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.
This Week's interview is a story about a first time SaaS entrepreneur.
She didn't have any experience with software and didn't know the first thing about coding, but she was already building a following in the social media space and realized that the way most people handle social media isn't sustainable for small businesses.
She thought there was a better solution and decided to build a software product.
And she's done a lot of things that many startup founders would consider counterintuitive.
For example, her products homepage is optimized for email list building and not getting people to immediately sign up for a trial of the product.
And her approach to Facebook advertising has been deceptively simple and it worked against the advice that most Facebook experts would give you these days.
And she's kept her company laser focused on small business customers.
She could have easily started adding more features and higher level plans for teams and agencies, but she's been very deliberate about not doing that.
In fact, her product doesn't even offer multiple plans.
There's one plan, one price if you pay monthly and one price if you pay annually.
That's it.
And that approach has paid off.
The business is now doing over $4 million in annual recurring revenue and is continuing to grow quickly.
There are some great lessons here and I hope you enjoy the interview.
Today's guest is the founder of Meet Edgar, a social media Scheduling and Automation SaaS product.
She started her entrepreneurial journ journey at the age of 22 by launching a web design business and then going on to build a social media consulting and training business.
In 2014, she decided to launch Meet Edgar, her first SaaS business.
Today the company generates over $4 million in annual recurring revenue and has been self funded from day one.
So today I'd like to welcome Laura Roeder.
Laura, welcome to the show.
Laura Roeder (02:46.040)
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here.
Omer (02:48.200)
Now, I've kind of been following your story for a while, so I'm really glad that we finally got a chance to chat and I can kind of pick your brain a little bit more before we get started.
One of the things I always like to ask my guests is what drives and motivates them.
So what is it for you?
What gets you out of bed every day to work on your business?
Laura Roeder (03:07.160)
So a phrase that I think about a lot is you reap what you sow.
And it's.
It's an oldie but a goodie.
It's.
It's very, very simple.
But I am definitely a believer that you create your own life and the events every day are the product of something that you've done in the past.
Right.
I'm sitting here having this interview with you.
I actually don't know if we contacted you or if you contacted us, but we made it happen.
And now I'm here doing the interview, and now someone is listening to it.
So every day, I love knowing that the little actions that I take every day, whether it's for my health or my business or whatever it is or my marriage, that all adds up to what I'm going to sew my life in the future.
Omer (03:53.840)
Yeah, I love that.
It reminds me of a book that I read a while back called the Slight Edge, and I just love that because it's kind of all based on saying that no matter what you do in your life, it all comes down to small actions that you take every day, and they all build up and they all kind of get momentum, and whatever you want to do, it starts with those small steps.
So, yeah, I love it.
Laura Roeder (04:18.400)
Absolutely.
Omer (04:19.680)
Okay, so I kind of told the audience a little bit about Meet Edgar, but for people who are not familiar with the product, could you, in your own words, just tell us a little bit more about what the product does and sort of basically, what's the problem that you guys are trying to solve?
Laura Roeder (04:38.560)
Yeah.
So Meet Edgar is for content creators who have seen that problem of putting many, many hours into writing a blog post or recording a podcast, that first day gets a ton of traffic.
The first week it gets some traffic, and then after that, it's generally dead in the water.
Maybe a little search traffic trickles in, maybe nothing.
Most people spend a lot of time creating content, but then they do absolutely nothing to keep leveraging that content over and over again.
And for most businesses, the majority of your content is evergreen, meaning it still has as much value six months or a year or five years from now as it did when you initially recorded it.
I mean, an interview like this is a great example.
Right?
We're talking about business success principles.
You can listen to it in 10 years, and maybe we'll make some funny references to data technology, but hopefully the content will still be valuable.
So what Edgar does that is really fundamentally different from other social media tools and is Edgar stores a library of all that evergreen content and then keeps sending it out for you on autopilot over and over again.
So other tools, you have to keep going in and filling your queue with Edgar.
You give Edgar a library of what you want to send out, your own content, inspirational quotes, other people's content, whatever you want to send out.
And he, we like to call Edgar he instead of it.
It's a little friendlier.
He goes into that library and fills up your queue for you every week.
Omer (06:09.330)
So where did the idea for this product come from?
Laura Roeder (06:14.610)
It came actually directly from training.
I had realized in running my own small business and working with other small businesses that the way most people handle social is not sustainable for a small business.
And the way that most people handle social is they create new status updates every day for the rest of time.
That's what they do on social media.
And any solopreneur or small business owner or nose, you get burnt out.
You don't have time for it, even if you're using a scheduling tool.
So you don't have to be there to post live.
It's just a huge volume of status updates that you have to create.
So I kind of realized this isn't working.
And only a tiny percentage of people see anything that you post.
So you can go into Twitter, you can go into Facebook.
They'll show you what percentage of your audience saw something that you posted.
And it's 5% or under these days.
I mean, often on Facebook, unfortunately, well under 5% of the people who are liking your page or following, following you on Twitter or seeing what you post.
So there's no reason why you should create a status update, create an image, send it out once, and then never send it out again, like that blog post.
You can create social media status updates that are valuable in the future.
I created this methodology that I was using in teaching others of dividing all your content into categories and then cycling through those categories.
But there was still a lot of manual work you had to do with the tools.
Basically, you had to copy and paste it into a tool over and over again.
If you have an image, God help you, because there's no good way to handle that or store that.
So Edgar was built to make this strategy happen via software instead of via a human copying and pasting.
Omer (07:55.540)
So you've got the idea, you think there's an opportunity here to potentially build some kind of product.
You're not a developer, you don't code, you don't have a background in the software business.
So how did you even get started with this?
Laura Roeder (08:14.340)
Well, people hate my answer for this because the answer is I married a Developer, which people tell me is not really that helpful.
But you know, hey, you can marry a developer too.
Omer (08:26.259)
You know, actually somebody told me yesterday, I was talking to somebody and they said finding a technical co founder is as hard as getting married and said, no, no, it's actually harder than getting married.
And actually you kind of literally,
Laura Roeder (08:41.950)
I did both.
Yeah, I did both in one go.
So I mean, the part of it that is helpful for someone who's not going to marry their technical co founder is just the idea that you do need a technical co founder.
I would not recommend.
If you're not a developer, I would not recommend hiring an agency to build a product for you.
I mean, this is what you're selling.
You have to understand what it is that's being built.
And by the way, there's exceptions to everything.
This is what I love about entrepreneurship.
Groove started out that way of someone non technical hiring a team to build it.
And then they grew over time.
I just want to point that out.
I don't think there's any one way to do anything, but what I've seen be the most successful is to work with a technical co founder.
And if you are not technical, a weird thing that, like I'm the CEO of a software company, like it's weird to say I'm not technical, but you know, you know what I mean?
People use that term to mean that you're not an engineer.
Omer (09:39.680)
Right.
Laura Roeder (09:40.560)
What you have to offer is the sales marketing business side.
And I found that a lot of people on that side really overlook their talents and they think like, oh, I don't know how to code, I don't know how to do the important stuff.
But any developer that you've ever met has a bunch of projects they've created and put out and no one knew that they existed because they don't know how to do the marketing side or they don't know how to run a business.
I would just point out your skills are very valuable too.
And I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking, oh well, I'm going to offer the idea and then the other person's going to offer the code.
The idea is not really that valuable, but attracting customers to an idea is super valuable.
Omer (10:23.100)
What's your husband's name?
Laura Roeder (10:24.700)
Chris.
Omer (10:25.420)
Chris.
So what happened?
You came home one day and, and said to Chris, can you build a software product?
Laura Roeder (10:32.990)
Well, he's the one that really made me realize that the idea for a software product was there because it seemed like such an obvious idea to me.
I mean, at the Very minimum.
It was so weird to me that the social media tools didn't and still don't keep a library of your updates.
I thought even if you had to click to do the repeating part, why would they not just keep a library of what you've sent out?
I actually assumed that it must be just not possible.
I thought this is such an obvious idea that everyone wants.
It must be you can't build it or it's really hard to build.
I was really just talking to him about how frustrating it was that there was so much copying and pasting to be done.
It seemed really silly.
It seemed weird that the tools didn't do it.
He just said, well, I could build that.
And I said, great, build it.
Omer (11:24.270)
Okay.
And then how long did it take to build the first version of the product and get it in front of your first few customers?
Laura Roeder (11:34.830)
It took about six months part time work from the beginning to public release.
So we did have a few, you know, first we started using it just at our own company and then we had a few early friend testers during that period.
Omer (11:47.550)
Okay, I want to kind of dig into a little bit about how you kind of found those first, like, you know, 10 customers.
So beyond the people that you actually knew.
It's always really exciting, I think for anybody who builds any kind of product to have a stranger, somebody who's not their mother or a relative come along and you know, get out their credit card and pay for something.
So how did that happen for you?
Where did those people come from?
Laura Roeder (12:22.750)
So I had already been running the social media marketing training business for, I don't know, five or six years prior to that.
So I was not new to this world.
So when we launched Edgar, I had a 75,000 person email list, 30,000 Twitter following when we launched.
So we were not launching cold.
We had an audience to work with.
In retrospect, what was weird is that we didn't do a big launch.
We could have done to that audience a big launch and a big promotion and got hundreds or maybe even possibly thousands of customers in the door right away.
Instead, I had the idea, oh, we'll test different offers and so we'll segment the existing base based on what products they've bought before, if they've bought before.
And I think it's interesting because it's so easy with marketing to make it too complicated to think like, oh, I'm going to especially specialization.
People are really into this idea of, oh, I'm going to create a different funnel for people if they read this blog post, they're going to get custom content and then that's going to send them into a funnel related to that content.
All this stuff sounds great, but I've done it.
And what happens is you end up with 10 funnels and the manpower to improve none of them because you just don't have that much bandwidth, a small team.
And that's kind of the mistake I made there, thinking, like, oh, we're really going to hone in our offer by doing this different segment testing.
In retrospect, we would have been much better off just doing a big launch, possibly screwing it up, but getting as many people in the door from day one as possible.
Omer (14:08.500)
Why did you not want to take the big launch approach?
Was it because.
Was it because of what you just described in terms of how you wanted to structure the marketing, or was it also kind of based on getting a sort of a steady sort of trickle of new users in validating it, making sure that people are able to kick the tires and you were just comfortable that this product was ready for primetime?
Was that part of the reasoning?
Laura Roeder (14:41.420)
I mean, maybe that was a little bit kind of under the surface.
That wasn't the main thought at the time because we knew we had built it to be able to scale to a lot of users, and we felt pretty confident that we'd done a pretty good amount of testing.
I think I just had this idea in my head, oh, well, by segmenting these different offers, we're going to be able to find the perfect offer, the perfect phrasing.
And I think I also thought, well, maybe it would all shake out the same.
If we do five different offers to different segments, maybe that'll equal the same amount of customers that we would have done with a big public launch.
But there's just a momentum with the sharing and the excitement of one big launch, and that's what we lost.
Omer (15:26.370)
So you're doing over $4 million in annual recurring revenue at the moment.
It doesn't sound like it was such a big deal that you didn't do the big launch.
Laura Roeder (15:36.530)
No, no.
I mean, yeah, I don't feel like that ruined us in any way.
It's just like if I had to pick something to.
Omer (15:43.550)
I mean, totally.
I think there's.
Especially given the fact that you already had this existing audience and this huge email list.
It sounds like there was a potential to do a really quite a massive launch with a lot more fanfare and a lot more, I guess, create a lot more buzz very quickly for the product.
So maybe we would be talking here and Saying, oh, you know, you hit 4 million two years ago and now you're doing whatever.
Laura Roeder (16:13.840)
Yeah.
I mean, although it's only two and a half years old, if we'd hit 4 million six months after, that would be an incredible story.
I would love that.
I would be very happy.
Camper.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, there's.
What I see now after doing SaaS for a few years, is that because it's reoccurring revenue.
I mean, it sounds obvious, right?
But because it's reoccurring revenue, the sooner you get the customers, the sooner that reoccurring revenue starts up.
I think I didn't realize the power of that in the beginning, where I thought, if we have 100 customers in month one, or if we have them kind of doled out over the first few months, what's the difference, really?
Now I can see that there actually is a huge difference, because when you're bootstrapped and you're a SaaS company, if you can get 100 people in month one, well, now you have all of their reoccurring revenue in month two, which.
Which is a big deal.
Omer (17:10.770)
Right, Right.
So, okay, I want to talk a little bit about how you.
You built this audience.
I mean, getting a.
An email list of, what did you say, 75,000 people.
I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
I don't even know how you go about building an email list of.
Of that size.
What?
Yeah, I mean, tell me a little bit about that.
Like, how did you.
How did you do that?
I mean, so you talked about probably you would.
You were building this social media business for about four or five years.
Where did those email addresses come from?
Laura Roeder (17:50.340)
Well, so we've done it even more quickly with Edgar, and I think the most important thing about list building is really just to make list building your focus, where that's the main thing.
That's the main thing you want from visitors is their email address.
Because I don't have anything exciting to tell you.
The way that we built the list for the training business, the same way that we've built the list for Edgar, is content marketing, social media marketing.
We've definitely done some ads as well, but people have a misconception of how important the ads are.
They're not the main driver by a long shot of our acquisition.
And so I think the biggest difference isn't, like, in what marketing.
We kind of do the same marketing activities that anyone who does online marketing does, but something that we do really different at Edgar is email collection is our call to action.
On our homepage.
And we get around 10% of people who are visiting the homepage giving us their email address.
So it's just a much bigger focus.
Most people are collecting email on a little sidebar on the blog.
Maybe for us, that email marketing to me is how you sell something online.
And that's what we do.
Omer (19:09.490)
So you talked about content marketing, social media marketing and advertising.
So just ballpark, what percentage of leads come from those different areas?
Which area is which channel has been most effective for you to build that email list?
Laura Roeder (19:30.170)
I mean.
Well, our biggest category in Google Analytics is always direct, the mystery category, which I don't know if it's that way for everyone or if we're just especially unlucky.
So it's yeah, direct followed by search, followed by referral followed by social and ads.
So, you know, search is interesting now, right?
Because search isn't like its own standalone thing.
You know, social media plus content marketing plus paying some attention to what you're doing as far as the pages on your site add up to search.
So it's not even really that interesting to me to look at things segmented that way because it all feeds into each other.
Omer (20:14.520)
Let's kind of talk a little bit about the content marketing and just generally sort of what you've done there.
What's kind of your approach to creating content.
Is this something that, you know, are you kind of in the school of write long in depth posts or kind of and do less quantity?
Is it more about writing maybe slightly shorter content, but being much more consistent or regular about publishing?
You know, once or twice or three times a week?
I've been kind of looking through the blog and I know it looks like probably right now it's about a post a week in terms of the cadence, but has it always been like that?
And is, is that what's worked best for you, even from the early days?
Laura Roeder (21:01.410)
Yeah, so, I mean, it's actually not something we've experimented with too much.
We're about to start increasing the frequency now that we've hired another writer.
But we've posted once a week, We've sent out an email newsletter once a week.
We definitely pay attention to what gets shared the most and what gets the most traffic.
And I mean, if you look at our blog, it's really obvious we found kind of a niche which is just explaining the latest social media news and social media changes.
When Facebook, I think one of the latest ones was you can do Facebook live from your desktop and not just your mobile.
We break down how you use that for a small business.
What does that mean for you as a small business?
Is this something that's worth jumping in and spending your time on?
That's kind of become the focus of our blog because that's what's emerged as the most popular out of all the topics that we've tried.
But it's always a work in progress.
Omer (21:58.780)
Okay.
And then in terms of call to actions and getting people onto an email list, it looks like there are kind of two call to actions.
On the end of a blog post, there is usually something which asks people to join the newsletter and get updates that way.
And then I've seen across the site and on the homepage, a link to get your invitation for Edgar.
Are those the two sort of main call to actions that you've used to build that list?
Laura Roeder (22:32.310)
Yeah.
And the blog drives less than 10% of our list.
90% is from the homepage.
Request your invitation.
Omer (22:41.430)
Wow.
Do you think it's people kind of coming to the blog and then sort of going over to the homepage or people are just finding the homepage?
Maybe it goes back to that direct question in Google Analytics and saying where people are coming from.
Laura Roeder (22:55.230)
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a mix.
We have a lot of customer reviews that have been written about us, so people find us that way.
People find us on podcasts like this.
Some people click over from the blog, obviously.
Some people hear about us from a friend or hear someone mention us on social media and click from our Twitter profile.
Something that I think we've done well is I love that 90% comes from the homepage, because one, it's a really simple thing to do.
Have your best converting page be your homepage.
Because a lot of people, when they're doing list building, they're driving people to these little landing pages that no one can discover.
A lot of people, when they do Facebook ads are driving people to a landing page because they're like, oh, that one has our highest conversion and we're trying to get emails from our Facebook ads.
Well, why would you not make your homepage, which is the easiest to discover, your best converting page?
That's where I want everyone to opt in, because that's the easiest one for everyone to find.
I don't have to set up some special campaign for them to discover.
They can just go to our homepage.
It makes it really simple.
From our blog, from social media, when I'm on a podcast, I don't have to be like, oh, go to the special landing page to get the special gift.
It's just like Google us and go to our homepage.
And once you go there, if you're interested in Edgar, you'll opt in.
What's so great about the request invitation call to action is they're not asking to learn on a webinar, they're not asking for an ebook.
All those things are great list building, but you don't really know if they're interested in your software.
You know that they're probably a good lead because they're interested in your topic.
The people who have requested an invitation are like, I am interested in buying Edgar.
That's all they've asked for on the homepage.
Omer (24:46.800)
Right, right.
So I wanted to talk a little bit more about what you mentioned earlier with the segmenting because you know, anyone who has spent any time kind of thinking about marketing, you hear a lot about, you know, segmentation is important and some people kind of take it to almost an extreme in terms of, you know, hyper niche marketing.
And the more niche you can get, the more you're going to connect with your, your, your target or your prospective customer.
And, and you've said, well, we're not doing any of that or we, we kind of stopped doing that.
And so does how, how does that sort of work out?
Because I think I could look at this and say, well, you could get somebody who signs up here who is a kind of a solopreneur.
They kind of, you know, they're self employed, they run their own business and so maybe they have a certain set of problems and needs.
On the other hand, you could have somebody who, you know, it runs a 20 person marketing department and they may, they may sign up here and they will have different needs or different issues or different questions.
And so if you're kind of bringing all those people together into sort of one funnel and you're not really able to understand the differences between those types of customers or their needs.
How do you deal with that and how have you made sure that you're still able to say the right things to get those people to pay attention and to eventually get their credit card out?
Laura Roeder (26:30.370)
Yeah, so I mean you bring up so many interesting things there.
I mean one is that the more focused your product is, the easier this becomes.
So we recently eliminated different plans.
You can pay monthly or you can pay yearly.
We don't have different tiers of different plans.
We don't have the ability to add multiple users.
We're not built for managing multiple clients.
So we're not for agencies.
Right.
We're built for small businesses.
Yes, some People who use us are solopreneurs.
Some people have five person marketing teams, some people have much larger marketing teams.
It's being used by a segment of the company.
But we're clear on who we're created for.
So that just makes everything a lot easier.
Right, because we've decided we're not going to design the product for agencies.
We don't have to talk to agencies in our marketing and we also don't have to make any development decisions, any product decisions for agencies because we're super clear.
So that addresses a huge amount of what you're saying.
But of course there's still many different types of customers.
We don't have any kind of industry specialization.
So we see a huge range in the industries that our customers come from.
But I think a lot of the segmenting stuff is a little bit overrated and a little bit of fantasy that you're going to be able to write this email that connects so much better.
Like if you're genuinely solving different problems for different types of customers, that's one thing.
Or if you're selling, of course, totally different products to different customers.
But if you are just talking to a person who is the only person on the marketing team versus the social media person on a five person marketing team, what are you?
They're doing the same thing on social media.
Okay, maybe one has more time and one has less time.
But is that really going to be the thing that convinces them to buy your tool?
Because you mentioned that in the email.
You need to be clear on the one problem that you're solving and that's what you talk about in your communications.
And it sounds nice to have these different personalizations for different people.
But the reason it's great not to is just because you can make your funnels so much more effective.
Effective because we have one funnel that everyone goes through, it allows us to optimize it.
Right.
It's really easy to keep running tests on every stage of that funnel because we have the time to do that to make sure that the funnel that we're optimizing is our one and only best funnel.
And if you have four of them, it takes a really large team to, I mean, the upkeep of keeping them updated alone.
So many products like their email marketing is a little bit outdated.
It's hard, it's a big job to keep up with all this and to keep improving it.
I mean, most companies just don't even try.
Most companies with small marketing teams.
Omer (29:27.930)
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally hear you.
Because it can, it can get out of control very quickly.
And, you know, I've seen what some people have done on the back end with their email marketing, whether it's, you know, in infusionsoft or whatever the tool is that they're using.
And it's kind of like it's hard to even just understand what's going on, let alone think about, is there somebody actually looking at this stuff and paying attention and thinking about, is this stuff still relevant?
Or, you know, it's, it's just, it just.
I can see it becoming a big headache.
So I think it's really smart that you've done that.
And, and I think it's a great insight in terms of getting very clear about the problem that you're solving and just trying to focus around that.
Laura Roeder (30:20.720)
Yeah, I also wanted to mention about over segmenting.
It tends to push you into messaging people less when, like, almost all marketers need to be reaching out to people more.
You have to be on just the top end of the obnoxious scale to be, to be talking to people too much.
Because, you know, we've all heard this a million times, right?
We all know this.
We live this.
We're so inundated with messages because we're not opening all our emails.
I mean, you look at email marketing, if you have like 20, 25% open rate for your marketing messages, that's considered a great open rate.
So that means that 80% of people who have asked to be on your list did not.
Never saw your email.
Right?
Did not open your email.
So if you're doing all these detailed segments, it's like, well, if you're sending a message to these guys, you should send it to the other guys too.
We realized this with our product update.
We were sending out product updates to our customers and like, we should send product updates to everybody.
All these people are interested in Edgar.
Why aren't we telling our prospects that we have something new and exciting?
They probably want to know about that too.
So if we're tempted to just send out to a segment, we always ask ourselves, does this really need to be for just them?
Could this be for everyone?
Because it's just a way to create another touch point.
Omer (31:35.650)
One thing I wondered about was when you said you made the deliberate decision not to kind of focus on agencies or that type of business.
And I'm sure that for a lot of businesses, that would actually be an interesting path to further scaling and growing the business.
Because you've probably had agencies who've contacted you or your team saying, well, could you do this or if, you know, could we all log into the same account with different, you know, user profiles and stuff like that?
And could I kind of manage it so I can kind of, you know, manage the different accounts and access and stuff like that?
And I know it kind of adds a lot more headaches probably to sort of building the product.
But on the the other side, it potentially opens up another tier where instead of charging, how much are you charging these days now?
So it's $49 a month for Edgar.
Maybe there's a.
There's a $500 a month plan there.
So did you feel like maybe you were leaving money on the table by not going after some of those maybe bigger clients?
Customers?
Laura Roeder (32:46.240)
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
You're always leaving money on the table, right?
It's a phrase like, oh, you're leaving money on the table.
But yeah, every person who hasn't bought Edgar, sort of leaving money on the table, you know, and we've built a great product for small business that meets their needs, and we only have 7,000 of them using Edgar.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's more than 7,000 small businesses that would get value from Edgar in the city of Austin, where I live, or at least for sure in the state of Texas.
Right.
We could only focus on small businesses in Texas, and we would still have huge room to grow.
So it's like, this is the problem with going after different market segments too soon.
It's a totally valid way to grow.
But going after agencies, you now have different marketing messaging, you now have a totally different product.
You're probably going to have a sales team, which we don't have, because they want to talk to people on the phone and demo and do all that stuff.
They expect a different level of service.
You're just.
It's like another little business that you're adding on to your business.
So you just.
You have to know what you're getting into.
And I think if we have a marketing funnel that works for small business, we have a product that works for small business, why would we not keep growing that?
Omer (34:01.070)
Yeah, I love your.
Your clarity and your focus here because.
And I think this is a really, really valuable lesson for anybody who's listening, thinking, how can I get more customers?
And inevitably, that leads to conversations where you're adding a whole bunch of new features which will not appeal to everybody.
And then you start kind of almost building these kind of siloed versions of your product to kind of accommodate all these different people.
Right.
And it sounds like A idea.
But inevitably it also leads to a lot of headaches.
I mean, yeah, sure, there are, there are, you know, many businesses that do figure out how to make that work.
But I love the focus and, and almost goes to, I think sometimes there's almost a, a misconception that you can only grow to a seven or eight figure a year business.
Laura Roeder (35:01.810)
Right.
Omer (35:02.170)
If you do all of these things and you bring on all of these different types of customers and you've said, no, we're gonna, we're not going to do that.
We're happy with what we have and we, we can be more successful by focusing on those people and just doing a really great job for them.
And I love that.
It's, it's great.
And I kind of, I kind of also wondered whether I'd be able to convince you.
And you say, yeah, maybe we're thinking about it.
But no, I love how, how, you know, resolute you are about this.
Laura Roeder (35:30.300)
It's great.
Yeah, it's a very common thing to say, oh, you start in small business and then you move to bigger companies, then you move to enterprise.
But I know it's possible to just do small business.
I mean one, just because I have common sense and I know how many small businesses are out there.
But there are many companies that I admire that have already done it.
I love mailchimp.
They've built a. I don't know what it is.
This day is hundreds of millions of dollar business.
They have some bigger customers now, but they just introduced some specific enterprise features like two years ago.
They waited until now, and still their bread and butter is small business.
So I know that it's possible because I see the companies that have already done it.
Omer (36:13.900)
The other thing I wanted to talk about was what you did with your Facebook advertising.
And we talked a little bit about this before we started recording that.
As I recall, your Facebook ads were.
Well, let me kind of put it another way.
When you think about Facebook advertising, there are all these experts out there who will tell you all the things that you need to do and how you should set up your, your ads.
And you know, maybe you should be doing ab testing, maybe you should be doing retargeting and segmentation and all of those things.
We already talked about the segmentation, but your Facebook ads were nothing like that, right?
Laura Roeder (36:57.060)
Yeah.
Especially when you first launch.
There's so much low hanging fruit in paid advertising.
And I think a lot of companies think of paid acquisition as something that they're going to do later.
But I love paid acquisition in the Beginning, because content marketing and organic and search, that takes time to build up.
Right.
You're not going to show up for all these search terms right from day one, and you're not going to have a huge audience for your blog right from day one.
But you can make a deal with Facebook where you're like, facebook, I'm going to give you money, and then you're going to tell people about my startup, and they're like, yes, I'll take your money.
So that's a great thing to do from the beginning.
And our ads, when we started and we still run ads like this just said a new social media tool.
Check out Meet Edgar, a new social media tool.
And that works for a lot of industries.
It doesn't work for every industry, but for a lot of things, you have people who are interested in what you do.
Right.
If you open up a new golf course, people who play golf, just the fact that there's a new golf course that is interesting to them.
I'm interested whenever a new restaurant opens in my neighborhood, any kind of business that open.
Any business, actually, any business that is walking distance from my house, I am very actively interested in.
In knowing that exists.
And if you show me a message that says new restaurant in your neighborhood, like, I want to click, I want to read the menu.
I want to see what's going on.
So there are so many businesses that could at least just start on Facebook with just saying, hey, we have something new.
And what's so cool with Facebook is you can target people who want to see it.
Omer (38:31.830)
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that.
You know, in terms of, again, it's a reminder that you don't overcomplicate things if you don't have to.
And try to try the obvious things first before you start building, you know, 200 variations of ads and the retargeting and multiple funnels and all of that stuff, it's just, hey, run an ad on Facebook and say, here's a product.
Check it out.
And I guess you were sending people to your homepage, Right.
Which is why we get a lot of people there.
I also want to talk about pricing.
You charge $49 a month for Edgar, and I think for people who may be used to using other social media tools, may.
May kind of be more used to paying, I don't know, like, 10 bucks a month.
And so when you first started out and you launched, what kind of.
What was the reaction from people about the pricing?
And what did you.
What did you learn from that?
Laura Roeder (39:33.310)
Yeah, and our pricing is actually that's the price.
If you pay annual, if you pay monthly, it's 79amonth at the time of this recording.
So it's interesting because on social media tools there's so many different.
There's so many different tools and there are a lot of tools out there that are completely free.
Yeah, there are a lot of tools that have a plan or the whole tool is in the $10 a month range.
The business tools and the professional tools are actually generally starting at 100amonth.
That's true for Sprout Social Buffer, a lot of the tools out there, but a lot of them have free plans.
So it's been interesting to us because people definitely do compare us to both.
Like we get compared to the hundred plus a lot and we get compared to the free a lot.
So when we launched, it was very deliberate that we wanted to let people know that we were a business tool.
So we were very clear that we didn't want to be in that like sub $20 a month range because that didn't feel like the right range for a business tool.
That felt like the right range for like using social media for a hobby or maybe a blog or something like that.
And that's not where we wanted to position ourselves.
Omer (40:43.310)
Okay.
So in some ways you kind of segmented your potential customers anyway there.
Right.
Without all the, the complication in the back end in terms of, you know, if, if you are a business user, probably paying 50 bucks a month or $79 a month, whatever it is, is not going to be so much of an issue once you understand how much time you can save and.
Laura Roeder (41:10.910)
Right.
Omer (41:11.270)
The value that you get from this.
And if you are somebody who is primarily price driven and paying more than 10 bucks a month is something that you're not totally happy with, then you probably aren't the right type of customer for this.
So I guess you don't really have to spend a lot of time convincing people either the price works for you or it doesn't.
Laura Roeder (41:34.500)
Well, Exactly.
And if $50 a month feels like a huge expense for you, like your business is brand new or you're not really making money yet, and we all started there, you know, don't get me wrong, but for any business that's kind of, I don't know, making a full time income, $50 a month is a very reasonable expense.
So we feel like that's a, you know, we're not too scared to, to cut off that segment.
Omer (41:59.819)
One other thing I wanted to ask you was about the team.
And so you have about 25 people.
I understand.
How.
How is that sort of working out?
Are you kind of like hiring?
Are you still hiring and growing pretty quickly?
Laura Roeder (42:15.640)
Well, actually, we hired so much last year, so our plan is to slow it dramatically or stop it for a lot of departments this year.
And we did that deliberately because we saw that hiring was just really.
Because we doubled our team size last year and everyone was just so sick of interviewing.
It was taking up so much of our team's time because we have a pretty in depth process.
Everyone goes through three interviews and they interview with people outside of their department.
So it really involves a lot of people on our team.
Everyone does a test project.
So we decided this is taking up so much time.
Let's just try to front load this as much as possible and make our 2017 hires in 2016 and just get it done.
So we'll have a few trickle in.
But the longer I've run this, the more I've seen that you kind of have to hire ahead of time.
And we definitely hired too slowly.
For the first year and a half, we were really behind.
Our development team was two people for a really embarrassingly long time because it was a little scary.
Running a bootstrap business that's doing well, I feel like, is hiring.
Is it like this hubris that I'm going to regret?
Sure, we're growing now, but are we going to be growing in a year?
And I've just found when you're bootstrapped, you just kind of have to take those leaps of faith because otherwise you're going to fall behind and you're not going to keep up with your business growth with your team.
Omer (43:50.170)
Yeah, that's very good advice.
Okay, let's get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Laura Roeder (43:58.730)
All right.
Omer (43:59.370)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Laura Roeder (44:03.050)
You're not the only person in the world that can do things, let other people do things.
Omer (44:07.630)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Laura Roeder (44:11.230)
Scaling up by Verne Harnisch.
Because it's like a how to textbook on the day to day of how to run a business.
Omer (44:18.110)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Laura Roeder (44:23.390)
Internal locus of control.
I don't know.
Google it if you're not familiar.
But basically, having an internal locus of control means that you believe that you control the outcomes in your life and that that's important for an entrepreneur.
That's something we look for in Every person on our team.
Omer (44:39.460)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Laura Roeder (44:46.260)
Tech cutoff.
It's more of a getting to bed habit, but I do tech cutoff at 9pm So I can't be on phone or computer or anything after nine.
Omer (44:55.620)
I like that one.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Laura Roeder (45:01.470)
I've always wanted to do like a head massage.
It's like a salon but where you only get your head massaged so you don't have to like take off your clothes or go through the whole rigmarole.
Because I feel like a head massage is a huge percentage of a good massage.
Omer (45:16.990)
I would go to that.
I'd be your first customer.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Laura Roeder (45:25.630)
I have no hobbies and my husband says that I'm the most boring person in the world and all I like is best.
Omer (45:35.050)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Laura Roeder (45:40.010)
My son.
I have a two year old son and he's pretty important.
Omer (45:44.570)
Wow.
So he was born around.
He's almost the same age as Edgar.
Laura Roeder (45:48.570)
Yeah, I was pregnant when we launched Edgar.
I took three months off maternity leave like six months into the company.
Omer (45:55.370)
Wow.
Laura Roeder (45:56.250)
Yeah.
Omer (45:56.890)
Cool.
Laura, I want to thank you.
I really appreciate you making the time and sharing the story of Meet Edgar.
I love, I love your focus.
I love the kind of the clarity that you've kind of have vision that you have about the product and the business and I think the, the results that you are driving with the business is just kind of a evidence of, of that paying off of, of what you're reaping and sowing or so.
But you know what I mean.
So if folks want to find out more about Edgar, they can go to meetedgar.com and you can sign up for an invitation there.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Laura Roeder (46:40.870)
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter, KR or I blog at my name auraroder.com awesome.
Omer (46:47.750)
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
I'm glad I finally got the chance to chat with you and I wish you all the best with Meet Edgar.
Laura Roeder (46:55.750)
Thank you, Omer.
Omer (46:56.790)
Cheers.
