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 James Deere, who's the co founder of a software company called Gather Content.
And in this episode, James shares with me how they transform their business from a design agency to a successful software as a service business that's already generating $50,000 every month in recurring revenue.
So with that, let's bring on James.
I'm absolutely delighted to introduce my guest today.
James is the co founder of gathercontent, a UK based content development platform that helps agencies plan and produce web content for their clients.
James founded the company with his wife in 2010 and gather content now has close to 700 customers across 100 countries.
So James, welcome to the show.
James Deer (01:21.730)
Thanks for having me, Emma.
I appreciate that.
Omer (01:24.050)
Now I've told the audience just a little bit about you.
Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and give us an overview about your product and business.
James Deer (01:33.330)
Yeah, okay.
Yes.
Where do I start?
I guess my wife and I, we run the business together and we live, we live in London, we've got a small daughter.
So kind of managing the whole startup thing alongside having a 50 month old baby is definitely challenging.
Prior to starting Gather Content, we actually founded a digital agency together.
And through that we kind of realized that there was a big pain we had as a company which eventually turned into Gather Content.
And I suppose we can kind of get into that stuff in a little bit.
Omer (02:11.880)
Just explain to our audience a little bit more about how Gather Content will solve a problem for one of your customers.
James Deer (02:18.990)
So if you're an agency, so say for example, you work for say an ad agency or a digital agency and you're engaged with a customer, client, sorry, and that client wants you to build them a new website or redesign an existing website.
That website obviously needs content and prior to people using other content, the way they'd manage that would be through collecting all of that content in say Google Docs or Word or some people would put it all into a spreadsheet, believe it or not, and you kind of have all this content that was really difficult for multiple people to work on.
So in a sense where you've got Google Docs that multiple people can edit, say a document at one time, we kind of built a product where you kind of have that functionality, but also the workflow that goes around it.
So in a Word document or a Google Doc, you can't set a due date and a deadline.
There's no idea of or there's no concept of workflow.
So for example, if I wanted to say, okay, I need you to go into the Google Docs drive, or the Google Drive is called these days.
You need to go and work on everything that says ready for OMA to review.
It's just really difficult to do that kind of thing.
So what we decided was there just had to be a way where our clients could alert us once their drafts were ready.
And then the copywriters that we would put into the system, they could then alert the designers that the copyright is ready to go into the design work or the developers.
So it's kind of this idea of agencies being able to move their clients for a process that's really efficient instead of wrestling with all these kind of various Word documents.
Omer (03:59.010)
Before we get into more details about Gather Content and where you started, we like to kick things off with a success quote just to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
So do you have a favorite success quote?
James Deer (04:12.770)
No, surprisingly, I don't really.
I mean, I don't really read business books.
I buy them, but reading them is another quote.
So yeah, I wouldn't say I have a kind of a quote that jumps to mind, but I kind of feel like I'm just someone that's very results orientated and I think that I just genuinely, really passionate about creating and building businesses and I just love to problem solve.
And I think that especially now that we have, now that we have this young daughter, it really kind of puts, it really kind of gives everything a purpose.
Whereas before, you know, before we had the baby, it was very much kind of, you know, we'd be working, I don't know, 90% of our time would be working.
You know, even on weekends it would be if, you know, if we weren't working, we'd be thinking and talking about work and how we can improve the things that we're doing and, you know, how we can get that client or that customer.
And I think that, yeah, having a daughter really kind of, although it's still difficult, I really kind of feel like it kind of centers you, it kind of gives you a focus as to life is short and life, there's more to life than just work.
Omer (05:29.719)
Okay, James, so let's take a journey together back to your early days and explore how you got started.
First of all, tell me, where did the idea for Gather Content come from?
James Deer (05:41.340)
There was this big pain when we were working with our clients around getting content together for their websites.
We'd be building websites for oil and gas companies up in Aberdeen in Scotland.
Through that, we just realized that the content side of our project, so the design and development stuff, that was relatively easy, but actually working with these big companies and pulling together all the content was a really big challenge.
Especially when you're dealing with all these Word documents and spreadsheets and you've got files coming in or CDs, and you've got zip files in your inbox, and there's kind of no context to any of this stuff.
So we just kind of felt that there had to be a better way, and we were searching for solutions, and there just wasn't anything out there.
I mean, there was a couple of tools that you could probably kind of retrofit, I guess, but there was nothing that was actually specifically built for that situation.
Omer (06:29.780)
So what did you do when you had that idea?
Did you go out and start validating that with potential customers?
Did you go out and build something?
What was the next step that you took?
James Deer (06:42.110)
So after we.
So we basically, we had the idea.
I literally spent probably a day just mocking up some quick Photoshop files.
And then I.
So we.
So we were.
Yes.
I'm trying to think back.
It's been so long.
So, yeah, we kind of went through that and we were trying toying with the idea for a while, kind of looking for a solution.
And then we kind of had that project I was talking about where there's several hundred pages across six languages.
And for us, that was kind of the tipping point of, okay, we need to build this for ourselves.
And once we kind of got it into a very early stage alpha, and we were kind of having some success with our clients and using it, I went around a few local agencies and just kind of talked to them about the idea.
I showed them these kind of screenshots.
And because the prototype and the screenshots kind of looked a little bit different, I kind of took that round and got some good responses.
And then before we kind of did anything else about, I was like, well, that's good, but speaking to four or five companies, I probably need to do a little bit more.
So I essentially organized a bunch of Skype calls.
So on LinkedIn at the time, I think you can still do it.
You can message people that you're in the same group with, even if you're not connected.
I just went through a load of sort of digital kind of agency groups, web design Groups and looked for other agency owners that can or would potentially have the problem.
And again, just kind of spoke to them and it just seemed like everybody, there were just themes emerging that we were onto something and there was definitely a problem here and it was something that definitely people were.
It was kind of like one of these things that wasn't.
People didn't really realize it was a problem until we actually spoke to them about it.
And they were kind of a light bulb moment going.
Actually, you know what, we do waste a God load of time on organizing the client's content.
So I'd say yes, we definitely did some customer development, although I didn't realize that's what I was doing at the time.
It was more just kind of conversations with people.
So we continued to kind of build out this alpha into a kind of a private beta where we just invited a few of these people to kind of get their initial opinions on what they thought, the idea and how they worked kind of conceptually, what they thought about the way the product work and how we kind of structured things.
The feedback was really, really good.
And then from that we took the private beta.
So I think at the time we probably had 20 or so companies using the private beta.
Whilst we were doing that, we kind of just had this landing page that was up.
It was a very poor landing page, but basically just kind of explained what it was, what problem we were solving.
And a little opt in thing saying get my beta invite.
I think we managed to get that up to about 1000 or so email addresses.
That was just through tweeting and again, looking at our personal networks and again just having lots of conversations asking people to refer us.
Do you know anybody I can talk to about this problem?
Because most agency owners know other agency owners.
So yeah, we kind of got to this point where we had about 1,000 people on the list and then we just decided to open the floodgates and just invite them all in.
In hindsight I wouldn't have done it that way, but that's what we ended up doing.
And just the response was really great.
And obviously it was buggy and the software was arguably still really kind of crappy back then, but it just, you know, we were just kind of blown away.
And then we kind of looked at the active user count throughout this.
I think it must have been about three months that we were running the public beta for and the active user account.
Yeah, it was just going up and up.
Omer (10:27.900)
So when you approach these agencies on LinkedIn or through referrals, what kind of conversation did you have with them?
Were you using that as an opportunity to explore the problems they were having, or were you just looking to get feedback on the product, or were you making a pitch to try and sell the product?
How did you approach that?
James Deer (10:45.730)
So the way that I got the conversation was I'd love some feedback on the product that I'm building.
Agency owners, I found, tend to be quite open to looking at new, interesting things.
But then when I was on the call with them, I would kind of talk to them about how many projects do you have running at any one time and what your process is like, how do you guys work?
What kind of inefficiencies do you have?
The questions weren't as blunt as these, but I'd kind of just delve in and kind of keep asking, why?
Why do you work like that?
Why does that happen?
Why unhappy clients unhappy?
And just kind of just delve my way in and just have these conversations.
And there was no real plan structure to them.
I guess I'm just somewhat inquisitive.
And again, because at the time, I was really interested in the way that agencies ran.
It was just more of a, okay, you know, let's just have a general chat about agency life and how you do things, how we do things, which would kind of lead into the content conversation around.
Okay, so, you know, how do you manage content with your clients?
You know, and the answers would be anything from Word Documents to, you know, we have text files inside folders and Dropbox.
You know, we literally, you know, some.
Some clients that, you know, we had a client who, who literally came around with a big box of their printed marketing material saying, hey, you can use this for the website content.
So, you know, there's.
Yeah, so there's just.
It just.
It was just obvious to us, I guess, do you know that there was a problem?
And again, the more people I spoke to, I must have spoken to.
I mean, there's.
Obviously, there's lots of posts and articles and information on this stuff these days, but I think back then I think I must have spoke to probably 30 or 40 different people, and maybe just for an.
Most of it was over Skype as well.
So it wasn't kind of, you know, I wasn't traveling to meet people.
And again, it was just through, you know, at the end of the conversation.
I don't suppose, you know, any other agency owners in your.
In your area that I could chat with and, you know, learn about the way they work.
And most people would, you know, would make those kind of Referrals for us.
So yeah, I mean, what was kind of interesting at this point, what I would do now is I would have all those conversations before we built anything.
But because we were having the problem ourselves, we were kind of building the product as we were having these conversations.
Now obviously customer development these days is still really important, but I think what was happening at the time was it was just kind of cementing the fact that the product we were building was worth building.
Omer (13:19.880)
So had you been doing any software development with your agency or was this something new that you had started to do?
And if so, how did you go about doing that?
James Deer (13:31.240)
So, yeah, the agency.
So we have programmers within the agency and we were fortunate enough to be very profitable.
So we essentially brought on a junior developer that would pretty much spend 75% of his time just digging away our features list.
Don't get me wrong, the code was not great back then, but it was more just concepts of, okay, well we didn't really need to worry about scale or anything like that.
It didn't have to be blazing fast or anything back then.
We were just kind of again, just building the features and seeing if people were using them and getting feedback on them.
So we were really fortunate that, that we had the cash to kind of go, okay, let's make an investment in hiring a developer.
My background's design, so I could do all the design work in my spare time side of client work.
So yeah, we just kind of invested and just kind of decided, you know what, let's just bring on a developer to kind of take it forward.
Because initially the prototype was built, the very, very initial prototype was built kind of just in maybe a couple of spare hours a day from one of our developers.
And then it got to a point where we were running the public beta or the private beta and we were like, okay, let's just bring on a full time developer to kind of pick up momentum with the project.
Omer (14:52.280)
And how long did it take you to get those thousand email subscribers from your landing page?
James Deer (15:00.440)
It was quite quick, actually.
I'd say a few months.
I think the reason for that was because we were kind of talking about it loads.
I mean, what ended up happening for.
I'd probably say, I don't know, 500 of them.
Smashing Mag somehow, which is a big kind of, I don't know if you're familiar with Smashing magazine, but it's kind of a big publication in the web community.
Somehow they kind of got a hold of the landing page and they tweeted, oh, this looks interesting link and then we noticed that tweet, and then we looked at our kind of campaign monitor subscriber stats.
Literally, I think within probably three or four hours, there was hundreds of people that joined the list.
But yeah, I mean, back then, again, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a planned thing.
It's kind of.
It just happened, you know, it happened naturally.
And obviously, you know, that's kind of down to a little bit of luck.
Obviously, you know, we were working hard and talking about the product to people on Twitter.
So somewhere along the way, someone at Smashing Mag kind of picked up on one of those conversations.
But again, you know, these days, kind of, I would, I would actively or I guess proactively kind of go and approach these kind of industry, you know, whatever your, you know, whatever your products or services, go and buddy up with as many people that work at these kind of, you know, hangouts for your audiences as possible so that, you know, if it's a tweet or you're able to kind of get a guest article on there or, you know, there's always something, if you're persistent enough that, you know, you can do.
Omer (16:27.269)
Let's talk a little bit more about what you were doing during the beta.
Now, I used to call that beta 2 when I lived in England, but now I've moved to the US So I have to say beta.
So what were you doing during that time and were you charging any customers for using the product?
James Deer (16:47.200)
No, not during the beta, we weren't.
Again, in hindsight, we would have.
But yeah, I think at that time it was.
It was just literally having phone calls with people that were using it.
We took metrics quite seriously from the get go.
So we were measuring activity.
I mean, there wasn't any kind of magic thing we were doing.
It was just being persistent in terms of talking to the active user base.
Obviously, when it's public beta or beta.
You're confusing me now.
When it's public beta and it's free, it's a really easy way to get people in the door because people like to try this stuff out.
There wasn't anything special we did.
We were just building the product, listening to our customers, talking to our customers about the features.
Again, at that point, we were still building it for ourselves, for the clients and things that we have for the agencies.
So all this stuff wasn't totally new to us.
And then we'd kind of get these kind of odd use cases come in.
I think someone started writing a book in the product and things like that.
But yeah, we were just kind of listening and again, just like really short iterations on the features, improving them, just really improving the ux.
And again, even kind of obviously looking back, it was still a terrible product back then, but people were receptive.
And I think one thing that we've kind of done in the company is even though we are a low cost product and the way that we work is obviously to have many customers paying a relatively low monthly fee, we try to be as proactive and as human and develop relationships with these people as much as we possibly can.
So that's kind of something we've always stuck with.
You might use SaaS products where you very rarely hear from the company, aside of maybe their monthly newsletter or whatever.
We're very, very, very proactive and kind of always have been in the customers that use our product and getting to know them.
Because the thing is, when you're doing that kind of thing, asking for case studies six months down the line becomes no issue because they know who you are.
It's not completely out of the blue.
You've checked in with them, you've maybe given them demos or training, you've had conversations with them about the feedback that they've given in, if they've got problems.
I think the average response time to a support ticket that we have is I think it's about 40 seconds or something silly like that.
Wow.
We just are just obsessive over.
Obviously not every ticket can be that quick.
But even if it's someone just saying, hey, look, I'm running into this problem, there's an error or something's not working the way I expect it to, what we tend to be is like, hey John, really sorry about this, I'm going to be investigating right away because what a lot of companies will do is they will take that ticket, they won't respond, they'll spend 24 hours investigating and then they'll get back to a customer, which I think it's fine.
But for us, I think it's just we definitely have seen to build a reputation around just really fantastic customer support and that's really important for everybody in the company.
So from me as a founder through to our development team, everyone's kind of on the ball when it comes to making sure customers feel like that.
We've kind of been saying recently, it's like when you kind of come on board with gathercontent, it's like you're going for a five star hotel experience which all of your needs are kind of anticipated.
And when they're not, they're dealt with very kind of quickly.
We kind of just sort of say to ourselves, well, if we can maintain a five star hotel experience for all of our customers, which is difficult at times, then those people are only going to talk about us.
And that's kind of what we're finding is a lot of our growth is word of mouth, which is fantastic.
Omer (20:39.540)
That sounds like a great philosophy and a way to run a business.
But looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
James Deer (20:49.460)
Not charging for the beta?
I think that's probably the biggest.
I think that we, I mean, arguably, you know, even with kind of, I think we, I think we launched out of the gate with 100 paying customers, but we could have had revenue coming in sooner, I think is what the bottom line is.
And I think that again, because obviously when you're validating a free product, which is what it was in the beta, we were kind of looking at the launch day and thinking, oh my God, I hope all these people pay.
Whereas if we would have been, if we'd have been kind of having that pricing conversation up front, even if it had been a beta discount or whatever, we'd have come up with, up with charging for it would have definitely taken away some of the anxiety and it would have definitely meant that we 100% knew that we were building the right thing.
Whereas I think the way that we did it, there was definitely a level of uncertainty.
I mean, I think that we were quite fortunate in that we were fixing a problem that a lot of people have.
But yeah, I think it would have kind of taken away that 25% of uncertainty and anxiety that we had kind of coming up to the launch day.
And I think that for anyone else kind of building a product that it is in the early stages of, I think that charging ASAP will make sure that you are building the right thing.
Because you might have a bunch again, if you're in public beta and it's a beta and it's free, you might have all the free customers that are using a certain portion of the software where the paying customers want a different part of that software.
So you might have this kind of unbalance of where certain people are willing.
Sorry, where certain people are seeing the value.
So all of your free customers may be seeing the value over here, but actually where.
And you know, because of that, you're seeing all these free people using that, you're spending your efforts building that out and improving that.
Where if the people that are actually willing to pay for the software are getting value from a different portion of the product.
Really, that's where you should be spending your time.
Again, that's a very kind of simplified version of what reality is actually like.
But it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely the biggest mistake that we made, I think, was not charging sooner.
But back then I just don't think that there was, you know, there was as much advice on it, or at least I wasn't exposed to as.
As much as I wasn't exposed to as much advice as there is kind of these days on all these type of topics.
Omer (23:20.410)
Now, when did you get your first 100 paying customers and how did you go about charging for the product?
James Deer (23:28.810)
We literally.
So obviously these people were using the beta.
We sent an email out, I think it was August 1, 2012.
So we founded the company in 2010, but basically it was just a couple of years of very slow development.
And then kind of six months prior to the paid launch is kind of when we really ramped it up.
So we say we kind of, you know, we launched commercially in some September 2012, two years ago.
So on the August and the month before, we sent out an email to all the users saying we're planning on charging in a month's time.
Here are the pricing options, just so they were completely, they completely understood what was happening and that was it really.
And then what we did was in September, we switched everybody over to a 30 day free trial and then it literally was just nail biting, waiting for those 30 day free trials to end and watching the revenue come in because you're sitting there like, oh, gosh, I hope these people pay for the product.
And in our case we were lucky that they did.
But had we charged early, we wouldn't have had that issue.
But yeah, we just sent out an email.
We just made it very clear to people, look, we need to make a business out of this.
We've got people working on this, set the expectations for the pricing.
We gave a beta discount as a thank you for everybody that participated in the beta and that was it.
And we just, we just sent out the email and then the 30 day trials started expiring and fortunately the customers started rolling in.
Omer (24:56.300)
So you've got a product in market and some customers and you want to keep growing.
So how did you go about getting even more customers then?
James Deer (25:08.300)
That's a really good question.
So in the early days and even now, we still don't have, we still don't put huge amounts of effort into the marketing, but we can Kind of get to that in a bit.
But back then it was heavily word of mouth, really heavily word of mouth.
Because again, there wasn't a product out there back then that was solving this problem.
So, you know, we'd be speaking to all of these new customers that were signing up and I think we kind of had.
So we launched in September, I think we had probably close to 250 by Christmas that year.
And it was just.
Everyone was, oh, yeah, I heard about it from this agency.
I heard about it from this agency or I saw you mentioned on Twitter or saw someone talking about you on Twitter.
We did things like we tested.
What did we do?
It was with Smashing Mag.
We bought some ad space with Smashing Mag that just, you know, I think we paid about.
Would it be in dollars?
About 1,000 pounds.
So about $1,600 I think we spent on smart placements there.
That failed miserably.
So that was a complete waste of.
Waste of money.
What else did we do?
There was lots of still.
I was still connecting with people on LinkedIn quite a lot.
So it's still quite a manual process.
And again, it was.
Even though we were launched at that point, it was, hey, I'd still have some feedback on my product.
We've just launched.
It would be really great to just see what you think.
And I did that.
I must have probably messaged individually, painstakingly, probably a couple of thousand people on LinkedIn project managers.
And it wasn't just agency owners now.
It was kind of slowly understanding the types of people that got the benefit from the product and slowly building out the different Personas around how.
Because with our product, there's different people that kind of touch the process at different stages.
So you have the web designers, you have the project managers, you have the copywriters, obviously, you have the client side, you have the agency owners.
So there's all these different people that are floating around that we could be talking to about the product and then they would know people.
But yeah, I'd say largely word of mouth.
I suppose you can kind of engineer word of mouth to a certain level.
Another thing that we took, another thing we took quite seriously was just our blogging efforts.
So week in, week out would be blogging, which I suppose these days is called content marketing.
Just blogging about different kind of agency processes, just offering advice on how to get content and organize content from your clients and just kind of looking, taking on all the kind of initial customer development discussions that is done, kind of taking from that things to talk about and just talking to customers and kind of like what kind of things can we help you with?
So it would be things from how do I get my clients to agree to a tone of voice guidelines?
So then we'd write a post on, okay, how to get your clients to use the tone of voice guidelines that you set up through to schedule content planning, how to plan the content, how to set up the information architecture, kind of all these topics that relate to the research and the content, kind of planning and production phases of a web project.
So we kind of made sure that we were pretty consistent with that stuff.
Yeah, and there wasn't again, it was just, I think there was kind of no silver bullet.
And again, I'm still kind of learning that now it's just layer upon layer of just small things.
And I think obviously it depends on the product and kind of the space you're entering and how much competition you have and things like that.
But for us it was more just manually trying to get the word out there.
We sponsored a couple of conferences as well, which was quite nice.
I think that it was good fun and I definitely think it was beneficial.
But financially the return wasn't there at all.
It was very expensive.
It was good to meet some of our customers in person.
But I think for a relatively low priced, high volume software as a service product, IT conference sponsorship, I think you can kind of get creative with that.
Rather than kind of spending the 2, 3, 4, 5,000 pounds or even dollars of cash to kind of be there with a little stand, I think you can kind of grab a couple of tickets, go there with T shirts on and just have the ambition or have to go, I guess, to speak to as many people as you can.
Something that we're seeing success in now, which is kind of cool, is that we're partnering with commerce conferences and we're just giving away free licenses to the product because they all kind of do competitions and things at conferences.
So you know a conference, look, have three yearly subscriptions that you can give away to your attendees in exchange for our logo being on the kind of the logo loop that they have between talks and just a link back from the website, which is working quite well.
But yeah, back then I think it was just be really persistent, just talk to as many people as you can.
And I think again, and it's just like the sooner you understand who your customer is, the quicker you can focus your efforts to speak to the right people.
Initially, when we kind of started out, we kind of covered both agencies and in house web teams.
But what we Kind of relatively quickly learned was that agencies were our ideal customer because they would stick around for longer because they would have multiple projects running at any one time.
Which means that they wouldn't catch cancel after a project ends.
Where at the moment we kind of see that an in house web team, or even back then seeing an in house web team, they would probably cancel after say eight, nine, ten months, maybe a year once their project is finished.
Because that's kind of the nature of our product.
It's quite cyclical at the moment, which is quite interesting.
But yeah, back then I think I'm just trying to think.
Another thing that we did that was quite successful actually was we just launched a book giveaway.
We called it the Content Strategist's Bookshelf.
I literally went to every publisher that was selling books on the topic and said, hey, we're running a giveaway.
Any chance we can get a couple of free copies of your books?
And surprisingly, they all gave us free copies of the books.
We didn't even have to pay for shipping.
So we kind of had about a stack, I think it must have been about 10 books.
And the idea was that to enter, you give us your email address and you tweet, tweet a link.
And that went for a community of the size that we serve that went viral, so to speak.
So we got hundreds and hundreds of people that entered the competition.
Let me say it's probably a few thousand actually.
And from that, obviously we got customers that kind of learned about us through entering the competition.
But yeah, again, there's no silver bullet.
I just think, you know, especially, especially nowadays, I think there's so much marketing advice out there and I think you just have to realistically look at what time you have available.
There's a saying that my co founder has, my wife.
I'm trying to think what it is.
It's like lowest resource, highest impact, so what can you be doing where you're spending as little time that has the highest impact?
And that's definitely something, I think even now we kind of try and prioritize all of our marketing tasks and campaigns around.
Okay, so if we were to do say a weekly T shirt giveaway, what's the, you know, okay, so what's involved in actually doing that?
So you've got to get the T shirts designed, you've got to get them printed, you've got to set up a process for shipping them out every week.
You've got to have the software in place to collect all of the email addresses and determine a winner every week.
And then you kind of got to think about, okay, so we do that.
Realistically, how many email addresses are we going to get every week that we can begin to nurture?
So then you're able to weigh that up.
And then when you kind of plot it like that against another initiative that you could do, it kind of makes life a little bit easier in terms of, okay, well, right now we should actually be writing this ebook that we can repurpose and you know, put in all of these different places that will actually send traffic directly to back to our homepage and get trial signups.
Omer (33:18.300)
For example, how much revenue are you generating at the moment?
James Deer (33:21.780)
We're doing just under $50,000 a month right now.
Omer (33:26.900)
So what's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
James Deer (33:32.260)
The amount of things that we can do to grow the business that we haven't done.
That is 100% the thing that gets me out of bed every morning and makes me, you know, I've got a fire in my stomach to get to work.
Omer (33:44.500)
Now, I know you recently relaunched your marketing website and saw a tremendous increase in your conversion rates.
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
James Deer (33:54.020)
Yeah.
So back in April, we launched a redesign of our marketing site that we probably put about six months of effort into.
And you wouldn't think that by going to visit it right now, which is@gathercontent.com but we launched it.
And then for us, any kind of marketing stuff we do tends to take about 30 days or so to see the kind of revenue and the financial result because of the free trial that we offer.
So we offer a 30 day free trial.
So we launched in April.
We noticed an instant kick of trial sign up.
So we managed to basically launch this new marketing site and essentially increase our monthly new customers paying customers by 50%.
That literally took us from getting probably around, probably around 50 customers a month to 80 or so.
Omer (34:49.020)
Do you know what the key factor was that drove that increase in your conversion rate?
James Deer (34:53.020)
Back in January of this year, we made a decision around who our ideal customer was.
As I've mentioned before, that's for us, that's people that work within digital agencies who work with clients.
Before that, we were kind of broad where we'd be like, we're a product for web teams, whether you work in an agency or an in house team.
So we kind of made that decision to say, okay, we're 100% solely focusing for the foreseeable future on that one kind of vertical, which was agency people.
And then from that, once you kind of make that decision to be that focused, you're never trying to.
You're never trying to cover more than one camp in terms of the way that you're communicating the product and the messaging.
So one of the biggest challenges we have was with the usage of the word clients, because obviously in house, teams don't have clients, they have stakeholders.
So what it meant for us was actually we could drop all of that pressure and that thinking throughout all of our marketing materials and just focus on the problems that we know agencies have, how we fit in terms of the value chain of the different tools and things that agencies use.
It really kind of brings into focus all of the potential partner opportunities that we have.
So really kind of going with this idea of, okay, agencies, we understand you, we've been there, you are our ideal customer, and we're going to focus on getting you to sign up and pay for our product.
Omer (36:18.940)
All right, James, now it's 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 possible.
Are you ready?
James Deer (36:27.490)
Yeah, let me just have a sip of water.
One sec.
There we go.
Right.
Okay.
It sounds quite intense.
Let's do it.
Omer (36:34.810)
Great.
Let's do it.
What's the best piece of business advice you ever received?
James Deer (36:40.250)
Always.
Always be worrying about the cash, because cash is king.
And that sounds really cliche, but so many people I speak to are burning for investment or they're burning through their savings and cash really does speak louder than anything else in business.
Always be selling.
Omer (37:03.170)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
James Deer (37:07.250)
One that I read recently, which led us to, or say recently probably, I don't know, about six months ago, was remote, no office required by 37 signals.
And that book led us to the decision that actually we will be a fully distributed remote team.
And I think it's kind of for anyone that's kind of in the earlier stages where perhaps you maybe have a couple of teammates or you're in the process of hiring them or you're thinking about it, I think it really does open up the potential of hiring people elsewhere versus kind of just looking at your doorstep.
And one of the biggest things we noticed was just the amount of disruptions and distractions.
It goes down so much when you're remote because you've not got someone all the time sitting next to you that you can fall into a conversation with.
So the output of the company, when we went remote and people started Working from home or coffee shops or wherever they wanted.
Productivity just shot straight up.
Omer (38:09.760)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
James Deer (38:16.720)
Drive, I think, I think you need, I think, drive.
I think that just having that drive where no matter what's thrown at you, you're just able to keep going when you're feeling.
When you're six.
We've had maybe not so much in this business, but our previous business.
There were some close calls around cash flow and things like that, but just being able to kind of remain focused and keep that drive when things are tough, that you're able just to kind of keep going and overcome those, kind of.
Of overcome anything that comes at you.
Omer (38:50.650)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
James Deer (38:56.650)
Trello.
We literally run our lives and business on Trello and those who are not familiar with it.
Basically Trello is a to do list manager, but essentially you have boards and every board has multiple to do lists.
So you might have to do, doing, done, or you can kind of customize that.
So we have it set up for agile, for our marketing and for our product.
We use it for our life things.
For example, I know right now that I've got to fix some of the curtains in our apartment and my wife Alice makes sure that that's updated with plenty of things for me to be doing.
Omer (39:36.070)
If you had to start over today, what problem or market would you go and tackle?
James Deer (39:41.410)
Knowing what I know today, I'd say customer success simply because I think that there's a few players in it already and it's starting to become more developed.
But I think that every company needs a customer success organization and to do that they need products to run it.
So yeah, I'd absolutely, if I sold gather content today, I'd go and start a customer success startup.
Omer (40:06.780)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
James Deer (40:12.060)
That's a really good question.
I was once spotted for a Division one league football club in the UK when I was younger and I just decided that I'd prefer computers.
Omer (40:25.020)
Which team was it?
James Deer (40:26.540)
Qpr.
I think they're Premier League now, but back then they were Queens Park Rangers.
They were, I think they were in division one back then.
At the bottom of division one.
Yeah.
And I was about probably at 13.
I think.
Omer (40:39.140)
What is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
James Deer (40:43.860)
So outside of work I think it's spending time with my daughter, my wife, and just doing simple things.
Like, you know, every Saturday we go out to a new place for brunch and just kind of creating those kind of family routines.
So I'd definitely say that's kind of my passion.
All right.
Omer (41:02.940)
Those were great answers.
Thank you, James.
It's time for us to wrap up on this episode.
So, James, I want to thank you for joining me today and talking about Gather Content and I appreciate you sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
If people want to find out more about gather Content or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
James Deer (41:22.980)
Best way to get in touch with me is to email me, which is jamesathercontent.com or you can follow me on Twitter, which is just amesdeer.
Yeah.
To find out more about Gather Content.
Just if you head over to gathercontent.com and you're an agency, you'll understand where I'm coming from when you read all of our wonderfully crafted marketing copy.
Omer (41:47.290)
Fantastic.
Thanks again, James, and I wish you continued success with Gather Content.
