Andrew:	This course is about how to get your first 927 users.

The course is led by Josh Ledgard, co-founder of Kickoff Labs which helps companies find more customers by generating word-of-mouth through stunning landing pages. In fact let me bring up their home page there so you get a sense of what they do. There's the business. Here I am, Andrew Warner. I'll help to facilitate this session. I'm the founder of Mixergy where proven founders, like Josh, teach.

Right. Josh, we've a big agenda here which I'll go over in a moment but first I know it's on the audience's mind, They're trying to get a sense of who you are. Who you are is a guy who's done really well getting users, but you also struggled like many people in the audience might be struggling right now to get users. Do you remember what it was like back in those struggling days?

Josh:	Yeah, I mean I don't think our story is uncommon, so my co-founder and I, we're both engineering backgrounds, technical, you know we had all the background in developing a product and everybody sort of assumes that building a product's the hard part and then we made the mistake that a lot of people make. and you say "If I build it, they will come" and we built a product to generate leads, ironically enough, and we put up a landing page and we'd done some little bit of marketing around that page and we generated some leads but in the first couple months after we launched it was more like crickets. We had maybe two to ten people in each month that we could say that we hadn't sort of personally poked and prodded to get onto the site,

Andrew:	And here you are in the business of generating leads, and you're struggling to get leads

Josh:	Yeah.

Andrew:	And, did you, were you still working your full time job and this was a side business or at the time had you already quit and launched into this full time.

Josh:	No. We had quit and we were eating into our savings. We had both set aside and said we got some bufferings, we knew we weren't going to be successful overnight but, you know, at that point you're just watching this money you've put in the savings account go tick, tick,

Andrew:	Yeah.

Josh:	You know, down and you're getting up against a wall saying "If we don't turn this around we have to consider doing more consulting or look for other jobs while we figure something else out."

Andrew:	Right, and you did figure it out. I mean, none of us have it all figured out

Josh:	Yeah.

Andrew:	...completely, of course, but the reason that you're here is because you have an understanding of how to get users, how to get how to get leads, where are you guys today after using what you are about to teach the audience?

Josh:	Yeah, I mean, so what we did is we set a goal for ourselves and we said we wanted to get 5,000 people to evaluate the service to become customers atone point of our service and we passed that in between the last time we chatted and now, and not only did we get, within the same day actually, we passed not only 5,000 users on the site, but we passed, we were about lead generation, we generated a quarter of a million leads for our customers.

Andrew:	Before, let... That's a quarter of a million leads for your customers. So not only have you gotten customers for yourself, but you are helping them and I should say me too as one of your customers, get leads. A quarter of a million is huge, okay.

Josh:	Yeah. And so like, you used our product and you had your own ways of marketing it and, we help the customers get the leads and on the day that we did that, it was just amazing to me, because we passed those things, and I wasn't stressed out like I was in my full time job. I actually had taken a half day to spend some time with my wife and my kids and I got the email notification that we passed it, and I was like, "Wow, this is really awesome." I only want to go onwards and upwards to 25,000 customers.  You know, two million leads generated for those customers, so that's where we are, you know. It's kind of uplifting and we go on from here.

Andrew:	Right on. It is exciting when you start to feel that customers are coming in. I remember for myself, the first few hundred customers, the first few hundred users even to my site were painful and I was doubting myself and unsure of where I was. But once I got the first few hundred, the next thousand were easy.

Josh:	Yeah.

Andrew:	And then the next thousand after that easy. And then you start to feel, "All right. Now I know what to do and I'm hungry for more and more and more" and that's what you're doing.

Josh:	Yeah.

Andrew:	And I should say the way that we use your service we use Kickoff Labs here at Mixergy to create quick landing pages for ideas that we have or we did it for this course when we originally did this course live. I used Kickoff Labs. I created a quick landing page that allowed me collect email addresses of people that wanted to show off, show up at the live session and what I love about Kickoff Labs, one of the things that I'm especially exited about is after people gave me their email address and said yes I want to register and show up live you said to them, look if you, if you help promote this event you get a bonus and I of course came up with a bonus but your software enabled me to give that bonus and that's what, that's what really encouraged people who registered to spread the word and bring in more leads and more leads and more leads. That's the idea behind Kickoff Labs. 

So, you guys have done it and the audience says OK you have authority to teach this but what about me, I'm sure if everyone in the audience is thinking and so, don't worry guys we have of course a packed course that's all about you and I want to point out a few items here that you want to think about, that you … that I hope you pay special attention to. Which is how he, what he did before he launched that helped build up his customer base afterwards and that's this item right here. 

Then, I also want to take you, I want to also encourage you to pay attention to this section right here which is I call bribes but it's encouragement. What do you do to get customers to, what, what did I write there? What bribes can do for, can do for you lets get right of the typo. What bribes can do for you? Typos not withstanding, that's an especially powerful thing that when you discover that you're going to see what happened to us which is our customers brought in more customers which is much better than me having to struggle to get more customers all the time. All right so, want to jump right into it?

Josh:	Yeah let's just jump into it.

Andrew:	All right, first big idea is what do to before you launch? What should we do before we launch?

Josh:	Yep. I mean the, the biggest things so I, I can say is put up a page and, you know, pull people a page and get sign ups, I don't think we use that effectively like I said in the like, like in the intro. We actually have an email that goes out now as one of our, as one of our [??] emails that talks about how badly we used our own service. And . . .

Andrew:	Well what did you, what did you, what did you guys do?

Josh:	So we, we set up a landing page and we, we did a little bit of promotion, you know, we kind of went out to twitter and Facebook sort of the big popular networks and, you know, Google plus and said, hey, hey, you know, here it is, we wrote a couple blog entries and pointed at it and, you know, the tactics that we get thru are going to call out why those are big, you know, mistakes, you know, before, before you launch those are just the wrong things to do. The thing that we did that helped us before a launch was we did, we did start going into doing a lot of market validation with customers before we launched. 

Now, it didn't helped with, it didn't helped as much as with the marketing and I can talk about how we can help with the marketing but the validation we did before made sure that when we started to get customers that we were on to the right, to the right product and the right idea and so we weren't, weren't as worried about that so, you know, one of the things that we did before we launched was we had this idea that we were going to make it really easy to put up a website that collected email addresses and enabled, you know, potentially enabled newsletters, we didn't offer that right when we launched but just able to collect the, the newsletters, four newsletters for, for our customers we said, you know who really needs this, who needs this are all these people without websites who are, you know, maybe micro printers, or whatever your, your word for them is, is of the day.

But people that are advertising today's on Craigslist and they said I have a service and I want to render it but they don't look credible because they don't have a website, they don't, you know, email their customers, they don't work via email we said if we just made it simple enough for these people to use then we'd be really on to something so I started calling them up thru Craigslist and I said here's, here's, you know, our service we can help you, we, here's a service, you have a dog walking . . .

Andrew:	This is one of the kind, this is the kind of service . . .

Josh:	. . . [??] . . . person we called this and we're a person that we called and said hey you know, your ad would look a lot credible if you had a webpage you, you, you could email your customers and they would flip the call back on us. They either, you know, didn't want the, the service or they'd say "You know, I need a full website, I need a blog, I need a, you know, five different pages". They have it in their head that they need this, you know, 3 to 5,000 dollar, you know, website customize word press thing and after you hear that enough times you realize that this is not the market, market were after for. Not only did they, you know, the people who didn't want it don't have the money to spend on it.

Andrew:	Right.

Josh:	And then, then not only that, but they, you know, the people that do think to see the value in it had been sold already on a, on a higher price concept and so they actually start pitching us say, "Oh you guys do websites, you can do our website" and that just wasn't, you know, something we were invested in doing.

Andrew:	I see so the whole idea of, of giving them quick landing pages that allowed them to, to be quick web pages where their users could come in and register, lost on them completely it wasn't the right market.

Josh:	Yeah, you're, you're part tied, at, at the time your more tied to the idea of calling it one page sites or one pagers and just that was all a lot of businesses needed. I still think that's true, I just don't think they get it and I don't think they're quite there yet so whether the markets not ready for it or maybe they'll never get it, I don't know but it probably won't be us servicing that need. Somebody else can go after that market.

Andrew:	All right, so that's a big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs I know make, that they struggle, they struggle, they struggle. They can't figure out why they're not getting users and it turns out for many of them that it's that they're going after the wrong users, the people who are never going to buy no matter how good they are at pitching, no matter how shiny their web page looks, no matter how hard they work and how many self help books they read, they're not going to be able to convert these people because they're the wrong people. You can't sell a bicycle to a fish.

Josh:	Exactly.

Andrew:	And in this case, you can't sell a quick landing to page to a dog walker. So then, what did you do? What should we do in that situation?

Josh:	And so what we started doing that was a lot more effective and it's still is effective for us today is really just going after and marketing to, once we realized that that wasn't going to work and we figured out from talking to enough people, oh, OK, what we're good for is these landing pages. There's a market for landing pages. There's a lot of places where people discuss landing pages out there and so we started actually just going and having conversations on one of the biggest places was Kora [SP], so if you look at Kora you can drill down into web pages and the specific sub topic of landing pages and right there, you know, that was just one screen shot of one day. 

There are 18 open questions of people asking questions about landing pages and there's probably, you know, hundreds and hundreds of answered questions in there. So we just started helping out these people without selling our services and just started answering questions on Kora and you know, I just started signing things, Josh, Founder of Kickoff Labs, we make stunning landing pages. And those answers started driving back traffic to what was at the time our product but what we've seen successful customers do of our own who are building successful landing pages, you can drive the traffic back to a landing page and convert them before you launch. 

Andrew:	So...

Josh:	Yeah, what?

Andrew:	No, no. You go ahead, sorry, I don't want to talk all over you. I know last time you and I recorded this, when we did it live, I was talking over you and I want to be especially careful not to do it now.

Josh:	Oh yeah, no problem. And so we built up ourselves an authority within these niche communities so when I talked in the beginning I told what we did wrong before we do it and this is something I learned from watching our own customers who in a lot of cases are smarter at marketing than we are. Was that building this authority within niche communities is far more powerful sometimes, or a lot of time, that trying to do it within Facebook or within Twitter because your sort of shouting to a crowd on Facebook and Twitter, if all you do is you use that to market your product. 

But if you find where your customers are hanging out and where they're having discussions, whether that be business forums or in this case a niche community like Kora is a great place to start. I always tell people to start and look for communities there. Get involved. You can see I am still one of the top answerers in this space. I still go and I answer questions in this space and that drives, probably at this point about 15 to 20% of our upgrades come from the hour or two a week we spend in these niche communities like this. 

Andrew:	So what do you say to an entrepreneur who's watching this who says, I need thousands of people, I need millions of people, it's not going to scale for me to sit on Kora and answer questions and get a dozen people a week. It's not going to scale, it's not going to let me get to these big numbers. 

Josh:	Yeah, so I think, I have to things to say to that. One is that I think there are a segment of celebrity entrepreneurs who can put stuff out there and they can instantly get 10,000 people to try out anything they do. I think 99% of people out there that are either thinking about starting a business or are starting a business don't fit into that category. They're not going to get themselves on Tech Crunch on day one when they open the doors or before they open the doors. And so people have to get in the mindset of forget about 10,000, focus on the first 100 and then focus on the first 1,000. If they happen quickly, it happens quickly. 

Our method has been to do these investments that pay off over time too because I haven't gone for three weeks, I should, I should, I don't think I've gone for three weeks back to Kora, but the investment is paying off long term. So, you know, a couple weeks ago I answered, spent an hour and that just keeps coming back because people come to the popular questions and they see the answer and they go back. So it's just as effective as sort of looking at SCO and doing link building, you know, with SCO saying how are you getting more links back to your site? Accept you know, you can place the links out there when you're just starting out.

Andrew:	And especially for this stage of the conversation. We're talking about before you even launch. It helps you figure out if you're talking to dog walkers or marketers. Dog walkers who don't need your product, marketers who understand and want more of it.

Josh:	Exactly. It's the investment not just for marketing to get 1,000 customers. I guess that it's for helping validate what you're after. When I had these conversations in Cora and people would upvote my answer, it validates that, A, I know what I'm talking about, and B, I can probably sell to these people, because they're getting right along with it. They're not disagreeing, saying, "No, I couldn't use a service like that," or "No, I wouldn't want something like that."

Andrew:	All right. On to the next big idea, which is to know where to pitch to get social proof. Where do we get social proof?

Josh:	This is something that we're going to assume you've done some initial marketing before you've launched, that you've gotten, even in our case, the five to 10 people, as depressing as it was. Within the first couple months, we worked really hard because in a couple of your courses, people have mentioned how important it is to have social proof. It's true. No one wants to feel like they're the guinea pig. No customer wants to feel like they're first and that no one else has done it. At the time, we couldn't brag and say, "10,000 customers, used by Microsoft, used by Dell, Intel," or whatever else we could say.

Andrew:	Is that, by the way, who is using your product now?

Josh:	I made some of those names up. We've had people with those addresses, but . . .

Andrew:	You had had big companies use your product. In the beginning, you couldn't do that. You couldn't say that because you didn't have them.

Josh:	I didn't have them, but I had small people who were using it. What works well with small people . . . Small people, it sounds insulting. I don't mean it that way. We did have some customers using the product that liked it, and we mined those first five, 10, 20 people for quotes really hard. We just contact them and say, "Hey, do you like the product? Would you be willing to say something about it to our other potential customers?" At least, that gave us useful quotes we could use. We were then able to go and fill up the home page with five quotes. The instant we did that on the home page, we went from, I think, a two or 3% conversion rate to signing up to a seven or an 8% conversion rate, whether the home page was just our own feature explanation versus essentially filled with quotes. 

It was an amazing shift, and it clued me in, really validated the power. You can have people tell you how important social proof is, but when you see the numbers, it really sinks in. You say, "Wow". With these quotes, that's starting to build on that first 20 people. Then, the quotes helped us get to 100 really quickly because our conversion rate went up. Whenever we got someone to the site, they were much more likely to sign up, they were much more likely to become a customer.

Andrew:	Can you tell us how you got those first quotes? Give us an example. I've got here Elizabeth's story. Do you want to tell us that one?

Josh:	I sort of believe that even if you are not targeting nation wide, multinational, or world wide service, if you can't win a local market where you are in, how are you going to win a national market? I've heard lots of stories about people. The founder, he sells BARE Granola. It wasn't in nationwide stores. He just went to his local Whole Foods and started pitching people in front of the Whole Foods to buy his granola product. I said, "I need to do the same thing for marketers that are looking." 

I looked for networking events, start-up pitch events, because our product can obviously used for new companies. I went to as many of those pitch events as I could to work on the pitch. We did a couple of pitch competitions, one of them we one. The winning pitch was, I gave the intro of our product, pretty much what you said in the beginning, which was 10 seconds out of three minutes. For the rest of the three minutes, to sell what we were doing, I read customer quotes from the first few people that we'd gotten using the product. I said, "We're focused on customers. This is what our customers say about us." That was the winning pitch. It just builds on itself. 

From there, that quote led to me meeting Elizabeth Case, who was a marketing professional in the Seattle area. She used our product and had great success. She linked back to us on the web site. It's just this cycle of as many links back you can get. I literally asked for it. People often forget, you have to ask for things if you want them from customers. I said, "Hey, if you like our service, can you give me a quote and could you link back to us on your web site?" It took me 30 seconds to make that request. I get the link back. 

Her site is not Tech Crunch by any means, but having this out there is proof, it validates people are willing to use the product and people are willing to stand behind it with their name and say, "I believe in this product, it helped me," so to summarize, just directly ask those first 20 customers for quotes and then use them, parlay them into more quotes and more links back to the site because you have more social proof and social proof builds on itself. Does that make sense? 

Andrew:	Absolutely, there we go, yes, so the answer that I had up on the board earlier, where the pitch is, you're saying pitch as many places as you can and not only pitch and get people to help you pitch, get them to give you quotes like the one that we saw up there from Elizabeth Case (SP).

Josh:	Yep.

Andrew:	Eventually you get to a place like this where you have a collection of customer testimonials. 

Josh:	Yep, you could just say a great collection of quotes. We have a document with hundreds of customer quotes at this point that we can pull and reuse and put to whatever campaign we need, so if I have somebody who's making a landing page about musicians, I have a quote about that now.

Andrew:	Right.

Josh:	So I can just reuse it, and having that library really helps over time when you start saying, 'OK, we're going to get into another vertical, do we have a quote that is social proof for this vertical?' Yeah, it helps tremendously.

Andrew:	All right, so let's go on then to the next big idea which is, who to market to when you have no one, and really at this point, you have some people. It might feel like no one compared to this big aspiration you had when you started your business, but you've pitched to people individually, then you've leveraged your success stories to pitch to a bigger audience and close more sales, and now you feel maybe a little like you have no one, but you know what, you're starting to really build a user base. What happens next, who do we pitch to?

Josh:	I think users, you feel like you have people. It's at that point, no revenue, you feel like you have no one, but so basically you realize that one of these mistakes made before we launched was that we were pitching to our audience so frequently on line, on line pitching, we were pitching to our audience and we didn't have an audience. We started a blog, but nobody reads a new startup's blog and even if you get yourself into Hacker News, for example, and you get promoted up, Hacker News' people don't buy anything. They're not the people who go and buy products, especially ones like ours. 

So we started, first thing is just from talking to our first customers, knowing more about them, where did they hang out. We found a lot of them hung out on Tech Crunch, so the first thing that we did was we started leaving comments on Tech Crunch stories, just one or two. It's not a huge time investment. Again, it's like if you spend an hour or two a week on [??] and an hour or two a week on Tech Crunch, I'm talking about four hours a week now. We made a couple of comments at first, just to get people pulled back to the site, which a comment can balloon up into something bigger, so the screen shots I think you have is a comment we turned into Tech Crunch, turned into not just multiple paying users came out of this comment, within the time spent to leave the comment, so I spent maybe 10, 15 minutes thinking about writing the comment and replying to it. For that 10 or 15 minutes, I know because we used tracking for this, we're looking at referrals and measuring things constantly, which I don't talk about, but I think is really important for people to do. 

We know that we got five or six paying customers out of this. In addition to the five or six paying customers, when you zoom out, it's a person who wrote a blog entry about our service which is just SEO gold. The more people you can get to write a review, a blog entry about your service, the better off you are and so from this is not only a big believer in reuse if you get the sense from talking to me, so from this I got paying customers from the comment, I got the blog entry which then helps for SEO and reviews, and then from his blog I get quotes because I can extract quotes from the blog post and use them on our website, so I get even more social proof from doing it. 

Andrew:	So when you're small and you don't have a huge audience yet, the thing to do is to look for people who have those audiences, who have existing audiences, to leverage them is what you're saying, and in this case, you're showing even a small attempt at that, which is the comment on Tech Crunch, ends up leading to big things which is more users, more customers and reviews here.

Josh:	It just multiplies and I think I had a couple of other recommendations I have for people are, that have worked for us in the last few months is that I would have started way sooner if I was doing this again, was it's hard to get a guest blog post on a more popular blog. So you know to get a writer at Mashable or Tech Crunch to write about you. But what's easier is to look at what other products your customers use and get posts on those blogs. So, you know, it's really paid off for us to look and say, hey, you know, a lot of our customers were using visual website optimizers so I contacted him after hearing his interview on Mixergy. So, listen to Mixergy and find people to contact. 

I contacted him and I said, hey, do you mind if we do a guest blog post on your blog. I think your audience would really dig our tool and vice versa. I know our audience was already using his tool from talking to customers and so those posts, like other companies, like the ones that, you know, we know our audience are using like visual website optimizer, like Uservoice, like KISSmetrics, those corporate blogs their just like professional journalists since they need content too and the benefit for you is that those corporate blogs have an audience of people that have already bought something. So they've proven that they are somebody willing to pay for a product, which is important in our case, and they're willing to read what you have to say and wink back and buy something from your site. 

The other thing we did, that worked really well, was I said in the beginning, don't use Twitter. I would refine that and say if it is used effectively you can Twitter to market to influencers. So we started following topics like landing pages, like start ups, like marketing and finding out who, not just anybody who mentioned things are, but who are the top people, the top sites being mentioned for this topics. Found the blog posts, found the influential users and just wrote them a quick note and said, hey, could you do a review of our service or would you try out our service and what do you think and those people got use re-Tweets because we looked for people that had an audience, you know, of 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 followers and approached those peopled. In not a heavyweight form like could you, you know, could you please promote our product. Just sort of a, you know, hey, would you mind Tweeting about what your two cents are on our product. 

So just a real lightweight way to introduce ourselves to ask them for a quick review or their thoughts on it. And you start leveraging their audience to build up. And the last thing we did mention, it came up in random conversation I think the first time we did the live version of this interview.

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Josh:	Was using App Sumo. App Sumo is the biggest, there are others out there. But these services have a huge audience. I don't know how many are in App Sumo's audience now so you're even better off to get into App Sumo now then you were when we did it. But when you start thinking about spending money on Google ads or anything like that, which I'm not going to talk about here at all, but when you start thinking about that, you're paying for people to get back so you know, would you be willing to trade 60% of your profit for a customer? Yeah, of course you'll give people 60% off as a lead generation engine for customers. It's no different than having to spend thousands of dollars on Google ads to pull customers in.

Andrew:	What you're saying is that by going App Sumo you have to give customers a big discount and then you have to share some of the remaining revenue with App Sumo but its worth it because they're going to give you a lot of customers and even if you have to buy ads your going to end up having to give up part of your revenue to those ad buys. 

Josh:	Yep. And so that's one of the ways, not just doing the personal marketing, that we're talking about that you can scale and do something quickly that I would recommend anybody starting out would approach them once you have some proof. App Sumo is at the point where they want to see some proof that customers are using the service. You've got to still build up to users one through one hundred maybe first and have some success stories and some social proof build. But once you have that, you know, they're great guys. I've contact them and said, hey, can we do something else and they're all yours at this point for doing other deals once your in.

Andrew:	All right. So this is something actually going back to this topic right here, who to market to. It's a mistake that I made when I launched Mixergy. I kept thinking I do everything on my side and bring everyone over to my side and as I've been doing these courses I'm recognizing that the entrepreneurs who know their stuff end up thinking, where are the platforms where my customers already exist, how do I go on there and then I'll start to siphon some of those users back to my site and keep them longer term. 

We did a course with Ahmed from Lexity and he said the exact same thing. He had a brand new product. A lot of people still don't know what Lexity is, I'm sure, as I'm talking about them. But he partnered up with Shopify which had his customers and by going on the Shopify platform they had tons of his potential customers, he was able to bring some users over to his site. I should have done the same thing. And it's not too late, we should start thinking more along those lines at Mixergy. And the other big idea that you just talked about is the right way to use Twitter, which is it's not just about promoting when you have no followers in the early days which is really common, it's not just about promoting through Tweeting. It's about saying whose out there, whose already talking to my customers, how can I engage them, just join the conversation with them and get them to maybe Tweet out about them. 

I won't say who it is but a well-known entrepreneur not only emailed a bunch of us recently to ask us to Tweet out but he also sent us a Google calendar reminder so that we'd get an alert about when to Tweet out for him. And I guess he didn't do the time conversion properly so one of the guys on the list emailed me back and said, thank you, you just woke me up, what are you doing? And it was playful because this guy is very generous and so we're happy to help out and we aren't as bothered as, none of us were super bothered by it. But it's interesting just to see that even at that level he is asking people to Tweet out for him. He is asking and doing everything he can to get them to promote. Alright, so that's this idea right here. We talked about that. Now let's move on to the next one, how to leverage powerful customer stories.

Josh:	And I think we started at this a little bit backwards and so we started with the belief that one of the things we wanted to do was promote our customers because we knew that if we had customers that were successful and we could leverage what small audience we'd built at that point to help make their use of our product successful that they would then be happier customers, would then refer their friends. Which is really the gold that you're after, that friend referral. And so we started asking customers if they wouldn't mind being interviewed for our blog and when I realized we ended up doing after we did ten or twelve of these things was that we weren't necessarily doing interviews that helped them and they certainly saw some benefit from doing it because we did promote them and link back to their site and their product in the interview, but what we were doing and we were dumb and didn't realize at the time, is that we were building a library of case studies. And so now when, so for now.

Andrew:	This is what you guys did, I'll scroll in a little bit so people can see the top. Where is that? There's the scroll, so this is a post that you guys did, this is one of your customers who you interviewed, right? Trend Lend, is that the name of the company?

Josh:	Yes, Trend Lend [SP]. 

Andrew:	OK. And you did an interview with them and you're saying not only was it good for getting their audience to pay attention to your site but it also gave you a case study.

Josh:	Yes. And it was good, it was a win/win, we pointed people back to their site, they promoted it so we got their audience to come back to their site, or to come back to our site. But then it ended up that once we'd done a bunch of these what we were building was, I think you mentioned this before, forget his name, I'm terrible with names but the guy who runs visual website optimizer, does a great job of.

Andrew:	Cross Jobra [SP].

Josh:	Yes, does a great job of promoting case studies and so we were essentially having the customers write the case studies themselves just based on the simple questions that we were asking them. And not only that but especially for the first ten that we did, we were learning more about the customers that we wouldn't have found out because we were essentially doing customer interviews in this and so if you look through our questions.

Andrew:	Who or what inspires you today? What other advice do you have for other people just getting started? What do you like most about Kickoff Labs and so on. So what you're doing is you're just getting to know them and their opinions there.

Josh:	Yes. And it's a little bit of an education by osmosis but the more you understand your customers and what inspires and what motivates them, the better off you are. So that's really what drove that question. The what other advice is really almost selfish, you know, these people are also entrepreneurs, I wanted to learn from them. So if they had advice and tips they could share to us then we could learn from it and we could share that to our audience of other customers that wanted to know how they would get an audience on their landing page.

Andrew:	And so, unlike here at Mixergy where I do interviews and courses where I get the entrepreneur on camera and I record and we do a lot of setup and pre-interviews and research and all that. You don't even do that, you just email them a collection of questions looks like in this point, I mean in this example, you published three questions. So you send them a short list of questions, they answer it via email, you publish it on the site, big screen shot, you get the understanding, you get the traffic and you get case studies that you can use in the future.

Josh:	Exactly. So you know, I want to do some experimentation with video and instead of having customer interview or customer quote on video but at the time, this was, you know, you mentioned how does this scale. This is something that was real easy for us, we had a template, we just emailed out a few customers every week that had popular sites on our service. So we knew they already had talent in building an audience, and so we wanted to get the people who were popular using our service and say, 'Hey, would you mind answering these questions?' And the questions were so small, they didn't mind helping out and giving the time back. Then we emailed it out and I cut and pasted it to WordPress and there we go. 

Andrew:	I love that. That's such an easy thing to do. All right, let's go on to the next big idea which I call the 'F Story'. It's got people laughing in the live session. Do you know what I'm talking about here? Should I just bring up the website?

Josh:	You can bring up the website.

Andrew:	This is what "F" stands for. Who are these guys? Tell us about this company and what went on here with you guys.

Josh:	Yeah, so they're essentially an organization that's trying to build awareness about global warming and is something I didn't actually know when I talked to them at the time, but . . . 

Andrew:	You just thought that they were into farts.

Josh:	Yeah, I was like, these guys . . . So I get a list of new sites that go up every day with Kickoff Labs, so I sort of peruse it and when you see that farts.com is hosted on your service, you say, "I should reach out to these people and see what's going on." Because when I clicked it, I was like, "What is going on here?" I still don't know if this is the best landing page in the world, because I'm still not convinced it really tells you what it's about, but it was just humorous. I never try to miss an opportunity to talk to interesting customers. So I get that daily mail that says here's people that have signed up, here's what they're doing on your service. 

There's lots of ways you can do that, we just generated our own mail to just tell us when interesting, popular sites went up. So we saw this flew through the ranks pretty quickly and became a popular site fast in our service. So I called them up, and the great thing about it was I found out he had a support question, so I was able to answer the support question. And it was just funny because I was talking at the time when I called them up, I was actually also on Skype with my co-founder who was muted, because he wanted to kind of hear the conversation, too. 

And I was sitting there explaining this technical step, he was like, "How do I set up the domain records?", and so I'm sitting here, "OK, so you take the MX domain and you take the root domain and the A record and you point it at farts.com" and my co-founder is just cracking up. We're all kids at heart. You're sort of like, I can't believe I just used the term "and point it at signups.farts.com". [laughs]

Andrew:	But the opportunity was to get on the phone with them and to really just understand their thinking, what are they doing with your site, why they're using your product, what's . . . 

Josh:	Yep.

Andrew:	. . . working for them, we're they struggling with it, and that's the big takeaway that you want to leave the audience with, which is talk to your customers early on to understand what they're trying to do with the site. And you know what, by the way? I agree with you on this. Now that I take a look at this site, this page . . . first of all, I see that your design is nice. It's actually beautiful and it's got all the elements that we need:	the email collection box that's really big, the button that they could replace the 'Submit'. I hate the word 'Submit' on a button. In this case it's 'I will help'. You got the Tweets and so on. But you're right; they don't say what we're getting here. If you fart, you can help. Enter you email below. Save the planet. I mean they're not being concrete enough about the benefit of putting the email address in there, so they still need to learn . . .

Josh:	They still need help, but it's interesting what I learned from calling them up is I found out that, hey, there's this thing that was really hard for them to do to set up the domain, that we could make easier. So we modified some of our help documentation to answer some of these questions, but I mean, I weren't looking for opportunities to call our questions, to call to talk to customers, I might have missed that. A lot of people were probably just going and failing at it, and never calling me, and they'd just drop off and they might leave, and I'd never find out why they left the service; but because I was reaching out to people who were getting some quick traction or their site was trending that day, I was learning what bumps they were running into and then improving our product along the way.

Andrew:	All right, let's go on to the next big idea, which is the one that I told people in the beginning they should pay attention to, which is 'Bribes. What bribes can do for you.' Now Seth Godin actually when I talked about this concept, I said, 'Seth, I'm catching a lot of references to bribes in my interviews.' He said, 'It's not really a bribe, it's you want to give people a reward and it has to be something that's meaningful and connected to the business.' But he agreed that it's an important point. Maybe I shouldn't be calling it a bribe, but . . . I do feel that you're kind of . . . well, let's go with the word incentive. 

Josh:	Yeah.

Andrew:	How can we incentivize our users? I don't want to use a word I think that . . . actually . . . 

Josh:	Yeah, I mean, it's . . .

Andrew:	How do we bribe our users to get them to promote us?

Josh:	It's ultimately a bribe, and so I tell our customers and I would tell entrepreneurs now too, that you basically are after two conversions. And most people think about the first one. They don't think about the second one, and a lot of people don't think about how incentivize both of those conversions and we certainly weren't before we launched and when we launched Kickoff Labs but that first conversions is you want to get them to sign up and so what can you offer that'll get them to sign up on your page. 

What do you have to offer? You may not have a product, some of our customers have products, some of them don't but you may not even have that but maybe you could offer yourself as a domain [?]. Say, hey, if you sign up I'm going to send you a newsletter with an auto response with five tips on how to grow your business or I'm going to send you a cheat sheet of how to do this. You can sell your information. 

You can use your knowledge as a domain expert in whatever your building to parlay that into hey, it's a bribe because when people are hesitant they see an email box, they don't' want to just give up their email address, there has to be something in it for them even if they think what you're doing is cool and we look at stats on the page, there's a lot of pages that sometimes people will share the page but they don't enter their own email address and we can see that because we watch people's behavior on the page. 

So, we know on landing pages sometime people share the page but they don't bother to enter their email address and you have to wonder why that is and I think it's because those pages that have that trend, they're not offering enough to get the person to enter their email address. They maybe have something that could be a potential product or interesting sell that they person say's, oh, I'll share this on Twitter which people sometimes think is less of a task then giving my email is more personal and so you need to bribe people to do that initial conversion.

Andrew:	Do you have an example? Let me, I don't want to pick on these guys because I think their fun and I'm glad but I feel like they don't have an incentive here. They don't have that bribe as I call it. Do you have an example of somebody who does it well?

Josh:	I'm trying to think. Off of the top of my head, I mean, there's been lots of examples. Often time I don't have one. I know the visual we have is about the second conversion that we're talking about. It's actually about both so go to the next screenshot.

Andrew:	What is this company?

Josh:	So, they let the videos do the talking for the most part but what's amazing is you probably wouldn't guess this page converts at 40%. 

Andrew:	40% here wow.

Josh:	Yeah. 40% of people that hit this page enter their email address, right, and they do two things really well. For a long time what they were doing, basically they do two things and they made it simple into one. You enter email address for a chance to win this here, right, so your bribing them with a contest but what they do is they also focus, they realize the importance of that second conversion and the second conversion is get them to tell their friends about you, right, and that's often time we forget about even our product to, is once somebody has bought we think oh, job done, they bought. Your jobs not done I don't think until the person says I'm willing to tell my friends about you. 

So, what they did to get people to tell their friends is they said, listen, you enter your email address, you effectively get a raffle ticket where we give away this scooter but when their email that they send back, in the auto response, they send back they say guess what, if you share this with your friends and they sign up, everyone of your friends that signs up is another raffle ticket to you. So it's like the pyramid scheme of lotteries and there's one guy on their site and they've had thousands and thousands of signups but there's one guy who's responsible for 3,000 of their signups because he shared it and then, we track in our product we track not just directly influenced but also the children of that and so the descendants of that, so they can attribute back 3,000 signups to this one person which is a huge, good percentage of their conversions that they've done,

I know that not only are they going to do the raffle like they said and give everybody a ticket but they'll do something great for that guy to I'm sure because he was sharing, he shared so effectively with his friends but in that case they did the one, get a raffle ticket and they made it simple. They just said every one of your friends is another raffle ticket in the contest. People like contests, they like the chance to win. It's just a great way to do it. The other examples I have are a little bit more common. I don't have live examples but I know what people have done that has worked really well. Two things, one is giving a way an eBook, like I said, a cheat sheet, an eBook for a signup so that was leveraging the knowledge and the other is giving away a discount that scales really well and so actually if you go to, they're not even our customer and I should have done this visual, go to, I don't know if you can pull up a website.

Andrew:	Let's take a look. Let's see. Usually we can do it. So while that's coming up here, did we get this up"

Josh:	If you can go to this site. Let's see. And of course now they're going to prove me wrong, they're going to have taken this down.

Andrew:	But we're often told to give people an incentive to give you their email address, what's rarely talked about it, after they give you their email address, once they've taken that big risk on you and trusted you on their email address they're much more likely to share it with their friends than if they were just a random stranger that hadn't committed to you.

Josh:	Yep. 

Andrew:	But to get them to do that, you guys at Kickoff Labs say give them an incentive, tell them that if they do take that next step with you which is to share it with their friends on Twitter on Facebook et cetera, that your going to give them something in return to show your appreciation and that's what you guys are especially good at and I'd love to be able to do that everywhere. I wish every web room incorporated ads into their forms, I wish that anytime I got someone to register for my list I could do it. But it's too tough to code up and the reason that we used you guys and the reason that you and I connected is, we can't code it all up, we just wanted it to run and so we turned over our page to you and you guys made it run.

Josh:	And the best practices there are both whether you use our service or not, I mean, I would tell people, of course the lobby guys is the example I was going to pull up. They're not using it anymore but they did a great job. They weren't using it.

Andrew:	I just brought up their page to, this is the site you were talking about.

Josh:	Yeah, they used to, when they first were looking for their first kind of wave of users, they had a great bar at the bottom, it was like a progress bar which showed you basically where you were and it said, when you enter one email address great, we'll put you on our waiting list. When you enter three email addresses, you'll be within the first 2,000 people to get an invite. When you enter ten email addresses we'll get you a t shirt and when you enter 100, I forget what their reward is for 100, when you get a 100 of your friends to sign up. So they staged out their rewards to kind of pull people through. I just thought it was a genius use of that reward system.

Andrew:	Are they using your software? I was checking out the source to see if they were. Is this your site?

Josh:	No, they weren't using our software to do it. I mean, it is something that people have done similar things with our API but they're using custom built stuff to do that.

Andrew:	Well, I'm actually able to bring up web pages so if you need me to bring anything up we can do it to.

Josh:	That actually worked other than that they had stopped doing the promotion that I really liked.

Andrew:	And by the way, here is a list of, what is this, you guys worked well with them, you've been there so I can see how you have social proof all over the page here.

Josh:	Yeah, if people click on our website, if they click the discover tab at the top of our website. Customers can kind of look if their looking for inspiration on the Discover tab of our website.

Andrew:	Where is the discover tab? I don't see that. Oh, there it is, OK.

Josh:	Up at the top. Top menu.

Andrew:	Ah, and you can see what other people have done.

Josh:	Yeah, so we have people that have their pages on the right side, or the popular pages for that, you know a couple of hour span, and just in the middle are just as people get sign ups we push the site up to the top of that list. So you can kind of see popular sites on one hand and then in the middle is the other side, or the middle is just live sign ups as they're happening on the sites.

Andrew:	Cool. So back to the big board. We talked about what bribes can do you for you. And we talked about how to do it right. Let's go on to the next big idea which is going overboard. You want to nurture your first customers like crazy and make them love you is what your saying.

Josh:	Yeah, and that just plays off what I was talking about in terms of thinking about the second conversion. It's not just for a landing page and getting people to sign up, it really us a thing that you need to think about for your business. You're relationship with a customer doesn't stop at the point that they've bought your product. Your goal is not just that they become repeat customers but that they, you have to think about your goal is that they become such raving fans of you and your work, to use Ken Blanchard or whatever, the book raving fans, that they are willing to tell other people about your service and your support.

And so, especially when you're just starting out and those first couple hundred users, you know, I recommend just reaching out personally to them with an email or a phone call and seeing what they like about the product and saying, hey thanks for signing up, if there's anything I can do to help let us know. And I think there's a visual or a screen shot of a great example, not one that I wrote but it was better than what I'd written so I used this one. This is an excerpt from a blog post by Rob Fitz [SP]. He talks about, hey what better do you have before you have 1,000 signups that tend to be talking with each and every person that sign up. 

You won't find too many better uses of your time then to talk to these customers both from the marketing perspective to turn them into raving fans and get them to share with their friends but also from the improve the product perspective. In one case I called up one of our customers, one of our first 1,000 and he ended up saying hey, by the way, I'm in a startup incubator and your product is perfect for all the [?] incubator and he said can you give me some sort of discount for all the startups they [?]? Yeah, sure, you never know what opportunities there from talking to your customer because then we got 30 more customers out of that one phone call and we did features we wouldn't have done for a long time. 

When we started talking to these first 100 customers, we realized that they really cared about SCO and, again, another thing that we didn't focus on early, not going to cover it in the course but SCO is really important, but we didn't have a way for them to adjust the SCO's setting on the page exactly the way they care about. The marketing customers, people who care about marketing, whose job it is to be a digital marketing professional that is extremely important to them. So unless we were talking personally to these first 1,000 we wouldn't have added it because Scott and I were like, SCO's black magic, black art we're not going to focus on it. 

We would have completely ignored it and but adding those settings now we get customers, I love it, I go in and I can tweak the SCO to my heart's content. I can add, change any settings on a page and we wouldn't have done it had we not talked to the first few customers. So it's both a marketing opportunity and chance to learn about the customers out there. And they love it. They love you for it. They love hearing that the founder called them and talked to them. I still can't talk to everyone that signs up today but I still look for the important people and I still reach out to them directly, that sign up.

Andrew:	All right, I've got a couple other visuals here within this section. What do you want me to show next?

Josh:	It kind of goes with the social trusting. The only other visual we can skip on in the section but the only other visual was, let' see, it's in the same section. You can look at our support page.

Andrew:	OK, you're showing how accessible you're making yourself because you want to really go overboard and make yourself easy for them to talk to.

Josh:	Yup. Especially if you're building a solution where you taking some that's challenging tactically and making, trying to make it really simple, making somebody feel like they'll be supported along the way is extremely important. So, that's why we have the phone number, that's why I have the big giant help and feedback button and it's worked out really well for us. Like I said, the opportunities we got from talking to the customers and just because I answer support question I make sure I throw in and say hey, how'd you hear about us?

Andrew:	And you do want to say, here's something you don't like. You don't like the opposite of this where people send an email from an address that you can't respond to. You're saying, if you're a company sending out an email, be accessible especially at first. Allow people to hit reply and what you guys do on the bottom of your emails is say, is actually encourage people, you say you love to hear from them and you encourage them to email back.

Josh:	Yeah, you'll notice it's the only, other then the blue links, it's the only color we use in the email template is a around the word love in that template and it's worked really well. I mean, I hate you sign up for a service and there's not tactical reason why anybody has to have a no-reply that you cannot reply to this email address on the service. You could say, if you were worried about it, hey we may not get back to everybody or reply if you're at Facebook or something but for any modern medium size, this is no reason why any email address that sends out a notification, you shouldn't be able to direct all of the reply's to a support address. In this case it did come from our support address when it does go out but we have a notify kick of [?] account that sends them account updates or when they get their accounts close to being expired if they bought a package and that we let people reply to, too. 

There's no reason, and people do, they reply to it all the time because when their thinking about you and they have a question or they want to tell you something you want to be accessible and so we try maybe, and we actually needed up convincing the guys at User Voice to do this, they read our blog post and we're doing a gust post on their blog and within two days they converted all their email addresses to be replyable. So when User Voice sends out an email you can reply right to it. 

Andrew:	By the way, as a Kickoff Labs user, this is the email that I love most. This is the email that comes in to my inbox. It says, "You have new sign-ups" and it gives me the names of the people who signed up. It's encouraging to see how many people sign up and to get that email everyday.

Josh:	Yeah, people have it everyday or every week or just choose not to get it. Most people seem to get it on a weekly basis and, yeah, we hear that all the time that because they get this email it motivates them and say, oh . . . it's either, wow, a hundred people signed up or it's only two, I need to go promote harder . . .

Andrew:	[laughs] I'm surprised by how many people we got to watch a live session. Our initial bribe was, 'Watch this course live', which I screwed up and I'm going to have to fix. Then, the benefit of sharing was we're going to hire writers to create a guide based on this course and we'll give it to you if you get two of your friends to sign up.

As we did that, we kept getting these emails, they just kept . . . where is that, is this the email? Yeah. Emails like this kept popping into my inbox which was encouraging, like you said.

Josh:	Yep.

Andrew:	All right. So, the next big idea is that we need to exploit our competitors' weaknesses. What do you mean by that?

Josh:	So, I think people are just super friendly sometimes and they look at the competition and they don't want to go near the competition's customers, but I think it's prudent for anybody to set up alerts. We use both Google alerts and we also use the Twitter search and monitor several topics. 

I mean one of the topics we monitor are sets of competitors and the other set of topics, and Google alerts will give you daily emails of important blog posts or articles written about them. Then, for kind of getting closer to the customers, we set up some safe Twitter searches as well. 

So, we go to the Twitter search and set up searches for people mentioning our competitors, but also people mentioning the general market we are in of landing pages and start-up pages and sign-up pages and just see what people are saying. We can learn a lot from that.

But, especially, I think a lot of people kind of discover the differentiators as they go and when you enter a marketplace, you have an idea of what they would be. But as you start watching the tweets come through about your competitors and see on forums online and blog posts what people are saying, you learn, wow, my competitor is really good at 'X', but not so good at 'Y' and I bet there's a lot of people who really need 'Y'. 

In our case we learned one of our competitors offers a free solution. And two of the things we learned from that was, A, because their solution is free, they force their brand on people and we knew there was a marketplace of people craving for white label unbranded solution. Then, we also knew that they were having problems supporting the volume. Because one of the choices you make when you say we are going to do a free business is you are temping the scale.

If you have a two to five person company and you say everything is free and we're just going to try to get massive user adoption, you've got to somehow support those customers and more often than not, you can't do it. Scott and I kick off, our belief is we wanted to be in a business and be able to support and help customers, even if that meant less customers, we wanted to form a closer relationship with them.

So, it helped us be able to highlight those things as differentiators from our competition.

Andrew:	Yeah, I know what you mean. When your product becomes my home page, the home page of a new product that I'm launching, I don't want your branding to be bigger than my branding. I don't want some issue to come up and not be able to call you up and say, hey, how do I fix this, how do I solve it and you notice those two things by watching the competition on Google. . .

Josh:	Yep.

Andrew:	By using Google alerts and Twitter alerts. 

And something happened with one person who you discovered while monitoring, can you tell that story?

Josh:	Yeah. This person was setting up a carpooling service and they were having problems redirecting their page to a competitor and they had tweeted three or four times. I don't generally just reach out and say, oh, I'm going to try and steal a customer from my competitor. Despite the title of my blog posts, which you might be highlighting up in a second.

Andrew:	Yeah, let's bring that up.

Josh:	But I felt bad for the person when it was the third time he had been reaching out and hadn't gotten an answer. So, I said, hey, I'm willing to help you out. We will see if we can do something for you. Sure enough he had a really simple problem he was running into and he was just trying to get an answer fast because he was trying to set it up before he presented at TED because he was going to be speaking at the TED Conference.

It's just a few of these gems you notice when you do that because what happened was he wrote up this great case study of converting to our system and then he talked about us as part of his presentation and to the other start-ups in the area. He's from Argentina so he talked about us there and then all of the sudden we got a little bit of minor press there. We got a couple of hundred more customers coming on board from, just reaching out and helping this one person who was having problems with a competitor.

Andrew:	I see. And this is a case on your site, this is how you talked about it and told your audience about it.

Josh:	Yeah. It's this, since the [??], our site's been targeting start-ups who are also offering not just stuff from our landing pages but sort of business advice so one of the things we said was he wrote this long email to us and asked him if he mind if I republished the email about his experience switching to us and why he did it and why he liked it and so I figured I share it on the blog.

Andrew:	Great point and great example of what can happen when you're watching what people are saying about your competition.

All right. Next big idea is to be crazy. What did you guys do that is crazy?

Josh:	I don't think that we do enough crazy stuff. I keep wanting to look for things to do more of but you have to do a lot when you're trying to get press attention and as I go back and forth, I hate working with the press and sometimes I like it when I can make a connection but they get so many pitches. They're inundated with so many emails to pitch this and do this and I launched this, that it's hard to stand out and so, I said in the previous point, I was monitoring a topic about sign up pages and start ups and I saw these two reporters going back and forth on Twitter about "Hey, all these meta start-ups, helping start ups is a sure sign that the bubble is coming and before we know it pet, you know, pets.com is going to come back as pets.com version 2 and..." 

So, I just injected myself in the conversation and used our product and said, "You mean, like this?" and I set up a landing page for pets.com 2 and said, "Hey, you know? I'll sell this to you for, you know, a valuation, about $1 million or something. If you're interested, you can own the domain and have the landing page for pets.com 2." And the two reporters got a kick out of it and one of them reached out to me and we got a story on the next web because put ourselves in the conversation.

And this is just an example. It wasn't a pitch. I didn't email them. I think he was on my list of people that I emailed sort of a generic pitch that just never worked. But when I was following them on Twitter and I saw the conversation and injected myself, then he came back to me and he said 'You guys have an interesting product. I can do a story about you and kind of pitch it this way' and I helped him out. We did the story about us and that's driven a lot of traffic and we got a lot of customers from that referral, from the next web. 

Andrew:	And that's just a page. I know that that page can be created in minutes, maybe a few minutes, right? Did you buy the domain also? You did.

Josh:	At the time I did. I let the domain go so it was just a sub-domain to but, the page itself as set up I think it took me like 10 minutes. Most of that was just coming up with the copy and quickly finding the images that I wanted to put on the page. But, yeah, it was really fast for me to set up and have that. 

The funny thing about it, when the site went up and the reporter retreated, it was a, I had to put a warning on the page that said "Don't sign up". I didn't disable our sign up button on the page because I had 40 people sign up for it as Coming Soon. I'm not sure why.

Andrew:	They were using this?

Josh:	What?

Andrew:	The bottom of the page here, if we scrolled to the bottom, that, people just put on their email address and submitted it.

Josh:	[??] their emails address on the page. I don't know if they thought it was a joke or something and so I had to disable the form after I put the page out there because I didn't want people out there giving up their email addresses for what was essentially just a one-off joke to help get our name out there.

Andrew:	And you got some press off of that. All right. Let's go on to the big board again and, the final big idea here is to turn your start up into a movement. How did you guys do that?

Josh:	I think the biggest thing is just to understand a little bit about root psychology and just thinking about, people like to be part of something bigger than themselves.

I worked at Microsoft a long time ago and I worked under Developer Community Software and we're just intrigued by these people who have got an answer 500 questions or 800 questions in a short amount of time in a couple of months in these Microsoft developer forms and they are not being paid by Microsoft to do it. They're not official Microsoft support and so we bring them in and say 'Hey, why are you doing this? Why are you helping us as this giant company to do it?' and he said, well, he never looked at it and that he was helping make Microsoft lots of money. 

He looked at it as he was moving the industry forward and that he was part of a movement that he wanted to work with smarter people so if he gave back then, if he gave back to the industry by answering questions and helping newbies get started and develop on Microsoft software, then he could be surrounded by smarter co-workers. So it was one part selfish and then one part he saw that he was part of a movement and so that's always struck me as something, you know, powerful that people can adopt with their marketing and their messages. You know, you start out your cast and you say, hey freedom fighters, and you've got your intro and I love the intro, but your making people feel like their part of a movement, right, and anybody can do that. 

And so, what we did was really just a simple thing and we put up on our site and said, hey, this is our goal, you know, our goal is we want to get to 5,000 customers, you've helped us and if you want to help more, you know, for every person you sign up that becomes a paying customer we'll get you a month of free service. And so, you know, there's a little bit of selfishness in it for them but then there's also this, you know, hey it's part of a bigger goal. Now it's a strange goal because it's not moving an industry forward, I think there's smarter ways people could probably do this and I'm sure if people hear this interview I'll hear it re-implemented in better ways but, you know.

For me, it was just, hey, you know, I might as well just be public with our customers and say this is what we're trying to do right now. This is one of our primary objectives and help us be part of it. And I've gotten, since we did the interview, and since you had that screen shot, you know I had a lot of people email us, just random customers and people on the website, hey, congratulations, I see you made it, did you know I referred ten people. I say, yeah, I know you referred ten people, I gave you ten free months.

Andrew:	Ha ha, that's a lot to give. 

Josh:	But people were happy, people genuinely felt like, you know, hey, they needed to say congratulations to us for doing it and you know, it's just because they felt like they were part of it and they helped out and I think anybody can use this strategy effectively to make their customers feel like their part of their goals. And I think people don't do this a lot because they're shy to scare, they're too scared to share some of their goals with their customers, just let their customers in a little bit and when your small and your just starting out, there's no reason not to. You know, what do you have to lose by sharing your goals with your customers.

Andrew:	Well, here, I'm keeping the screen shot up for a reason, because I want to highlight a couple of things about this that were, that I underestimate the power of. See the thing is, I keep thinking that if you want to create a mission, you have to have like a Martin Luther King size vision and Martin Luther King size vision that people will rally around. But you did something different. 

You said look, the mission is this, we are two guys here, and yeah, this is the part that I wanted us to highlight, this top sentence right here, in fact let me read it. Would you like to put a huge smile on the face of two scrappy co-workers with beautiful, young children who like to eat three times a day...and then you went on to do like saving money, etc, explaining what's in it for them. But you brought them in to your personal mission, that you're trying to build this new company and you need their help to get some new customers. And that's the mission that you got them on and boy anyone who is your potential customer has got to identify with that. 

And then the other thing you did was, you said, here's what we're going for, we're looking to get 5,000 new customers and, again, I'm going to circle this part, and this is where we are right now. At the time that I took this screen shot, which was a long, long time ago at this point, you were at 4,412 customers and so people got to see where they were and where you were and got to root for you and of course there was something in it for them too, you said that you were going to give them the free month but this number is what, the one that I'm circling right now, is what a lot of people were trying to raise for you and get you closer to the 5,000. And so that's what I thought was especially encouraging about this and of course, as you said, since I took this screen shot, you guys have blown through the 5,000 customer goal. Do you have a new one now?

Josh:	Yeah, if you go to our site now, we're maybe not as creative as we should be, we simply set the goal, the goal was originally 1,000, then we hit 5,000 and now we're going for 25,000.

Andrew:	So 25,000. Now you're bringing people in to this. What about this fear that if you show people where you are and where you're not that your competitors could get a better understanding of how big your company is and, you know, some people that want to do business with you might say, oh, they're too small, they haven't even hit their goal, why don't I do business with them once they hit that goal.

Josh:	Yeah, I mean, that was originally was my idea to do it back when we had in the 1 to 100 customers and I think Scott and I talked about it and we didn't do it because we felt that was a little bit small at the time, although looking back on it I don't think it would have mattered. I still think it would have been as good a [??]. The small thing is interesting because his point was he wanted to have some substantial numbers before we let people in and so that people didn't think wow I'm a guinea pig for the service. But once we passed that, then the thought of a competitor looking at us didn't really bother me so much because if you think about it if you knew how many customers your competitor has, what are you really going to change?

Andrew:	Right.

Josh:	What's going to change and in them knowing it about us? I don't think it's going to change their strategy or what they do. And if they try to do some marketing or a competitor tried to do some marketing and said hey don't go with the small guy go with .... That's just going to look bad on them. So you're always better off just ignoring the competition when it comes to your own messaging and your marketing. Not, as we talked about before, it's smart to pay attention to what they're doing so you can know how to differentiate. 

But in terms of directly using some of that stuff against them is pointless and it's not worth doing. But the other question I've had people ask that's similar is like, oh well isn't an investor going to see that you've only got this and they're not going to want to talk to you or give you money. And I guess my answer is well if anybody's going to give you a substantial sum of money they're going to find out these numbers pretty quickly anyway because they're not going to give you $50,000 in seed funding or $800,000 in funding or $1 million in funding unless they know what your customer numbers are anyway. 

So, at least, if you're up front about it then you can start demonstrating traction and I found it's the other way, is that once we started putting the numbers on the site, this number plus we also show on that same page the number of signups we've generated for our customers. But that's actually gotten investors and advisers calling us saying hey wow, you guys are making some real progress here in a short amount of time. How could we help? And it's actually started more of those conversations. Now, maybe I don't know how many conversations it's stopped because they've just looked at our page and gone away.

Andrew:	I doubt it has.

Josh:	But it's helping.

Andrew:	Here let me show one other thing and then I want to ask you a question that we don't have on the big board. I want to talk about one topic that we didn't put on there. And that last thing I want to show, in the bottom left corner of my screen shot are your signatures. So you really personalized it in addition to making that personal call to action at the top, on the bottom you signed it. All right there is one other thing that we don't have on here that you noticed after we recorded the first version of this. 

And I should tell the audience that we recorded one version where I screwed up the technology. We were doing it live and live did not work for me for some reason. Then we recorded version number two, which worked out well. We were riffing; we were going great. And there was some issue with the video at the end. So here we are recording the last section, the part that had a video tech problem on it. So thank you for doing this three times with me now. I said I owe you and I owe you big. And you did something really interesting the second time we did it. You said Andrew, since the first time we recorded I've been thinking, did I leave anything out? 

I want to really make sure that people understand what's worked for us so that they get a full understanding of how they can get customers for themselves. And there's one thing that you remember that we didn't put up on the big board that maybe we can talk about now. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Josh:	Yeah, I remember. So after we did the live thing and I knew we were recording the interview again, I said boy, I want to go back and make sure I do as great a job as I can for people because I really want to help people out. So I went back and I was looking through our customer sources that say for the 5,000 or customers we got to when we hit our goal, where did they all come from? And I realized these tactics are all building on it and a lot of it, just about everything, is measurable these days with the right tools. 

So, I think I realized that I left off about one-fifth of the 5,000 customers, somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter and it was a huge thing to leave off of the tactics which was in our case a large percentage of the customers do come from the fact that we have a free [??] model. So we do offer a free version with the branding as much as we said before we don't like, I personally wouldn't want the branding on my page but offering it has been successful in the sense that a good 20 to 25% of our customers come from another customer's home page. They click on our branding, they come through; they say oh I want a page like this, and then they sign up and they go through the process with us. 

So, that was the missing thing that we didn't talk about is figuring out how you can turn your customers into your marketing, not just directly through this sort of affiliate program that I talked about but how their actions produce other customers. And you know that's starting to become really popular [??] viral so a lot of things have become, it's kind of automatic, like if your playing an asynchronous game like Words with Friends, all of the sudden it shows up on the person's Facebook feed because they played a move and it shows on Facebook and somebody else on their Facebook friends list sees it but I don't think it's limited to just those things that are viral because there's nothing, there's not so much of that going on with a lot of landing pages. I mean, we do offer a social component but primarily it's just, it's a one off thing because you put the branding on it, it's an opportunity for us to get other customers from popular sites.

Andrew:	I've seen this done in several online businesses. MailChimp for example, have a free version that lets you email a thousand people for free without paying anything but on the bottom of all thousand emails that you send to your audience is a MailChimp ad. In KissingSights, let's you pop up a box, a little survey on your site. If you don't pay, then you get their KissingSights logo on there, on that pop-up and that's how they get customers.

So, turning your free people into promoters is another way that helps you grow.

Josh:	Yeah. So that's been a big part of our growth, just figuring out. It's difficult to figure out what the right model is of where you want to put the line of free versus paid but once you start figuring out that balance, I mean, it's something you can adjust as you go, specially when you're small and you're just starting out, to just kind of play with those levers and say 'Well, this is, we're offering this free, this is not' and then you play with the levers and say 'What if we took this away or added this' and it takes a while to find that right balance that attracts people to free being good enough for people to sign up but not completely but still enticing them to upgrade.

I thing that's why a lot of people are worried about the premium models. Where do you pick that line and I think that's where you just have to start measuring, making changes, taking something away, add something and figure out the right mix where you're still getting the upgrade that you'd like to see.

Andrew:	All right. Well, this has been a really comprehensive program. Thank you for going through all of it and I am going to recommend to the audience that, first of all, let me bring out the site. You go to KickoffLabs.com, there it is.

And I think I've, I don't know if I, we recorded 3 times. I'm not sure whether I said it at the end before or not but I will say it right now, that most people think that Kickoff Labs is a place you go to create a landing page before you create your actual product so that you have a way of capturing email addresses and getting those, the people who give you their email address to promote your product to their friends and do all that before you actually have a product.



I think of your product, Josh, at Kickoff Labs, as the place to go when you're, for just promotion. To implement several different promotion ideas. Of course, when we did the live version of this, instead of using the webinar software, email collection box, a lot of people register and put their email address on the webinar software site, I created a Kickoff Labs page where people can give me their email address, same as with the webinar software but where they're also encouraged to go tell their friends about it. 

And there are a lot of ideas like that. If you need someone to register for anything, I recommend that you check out Kickoff Labs and think of how can you use a Kickoff Labs form to collect that registration. Because with Kickoff Labs not only do you get a beautiful form that encourages people to give you their email address but you also get that virality that's built in . As soon as they give you their email address, they're also encourage to tell their friends and get their friends to register.

So, KickoffLabs .com and Josh, thank you for doing this first time, second time and now a third time.

Josh:	Third time's a charm.

Andrew:	Third time's a charm.

Thank you very much. Thank you all for watching and looking forward to your feedback on this and seeing how you use the course. Bye.