Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Super excited to have you. If you could kind of give us a rundown of sort of your background, what you're doing, where you're at.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So my name is Keith Burheck, founder of Segmetrics. I've been doing segmetrics for about 10 years and before that I was running a conversion rate optimization agency. We were focused specifically on info product people like Ramit Sadie, Eben Pagan, Jim Quick, and then working with a lot of SaaS companies as well to really understand where people come from, what types of customers convert, and essentially how to turn that traffic into long term customers that love you.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Okay, cool. Nice summary. And talking about kind of where people come from and what traffic converts. Let's get into marketing attribution. So this is an area I love it and hate it. Love it because it's so helpful and hate it because it's so difficult. So maybe for anyone who's not sure, could you kind of give us an overview of attribution itself, what it is, why it's important, any mistakes people make when they're trying to attribute and we'll just go from there.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'll talk to two real points about attribution because I think that there's. When people are talking about attribution, they're generally talking about where people come from and what did they do before they converted. And this is generally web based attribution tracking. So did someone come from Facebook, did someone come from Google Ads? Did they come in organically? Did they come in from paid what, what was the channel, what was the marketing piece that brought them in? But there's a second piece of that which is segmentation. And that is something, once someone joins your lists, once someone has taken that first step to conversion, like starting a trial, downloading a PDF or something like that, it is the segmentation you can do to understand what industry people are in, what they're interested in, the size of their business. And this is another type of attribution. It's not acquisition attribution, but it's a different type of attribution that's really important when understanding who and what types of customers convert the best for your business. Gotcha.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: And maybe let's just continue on this attribution. So when we're talking about attribution being important, like I think what you outlined is obviously like, oh yeah, okay, I should know like who's signing up and where they're coming from.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: But this is a harder problem than it sounds. So can you give us Kind of a breakdown of what makes attribution difficult and how people do it wrong, maybe.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So the.
It's a big topic. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: So frustrating marketers for years.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: It's. It. It really is. And so the. The main issue is that back in the day, everyone had one device. They had a computer. They were searching for you on Google. Maybe they saw an ad, and then they would click on that ad, and then they would show up on your site, and it was easy to track all the way through. And you could say, this person saw an ad. Then they went to Google and searched for me. Then they showed up, and then they converted, and everything was wonderful in rainbows. And it's not like that anymore. So now we all have three to four devices. We have our watch, we have our phone, we have our computer, we have our iPad. We have. We have our family iPad. I have my daughter's iPad that I borrowed to look up something real quick. We have so many dang devices.
And also a lot of the systems that we use to interface with the web are now closed. So Facebook has its own little Facebook browser. It's not a real browser. It doesn't connect to the rest of the stuff. If you click a link in Facebook, Facebook knows it. No one else does. You have things like Twitter that are going to be in an app, and unless you click that link, you're not getting out outside the app. And then it's. Obviously, there's all these problems now with tracking because some are for privacy reasons and some are for walled garden reasons where Facebook wants to control everything because they want you to pay them money in order to get that information. Same with Twitter, same with Google Ads, et cetera, et cetera. So it has really become very difficult to keep get real attribution over time because multiple devices, multiple platforms, multiple walled gardens all contribute to a conversion at this point. And now that we have AI, we have a number of people who come in and they have no tracking, they have no information on them whatsoever. And we asked them on the call, how'd you hear about this? And like, oh, ChatGPT recommended us. So we just clicked on that link and came in and I was like, great, it's going to get more interesting before it gets easier, I think is the real answer there.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think just to kind of touch base on that. So, you know, I deal with attribution all day, every day. And kind of what you talked about is there's different browsers. Some are walled gardens. Some reasons we can't really do great attributions due to privacy. But also one thing that maybe you have some thoughts on, that I'd like to hear is that multiple touch points can often make it really difficult for me and marketing to know what's driving roi. So we might have like a Google Ad that someone sees and they see like a LinkedIn post and then they see a podcast and then they get on a call and we're like, okay, which one of these, like actually drove that? And we can often tell like what was the first, what was the last. But it can be really difficult to tell, like which one of these actually worked, you know, or which one they like this, like which one of these hurt us in their eyes and we don't know.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And this is honestly what marketers are trying to. It's the holy. They call it the holy grail and it's multi touch attribution. It's like, show me that happy path that everyone followed through to convert to a customer. And it's really a lie. Like there are just, you need something like 8 touch points or 14 touch points now before, over time, right? Not like 7 clicks, like 7 or 8 clicks over time, over a number of days before you can, before someone converts. And they come in different orders, they come in different shapes. They, they might be organic, organic, organic, paid. They may be paid, organic, organic, social paid, organic. Like it's, it's just all over the place. There's no singular way to look at it. And that's why a lot of the attribution platforms that are out there, they really say, oh, find your multi touch attribution step. That's going to get you everything you need to know and solve. It's just muddled data. Like, it's just, you can't have enough traffic to really optimize something when you have 800 different touch points that could vary in or different combinations of these different touch points through that whole flow. So what we look at when we try to optimize for this, because it is just a huge, huge spaghetti mess, is we start with a very specific question and we choose an attribution model that matches that. So like you were saying, where do they come in first? That's very easy. Where do they come in last? Very easy. But what we might want to know is, okay, we are working on improving our ad spend right now. We want to get better at doing ad spend. We want to get better at converting people from ads. So what we would do is we would in psychometrics, filter out all of the organic anything that was not an ad. And we look specifically at the ads and we'd say, okay, here are the places that we're seeing conversions. Here's our first touch, here's our last touch, here's the time between those touches. So it takes three weeks, it takes a week, it takes six weeks, whatever. From that first touch or even from that last. That first touch, that last touch, how long does it take? So we're looking at things like that, and then we're diving down deeper into things like. So we'll see Branded, of course, is the number one paid ad that's coming in. And we're like, well, that's useless because they're literally searching for our name. So let's ignore that. So then we'll take out branded search. So now we have a sub segment of all of our ads that we're looking at. And we're looking for where did people come from? First touch, what caused them to convert? Last touch. And then we're focusing just on that block because that's what we're trying to optimize at that time. And if we're trying to optimize SEO, then we do organic and so on. And then when we'd want to see that full funnel of where are people coming from, we'd look at our trials and then work backwards through both of those. So it's really. And you know, Rob, we were both at microconf, and Rob Walling was talking about this. You can't look at the average. You can't look at the general shape of your marketing and set and find anything out. Right. If I look at my overall marketing of all the organic and all the paid and all the social and everything, it just becomes a mess, and it becomes an average. And you can't make a decision off that. You have to filter down. You have to pick out those blocks and you have to find outliers. You have to find things that are doing really well and really bad and then focus on those to optimize. And so that's kind of the whole attribution optimization strategy that we've been looking at.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: So I might have missed this talk from Rob. I'm curious. So he says you can't look at the average. I would not totally disagree with it, but somewhat disagree with that because I think it does kind of give you an aggregate idea of, like, how your marketing department is performing.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Yes, sorry, I got it.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: No, that was pretty much it. You go ahead, because I was going to ask what I'm not seeing Here.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So as a KPI of are we going in the right direction? Yes. 100%. You should use an average. But if you are looking to optimize your marketing, and that means if you are looking to make a decision to change a strategy, you can't look at the average. And so here's the example I always give. So let's say you have a trial to conversion funnel, all right. And you have Facebook ads, and you have Google Ads going, and you have 50 people, 50 trials from Facebook, 50 trials from Google, and you have a conversion rate of 50%. Awesome. You're doing great. Cool. Cool. No notes. Right? 50% travel conversion. Great. So then you look at Facebook versus Google and you say Facebook has zero conversions. And Google has a hundred percent conversions. Well, that was kind of hidden by that average of 50%. So as soon as you start drilling in and looking for a difference for an outlier, then you start to see something that you can really like, glob onto and improve your marketing.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Okay, I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: It's not that the averages are bad. They're just not actionable. Right. They're a great speedometer for how well you're doing, how fast you're moving, but they're not going to tell you what to do next.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: And when you're looking at different campaigns in marketing, whether that's paid, whether that's SEO or you know, social, whatever it might be, kind of what stuff are you looking for to determine success or fail? And I guess this can sometimes change over the course of the company. But I'm interested in kind of your thoughts here.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: And when we're talking about success or fail, are we talking about the metrics that they tie into or sources or what type of either?
[00:11:08] Speaker B: So some context here. So if you have like a relatively early stage company, they just want revenue and they have numbers they have to hit this quarter to make investors happy or some middle managers got numbers they got to hit to make their boss happy or whatever. So in that situation, you might be very focused on, say this month's pipeline and less focused on building brand in the future. Whereas if you have a company like Coke, they're probably doing very little to drive pipeline this quarter, but they're investing a whole lot in their brand and their name recognition and so on. So I'm curious as to your thoughts. When you're running a campaign, what metrics or what sources or what ROIs are you looking for to say, oh yeah, this was a success, or like, let's start reinvesting elsewhere. I'm just kind of curious as your thoughts.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: So we, and there's a couple and it really depends on what we're trying to focus on. So the we have a very good trial to conversion and a very good churn rate. And so those are not places we currently focus on right now, but I'll talk about those in a second because we did not always have a really good conversion rate. And so what we are focusing on right now is lead to trial. And so we are very much looking at what sources and specifically we have a bunch of integrations with different companies, we have a bunch of different use cases of types of people who use segmetrics. And so for us we have identified these kind of customer segments and these customer verticals and we have pages for each of them and we are measuring how much traffic we're getting on those pages and how much of those pages are converting to trial so that we can understand which of our customer verticals are being are more convincing than others. Who needs our product, which of our customer verticals. So is it people who use stripe? Is it people who use ConvertKit? Is it people who use click funnels? Is it people use high level? Is it bloggers? Is it podcasters? Is it SaaS? Is it info products? Like we have all these different combinations and we're looking at of those combinations, who is our best avatar based on who comes to those sites the most or those pages the most and who converts to trial the most. So currently that's what we're doing because we're focusing so much on that top of funnel to conversion.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: So just to restate that, so you're looking at who's showing up on the page and then who's converting just kind of at a broad level. Okay, interesting.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: And we're able to do that because those pages are very focused to specific use types. And so based on the page that they're hitting and that attribution of where they came from, we're able to see exactly what they're interested in when they're getting there.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Oh, amazing. And that's your conversion from lead to.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Trial, you said that is visitor to trial.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Visitor to trial. Okay, cool.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah, so we, I wish our lead to trial was better. It's. There's a lot of self serve and a lot of self serve is visitor trial, which is great. But I also wish that we had a good lead magnet to trial conversion, but we haven't needed it yet, so.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Yeah, nice.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a Nice problem to have, right?
Yeah, there is. The trial to conversion though was very interesting for us because we had pretty bad trial to conversion for a while. We measure 45 days instead of 30 because we have a 14 day free trial. So we wanted to see who stays on for payment number two. And that's really our metric that we look at when we're looking at our churn rate. And what we did was we found outliers and so we looked at all the industries that people come in from, what software they're using. So what integrations did they connect to? Segmentrics. And we pulled an entire report on based on each of the integrations and based on each of the industries and a combination of those two, who had the highest churn and who did not. And so, you know, normally when you're looking at churn rates and stuff like that, you're really looking at what plan are they on, how much are they paying and that kind of stuff. But because we connect to the marketing information as well, we're able to say, oh, here are people in the info product space, in the E comm space, in the SaaS space who are using stripe, we're using whatever and get those combinations. Say, this is a combination that converts really poorly. This is a combination that converts really well. And so we were able to identify those and then identify what things we can do to make them convert better. And that has upped our trial to conversion rate insanely.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: So let me make sure that I understood that. So you basically looked at churn rates of different segments of your audience to determine who might be the most potentially viable for like trial to pay conversions.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Right, Exactly.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: And then that's the craziest thing I've ever heard.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: That's right. That's what we do.
That's what. And it's, it's what I absolutely love because a lot of being able to tie it back to that lifetime value to that churn is really the important thing. Like you can get tons and tons of trials, but if they're not converting, then it doesn't really matter. Right. And because Facebook and Google, they all have those seven day attribution windows, you're going to be able to know, oh, we had 100 people come in from ads and 70% of them started that trial. Awesome. But how many people converted, we don't know because we're not able to track that back without a tool like Segmetrics. And so we built Segmetrics originally for ourselves. We were a conversion rate optimization Agency. This was literally the question we were trying to answer that we could not answer. And so we're like, well, we have all the data, throw it in a database. How hard could it be? And. And we built psychometrics. Turns out very hard.
Ten years later, and it's still hard. It's still a hard thing to do.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: That's the bonkers of. You looked at Churn and use it to give you info about trials.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah, a hundred percent. And then. And then. So what's even crazier is we then looked at what people do while they're on their trial to identify what it is that makes people stick. And so what we found for us is that we do onboarding calls, call them Kickstart calls, for all of our customers to come up. Anyone who gets on that call has a 97% chance of staying. 97% retention rate. It's amazing. But only like 11 over six months.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Wow. It's great.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: It's good. Yeah.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: That is so.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: But here's the problem. Only 11% of people got on that call. So even though that call has a huge impact on retention, no one was getting on the call. And we found out it's all ecom people, like everyone else was getting on the call. E Comm people were not getting on that call. They don't want to be bothered. They. They don't want to get. They don't want to talk to us. And so we found other ways to get them the same value. That was not a call. And so that. So ecom. So essentially, everyone had a really good Churn rate except for E Comm, which was miserable. And so we identified, okay, we have a problem with our E Comm segment. And then we were able to introduce new things. So on the onboarding flow, if it shows that they are e comic, then we send them on a different onboarding flow than they would have if they were SaaS, because we have seen that they need different content and different handling to be successful with the software.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: That makes sense. I'm curious how you segmented your Churn rate into different verticals, though. We asked because, like, structure doesn't do this. What's that?
[00:18:42] Speaker A: We ask them. So when you sign up, when you sign up for segmentrics, the first thing we ask is, we want to make this the best software for you. We have custom dashboards, we have blah, blah, blah, what industry are you in? And little dropdown. And they choose which industry. We push that into our marketing software. We push that into the onboarding software. And that really Builds the experience you're having as you go through Psychmetrics. And so it's useful for the customer because we're able to give them better value, but it's also useful for us because we know what information and how to talk to them so that they can get better value out of the software.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: So I try to avoid, like, super tactical questions because I know this might not apply a ton, but I'm really curious as to. As to kind of exactly how you did this. So you had an onboarding. Someone joins, they get like a little onboarding survey, asks what their industry is or whatever, and then they say they churn.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: So are you guys using Stripe?
[00:19:36] Speaker A: I guess we use Stripe and activecampaign.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Okay, so so someone turns. You see it in stripe, and then are you going back through that contact and are you looking manually? Like, okay, what industry were they in? So how are you segmenting them?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: So Segmetrics automatically pulls that information together.
We dog food, like, this is all. This is all stuff that we do. So what we do is we have a list of every custom field that we have on a contact in HubSpot or ActiveCampaign. And then we've tied each of those contacts to how much revenue they've made and their churn, and if they canceled and whatnot, how long they've been on. And so we just do a report of. I want to see the churn rate divided by the industry that they're in, and I want to see everyone who has signed up in the last nine months and show me that rate and just poof, right there. And then I can see, okay, this is how long people stay on for each of these.
For each of these industries.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: So I know some people who needed Segmetrics yesterday.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: It is something that we hear a lot, actually. Like, okay, it's a good tool. It's.
I mean, I hate tooting my own horn, but honestly, we built it to solve this specific problem because it's the specific problem that we have. Like, we are a bootstrapped small software SaaS company in the marketing space that does a lot of marketing. And we need to know, where do people come from? Who are our best customers and what makes them convert and what turns them into happy customers that stay on with us. And at the end of the day, that's the. That's the value prop.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, I am. I'm definitely going to sign people off to Segmetric. I mean, I mean, I'm being totally serious because I can I can think of one business right now that really, really needs this because their churn is pretty disastrous and they don't know who's churning really. So. Okay.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: It's a really tough problem like because. Yeah, because we used to use barometrics back before we built psychometrics and we've used like a lot of the other pieces software in the industry. And I think it's a culture thing because developers hate marketers and marketers hate developers. And it's like so true. Honestly. You go on a hacker news for 10 minutes and you just feel the vitriol, but it's, it's really true. And so when you have a SaaS oriented analytics platform, they don't bring in the marketing stuff at all because they're like, oh, marketing, that's for the marketers. And when you have a marketing attribution software, they don't handle SaaS, they don't handle churn, they don't handle retention, they don't handle all those numbers. You need to know they're just like, here's your revenue. It's like, that's not important. I need lifetime, I need churn, I need all these things that SaaS finds important. So lucky us, I guess.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so I think I've drilled far enough down into that might email you might get you on another podcast.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Definitely, definitely.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: That's the best part about having a podcast is just the free consulting that I get.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Like I said at the beginning, like I can talk for five hours on this stuff. Like I love talking about this so much. Like it is just. It's my joy to be able to talk about this.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: So anytime I might take you up on that, I am curious. So moving on to other topics that may be a little bit more interesting to people who are not that are not children lovers. You mentioned that you guys have a trial. I'm curious as to your thoughts on trial versus free plan.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: We had a free plan a long time ago and we used the free plan specifically to, to get as much as many people in as humanly possible so that we could do customer research.
This was when we were first starting and we didn't want there to be a barrier of paying us $50, whatever. We just wanted as many people to connect to make sure that we were providing the value. And at that time I think it was a good strategy. Our analytics really cost a lot of money. There are very material costs to running a lot of data analytics, especially web tracking and stuff like that. And so if we did not have that, then I probably would do a free plan that was very limited, just as like a teaser taster, but with the amount of stuff that we have, we really can't is the. Is the reality of it. I think it is a good strategy to a degree depending on your industry and what software you have, but it can backfire very easily.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: So I'm interested as to sort of your reasons why you would have a free plan if you didn't have high costs. I think even that kind of goes against traditional wisdom in the space.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: If you have something that costs you very little, that you can have or is essentially free, like you don't have, it's scaling costs and not individual costs, then I think there is a benefit to letting people be able to try and get some value out of the product before they switch over. I would probably not do it personally again, but there are times when you would want to. I think it is a very good initial growth strategy. I don't think that it is good for continued use over time again, depending on your industry. It's a, it's a, it's a tough needle to thread and I really think it's case by case, to be honest. Yeah, that, that being said, we, we are planning on a super low price version of Psychmetrics to get people started. Like very few features. Essentially Google Analytics sucks and no one likes using it right now since they went over to GA4 and it's like what if you just had a better version of GA4 that actually gave you the data you wanted and it was a modicum amount of money, like would that be better? And it's like everyone I've talked to was like yes, yes, just put it out please. And so that's.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: I would pay for that.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't do it for free just because we're not Google scale. But like yeah, for a modicum of money, yes, it'd be great.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Yeah. I was even doing something in Google Analytics the other day. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like where I wanted to see.
I don't even want to say because I don't want to sound like an idiot. You know what I'm just going to say. I'm just going to somewhat of a guess but I was like trying to find like what? Gosh, yeah, I don't even remember. It was something about like referral traffic and going to certain pages, but I don't remember exactly what it was.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not possible. I have to go. They have this manual explorer And I just open up the manual explorer every time. I'm like, there is no report that they give you that is any amount of valuable or easy to use. And it's like everything is just half ba.
It is the worst. It's like when Netscape tried to rewrite itself. Like, it's just absolutely the worst. God, I can't believe.
Yeah, yeah, the. It's funny, the only time I log into Google Analytics anymore is to check if our data is matching what Google says. That's the only thing just to make sure. Like, okay, this is what the traffic we're seeing, this is the pages. Is that correct? Cool. We go check it in Google Analytics, everything matches. Awesome. I'd rather use sigmetrics, so.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's interesting to me because I don't even put that much faith in what Google does. Like I think it's fairly well known. But in case anyone doesn't know, like Google doesn't even agree with itself. So if you look at Search Console and then Google Analytics then they're often different. Yeah, so that's interesting to use it as kind of a baseline. I wouldn't even use it for that. I use it for better than.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: I mean it's better than nothing.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: Like that's not better than Segmetrics apparently.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Obviously.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Obviously.
Yeah, I literally just use it for like one end of month report and then I use it for trends. But as far as like, you know, trends is like up or down.
I think that's somewhat useful. But as far as like actual numbers.
Yeah, if you make something, I'll buy it. How's that?
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll send you the link.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Yeah, send me the link. Really curious. So you guys are bootstrapped solo founder? Co founder.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: We had a co founder when we first started but he. Hi Charlie. He was working with three different startups at the same time and one of them got a million dollars of funding and I was like, dude, like we're still at the like $200 a month range. Go, go do your thing. Like. And so he left I think within the first year and then we took it over fully at the agency. So now Scott, who is my right hand man forever at the agency, he's kind of leading up product and. Yeah, and we've kind of built it from there.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Amazing. And are you more on the technical side or the non technical side?
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Every side. Which is the worst?
[00:28:28] Speaker B: All the sides.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: All the sides. Like so my background is technical but I've been doing marketing for and especially technical Marketing for the past 15 years. So I have a design and development background. I taught myself marketing about 15, 20 years ago. And I will say, people are like, oh, being a unicorn is great because you can do all this stuff. It's the worst when you're a founder because everything, you're like, oh, I could do that. Or you have opinions on everything that goes out. And it's the worst. Like, I'd much rather not understand dev or not understand marketing and just have to rely on people. Like, I think it'd be much easier.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Well, you don't, you don't talk like a developer, which is really the highest compliment that I can give to a developer being in marketing. I think the greatest, the nicest thing that I could possibly say to a developer is not like, oh, you're a great coder. It's, you don't talk like a developer.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, you, you can actually communicate. Yeah, it's great.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: You talk like a human. That's.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: There are a bunch of us, like, not, not to perpetuate a stereotype, but there are a bunch of, of great communicating developers. And I work with a bunch of them, so.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: That's true. That's true. There definitely are. And, and you know, we at Turnkey have a bunch of, like, I've been so impressed with all of our developers. Cause they're all like human literate.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Like they can just talk to 100%.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: But I absolutely talk to developers pretty much every day. Who I'm like, dude, you need touch grass.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Not to get too far into the weeds, but I think there's, I think it's people who work at larger companies where you can be like that, like Turnkey as well, I believe. But we're completely bootstrapped and we have to be, we can't be in a development silo. We have to talk to all the developers, have to talk to customers. They have to understand marketing. And that's one of the things I'm proud of at Segmetrics is we came out of that agency. All of us understand marketing, all of us understand our customer base because that's who we are. That's what we were doing before we did Segmetrics. And it's really valuable to be able to understand that. But at a large company you can just be in your little developer silo and not have to deal with that and you can just talk with other developers all the time and that starts to break down. Non developer, let's call it non developer communication styles.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I don't know it's so I self taught development and I joke that after four years of teaching my self development I was good enough to get a job in marketing. And I did notice at one point, I don't know if it's because I disconnected from humans more but I did notice about three years in I felt like my social skills actually declined a little bit which that might have been somewhat due to like Covid as well. Like I'm seeing less people, I'm talking to less people and I'm talking to more computers. Like why don't you function like a freaking if statement.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: I think that's it is honestly the main thing which is that in development it's very like if this then this. Right. It's very programmatic and very like I'm trying to think of the word but it's set right and humans are not and conversation is definitely not. And it's like if I do this then I want this as the as the result. And that just doesn't happen ever.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you have any tips on like hiring? Finding great developers who are also good communicators?
[00:31:47] Speaker A: I've just been lucky is really what I honestly I have. We've tried and I've been very bad at it. Like I think when we do hiring it's less about skill and more about personality and communication style. And I think that does a lot of it. Like especially when we're hiring developers, we're trying to find someone who is fascinated and interested in something that also has overlap with what we're doing and then have curiosity about that. And that has tended to find people who are much better at being interested in what we do and working with the team and doing new stuff than it is someone who just wants to sit down and push out bug fixes or that type of stuff, which is also an important skill. But again, at a bootstrap stage, you need someone who is really excited about what it is you're doing and excited about learning new things. And I think that translates into communication and into working with a team better.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: If I can kind of echo that. So I've had really good luck just hiring people like almost totally based on personality. Not 100%, maybe like 80 to 90%. Actually I'm a little bit infamous that I like. I'll usually do one video interview with a person and then I'll just hire them.
I'll do like one video interview. Sometimes I'll do like a test task depending on maybe how senior the role is, just so we can see kind of how we think and how we work well together. But as far as, like, total time in interview for someone who is applying to one of my jobs and ends up getting the job, I mean, like, less than an hour. As far as, like scheduling in interview, doing tasks, and then offer. It's even. Even, like, fairly senior roles.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Yeah. It's gotten to the point where, you know, you're talking about tests, especially for developers and stuff like that. It's so easy to game these things now. Like, there's more value in having a talk with someone about personality and seeing that personality and interest and talking through skill sets like that than there is in, like, sending over a test or like a programming challenge or something like that. We used to do programming challenges and they're okay, but again, they're not. They're so easy to just like ChatGPT at this point, like, it doesn't. It's not valuable anymore.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Especially now. I actually knew a programmer buddy who, he would take interviews for people, like, they would pay him to take interviews and they would be on the camera and he'd be like, under the desk or whatever and he'd be typing.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: He'd have like a separate. Separate screen. I think it's like Bluetooth keyboard. And so he could see everything on the computer screen and he'd just like, fill it out for them.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Which is a brilliant job, I guess. Brilliant business. But.
But Keith, this has been great. I won't keep much longer. Do you have any. Any, like, kind of closing advice for us? Anything? I should have asked you that. I didn't.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: No. I think we hit the big ones. If I'm to reiterate, it really is about outliers. It really is about asking good questions about where people come from, who they are, and then trying to find who performs the best and who doesn't, based on your definition of best. And it's really good questions. Like, the better questions you can ask, the better answers you're going to get, and the better you're going to be able to improve your marketing and your business.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: And I'm seriously going to sign some people up for psychmetrics pretty soon after this call because. Yeah, that's really cool. So. Yeah. So if people want to find more out about you, your business, where should they go?
[00:35:32] Speaker A: Yeah. So segmetrics IO, soontobesegmetrics.com, both go to the same place or you can find it.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Yay.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Finally, 10 years later, that's a whole story in of itself.
And then on Twitter and LinkedIn and all those places, just look up segmetrics and we're there.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: Awesome. Keith, thanks so much. This is a great episode. I'm super excited for this so much.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: This has been super fun. Take care.
