Ben Orenstein – Blind Spots of the Developer Entrepreneur – MicroConf 2017

Shai Schechter • 2017

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  • Prescriptions and Descriptions
  • A lot of speakers start by talking about themselves
    • I’m going to talk about YOU
    • I sent out a survey to attendees
    • Got about 50 responses
    • Q: Monthly income from products
      • 20 @ $0
      • 13 @ $1-999
      • 3 @ $1k-3k
      • 5 @ $3-5k
      • 2 @ $5-7k
      • 4 @ 7k+
    • So half the people have started, half haven’t
    • Presents a challenge
      • Those halfs need different advice!
    • So this talk:
      • Just starting out? Prescriptive advice – you need to know what to do
      • Later stage? Descriptive advice – show you what’s worked for me for you to pick and choose
  • How I started
    • Programmer 6 years ago. Was using vim
      • Made me more efficient
      • But it’s hard to learn
      • Really deep. You can keep learning more and more things about it
      • Became vim aficionado
      • Started helping my coworkers
        • Became “the vim guy”
        • I loved that – I love teaching
      • “How else can I teach this?”
      • Emailed the organizer of the Boston meetup group
        • “Can I give an 8 minute lightning talk teaching the basics of vim?”
        • Went well
      • Can I give a 40 minute conference talk about vim?
        • Applied, got accepted
        • People showed up!
      • People are willing to pay to hear me talk about vim online
      • Can I distill this into an online screencast?
        • Put it on Shopify, $9
        • Started to grow a following online – people wanted to learn vim
      • 2/1/10 – someone bought!
        • Exciting
  • Get to that first purchase email

      • It’s transformative
      • My mission: to give you that same experience
  • Part 1, for people who haven’t started: How I’d Start Over
    • The process I took with vim was mostly right, but by accident
    • Phase 1: Teach
      • Some ways to pick a product
        • What is something that you from 6 months ago would’ve found valuable?
          • Especially if it’d save you time/money at work
        • What are people asking you about?
          • Indicates people see you as an authority
        • What are you passionate about that bores other people?
          • Speaking to someone last night: “I spend so much time on billing and expense reporting for my freelance stuff, because I love that stuff.” <- Dude, that should be your first product.
      • How do you teach it?
        • Small, in-person, free
        • Ask around. Offer a lightning talk / free lunch and learn about <topic>. People will take you up on it
      • Do this multiple times
      • Three wins in this phase
          1. You’re building an audience. Authority. People are starting to trust you. Get a way of staying in touch with them. Get their email
          1. You get practice at teaching
            • It’s a tough skill
            • You’ll improve it this way
          1. You can do crazy amounts of customer research
            • Ask them – who are they? What got you excited about this? What did you take away from it?
            • Crazy amount of valuable information. Take advantage of that
    • Phase 2
      • Goal: sell ONE copy to ONE stranger
        • Everything else comes later
      • Small is beautiful
      • A 198-page e-book is bad – people won’t read it all, may not open it
        • Start small
      • Example titles (using Docker)
        • “Docker crash course”
        • “Docker for beginners”
        • “Docker for non-programmers”
        • “What I wish I’d known about Docker when I started”
        • “Why Docker sucks and what you should use instead”
        • ALL great e-book titles
        • 40 pages – great.
      • Recommend: get an Airbnb
        • Not a hotel: because Airbnb has a kitchen
          • Buy enough food to last 4-5 days
          • You don’t need to leave to get meals. That interrupts your flow
        • Goal: really simple. Really focused.
          • Write one chapter of your e-book
            • Not the first / intro chapter
            • Pick a meaty middle chapter
          • Write the contents page
          • Make a way to accept money
            • Do not code your own checkout
            • Use Leanpub
      • Most people here said they wanted inspiration & motivation
        • But the people saying this were the ones who haven’t got started
  • It’s natural to assume:
  • You feel inspired
  • You get started
  • You have success
  • But the reality is
  • You get started
  • You have success
  • You feel inspired

    • “Do you write on a schedule? Or only when you’re inspired?” - “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I get inspired every morning at 9am”
      • Book recommendation: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
  • Part 2, for people who HAVE started: My Ten Best Tactics
    • A grab-bag of tactics
      1. Create a recurring reminder to run a pricing test every 6 months
        • If you have only one price point: double it
        • I did this recently
          • Someone recently signed up to my product with an @uber.com address
            • That company is happily losing $3B a year
            • I’m charging them $29/mo
            • Hid the $29/mo plan. So cheapest was $59.
              • Just commented out the HTML!
            • Zero change to trial signups at first
              • After a while it did go down slightly, but trial to paid was way up
      1. Create an email course
        • I run an educational site. Helping people with Rails jobs
        • Made a free email course – “land your dream Rails job”
          • Took a while. It’s a solid course. Took some work
          • But it started converting 10% of the people who went through it
          • Totally automated
            • It’s like marketing automation is a thing and you should use it 😉
      1. Integrate and partner
        • Slept on this for a while. Dismissed it for a while
        • Turns out it’s awesome
        • Look for win/wins
        • We had a Zapier integration
        • Zapier wrote about it on our blog
          • That drives a lot of customers, for free
          • Win/win: Zapier wins, and we win
            • Another example: that Ruby education product
        • Went to someone else with a Ruby education site
        • Suggested a combined course. My best content, his best content. Cross-promote it
          • Made $100k combined in like 4 months
      1. Sell annual plans
        • Talk about it in two places:
        • your pricing page
        • An email that goes out on day 86. Do you want to switch to annual billing? Your next bill is in 4 days time, so let me know and I can switch you before that.
          • Also at the end of the year. If you have a bunch of money in your budget you need to spend – we’ll take it!
            • All that cash upfront is wonderful
      1. Put faces near things you want clicked
        • Humans have evolved for millions of years to be interested in faces
        • We can’t help it - Increases conversions
      1. Try a diving save
        • People sign up, but don’t have time
        • About a day after they cancel we email them
        • Saw you cancelled. That’s cool. People often cancel because they don’t have time. How about we get you set up on an annual plan, for a discount, so you have plenty of time to get set up
          • People take us up on this
          • From $0 churned customer → annual plan
      1. Start a podcast
        • Podcast Motor. You basically show up, do the speaking, you’re done
        • Great ROI
        • People tend to say yes to podcast interview requests
        • Can get big names in your industry on your podcast
        • And get them to tweet about the podcast
      1. Manually onboard customers
        • Highly recommend
        • Watch someone sign up for your product live
        • Get THEM to share THEIR screen, and talk out loud as they do it
        • You’ll learn A LOT
        • You think things are intuitive. They’re not. - Worth doing periodically. Especially worth doing in the beginning - “Enter your email here, and one of the founders will get you onboarded”
        • Email them, non-automated email, let’s get a time in Calendly - Great way to test onboarding. Show them the new price page and say ‘how does this pricing look to you?’
      1. Double down on things that work
        • It’s easy to get excited by the new and shiny
        • But you can get great results from doubling down on what’s working now
        • Snapper:
        • Had a popular blog post about the 30 best stock photo sites
          • Great, but it was sending people to 30 other sites
          • So he made his own stock photo site, and pointed people there at the top of the blog post
          • High conversions… and eventually led people back to Snapper
      1. Ask for help
        • You can ask me for help, whenever
        • @r00k
        • ben@benorenstein.com - Other people are happy to help here. Talk to people. The speakers here – reach out. You’ll be shocked how friendly people are. People are happy to help
  • Q&A:
    • “When you get rid of your lowest pricing tier, do you add one at the other end?”
      • Good question. Haven’t tried it.
      • Running one now – what if we put an SLA in the top tier?
      • Should try – “Enterprise - Contact us for pricing”
    • “Rationale of starting with non-SaaS?”
      • It’s harder
      • You can sell a lot of an infoproduct pretty fast and pretty early on
        • Getting that first $ matters more than anything
        • Start your scrappy little business as quickly as possible. Don’t worry about replacing revenue. Just get the first $ as quickly as possible

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