Working with peak performers

My co-founder Fiona, standing on the ‘roof of the world’, the summit of Everest.

Yesterday was my usual weekly catch up meeting with my co-founder in my SaaS startup. Fiona has been with the company for about 7 months now, and has been responsible for amazing growth and success in our company in that time.

Before she joined, as part of my due diligence before signing her up as a director of the company, I spoke to her previous business partner, and he mentioned during that conversation something about Fiona and her husband doing an “Everest expedition” some years ago. I assumed it was a hike up to one of the basecamps or similar, like I have heard others do.

But during our meeting yesterday, our talk somehow turned to the tallest mountain in the world, and I was startled to learn that Fiona is actually the 3rd Australian woman to ever have climbed and stood at the summit of Mount Everest!

Work talk was put aside as we spent a long time talking about that incredible achievement. The sheer amount of mental and physical strength required to undertake that sort of climb, over a long period, and to actually make it to the top that so few have done before just had my jaw on the ground for most of the conversation.

I can see now the where some of the dogged qualities that my co-founder has comes from. There is a big difference working with flakey people who will turn tail and run at the slightest discomfort or inconvenience, and those that will persevere through the tough times and have your back no matter how precarious the situation becomes. I think I know which category Fiona belongs to.

I am really proud of my co-founder, and am glad that I have the opportunity to work with strong women like her in my career.

My 'Chinese Bamboo' startup...

Photo by Jason Ortego on Unsplash

Did you know that when you plant Chinese bamboo seeds in the ground, that it can take up to 4 or 5 years for the first shoots to show? And did you know that as soon as the first shoots emerge, it then only takes about 6 weeks for the plant to grow to reach 90 feet in the air? The trick here though, that you still have to nurture and care for those seeds through all those years of not being able to see anything above ground. Otherwise you won’t get that dramatic growth spurt at the end.

This actually draws a really close parallel with my startup story for HR Partner.

I clearly recall sitting down and writing the first lines of code for my B2B cloud HR system back in late 2015. I basically chained myself to my desk for 3 months straight, single handedly writing around 20,000 lines of code to get that first beta version out by Christmas.

Like all startup founders, I believed in the mantra ‘if you build it, they will come’, but like all startup founders, I was completely wrong about that, and the sales & marketing side of the business took up all of my time and energy.

I managed to get my startup to around $1K per month in recurring revenue by mid 2017. Enough to pay the hosting bills and other incidentals, but that was about it. I stayed at that level for nearly 18 months. In late 2018 I put in a superhuman effort to basically double that, but still it seemed that growing my startup was going to be an extremely difficult and questionable proposition indeed.

Our actual MRR graph from ProfitWell for Nov 2019

Then, in mid 2019, my amazing co-founder Fiona joined the company. We took a look at the marketing, and decided to make some tweaks to try and see if we could ‘move the needle’.

November 2019 (almost 4 years to the day after I launched the Beta) was the biggest month we have ever had. We have basically tripled our MRR in a matter of weeks. This was our ‘Chinese bamboo’ moment, of sorts. I posted about this on Twitter, and people asked me what we changed or tweaked in order to get such results. Here are my thoughts on this. Maybe it will be a useful reference for someone else wanting to build a B2B startup.

1. Play the ‘long game’

In the early days of my startup, we would chop and change marketing tactics on a whim. I thought we were being all ‘agile’ and responsive, but really, all we were doing was wheel spinning and flinging stuff at the wall to see what stuck. Sometimes, our website would completely change twice in a month, because we didn’t see any increase in user signups.

We were just a small sail boat in a pond being blown to and fro on whatever winds were the flavour of the month at the time. Our fingers were in too many pies, and the effort was draining all our precious energy.

My new co-founder Fiona insisted that we take a more disciplined approach to marketing when she came on board recently, and so we stopped making constant changes to our website and blogs and marketing channels.

We would make one change, then set in in place for at least a month to monitor it. We would set definitive KPIs in place to measure effectiveness on several levels. At the end of the month, if things were not working or trending down, we wouldn’t throw it all our and start again as before. Instead, we would make one small incremental change. Sometime even using Google Optimize or similar to A/B test small changes. Then we would begin the monitoring process again.

From this, we began to learn a LOT more about how users approached and engaged with us. We learned things like how reducing just one field in a form could double the chances of people filling it in and submitting it.

Our website basically hasn’t changed much since mid 2018, and likely won’t for a while yet.

2. Spend time making life easier for the user

While I spent all of 2015 to 2018 coding up brand new features and fancy bells and whistles for HR Partner, during 2019 I stopped all new development altogether, and spent the year just listening to our existing customer base and making smaller, incremental improvements to our UX and functionality just to make their lives easier. Some may call this ‘Product Market Fit’, but for me, it was more about removing any pain points in my customer’s lives that may be hindering their use of my product.

It was really hard having to sit on tons of ideas and put them on the back burner, but I had to focus on what users actually loved about my product. In talking to them, I discovered that there were things that they thought were cool or nice about the system that I had never even considered as being interesting to anyone.

But when I started mentioning these same things to potential customers at demo sessions, I could see that they would also become excited about them.

As the developer, I had in my mind one set of features or functionality that I thought would be exciting to future customers, but as my existing customers, and Fiona showed me - what really got customers excited was a whole different set of factors. That was an important learning for me.

3. Go to where your audience is

I have written before about focusing your marketing on where your audience is going to be. We spent too much time and energy in the past promoting our SaaS on sites that were frequented by designers, developers and other solo founders. Don’t get me wrong - those places got us fantastic feedback and suggestions for our system, but it never got us paying customers.

It was only when we started promoting HR Partner on places like LinkedIn and Capterra, G2 Crowd etc. that we saw a marked increase in paying customers. LinkedIn allowed us to talk directly to HR managers and business owners. People who would be making the decisions. The Gartner sites like Capterra were already full of people who were ready to buy an HR system and were actively looking. They were already pre qualified, hot leads!

But once again, the ‘long game’ is essential even in these avenues. We couldn’t just put up a single ad and expect immediate results. We had to carefully balance placing ads along with posting good content and articles to get our name and branding in front of the audience there without coming across too strong. That took a lot of patience and careful strategic consideration.

4. Study the channels you will be using

There are a plethora of ways to market you business online these days, and none of them are simple. From SEO to ASO (App Store Optimisation) and even Facebook Ad campaigns - most of them can seem like a ‘dark art’. There are so many cunning tips and tricks that you can use to influence your reach and reduce your spend that there are now entire courses out there to show you how to do it.

My advice would be to always stop and study the platform that you will be using to promote your product. If you just decided to ‘dabble’ in a particular promotional tool, like Facebook Ads or Google AdWords, and you were only intending to spend a few hundred dollars ‘to see what happens’, then I would say you would be better off taking that few hundred dollars down to the nearest casino and putting in on black or red at the roulette table. You have a far better chance of making money that way.

Take the time to become intimately familiar with the tool or platform you intend to use.

In our case, when we decided to use Capterra, we saw that it was critical on that platform that when people searched for “employee management software” etc., that were were in the Top 10 company names that came up. It is the old ‘above the fold’ trick. Companies at the top of the list had a phenomenally higher click through rate than those below.

The problem was, in order to get to the top of the list, you had to bid an extraordinary amount of money - something like $20 or $30 per click to get there. We were only a small bootstrapped company, and didn’t have the marketing budget of our well funded competitors. Even putting $500 on our monthly CPC budget on there would run out within the first few days of the month. Our cost of acquiring customers was huge.

But then we discovered something out of our own experimentation. We discovered that while Capterra’s own internal CPC tool was saying $20-$30 for top listings, that we could actually bring it right back to around $15 per click and still stay at least within the top 15. We also found out that if we kept our budget really low during the start of the month, then increased it later in the month, we would appear higher in the searches, as most of our competitors would have exhausted their CPC budget earlier in the month (like we used to do).

But by far, the biggest learning for us was that we could allocate our CPC budget per region. We had always gone worldwide on Capterra with our CPC budget, however we found that if we focused on just regions like the UK or Canada or Australia, that we only needed to spend about $8 per click to be in the Top 10 for anyone searching from those areas.

And once again, the $8 that Capterra was telling us was only a suggestion. By careful monitoring, we found that we could in fact drop our budget back to $4 or $5 in some areas and still be in the top 10.

It is all about getting to know the platform you are working on intimately, and the exploiting that to full advantage.

5. Persevere with the things you don’t identify with

I have also posted before about inadvertently being good at things that you don’t actually enjoy doing. In my case, it was taking sales calls with customers. I don’t, and I never have, and I never will, consider myself a salesman. I really don’t enjoy anything about the process. I would much rather be coding.

But for some reason, I seem to be OK at it. Customers seems to like talking to me, and I actually love talking about my product. Somehow, out of all that, sales seems to happen.

Is there any aspect about running your startup that you don’t look forward to and try to avoid at all costs? Another one for me is the accounting paperwork. I loathe it and will make any excuse to avoid it. But it is essential for the health of your company, and we can’t make any long term strategic decisions about the company without meaningful financial data. So I have to grit my teeth, roll up my sleeves, and get down to it.

6. People trust people, not companies

This is about the only tip that I have here that seems to get easier as we grow. It was hard - VERY hard, getting our first few customers on board our SaaS. This was mainly because we had no proof that we could offer those first customers. We had no loyal, happy customer base. We had no reference sites that we could point them to in order to reassure them that they were making the right decision in choosing us.

But nowadays, we have quite a few customers who love to evangelise for us, and to talk us up to anyone who will listen. And we ensure that we find them people to talk to!

How did we get such a base of happy customers? Well, it was one of our philosophies right from day 1 - because we didn’t have the venture funded deep pockets of our competitors, the only way we could get and keep customers was to provide them with outstanding support levels, and to also listen to them and make changes in our software to meet their needs.

In fact, if you go and read our 5 star reviews on Capterra etc., you will see that most of them explicitly mention this fact. That has turned into a really powerful tool for us.

We’ve found that no matter how good our demo is, and how many features we show them that they go “Wow” to, that at the end of most sales calls, the person on the other end will almost always ask about other customers in their industry who use us.

Usually, we point them towards our Capterra review page, or else give them the contact email of another happy customer, and that is enough for them to commit to subscribing to our service. In fact, we scored one of our biggest customers in November this year precisely because of this tactic. The customer emailed me back and said that they were signing up based on the glowing recommendation they got from another customer of ours.

Conclusion

I hope that I have managed to give you an insight into what we did do accelerate our growth in the later half of 2019. Going back to the Chinese bamboo analogy - it is important to know that for those first 4 or 5 years of the bamboo seeds being in the ground, it is imperative that you keep up the nutrient feed to it, and ensure that it can germinate undisturbed.

It was like that in my startup. Even through the lean years from 2016 to 2018, I would put all my heart, soul and passion into my startup and treat every customer like gold. I never wavered from my vision. I knew that this was setting the standard for what it would be like once we had broken ground and started reaching for the stars.

Thanks for reading. Best of luck on your own startup journey.

What hurts the most...

Photo by Isai Ramos via Unsplash

In my half century and three years of walking the planet, I’ve seen and experienced a lot of things. I consider myself quite a sensitive person, so I tend to react emotionally to a lot of things that I see, hear or experience.

I actually think that is a good thing for a creative person. People tell me to grow a thicker skin or to ignore it, but I can’t do that. If I close myself off to all the noise and experience in the world, then I am likely to miss something important or beautiful.

We all know there are a lot of things that can upset us out there. Primary among these are human relationships. We are complex beasts indeed, and the tangled weave of emotions, thoughts and perceptions that go towards making two people understand each other are indeed something that would challenge even Deep Thought.

I have experienced many hurtful things in my life. From direct physical pain, being ignored by someone, racists taunts in public - you name it, it has happened at one time or another. But here is the thing. I can handle all of the above quite well. I know that often times, it is the manifestation of the other person’s perception that dictates these sorts of actions, and there is nothing that I can do about that. It is completely under their control and influence. Not mine.

However there is one thing that really hurts me deeply. And that is when someone that I care about makes a completely wrong judgement call about me. I mean, I am by no means a perfect person, but I try and lead my life to be a good and upstanding citizen of the planet. My mantra is to always conduct my life in such a way that I can sleep easy at night. It was something taught to me by my father, and I intend to pass that lesson along to my own kids as my legacy.

The problem is that on several occasions, people I have cared deeply about have accused me of completely the opposite of what I am about. These are people who I thought knew me, and knew the way I conduct myself.

It is not that it leads to any self doubt in myself. I am pretty strong in my convictions and principles so virtually nothing can shake that. I think the thing that upsets me the most is that it suddenly seems to open up a yawning chasm between me and the other party. It is as if someone has just cut away the bridge that we walked easily across back and forth for years.

In the past I used to dwell on this for months. Years even. But as I grow older, I think I am realising that these things are also a result of the perceptions and battles that the other person is going through at that time. I have learned to let go a lot more easily now.

No malice. No anger. No reservations. If the other person does not want my friendship, then that is fine. The hurt goes away quicker now. I have many things in my life that bring me joy and that I am grateful for, and I cannot take away my mental time and energy on things that can never be repaired.

I will sleep easy tonight.

Dad's train set

Stock photo from the internet - NOT dad’s model railway :)

One of my earliest memories growing up was when we lived in our house in Butterworth, Malaysia. I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I remember that upstairs in our house, we had an entire room dedicated to my dad’s hobby at the time, which was his model train set. There was a huge table in the middle of the room that took up most of the space, and on it was a marvellous mini village, hills and tunnels with railroad tracks leading all the way around it. Inside all the cupboards along the walls was an entire collection of colourful model railway engines, carriages and rolling stock.

Being so little, I wasn’t allowed to handle the models myself, but I could be the engineer sometimes and manage the controls to start, stop, and control the speed of the trains under close supervision. The smell of white craft glue (used to build the diorama), or that particular model engine oil (used to lubricate and also to generate the smoke stacks) still brings those memories flooding back.

I know that when we moved house (as we frequently did back then, as dad was routinely transferred to another state as part of his role as senior medical staff in the government), he destroyed and threw out the whole table, keeping only a handful of model trains and controls.

I never thought about those trains since we left Butterworth.

Many years later, in the late 70’s when we emigrated from Malaysia to Australia, I know that we ended up either selling, throwing away or even burning most of our possessions as we could not carry much to the new land where we would be rebooting our lives.

Though I loved building plastic model aircraft, I never got bitten by the model train bug, so never even though about that old model railway village, except for the occasional time that I would see pictures of it in old family albums.

Then, on my 40th birthday, my dad and my father in law took me out to a bar at the wharf to celebrate, and my dad presented me with a small cardboard box. When I opened it, inside were some old Fleischmann and Hornby engines and carriages from back in the day. All vintage now. All hand painted by him.

I was astounded. I thought these were all given away or thrown out decades ago, but somehow, my dad kept them and transported them over to Australia even though what we could bring was severely limited.

For the first time, I realised how much this hobby meant to him. It was obviously a passion that he enjoyed outside of his stressful career. I know now how much it must have taken from him to get rid of that model railroad village that he had painstakingly hand built over years - and to turn his back on it knowing that he would probably never get the chance to build something like that again.

Dad passed away a decade ago now, so he will never get the chance to see those carriages scoot around a track again, but I will always treasure them as a part of him, a part of his heart that he handed to me, and that one day I will hand down to my own sons. Perhaps someone in our family will one day build a little railroad village and carry my dad’s (and my own) memories around those tiny tracks.