Omer (00:11.360)
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.
In this episode, I talked to my friend Andy Baldacci, the host of the Early Stage Founder podcast and currently a marketer at Groove.
Groove is a simple help desk SaaS product that's used by over 8,000 companies.
The business was founded in 2011 by Alex Turnbull.
He bootstrapped the business and has grown it from zero to over $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
For two years, Alex and his team tried to make content marketing work for them, but they were getting nowhere.
And at one point, he seriously considered shutting down their blog for good.
But after taking a step back, he decided to launch a new blog in 2013.
It was about a startup's journey and sharing everything they Learned, getting to $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
At that point, they were only making a few thousand dollars a month.
It was a unique approach at the time and it was a big, audacious goal for a bootstrap startup.
But they worked hard to publish high quality, in depth, transparent content every week, and it started to pay off for them pretty quickly.
And over the last five years, that blog has been the biggest driver of their growth.
It's helped them to go from a few thousand dollars a month to becoming a five million dollar business.
But recently, Alex and his team decided to shut down the blog, at least for a few months.
Alex felt that growth was slowing down and the team realized that what got them here wouldn't necessarily get them to their next big milestone.
In this episode, Andy shares the story of how they used the blog to get to $500,000 in MRR, why they recently shut down the blog, and what they're doing to reboot their content marketing efforts.
There are a lot of great insights and tips here that will help you no matter what stage you're at with your content marketing efforts.
And there are also some surprising lessons, so I hope you enjoy it.
Andy, welcome to the show.
Andy Baldacci (02:43.950)
Thanks so much, Omar.
It was a bit of a struggle with technology front getting here, but I'm glad that we were able to talk, hear each other, and hopefully record this.
Omer (02:52.670)
Yeah, let's not talk too much about that.
It's like we're two experienced podcasters.
Andy Baldacci (02:57.710)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Omer (03:00.270)
All right.
Andy Baldacci (03:00.710)
Embarrassing.
Omer (03:02.270)
So let's start by just getting inside your head a little bit.
What gets you out of bed, like what drives or motivates you to work on what you do every day.
Andy Baldacci (03:11.040)
So it's funny, it's like I am not a morning person, so I have to kind of push myself to actually get out of bed.
But the thing that has actually gotten me to not become a morning person but actually get out of bed more consistently in a literal sense, is there's just so many different things I want to do.
There's so many different tests I want to run, projects I want to start, and things just kind of want to learn about.
And so the longer I stay in bed, the longer I kind of get slow moving in the morning, the longer it'll take me to get those things done.
So I try to just keep a good list of what I'm trying to do and help use that to motivate myself.
Omer (03:46.710)
Great.
So for people who aren't familiar with Groov, can you kind of tell us, you know, what does the product do and who's it trying to solve a problem for?
Andy Baldacci (03:58.710)
Yeah.
So for just some quick background groove, we make basically just simple help desk software.
And it's for businesses that have outgrown email.
It's businesses who have typically been handling support requests just out of their inbox.
And as their teams have grown, they realize it's not really a scalable solution.
Emails started falling through the cracks.
It's hard to know who's working on what.
And that's kind of where we come in and we work with growing startups to give them, I guess what we call like a right size solution for them.
Our founder, Alex Turnbull came up with the idea for this when he was at his previous startup and they ran into the same problem.
They had four people kind of doing support out of one inbox.
It was a mess.
But whenever he looked at alternatives, he just kind of was confronted with these really enterprise level tools that were way too complicated, way too complex and way too expensive.
And so we came in and looked to solve that problem for growing startups.
Omer (04:59.470)
Now a big part of Groove's growth has come through content marketing and the blog, or you have a couple of blogs on the site and that's really taken the business from when it launched in, I believe it was in 2011, from basically zero to doing over $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
And the blog has been a big part of that growth, right?
Andy Baldacci (05:30.270)
Yeah.
And so that's basically been our almost exclusive marketing channel is content marketing.
We have never had a sales team.
It's all just been grown on the back of our blogging and really just a word of mouth that's grown around building that brand.
And so that's something that we've been committed to since day one.
But actually executing successfully took a few years in before we got to that point where we could really see the results and started hitting some traction.
Omer (06:02.920)
So it's been the primary growth vehicle for the business.
It's helped Groove go from, as I said, zero to well over $5 million a year.
And you guys decided to shut it down?
Andy Baldacci (06:19.240)
Yes.
Omer (06:19.720)
Yes.
So we're gonna talk about that and why you did that.
But before we do that, let's kind of go back to 2011 and tell the story on how this blog came about and some of the problems that were faced along the way.
And then eventually what was done to kind of make things work.
And so, to start with, from what I understand, for the first couple of years, there was a lot of blogging going on, but nothing really was working.
Andy Baldacci (06:51.780)
Right.
We were just putting out content that we thought we were supposed to be writing.
We'd look around and see what other blogs are doing and just try to do the same thing, but that was about it.
We didn't really think too much about.
Okay, like, how are we actually going to get this in front of people?
How are we going to get this to be shared?
How are we going to get this to show up in search engines?
What?
We just kind of assumed if you build it, they will come.
And they didn't.
And after a while of doing this, realized it obviously just wasn't working.
And this was the first time where we kind of hit pause on the blog.
And just as an aside, we haven't completely shut down the blog or anything like that.
We're taking a break, we're taking a hiatus, and we can talk more about why in just a minute.
But this was the first time where we kind of hit pause on things because we knew what we were doing wasn't working.
We had to go back to the drawing board.
And so we looked at what.
What those other companies, like HubSpot, like Unbounce, like Copyblogger, what they were doing and try to dig in real deep.
And honestly had a lot of conversations with successful content marketers to figure out what actually it was that really got the success from.
Cause it was more than just writing an article, like 10 Quotes to Change how you run your startup.
There had to be more strategy to it than that.
And that was really what got us started on that journey of being more deliberate about our content, of making sure we understood what our target audience actually cared about and making sure we had a plan in place for how to spread this content so that it actually got in front of them.
And that was kind of what we were going through back then around really is when we started taking the turn was 2013 or so and into 2014.
Omer (08:29.930)
And that's when you kind of launched this startup journey blog.
Right.
In terms of, you know, follow us as we kind of share everything we're doing as we go from zero to $100,000 a month.
Andy Baldacci (08:43.920)
Exactly.
It was something where nowadays it seems like so many startups are blogging about their journey and it's, it's awesome for us to see because it's content that we love to consume ourselves and it helps us grow.
But at the time there, there just wasn't really much out there like that.
And we knew that what, what we are going through is something that a lot of other founders, a lot of other startups were going through as well.
In a lot of those conversations we had, it wasn't like these content marketers or these startup founders kind of just instantly hit on success.
They had to struggle for quite some time to figure out what worked and what didn't.
And then we kind of clicked it for Alex and Len, who was the head of marketing at the time, that why don't we just talk about this?
This is clearly something that needs to be out there.
We going after startups as who are really targeting at that point, this is what they need.
And so we kind of came up with a SaaS startup's journey to $100,000 in monthly revenue, which was a very audacious goal at the time.
I believe we were probably at like a few thousand dollars a month revenue.
But right after that, we kind of started with our first post, which was very transparent, very honest, and got into some of the struggles we had been going through.
And, and obviously we leaned on some of those connections that we had built with other content marketers.
But within 24 hours, the blog then had a thousand email subscribers.
In a month, it had 5,000.
And while that exponential growth didn't exactly maintain, we kind of grew from there over time into where we're at today.
Omer (10:16.030)
I didn't realize it was at a few thousand dollars a month.
Then it is a big, bold goal to go out and publicly say follow us as we get to $100,000 when you don't really have any idea if that's going to ever happen.
Right.
Andy Baldacci (10:28.960)
It was something where at that point a few thousand might be low, but it was definitely not at the point where it was fully profitable to support a significant team of any sort like that.
It was very early days and we did have customers of product.
We knew we were onto something there.
And so Alex had faith that we can figure this out, but it will be a true journey.
And he was committed to going through that and also committed to sharing it.
But I agree, yeah, it was definitely a big bet.
Omer (10:59.420)
So you had two blogs, right?
So one was this startup journey kind of blog, and then the other one was more focused on support resources.
In terms of people who are going to use a help desk system, what are the kind of things they need to know to be able to run that kind of support operation, how to hire people, et cetera and so on.
Was there a big overlap between the two audiences?
I think the reason I asked that is because these days I see a lot of startups who are blogging about their kind of journey.
But I often wonder, are the people who are interested in reading that content also your target customers?
And if there's very little overlap, then you got to wonder whether that's kind of a strategy that's working for a lot of startups out there.
Andy Baldacci (11:58.250)
Yeah, so that's something where we didn't have the support blog in the beginning, and that was something that, looking back on, it was a mistake.
But it took us some time to kind of get to the point that you just laid out there.
And it was something that in the beginning was we had a freemium model, and for a lot of the startups we were talking to, they were a great fit for that model.
They didn't need to have a big team to become paying customers.
And so if we could reach those very early stage founders, they were a strong overlap with who we're going after.
But as we started getting some traction there, who we really were trying to reach changed.
And we did away with the freemium plan because we saw a lot of those accounts weren't growing into paying users, but were generating a lot of support requests.
Kind of the standard critiques you hear of the freemium model and realized that that wasn't quite reaching the audience that we needed.
And that was when we spun up the support blog, because we knew that we had to have a better way of reaching out directly to that audience.
And while there is some overlap there, especially as we've grown, it's not huge.
And that's been part of what we've been thinking about as we have kind of taken this most recent hiatus with the blog and how we can come back and fix a strategy to be a little bit more cohesive.
Omer (13:23.220)
So just out of curiosity, when you look at the two blogs, the Startup Journey blog and then the sort of support blog, which one does a better job at converting more people into customers?
Andy Baldacci (13:37.950)
So that's where it gets a little hand wavy.
Because with the support blog, that's a much easier thing to track.
When people come there, their intent is much higher and it's a lot easier for them to follow them into the product.
But on the Startup Journey blog, that's what people know us for.
That's why when we talk to a lot of customers, that's how they hear about us.
But it's more of a branding play in the sense of it's all about building awareness.
And that's where I think a lot of our word of mouth comes from, which is has been valuable to us and why we've committed to it.
But it's something that frankly, if you look just purely at the numbers, isn't there?
But when you start talking to customers, that's why they've heard of us.
That's why I think a lot of listeners, if they have heard of Groove, it's probably because of a lot of that Startup Journey content that might have resonated with them where whereas the support content, while it is valuable, we haven't established that thought leadership there yet.
And so on the metrics, it's a support blog, but looking at the big picture, it's hard to say.
Omer (14:38.230)
So the blog launched or you kind of did this kind of relaunch in 2013, and as you said, it kind of got a lot of early attention.
A lot of people started subscribing, they wanted to kind of follow the story.
I think a big part of it was, as you mentioned, no one was kind of really doing that kind of blog back then.
So it kind of made it a little bit unique.
Secondly, there was this kind of audacious goal in terms of, you know, we're going to go from 0 to $100,000 a month and kind of we're self funded and et cetera.
And thirdly, I think it was the transparency of the content that was being written.
And I think the combination of those three things really helped to create a lot of buzz, attention and interest in that blog.
And I'm wondering, like, was there other, other things that were done to kind of get the word out?
Was any money spent on marketing the blog in terms of advertising?
No.
Andy Baldacci (15:45.570)
I mean, over the entire history, I wouldn't be surprised if like a few thousand dollars was spent on random experiments.
But there's never been a paid advertising budget and even today there still isn't.
Omer (15:58.530)
Well and then so sort of the typical funnel, it was kind of pretty basic from what I understand, that people would come to the blog, they would see some sort of opt in form which said follow us on this journey and subscribe here and you'll get updates as we kind of tell you more about what we're learning and what we're doing.
And then once people were subscribed, they would get onto some kind of basic autoresponder email sequence which would basically keep feeding them this new content that was coming through.
But in terms of actually a clear call to action and actually a deliberate effort to convert these people into signing up for a trial of Groove, the help desk.
Was there just like one email that they'd received with a link in there?
Andy Baldacci (16:57.130)
Yeah, I think you're being a little bit generous calling it a real funnel at that point.
It was basically like you said it was.
Sign up for the blog, Follow our journey.
In the early days there were probably, I don't think there was an autoresponder that came a little bit later.
But yeah, the autoresponder just kind of fed them some of like the greatest hits articles and then the last email asked them to sign up for the trial and after that they would get new articles.
But there wasn't really a way that we pitched them on the product again after that point.
Omer (17:32.080)
So what do you think led to the business getting to $100,000 a month and we'll talk about kind of it went beyond that.
But it doesn't sound like, you know, there was a great master plan here.
Right.
But it was working.
And I'm just kind of, kind of curious.
It's like was there anything else that you guys had to do or just by what we described there and just continuing to pump out this content, you were just seeing increase in sign ups and customers and sort of with Groove just happening.
Andy Baldacci (18:06.640)
Yes.
So a few things is there definitely wasn't a multi year overarching plan of like, okay, we're going to do this strategy to get leads in and then here's how we're going to nurture them, here's how we're going to eventually make the sale and all that like that that didn't exist.
But we did know that this was a major problem that people were experiencing back when we launched.
There wasn't as much competition out there and our product was significantly better than what was out there.
And so we knew that if we could get enough awareness of the product, of our brand, of our company, we knew that that would lead to customers.
And so at the time, the reason, in my opinion, that the content caught on so much is because, like you said, it was unique at the time, but also, like, frankly, I didn't write it so I can kind of, I'm not patting myself on the back like, it was written really, really well and we did it consistently.
We showed up there every week with something interesting to read in a very well written, transparent, pretty vulnerable format.
And that resonated with people.
And that's kind of why it was so widely shared.
And that's why it kind of spun up like that.
It wasn't so much that we just caught a wave and rode it in.
It was a lot of work to paddle up and just catch that wave of continuously putting out that content, missing a few waves and just going right back at it until we did catch that one and then once we're on it, not going to quit at that point.
And so while there wasn't a very complex plan, I think that also speaks to where a lot of early stage startups go wrong, is that they complicate things way too much.
Where if you can keep to the basics, do it really, really well and then do it consistently and have a good product.
Like, again, none of these things are easy, but if you do that, I think you will get results.
It's when you don't have a great product, you're trying five different marketing tactics.
None of them are you really giving that much effort to.
And then you're wondering why you're not getting traction.
So you have to have the product working for you and you have to have one channel that you're executing really well.
And it doesn't need to be perfect, as we've shown, but if you can just do that, then I think that people will find traction.
And that was what we were able to do really well, is just put out good content about topics people cared about and write it in a way that people would get people interested and want to share and have a good product.
And so while it wasn't a crazy plan or an inventive plan, that was what got us to that point.
Omer (20:37.280)
Yeah, so I think if I had to sum it up, I was explaining to somebody, I'd say there was no funnel, there was no backend master plan on how to optimize the conversions at each stage of people coming through or so on.
It was a Very simple thing it was write great content, do it consistently.
And the content in many ways was unique.
And so you were getting a lot of people interested in that content.
And then it was, well, some percentage of those people will convert into a trial.
And we're also doing a great job in terms of building a great product.
And once we get them there, the product will sell itself, essentially.
But there was not a lot going on in between those.
Andy Baldacci (21:23.410)
Right.
And I think that's sort of the thing is that it was simple, it was relentless.
Focus on the product and on the content and not thinking about too much else.
And frankly, I think focusing too deep beyond that at that stage would have been a mistake.
I think if we had best practices in place, obviously it would have grown a little bit faster.
But there's only so much that you can do in an early stage startup with limited resources.
And the more people try to complicate things, the harder it is to just show up and execute.
And so I think you summarize it pretty well, is keep it simple, but high quality.
And I mean to kind of add to that, it's also the reason why a lot of the content stuck as much as it did is because Alex, our founder, was relentless about having customer conversations every day.
He had hundreds of these.
And so those not only helped improve the product, but also gave a really good insight into what people cared about.
And so great content isn't easy.
It is simple, but it's not easy.
And so I think that's kind of a good way of putting it.
Omer (22:28.870)
Yeah, I think the big lesson here is about the simplicity.
Pick something that kind of is working and don't overcomplicate it.
As you said, just be relentless about executing and getting those customers.
And that's shown.
Just that approach alone has helped take groove to over $5 million a year.
And it kind of reminds me of, I remember talking to Laura Roeder, the founder of Meet Edgar, and I think Meet Edgar is kind of a similar size business to Groove.
And I remember kind of she was saying, well, when we launched, they were getting a lot of their leads through Facebook, at least that was one channel.
And so I was like, okay, great.
Well, you're, you're this social media expert, strategist.
That's kind of how she started out.
Let's talk about the, all the cool things you did with Facebook advertising to make that work.
Right.
And I was expecting her to talk about how they had different groups of audiences that they were going after, how they'd kind of built some kind of Funnel how they were doing retargeting.
And she was like, oh no, we, we kind of created this ad which was basically, hey, we have this new social media product, check it out.
And it would go to a page and they'd get people to subscribe or grab an invitation.
There was no segmenting of different emails for different types of people, whatever.
Everybody got the same thing.
It was like, it was unbelievably simple in a very similar way to what you're describing here in terms of really.
Andy Baldacci (24:06.730)
And it worked, right?
In both cases.
I think it's something where people can get hung up on the marketing strategies and all of that.
And I think people just complicate it.
And in those early stages when you're not Honestly, like probably sub 100k mrr, the thing holding you back is probably your product.
Because at those scales you can do a lot of just one to one sales.
You can really grind it out if you need to and not obsess over complex marketing strategies.
But if your product isn't great, it doesn't matter how much traffic you're sending to it, especially when there's a dozen other tools that can do the same exact thing.
So it's something where the more differentiated you are and the better you truly solve the problem for the user and understand what that problem actually is.
Then it's like, you don't need to complicate the marketing strategy.
You just have to put it in front of people.
Because when they look at it and say, oh, this is built for me.
Why would I try anything else?
There isn't anything else.
And that's the missing piece I think a lot of founders overlook is that they probably have a long way to go to get their product to a point where that exists.
Unless they really niche down, which is probably not a bad idea for a lot of people.
Omer (25:15.290)
So everything we've talked about got groove eventually to $100,000 MRO.
And then you guys said, okay, well that title doesn't work anymore.
So instead of saying to $100,000, let's now say follow us on a journey to $500,000 mrr.
And so you guys kept doing more of the same, right?
More content, like regularly high quality, transparent, all of that stuff.
And then soon enough you hit 500,000 mrr and got past that.
So I guess the next step would have been, well, follow us to, you know, a million dollars MRR or whatever, right?
And again, so this was working, right?
Again, just doing the same thing relentlessly was working.
But then you guys decided to shut down the blog or took a hiatus.
Right.
So for three months, just shut it down and said, okay, we need to kind of regroup and figure out what we're doing here.
Andy Baldacci (26:15.730)
Why?
Omer (26:16.290)
Like, it looks like things are working.
Why is this a time to say let's stop and let's figure out how to do something differently?
Andy Baldacci (26:23.570)
The timeline's a little squashed there.
That kind of speaks to it a little bit better is that it wasn't as though it was a super smooth journey to 500k and we just kept growing the same growth rate.
After that.
Things slowed and growth has significantly slowed since then.
And we kind of realized that what got us here won't get us to the next level.
It's not that we're going to stop doing what got us here, but we need to rethink it because we had reached a plateau and to break through that we could just do more of the same.
And that was really why we did hit pause, is because up until that point, we kind of had figured out a very good system for us that worked and didn't mess around with it because there was a lot of other things we had to do.
The marketing team was one person, it was lend marketing.
And Alex would help out when he could.
But with everything else that was going on, there wasn't a lot of time for that.
And most of the investment was going into engineering.
And so when they found the autopilot strategy that worked for them, put it on autopilot, just run with that.
But then it kind of stopped working or it stopped working as well.
And that was when we realized we had to take a step back.
And it was a little before that realization is when I joined the team.
And so that's kind of the context I'd come into.
It was saying like, okay, this is what got us here.
This is what drew me to the company is seeing everything that they'd put out over the years.
But we do need to make some changes.
And that was the context of when I joined.
Omer (27:57.010)
And so when you sort of talk about slowing down, was this sort of just reaching a plateau or it was just very slow growth.
Like, I'm just wondering like, was it like, there's a problem here and we need to kind of do something about it or, oh, it's kind of like, you know, we could keep doing what we're doing for another few years, just we'd be seeing growth at a slower rate.
Andy Baldacci (28:18.850)
It was a mix.
It wasn't as though things are crashing.
It was a plateau, a slow Growth is probably a better way of putting it.
But it all came down to what, as a company, Alex had as a vision and what we all were trying to build.
And did we want to just kind of, were we okay with slow growth?
Is that really what we saw as the best option going forward?
And Alex's answer, and I think the team agrees, is, no, we don't want to do that.
And so to kind of break through that plateau, we need to make some changes.
It would have been easier for sure.
The last year would have been a lot easier for all of us if we had just kind of kept doing more of the same, and it would still be a profitable business.
But it was kind of trying to get to that next level of profitability, of success, just of business in general, that drove us to make those changes.
Omer (29:12.080)
Okay, let's talk about the changes that you guys have made.
So you had some time to step back and look at the situation.
What can we expect to see from the blog and how you're going to do things differently?
Andy Baldacci (29:26.520)
Yeah, so there's a couple things.
The first thing I'm going to talk about right now is just what our focus was and who we were really writing for.
And you kind of touched on this in the beginning of the interview when you asked, is there much overlap between the audience you're speaking to on the Startup Journey as compared to the audience in the support side of it?
And we realized that there wasn't.
And we realized that when we had done away with the freemium plan, we didn't necessarily have a significant change in who we were writing for on the Startup Journey content.
And so that content is still going to be written, but it's going to be more about where we're at today and about for companies in similar places, because companies of our size at the lower end really are who we're really trying to reach out to.
And then on the support side of it, while that blog has grown to be larger than the Startup Journey blog, we realized that we still were leaving a lot of growth on the table by not really thinking about SEO, by taking a similar approach, where we're going to answer the questions, solve the problems that we know our customers have, but if they're not necessarily searching for it, it's still hard to get in front of them.
So the big thing we did is really just shift in focus of who we're writing for and how we're getting that content found.
And so a big change in focus has been on more SEO, and that has been a long process and I'm more than happy to go as much detail of that as you'd like.
But updating 300 plus blog posts to your new SEO standards is not an easy task.
So that's kind of been occupying our time for the past few months.
But.
But a lot of it really just comes down to focus and making sure that who we're trying to reach is who the best customers are for our business.
And then once they actually get to our blog, get to our content, have a more deliberate funnel in place to move them towards the product and just get something in place that we can really measure.
And those are things that we didn't have before and they will really allow us to be more methodical going forward and start running more tests and start trying new things and actually knowing if they work or if they don't.
And so it's really just been building that foundation so that we can continue to test and experiment and grow.
Omer (31:46.460)
Yeah, I mean, obviously I think it's getting clarity on who your target audience is is always a good thing to do.
And as this blog is evolving and the business is evolving, the story that you're telling in of terms terms of the startup journey is going to appeal to a different type of person, a different type of company to what you were doing five years ago.
But the other thing was, I mean, it sounds like to me, even aside from that, just trying to improve the conversion of the traffic that you're already getting would be a good thing to look at.
And you talked about, there was like one email that mentioned the free trial for Groove.
Did that ever change?
Like up until now?
Was it like, oh, let's send them two emails about it?
Andy Baldacci (32:37.370)
No.
No.
So that definitely changed.
That was one of the kind of first things that I've been tackling is I would call it like just getting the funnel to like an MVP stage where we know it is not perfect, we know a lot more work needs to be done, but just get it to a point where it kind of exists a lot more deliberately and clearly than before.
One of the first things was just setting up kind of a smarter, not in the thought behind it, but just in how it works.
Onboarding sequence of emails for when people join our email list.
And it's still rough for sure, but it's much better than before.
And so what it tries to do is just get a better sense for what topics people are interested in, where they're at in their business, and then just slowly steers them towards content that's more relevant to them.
And if they do seem like they're in a position where groove would make sense, then it will start kind of a pitch sequence where it'll first make the case, it'll slowly make the case, kind of talk about the pain a bit more and why the way they're handling things right now is a problem.
Show how it can be fixed and then kind of show how groove fits in.
So it's something that is more complex than before, but also it's adaptive.
It changes to who's coming in.
And a lot of them aren't good fits.
And it doesn't make sense for us to pitch them.
We don't want to necessarily tarnish our brand by being in their face all the time.
But for the ones that truly could use it, and a lot of prospects really could use this and really need this, not having a good solution like this is holding them back.
Like, it's kind of our job to help them realize that.
And so that's what we're trying to do now with that sequence.
And then on the other side of things, it's just.
Yeah, just running relatively basic tests at this point on the opt in forms, on what we're offering, that sort of thing.
And it's nothing crazy.
A lot of it is just what's been written about a hundred times of having relevant upgrades that are directly related to what the people are reading about.
And we had a good amount of those in place, but now it's like, all right, let's test how we position them, let's test the phrasing, let's test what the forms look like, that kind of thing.
And we're definitely seeing some early traction there.
The first step was really just getting the basic best practices in place so we could start testing on top of that.
Because it doesn't make sense to run a bunch of tests on our opt in forms when once they get in, there's still not a good way of getting them into the trial.
So it's just getting all the pieces in there first and then starting testing on top of that.
Omer (35:01.310)
Now, you and I had been talking about this before, and one of the things you mentioned was around kind of a B testing and sort of some of the earlier results that you guys were seeing, I'm curious, was AB testing something new as well, like.
Or was that something that you guys had been doing over the last few years?
Andy Baldacci (35:21.150)
There was some basic A B tests in place on some of the opt in forms, but it wasn't a consistent process.
It wasn't something where we really had established like, okay, every month we're going to review our results, we're going to plan new tests, we're going to put them in place and just month after month is what we're going to do because there just frankly wasn't the bandwidth for that.
So there were some tests on a few of the opt in forms and they did get good results and so it was really just expanding that a bit.
But a B testing even today isn't something that is going to necessarily be pervasive throughout everything we do because even at our scale there's a lot of pieces of the funnel, there's a lot of parts of the website that just don't get enough traffic to run meaningful tests.
And so I think starting with a B testing too early is a distraction for a lot of companies.
And so that's something where we're starting to do it more of now.
But even then it's like I don't know if we necessarily, I don't believe we get enough email opt ins every month to run like serious a B testing there, at least not to devote significant time to it.
And same with like in the trial, it's something where we want to get up to best practices.
But there are other pieces of the funnel that need to be targeted first because we know we can get results faster.
And with a B testing it's really just all about getting results, finishing tests quickly and getting conclusive results so you can move on to the next one and just kind of stack up a few wins together.
Omer (36:46.080)
You know, I think if there was one big takeaway for me it would be figure out how you can acquire a customer and then just keep doing that.
Be relentless and don't over complicate things.
And I think the Groove story is a great example of that that we kind of hear so much and especially kind of you and I especially in the marketing world about all of these kind of complicated things that you should be building out and doing and whatever.
So I love kind of hearing this story because it's just such an important takeaway.
Just don't overcomplicate things for you as you sort of think about key takeaways in terms of what you've kind of learned from seeing this blog grow and then kind of having time to step back and figure out how to kind of deal with the next phase of growth.
What are some of the key takeaways for you?
Andy Baldacci (37:53.660)
Yeah, so something that you had asked me about this before so I came like somewhat prepared on this one.
And the key Takeaway is kind of that I boil it down like five things and I think you touched on a lot of them and what you just said.
And it's that the first is just consistent action in the right direction in is going to produce results.
If you can just find something where you're getting a little bit of traction, keep doing that, keep testing, keep improving and like keep doing it.
If you do that and don't get distracted by all the shiny objects, which in marketing again is really hard to do, you'll get results.
The other thing though is that once you start getting results, you don't want to get complacent and you do want to make sure that you keep pushing and you do keep trying to learn.
At the same time, especially as a self funded company, sometimes you don't have many other options.
You don't have a large team to handle all the other responsibilities.
So when you do figure out some playbooks at work, all you're trying to do is just keep executing them.
So it's finding that balance.
But the third takeaway is just kind of like getting the right pieces in place, making sure you do have the best practices there that making sure you're not overlooking just any glaring holes.
And sometimes even though you are super busy, you're going to have to be pulled off of other things that may seem more important just to kind of plug some of these holes.
In the long run, I think that'll be helpful.
And then the last is really just simplifying and focusing.
And that's kind of what I think a lot of the message I've been talking about today boils down to.
And what you just said as well is that it doesn't need to be super complicated.
Especially at this stage of the business.
A lot of these strategies are out there.
Very rarely do you have to reinvent the wheel, but you just have to kind of identify what works for you and focus relentlessly on that and then just execute.
That's kind of how I would sum up a lot of those lessons.
Omer (39:44.060)
Awesome.
Good summary.
All right, let's move on to the lightning round.
Just have seven questions for you and just answer them as quickly as you can.
Andy Baldacci (39:53.260)
All right?
Omer (39:53.820)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Andy Baldacci (39:57.890)
Just show up every day.
Omer (39:59.650)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Andy Baldacci (40:02.290)
So for that one 8020 sales and marketing by Perry Marshall, it really just boils down to how to focus on what matters and really just hit the leverage points that will make the biggest impact.
Omer (40:14.930)
I Have that on my bookshelf.
All right.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Andy Baldacci (40:21.790)
Discipline.
Omer (40:23.310)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Trello, what new or crazy business idea would you love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Andy Baldacci (40:33.150)
So I really want to work on helping founders hire assistants, executive assistants, and learn how to delegate better just being in the space.
It's crazy how many founders of very successful companies are still doing a lot of routine things, things themselves.
It's because they don't kind of know how to take the next step.
So I'd love to dive into that if I had the time.
Omer (40:56.000)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Andy Baldacci (40:59.600)
Before I got into marketing, I was a professional poker player for seven years.
Wow.
Omer (41:06.240)
See, I've known you for a little while and I had no idea about that.
So there you go.
That's a great one.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Andy Baldacci (41:16.680)
Passion is obviously family, friends, that kind of thing.
But like, for a more personal, like, selfish would be like food, just love good food.
Doesn't need to be fancy food, but good food.
And living in Austin, Texas has been amazing for that.
Omer (41:30.360)
Oh, yeah.
I'll have to get down there.
Andy Baldacci (41:33.280)
You should, you should.
Omer (41:35.000)
All right, cool.
Andy, thank you for joining me and kind of sharing the story of Groove.
It's, as I said, I just love the simplicity of what's helped to grow this business.
And I'm kind of looking forward to kind of hearing more about the changes that you guys are making and kind of the results that you start to see from that.
If people want to find out more about Groove, they can go to groovehq.com and from there they can check out both the blogs and the newly revamped version.
Coming soon, right?
Andy Baldacci (42:10.300)
Yeah.
And so at the time of this recording, in like mid June, we're about a month away from the relaunch.
And at that time there's going to be a brand new look to the blog.
We're going to unify them a bit so that there's one blog.
There'll be different categories, but just make it a little bit easier to navigate.
And then there's going to be some cool new things like the Groove Academy, where we get into some more actionable content to really kind of take what we have out there, the next step and just show how people can actually apply some of these lessons in their business.
So really excited to get that out there.
Definitely.
Go check that out.
And yeah, Just Groove HQ.com blog is the best place to go to see all of that.
And not sure when this is going to go live, but hopefully soon enough that'll be up there for everyone to see.
Omer (42:52.800)
Cool.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Andy Baldacci (42:56.960)
So the best place is honestly, probably just by email.
I would say just email me@andyaldacci.org and that last name is B A L D A C C I.
Omer (43:09.790)
Awesome.
Thank you my friend.
It's been a pleasure and wish you all the best.
Andy Baldacci (43:14.350)
No, thank you very much.
It's been a lot of fun.
