Speaker 1 00:00:04 Welcome to Subscription Heroes. I'm your host Scott. Hear. Today we get to learn from the legendary Samuel Heli Samuel's, a customer onboarding and activation expert who love teaching operators how to turn their sass into a powerhouse Samuel created self-serve saas.com, a playbook in a community for optimizing scale friendly cash flow. Here's what we cover, what the holy grail of onboarding is and how to apply it to your business, avoiding the bad habits we've learned from viral social companies and why you should be segmenting your customer's buy intent. There's so much more. So let's dive in. I wanna start with your latest work. What do you want people to know about self-serve SaaS?
Speaker 2 00:00:46 Well, I think self-serve sass is really important. I mean, especially when we're talking about it within a subscription context, there are a lot of, uh, digital offerings out there that you could generally call a SaaS company or, or a startup or whatever tech business you wanna put, nomenclature you wanna apply. And a lot of those business models are predicated on bringing in healthy subscription based customers. If you are a self-serve SaaS company, then you're not only offering a, a digital product to people in a subscription model, but you're also hoping that they're going to convert and stay subscribed on their own. So you need to create an automated conversion process for the whole customer lifetime, since you won't have any human driven sales functions, uh, available to, to help augment that. That's just a, a really fascinating area of, uh, where design meets business for me. I think that there is a lot of information out there about how to scale up your company in an enterprise upmarket sales driven kind of way, but not a lot of information out there on how to scale your company based off of self-serve. And especially if your market is really a self-serve market, I think that there should be ways for, for founders to, to succeed without having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Speaker 1 00:02:05 Right. It's like these principles are fairly self-evident, you know, you get have lower overhead, faster scaling. Yeah, I guess Optimizly is one of the earliest examples of this back in 2014. Um, but now it's everywhere. The problem is, you know, as you said, it's not always clear how to approach it. Alright, so I guess just to establish a baseline, what are the core tenants for you of a self-serve SaaS? I'm gonna keep trying to enunciate that as a business model. The, not the proper noun, but the whatever the opposite of a proper No. Is
Speaker 2 00:02:38 The generic, I guess the generic,
Speaker 1 00:02:40 No, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:02:41 <laugh>. Um, to me the, the core concept of self-serve, I think of it almost like a really sophisticated vending machine where if you're going up to, uh, a vending machine in real life to buy a soda or a bag of pretzels or something like that, you are deciding what you want and facilitating the transaction entirely yourself. It's all one coherent entity in a way that is completely driven autonomously by the, the user of the vending machine, so to speak. And in a similar sense, we're creating really complicated digital vending machines and looking to create digital environments for people to be able to successfully buy their bag of pretzels or their soda. So to me, that's the gist of it, but there's plenty more complexity to dive into. Not sure how deep you'd like me to go.
Speaker 1 00:03:33 I guess one of one of my questions is, is that if you have an existing self-serve product and you've kind of maybe stumbled your way into it, you've found some success. You know, how could you deliberately apply a self-serve SaaS model with your tenants? You know, you want to, because you wanna create a virtuous cycle of getting your customers more of what they want, helping them or helping your team understand your customers better. And then of course, that has ongoing benefits improved free to pay conversion and retention, et cetera. So, you know, how would you maybe, is there a framework you would apply or, or some tactics or anything like that? Well,
Speaker 2 00:04:12 I mean, there's a million different tactics for sure. Uh, it's a, as far as frameworks, uh, I'm working on it. Uh, I don't think that there are a lot of really reliable ones out there right now. There are some that are kind of close, like, I mean, there's product led growth or, or jobs to be done or, or different conceptual frameworks that to help you get into the mindset of serving users in, in an autonomous kind of fashion. But at the same time, I think really from a business standpoint, what you're ultimately looking to do is to turn your cost of acquiring new subscriptions into long-term healthy lifetime subscription revenue. And as a business function, the smarter that you can get about taking your cost of acquiring a customer, your CAC and producing l t v lifetime value out of it. To me, that's really the name of the game that we're trying to create processes that are smart ways for us to go out and buy quality lifetime revenue as cheap as possible.
Speaker 2 00:05:13 And to me, the, the biggest force multiplier that you can take to that approach is to create an, not to sound highfalutin, but an an ecosystem in which people can succeed on their own as users when they're trying to, to improve their life with your offering. That's, uh, you know, the easier said than done for sure, but I, I think especially if you look at startups, uh, a lot of times it's harder to break into like an enterprise sales kind of market because you've gotta be soc two compliant and have a million. I mean, it's just a, it's a whole different ballgame. And so it's, it's easier to get started in a self-serve kind of context where maybe you're just creating an app and selling it for $20 a month and kind of seeing what happens. But if that turns into something that has traction, the real question is how do you then scale that out and how do you, you know, double down on what's working or even identify what's working versus what isn't. And that's something that I see a lot of companies struggle with and then ultimately outgrow by just doing sales instead, rather than getting really, really sophisticated at the self-serve side of things and learning how to lean into those margins and squeeze as much juice out of it as they can. That's
Speaker 1 00:06:26 A good segue. I saw this stat the other day on Saster, and I think it was from a presentation from Jessica Bardos from Salesforce Ventures, and she was saying that only 150 private subscription companies, I guess you could also read that as startups have crossed a hundred million dollars and, you know, so I haven't been a part of a lot of startups acrossed that line. That to me, to me seems pretty big. But I think it's a good number because, you know, a few, only a few companies in history, there's an elite few that have unlocked this. So if you had a SaaS you wanted to grow a 200 million revenue starting today, where would you start? How would you unlock that growth?
Speaker 2 00:07:08 So when we, when you say a hundred million revenue, is that r like a hundred million? Ar ar okay. So yeah, so like closer to 10 million months. So I mean, if we're talking about that within a self-serve context, we also need to be thinking about just the nature of self-serve as a business model, where the business model dynamic works best in scenarios where people are wanting to make independent decisions for relatively smaller amounts of money than in a sales-driven kind of context. So in industry lingo, it's low arpa high value, so low average revenue per account, but you've got a ton of accounts out there. Instead of trying to sell big contracts to Fortune 500 companies, you've got 20,000 small businesses that could be your, your target market for example. And so when I'm thinking about how do I get to a hundred million a r r in a self-serve context, one of the very first things that I think of is what's the amount of volume of customers that's going to make up that amount of money?
Speaker 2 00:08:10 And how do I find a repeatable process for not only going out and acquiring those customers, but also keeping them around as sticky, good long-term revenue that I can be building upon month, over month, over month, a uh, you know, having good churn, things like that. And so from that standpoint, for me, if I'm really trying to think of how do I scale out to, I don't know how to do the math in my head off the, just off the top, but you know, out to what would at least be thousands and thousands of customers, what I would really be trying to hone in on are what are the improved life circumstances that somebody is coming to my offering for? And how do I create processes not just around being more effective at charging them, but being more effective at getting them to the outcomes that they're hoping that my app will unlock for them in their life. And the more that we can focus on the right outcomes that are strongly correlated with really healthy long-term lifetime value, and the better that we can get in moving that lever to unlock those outcomes for people, the more likely to me it is that we would have a repeatable process for turning CAC into L T V at such a rate that we could scale it up to a hundred million dollars
Speaker 1 00:09:29 Outcomes happen outside the product. You like to say, right?
Speaker 2 00:09:32 That's right. There are in-app outcomes and there are out of app outcomes. And every single in-app outcome is driven by an out app outcome.
Speaker 1 00:09:42 Let's take a little break to tell you about turnkey, the ones making this podcast happen Now. I think turnkey's awesome, but I am super biased because I'm a co-founder, but I love what we're doing for subscription companies. You might look at your churn numbers and think there's gotta be a way to turn this around. There's gotta be someone who can improve retention and help us track down why people are leaving your product. And that's why turnkey's here, turnkey's the only platform that fixes every type of churn for you. We handle retention for customer obsessed teams like Jasper Farro, AI Dungeon, and Costos. We lower cancellations by up to 42%, recover up to 89% of fail payments and even increase customer l t V by 28%. And we do it with our user-friendly, customer-centric, cancel flows, modern failed payment recovery and AI driven feedback analysis. So if you wanna run a healthier subscription business, head to turnkey.co to get started. So is there someone who comes to mind, a company that you've worked with or one that's scaling right now that makes you go, yeah, they really have got this right or they're inspiring to me in some way? Not to put you on the spot.
Speaker 2 00:10:54 Yeah, no, no problem. Um, I mean, MailChimp is a great example of a, of a relatively bootstrapped self-serve business model. I did have the pleasure of working with them several years ago and, and, uh, you know, I'm quite a fan of, of what they accomplished there. So I'm not sure what has happened since they sold to, uh, Intuit, I think. But that's definitely a, uh, a path to emulate, although of course it did take, uh, quite a long time to get there, uh, for them as well as would as that any company of that size would be. Right.
Speaker 1 00:11:24 Wow. What was their exit again? It was,
Speaker 2 00:11:27 Uh,
Speaker 1 00:11:27 What, 1.5 billion or something?
Speaker 2 00:11:30 It's a lot. They were, yeah, they're, they're the pretty staggering volume just in terms of daily signups, the amount of revenue they're making. It was, it's quite a, quite a machine they have running over there.
Speaker 1 00:11:40 So a while ago we, we had a conversation, we were speaking about key value metrics and just to define them, key value metrics are embody the things that people do on your product that, um, they find valuable, right? Or they, they, they extract some benefit from, from those things and that makes them stay around longer. And correct me if I'm not defining this well, but, um, I was wondering what you thought about how can businesses do a better job of uncovering or understanding or collecting their own key value metrics? The, the one that comes to mind is the urban legend of Facebook in the early days, the seven friends
Speaker 2 00:12:18 In three days.
Speaker 1 00:12:20 Yeah, yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. So you got that number of friends, you, you're, you're stuck around for life. So Yeah. Um, how can businesses do a better job of finding their own key value metrics and constantly rediscovering that as they evolve?
Speaker 2 00:12:33 Sure. As I love that question. Boy, there was a number of different ways we could, we could tackle that. Uh, on the one hand, I think that a lot of the key value metric mindset out there has been largely established by go big or go home viral social companies. So Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera. I mean, Twitter had like follow 30 people. Facebook had seven friends in three days, et cetera. And in all of those companies, they're not directly making money from their user base. They're making money from ads, partnerships, whatever. And so the growth metrics that they had to work with were, by definition loosely connected to revenue at best. And therefore you would need to use something like, well, if, if people follow, you know, 30 people, then there seems to be an inflection point in terms of retention. But really those kind of questions are more about like, how do we, especially when you start going down the road of like, how do we get like people to build habits and, you know, get addicted to our product.
Speaker 2 00:13:40 A lot of the, the viral kind of plays don't necessarily make sense within a subscription business model where you are saying, Hey, we're here to help provide value to you and we want this to be a good deal for you. Where ideally you're happy to pay 20 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, whatever that is in exchange for all the benefits that are offering on locks for you. And so to me, the question really becomes less focused on key value metrics in terms of engagement and user behavior in, uh, in the abstract and more about what are the specific goals that are driving people to find your offering to be relevant to begin with, and how do you speak to those goals as much as possible and identify which of those goals most closely correlate with revenue, which is something that like a Twitter or a LinkedIn could wouldn't necessarily be able to do. And so I, I feel like I'm kind of losing the thread here. I apologize, but uh,
Speaker 1 00:14:41 No, no, I I think it's telling that the, the most prominent, prevalent examples of these, you know, mythical key value metrics and, and they do sort of have the air of urban legend, right? Um, absolutely. But they, yeah, they're all tied to social apps and growth-minded viral virality, sas key value metrics aren't, I don't know, they're, I guess they're not as, as cinematic or fun to discuss in certain cases, I guess in pop culture, right? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:15:09 I mean, I, there urban legends are only worth so much. And I think that when companies who do have a closer connection to revenue who are charging their customer base directly try to emulate the Twitter and Facebook type growth approaches, a lot of times I'll see maybe a data scientist will come up with something where it's like, oh, uh, there's a, an inflection point in retention if, uh, somebody creates three projects, so let's, let's gear our activation experience around getting people to over that three project threshold where you know for a fact that nobody is like, you know, what's great about this thing is like I can make three projects with it. Nobody's coming to you for that. They're coming, that's a byproduct of them trying to do something else that's actually meaningful to them. And the more that you can put your finger on the pulse of what's actually meaningful to people, and again, confirm that that is something that correlates strongly with long-term healthy revenue production, then you have the makings of a, at least a hypothesis that you can be trying to build out a process around optimizing.
Speaker 2 00:16:16 Whereas if you're trying to optimize for creating three projects, yeah, in theory you could be like gamifying it so that more people go in and create three instances of whatever project is in your app, but that doesn't mean that they're getting value. And it probably doesn't really mean that getting more those extra people to do that arbitrary thing is gonna unlock more value in the form of revenue for you either. Uh, it's not the thing that's causing people to pay you. Where, to me that's really the name of the game is identifying what's the driving force that leads people to want to give you money in an ongoing kind of way. And how do you just keep doubling down on that as much as possible? Instead,
Speaker 1 00:16:58 I've been in, in conversations in those in rooms where we've, I've had similar conversations where, you know, the, it's the three project fallacy. I, I guess we'll call it <laugh>, it uh, just cracks me up cuz it's, it's just so simplistic and I guess it's a reflection of maybe someone doesn't know where to start or they're just exhausted by all the inputs and this is the most common, or I don't know, prevalent metric that popped up in all of the, uh, mixed panel dashboards or whatnot. Are there any common places to start in uncovering these key value metrics or just common ones you see across the board in sas?
Speaker 2 00:17:33 Uh, one big recommendation that I make is to segment by intent. So if somebody is, for example, creating their account and you can ask them what are the, I mean, in so many words, what are the benefits that, that you're here to unlock? How can we be of helped you? You know, you would, you would phrase it in a, in a more familiar kind of way, but asking them basically like, what is, what are, what are you here for help with? And letting people identify, oh, this thing, this thing, not that thing, but this thing. And it, when they, uh, you know, press a button that answers the survey question that, that says, this is what I'm here for, then you can flag that particular user for, for tracking. You can see how likely it is that people who say they're here for option A actually go on to convert or are retained in month two or month three, versus people who say they're here for option B or here who, who say, I'm not here for any of these options.
Speaker 2 00:18:30 In, in which case you have a, a mismatch between your, your messaging and your products value proposition. One general recommendation that I would make is that there's a lot of opportunity, in my opinion in the chasm between what marketing is focused on, which is usually driving top of funnel signups start, you know, trial starts, you know, very high level account creation kind of things. And ultimately what product is focused on, which is delivering capabilities for long-term healthy customers. The how those marketing signups turn into products, long-term customers is an area that I think a lot of companies have as an oversight. Even just organizationally, they've got their marketing department, they've got their product department, maybe they've got customer success, maybe they've got growth, but really like who's really watching to see are these new trials that we're getting high quality, are they likely to convert? Do we have a general theory in place around what, what inflection points people need to experience in order for them to convert, et cetera. I, I think that there's just a lot happening there that, uh, is really interesting to explore, but maybe because of general org chart design tends to be overlooked in most companies.
Speaker 1 00:19:47 Oh yeah, I've definitely seen that happen before. You know, it's like, hey, marketing goes, Hey, we've got you all the, the leads you asked for and product goes, yeah, but they're all churning and finance goes, you gotta do something about, you know, this churn problem and it's just passing the baton around. And who ultimately owns that? Right? Who, who who has the ability to cut through and solve the problem of the mismatch? Yep.
Speaker 2 00:20:11 100%.
Speaker 1 00:20:12 That's another podcast, I'm sure <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:20:14 Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 00:20:15 Or, or, or a whole management course, right? So, you know, you mentioned onboarding and, and segmentation and you said in the past that the holy grail of customer onboarding and ultimately customer success is, um, is context aware or segmented onboarding, and I actually saw this the other day, um, in pseudo, right? It's an AI assisted fiction writing app started by my two friends, Amit Gupta and James U for full disclosure. So it, it's amazing you come into the app and it asks you what type of story are you working on? And you type in freeform. I'm writing a novel about, uh, space opera or a heist fantasy. I don't know why that came to mind, but sure, we'll go with it. You know, then, then it literally shows you with that context and that hyper-awareness. It says, Hey, so maybe in a space opera you need to come up with some characters like Luke and Star Wars, and it makes these crazy references too. I just thought it was pretty incredible. So I, I'll I'll send you some screenshots after, but I guess my question is what are the key elements of this, this context to where onboarding experience, um, you mentioned a few before, but I imagine it starts with someone's role and or mix of what key benefit am I looking to get outta your product?
Speaker 2 00:21:32 Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's really a question of just meeting people where they're currently at. One really simple example that I remember hearing about was, uh, there was a company that, it was a mobile app that gave guitar lessons and they tried all kinds of different things to improve their, their activation and conversion rates. And a lot of them didn't work as, as is the case with, with, with any kind of growth experiments. But one that they finally landed on that did work was just a simple question when you're just going through the onboarding, which is what's your current skill in playing guitar? Are you absolute beginner? Are you, you know, do you know how to reshoot music? So on and so forth. And just by getting an understanding of where people were at, they were able to tailor the lessons to somebody who had the level of skill that the person claimed to have.
Speaker 2 00:22:24 And doing that alone made it a lot easier for the software company to identify what would be relevant and what wouldn't be relevant to any given person depending on the situation that they had self-reported as being in. And that is really freeing from a software design perspective, because you don't have to just kind of satisfy and just, and create a one size fits all experience, experience that in theory could be useful to anybody, but in practice is not actually made for anybody where really if you can get some contextual clues about somebody, and ideally those clues would be not only about their current situation, like how good are you currently at playing guitar, but like, why do you wanna become better at guitar? Like what are the things that you want to be able to learn? If you can get an understanding of where somebody's currently at and where they're trying to get to, especially as it relates to how they're trying to leverage your app to get there, then it's a lot easier.
Speaker 2 00:23:28 It's almost just like paint by numbers of like, okay, well you need to do this and this and this. You can lay out a whole journey for them, not like you railroad them through it like a wizard. You still can provide the optionality, but you can choose what to surface as far as what's relevant to them at any given time. And so from that standpoint, I think segmentation is extremely powerful and under leveraged, especially within the realm of product design. Even something really simple, like if you were asking people, let's say an invoice sending app, uh, if you were asking people why they wanted to send invoices and one category of people said that they wanted to, uh, appear bigger so that they could land a a big new client and they wanted to step up their invoice and gain because of that. And then another category of people said that the person who handled their invoices left the company and they just have a, a zip drive with word documents in it and they don't know what to do.
Speaker 2 00:24:24 That's a whole different category of, of concern and, and problems to be solved. And even if you just like took that segmentation information and just had a, like a different testimonial on the billing page that spoke specifically to, man, it was amazing how blah, blah, blah helped me get all my word docs, uh, imported into a thing and now I don't have to worry about lapsed payments anymore. If that's the testimonial that they see after they told you that that's their problem that they're having, it's much more likely that they'll go, uh, okay, kinda like as a kid, would you play hotter and colder where it's like getting warmer, getting warmer. You wanna let people know that they're getting warmer as much as possible. And that's not, you're getting closer to seven friends in three days, or you're getting closer to three projects, is you're getting closer to the stuff that you care about.
Speaker 1 00:25:11 I love how you put that because it, it creates this insane feedback cycle of, okay, these people, we, we've successfully identified this type of customer that we can call them out. And then we're seeing in progress through, but also we're getting other product ideas too, where if you want to appear bigger to land a client and that segment takes off, then you can do all sorts of product enhancements to, to satisfy that and, and, you know, increase retention and and, and all that good stuff. And then it informs marketing too, to your point.
Speaker 2 00:25:45 Yeah, I was just gonna say the same thing. Yeah, it can inform your acquisition strategy, it can inform what your ad copy is, who you're running your ads to, you know, I mean, it, it's really thinking about it. That's why I was using the, the highfalutin term of ecosystem earlier where, like, one example that comes to mind, this isn't really segment specific, but I just recently started getting the activation emails from, uh, buzz Sprout, which is a, a podcast hosting service. And one of the first lifecycle emails that they sent was, here's our guide on the best microphones under a hundred dollars. And that's not an email that's like, you haven't made three projects yet, log in to get three projects started, or anything that's like tone deaf or just speaking only to like the practical logistics that need to take place in order for somebody to like make the app function.
Speaker 2 00:26:34 But instead they're understanding, like if they just come in and say, upload your podcast episode n as the very first step, it assumes that people have a podcast episode or a podcast at all, or even a microphone or know where to start, or any of those kind of pod art, you know, uh, podcast titles and all of those kind of things are hard to figure out. And so if you really want to take on the customer's problems and genuinely help guide them to places that, that they couldn't get to without you, sometimes it involves helping them understand the best microphones under a hundred dollars, but that's not, has nothing to do with the operation of your interface.
Speaker 1 00:27:12 And I I love how it's yeah, removing a constraint that they have no control over. It's a physical thing. And, uh, I faced this in a, in a different startup where you had to buy physical, um, personal key, uh, I remember hardware keys, it's been not that long, but I already forget the terminology <laugh>, but like a treasure or ledger. And you had to wait for that thing to come in and then you had to go back to the app and set it up. So there was this period where people forget about you, but if you can identify that segment, knock down the barriers, get them to a solution, faster outcome happening outside the product, you've got your gear now, now I'm set up. Now I'm sure there's another Activate lifecycle email where it's like, how to tune your mic or how to connect it with this or whatever, right?
Speaker 2 00:27:57 Yep, yep. A hundred percent. It's basically, your problems are my problems and we're gonna try to solve them as comprehensively as possible. Because I mean, even if you think about it like in the, in the, in the case of Buzz Sprout, like their total addressable market changes depending on what their approach is. If they're only going to help people who already have a podcast episode recorded, that's a way smaller market than people who are wanting to start a podcast but don't really know where to begin. And if you can come in early and be helpful when they're in the figuring it out phase, it's gonna really build a kind of trust that would lead to a really healthy long-term subscription further down the line. So it's a question also of just of, of timing and, and market specificity where you could say, well, we really want to help people who already have podcast art and have already recorded five episodes and they're just looking to find a better host for their services. But your market is way smaller by consequence of that your market is basically just your competitor's customers rather than a very wide pool of people who are somewhere in the journey of trying to start their podcast instead.
Speaker 1 00:29:08 Yeah, I mean, and it's especially relevant too, cuz I think podcasting as an industry declined something like 5% last year. So continuing to get new blood in is even more important and more of a challenge. And guess we're all that's,
Speaker 2 00:29:21 I, that's, yeah, I think that's relevant for any business. Like you, especially when we talk self-serve you, you've really gotta be thinking volume and ideally also expansion as you would with any kind of SAS business, but you, you don't have the giant whales coming in and, and spending the equivalent of all the rest of your customers just in one account or something like that to be able to save you, so to speak. You, you really have to be, whether you like it or not, you have to be in much more, much closer touch with the, the heartbeat of your, of your growth process.
Speaker 1 00:29:53 I wanna ask about segmentation. One thing, uh, I've seen in, in companies where you work really hard, hard on onboarding, it's a huge priority. You nail down what, whatever you call it, the persona, the customer profile, whatever you wanna call it. And you have these segmentation questions and roll questions, and then you kind of move on. It becomes stale over time, not because you're neglecting it on purpose, but because you're busy, you're putting out fires everywhere. And then the data you look at just kind of starts to, to tilt and shift in a way that it starts making less sense. You know, how do you go and make sure that this is, do you put a team on this, you know, to revisit this every quarter? I don't know, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask an AI question too. Could AI do this? Probably, who knows? But how do you keep this se these segments, you know, fresh and, and, and prevent them from going stale?
Speaker 2 00:30:45 Well, yeah, I think that you wanna keep your, your finger on the pulse of how things are trending at, at any given moment. And this is, uh, I mean this again speaks back to, to maybe the, the org chart disconnect that we were talking about before, where marketing's focused on their metrics, products focused on their metrics, and that hopefully all of these things just kind of come together to produce good unit economics. Whereas for me, I like to start by looking at the unit economics and get an understanding of like, what is our tact to L T V ratio right now? How long does it take to pay off our cost of customer acquisition? Is it 10 months? Is it 14 months? What, what does that do to our cash flow? So on and so forth. And to me, the, if you start with revenue and then reverse engineer different points of leverage along the customer journey that could impact revenue, I think that that's more compelling than, well, we sifted through the data and found that you gotta create three projects and then you're more likely to still be logging in two months later.
Speaker 2 00:31:47 So let's try to make that happen. I can understand why companies would wanna move on from that or, or generally speaking, not find a lot of success in in doing that repeatedly. But at the same time, I really would advocate for not thinking of your activation process as a feature that you just ship and then revisit every couple years. To me it's really the heartbeat of your company. This is how you're, you're going out and you're actively investing money to bring in new subscribers and you continually wanna be informed as to whether the new subscribers that you're bringing in are as at least on track to be as healthy as your past subscribers, if not more. And ideally that you're acquiring them at a, at a more scale friendly acquisition cost, so on and so forth. And so to me, that's something that those are trends that are taking place within your data and within your customer base on a daily basis. And, and, uh, to, to just revisit that every couple years to me, I is, is, is a concerning way of approaching it, in my opinion.
Speaker 1 00:32:50 Amen of that. Yeah, it's, it's, it ends up being one of those, and, and the places I've been, you know, one of those all hands on deck, three month grind fests, and then you put it on the shelf and, and it's like, why did we do this? Uh, just to get a bump in metrics or survey results or something for a few months and then, you know, uh, it's, it, it's frustrating. I wanna close with two questions. The first is, if you're reading a book or I've read a long form piece lately, which one particularly had an effect on you?
Speaker 2 00:33:21 There's a book that I came across that is, I, I think it's outta print, so it's a little hard to recommend it. It it, it was really, uh,
Speaker 1 00:33:29 I already love it. Yeah, <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:33:31 Exactly. Uh, but it's called Reframing Business by, let's see, I've got on my desk here, Richard Norman Norman, n o r m a n n. And this was a, uh, book that I heard recommended in a, in a lecture on an economics theory called Service Dominant Logic, which is similar to a lot of the concepts that we've been talking about, uh, today. And they, uh, they, they built out this theory largely inspired by the work of Richard Norman, uh, who wrote the book Reframing Business. So I was like, all right, I, I should check this out. And I, I like never underline or, or like dog ear pages. Like I always just leave my books pristine. And this one like almost literally has a highlighter on every single page where I'm just like, oh man, this, the way they're putting this is like completely the, you know, the in line with how I see it too. And I found that very, very inspiring. So that's the book that I'm working my way through right now, and I'm strongly recommended if, if you're willing to take the chance on a, on an expensive obscure out of print book, <laugh>
Speaker 1 00:34:33 The best kinds, well, maybe not the expensive part, but Right. <laugh>. Uh, so, uh, just for our listeners for one last, you know, high octane tip, what would you leave them with? Could be about design, leadership, reading, uh, up to you.
Speaker 2 00:34:49 I think really for me, one of the, the keys that I see missing in our industry is a real sense of investment in actually following through on the expectations that you're setting with your customer base. A lot of people will create value propositions that sound good on the surface, but are maybe kind of abstract or even like a company that, you know, let's say that they're really well intentioned and they go out and they do switch interviews to identify the different jobs to be done, you know, considerations that, that their, that their business might be serving. And, you know, thinking about how that could inform their, their marketing or the way that they position their offering or things like that. And, and I think that's great, but I would also recommend that we really think about how do we create systems that reliably follow through on the promises that we're making.
Speaker 2 00:35:39 And if we're identifying jobs to be done, instead of just using those to put a different spin on our marketing and our positioning, how do we create systems that actually get people to the places that they're hoping the jobs will get them to arrive at and build out the processes that reliably help make people make incremental progress toward becoming better at playing guitar or appearing better to bigger to potential clients with their invoices or whatever it is that they're trying to unlock in their life. How do we take on those problems and create systems that, that genuinely are geared toward increasing the likelihood that people are successful with those out of app outcomes, rather than just making sort of hand wavy promises and giving everybody a one size fits all interface
Speaker 1 00:36:26 Could not agree more. The promise needs to be more, not just a guidepost, but you know, actually follow through and to be taken as a, a commitment. So I love that you said that. I'm grateful for you coming on. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 00:36:42 A pleasure. Of course.
Speaker 1 00:36:43 Awesome. Thanks. Don't miss out on future episodes. Get alerts from new
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