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John Sonmez - YouTube: Fame, Glory, and 50+ Email Sign Ups a Day

• How many of you have a YouTube channel?
  • (some)
• I have a channel
• YouTube is a pretty good place to be if you want to grow your business
  • Surprised by how much growth
  • Actually surpassed my blog by 3x
• I’m
  • A little bit crazy
  • Run a site called Simple Programmer - I teach software developers how to be cool
• Results I’m seeing
  • Stats
    • 80k+ YT subs in 1.5 years
    • 6K+ new subs per month
    • $7k/mo ad revenue
    • 600k/mo video views
    • 50+ email signups per day
• How I’m running my YT channel
  • Record 2-3 videos per day
    • iPhone
    • DSLR on desk
    • Need to be able to EASILY record, so I can do 2-3 per day
  • Every 2-3 months batch high quality videos
    • With professional videographer
  • Drop videos into Dropbox
  • And I’m done. Editor takes over:
    • Editing
    • Tagging
    • Descriptions
    • Thumbnails
    • Scheduling
  • I could never do 2-3 per day if I had to do the editing, tagging, etc
  • As hands off as possible. Some initial training for the editor, but now he just fills in everything from the videos I drop in Dropbox
  • How to get video ideas?
    • Questions people ask (constant stream of questions coming in from subscribers)
    • → editor sends a form → Zapier → Trello board
    • Books I read
      • Audible books on 3x while running!
    • Have some way to capture ideas easily. I use Draft on iOS
      • Throw video ideas into the app as they come to me
• How do I get the results?
  • Be prolific
    • Huge difference in growth after switching to >1 video per day
  • Be polarizing
    • Don’t be afraid to tell most people to “fuck off”
    • It’ll make people angry
    • 1500+ unsubscribes per month
      • More proud of this than the subscribes!
      • Videos that actively tell people to unsubscribe get the most subscribes!
    • Get people lit up
  • Make longer videos to increase watch time
• Tactics and tools
  • Call out to other videos of yours
    • Want people consuming as much content as possible
      • People will either love or hate my stuff
  • Call to action → Subscribe
  • VidIQ
    • Use for stats and optimizing tags
    • Use description campaign to send people to lead magnet to capture email addresses
      • Getting 50+ signups per day
• https://store.simpleprogrammer.com

  Dodd Caldwell - Raising My The Price For My SaaS App By 60% (And How It Worked)

• Co-founder of MoonClerk
  • Target small, mostly local businesses
  • Built on top of Stripe
  • Help them accept recurring payments without any programming
• Raising our prices by 66% (and how it worked)
• Background
  • Launched 4 years ago
  • Started $9/mo (for up to $1k monthly volume)
• Raised base price 66% to $15/mo (for up to $2k monthly volume)
• Why did we raise our prices?
  • SaaS law of thirds
    • ⅓ of users don’t use app
    • ⅓ of users are “light” users
    • ⅓ of users are “normal” to “heavy” users
  • Make the headaches worth it
  • Fight customer churn with negative revenue churn
    • Not a ton we can do to lower churn any further
    • But we can increase prices to compensate
• So we A/B tested
  • $9 vs $15 vs $19 base price
  • Initially sent 80% to the control ($9)
  • $19 was losing “bigly” so we dropped it
    • Conversion rate ~50% down
  • $9 vs $15 had about the same conversion rate
  • Increased A/B split to 50/50
  • Waited
    • About a year to get statistically significant results
  • $15 hurt conversion rate by ~7%
    • Was that worth it?
    • Pro forma spreadsheet to predict how that change would affect MRR
      • Variables:
        • Grandfathering vs immediate switch for everyone
        • Effect on churn rate
      • Estimated results in %s rather than whole numbers
• Making a data informed decision (9 steps)
  • 1. I will have some of the data I want
  • 1. I can make educated guesses on some of the data I don’t have
  • 1. Wise counsel can help me make a better educated guess on the data I don’t have
       • Other SaaS who had increased prices – reached out to them to ask for how it affected churn
  • 1. If there is no way to make a best guess on certain data, ignore it
  • 1. Few of my decisions are irreversible
       • Can always undo it
  • 1. Reversing my decisions usually has consequences but they are rarely nuclear
  • 1. If making or reversing a decision DOES have nuclear consequences, seek more counsel
  • 1. Make decisions based on real data if I have it + best guess if I don’t
  • 1. Even if the decision I make turns out not to be the “correct” decision, I can rest assured it was the “wisest” decision at the time
       • Important as leader of a team
       • I can clearly explain “this is why we’re going down this path”
       • Can always apologize if it doesn’t work out, but team will better understand when it doesn’t work out if they can see this decision making process
• Results
  • Started at 100% of customers in the $9 schedule
  • Today 33% of customers in the $9 schedule
  • Customer churn DECREASED by 10%
  • Grown from 2,600 paying customers to over 4,500
  • Revenue per customer grew over 40%
  • MRR nearly tripled
• Dodd Caldwell
  dodd@moonclerk.com
  @doddcaldwell

  Matthew Paulson - How a Washed-Up Personal Finance Blogger Became a Publishing Tycoon Using Automated Content

• Between 3-5 million page views per month using automated content
• Began in 2007
  • Ran a network of personal finance blogs (American Consumer News)
  • Did pretty well
• Made $130k in 2010
  • Content quality wasn’t too high
• Google Panda update
  • Half of traffic disappeared overnight
  • Business became a shadow of its former glory
  • Needed to reinvent the business for the future
• American Banking News
  • Had some traction from publishing news
  • Was still doing pretty well because it didn’t get its traffic from Google
    • MSN Money, etc. 300-400 page views per article they published
  • Problem: shelf life was short
  • Realised we could write really short, easy articles
    • TextExpander to write articles really quickly
    • Publishing ~50 of these short stories in a couple of hours each morning
  • Figured out… can use software to do this. Can automate the whole thing.
    • AnalystRatingsNetwork
    • Little form → script (pulled in e.g. stock price) → short article
    • Now over 25 templates for different types of articles
    • ~1MM page views per month
  • Didn’t want to stop there
    • Took same technology, built free daily newsletter
    • Collected email addresses
    • ~10k subscribers after 6 months
    • Getting great feedback
    • Opportunity for subscription?
      • Emailed list, asked what they liked/disliked
      • Made a premium version, $15/mo, better features, sent earlier
      • 100 people signed up initially
        • Not huge
    • Now called MarketBeat
  • Now have a third tier as well
  • Built out relationships in the market
  • Grown the business since, but same model: publishing 2,000 articles per day using this automated system
  • 2016
    • $2.75MM revenue, $2.16MM profit, 37.5MM unique visitors, 445k email subscribers
• 5 strategies that are working right now
  • Web Push Notifications
    • (in-browser notifications even when they’re not on your site)
    • ~50k people opted in to this
    • Can use for cart abandonment
    • Or new blog posts
    • Or to sell (& advertisers pay to sell here too)
    • Tools: OneSignal, PushClick
  • “Nine word emails”
    • Email that worked the best: “Are you still interested in helping out with the ______? If you would like to help out, here’s the link:”
    • Works because it’s short
  • Google AMP & Facebook Instant Articles
    • ampproject.org
    • Google favoring these in search results
    • Made all our sites AMP friendly
    • ~100k AMP page views per week
    • Highly recommend to anyone using news-style content
  • Structured data
    • Schema.org markup
    • (“Position 0” ranking on Google)
    • Question data in the markup (e.g. “what is Apple’s stock price today?”)
  • Session replays
    • Most of us don’t know how users interact with our web site
    • Session recording software (ClickJar, HitTail, …) see where people are clicking / getting stuck
• Matthew Paulson
  www.mattpaulson.com
  matt@mattpaulson.com

  Daniel Craig - Why the IRS Loves Your SaaS Business (And How to Keep It That Way)

• Daniel Craig
  • Run Bloom SaaS accounting
• SaaS approaching 30% of application spend
• Reason #1: Tax revenue
  • IRS loves revenue
  • ASC 606 - the new revenue recognition standard
    • If you get your revenue in Jan and deliver your product over the next 12 months, you have to “earn” that revenue over the whole 12 months
    • Affects how you report your revenue
    • Recognized revenue vs deferred revenue
    • Effective January 1, 2018 (public companies) 2019 (private companies)
    • Only applies to companies filing on an accrual basis
  • BloomAccounting.io/microconf
• Reason #2: Job creating
  • Section 199 deduction
    • To promote manufacturing in the US
    • SaaS sometimes counts
    • Can deduct 9% of qualifying manufacturing REVENUE from tax bill
    • Talk to your CPA about this
    • Qualify if: sell an on-premise version of the same software / have a competitor who does with a “substantially identical” product
• Financial management: goal is to maximize profit
  • “Making sure we have enough money in the bank”
  • “Budgeting revenue and expenses”
  • What’s missing from all of these:
    • Any real focus on PROFIT
    • Treats profit as “whatever’s left” instead of thinking of profit first
  • Financial management is the discipline of predetermining your profitability.
• Books:
  • Simple Numbers (Greg Crabtree)
  • Profit First (Mike Michalowicz)
• Keys:
  • 1. Pay yourself a market based wage
       • What if you don’t have the cash to do it?
       • 90% of entrepreneurs underpay themselves
       • Ask yourself: how much would I get paid if I quit and went to get a job?
       • Instead of $20k salary
       • $80k investment (which includes $60k sweat equity investment)
  • 1. Define “done”
       • How much will it cost me to get to 20% profitability?
       • When developing a new product, or a new feature set
       • Important to calculate this if you’re putting an undefined amount of time into an undefined result
  • 1. Enjoy regular profit distributions
       • “Profit protects you from your ego.” (Jason Fried)
• BloomAccounting.io/microconf

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