Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Josh Ledgard.
Josh is the co founder of Kickoff Labs, a lead generation platform which provides easy to set up landing pages combined with lead capture forms and email marketing to help grow your customers.
Josh and his co founder Scott launched Kickoff Labs in 2011 and since then have helped their customers generate over 3 million leads.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh (00:56.630)
Thanks Omer, Great to be here.
Omer (00:59.750)
So I've told our audience just a little bit about you, Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and then give us an overview of your product and business.
Josh (01:08.390)
Yeah, I'm happy to do so.
Me personally, I live fairly close to you in a small town outside of Seattle called Sammamish, Washington.
I've got a wife and a two year old and a four year old and I started this business with Scott while I had a six month old.
So when our four month old was, or our four year old rather was only four to six months old and that might seem an odd time to most people to go from a steady, well, I mean on paper a great job.
I was running a product team for a company based in Dallas that had about 30 people on my product team and had a lot of say and a lot of influence on the product and really enjoyed working on it.
But I did not enjoy the 60 hour a week lifestyle that role demanded.
And I realized that to kind of get anywhere I had to have a bigger equity share and I realized it wasn't going to happen at that company.
So.
Well, how do you get a bigger equity share?
And I thought, you know what, you own the business and then you control exactly what, excuse me, what sort of equity share you get.
And I've made a lot of choices that one and since then based on, you know, what gets, what helps me not just professionally but personally find, you know, more happiness, more time with my family and the ability to enjoy life rather than working 60 hours a week.
Omer (02:47.950)
Now most people don't start a business so they can create more of a balance in their life.
And so I'm going to, I think that's going to be an area that I'd love to talk a little bit more about and find out how you're doing that because you clearly you are doing that and you're having success with that.
So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a while.
Now, before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite success quotes?
Josh (03:18.670)
I'm still going to go with Yoda.
Do or do not.
There is no try.
And I picked that whenever somebody asked me for a quote, especially because I see so many of our customers and other people in the startup space with today's sort of minimum viable product mentality that don't really focus on the viable part.
They put a lot in the try minimal part, and they're not really doing it.
They're not really going for the product and they miss the part of MVP that's viable, that's core.
And so I say, you really have to do it.
You can't just try.
Like, if you try and put up a landing page and say, I'm going to see if it gets any hits, those people are just destined to fail.
But if you say, I'm going to put up these four landing pages, I'm going to market each one of them in a separate way and I'm really going to put effort behind them and I'm going to see which one works and then I'm going to really go after that business.
They're doing it and they're still doing it.
Mvp, they're doing it as small as possible.
Batch they can, but they're actually putting effort behind it.
And that's why I like the quote of.
I feel like a lot of times today people have great ideas and, and they just try these great ideas.
They don't actually, they don't actually do it and they give up on them potentially too early or without enough effort.
Omer (04:41.000)
So I love that quote for two reasons.
One, I think for the reasons that you just explained.
And then secondly, I actually use that quote with my kids every time they tell me I'll try and do something.
So it's a very universal quote.
Okay, let's start first by giving our listeners a better understanding of Kickoff Labs.
Tell me a little bit more about who your target customers are.
Josh (05:06.370)
Yeah, so today when I look at our product, about 50% of our business comes from people who are setting up new businesses.
And that was the original core of our product, was the kickoff part of it.
So people that are launching a new startup, people that are launching a new product, people even at existing companies, like one of our early success stories was KLM Airlines was launching a new app that's a product Launch within a larger company.
So about 50% of our business is either new or existing companies doing a product launch of some kind that they want to have a landing page or an opt in form for.
The other 50% is I would say primarily existing business people that work in marketing that are doing what I would say is a growth campaign, a campaign designed to expand their audience.
So they might have 10,000 people on an email list and they want to get that email list up to 20,000 people.
And they'll set up landing pages with either incentives, be it an ebook, a PDF for something that they're downloading, or a contest or say, hey, sign up and you'll be entered to win.
Oh, by the way, if you get five of your friends to sign up or the person who gets the most of the referrals to sign up, they also get something.
And that speaks to those two customer segments, the product launch, the new and existing.
And the existing trying to growth speaks to one of the unique value propositions we have, which is rather than simply focusing on a landing page builder, our goal is to make things as optimally viral as possible.
So we offer a unique referral system, meaning that if you sign up and you download my company's PDF and we give you a share link to say, hey Omer, go ahead and share this with your friends.
And if you share to 10 people, we're going to give you, in some cases like an e commerce site, they'll give you $25 to spend if you can get 10 people signed up at the E commerce site.
And we enable that tracking, we enable that reward for those customers.
And so that's kind of more of our niche in the lead generation is focusing on on scenarios where you really want to get customers bringing in other customers and not that everybody needs a viral coefficient of greater than one where you're seeing that hockey stick style growth.
But if you just think about it, that's not what you need to be successful.
You might just need to make your $100 in marketing act like it's $135 in marketing.
And so that's generally what we see is through these forms.
Whether or not you even add incentive on sharing, just even having a share option on a thank you page will get you 30 to 40% more leads than you were previously getting.
Omer (07:56.980)
Can you give me an example of a particular success that a customer had using Kickoff Labs?
Josh (08:05.780)
One particular example of customer success?
There's so many fun ones.
One of my favorite companies that uses our product is called Chubby's they make these shorts that are, I'd say, I don't know what the best way to describe them.
They're extremely short shorts for men that you would wear, I guess, on a golf course.
That's where some of their pictures come from.
And they're wild colors, they're plaid.
They really get their niche of their customer.
They sent me a free pair and my wife laughed at me.
She said, I don't think you can wear those.
You're too old for these shorts.
And she's probably right.
But they do.
About every other month they do, they come up with a different promotion.
And one of the recent ones was called Thyber Monday.
And the contest, Thyber Monday was they wanted to get people to like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, give them their email address was step one.
That would enter them to win a prize.
And then they had a range of prizes, basically from a thank you email if you got one friend, referred to $10 off if you got five friends.
And then they escalated for the referrals.
But the key point is that they made it achievable for everyone to achieve some level of referral.
Because if you set a prize reward too high in a contest, you scare off a lot of people who say, I'm never going to get 100 of my friends to sign up.
But if you say, I'll give you something, if you just get one friend to sign up, and then I'll give you something more if you get four friends to sign up and then I'll give you something.
And you have prizes for kind of every level of influencer along the way.
And every time they run one of these contests, they seed it with a couple thousand people that they send to the page.
And they're always tripling that couple thousand by the end of the contest in terms of growing their mailing list.
And so it's been a really, really winning strategy for them to grow their audience.
And they know as an e commerce site selling these shorts online, the larger their mailing list, the more likely they are to have people coming and shopping and buying on a regular basis.
Omer (10:29.320)
I just checked out the website while you were explaining that.
And while the guys with those pictures look pretty good, there's no way I could get away with wearing something like that.
So, Josh, let's talk about the early days of Kickoff Labs and explore how you got started.
First of all, tell me, where did the idea for Kickoff Labs come from?
Josh (10:50.800)
Yeah, so Scott and I had both had been.
Both been working for the same company, and I Think within the span of about a month.
I told Scott first, hey, I'm going to leave.
I'm going to do my own thing.
I don't know what it is.
He said, oh, you beat me by a month.
I was going to tell you that next month.
And he.
And we'd worked pretty closely at this company and so we just sort of started talking like, hey, chances two is better than one.
Let's see if we can come up with some ideas and work together.
And we put together, we must have had like one sentence ideas for like 50 different things we could do.
We kind of took about 25 of those and wrote like a paragraph out to narrow that down.
We went from that 25 down to about five or six different ideas where we had like two or three pages written out about what that would mean and what kind of product that would be.
And then at that point it really felt like, boy, to go any more detail, we're just absolutely guessing, like, I'm just writing in, oh, the potential market is this big based on Google queries, based on customers, based on these businesses.
And then because it's important for us both having families, it had to be something that could be profitable.
We couldn't go after kind of a consumer space.
We wanted to go more business to business and try and do something that we can attach a price to.
But it turns out once you get to a certain stage of writing out your business plan, you're just guessing the numbers, the conversion percentages.
And what really meant something to us was, well, what's really important is could we successfully market any one of these ideas and get people to sign up for it?
And back in 2010, 2011, that was a much more novel idea.
And I think Scott said what we really need is some sort of service just to generate pages for each of these five ideas.
And then at least at the end of the day, we'll have a service that generates these five pages.
This is how developers think, because we both came from more technical background.
And then we added that to our list of ideas.
And it turns out that was the one that we were able to get the most weight in terms of people actually willing to give us their email address and information on.
And the one that we were able to market most successfully as we were starting to think through how we would actually build a product.
Like I said, our core initial audience was definitely our own use case of quickly put a page up and throw some ads at it, or throw it on Facebook and see if you could get interest and email Capture features came from.
Then we started just growing from our.
From.
I mean, I'm simplifying the growth story.
I think you have a question maybe later about that.
But then we really just started advancing on the idea based on the direction, what kind of data we were getting from our customers.
So from there they said, oh, well, could you send an autoresponder email?
Sure.
And then from there they said, well, it'd be really great to be able to reward people that get three people with early access.
Great, done.
We'll do the virality feature.
And we just focused on what our customers were telling us.
And we just kept doing that over and over again through iterations of the product as we were growing.
Omer (14:09.140)
So you had these ideas or a short list of ideas, and it's.
So from what I understand, you created landing pages for each of these ideas, drove traffic to them and captured email addresses, and basically measured which idea was getting the most interest from potential customers.
Josh (14:30.820)
Yep.
And then, like I said, we actually included in the list of ideas the idea of a tool that generated these pages.
Omer (14:39.780)
So you were basically doing manually what Kickoff Labs does for your customers today?
Josh (14:45.300)
Yes.
Omer (14:46.180)
Got it.
Okay, tell me about one or two of the other ideas you tested.
Josh (14:53.620)
One that we actually developed to a certain level where we actually had a private beta and we were getting some customers on board was called Sift Social.
And the idea was that there's all of this noise going through if you're a larger company on Twitter about.
In your space, either, not just about your product, but about your space, your industry.
So for us, it might be people talking about marketing and people talking about landing pages.
And there's a lot of employees at your company that are paying attention to the social media, perhaps in their own way.
They've each got their own sort of hootsuite account, They've each got their own Twitter account, and they read things, but they're not doing things together.
And so the idea for Sift Social was, could we make it so that if you were a larger company, your employees were collaboratively sifting through all of these shared searches on Twitter or Facebook or other places where you could do shared searches and bubbling up what was most important to your business?
It would start with people you look at, sort of.
If you could imagine a company like Microsoft and they've got 1,000 people, might work in a group, and they all are sharing or retweeting or favoriting within CIF Social the same articles, then you might want to bubble those up and share them on a larger basis.
Either reshare them publicly, reshare them internally, add them to a queue that would say, hey, we should write a blog post about this because it's related to our product.
And so the idea was sort of like, if you imagine, like not a social CRM, but an idea manager, where you would just take these tweets and these links and you would bubble them up internally for one to kind of rank them and help people internally see what the interesting buzz in their industry was, but then also take action on them to put them into a queue to, say, write a blog post, retweet, buffer this.
This thing.
I really liked the idea.
And we had a couple groups at Microsoft beta testing it.
We had good feedback on it, but as we were developing it, it just felt more and more that Twitter is just going to pull the rug out from under anyone that does this idea.
It turns out we were right because it was about the same time Kickoff Labs actually started taking off more as a product.
And then about that time where Kickoff Labs was taking off, two things happened.
One had a mentor.
Tell me it looks like you've got one product over here at a certain revenue level with barely any effort.
Why are you building this other thing at the same time?
Why aren't you just focusing on the one?
And then Twitter kind of killed a lot of their API access for clients is when they started consolidating who could do what and access the API and basically saying services like what we were doing, they didn't want to have them done by third parties.
And they bought up some of the people who were close to doing this.
I forget the name.
There are a couple companies Twitter bought that were doing something similar.
Not quite a collaborative filtering, but more automated filtering.
And it just seemed like Twitter was going to and they would have made what we were doing cost prohibitive.
Omer (18:23.850)
So when you tested these ideas, you didn't just pick the one.
You kept going with a couple of them.
Josh (18:30.570)
We kept going with that one.
We didn't go any further with the other ideas.
Omer (18:38.410)
How clear cut was the feedback that you got that this landing page solution was the product that you guys should be building?
Josh (18:47.450)
How clear cut was it?
Yeah, from feedback, you know, at the time, it felt very clear cut, but really it shouldn't have been.
It just was the one where.
It was the one where, I mean, we got twice as many emails captured as any of the other ideas we published for the same amount of effort marketing.
It was the one where people would say, well, I'd pay for that more than anyone Else it was the one where we, we knew more people in the entrepreneurial space than we knew in other spaces.
And so it was kind of easy.
That necessarily shouldn't inform somebody to say, like, oh, you should always do the easiest thing.
But in our case, the science just kept pointing to it saying along the way.
And like I said, even when we built out betas of this product, Kickoff Labs and then the SIF social product, it just kept growing more organically than the social product was going to require.
More of a sales effort, more of an in person going to these companies, getting them set up, teaching them how to use it successfully, effort.
Then I think we had the resources to invest in at the time.
Omer (19:56.890)
Did you guys build the product yourself or hire a developer?
Josh (20:00.810)
We built it ourselves.
Omer (20:03.690)
And how did you go about getting your first few customers?
Josh (20:09.370)
Obviously, since we had built a landing page, we had a launch list.
And we'd envisioned that the day we launched, we're going to send out this email and we're going to get a huge percentage of these people who are on our list.
They're going to come and they're going to click buy because they gave us their email address.
They wanted the product.
Right?
And it turns out that was just Wednesday.
It wasn't a day that saw a ton of money being made.
And even the first month, I think we had maybe two or three paying customers to the point where before expenses, we'd made maybe 10 or $20 because we were pretty cheap at the time we first launched because we did go with the minimal concept.
And so I remember telling Scott, I was like, so what are you gonna do with your $5?
And he said, he said, hookers and Coke.
And I said, you are gonna have to seriously lower your standards for what you're gonna spend your $5 on.
And so that didn't work as well as we thought.
We did keep emailing them.
More of those people converted.
What worked best was realizing that we didn't.
Despite our best efforts to build our own audience, we didn't really have an audience yet of people that could buy the product.
And so we had to reach out one at a time to get people to come purchase.
So literally, I would go on Twitter for, for 20 minutes a day and look for people who are posting about landing pages, who are posting about competitors.
And I would find something personal about them.
So it wasn't just spam.
And I'd send like 20 or 30 of these tweets a day, like, hey, it looks like you're having a problem with X company.
You know, you're a Vanderbilt grad.
I went to Vanderbilt.
Why don't you try my product and we'll keep it in the black and gold.
And I just.
I had to come up with these personal engagements so that I wasn't going out and just doing this tweet bot spam like you said.
Landing pages, come try our product.
I wanted to actually.
I had actually to get people to respond and really drive people.
I had to personalize it to what they were saying on Twitter, to their bio.
That was a big strategy early on.
There was a competitor that got bought up at the time called launchrock, and they were at the time restricting who could use their product to people who had invited three.
And I would just email people and say, real entrepreneurs don't wait in line.
They actually just launch their product.
And you can do that today with our solution.
That got us a lot of customers.
But again, it was reaching out very personally to these people who had frustrations with an alternative solution or frustrations about marketing in the space, and then also finding places where people were discussing these problems online.
I mean, literally, there's a board on Quora, which is a Q and A site on the Internet.
I recommend anybody check it out.
Especially if you're listening to this podcast and you're not on core, you probably should be.
That people, literally, there's a subtopic where people talk about landing pages, and so realized that going in there and answering people's questions about landing pages and putting in the signature that, hey, I'm the founder of this company, we do landing pages would drive a ton of traffic back to us because that's where the audience was.
And so we learned that we had to engage where the audience was.
We had to engage them personally, whether it was personally addressing their concern, whether it was personally speaking to them through their biography or personally answering their question.
And I think that's where.
I think that's where a lot of people talk about.
When you talk about the hustle, that's how I think it's done, is you have to be really personal.
You have to spend the time and the effort to engage people, to draw them back into your product, to get them to give you a chance.
Because you, as newer business or even a growing business, people don't know who you are.
And I'd still say that's true about our business at this point, most of our potential customers have not yet heard about us.
Omer (24:17.790)
So after you and Scott celebrated and split the $10, how did the subsequent months look for you were you starting to get more paying customers coming in and was the revenue revenue going up?
Josh (24:35.760)
Yeah, I mean, it's never this steady line where you say every month you say, wow, that was way better than last month and next month will be even better.
It would come in burst.
So we're a recurring revenue product for subscription based.
And so you'd have a couple months where things would just like you'd see crazy growth because somebody would do a blog post about you or we had some articles written about us, and then the next month it'd just be flat.
And then you'd have two or three months where there'd be no growth at all, where you sort of question like, why am I doing this?
It's not growing.
And then you do something that works and you see another two or three months of steady growth.
And so we launched in July of that year and then by the end of the year we'd made.
We'd only made about $8,000 by the end of the year.
But the trend was a positive one overall.
When you looked at the six months, that convinced us to keep going for the next six months.
And we kept seeing that growth.
When you say, what did it look like?
For me, a lot of it really was realizing that the mistake that I see a lot of our own customers making, which was that people subscribe and we did it too as developers to the if you build it, they will come philosophy.
And the reality was you have to tell them about it.
And then even once you tell them about it, you have to tell them again.
A lot of my days were spent while we were growing a doing that.
Reaching out personally on Twitter, on Quora, on other Internet boards and niche communities where people are talking about landing pages and launch, product launches and growth.
So reaching out personally, then once we had somebody who signed up for a free account because we've got a free account level, and I'd see what they did also.
Then reaching out personally again and say, hey, it looks like your page is targeted towards this market.
If I could offer a suggestion on the copy you've put on your page and I would just give them personal advice and say, hey, here's my two cents.
That would really help your page.
And people appreciated that and that drove a lot of our early upgrades is just being really personal.
We did personally email and give personalized advice to at least the first thousand people who signed up with our product.
And it's a practice we still do today.
We optimize how we spend our time and to who we give that advice to.
So we look for people who are more serious and then we've got a way to rank our leads and then say, okay, who should we really spend time and personalize our advice to if we're going to try and convince a free customer to upgrade?
And so a lot of our time was spent literally just doing that.
And then when we'd see two or three people request a feature, then we'd just go build the feature.
We'd say, that's enough.
If we can get two or three people who are paying us that asked for this feature, it's probably worth building.
Omer (27:36.080)
Looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Josh (27:43.270)
The biggest mistakes is again, another one I see a lot of our customers make.
And you can't tell people it's a mistake because people don't believe you until they live it is trying to over optimize things with minimal traffic.
And so a couple of examples I can give is saying, like, oh, I'm going to run these A B tests on our homepage when you've already got maybe 10 to 20% people converting on your homepage.
Your problem is you only had 200 people coming in a week to your homepage.
I think we spend a lot of time looking at different parts of the product and trying to optimize things where the problem wasn't the optimization, the problem was just the volume going through it.
I talked to a lot of customers who say, I talked to a lot of customers.
One customer who quit our product pretty recently because I try and reach out to people who close their accounts and see what didn't work for them.
And I hear this sad thing over and over again.
So why did you stop?
And I said, well, I just didn't see the traction.
I optimized the landing page and I ab tested it.
And then I go and I look at their account numbers and I see like, they only ever had, you know, 75 or 100 unique views and they got 20 signups and that's, you know, a 30% conversion rate.
I said, wow, so you had a 30% conversion rate on what you were doing.
I said, you did not have a conversion problem and you focused all this time on conversions.
You had a traffic problem, right?
You didn't drive people to look at what you were doing.
Because if you're getting a 30% conversion rate, that's not your problem.
Your problem is, are you exploiting that enough, you know, by driving enough people at it?
And so I see people and it's human nature.
People tend to optimize for things that they think they can control more directly.
So tweaking something on your homepage, tweaking your marketing copy, those are things you have direct control.
You could just sit at your computer and do it all day long.
But things you have less control over are, how do I get the 99.99% of potential customers out there who've never heard of us to hear about us?
That's a much harder problem that your brain wants to retreat from.
Omer (30:09.180)
Okay, Josh, so you've turned this idea into a product.
You've got people using it.
You end the year with $8,000 of revenue.
Tell me what the growth looked like in the subsequent years.
Josh (30:25.900)
It was steady growth since then.
So we're at a point now where we've got, you know, we're still not a large company.
We've got somebody who works pretty much full time on sort of support and customer success.
We've got somebody who's working on now on sort of marketing and our funnels, and then we've got a few contractors who work with us on design and development.
And then we're able to actually pay ourselves a reasonable wage at this point, Scott and I.
And so it's been steady growth.
I'd always like it to be better, but it's enabled us.
It enabled me, for example, in the last year, I took five weeks and took my family to Ireland on a trip and I worked maybe two or three hours a day while I was there and things didn't fall off a cliff.
And it was eye opening to me to be able to be at a state where I could do that.
Omer (31:25.460)
Yeah, you know, I've been, I've been seeing a number of stories and talking to a few people who have built successful businesses and still managed to not work, you know, insane hours and have balance and either have family time or more social time.
And I think that that is a really interesting trend where because everybody.
Oh, I think most people have this stereotype expectation that if I'm going to go and build this business, I'm going to have to work 80, 100 hours a week.
I'm going to have to work all weekends.
And there are a lot of role models out there who will tell you that that's what they do.
So you assume that that's the way I have to go to.
So I think it's always really inspiring when I hear stories such as yours that, you know, you guys can build a successful business without, you know, going, you Know you, I'm sure you work hard, but it's not, you know, going crazy every day.
Josh (32:27.150)
Yeah.
And there, and there's, you know, and there's certain, there's certainly times where, you know, the work there, there is a ton of work and things have to be set up for.
You have to set yourself up and you have to realize that's one of your goals.
Because I do think that if Scott and I, you know, if we said, okay, we're not going to prioritize family time, he's not going to play the soccer mom and take his daughter to soccer every day and do that kind of stuff.
There's things that we could have potentially moved faster on and I think we'd accelerate things a little bit quicker.
But you just have to choose what you're going to optimize for in your life and in the business.
And then there's other parts to it, which is, sorry, things that we've done wouldn't have worked quite well.
So making that $7,000 in the first six months, if both of us hadn't already set aside savings for our family from working really hard at our previous job, then we wouldn't have had that Runway.
Right.
And so I look at things, I did say, wow, I can't believe I worked that hard.
But on the other hand, having worked to that level and pushing myself for the last few years before that enabled me to have a savings to where I could have the Runway.
Until Kickoff Labs was at the point, it took about a year until Kickoff Labs were at the point where we could actually, instead of just having to reinvest it all back in the business, we could invest it in ourselves and actually pay ourselves a reasonable wage for what we were doing.
That took about a year after we launched to get to that stage.
But to get that Runway, some people, it requires that they're going to have to work and do their startup at the same time.
And then, yeah, that's a 60 hour week.
If you've got a 40 hour week job and you're trying to build something on the side, 60, 80 hour week, or you decide you're going to build up a savings first and then it takes two or three years to potentially build up the savings because you knew that was your goal.
And I mean, I'd made the choice for myself about two years in advance, knowing that we wanted to build a savings for our family so that I could have the Runway to build this.
Omer (34:40.860)
Now, as you know, often with growth come growing pains and you guys clearly got traction the first year gave you the Runway to start building this business.
But as you grow, I think you start to face a different set of challenges.
So tell me about one big challenge that you faced as your business started to grow.
Josh (35:08.300)
One big challenge.
I mean, there's a couple and they seem to, every now and then they repeat.
I mean, I'd say right now a challenge that we're looking at is looking at our retention for our users.
And say as a SaaS business, you hit these plateaus in revenue.
And I remember I talked about earlier things kind of, they go up and then they plateau and they go up and they plateau.
And for a subscription based service, a big reasoning for that plateau is, are people quitting?
How many people leave within a month?
That is actually a huge limiting factor for your growth.
And so part of these challenges, figuring out, okay, what is causing people to leave and quit your product and having to really analyze when people leave, what was driving that, what was causing the lack of retention in the product.
Because it turns out that all of these plateaus we've had in revenue and even some of the challenges we face today.
The big challenge we face today is, okay, how do we get to the next plateau?
How do we lower that retention rate even further or not lower the retention rate, how do we raise the retention rate, lower the, the cancellation rate so that we get more lifetime value out of each customer?
And the answer is always slightly different.
So I'd say early on it involved realizing that, say, and some of the answers are the same.
Our product, I said initially for people who are launching new businesses, and that's what it was.
The key of it was.
But if you think about that market, if that market is 95% of your customers, they are horrible customers.
Businesses fail.
Eight out of, what's the stat?
Like nine out of ten businesses fail.
So that means that we were catering to a customer alone, just catering to that customer and then saying, you know what, there's two things that are going to happen with that customer.
Their businesses.
They're going to give up the idea, hence the business fails within two to three months and then they're no longer paying us or they're going to be wildly successful.
They're going to keep a landing page up for maybe six months and then they're going to quit because they have the resources to build their custom page.
They have the resources, they're like, we're going to build our own website.
And so a big part of our challenge has been realizing, okay, one, can we offer product and services to People that have passed that first stage and were successful.
So you've launched your website, but then the question still becomes how are you capturing people's email addresses?
Do you have opt in forms on your page to give away a PDF and capture email?
Because just because you have a website doesn't mean you need to stop collecting an audience.
And so hence that became features that drove into opt in forms and then contests in terms of re engaging customer lists, running contests, and then two, should we build some features that aren't just for.
Do we have to shift our audience?
So looking at our audience and saying, you know, we can't cater 100% to entrepreneurs because like I said, they can be terrible customers because of the nature of their business.
And so can we expand the reach of our product, add other features to our form where you can just have it as a standalone?
You could run a contest where we push information to mailchimp, we push information to Aware Weber.
We've got these integrations into Salesforce and other CRM tools so that we can cater to a different type of customer that has recurring campaigns.
They're constantly kicking off.
And so that's an ongoing challenge, I would say, for any SaaS.
Business is looking at both how do you grow the audience of people coming in, but then how do you keep them once they have it?
And those two sides of the coin.
I find the retention to be kind of a bigger challenge.
You can pay for traffic.
If you've got any sort of revenue, you can redivert that into advertisements, you can start paying for it.
So you can cheat a little bit on the traffic and sort of growing the incoming.
The top of the funnel part, it's much harder to cheat on the somebody is using their product and they're deciding whether or not they should keep using your product because that's based on the merits of value that they're getting from it.
And so that requires constant analysis of why would customers leave, what could you have done to kept them.
Do you have something that would have kept them around longer?
And that's an ongoing challenge for anyone, including us.
Omer (39:57.440)
Okay.
We started this conversation by going back to where the idea for Kickoff Labs came from.
And then we've taken this journey together on how you turn that idea into a successful product.
Let's talk about the business today.
How many customers do you currently have?
Josh (40:16.500)
We currently have about, I would say about a thousand active paying customers.
Omer (40:24.340)
And do you still keep the.
You still have a free plan as well, so you presumably have quite a few users on that Too, There's a lot of.
Josh (40:32.500)
So I clarified the thousand saying that's like paying active, but then there's all the people who are potentially active and free on the other side.
That's the bigger bubble, obviously.
Omer (40:45.630)
And what's your revenue today?
Josh (40:49.710)
We're going to hit.
We'll probably be around 35 to 40,000 each month.
Omer (40:57.790)
That's great.
Congratulations.
So what is the one thing in your business that you are most excited about right now?
Josh (41:09.000)
It's hard to say.
One thing, I'm going to say two, I'm going to cheat.
One, we've been doing every other week, we've been doing live chats with our customers and doing webinars.
And we were just doing primarily.
I think we've done eight or nine of them now, and most of them have been just, hey, show up and we'll review your landing page.
If you show up and submit it and you're there, we'll take a live look and give you feedback on your landing page.
I love doing that because it's fun, it's exciting, it's a challenge because you get these wildly different landing pages.
It's been a way that we could start scaling some of that personalization we did when we were smaller and we would personally email and give people people advice.
And it was a realization that we had to say, hey, what if that was public knowledge?
Like, we're putting the effort into reviewing these people's landing pages, but what are we getting out of it?
And maybe that's selfish, but could we do that in a way that's public and get people to volunteer to put their page on display publicly and we'll tear it down for them live?
And it started to really.
It's really taken off in terms of the people who are showing up to the chats and the people who are sending their pages.
And we get people that use our competitors that show up.
And that's always fun because I can recognize the competitor pages and I can tell them why they'd be better off with our solution.
But it's figuring out how we did those personal things early on and figuring out how we make them scale to the next level.
And that's really exciting to me is how we're getting out of this.
Everything's done personally for each customer and how we're scaling that so that we can amplify the growth beyond where we are.
And then the second thing is, I'm always excited being a product person, the next release.
So by time people hear this podcast, it'll be out we're putting opt in forms, exit intent widgets, pop up forms on equal playing field with landing pages in the product.
Before they're kind of a sub feature of landing pages.
You have to build a page first and then you could also have a form.
Now it's just going to be a level playing field.
They're pretty much given the same weight in the next version of the product.
Got a great feature called anyform, which is a script.
You just drop it onto any.
Could be our template, it could be any form you've built.
It could be something you downloaded off ThemeForest.
It'll turn it into a Kickoff labs viral form.
So that solves a huge problem from us because no matter how many templates we could build or have partners build for landing pages, somebody always has something else specific in mind for the look of their page.
And so we see that all the time with our customers, like, oh, can you just give me this specific look?
Well, you know what?
Now you see a look you like, go buy it, drop this script on it and boom, you've got it wired up.
You'll get the autoresponder, you'll get the virality.
You could even wire it up.
If you're using one of our competitors, you could make their pages viral as long as you're also using our service because you may like the look of their template better.
And you can still use our viral feature of it.
And also just a huge overhaul in our reporting because one of our goals is how we help people make smarter choices about where they invest their effort.
So giving them better reports to say, hey, it's not just that you have a 20% conversion rate, but you have a 50% conversion rate from Facebook and only a 2% conversion rate from your AdWords.
Maybe you should think about doubling down your effort on Facebook.
And so trying to give people that more proactive advice to focus their energy is just some of the features that are in the next release we're working on.
Omer (44:58.210)
All right, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Josh (45:04.930)
Okay.
Yeah.
Omer (45:05.810)
Great.
Let's do it.
What's the best piece of business advice
Josh (45:08.809)
that you ever received for a manager of mine?
If missing your release date by one week or one month is going to kill your business, then something else was fundamentally wrong.
And that's just advice just to focus on what you're doing and get it right, not quickly.
Omer (45:26.720)
What book would you recommend to our audience?
And why?
Josh (45:30.800)
For me, it still has to be the four hour workweek.
And not because I work four hours a week, but because it really just sort of changed a lot of what I was thinking about in terms of my life and the priorities and how I wanted to spend it and how I could potentially spend it going forward.
Omer (45:48.650)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Josh (45:54.010)
People I look up to in the entrepreneurial space is no matter how many hours a week they learn how many hours a week they work, it's that they are able to focus on the things that seem to drive them the most value and ignore things that are less important.
And that's just something I think everybody could work better at, whether they're working at their current job or their own company is just the 8020 rule.
And that seems to be the characteristic that I see shared universally amongst really successful entrepreneurs.
Omer (46:24.260)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or
Josh (46:27.220)
habit related to that?
The days I'm most productive are the days that start with me looking over a larger list of goals for a company and my to do list and just picking two or three things and say, I'm going to knock these out.
I can ignore everything else, but I'm going to get these done.
The days where I don't do that are the days where I just sort of wander off and I wonder at the end of the day, like, what did I accomplish today?
Omer (46:52.500)
Let's say you had a successful exit with Kickoff Labs and you wanted to start over tomorrow.
How would you go about finding that next business idea?
Josh (47:02.020)
How would I go about finding the next business idea?
It depends how successful the exit was, partially because some ideas require more capital, I think, than others.
I'm just realistic about that.
I'm sort of a pragmatist.
I personally look to combine two things, which is one, trends that I see in a marketplace or three, things trends I see in marketplaces that I enjoy.
So working with customers that you like is incredibly important.
If you don't have respect or like the people that you're serving, then you're going to have a bad time.
And then two, I guess I said things that I enjoy.
So passions that I have and sort of trying to find the best mix of the two.
Anybody that tells you it's all about just passion or all about chasing the money, then I think they're wrong.
I think that there's gray space in the middle.
Omer (47:57.630)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know.
Josh (48:03.870)
Well, I think I mentioned it earlier.
We started Kickoff Labs and the idea to do it when my wife was pregnant at six month old.
In that time span, what's the best time to start a new business?
Oh, when you've got a pregnant wife or a six month old, it seems obvious.
And then even other choices we're making.
We're actually moving into the city in another couple.
By next year we'll be in the city as a personal choice just because it's sort of questions I enjoy questioning obvious assumptions people make and seeing can we have an experience that's different than what everybody else expects.
Omer (48:45.620)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Josh (48:51.940)
So obviously my family, my wife, two year old girl, four year old boy keep me busy.
But personal passion.
I play about 30 to 40 adult baseball games a summer, so it's actually real baseball, not softball.
Next week, for example, I'm heading down to Arizona to play in a national tournament.
And so baseball has always been a passion of mine.
When I looked at where I was going to work when I graduated college, I said, well, if I can't play major league baseball, I might as well go to the major league baseball of software.
And so that's what drove me to choose a job at Microsoft.
I was like, well, that's the major league baseball of software, right?
That's my passion outside of work.
Omer (49:35.450)
All right, great answers.
Josh, I want to thank you for joining me today and talking about Kickoff Labs.
I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and your insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Kickoff Labs, they can go to kickofflabs.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Josh (49:57.130)
They can email me joshickofflabs.com and reach out that way.
It's probably the best way.
Omer (50:05.190)
Awesome.
Thanks again, Josh, and I wish you continued success.
Josh (50:08.230)
Thank you.
Omer (50:09.190)
Cheers.
