company, Booker.com. What they do as a company is they sell a solution to book appointments and handle the invoicing and the scheduling of appointments, a little bit different than Acuity. Don’t worry. I’m not going there. But more along the lines of if I was trying to get my hair done at a salon or barber, then I would go on to that barbershop’s website or salon’s website and I would book an appointment and it would handle all the logistics in the background and making sure that appointment happens and reminders and billing when I get there and things like that.

Andrew: Okay.

Randy: These guys were killing it, doing really well. They raised a significant amount of capital, but have really taken on their market. Now all of a sudden, they start to see this huge opportunity to go into other horizontal markets. So, you think about appointments and things like that, salons and spas are a great place to start. But what about pet grooming? There are a lot of parallels. There are a lot of similarities.

Andrew: Okay.

Randy: So, they said, “Why don’t we start selling to pet groomers? They have the same problem in terms of booking appointments, scheduling it, getting paid, everything around that,” but when they looked at them, as much as they had the same problem, the content, the website, the whole experience that’s going to create comfort for the pet groomer versus the salon owner is very different.

Andrew: So, what did they do then?

Randy: So, what they need to start to get into is the complexity of segmenting content and segmenting stories. That’s really not what a traditional CMS is built–

Andrew: Wow. So, I’m actually on Booker.com and they have a link to blog. So, I click the link to blog. The link to blog took me to Blog.Booker.com. Essentially, that is like a WordPress site, but it’s actually using your software. They’re using Uberflip to manage this.

Randy: Yeah.

Andrew: What’s different about this that I’m not seeing compared to any other CMS?

Randy: If you look up a bit–I’m trying to remember their site experience, but they probably have some kind of grey bar.

Andrew: Yeah, pet services, salons and spas, etc.

Randy: Yeah. Absolutely. So, it’s the segmentation of that content and the ease at which they can do that.

Andrew: Can’t you just do that with tagging in WordPress?

Randy: You can do it somewhat with tagging, but you can’t necessarily create the right path and you can’t add the same level of contextual path in terms of where you want to take someone.

Andrew: What do you mean by path?

Randy: Think about it this way–what is the path that we want to take someone through? This is an idea that is–we’ve come to this idea as an example with email marketing tools. So, anyone who’s familiar with solutions like Marketo or Eloqua or HubSpot you mentioned earlier, all understand the value of nurture campaign. You mentioned it with Acuity too. They’re able to send those warm up path emails to get you to the point where you’re going to be really comfortable and ready to engage.

Andrew: But on the web, we show you the latest thing just because it happens to be the latest.

Randy: Exactly. All of our CMS tools are built to simply toss the latest chronological stuff up at the top or, as we said earlier, just bulk it by format. We’ll put all of our eBooks together. We’ll put all of our whitepapers together. The reality is we need to tell more of a story. We need to think of every visitor coming to our website as just a new cohort.

So, we may have an amazing blog post. I know that there are companies like KISSmetrics, who’s got certain blog posts that continue to be their top-rated blog posts six months later or a year later. Why are we hiding some of that stuff in some cases down on page six? It’s just like Google. No one is going beyond that first page when they’re first getting–

Andrew: So, if it’s really good, but it happens to have been written a year ago and it’s really popular and it happens to be written a year ago, we want to put that at the top so people see it early on in their experience with us, not when they’re scrolling past a year ago.

Randy: Agreed.

Andrew: That’s it.

Randy: I would go further than just saying if it’s popular, if it’s good–why is it good? What makes it good? What are your goals? When we create content as a company, what’s the goal of that content? Is it engagement? Is it brand awareness? Or is it conversion? Is it lead conversion? So, also being able to have those insights, which we will provide to a marketer through that experience management to understand what content are they going to actually convert on. We may want to create that path with a great piece of content that we convert on.

Those insights help us both on our site, but they also help us on other channels that we may be using, like LinkedIn sponsored posts. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn in general and some of the products they have. The problem though with some of these sponsored posts is we want people to engage in that content, but we want to make sure that we take them to an experience where there’s another piece of content, where there’s a path that’s contextual. Again, not just the next chronological piece or not a dead-end all together.

Andrew: I see. So, when I’m looking at posts that people have used, that people publish using your software, on the bottom I always see a back and forward. Those are changed dynamically. It’s not just the earlier and the later published post?

Randy: Correct. The marketer has adjusted in terms of what content is going to live within that stream. But it’s not just the content. It is important to know. One of the things that we talked about is sometimes our goal is conversion. We actually want something to convert on an asset. And one of the things as much as you hear, one of the buzzwords that always gets thrown around content is context. The content needs to add context, otherwise it’s worth nothing. But the call to action should have context as well.

So, let’s go back to our salon and our dog. If the owner of each of those establishments is engaged and the call to action simply says, “Let us help you book appointments,” that’s pretty generic. It works across the board. But what if the call to action said, “We see you like dog content–sign up here for updates?”

Andrew: And that literally is what it says. So, when I’m looking at a post here within the pet services framework, on the right it says, “Read our Pet Groomers’ Guide to the Online World.” Now, let me click on salons and spa, look at an article there… The call to action on the right says, “Add a little extra loving and boost sales this Valentine’s Day,” and then, “Click here to learn more.” All right. I see.

Randy: Some people may feel that way about their dog.

Andrew: I do know that they do. So, I want to understand how you got to this when it’s so different from the original version that you had in your mind. But first I should say this message, this interview is sponsored by HostGator.

HostGator will let you host WordPress sites or any other site. They have a really good cloud hosting solution. All you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. When you do, you’re going to see that you host anything on there. I think they might emphasize. Randy, like me, they seem to be obsessed with WordPress. But you can host other software on there, other types of websites there, not yours though, right? Not Uberflip.

Randy: By no means are we seeing there isn’t a place for WordPress. In fact, we actually complement WordPress. It’s more the dynamic content that we’re talking about. So, the solution that you’re describing is still important for that main www that you’ve got, your product pages, things like that. We’ve seen a lot of people kind of hack away at the use cases for our solution. We can definitely get into how it works beyond just your main website.

You saw on Booker, we’re powering their blog. We’re powering their resources page. But you also get into companies who start to use solutions like ours for things like sales enablement, which is a really interesting opportunity, getting back to that Acuity example, how do we better arm sales people to be more efficient? How do we get them to be able to really segment great content?

Andrew: So, now I’m wondering how do I promote an advertiser, HostGator–well, actually, like I said earlier, they have a full on hosting solution for everything. They will do WordPress. They will allow you to host your blog. They will allow you to host your store.

Why don’t I ask you this, Randy, if you could start over right now with any kind of website–it doesn’t have to be a blog, it doesn’t have to be content, it can be anything–what’s the one business you would build if I gave you a HostGator account and said, “Start fresh. You have nothing from the past, no other money. You just have to start this business.”

Randy: I have so many ideas that go through my head all the time. It’s a matter of prioritizing. I think the benefit of having a solution like that is that flexibility. It’s the ability to spin up a site with ease as opposed to having to worry about all those issues that we’ve traditionally thought about in terms of managing a website, right? We’re offering a very similar way of thinking in terms of all these content assets, right?

That’s where again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we have displaced the CMS altogether or displaced hosting sites, we’re just complementing that. We’re following the same framework, but we’re making sure we put the control in the hands of the right people. The reality is a lot of our main www sites are still not necessarily in the hands of marketers quite yet. I think that’s going to change.

Andrew: They’re run by the product people.

Randy: They’re run by product people.

Andrew: Let me say this for HostGator. I’ll just give people a quick idea for the kind of business they can create and then we’ll go back to the interview. Here’s a cool thing that someone in our audience did. A guy named Brian said he loves Trello. In fact, I’ve known Brian now for a long time because he’s been a long time listener of Mixergy. I see his passion for Trello. He requires anyone who works with him to work with Trello.

Here’s this problem with Trello as a project management software. If you love emailing stuff into it, they only let you pick on section within one Trello board that you could email your data into, right? So, for example, if you have a to-do list for your whole team and each team has a column with their name on it, you want to email something to Mary, well, Trello will let you do it. But if you also want to email Steve, Trello says no. You can’t. You have to come back in to Trello and do it. But their APIs allow it.

So, what Brian did was he just got a developer very inexpensively to code something up where you could email into any section of your Trello board. So, you could say, “Steve,” via email, “Here’s what you need to do for this week.” “Mary,” via email, you just email it into Trello, “Here’s what you do for this week. Andrew, here’s what you do for this week.” Boom. It’s all in their columns in the right section of Trello.

The APIs allow you to do it. He hired someone to do it for him and then he created a website and said, “Anyone else having this problem? Here’s how much I charge for a solution that lets you email into any part of your Trello board.” Boom. A piece of software that he was using that everyone loves–not everyone–millions of people love now had this solution to a problem that he and so many other people had. It’s so much easier to create software today than we realize.

When you create it, you can go HostGator. They will host it for you. Here’s the thing–when you finally get your software up online, you want it to just stay up. You don’t want it to cost you so much money that you worry all the time about whether you can continue to pay the bills for the business or not.

You want it to be inexpensive. HostGator is inexpensive. You want it to be reliable. HostGator is reliable. If something goes down, you want to have a phone number so you can call somebody up and HostGator gives that to you. If you want to sign up for HostGator, you can go to HostGator.com and get a good deal. But if you want a great deal, go to HostGator.com/Mixergy.

Look, these businesses are not that hard to start. Go start it on HostGator. If you have a hosting company and you’re envious of all these people that have HostGator and you think you want that kind of tech support, you want that kind of availability, they’ll migrate you. You can migrate by going to HostGator.com/Mixergy. They’ll help you. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.

Randy, you had this idea. You knew what you wanted. People kept telling you, “What about video? What about this? What about that?” You kept putting it on your chart with your idea in the center and all of theirs as like in a ring around your beautiful idea. At some point it hit you, “We’ve got to merge it. People are telling us they don’t want what we want. They want something different, something bigger.”

What I’m curious about is, firs of all, what are the questions that led you to get the quests that shifted your mindset? How did you ask someone a question that lets you see the world in a different way?

Randy: Yeah. I think it’s about–it’s funny. We’re big on culture here. We have a lot of kind of fun ways that we put things to get people to challenge the way they think. One of them talks about being relevant. We talk a lot about relevance. It’s a big part of our core values and culture. One of the things we say is we really have to talk to customers. We need to challenge them on what their problems are.

We also have to remember that the customer is not always right. People read that or they hear that and they’re like, “I thought you were about to say the customer is always right. That’s what I always hear.” And that’s where it’s a little different. When you’re creating a category, when you’re building a new way of thinking, you need to listen to your customers. My favorite word is actually empathize with customers. But you also have to learn from them and then educate them back.

People didn’t necessarily jump up and say, “Here’s exactly what we need. We need this central place where all of our content can be managed. We need to be able to spin out content in a better way. We need to be able to convert people on that content. We need to make sure that integrates with marketing automation. We need to then understand…” They didn’t spoon-feed us. I don’t think we necessarily asked the questions.

So, I think–we talked about this specifically again in our culture–there are two aspects to changing the way people think. One is breaking the norm. The other is following trends, following the trends that are out there. So, we happened to be, I think, at the right place at the right time.

Andrew: So, it wasn’t that you asked your customers anything special in the surveys you mentioned earlier and it wasn’t any customer conversations that led you to this understanding, it was just that you happened to hit it?

Randy: I think it’s a little bit a luck. I definitely think we were gutsy enough to say, “We want something bigger.” We could have stayed along the path of just selling PDF software. At that point, I think we were already doing over $1 million in annual revenue. We hadn’t taken any external capital.

Andrew: Over $1 million just making it easier for people to share PDFs and get better data.

Randy: Yeah. This was early on.

Andrew: Something made you switch. It seems like you were hungrier for more. You said earlier that you sent out a survey. Did you send out a survey that led to this new realization?

Randy: Yeah.

Andrew: You did.

Randy: Yeah. We used–I’m almost sure it was Survey Monkey.

Andrew: What was so magical about your survey. I’ve sent out surveys that end up leading me nowhere. What did you ask? Was there one question that made you realize something new?

Randy: I think it was the open-ended question, to be honest.

Andrew: Okay. Do you remember one of the open-ended question?

Randy: One of the open-ended ones was, “What else could we do that spins off from what we’re already doing for these documents?”

Andrew: So, you were asking them what you should do?

Randy: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: So, how does that figure in with what you said earlier, which is the customer doesn’t know what they want?

Randy: Well, you can’t just listen–my point is you can’t listen to exactly what they want.
Andrew: What did they exactly?

Randy: There were a lot of people. At that point, we probably had–I’m guessing we had around 600 customers at that point and maybe we had 10% reply would be great. So, if we had roughly 60 people reply, there was a wide range. Some people wanted us to go really deep on areas we weren’t passionate about. We didn’t think it would solve a problem for everyone. Anyone managing product knows that every day you’re going to get tons of requests. If all you do is build every feature that people request, then you’re going to end up with quite a messy product.

Andrew: So, how did you figure out which requests to listen to or what was underlying it and important?

Randy: I think it was a mixture of looking for the things that were repetitive as well as the opportunities where we could do something that we didn’t feel like they could do on their own.

Andrew: Do you remember one of those features that was repeatedly mentioned that they couldn’t do without you?

Randy: Yeah. This repeated one was I need a better landing page for all of my eBooks at that time, right? I remember we contacted back some of these people and we said, “We actually already give you an embed code. We give you this little HTML embed code. You can go grab the 20 different eBooks that you have with us. To your point, drop it into a CMS and you’re off to the races. Why don’t you do that? They’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa… Me getting into the CMS is a huge project. Then I’ve got to update it every time I create another one of these assets. I want it just to automatically flow into there.”

So, that was that beginning point of understanding that it was the challenge of centralizing content. Creating the experience we were already doing. It was how do I centralize that? How do I make it easier to find? So, I think it was listening to what people wanted. And then as I said, what they had suggested were other links on pages to link out to Facebook, to link out to Twitter, to link out to YouTube.

When we looked at that, that’s where I mean that the customer is not always right. That wasn’t necessarily the best way to do it, but that’s how they thought of doing it because that was the easy path to get people to my videos, but the problem is–take video again as an example, the challenge with YouTube, as great and powerful of a channel it is, is if we send someone to YouTube as a brand, the first video they watch, absolutely, that’s probably going to be ours. But the next video they watch through the recommendation engine can very well be “Dora the Explorer” doing who knows what.

Andrew: Or with me, Casey Neistat. Then I stop going back to work. I know what you mean. Yeah.

Randy: Exactly. It’s distracting. So, the goal of YouTube is not necessarily brand engagement. It’s engagement for the purpose of delivering ads. As a brand–I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago titled something like “Why Do We Send Our Inbound Leads Outbound?” We’ve sent so much money to bring them to our website and then we’re going to just send them out.

So, what customers were saying to us was, “Help us do this.” And we were like, “Okay. There’s the opportunity. Not only do they have a problem doing this, but the way they’re thinking of doing it is broken.” That was where we felt that not only could we help them, but we could come up with a better way to do it at the same time.

Andrew: I see. So, you saw what they were doing or what they wanted to do, which is link out to videos. You understood what they were trying to do with that. Instead of creating that, you said, “Why are they asking us to create it?” And you understood they wanted to show videos to their users and they needed an easy way to do it. That’s the kind of thinking we’re looking at.

Randy: Absolutely.

Andrew: You were doing $1 million a year when you guys were just doing a better view for PDF. Today, what are you guys doing in sales?

Randy: We’re not overly transparent externally. Internally, we are. But we’ve crossed that $5 million annual revenue threshold.

Andrew: So by 2015 you already exceeded $5 million in sales?

Randy: Yeah. We’re passed that threshold, which was an exciting one, right? That’s one of those ones that it’s kind of a notch on the belt or however they put it. That was one that the team internally was really striving for and things like that. So, that was fun. It was fun to get there. We also have a unique way we’ve gone here. We haven’t taken any VC capital.

Andrew: You took some angel funding.

Randy: Yeah. We didn’t really call it an angel round, but I guess it was. Basically I guess–so, we had a whole bunch of really great entrepreneurs who we have relationships with who always said to us, “If you ever raise a series A, kind of leave me a spot on the side.” So, we fully intended to do so, we just kept not getting to that point of raising capital. Sometimes along the way it was because we sucked at it. And sometimes it was because we had found ways to avoid it.

We eventually got to the point where we realized a lot of these people we were talking about, they were already really engaged with us, if we could get them more engaged, it could add social proof with some of our customers. In the content space, we got great people who came on board like Jay Baer, who I know you’ve interviewed before, Ann Handley, who’s at MarketingProfs, she’s awesome as well.

Andrew: I had her on here too. She was fantastic.

Randy: She’s amazing. We also have some people who were more, I guess, tech/Silicon Valley-types of successes, people like Gokul Rajaram, if you know–the goal isn’t to name drop. It’s more we surrounded ourselves with a whole bunch of people, over a dozen when we put this vehicle together.

Andrew: How much of the business did you have to give up? What’s the share that you gave up?

Randy: We did it as a SAFE. So, that’s kind of up in the air, still.

Andrew: What does that mean, a SAFE?

Randy: SAFE is an acronym of a simple agreement to future equity.

Andrew: Okay.

Randy: It’s kind of like a convertible note. It’s a Y Combinator model that’s become more popular these days. It’s a really simple–not because it’s starts with the word simple, but a really simple documentation. You can kind of have people roll in and you basically have evaluation cap and then you also have a discount. That gives downward protection if we’re out to lunch with where we think that valuation cap would be. But it’s almost like convertible note in that it gives preferential pricing to a future round or future exit or whatever comes first.

Andrew: I see.

Randy: So, it was a really easy way to do it. The whole process was really enjoyable. I hear people dread about that process. We’ve had–when we struck out in the past, we had challenges. Fortunately we haven’t had to go that route in a while. I feel like it would be different this time.

Andrew: Are you guys profitable?

Randy: Intentionally not. We’re growing at a crazy rate here. Our team grew last year from–we were 32 people when we moved into this office in January last year and we’ll be 65 as of Monday. That’s just over a year. So, crazy growth rate.

Andrew: Let me ask you a little bit about people. I know we’re at the top of the interview, but I’ve got a bunch of things that I didn’t get to that were in my notes that maybe we can go through kind of in a lightning round. The first is about the process for culture, speaking of people. You said one of the biggest mistakes you made was not having a process for culture. I was wondering what is that ever since I saw it in my notes. What do you mean by that?

Randy: Yeah. For a while I actually hated those words even.

Andrew: Process and culture.

Randy: Process and culture didn’t seem to go well together. It was like formalize our culture. It felt wrong. The way I describe it now really quickly is when you’re just starting out, when you’ve got under five people, even up to ten people, you’re going to spend a lot of time with every person that comes on board, either due to the size of the room, the importance of onboarding, all those things. So, your passion gets easily transferred onto every one of those people.

When you get to the point where you’re hiring people at more volume–I said we’re over 60 people today–as much as I want to, I can’t spend that much time with new hires when they join. I mean 60 people, if I had half-hour meetings every week with them, over three-quarters of a normal person’s work week, not a startup person but a normal person’s work week would be filled with meetings. It’s just not scalable.

So, you get to a point where if you want people to buy into culture, you need something that people can buy into. I think of culture and I think of buy in. That’s what culture means to me. You look at the most long-lasting cultures out there, you probably think religions, maybe fraternities and sororities, things like that. The best ones all have some sort of guiding light. I’m not a big religious guy, but like a Bible or something.

Andrew: So, what’s your Bible?

Randy: Our Bible started–we put this into place when we were 20-something people, early 20s. I wish I had done it closer to 15. It started off with, “Okay, I want core values,” but then I went to the web and other than Netflix and Zappos, every set of core values I covered up–and someone told me to do this–cover up the name and see if you can figure out which company it is and you can never do it.

Andrew: No.

Randy: I was like, “I really don’t want that problem. I don’t want generic core values. I could have come up with those in a night.” So, instead I started to put together a deck. It ended up being I think like 80 slides in the first take of, “What did I want the day to day to be here? What do I want people to approach? How do I want people to think about why they come to work here? What we need to do for them, what we want them to do for us, what we want them to do for customers, everything from there.”

And then from there, it became really easy to find the trends. That ended up helping to shape our core values. We actually had our team contribute to that process as well. At the end of it, we have this amazing deck. We actually use Uberflip to host a site. You can go to Culture.Uberflip.com and that’s using our own technology another use case of content, which really helps educate people so, as I’d say–our brand color is pink, so we often say, “Drink the pink Kool-Aid here.”

Andrew: I see here, “We value HUSTLE. Hustling meaning heart, unique, skill, tech, learn and entrepreneurial. Innovation lives outside the box. Our customer success is our success. We are collectively and individually accountable.” What about this is different from what other people might have?

Randy: I think it’s a link–we’re fortunate to be able to do this. There’s a major link between our core values and our product in terms of what our product is out there to achieve. So, there are certain ones, without going into all of them, that really talk about what we want to accomplish for our customers.

So, I’ll give you an example. One of them that people really love–I’m not wearing one today–people love our HUSTLE acronym. So, you spelled out with some of those breakouts are. The term hustle gets thrown around at a lot of companies. We defined it as the mentality to get it done now versus the mentality to get it done tomorrow. Malcolm Gladwell will tell you about effort and you put more effort in, you’re going to win in the long run, right? I agree with that, but I think you have two people who put 40 hours in, work just as hard as each other.

The people who put 40 hours in a week versus the person who put 40 hours over two weeks–the person who did it in a week is likely going to win, right? It’s that get it done mentality. But then it’s what are our morals? What do we care about? How do we care about executing that in a way that we’re happy and proud of? That’s where we use that breakout into an acronym. Without taking it to everyone, the H stands for heart. Plain and simple–we don’t want to work with assholes.

I’m not going to name companies, but there are certain companies where I don’t call them because I know I’m going to deal with a really difficult rep. So, I do everything possible to avoid calling them. Similarly, think about it in elementary school. If there was a bully in the middle of the year, we scaled the fence on the outside even though going across the yard in the middle was the best way there.

Andrew: I see.

Randy: The same thing happens in the office when you have those people.

Andrew: What you did was when you got big enough, you just said, “Let’s sit down and think about what we stand for. You couldn’t come up with that. So, you said, “How do I want to work? So, you started writing down how you wanted to work and then from there, you said, “What culture do I need in order to get that? What do we need to stand for?” Then you started actually writing it with the team and then sharing it with the team and that’s one of the ways you created a process for culture, right?

Randy: Absolutely. And then the king thing I would just add is that cultures have to change. They have to morph. We talked about religions and sororities and fraternities, the ones that have lasted the longest, they adapted with time. Your culture needs to change. Our culture at 25 versus 60 is very–the core values are the same, but how we explain to people how to make those happen, what we facilitate to make it happen has to adapt.

Andrew: Let’s look at one other thing. You guys created something called Flip the Switch. What’s Flip the Switch?

Randy: Yeah. That’s one that we’re trying to adapt now. So, the idea behind Flip the Switch was I looked at a lot of companies who had hack-a-thons and I was like, “That sounds awesome except I can’t code. So, how am I going to get involved in this thing?” So, what we came up with was the idea of Flip the Switch, which was a team breakout that we would do every couple of months and we would just tackle a big problem.

Sometimes that big problem was like you’ve asked me a lot of questions–if you could do it again, what would we do differently? If we could redo our pricing, what would it look like? When you start to engage people outside your management team for that and force yourself to do that on a day to day, you get buy in a whole different way. You get buy in because we would break the teams up such that every team had a sales person, success person, engineer, marketer–you get the idea.

And then you almost have these mini-startups. So, you’re thinking back to that real creative approach. At the end of it, they would actually present to Yoav and I and we would all as a team kind of debate what were good ideas so that when we chose some of those ideas to implement, you already had full-team buy in, right?

Andrew: I see. But you gave them a problem. And then they created a little startup to solve it. Is that right?

Randy: Yeah. We broke them into teams and they would kind of solve that with contributions from different mindsets.

Andrew: What’s a problem that you gave them that worked out well?

Randy: I remember early on the original product we launched when we broadened to the hub platform that we have today looked a certain way, behaved a certain way. We challenged people, “If you were to lay it out differently, what would you do?” Some of those ideas were so obvious, but we were so stuck down that path that we just weren’t seeing them. Some of those people had been engaging with customers. Some of them wanted to do a new use case and the platform didn’t lend itself. So, it resulted in us really changing the whole home of the hub and how that’s set up.

Andrew: I see. All right. I think we’ve got to leave it there. No, actually, let me ask you one other thing and then I’ll leave it there. I feel like one of your strengths is that you didn’t go in the direction that other people do of creating a simple product that anyone could buy off the shelf at a cheap price, that you from my research, as I kept going back in time, you guys were always at the $1,000 price point or so.

You were always on the higher end. That allows you to sell in a more engaged way so you can find out what people are really thinking of your product because you have to have a sales person at that point. That allowed you to charge more and get more retention from your customer because they were building you into their business. What do you think? I’m looking at your face to try to get a read on whether you think I’m a dick for saying this or if I’m onto something.

Randy: No. The funny thing is actually our pricing has increased over time. Way back when, when we had that originally solution, $30 a month you could start with.

Andrew: I couldn’t find the $30 version.

Randy: Yeah. Some people still have it and we love it because we believe in grandfathering pricing. So, some of those people get a ton of value. I think we ultimately just kept adding sophistication. Sophistication sometimes can be really bad. I think we’ve done so in a way where it’s sophistication for like the modern marketer, as we say, who really wants to push the limits. When you get to that person, you need to understand that as much as you can have tools off the shelf, when it’s a disruptive idea, you also need education.

That’s where we–it’s not just a matter of how much margin can we have on the software that we built versus we sell. It’s also, “What support do we need? How do we get people to challenge the way they’re thinking about organizing content like we talked about today? Setting contextual CTAs?” These are new ideas. As much as you can hint people towards that with technology and there are great tools to do that, it’s the ability to actually bring that all together and make it easy for them to do it and empower them. We do that with not just technology. We do that with great support, great success team, and just an overall culture.

Andrew: So, is pricing it higher helping you grow more, helping you sell more?

Randy: I think it’s helping us scale at a more realistic manner given where the market is at. I think long-term, there will be more solutions like what we do out there that hopefully do what we do for SMB-minded customers, more the S of SMB. But I think it’s still very early. That’s the great opportunity that we have. We’re very much leading in this market at an early time. So, I think it’s more about how do we put the right attention to it and to do that, you need to charge what the value is that we’re providing.

Andrew: I see it now. March, 2012, I’m looking at a version of your site. You guys had a $29.95 version.

Randy: What a steal.

Andrew: Somehow I missed it. I guess people still have that. But you also, interestingly enough, allowed people to easily upload a PDF to try out the product, which is not something you continued, it looks like.

Randy: No. That PDF solution is still part of our tool and in some cases it wins deals for us because people are like, “Who else is going to go out and actually fix that for me? Who else is going to figure out PDFs for me?” And even companies who have created similar types of things that we’re doing now, they don’t have that. So, it almost continues to live as a nice competitive advantage.

Andrew: Where can I try that free version? Is it under Flipbooks?

Randy: I don’t know.

Andrew: It’s kind of buried if it’s there.

Randy: If anyone wants to reach out to me, they can do so on LinkedIn. I am more than willing to make sure that you can try this before you need to buy. We’re very much an education here and part of education is giving people the time they need to do those things.

Andrew: All right. Thank you so much for being on here. Anyone who wants to check out your website can go to Uberflip.com. My two sponsors for this interview are that great scheduling app, Acuity Scheduling. Go check them out at AcuityShceduling.com/Mixergy. And the hosting company, they are, of course, HostGator. You can check them out at HostGator.com/Mixergy.

If you like this interview, go subscribe–not yourself, you probably already subscribe. Do what I did. I actually had this guy–listen to this, Randy–a guy from New York, hedge fund manager comes in, has no idea what a podcast is. He happens to have been stuck here because of a snowstorm. We’re having drinks with him and a friend of mine. He doesn’t know what a podcast is. I blow his mind. I pull his phone out and I subscribe him to, first of all, Mixergy, and second to a couple of other podcasts. Now the guy is discovering podcasts for the very first freaking time.

Anyone out there who does not know about podcasting, should know about them and you should introduce them to Mixergy. Just take their phones like I did and show them how easy it is to subscribe. They’re going to thank you for it and they’re not going to believe that it’s free. I appreciate if you guys do it. If you do do it, let me know.

Randy, thanks for doing this interview. Everyone else, thank you so much for being a part of–let me see just one more thing. I want to thank the person who introduced us, that’s Shrad Rao. I’m now a customer of his. He is now doing all of our billing at Wagepoint. Thank you, Shrad.

Randy: Good guy over there.

Andrew: Really good guy.

Randy: They’re a customer of ours too.

Andrew: Right, that’s what it was. That’s how I connected–I complimented in the interview about how good his site looked and I said, “You have a really good eye.” He said, “No, I have to admit. It’s this company Uberflip.” I just thought it was a small design shop that did it for him.

Randy: They’re growing quickly though. Good for him. He’s a smart guy. Great guy.

Andrew: Yeah. Thanks for doing this. Bye, everyone.

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