Get all the FemtoConf 2019 notes

Website: RightMessage
Twitter: @shaisc

Personalised CTAs: happier users, more conversions

• There are 5,000 advertising messages a day thrown at us
  • We recognise 50
  • We remember 4
• Important filter questions:
  • “Is this right for me?”
  • Can this help me?”
• Personalization should be based on intent, knowledge level, etc.
• Instead it is based on the first name

3 things that you can do next week that will make your CTAs more relevant so they convert better and your users are happier

• When you click through to a website from a link in their newsletter, don’t show a CTA that say “signup for newsletter”
  • Adjust CTA based on where people are in your funnel
  • Has never heard of you? “Signup for Newsletter”
  • Is on the newsletter? “Buy my book”
  • Bought the book? “Buy coaching”

• “I am a ____________ and I need your help with __________”
• “I work in retail and I need your help with increasing average order value.”
• Things you can segment on:
  • What are you struggling with right now?
  • What excites you most about [thing we do]?
  • Why are you intersted in [product]?
  • How much do you know already about [product/problem]?
  • When are you looking to make a decision?
  • How do you solve [problem] at the moment?
  • What industry are you in?
  • What’s your job role?
• Actions:
  • Lead magnets
  • Webinars
  • Purchases
• Surveys
• Trigger links

What if you don’t know what your segments should be?

• Ask what people are hoping to get out of signing up for your email list
• Great place for that is the “Thank you” page
• put everything into a spreadsheet and you’ll learn what your segments are

Describe the same thing differently based on their who/why

• Address people as Freelancers, Freelance Writers, Design agencies, Freelance designers, etc.
• e.g. car buyers:
  • “I care about safety” – Highlight safety features
  • “I care about price” – Highlight what a steal this is
• Niching without actually niching
  • E.g. your tool integrates with Paypal, Stripe and Braintree, change copy to Paypal/Stripe/Braintree if you know what a visitor uses

-Christoph

Website: FEInternational.com
Twitter: @jmegilbertson

A Successful Exit: 4 Lessons from hundreds of millions in deals

• Universal truth: “We are all going to leave our business someday.”
  • retirement
  • want to start something new

• Document everything
  • Metrics
  • Track financials
• Test, test, test
  • remove single points of failure
  • Still thriving in 10 years

• listen to those who pay you the most
  • build for your biggest customers

• Sell while you’re still growing
• Exit before you become stagnant

What is a business worth?

• Multiple of Seller Discretionary Earnings (SDE)
• SaaS: 3-6x annual SDE
• Content: 2-4x annual SDE
• E-commerce: 2-4x annual SDE

-Christoph

Get all the FemtoConf 2019 notes

Website: WithJack.co.uk
Twitter: @iamashley

Background

• Self-funded
• single founder

Lesson One: Position your product to a tiny audience

• Ashley did not re-invent the wheel. She is selling an existing insurance product
• Messaging (“We’re the insurance company for freelance designers and developers”)

Tips for choosing your tiny audience

• Have experience in their world
• Like the audience you serve (would you have coffee with them every day?)
• Have an existing network in that space
• Target an audience others in your field are ignoring (but be mindful of why they’re being ignored!)
• Questions to ask when choosing your tiny audience:
  • Do you need high volume to make money?
  • Is churn high?
  • Is the market big?

Lesson Two: Resist the urge to over engineer

• As a self-funded startup, you don’t have the resources (time & money) to build everything
• Ashley’s expectations before starting:
  • A suite of products
  • A dashboard to manage your insurance
  • Instant quotes and cover
  • Polished customer journey
• Reality:
  • One product
  • Manual quotes
  • No dashboard
  • Incomplete customer journey

The benefits of not over engineering

• Customer conversations lead to insightful data
  • Where they’ve come from
  • their thoughts on the experience
  • what features to build next
• Converting at a rate of 40%
• Discover common questions to crate educational tools/resources
• Can you scale back the tech?
  • Buffer emailed users when they got a sale because they didn’t launch with a payment system
  • Stripe delivered ‘instant’ merchant accounts by manually adding users behind the scenes
  • DoorDash collected food orders from restaurants and delivered to customers

Lesson Three: You’ll only discover problems post-launch

• My process to gather feedback and discover problems:
  • Personalise the email
  • “As a small business, this feedback really helps”
  • Try surveys – when asking for feedback, I got more feedback with a survey form vs. asking for feedback in the email directly. I use iteratehq.com

-Christoph

Get all the FemtoConf 2019 notes

Website: ReleaseNotes.tv
Twitter: @dazeend

Brute-Forcing Customer Acquisition with Cold Email

• started out with RelaNet, trying SEO
  • no customers, very little traffic
  • needed revenue right now
• tried Content Marketing next
  • very few conversion, because I had no traffic
• tried Facebook Ads next
  • it worked somewhat
  • spent money faster than revenue came in
• Realization:
  • I need to hunt down my customers
  • So I started cold emailing

The Process

1. Create Email List
2. Compose
3. Send

Step 1: Create Email List

• nice thing about B2B: businesses want to be found (on the internet), makes creating the email list easier
• Three step process:
  • Target Audience
  • Decision Maker (who can say yes to purchase decision?)
  • Categorize by need (helps you personalize the message)
• Define your target audience by:
  • Occupation
  • Revenue
  • Number of employees
  • level of sophistication (expressed through job titles)
  • Geography
  • Technology

Targetting by Occupation

• are you trying to get in front of people who need to register with the government?
  • e.g. pharmacies, dentists, firearm instructors
  • There is probably a society and a website that has all the registration data

Targetting by Size (Revenue, Number of Employees, Job Titles)

• LinkedIn is the way to go
• LinkedIn has a boolean search capability
• Use LIX (LinkedIn search eXporter) to export search results

Targetting by Geography

• almost all governments make the business registrations available online
• powerful way to find businesses

Targetting by Technology

• Use BuiltWith to find businesses/websites that use a technology
• Free alternative: https://techlookup.hunter.io/

Finding the Decision Maker

• get a virtual assistant to find the relevant contacts and fill in the blanks in your contact list

Categorize by Need

• categorized each business by
  • has a nice website
  • has an ugly website
  • has no website

Step 2: Compose Emails

• two things to compose:
  • Subject Lines
  • email bodies (plural)
• tips for subject lines:
  • use their name or the company name in the subject line
• Email bodies:
  • write one email body for each category we identified earlier
  • best email bodies are: Relevant, Genuine, Personal
• Structure for a good email:
  • “Hi $Firstname”
  • Introduce yourself and your company
  • Mention that you are local (if applicable)
  • In simple words state the problem they have (“I was looking at your firm’s website, and noticed that it might be due for an update”)
  • Offer to help (“If you’d like a hand with this, I can help”)
  • Show them how you can solve it and why you’re the best choice for the job
  • Write a clear Call-To-Action that is appropriate to your audience (e.g. accountants are used to doing business on the phone)
  • Sign off and mention your contact details

Step 3: Send Emails

• Don’t send them by hand one at a time
  • Automation avoids really embarrassing errors
  • MaxBulk Mailer
  • Bluetick.io – also automates follow-ups

Results

• based on when I used MaxBulk Mailer, so no follow-ups!
• I expect that all of these results are way better now
• 6.6% Response rate
• 1.5% book call rate
• 0.4% email-to-close rate
• Knowing these statistics allows you to calculate how many emails you need to send

-Christoph

This is the central resource for a recap of FemtoConf 2019 in Darmstadt, Germany.
If you write/record/create ANYTHING related to FemtoConf please let me know (Twitter: @itengelhardt ) and I’ll be happy to add it here.

Notes on the Talks

• Charles Perry – Brute-Forcing Customer Acquisition with Cold Email
• Ashley Baxter – Lessons Learned Bootstrapping in the Insurance Industry
• Jaimee Gilbertson – Successful Exits
• Shai Schechter – Personalized CTAs

-Christoph

The FemtoConf 2018 Notes and recaps can be found on the central hub page.

Website: profitwell.com 
Twitter: @Patticus

• How growth is changing: What we think works doesn’t actually work. This has dire consequences for your business. 
• We are living on another planet: 
  • 10 years ago you could build a database with a shiny UI and you were good
  • Today you face fierce competition
• Number of competitors when you started: 
  • 5 years ago: about 3
  • 1 year ago: roughly 10
• Sales & Marketing channels are plentiful
  • Number of sales & marketing channels utilized
    • 15 years old: 2.31
    • 1 year old: 13.22
  • competition is getting harder and harder
• Time taken to fully onboard product in an organization: 
  • 10 years ago: 56.7 hours
  • 1 year ago: 
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) has increased significantly by about 70% over the past 5 years
• relative value of features is declining
  • willingness to pay has declined over time
  • Customers do not care about your features (average NPS is actually down from 33 to 10.2) 
• What once worked is no longer working for building a business
  • Our playbook was acquire, acquire, acquire
  • Pricing (and retention) is an afterthought
• Acquisition is now table stakes
• Impact of improving:
  • Monetization >> Retention >> Acquisition
• We are building the wrong product, because we don’t talk to our customers enough

How do we fix this?

• Stop building. Stop buying ads. Stop guessing and checking. 
• For the love of God: Talk to your customer!
• How do we do that? 
  • There are three types of data you’re really looking to measure: 
    • Demographic data (purely for segmentation – i.e. size of team, revenue, software they are using)
    • Relative Preference Data
    • Willingness to Pay Data
  • Surveys
    • a non-compensated survey should be at most 5 questions long
    • compensated surveys maximum of 15 minutes
  • Start with a draft of your buyer personas
  • What’s our experimental design look like? 
    • Relative preference: What do people value? 
      • Don’t let them rank features on a scale of 1 to 10
      • Force them to decide on the most/least important feature
• How much are people willing to pay? 
  • At what (monthly) price point does PRODUCT become too expensive that you’d never consider purchasing it? 
  • At what (monthly) price point does PRODUCT start to become too expensive, but you’d still consider purchasing it?
  • At what (monthly) price point is PRODUCT a really good deal?
  • At what (monthly) price point does PRODUCT become so cheap that you question the quality of it? 

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: dnsimple.com
Twitter: @aeden
Slides:

 

Talk Recap

• 7 figure revenue
• looks successful from the outside, but
  • conflict with brother/co-founder –> no longer speaking to each other
  • father passed away
  • 7 hour DDoS

lessons learned from going through the lows

• don’t make decisions when you are upset
  • it leads to really bad decisions
  • wait a few days/weeks before making decisions
• get a second, third, fourth opinion
  • from people you can trust
  • join a mastermind group
    • people learn about your business and can give good feedback
• look at all the options
  • avoid tunnel vision
• when things go awry, stay the course
  • things aren’t as bad as you think they are
  • you’re probably doing really well if you’re selling stuff online and talking to customers
  • you’ll weather the storm – not going to be the end of the world
• Every successful business has failures on a daily basis
  • a great business is great at adapting to change and failures
  • it’s not all unicorn, roses and rainbows

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Webseite: Gumroad.com
Twitter: @delk
Slides: here

Revenue Cliff

• All digital products produce 90% of revenue in first 2-3 weeks
• Applies to digital products across all genres and industries

Evergreen Content

• Produce great content that will be great for years to come
• Josh Kaufman does great content marketing
  • TEDx talk video on Youtube: First 20 hours
  • reading list on the best business books
  • they drive 50% of revenue – worst month: $20,000 / promotion: 0 / baby: 1
• content needs to be:
  • valuable
  • free
  • shareable
  • similar

keep your content relevant

• you need to update it every once in a while
• e.g. Discover Meteor – $250,000 sales at 26.81% conversion rate
• Every update to the book created a spike in sales
• Drip email campaign
  • very long-term, regular, valuable content
  • binary outcome: They buy the book or they unsubscribe

Have Tiered Pricing

• Have multiple price points / tiers
  • allows you to upsell and increase LTV

Cross Promotion

• Brennan Dunn does that well with his products (Book, masterclass, SaaS)
• Develop an ecosystem (products for the same audience)

Questions & Answers

• Do cross promotion on email lists of partners

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Website: GetDrip.com / HitTail.com / SoftwareByRob.com
Twitter: @robwalling
Slides: here

What Is In It For You?

• Benefits of the “Slow Launch”
• How onboarding will make or break your business
• The optimal path to recurring sales
• Knowing when to move on

Part #1: The Slow Launch

• Build your email marketing list –> notes from last year
• Keys to the Slow Launch
  • Pick the right early customers
    • the 1st one didn’t work for Rob’s vision of Drip
    • Spent a month and built
      • Popup widget
      • Mailchimp integration
      • Email designer
      • Broadcast emails
    • Customer asked for a MAJOR feature –> “fired” the customer
    • choose new customers, repeat

    • Features for customer #1 & #2 have to work for #3, #4 and #5 as well!

  • Become a developer for hire (really custom onboarding)
  • When you have “Problem-Solution-Fit” for at least 1 customer, ask additional customers to join your beta
    • “Don’t worry about billing right now. We’ll do that when Drip provides you value and we are sure this is a long-term fit for you”
    • But manage expectation: “You will eventually be billed. ” (implied)
  • Go high touch
  • Name your price up front
  • … but don’t charge until a customer receives ample value
  • unlimited trial length

Part #2: Onboarding

• MPA = Minimum Path to Awesome
  • Proposal software: first time someone gets a proposal accepted
• MPA for Drip was 2 steps
  • Including the Javascript
  • Setting up the campaign
  • Big progress bar during onboarding
• Do anything to make them complete the MPA
  • Concierge onboarding service (e.g. create drip email campaign for them – at no cost)
  • Add drip email campaign during onboarding
• Lessons:
  • Determine your app’s MPA – take a guess at first & refine
  • Guide new users through the MPA
  • Do it again via email
  • Offer to do it for them (“concierge”)
  • All this increases trial activation from 5% to 60%
• The Slow Launch Part #2
  • Wait until onboarding is working
  • Divide list into cohorts (10-20% each)
  • Send a launch email sequence with a time-limited discount
  • Wait [trial_lengths] days
  • Repeat
  • ==> $7,000 MRR

Part #3: Stair-Stepping

• Step 1: Build one-time sale, single channel app
  • e.g. WordPress plugin, mobile app, Magento add-on
  • NO SaaS app
  • Traffic: SEO, WP.org, Amazon, Youtube, etc.
• Step 2: Repeat step 1 until you own your time
  • e.g. 3 more WP plugins
  • Brings income diversification & experience
• Step 3: Recurring sale
  • e.g. Baremetrics, Drip, Planscope, DistressedPro

Part #4: Lifetime Value (When to move on)

• LTV = total profit you receive from a customer over his lifetime
• LTV for HitTail when Rob bought it: $90
• LTV for HitTail now: $140
• LTV for JustBeachTowels.com: $30 revenue, $7 profit
• Simple way to calculate LTV: 
  • Average order size – cost of goods sold
  • OR
  • lowest plan * 10
• Better way: 
  • One-time: ARPU – COGS
  • OR
  • Recurring: AMRPU / monthly churn
• Sample Customer Acquisition Costs (CACs):
  • Content Marketing: $50 – $200
  • Facebook Ads: $50 – $300
  • Adwords: $100 – $1,500
  • Cold Calls/Emails: $250 – $2,000
• LTV >= 2x CAC
• You should quit if you can’t make those numbers work
• “Free” marketing channels
  • Google / SEO
  • iOS app store
  • Android app store
  • WordPress.org plugin repo
  • Amazon.com
  • Youtube
  • iTunes podcast directory
  • etc

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Website: Planscope.io
Twitter: @brennandunn
Slides: here

• I am a hacker & I like growth, but I don’t like the term “growth hacking”
• I am a solopreneur – with a bunch of different products
  • I don’t work that much, because of my wife & kids (a.k.a. my board of directors)
  • Frequent Question: “How big is your team?”; Answer: “About a quarter of a person”

Why We Are Here

• We are all here to grow
• We are all here to make more money

The All Important Sales Funnel

• e.g: Visitors –> Trials –> Activations –> Paid
• Activation: “Somebody who is actually utilizing your product in their day-to-day workflow”
• If you improve one step of the funnel, it improves all the other parts of the funnel TOO!

Lessons

Lesson 1: Reaquiring Drive-Bys

• People need to come back to your website for them to buy your product
• random visitor: “Google, how do I raise my rates?”
• Avoid “One size fits all” retargeting
  • Are they looking to double their rates or searching for software? –> Address those people differently
• Visitors to marketing site –> Retarget on display network (Interested in product)
• Visitors to blog –> Retarget on Facebook, drive to email course signup landing page
• Retargeting is more than just converting visitors
  • Trial users: Invitation to join the founder for 1-on-1 onboarding
  • RSVP for an upcoming webinar or mastermind
  • Videos or blog posts of success stories or usage guides
  • Product updates
  • Compliment and reinforce your trial lifecycle communication

Lesson 2: Segmentation

• Goal: Make this a product-for-one
• Customer: “I own a development consultancy, and we bill $10,000 a week”
  • Adjust the product to what you just learned about THAT customer:
    • Lifecycle emails: “When I ran my consultancy, I…”
    • Onboarding: Sample project with development-y tasks, rate of $10k/week
    • In-App messaging: reporting verbiage, button labels, etc.
• Further ways to individualize
  • Listed in 3rd party integration marketplace? You have referrer data – auto-default to linking with the referring tool
  • Create specialized landing pages for each persona “I run a 20 person agency… there’s no WAY a tool that works for freelancers could help me.”
  • Level over 9000: Figure out how, why, and where they first showed up on your site, and profile/cookie them for later
• Takeaway: a perfectly placed IF-condition can go a long way toward improving conversions

Lesson 3: Trial Scores

• Goal: Learn & Optimize Outreach during onboarding phase
• “What is common about people who convert to paid?” (for planscope)
  • have created a project
  • invited a client to join project
  • invited their team members
  • added 3rd party invoicing integration
  • used internal communication
• Turn that into a score for each customer in trial (Client Happiness Index)
  • Tailor your lifecycle emails according to their Client Happiness Index
  • Your #1 is to nudge people toward converting
• Takeaway: Write & Test your automated emails inside GMail before putting them inside a cron job

Lesson 4: Educate Everywhere

• Goal: Focus on the customer, not the product
• Your product is only a small part of your customer’s business
  • Educate them on topics related to their business
• “Click this button. Now enter a rpice in here. Then, click…” VS. “Here are some tricks you can use to win this new project…”
• Send helpful content right after events in your app.
  • e.g. send a “My help is to improve your chances of winning your proposals by 2-3x. Here are a few tips:” email right after they created their first estimate
• Celebrate your customer’s successes – and gather some great testimonials along the way
• Takeaway: What actions ALIGN with why someone actually wants your product?

Lesson 5: Do an Exit Interview

• Goal: Go beyond what funnels can tell us
• Not-so-obvious reason to collect credit card upfront: Requires people to cancel
• Ask people why they are cancelling & how you can improve
• Collect the responses, categorize them
  • Product reasons
  • environmental reasons
    • some won’t help you
    • but “I ran out of client work” –> you can teach them to get more business
• Takeaway: People are at the high water mark of their emotional entanglement with your product when they cancel

Lesson 6: Ways to Increase CLTV

• The goal of the trial is to establish product fit. When done, CHARGE.
• Decrease churn, e.g. by offering them a discount when they are likely to churn

Misc

• Look for repeatable quests that get you to that next level faster

Questions & Answers

• What do your customers mean to you?
  • My customers were struggling with cashflow, it’s great to help them
  • “Raising my rates is what allowed me to finance my wedding” –> Best. Feedback. Ever.
• Can you expand on your use of CRMs to provide 1-on-1 onboarding?
  • Push customer happiness index into close.io, multiply by CLTV,
• You have switched positioning from freelancers to agency. How did you adjust your content marketing?
  • There are different terms for “people who work for other businesses on a project basis”: freelancer, consultancy, consulting agency
  • Agencies don’t think advice for freelancers works for them
  • “Duplicating”/Cloning content for freelancers and agencies
• How did you do 1-on-1 onboarding?
  • I remotely joined them on their computer, trying to work their way through the app and get confused

 

-Christoph