Going from zero to $36k MRR with a productized subscription
Ditching Hourly · September 11, 2023 · 58 min
Transcript81 sections · auto-generated, so expect the odd wrong word
hello and welcome to ditching hourly I'm Jonathan Stark today I am joined by guest Zach Stevens Zach welcome to the show Jonathan super stoked to be here thank you for having me we are going to talk about product marketing as a subscription service today I know everyone's going to be very interested about that but first can you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do sure uh I'm Zach I am a designer of nine years and earlier this year I had been toying with the idea of potentially doing a subscription model for my own services for brand Identity Design web design and my now co-founder who is a very skilled and gifted marketer copywriter came to the came to me with the idea of doing product
marketing as a service so ended up joining forces with him and now we help SAS Founders turn traffic into Revenue love it and I love the name well Corey is a very gifted copywriter so naturally he's able to come up with these good monikers for services offer rings and Brands and I love it because it you're able to do so much more with a well-crafted name and good story design wise so Props to him for coming with a good name killer love it okay cool so this conversation originated from an email you sent it was almost two months ago I think correctly and you said that at the time you had just launched and then soon after that you were almost completely sold out or booked up and and we decided that we should wait a little
bit to see you know I liked it how it went in a couple of months so what can you tell us about I guess the initial I'm super curious about the initial launch and how you got the word out and who were your first clients that kind of thing so like because the idea is to paint the picture for someone who might be kind of renting themselves out by the hour to do a particular thing um and they're don't love the idea of doing sales they don't love the idea of the the Y conversation and trying to get good at sales interviews and writing proposals and they'd like something perhaps not as high margin but they'd be willing to trade that kind of high margin high stakes custom project proposals life for more predictable
income on a subscription basis and I might be assuming the subscription Pace but let's talk about that but a more predictable income a more productized service and and probably I'm guessing a more focused kind of work but I'm kind of making a lot of assumptions here so what what was the initial experience like switching from Not subscription for whatever to subscription for a particular thing at the time I had I had done subscription in air quotes for specific clients clients that I really liked or that I had a good relationship with also one that I had did not have a good working relationship with but that's we can dive into that story as well because there's a lesson to be learned about how you go about running
something like this so I had done it before and I knew that it was predictable I liked the idea of not having to go about doing things like a scope analysis or producing any kind of proposal and say just you get one thing at a time and you can give it to me as long as it's within my wheelhouse and my competencies then I will get it back to you the catches that you get I don't have to track hours we don't have to look at a defined and scope as long as I can do it I will do it for you catches you just get one thing at a time so I was familiar with it already and there were some hesitations that I had about jumping into it and going the full-fledged subscription model like not being able to funnel everybody through a
interview with me to do like a initial sales call but then I'd seen so many other people have success with it and like you know Brett from designjoy is kind of the Bastion of this model you know one person earning 1.2 million dollars a year and then I heard you speak with Ron Baker about uh the subscription model as well and he and you and my co-founder Corey echoed something that came up three times and it took that third time for me to finally get it and for it to register which was they're not paying for your services they're paying for access to you and so that was probably the first leap that it took me to be on board with it as opposed to something like value-based pricing singer productized services with a more defined
scope and as far as the initial launch goes I was very fortunate because Corey had done such a Corey my co-founder had done such a diligent job over the years building a huge email list for people who are either marketers or have a marketing position at a company so he's got 20 000 people following him on Twitter 20 000 people on his email list and so when we sent this out and launched it our conversion rate had to be in like the thousands of percentage points to make us at full capacity right so we had a lot of things going in our favor and I mean I don't want to Discount myself too much because I did a good job of making us look legit and like we were worth people's money based on The Branding and stuff that I did we
had a lot of people that were able to get right in front of nice that's fabulous Okay so what you know you said a thousandth of a percent of twenty thousand people or forty thousand people if you count social also what did you what were your thoughts around capacity at the time like what did you think was the maximum number of clients you could handle it just as a guess well we we set the bar very low we said we only want to take on five at one time to see how well we manage these people and when you're charging six grand per person as your minimum price that's 30 grand per month uh which is nothing to Snuff at you know that's a sizable income for uh essentially two two to three people running running the show just to see if
we could manage the workload uh so we knew that we were going to cap it at five we ended up having two people sign up at like the exact same time so we ended up going one over and we're like okay we'll we'll be all right nice problem to have uh but now we're opening it up again the whole point was to just make sure that we could manage the workload and also to uh promote some kind of scarcity with the kind of people that we were working with and to show that we're not here to service a hundred different people poorly we're here to service 10 to 12 at Max very efficiently and what are those so I'm imagining you have a very specific even more specific than the already listed out so like who's your ideal client based on what you know
now we like to work with SAS teams of less than 10 people ideally that have got some Runway like they've established the fact that they have a good product uh they probably I think the most common thing that we have is around the problem of a leaky bucket where they're getting a bunch of traffic they have a lot of people that are coming to their site but there's so many parts where they fall out either through poor messaging on the website not being able to convey uh look legit like they they look scammy or they look like a bootstrapper created it and so it's not like worth the price tag and email sequencing all the things that are around product marketing and after somebody hits the website is where we
come in and do the most damage and make it it's like turning things uh turning products into uh something like a nice to have to something that people must have right now great okay and so that's you said I think at the beginning use the word conversion like turning your traffic into customers or something like that traffic into Revenue traffic into Revenue thank you okay great cool well that's got to be very attractive to that market right so that they know they've got this sort of leaky funnel or leaky bucket they're getting traffic to the site they know once they activate clients that they stay around that you're not solving a churn problem right so it's a very very specific problem that you're solving or tell me if you
are correct me sometimes it is it's uh because oftentimes churn is a result of bad expectations and we try and help set the expectations of this is exactly what you're getting and it's hard for people to talk about themselves just in general from a company standpoint but then also to fate in a way that's very clear and concise uh and avoiding being cute and more trying to answer questions with Clarity and setting them up so they know what they're getting into and this is what I will receive from this product and that helps mitigate against the the churn that is prevalent in a lot of SAS companies yep okay so is there any pattern the types of SAS like are they typically more B to C or B to b or
Enterprise or tiered or you know is there just curious for those things are if you see any patterns there or if it's really just more about the team size and the fact got this kind of proven product put a leaky bucket well 90 of SAS is B2B initially so that sets us up to have more of a pool of people that are in the B2B space we could operate for someone that's in a b2c Arena but just given the nature of how many SAS companies there are in the likelihood that they will be a B2B company all of ours are B2B so it's around things like people who are offering a SMS marketing platform for creators or a AI site Monitor and heat mapping tool so a lot of it is it's around business to business problems and as far as
Enterprise versus non-enterprise I feel like now every SAS company has an Enterprise platform whether they use it or not is a different story it's usually just there's like a pricing anchor but I would say that they I would characterize one to two of our clients as an Enterprise tool and then the remaining five I would say or I wouldn't call them I would stop they couldn't be Enterprise but they were operate for other small small to medium-sized businesses as well okay and and how different are their relative price ranges like are they all kind of have a starting off you know I'm gonna guess it's a lot of bronze silver gold and two you know price tiers it's they're starting in the 49 range and
they go up to maybe the the 495 range but is that totally off base or is that kind of kind of what you're looking some go some go a little bit higher like uh we just got off the phone with somebody who their highest here is 9.99 like a thousand dollars a month that's their Ultra Enterprise solution but that sounds about right I think that there might be a couple as well that are in the that have it's like a 20 tier yep uh at least if they have an offering for somebody who's like a booster a solopreneur business they but that's specifically within their marketing like they have that offer because they're working with soloists and having that 20 too for a single person operation is a lot more feasible than 49 right which
would be more than double the cost right okay so that paints a really clear picture of how specific your at least the whether or not you know how how much this was conscious and how much of it was just like a result of coming from Corey's list and who was on there it's very specific it's extremely specific so that's yes I think that that would end up being quite important in terms of capacity planning and what you would expect the workload to be so if you had somebody for example if HubSpot hired you and or some Salesforce like someone huge right you probably I would imagine you would be likely to get overwhelmed by the request because you've got they've got so many irons in the fire they get so many employees you know like
like let's let's let's pivot into capacity a little bit and talk about your product process for not getting overwhelmed by you know that what I think you said seven clients now how many do you have now yeah currently we have seven okay and uh we'll be hopefully at nine by the end of the week if things go well cool that's awesome so what is what is the capacity what is the what was the fear and then what was the reality months later uh the fear was that we were going to not be able to fulfill and do a job to our standards that we couldn't put out work that we felt really proud of and that clients would be really happy with and also starting small because both Corey and I I there's no reason we both thought that
this is a hypothesis and we're going to test it out see if we like this if the workload is good and if we feel that we can do this and do it in a way that makes us both feel good for what we're putting out there and that provides value to clients and then just seeing how often we can do that it was really just to to help us dip our toe in instead of having to jump head first because both of us have other businesses as well that we I mean I'm technically still running Zach Stevens design company even though all my time is going to conversion Factory but the point was for us to test this out and see how effectively we could do it and making sure that we had a number that we knew we could handle so that we didn't get
overwhelmed with 20 people signing up and all of a sudden we have this huge backlog of stuff that we need to do and our initial launch blows up like before it even leaves the atmosphere but right okay so what was the experience so you got these six people they're probably all onboarding right around the same time which is pro probably wouldn't be normal you know once things are going concerned and you probably you know of course like everyone you're gonna have some churn as well and in theory you'd have a better a little bit more control over when new clients were onboarded and so forth and what there's a lot of controls you could have then but so launch is a special situation you're like okay cap
it at five one extra snuck in and what maybe not if well at first I guess I'm curious about what do you do now any what what have you changed about your initial onboarding what did you learn from your initial approach to onboarding that has been changed if anything I think the biggest takeaway from us was particularly for the people that are coming to see us there's a lot of strategic implementation that they want first which we hadn't thought they would want because we thought that with the with the subscription model that they would be more looking at to ask to us as yeah like hey create this landing page create this logo do some copy for this make an email sequence for us for our onboarding but in actuality they needed
it we got more people on a higher tier and I think that we're gonna start pushing people to say hey it works really well depending on their their circumstance like you mentioned HubSpot HubSpot doesn't need a lot of strategic advice from us at least I don't think so but to push people and say you know it works really well if we're able to jump in and do some of the premium tier services that we offer like customer research positioning pricing strategy brand strategy so that we can lay a more solid foundation before we start doing all these other things if we build you a bunch of landing pages and we know that you're going to want to update your branding and your messaging that we're going to have a lot of dirty dishes that
we have to clean up and then and then get out of the sink so let's just clean the dirty dishes you have right now before we start making new ones that's a great analogy so visual and and you are you I think you said you were surprised by how many people did kind of want that a higher level positioning branding and so forth Yeah we actually have it's about half now so half are no it's more than half so more than half of our clients right now are on a higher strategy based tier with our premium sync tier where they get FaceTime with us on a bi-weekly basis and there's some premium services in there as well that aren't available on the lower tier and it's more than half more than half are on that premium tier
and how much is that nine so uh async plan is 6k a month and then the premium tier is nine killer okay and what what about the uh what does it feel like capacity wise so like like how how close to the edge does it feel do you know what I mean it's I what am I trying to ask here it's kind of like how precarious does it seem I'm assuming you're gonna say not very but I'm curious because I can imagine people being like thinking like oh you know I mean you onboarded seven clients in two months with six weeks like most people that's two years of deals you know so like yikes that in theory and you know so and if they're used to clients really burying them with work or lots of changing quests or unexpected scope
creep or any of those things like having seven clients from a standing start going from zero to you know close to 50 around 50 Grand a month boom in one or two months with two or three people it's like it seems impossible so what what's the thing that we don't see from the outside that makes it not impossible I think there's a couple things that contribute to it I will say at at initial onset it did feel like there was a lot going on because we were doing not only fulfillment but also sales calls of new prospective clients that was probably like the first month was me and Corey jumping into a call and then both of us going away for two hours to work on stuff for clients that had signed up without having to call us and then
jumping in another call like I remember there was a week where we had eight calls lined up in addition to doing the work so having to onboard five at one time and learn everything about those those Brands and those clients and then do work for them as well those initial for we weeks were pretty hectic because we're doing so much but then it kind of fizzled out and we as soon as we familiarized ourselves with I mean speaking from my deliverables like all the design stuff I got to know all their colors got to know their typefaces got to know what their Market Chief marketing officers like and don't like and how it can be of better service to them things got a lot smoother so I think that having if we could have
trailed out the onboarding parts that I think that would have made things go a lot smoother right also worth keeping in mind that anytime Corey is working on something like a copywriting quest or email sequencing or if he's doing customer research they're not working with me so it's split that way too because we have since we have multiple people working on stuff doesn't not everything requires both of our both of our attention so that's been helpful as well right got it share the duties share the responsibilities okay so what I'm curious how elaborate it's just it's been not that long but how elaborate is your process for getting answers to all those questions like you you just listed like finding out what the CMO likes
colors all those getting to know the getting to know them piece Brett at designjoy I think it famously there's no phone calls no meetings no nothing take it or leave it so how do you communicate how did how does the client communicate that stuff to you in a way that uh allows you to produce work satisfactory work as quickly as possible is it just a phone call and like they give you access to a Dropbox or do you have like some kind of software or something that that like an ingest ingestion system I mean uh using the term loosely ingestion system in our in our notion doc where we have like all of our client we run out of our client operations uh we have a template that we use whenever a new client inches up and we have in there
space for them to put their logo files any kind of brand guides or positioning work that they've done we can also take a look at their website as well and just see okay what are what's the kind of language they use they have any kind of formatting or set that we can use that's ready-made kind of like a board so that we can then uh work a little bit faster and as far as understanding what they like that it's very it's highly nuanced stuff things like oh you know I think I would like this these the letter spacing on this header to be four pixels instead of two that that's that's more the stuff that that I was understanding and learning and that they would call me up but that's okay because we still at the
end of the day we're still able to take them to the 96 97 finished and then if they have feedback that is something along those lines of I would like this to be tweaked just a little bit or can you make that blue a little bit more Bluer then those are things that I'm not gonna know nor am I going to be able to find out from any kind of material that they give us but that comes with the relationship and the Rapport it never hurts to since smiley faces over like you know as an emoji when you're saying oh hey you know I'll get right on that Fred thanks so much for all your feedback I appreciate it right so so to summarize that it's kind of like you know minimum viable client communication at the beginning and then you get to
know them through their revision requests yeah and we're super like we love using tools like Loom anything that we can do to make it feel like we're in the room with them and like I will walk through every single deliverable that I send a client so they can hear the thinking they can hear the decision making process that went into it so there's a lot of communication that's done that might not be face to face but it's really really good and it helps get the point across So when you say not face to face you mean not synchronous right like I'm sure you don't do anything in person uh well face either via Zoom or in person we actually because we haven't had anybody both Corey and I are in San Diego and we haven't had anybody from
our hometown that's wanted to meet up with us until last week where somebody asked us the question would you be okay meeting us in person for the first sync up meeting which we said uh you know what I mean if you're in San Diego we're we're not going to say no just know that this is a very uh special case because you are here and we're not going to do this for everybody yeah yeah but when I say uh communicate it's just not where we're together like where they can hear us say something and then respond at the exact same time it's all done asynchronous communication perfect that's great yeah that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of spreading out the workload so what what are the other communication channels I'd be very
curious to know I'm sure people would be very curious to know like what what are the channels that are that you do you support it might say this on your website but but is it for example do you kind of insist that any new clients go through like your slack or your notion or whatever or do you say like oh you know we'll join your slack or we'll join your team's instance or however you do that and and like how similar in terms of communication the back and forth communication how similar are all of your clients is it kind of custom for all the different ones they have different things or is it all the same and kind of standardized this is a really good point because if you I don't know if you have this issue but I know
me if I have things like if I have to respond to some clients in Gmail if I have to respond to some clients and slacks some clients directly in figma it should hurt your mind yeah it's horrible it's exactly the thing you don't want to do so centralizing your communication efforts as much as you can and I stress that because there are some ancillary methods by which I will get feedback it's like if I send somebody a loom video they can comment on the loom video and I might get notified there but that's not as bad as being able to or having to go through Gmail go through their slack make sure that we're in all the appropriate slack channels getting invited to like the ones that they create that we don't want to be a part
of uh yeah so all our communication is mostly in notion and that's where we'll drop things yeah where we'll drop things like comments because I mean it's it's such a powerful Wiki that you can add pretty much whatever you need to in there like I will drop Sigma files Corey can drop the heat Cory will most likely just write the copy in notion itself because he can do that so most of it's done through there and the other ancillary methods might be like if the client has a Google doc that they've written a bunch of web copy on they might go back and forth within that or they might comment directly on a figma file that I've created which isn't that bad because I have to go look at it anyway and then I can see more precisely
what they're commenting on so stuff that I don't mind really but making sure that we weren't subject to joining their slack channels any communication methods that they prefer that was a big No-No for us yeah agreed yeah and at my over the years the different things I've done that involved client Communications just complete it's instant disaster if they it's just I just can't work with I learned early on I could not work with someone who insisted that I use their platform it just doesn't work so that that's a real that is something to keep in mind ladies and gentlemen if you have especially the thing is you if you follow this model and it works you're going to have way more clients at the same time more concurrently than you're
used to because most people are used to having like one or two I shouldn't say most people most people I work with they're used to having like one or two clients maybe they have a whale client and then maybe maybe two other ones that are old Legacy clients that have little things to do but they they don't have there's not it's not a pro it doesn't get to the level of like oh we have 15 active clients no it's like a pipe dream right so they so the idea of being concerned about this sort of a thing and how important it is is I'm glad I'm glad we're talking about it because it's pretty important um the the other thing that you mentioned around you know figma and or maybe Google Docs or whatever that's
that is something I have never found to be a problem I'm not sure why but I think it's like you said you have to go there anyway so it's like in your face and it's a more appropriate place to put it because it's right where you need it so there's something about that that seems like a loophole but is in reality is pretty useful okay yes I mean it's like I said it's it's a it's not them having a pattern interrupt right it's just it's part of the my day-to-day like I'm gonna go in there anyway and if it's going to help expedite the process then I'm all for it right or or do you have to like there's this thing called figma and that's where we do it and you like kind of onboard them into the product uh
figma given the people that we work with Sigma is a really common design tool especially for people who are in the software industry uh so that one we haven't had a lot of issue with at all notion has had some people like we had a client say I just don't like leaving the cards back and forth that I mean that would have been any of those kanban board systems right like whether it's Trello or Asana whatever um so we all we do is we send a a quick little video when they come on board that is here's how to use this notion Doc and if you want to make a request here's how you do it the thing is to try and limit the stuff that they have to do because for us we're just like no you just move the card and then write stuff
like that that's it you don't have to because you can do a bunch of stuff in notion but they don't have to do that that's that's just for us right to know right Okay cool so so it hasn't been too much of a problem but it is it has cropped up a little bit what just a little bit cool what is the what would you say are this the the boilerplate or the templates or any systemization that you've done or plan to do very soon what what are the real low-hanging fruit kinds of things that you think would probably be common for someone who might be making a shift like this you know from from just doing custom stuff to having a subscription as a service and because you mentioned you mentioned that you had like a a questionnaire you
mentioned the onboarding video for like how to use notion like what are what are some other things that you're you maybe did manually a few times and you're like this should be a video and then you made the video and like wow I don't have to do that anymore so I'm looking for early optimizations on probably the communication process or the file transfer or whatever uh yeah I think that'd be so getting that initial video of this is how notion Works here's how you use it that goes out when the client signs up was really helpful because it just got them in and notion does have a drawback in that you're not able to get the same kind of automation that you are with Trello it's like we actually do
have to create the board when someone signs up and then invite them to it which was something that we think we might want to change later this year like we might be switching platforms as far as what we manage all our stuff in simply for that purpose but because we took on so few clients for like that doesn't it doesn't really matter like we can create and create a template for them and then duplicate it invite them to it so that wasn't that huge of an issue but that would be one thing if I could go back I would try and do something that was very automated like no delays in the process of someone signs up then they can immediately create the tasks that's on their mind that's making them want to sign up in
the first place the whole reason yeah yeah exactly it wasn't that big of a deal for us because again we were taking on so few and we were awake and we got notified as soon as people signed up so it felt instantaneous even though it really wasn't uh yeah the second thing I would say is that because the stuff that we're doing has so many compounding tasks on it we've created what are called Blueprints and these are like predetermined sets of tasks that walk people step through step by step like if you want a web page here's step one to do that here's step two three four five six seven eight and then they can move those cards over and they already have somewhat of a road map of all the things that need to get done well this is wait
wait wait so that's very interesting but I'm not sure I'm understanding so so let's let's go back to it's like it's a web page and they want yeah just just like re-say that a little slower because that sounds very interesting so I mean conversion Factory being conversion Factory we have blueprints that are inside of our uh notion boards like best practice kind of things no they're actually like it's a blueprint like here's step one to do this thing that you want so because we know what most of the tax people come to us for it's web pages websites email onboarding brain Identity Design and like I would say those are probably the the biggest ones okay um or like a miscellaneous marketing collateral so having done all this stuff
before we know what the steps are in the Frameworks so we can have a card in there that has subsidiary cards inside of it it's like when someone moves a uh a web page blueprint over we can take the small subtasks out of that and then they all get populated in the backlog okay we'll move the first the first step over so it makes sense it's getting closer so as the customer experience so I'm I'm your client and you like and you're explaining this to me so and you say something like okay like just break it down into the into like the the like I'm I'm six years old like I you use Zach says to Jonathan I'm your new client if you want a web page do this yes so I'd say Jonathan if you want a web page yeah you can take our web page
blueprint and then you can take all of the subtasks that are a part of that and use those as a starting point so that you know exactly what tasks have to go into this and that way you're not having to think from scratch like what is the first subtask that needs to come into this larger project that I want to achieve and accomplish and I'm in notion and I'm grabbing this mini project subtasks anyway and and what am I moving over like one because you're only allowed to make one request at a time so if I move the whole thing over that I'm kind of giving you like 12 requests and you're going to what work through them one at a time or or am I moving is the first one over so there's some analog there's an analog step in there where
they'll move the project task Over The Blueprint Card and then inside that Blueprint Card there are the subtasks and so what we will do is we'll go in and we'll move this out because it's it's like a more nuanced movement and gesture in webflow or not webflow notion to do that so we'll just client will move the web page blueprint over and then we will say okay cool like here are the other tasks for that let's get started with step one so that way we're actually cranking stuff out and sending deliverables over and doing so with the Frameworks that we know need to be done to complete this task as a whole okay so like so they move the whole chunk over so they don't have to think about that and then you get to work the first thing
that's right right okay so then do you I know this is super tactical but it's really useful I know it's useful for people listening so then in notion and I've never seen this in notion so I'm just picturing Trello but in in the kanban thing you're like then what would you do you would move that first task into some kind of active column like this is the thing you know in progress or this is the thing we're working on and it's like and what what's that first one for a web page is it like they send over some headline or like what is it for like how do you know what it's even for yeah so they'll still have a description point where they can say what is the goal of this deliverable what are you expecting
uh all the general stuff that you would get from a task and the granularity of it is that they they only have to move over the like the web page blueprint and then we come in we'll make a duplicate of that so that we have the template still intact and then we'll take all the subtasks move those into the backlog and then get started on step one of all the sub those like eight subtasks and the step the first first step in that would if you're asking specifically would be something more along the lines of a wireframe where they let me know exactly what it is they might have attached a rough outline and like a Google doc or something like that and that way we can get to work on a higher level deliverable like a or like the
architecting of that project and get alignment on that cool move that over to the done column step two comes in great step two's finished then step three four five six and you can actually do this in Trello a lot more effectively because of something that I was after we had come up with this idea for blueprints I wanted to explore but Trello actually has a mechanism where you can create these I forget exactly what they were called but it's buttons where if I click this then it will do something with the cards like it will auto populate a series of cards that you teed up and it was pretty cool like I it's something that that's probably one of the reasons why we might switch over at some point
because they can do something that's a lot more simple like I click this one it will auto populate with all these tasks and it will move task number one into the in progress column right move so just try yeah trying to simplify that idea of one task at a time because a client's not gonna necessarily know where to start right with like a brand identity process it's like I know I'd want thing but I have no idea how to get there so can you help me see what steps need to be taken because I might have steps one through four completed on my end and then because I know exactly where we're at in the process I can just know that we I know from as a client that we can skip to step five and that makes it a lot easier wild that's very
so this is I've talked to a few people who are doing some kind of implementation execution as a service and this is this is unique and I see tons of benefits to it it's it reminds me a little bit of when I interviewed James Turner from snap copy where they've got these these different they sell credits and then they've got all I was gonna say yet I remember this podcast I might just full disclosure I am a fan of Jonathan's I do listen to his podcast and I remember hearing these guys like oh that's kind of cool like the the credit mechanism where you can pay to play yeah and jump in I'm sorry yeah the so the thing the thing about it is the the way that the reason that works is because they've got all of these because
then the problem they have is like oh I bought all these credits because I needed I wanted to do this one particular thing and I had to buy three thousand dollars worth of credits but I only needed to use 500 so like you know and for them they want people to keep using them they don't want people to you know spend three thousand dollars to get 500 worth of stuff done and then just like let it expire that's not good for business long term so they went through the exercise or I think whoever some you know earlier might have been uh Leanna all right who did it joint maybe but they pre-scoped a whole bunch of common things and they I want to say there were like like 20 of them there were quite a
few things and like this kind of a thing is one credit this kind of these these were all the things that are two credits these are all the things that are three credits and it remind when you were talking about the blueprints it reminded me a little bit of that but instead of this sort of um abstraction between the dollars in the credits and the tasks it's more like look we we know what needs to happen when you know from experience we know what the patterns are when someone needs a new web page for example that it's going to turn their traffic into Revenue because the goal is always the ultimate goal is always the same the ultimate goal of everything you do is always the same or at least it's projected that way
it's like turn the traffic into Revenue so okay given that base assumption here's the here's the process for common activities and we'll just plow through them in a sort of well this is a good next question in in what in what way do you plow through them so so let's say you've got all these people they're moving These Blueprints over and then you take the first task out and this moves into in progress what does your day look like so both you and Corey and like how does it how does the interplay work so is like when the thing gets moved to in progress is it automatically three defined as a copywriting thing for Corey or as a figment thing for you or like what's going on there and then like like you get to your desk you open up
what and then what do you do how do you how do you remember to touch every client in a reasonable amount of time like is it some round robin kind of process do you have a list like what was the last thing I did how do you how do you maintain that I'm just very hawkish with everything so even if I know Corey is working on something that I'm not directly a part of I still want to know what's going on in case I do need to jump in I want to have context for was done in the past where they at now just gaining all that contextual information so that I can do my job to the best of my ability smart Okay uh I mean my day I try and plan like just on every Sunday I try and write down what's going on with
each client like it's the last task that's on their notion board so I know exactly what my story starting point is going to be on Monday and I will first if I can I will start working on something that I know I have to work on before I check notion to see if they had moved anything over if they've commented because I want to get the thing done that I know I have to get done it's like that big rock project on my plate like if I need to develop a web page or if I need to do logo Concepts or if I need to do something that requires like the best of my brain's abilities I will work on that first and then around and I generally start work between eight and nine and so I'll go for like however long it takes if it takes the three hour
work period that I like to have in the morning to get that done then that's great because it was a really big deep project that required a lot of brain power for me and I was happy to give it in the morning and then I'll check and you're probably going into figma so like like at 8 30 in the morning you like know that client B needs X and you you avoid notion you go into figma or whatever your whatever app you need to do that work is that right that's right great killer okay I'll check well and Corey so Corey Nick and myself my Nick is our other co-founder we all have each other's numbers so if there is a and I don't ever expect there to be this because of the industry that we work in if there was something that really
needed my attention then they would either call me or text me and say hey dude 9-1-1 you need to get on this now and or talk with us about it but like I said the likelihood of that is very low considering the the things that we work on right okay so how many clients to Do's keeping someone touch and I know that's the word it just feels weird but like how many clients do you touch in a given day like what's the goal do you try and touch every client project move every client project or task forward a little bit every day or is it like throughout the course of the week you're gonna touch everybody at least once how do you how do you like what do you think is the I don't see bare minimum but but that's
kind of what I mean like what what do you think is the bare minimum in terms of client communication for them to feel like you're still in their corner you haven't forgotten about um things are moving forward and they're happy to let their I don't know I guess credit card run again at the end of the month or when they see it run they're like yeah that was worth it I think if you can get to them within every 48 hours then you're doing solid because a lot of times you'll they'll move a project over and it will have a set duration like a typical duration on there a one to three days it's our lowest our lowest one yeah so like if we're doing something that requires a really big heavy lift like if
Corey's doing customer research I mean that could take weeks you know it's where he's actually going on calls with their customers and getting information and listening to them so uh I feel like as long as they can see things being worked on within every 48 hours and even if it's just a progress update like hey this is where I'm at so far uh if you need to do a technical vet check on something go ahead uh that's it and most of the clients because some of them do get to see us uh they think have sync calls with us every other week right those ones we can yeah we can we can wait until like we see them again to because they probably want to talk through some of the Nuance of the project anyway and then we can do that
but I try and do every 48 Hours depending on the task like if I had a bunch of stuff that I could do while I was watching TV that wasn't that's a big deal then I'm just gonna bust through those as as quick as I can and get them all off my plate so that way everyone's happy it really depends on what what each client is looking for and what I would aim to do is just do what has to get done so if it's a really big task then I'm going to allocate a specific amount of time to that so that I know I'm going to give this my best efforts and things that need to get do what needs to get done for it yeah what's an example oh sorry before we move on what's a bit what's the example of a big test versus a small task sure so like if
I had to come up with creative directions for the brand identity that's going to be created for ex-client that's a lot of innovation work where there's a lot of mess there's a lot of things that I don't know that are going to work that might work a lot of explore a lot of ways yeah elements yeah lots of waste and so that is something that I would say is like a larger project that requires a lot of give and take for me where it's not going to be very cut and dry there's going to be a lot of nuance to it that I have to navigate and then figure out which is the best solution and it might be really quick it might be really it might be longer than I'm anticipating okay and then a small task is like a small task is like hey I need
these table signs for an event on Friday can you please put this together put a QR code on it and make sure it has printers marks and just make it look branded it's like cool I'll have this done in half an hour here you go great all right cool and now I want to jump back to the comment you made about sitting on the couch watching TV and like kind of like like oh this is sort of I can do this at the same time it's kind of fun um what is the it's like torrentially down I'm sure this sound is terrible right now it's like raining so bad it's definitely I hope it's not as bad as the leaf blower that's going outside my window I can't hear that hopefully you can't hear the rain anyway um what I have to sell these stupid
questions it feels like a dumb question right but like work life balance you know don't don't you feel I'm trying to I'm trying to surface all the fears of The Listener don't you feel like there's this never-ending tide or you know this this never-ending request funnel that's just bearing down on you and you have to like do things while you're watching TV and you're you know does does it feel incessant or does it like how does it feel because it's got to be different it's got to be different than than you know we didn't talk about your former earlier life or your your direct design business how you price that work and how you build for it but I suppose everybody has the experience of billing hourly at
some point so how does it heal does it feel better and more predictable or does it feel like exhausting and cecipian if that's how you say that um I think that the so I'll answer it I'll answer the first part I don't like using the term work-life balance I like using Harmony instead work life Harmony so at some points you're going to have parts of your day where work is a lot more louder and you hear that as more of uh it's the it's the primary instrument that's being played versus versus life you know where it's like hey you know what um baseline's taking a backseat on this one but drums they're gonna go ham right now and and that's okay because I I like knowing that things are going to fluctuate and putting yourself in that
situation where you're like I just want to have this predictable like time where I'm only gonna work here and that's it it's like you're gonna have some romance with your with your work life man what an interesting perspective I've never heard anyone say it like that but that is exactly how it feels to me it's like I mean I know because I know you like in one of your recent emails you're like I've written emails with a baby posted on my arm and one-handed in the dark and it's do you love what you do or do you not because if you do then you can find joy in doing that and remembering to put yourself in the position that you could be otherwise where you're working for somebody else or you hate your job and
you want to leave so if I had to choose between having the occasional day where i'm watching it Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and yeah seeing in King King in like Mindless data work while I'm doing that because my wife's not even home yet because she's still at school teaching and screw it like I'm just gonna I'm gonna do it I'm not gonna I'm gonna give it my all to not let my health become in Jeopardy right because of of work I would say that I mean you could literally call that life because it's it's your health but you get my point I think most people think like Leisure Time versus work time uh yeah I mean you just open up a can of worms I'll try not to go down that rabbit hole but it's like when and people would ask
me like how do you find the time to write your email every day and I'm like how do you find the time to hug your kids you like doing it so you're just gonna do it but yeah but let's let's bookmark that one because it's with a whole rant I do have a small side on that okay yeah go for it are you are you uh Alex from Ozzy fan do you know who he is I'm familiar with that I read I read the first 100 million dollar uh offers book and I I mean I can tell you what I think well I'm I read the book too but this is from a podcast he was on uh where he he had somebody who critiqued him uh asking it early on as he was getting into fitness like aren't you worried about like you know burning out when you're trying to get you know in
this finish your physical form and you know really get buff and big like he is now um and it was from a guy who wasn't fit like I don't know if he was severely overweight or you know uh look like a bean Pole right but Alex said his reply was meant you can worry about critiquing that when you are when you're at my level and that's how I feel in this position where I might I don't know what I have to finesse and refine about it but I know that it's a good position to be in so those details are things that I can work out later as far as uh or like I don't anticipate that I'm gonna burn myself out because it's not a problem that I've had to encounter lately right yeah that actually that that is the Crux
of the question is like every everybody I talk to who fears a subscription model they're attract they're they they are attracted to it for the predictability and the the safety of it of having a lot you know more clients than they're used to and in a way where they're allowed to charge their credit card every month so it feels very predictable it feels like you still have separated your time for money it feels like you're still Your Own Boss um they want that but then the fears if I feel like probably most of the questions I've asked are trying to lay those fears or at least surface the fears of the reality of it to see if it's really a good choice for them and burnout is basically those like that is
the encapsulation of the whole fear all the fear boils down to burn it because they're imagining that this kind of predictability that the dark side of this predictability and call it high utilization the the dark side of that is burnout and that they'll just be like overwhelmed under delivering feeling bad that they're under delivering resenting their clients and all of these things and so I guess probably probably the all of my questioning so far most of it is around talking about that fear whether it's Justified or not and if it's not justified then then what were the tactics that you used to kind of prevent yourself from from what you also feared was getting buried in work at the very beginning yeah it's I think there's I
mean gosh there's so many things that you can do to avoid burnout I would definitely say that you it's not like you have to jump all in I mean I didn't do that I didn't do that with any like with my first design business I didn't do that with this it was I'm gonna test this hypothesis and put the rubber to the road in a way that I know I can manage because I know for a fact based on past experience at design school and having taken on clients myself I knew for a fact that five people was a hundred percent going to be manageable it didn't matter what they threw on that board I knew that five was going to be something that we could handle so so you found a point where you're you're you're the leap of faith was minuscule if
non-existent was more like a step you know yeah a step of faith and would be super important you said it but I want to amplify it and experiment dipping your toe you've said it a couple times it's like let's just dip our toe in this and maybe it will be uh I don't want to say a mistake I don't want to say failure it's just alert you know something we learn and the the bet the ante that you're putting on the table pretty low pretty low and potential upside extremely high yeah exactly because yeah so I think the other thing to mention around that would be I mean if you want to talk burnout like have some other stuff that your value is more contingent upon that's outside of work than this like I don't have hobbies do I
mean karate or play music right right and spend time with people who aren't either your co-workers or clients yeah yeah I mean I think that's just that's that's good advice in general the capacity thing is the thing that's just always comes up so do okay so let's I'm looking at the time I know we got a role but this has been great so I really appreciate you sharing your experience is there any any final words that you could perhaps perhaps help someone who wants to take the step of faith you know any any parting words of advice for that person they're like there are lots of them who I started writing about subscription stuff and like all of these people were like tell me more tell me more tell me more so I've been looking
for folks just like you who have actual experience doing it and can can help other people take the step of Faith which is probably going to be the title of this episode but no so so any parting words of advice for that group of people who are on the fence well what do you have to lose I think that's what it comes down to right like and if you do have if you do have something to lose what are the things you can do to mitigate that risk like can you chop it down a little bit can you limit yourself on clients can you raise the price so high that you know you're only going to get people or like this is going to cover you because you have to think about where you're at now versus where you want to be and if where you think if
where you want to be if it seems like it's a step to get there then why not take it because you can always pivot and change like if you you're thinking I think the problem is that they think that everyone's looking at them and watching them and they think that if this screws up then everybody's gonna see I'm a failure and the truth is there's maybe going to be five people that see this as a failure it's you and then the four people that you tell this about that were directly involved watching you and that's okay because it will lead to something else and there's nothing that stops you from changing your method again because you made a change to become a solopreneur anyway and took that's a huge leap yeah yeah
that's a huge leap you left you left a steady full-time job with benefits and to try and sell your stuff to people who never met you before now there's a different method for you to do that that could be something that you like it could also not be but there's there's not going to be any kind of sword that you can plot that doesn't have two edges that isn't going to cut both ways because I know for a fact that we are leaving money on the table by not doing value-based pricing in the traditional sense but this is the the newest method that we think we could have that we thought we could utilize and leverage and it's worked out so far and it seems to be the trend that everyone else is going toward so we
figured there's no reason that we can't try it and see if it's worth it right yeah yeah someone someone asked me the other day what the opposite of failure was and I said regret not success and yes and it's it's not it's actually not like literally speaking it's probably not literally true but if you're not failing then you're not trying anything and if you're not trying anything you're probably going to end up regretting that so it's like it's like the zone of proximal development for anything right like uh you and I apart from wearing black t-shirts all the time we have another thing in common which is that we both practice martial arts uh so I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I took like a 10-year I took a 10-year Hiatus from
when I graduated high school and I did wrestling then as well but you show up up after 10 years and even though I had some skill like you get the crap beat out of you but that's the only way you learn is through having those trials and then knowing how to counter them and playing more strategically in your head so the next time it comes around you'd have some methods for defense and then pushing forward on the offensive so I I wish that that mentality could be widespread throughout your audience and across anybody who takes their life and their responsibility for their finances into their own hands because it's a huge risk yeah yeah it's you know you can't learn to ride a bike by reading a book
at a certain point you gotta skin your knee if you did I'd be very impressed you know if you could learn to read a book while riding a bike though that would be something all right and let's leave it there there's a mic drop right there so Zach thank you so much for joining us on ditching hourly Jonathan my pleasure thank you for having me where can people go to find out more about conversion Factory or whatever whatever else you're doing and perhaps even ask you follow-up questions the best places to if you want to see what conversion Factory's doing you can go to conversionfactory.com that would be the easiest way to see like the pricing structures and what we're offering and get more detail on that if
you want to follow me I am most active on Twitter you can find me at zstv and it's my first initial and then my last name Sans vowels well it's cool and and you yeah uh me and Paul Jarvis right yeah exactly um or you can find me on LinkedIn searching exact students just look for the semi-attractive bald guy and that'll be me nice all right folks that's it for this week I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join us again next time for ditching hourly bye
The first one. How three co-founders got to $36k MRR in a month by starting small, testing a hypothesis, and putting every conversation in one place.