Startups For the Rest of Us
Episode 750 | Making Your First Hire, Testing Prices, And More Listener Questions (with Laura Roeder)
Tue, 21 Jan 2025
In episode 750, Rob Walling is joined by Laura Roeder, founder of Paperbell, to answer intermediate listener questions. They discuss making your first hire with limited funds, testing pricing models with existing customer bases, and more. Laura also provides some great advice on content marketing, drawing from her past experience at MeetEdgar. Topics we cover: (3:14) – Building a team before you can afford your first, full time hire (11:11) – Testing pricing with existing customer bases (19:00) – What type of content should you focus on? (25:20) – Growing a pipeline of leads with limited resources (31:00) – Who are your 100 best customers? Links from the Show: SaaS Institute TinySeed TinySeed Tales is Back: S4E1 Lauraroeder.com Laura Roeder (@lauraroeder.bsky.social) | Bluesky Paperbell Episode 473 | Managing Annual Subscriptions, Low-price vs. High, Being a Non-Developer Founder, and More Listener Questions with Laura Roeder Exactly How I Cold Emailed My Way to A Life-Changing Exit (And You Can Too) by Laura Roeder The SaaS Playbook Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell If I Started SaaS in 2024, Here’s My B2B Content Strategy for $1M ARR The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. In this episode, I have Laura Roeder, founder of Paperbell, join me on the show to answer listener questions. We talk about making your first hire, testing prices, and a bunch of other questions related to mid to later stage bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders.
Before we dive in to today's questions, I wanted to let you know about something that my team and I at TinySeed have been working on for at least six months in the background. And it's a premium private coaching community designed for B2B SaaS founders making at least $1 million in ARR or more. It's called the SAS Institute.
And if you want to find out more, head to sasinstitute.com, enter your email address. We'll be trickling out more information in the coming weeks and over the next few months. We are keeping the initial group very small.
So if you're interested in applying to potentially be part of the first cohort to get expert coaching, mentorship, and community for high-level SAS founders, head to sasinstitute.com.
If you've been watching what we've done with TinySeed over the past five or six years and thought to yourself, I could really use some community and mentorship and advice, but I don't necessarily want to raise funding and or give up equity, that's why we're launching the SaaS Institute. And with that, let's dive into listener questions with Laura Roeder.
Laura Roeder, thanks for joining me on Startups for the Rest of Us.
Yes, for the third time, apparently. Fourth time. The fourth time.
Yeah, so back in 2013, episode 143, How to Hire Like a Bootstrapper, with special guest Laura Roeder, and then two episodes in 2019, where I interviewed you about, it must have been Edgar. Yeah. Yeah, it was about Edgar, because it's seller growth, platform, risk, layoffs, and powering through roadblocks. That sounds like the summary of Edgar.
That sounds like Edgar, all the things, all the things.
And then you sold Edgar in 22, I believe, right? A couple years ago.
Yeah.
You have a good blog post about that. We'll link up in the show notes. And then December of 2019, you came on to answer listener questions. So today you are working on Paperbell. Is that paperbell.com? Do you have the .com?
Yes.
Very nice. You want to tell folks what it is, the history of that, how long you've been working on it?
Yeah, so Paperbell is a bootstrap SaaS that's been around for four years. We're in the seven-figure annual reoccurring revenue range, and it's a tool for coaches, like life coaches, to run their business. So it has their website, their scheduling, their payments, client comms, all that stuff.
And how big is your team?
Very small. So we operate on all, like mostly freelancers and part-timers. So we basically have two developers, two customer service people. I have a project manager that works with me in marketing and freelancers.
Very nice. So you have a lot of experience across the board, bootstrapping, hiring, all the things. We have some good questions for you and I to bat around today. First one is from Ryan King. And Ryan says, hey Rob, Thanks for your advice on selling my company at the end of 2022. The sale didn't happen in the end, but I found my feet and I'm working on trying to grow again.
I have an intermediate startup question for you. I'm trying to transition from a one-person company where I do everything to having a team. Your book, I think it means a SaaS playbook, explores the idea of who should be your first hire. But I'm interested in that in-between phase where you have some excess profit, but not enough to make a full-time hire.
My SaaS produces in excess of about $2,000 annually.
month at the moment it's not much but i've been trying to use it to hire freelancers to work on the project expecting it to buy me time to work more on marketing and sales but it's been a very frustrating experience and i'm not sure i can find someone reliable at that price point i'm looking to try something new and i'm interested in hearing how you would utilize a small amount of funds to help grow the company if you were in a similar situation well laura i think both you and i have been in this situation so what what's your advice for ryan
Customer service is just the first thing that instantly comes to mind. For most businesses, customer service either takes up a lot of time or even if it doesn't take up a ton of time, it's a constant distraction, which I don't know Ryan's business.
But the fact that he's not immediately running to customer service makes me wonder if he has one of those businesses that doesn't have a huge support load. So maybe he's thinking... you know, I don't have to do that much customer service. It's no big deal. But the problem with customer service is that it's 24 seven.
And if you are a solo founder, you're usually kind of having it on in the background all the time is kind of how I've seen most people operate. So you can get a customer service person, you know, part time or full time, depending on where in the For 2000, for sure, obviously you can scale up the pay and scale down the time. You can get someone more experienced and have them in less hours.
So that's just kind of like my immediate thing that for most businesses would save them a lot of time. The other one that I would think to look to is just kind of like a general virtual assistant can be a really, really good hire at this stage. Lots of great people for around, you know, 10 to 15 an hour USD, you can find someone there.
really good, who knows what they're doing from various parts of the world. And yeah, maybe they're helping with stuff like customer service. Maybe they're helping with, it's just kind of the admin grunt work stuff. It could be marketing stuff, customer service stuff. It could be techier stuff that's more just kind of grunt work instead of, you know, requiring deep knowledge.
There's usually a lot of that that can be taken off a founder's plate.
Yeah, I like that. The virtual assistant thing, if you want to read more about that, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, I think was a really good book talking about how to think through that. Where do you hire? Are you an Upwork person? Where would you look for someone like this?
Yeah, good question. So I have a virtual assistant type of person I have found before on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. If you look for the more expensive people on those platforms, especially like Fiverr, if you're looking at the most expensive person on Fiverr, that can be a good way to do it. And especially if you have... some kind of like specialty that you're starting with.
Like let's say you do a lot of video editing. You're like, okay, I'm going to look for someone who has that skill listed on those sites and then they can do other VA stuff for me. For customer service, I would probably look more towards like, a lot of it is regional. So if you're looking in the Philippines, onlinejobs.ph, like oldie but a goodie, still kicking.
Back in the day, yep.
Yeah, it's still around. There's a site called JobRack that's really good for Eastern Europe. Obviously, there's tons of those now like services, you know, that will hire for you and do the placement, but you're usually paying a huge fee to them. So if you only have $2,000 a month, you'll probably be better off spending your time to source the person directly.
If I'm doing a full-time, you know, W2 employee hire, we go through Dynamite Jobs remote first recruiting just because finding full-time people is so time-consuming. But if we're hiring part-time, we tend, we being MicroConf, TinySeed, and even, you know, Drip back in the day, we tended to go to Upwork. And just, we had a process, so we filter ruthlessly. And we have a pretty good hit rate.
Depends on the role. But, you know, I've had to hire, we've had to hire a lot of part-timers, freelancers in the past few years. And I think that's the big, probably my advice for Ryan echoes yours. Customer support, customer success. Well, if you have a low-touch funnel where everyone's just self-sign up, I think it's customer support. It's email and live chat usually.
If you have a higher-touch funnel, I think a VA or an EA or even customer success for onboarding, if that's taking a lot of your time. Obviously, you have to hire part-time at $2,000 a month. But I've done this over and over and over. I've hired a lot of part-time people and eventually if they're good, I just move them to full-time.
I hired a book project manager, which I think of that specialization of that role, right? When I was launching the SaaS playbook of like, there's so many specialized things you need to know. And I went on Upwork and I said, project manager, Bonus if you have experience in the publishing industry. And I happened to find someone in South America. She's amazing.
And she totally rocked the launch of SAS Playbook. And then Sherry hired her as her chief of staff. So she now works full time for Sherry. You know what I mean? It's just these things. If you find good people, you keep them around. Like the editor of this podcast, I believe, has been editing it for 10 years.
andy who did email and live chat support for us at drip worked the full he probably worked there he was started as a part-timer doing five ten hours a week he was through the whole exit and was with drip for six seven years then he worked for squadcast a tiny seed company for five or six years and now he's working for another tiny seed company you know it's like they stay in there because he's so good he's so good like anytime i'm like if you look for a job reach out to me because like i want to place you with like a company that i trust right
So I think that's part of it too is like your first freelance hire is always like, you don't have the experience and you don't have any type of network. But once you start finding good freelancers, it's almost like keep them in your orbit because you may need them over your career.
And I found when you're looking on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, my tip would be to pay a bit more. Like, do not look for the lowest hourly cost.
Oh, for sure.
I have a guy I'm working with through Upwork right now that's doing, we use Divi on WordPress, so we kind of needed someone who's familiar with that system. And he's in Pakistan and he charges $15 an hour. So there's people in Pakistan who charge like $4 an hour. And I'm like, I want the $15 guy, you know? Mm-hmm.
I think just doing that, you know, if you have $2,000, it's like, yeah, you have some hours at $15 an hour. So don't feel like you have to just absolutely scrounge into just the absolutely cheapest person you can find. I found it's well worth it to work with people that are still very affordable from a USD perspective, but not that like...
bargain basement right yeah totally the other thing that i look for too when i'm hiring someone like this is usually it's for a focused task or role like we've said customer service but once i get to know them if they're good i'll say hey what else do you do what else do you dabble in and And you'll often find it's like, well, I do web design on the side.
Or I used to be a help desk person, so I know what FTP is and basic computer troubleshooting. And you just kind of find out what else they know, and you can start passing other things off to them that are hopefully within their comfort zone. I don't look for a unicorn of like, I need a customer support slash marketer slash developer. It's like, come on. That doesn't exist except for Derek Reimer.
Yeah. But realistically, if you find someone good, they usually are good at other things too. And if you are a limited team, you know, you don't want to hire someone for each role if you can possibly have someone serve as two. So thanks for that question, Ryan. I hope it was helpful. My next question comes from Mark Kohlbrug. He's the founder of Betalist and Startup.jobs and WIP.co.
And this question comes to us from Twitter, ex-Twitter. I actually asked this question back in June. I said, you know, what are some like more advanced, intermediate and advanced questions? And he responded with, how can I do price discovery for a product where customers know what the others are paying? In my case, it's a community product. but the same applies to certain markets.
And I made a clarification. I said, to clarify, do you mean how to raise lower test pricing when new customers know what your existing customers are paying? And he said, yes, specifically how to test different pricing models once you already have a customer base. Laura Roeder, have you tested pricing?
I have. And I will say it's, you know, people always say, oh, just test your price. And it's definitely not that easy for lots of reasons, right? Like I've definitely been in that position where we have now like 40 different things in Stripe because we followed the advice to test our price and now our tracking's almost stopped and we have a million to edge cases, right?
Like it's never as easy as people make it sound. And he's bringing up a common concern in price testing, which is like, oh, my customers are going to see, you know, that someone else is paying a lower price now. I will say that's usually less of a concern than you think it is. This person mentioned they have like a community that their
Even in that situation, let's say you have like a really active Discord that all your customers are on. They're not spending their time on your pricing page, usually, because they're already customers. But sometimes you get, it can happen, right? Where you get the one person and they're like, hey, everybody, did you know that this company now is like, we paid 50 and it's just 40.
But if you have that type of community, you're usually very tightly involved with it as the founder. And just be transparent. It's like, yeah, we're running a business. This is a test that we're doing. If it rolls out, we'll see if we might change pricing for existing customers as well. don't announce it in advance.
Don't go into your community and be like, hey, everybody, we're going to test out a lower price. But it's very, very rare that you will get any kind of backlash from existing customers. And if it's one-on-one, we'll just offer it. So if we're running some sort of promotion...
And one of our existing customers sees it, we'll either offer them that promotion, you know, just in an email or we'll be like, oh, we can give you this, you know, that was just for new customers, but we'll give you this other discount instead, something like that. You can just handle it on a case by case, one on one basis.
I echo all of that. I have tested, in quotes, because the only company, the only SaaS company I ever have seen that actually split tested pricing was Zapier. And I'm sure someone else has done it, HubSpot maybe. I mean, there's a few, but as a rule, like bootstrappers, you don't test pricing. You take your best guess and you make the switch and then you roll it back if it doesn't work.
And I have had to do that and it's not great, but you don't even mess with existing customers at that point. You just change the pricing page and you say, fingers crossed that this is going to work. And you stare longingly at your numbers for the next seven to 14 days and you're like gritting your teeth like, did I just ruin my whole funnel? Because it's terrifying.
And if it works, you're like, okay, now let's talk about grandfathering versus not. Do we raise on existing? Let's give it a couple months to iron out. Let's look at our churn, you know, that type of thing. And if it doesn't work and you know early on, then yeah, you just, you roll it back. That's the only testing that I've ever done.
So from the time we started Drip until we sold it, I think it was three and a half years ago, And we had three or four different versions of our pricing. Because I remember there was like the V1 billing engine and then the V2, V3, V4. And one of them switched the pricing model. So it switched from like new subscribers per month. We originally, that was our value metric.
And then we switched to just subscribers in your account per month once we became an ESP. And then after that, the next two, I think we're just increasing prices basically. Or like, you know, it was reducing the number of subscribers, keeping the price points the same. So effectively increasing pricing. And I do remember being nervous each time we did it.
I viewed them as a test, but we just did it. And I think pricing, there's so much to gut feel. And like, this is where like hard decisions with incomplete information. I mean, I know that like Patrick Campbell at ProfitWell talks about, if you've ever seen him do a talk on pricing, it's like, and we do this survey and you get these lines that like- I'm very skeptical.
Yeah, I don't, I just, I've never done any, I've never known anyone to do that except for ProfitWell, you know? And they're like pricing consultants. Everyone else I know, it's just kind of, it's gut feel. It's knowing your customer. It's knowing the competitive landscape.
And it's being like, well, am I losing, you know, some of my, if you're doing enterprise sales or even just high touch sales, am I getting 10 to 20% that are complaining about my price? Good. Then I'm probably priced accurately. If no one's complaining about my price, I'm probably underpriced. And if people are saying, oh, you're so cheap or I'm way less than competitors, I'm probably underpriced.
So
Yeah, I think, you know, he was asking about testing different pricing models. And it brings up one of just the hard things about being a bootstrap business is you just you don't have enough volume to test something like pricing model. Like your pricing model usually means a completely different product.
back end, right, testing some, you know, usage versus flat rate plans, there's a huge amount of technical work involved. And for you to be able to like maintain both those versions, and then actually test them against each other, you're just not going to have to, you're not going to have enough volume to do that. And you don't have enough volume to test a lot of things. I
So I think it is really important that you don't approach this like thinking, oh, I have no idea what's going to work. So we'll just test different things and we'll see. You really have to go in with a strong hypothesis of like, this makes sense. This is what the industry is telling me. This is what customers are telling me.
If you have strong evidence that something else makes more sense, sometimes we make the wrong choice, right? Like sometimes we start one way and it becomes apparent like, oh, we really should be a usage based company. then sometimes it makes sense to make that hard switch. But like Rob's saying, it really can't be a test.
It needs to be more a pivot to that direction and then throw it all back if you absolutely have to.
Yeah, and before I've changed pricing, usually it starts to just feel wrong in my gut of like, something's off, what's off? And then I start noodling in a notebook and then I talk to my co-founder and then I've talked to folks in my mastermind. And these days I would go, probably go to Patrick Campbell or he's busy these days, but Marco at pricing.io, pricingio.com.
There's like certain folks that I would go to for some advice. And I do think, it's not like, what should I do? But it's like, hey, I have these two or three different ideas and I have a leaning. What do you think? And then the person would ask me questions of like, well, I don't know your competitive landscape. How are your competitors priced, right?
And that's the kind of stuff like with tiny seed companies that I do all the time. Like the majority of my calls with them are around some type of strategic decision, a pivot or something, and pricing is a big one. And there are rules of thumb. So...
Yeah, so if you're not in TinySeed, just chat with AI.
Chat with AI. Yeah, say, pretend you're Rob Walling. You can do that now and chat GPT. There you go. And it's like, okay. Patrick Campbell, yeah. What's wrong with my pricing? This is my pricing page, tell me what's wrong. Yeah, changing the value metric is a big one. Simplifying, I mean, we do pricing teardowns at the kickoffs for TinySeed. And one of the biggest repeated things we see is,
too much there's too many value you don't need three value metrics usually it's like try let's try why do we have that one oh that's because a competitor nope get rid of it like just make it either unlimited or within reason you know within terms of service let's get down to the one thing that really provides the value so thanks for that question mark hope it was helpful
Our next question is from Daniel Tanner, and he asks, content. What type of content should you be doing and how do you decide if it's working? Laura, a tiny, small question. What type of content should you be doing?
I have an answer. The content you should be doing first is definitely the content that's closest to your content. sale. So you know what they call bottom of the funnel content, like the first thing you want to do with your content is have content for people who are actively looking to buy your thing, right?
When people are typing in, I need a podcast hosting tool, you want content letting people know that you are a podcast hosting tool, what you do all the things. So this sounds kind of
basic but that is actually like I think the best place to start with your content making sure that you're covering because of course you know you said the word content I don't really know if you mean like are these videos are these blog posts like are these LinkedIn updates but whatever it is you have to make sure it's really clear that people know like which problems that your tool.
So I mean, this could be support docs, right? It's like you need stuff on the internet that answers people's questions and tells them what your tool does. How do you know if it's working? Whoa, that's a much... A much harder question. How do you know if it's working?
I think something that's really tricky about looking at content in broad strokes is we kind of like to do things like look at which content converts. This is something that we will look at on my team. We're like, oh, which blog posts lead to a free trial signup or an opt-in signup?
And I think it's a little bit of a BS-y kind of metric because it's like, well, is it really that blog post that caused them to convert? Or is that the blog posts they happen to be reading right before they convert it? So I would actually advise that you not get too deep in the weeds of trying to pinpoint like, oh, this specific piece of content caused this action.
But it might be more if you are talking about like, video, LinkedIn blog, yeah, of course, you're looking at like, are those driving traffic for us, how are those performing, but to look at it in a more sort of broad strokes, holistic type of way.
Yeah. I'll start with the attribution. How do you know if it's working? You do your best. You do the best you can is what it is. And there's different types of attribution, right? There's like first touch. Well, how did you first hear about us? There's last touch. Well, that caused him to convert, which is what you were saying.
And then there's like this blended attribution of we've had six touch points with them. So each of them gets 15% of the conversions. Like you've seen this in Google, you know, Google Analytics.
Oh yeah.
And I never used, I used, I would look at first touch and last touch only are the only things I ever looked at. And you do the best you can. Attribution is not as good as it was five or 10 years ago. And it's probably not going to be as good five or 10 years from now because of privacy and because of, Google wanting to sell more ads, right?
So we don't get keywords provided to us anymore as we did back in the halcyon days of SEO. But realistically, even if attribution is only 70% good, 60% good, accurate, at least it's something. At least you have some data. The other thing I like to look at is having a, you know, how did you hear about us, right? When people get in the app. Is that foolproof? Of course not.
Every time, you know, we do this with tiny seed applications because I like to see what's actually driving applicants. And then I can even look at, Ooh, you know, these were our 30 best applicants based on our ratings. What drove those? Like what drove the best applicants? And it's super helpful for us. But inevitably we get people saying, Oh, your email list.
And it's like, that's not helpful to me. Cause it's like, how did you get on the email list? You know? And it's like, great, but how did you find the website, right? So it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. So that is how I know it's working.
And usually, I mean, I'll tell you, if you truly are doing an SEO and creating a lot of content, whether that's written content or videos or tools, I think of building a tool like Ruben does, the free tools. Usually it is like 80, 20 or even worse. It's like 95, 5 or 5% of your content catches and that drives a lot of traffic and a lot of conversions, at least in my experience.
The other thing to think about is you said like what is content? Because I think of it in two buckets, right? There's on-site, which is like I'm going to create stuff on my website usually to try to draw search engine traffic or to point people to from social media. So I go out, it's hub and spoke. The hub is my website. I want people to get there.
I want them to convert to the email list or convert to a trial. And the spokes are Twitter, Instagram, maybe even YouTube videos, a podcast, and whatever social media. So all of that is content. And that's why this is a complicated question is on site, you totally answered that of look at the five stages of awareness. You know, you can just Google that. I also did a, there's a talk on YouTube.
It's something like this is the best content marketing strategy I've ever seen. It's on the Microcom channel. It's a talk I gave. And I talk about creating content from unaware to problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. And you started this answer by saying, start with product aware and most aware, which is exactly what I say in that talk, and then work your way up.
So on-site, I think that's correct. Off-site, should I go on Pinterest? Like, should MicroConf and TinySeed be marketing on TikTok? No, because our people aren't there.
But our people are on Pinterest. We drive traffic from Pinterest. Exactly.
So that's then the question. Should you be creating Pinterest? Well, of course, because you know where your customers are. So that's the question I would throw back to Daniel is figure out where your customers are. Are they on Twitter? Are they on Instagram? Are they on YouTube? That's how I think about it.
And I would say, like, keep it obvious. I think people often overthink this and over engineer this. Like our customers are on Instagram is the main place because Instagram has a massive user base, you know? Don't try to get cute and clever with these little niche... I mean, sometimes there's a niche community that's super relevant to you, right?
If you're only for Ruby on Rails developers, yes, be in those forums and lists and whatever. But don't market on Blue Sky. It just launched. You know, like hang out there for fun if you want to. Like market on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Reddit if that's where people are. YouTube, lots of people on YouTube. Like just don't overthink it.
Go for the most obvious ones where your customers obviously are.
The biggest ones are usually the ones where there are the most people by definition. So I was skeptical. Two or three years ago, we were talking, what's the next thing we're going to attack for microconf audience building, right? Because we have the podcast, it grows really slow as podcasts do. And I was like, YouTube, I think it's going to be a bunch of 20-year-olds.
You know, I see my 18-year-old just sipping through Minecraft videos. And I was pretty skeptical. But then we did see other channels. Dan Martell had a channel and a few others that were talking about SaaS and had some reach. And so we were convinced of that. We were deciding between YouTube and TikTok at the time. And I went on TikTok and I was like, no, no, no.
I don't know that TikTok will ever, ever be for MicroConf TinySeed. But YouTube, you know, turned out to be really good. So thanks for that question, Daniel. I hope it was helpful. Next question is from Noel Gomez. He is a Tiny C founder. He asked on Twitter, given limited time and resources, hey, that's bootstrapping. How do you prioritize where to focus and invest to grow your pipeline?
So specifically to generate new leads. How do you do it, Laura?
Yeah, this one is interesting because he uses the word pipeline. So this makes me think it's a sales situation, right?
Enterprise sales, yeah. He has a really big, big ticket.
Yeah. So, I mean, the obvious one is just LinkedIn. I mean, that's where the vast majority of people are doing it. I know LinkedIn newsletters are the big thing right now that are apparently getting a lot of eyeballs and a lot of awareness. So, you know, we talked about being on the biggest platforms, right? Like... LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, depending on where your people are.
And then I think if you're kind of breaking down those platforms, you want to do what the platform wants you to do. And so usually they will have these new things that they'll give a lot of visibility to, like newsletters are a new product from LinkedIn. So they are giving a lot of visibility to newsletters.
The reason so many people are succeeding on LinkedIn right now in general is because LinkedIn is trying to get more like active users, you know, hanging out on LinkedIn. So they're actually showing people what you post in the feed. Like 15 years ago, you could post things on a Facebook page and that would show in people's feed because they were promoting that. But that time is long gone.
It's kind of a tricky balance. It's like you want to be on kind of like the mainstream trends. You don't want to be on something before no one else is there yet. But if it's a big platform, it is good to be on whatever that platform is pushing, which is why like on Instagram and TikTok, people are often jumping around between stories and reels and like whatever the latest thing is.
But it actually kind of does make sense to be on whatever the latest thing is because you want to be buddies with Instagram. Don't go against Instagram. Do whatever Instagram wants you to do.
Yeah. And I, I think the thing, the overarching thing that I think about is as a bootstrapper with limited time and resources, I would make a list of all of the marketing approaches that I wanted to try. And then I would pick the one I thought was going to work and I would work on it.
and focus because here's the thing i think if you try to do content seo linkedin twitter instagram pinterest try to do all these things you're just not good at any of them and you don't learn how to do them well you're just throwing stuff into the ether even with like with microconf tiny seed where we have budget and we have a team we pick one new thing to attack.
And we did YouTube for two and a half years and then, you know, until it plateaued around 90,000. And then we are looking at LinkedIn next and we're going all in. Like we hired a LinkedIn consultant. We are spending thousands of dollars a month, many thousands to edit video and to create carousels and to do this stuff and to do the play.
There is a LinkedIn playbook and kind of all the LinkedIn consultants say the same thing. This is what's working right now. right? So that's what we are going to do in the new year. For us, audience building is a thing because that's what microcommentaries thrive on, right? It's built around the audience. If you're doing enterprise sales, I don't think you should build an audience at all, right?
It should be all about like It's selling. And so I think of the big, I call them the big five marketing approaches, which are the ones that B2B SaaS companies, especially bootstrappers use the most, which is content SEO, cold outreach, in-person events, number six actually, pay-per-click and integrations and partnerships, and then in-person events is in there as well.
All of those depend on your annual contract value, are you high touch or low touch, right? So with Paperbell, you would never do, I shouldn't say never do in-person events, but it would be a stretch. Your ACV is too low. It would have to be a really big event with a lot of people for you to be like, I'm going to make this five grand back in signups, right?
Versus Noel, since he's a tiny company, I know that they could literally get one customer from an in-person event and it would totally pay back whatever sponsorship they paid. So that's how I do it, is I take a guess. And usually I want to do one that's slow and one that's fast, meaning content and SEO is usually slow. It's going to take months and months and months to pay off.
And so what's the fast thing I can do? What's the thing I can do to get a new customer tomorrow, right? It's like cold outreach, either AdWords or Facebook are the two big ones, or Captera, Captera G2, right? So it's like, can I run some ads and spend some money with a high ACV and also be doing content SEO?
Or am I gifted on the microphone and there's a bunch of podcasts and YouTube channels in my space? Do I want to go on a podcast tour or a YouTube tour and try to get on all those things? Maybe in your space there is and maybe it isn't. If it's enterprise sales, it might not be. But that's always the question is like, how do people market and sell in your space? How can you do it well?
Where are your customers and how do you find them? Is really the fundamental way I think about it.
The other thing that comes to mind is the book Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. I think it's called the Dream 500.
Dream 100. I've memorized that whole chapter.
And he's just like, what would be your best 100 customers? Write them down and call them. And it's like... Oh, yeah, that's that is the most and it's like you're saying it's very I do see a lot of founders that should be doing one on one sales trying to do more like broader marketing stuff because it's more comfortable for a lot of people.
Like they would rather be a guest on a podcast and they would like go walk the floor of a sales convention and talk to a bunch of people. But like. the podcast is not going to get them customers and the convention is so the beautiful thing about the dream 100 is it just like cuts straight to the point it's like who are your best customers have you called those people
And what I like about that book, if you're listening to this and haven't read The Ultimate Sales Machine, that chapter specifically, talking about the Dream 100, it's like make the list. And of course, this is for selling, I think it's like selling stuff that's like hundreds of thousands or millions a year. Like it's really high ticket sales. So maybe for you, it is Dream 500.
But it's make the list. And then you call them and then you follow up, send them something in the mail. And then you, these days, then you'd ping them on LinkedIn and then you'd send them an email and then you'd send them a physical thing. Do you remember this? Lumpy mail. Lumpy mail with a physical object in an envelope because those don't get thrown away.
They open it up and they're like, oh, it's a tape measure that says, look how DataCoves helps you measure your result, you know, or whatever, right? It's like a goofy, cheesy thing. DataCoves is Noelle's... Startup. And so does this take time, attention, money, focus? It does.
But if you're selling big ticket items, this is how when you do run into that person at a conference, they're like, I've heard of you guys. How have I heard of you? And it's like, I've just been around, right? Retargeting is the other thing actually I want to throw in. If you are not doing retargeting, it is the cheapest advertising, right? And you can retarget. You can do it on Facebook.
You can do it on the Google network. And you can do it on YouTube. And a friend of mine had the YouTube tracking pixel, which I guess is just the Google tracking pixel, and had this 30-second ad spot that was highly produced. And their customers or their prospects that they would talk to are like, you guys are everywhere. You must be huge because you're advertising everywhere. all over YouTube.
I see you all the time. And he was like, oh, dude, we're retargeting you. And so each of these takes time and money. Are you doing retargeting with Paperbell?
Well, you know what? I recently learned, this is kind of a new thing, is that on meta, if people listening haven't used meta ads lately, you don't choose any targets anymore. You just do the way that all the biggest spenders on meta do it now is just to use Advantage, what they call Advantage Plus, which is just like meta do your thing.
And what I recently learned is they also do retargeting automatically. So you actually, I mean, you still can if you want to, but you no longer need to set up retargeting campaigns because obviously you have your website pixeled and obviously those are smart people to show your ads to. So Meta just does it for you now. So we do. Yeah.
That's interesting. Man, how far this all has come. I remember spending so much time trying to figure out retargeting on Google and then is it working on Facebook? I feel like this question is like, how do you grow your pipeline? We could do an entire course on it. We could do an entire book on it. And a lot of the answer is, well, it depends on are you high touch or low touch?
Where do your customers reside? I mean, I think these are the exercises that I would be going through. I would also, I like spying on competitors. Like where are competitors running ads? What ads are they running? Go into Ahrefs and say, what are they targeting with SEO? Can I do that better? Are they on Capterra? Are they doing integrations and partnerships? Who have they integrated with?
Who's promoted them? You know, each of these marketing approaches, I list 20 of them in the SaaS playbook. And you can go down and one by one, look, are competitors at events? Are they sponsoring events? You know, it's like asking that question. Now, I'm not saying just because you're doing it, it's working, but at least it should be on your radar that it's a possibility in your space.
So thank you for that question, Noel. I hope that was helpful. Laura Roeder, thanks for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you, lauraroeder.com and, of course, lauraroeder.bsky.social on the socials.
I'm making Blue Sky happen. I want everybody to join me. Come join me, indie SaaS people. We are hanging out on Blue Sky now.
You're a fan, yeah. I don't know if you listened to the episode of this podcast that went live today, just a few hours ago, was Hot Take Tuesday. And it was Tracy, Aynar, and really it was the two of them debating whether Blue Sky has legs. And so Aynar's like, nope, not doing another social media. And Tracy's in your boat of like, Blue Sky all the way. I'm making it happen. Yeah.
Is this every debate? Tracy's positive, Einar's grumpy. Every debate.
That's pretty much every conversation. Yep. So thanks again for joining me, Laura. It was great.
Thank you.
Thanks again to Laura for joining me on the show. I hope you enjoyed as she and I dug into some really good listener questions today. Thank you for coming back and listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off.