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 Joshua Parkinson.
Josh is the founder and CEO of Post Planner, a Facebook tool that makes it easy for people to find and post amazing content to increase their social media engagement.
Josh founded the company in 2011, and to date, Post Planner has over 25,000 monthly active users.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Joshua Parkinson (00:53.430)
Thanks, Omer.
It's good to be here.
Omer (00:55.910)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but before we get into that, tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Josh when he's not working?
Joshua Parkinson (01:04.550)
Well, I live here in San Francisco with my wife and my son and daughter.
My son is 3 years old and my daughter is just a newborn.
We just had a daughter in the last month.
Actually, today is her one month birthday.
Wow.
Omer (01:17.590)
Congratulations.
Joshua Parkinson (01:18.710)
Thank you.
Thank you.
So we're easing into that, which is interesting, but it's really fun.
And I love my family so much and that's my number one thing.
And that's what I spend most of my time doing other than the business.
But I also just love the Bay Area and getting out on the beach and getting out in the water.
And I'm a mountain guy.
I grew up in Utah, so I love snowboarding and rock climbing.
Those are my two favorite things to do outdoors.
But yeah, I mean, I've traveled quite a bit in my life.
I love traveling.
I married a French woman, so our family is bilingual and binational.
So that's a little bit about me.
Omer (02:00.830)
Awesome.
All right, so we, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Joshua Parkinson (02:12.429)
How about this?
It's the things you do to avoid depending on luck that ultimately make you lucky.
Omer (02:20.430)
Say that one.
Move me one more time.
Joshua Parkinson (02:22.830)
It's the things you do to avoid depending on luck that ultimately make you lucky.
Omer (02:29.150)
I've never heard that one before.
Joshua Parkinson (02:31.710)
That's probably because I wrote it.
Omer (02:35.710)
So I love that.
I think you're the first one to come up with their own unique quote.
Love it.
All right, let's give the listeners a better understanding of Post Planner.
Who are your target customers and what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve for them?
Joshua Parkinson (02:55.580)
Yeah.
Our Post Planner is a social media app that helps you triple your engagement in ten minutes a day.
We say up till now we've only been posting to Facebook, but we're just launching a new web app in the next week.
Huge upgrade on our app that is also going to be posting to Twitter as well.
But basically what we do is we try to help our customers become more data driven in their content.
And by doing so, we help them triple their engagement, which is that they come into the app, they can access our viral photo section, find photos that have already proven to go viral, use those photos or replicate them, find articles that are trending and the data shows that they are popular and engaging in any niche, and again, post those.
Or just take their own blog posts and their own content and put that out there and automate it so that they don't have to spend so much time posting it.
So that's kind of the main thing that we do.
We help people solve the pain point of not knowing what to post on social media to increase their engagement.
And that's what we spend our time doing.
Omer (04:11.420)
Is there a specific type of customer that you go after with this product?
Joshua Parkinson (04:17.160)
Well, we have certain verticals that are more popular with us.
But, you know, we, I think we can benefit any small business, small or medium sized business, that just doesn't have the time to spend all day or hire someone to spend all day on social media.
But we also have a lot of customers who are social media managers who, you know, their job is their clients are these small businesses and they manage the posting for them.
You know, so we try to make life really easy for them.
These kind of people.
Omer (04:47.680)
Got it.
Now you have an interesting background.
Let's talk a little bit about that before we get into the business today.
You graduated with a degree in literature back in 2000.
What did you do for the next few years after that?
Joshua Parkinson (05:02.960)
Well, I bought a battery powered amplifier and I bought a ticket to Europe and I went over there and spit rhymes on the streets for five years.
I actually got a band in the first year and so I was actually a musician for, for five years over in Germany.
And then that led into a job because there's a lot of military over there in Germany.
I, during the midpoint of my music career, I started teaching again at the collegiate at the college level.
And that was for the University of Maryland, who provides who?
I mean, who.
Back in the day, they were the only university that provided education classes for deployed soldiers.
So I got a job with them and that led me to heading to the Middle east for three years.
I did two tours in Kuwait and one tour in Afghanistan teaching soldiers who were in the field.
So I taught writing and philosophy and literature, Shakespeare, that kind of stuff, you know, 100, 200 level courses for in the humanities to these badass soldiers.
So I did that for three years.
And then when I was done with that, I actually kind of.
In the midst of that, I reconnected with the woman who became my wife.
It was actually on the way to Afghanistan that I stopped by London to visit her.
She was an ex girlfriend of mine and I fell in love with her again, asked her to marry me.
But the thing is, I had already accepted to go back to MBA school for 2008 to 2010.
And so we did a long distance thing for two years.
And then when I was done with my MBA, she came to the United States and we got married and then she got a job in San Francisco and so we moved out here.
And that's like right around the time when I started my Post Planner.
That's a journey.
Omer (06:58.290)
That is quite a journey.
Yeah.
All right, let's talk about Post Planner then.
So tell me about the day that you came up with the idea for the product.
Joshua Parkinson (07:10.170)
Well, that, you know, it was.
It's more important probably to talk about the process that led up to it.
I had, I had been managing pages for.
I'd been one of these kind of social media managers in the sense of I was building custom Facebook pages for people and for small businesses.
That's kind of what led me into the whole Facebook app world.
And then my first kind of foray into building apps was.
And this is important to the Post Planner story because this is how I met my technical co founder.
I had the idea to create an app that was a voter survey app specifically for politicians.
So I tried to build this app by going the Elance Odesk route, outsourcing to people in.
I think these guys were in India at the time and it just didn't work out.
It was a real pain in the ass.
And so I had to figure out another way.
And so I decided to go on Facebook and find an app that was already doing what I wanted to do and then see if I could sell that person on joining me.
So that's what I did.
I went on Facebook, I found this customer survey app and the developer of that app happened to be in Bulgaria.
And so I reached out to him on Facebook and told him that I had this idea and I had customers ready to go.
All we had to do is make a couple changes to his current app and then we'd have customers tomorrow.
Do you want to do it?
And he said, hell, yeah, I'll do it.
We jumped on Skype and met each other and discussed things.
And he turned out to be a really great guy, and his English was really good as well, so we could communicate quite well.
And we just pretty much trusted each other from the beginning and started to do this app.
And then that app was pretty cool.
It did its job.
But I quickly realized that it wasn't really a very scalable app because acquiring customers was rather difficult because the customers were politicians.
And you kind of have to go through a couple gatekeepers to get to politicians.
And not to mention that they don't really pay their bills themselves.
They have lobbyists pay them.
So it's just kind of a quirky business, a quirky customer to have.
So I quickly saw that that wasn't really going to be the big idea or the big app that was going to make it for us.
But it was at that time that I really wasn't thinking in terms of one big app.
I was thinking more in terms of a suite of apps.
There were these players out there, like North Social, who were providing all these various types of apps, contests, promotions, like gates, etc.
Etc.
And so my idea was I wanted to kind of compete with them.
So this was just going to be one of many apps.
And so when the idea of, you know, having a scheduler inside of Facebook came along, it was just kind of, you know, going to be another one of these apps that was going to be in our suite, and it just happened to be the one that we kind of built second.
And, you know, I could build it because I had my technical co founder.
You know, if I hadn't had a tech guy to build it, then, you know, we probably wouldn't be talking today.
But luckily I'd found him in that kind of lucky way and, you know, it worked out.
And we built Post Planner and then launched it in March of 2011, four years ago.
And we've been hustling ever since.
Omer (10:41.940)
Okay, so you got the product built, you launched it, and how long did it take you to get your first paying customer?
Joshua Parkinson (10:50.020)
We had paying customers on day one, so only a couple, you know, one or two.
But yeah, we.
They kind of trickled in every couple of days.
And we.
And we started with a $5 a month app, which was, you know, super cheap.
And we had a free version and a $5 version.
So we had a lot of installs at the beginning.
The free version at the beginning would Only allow, what was it?
I think we only allowed people to post to their personal profiles.
They couldn't post to pages, but then the $5 app let them post to all their pages and groups.
So it was a pretty low price point.
And so we had some customers rolling in and they rolled in, they trickled in for the next several months.
We quickly added a pretty awesome feature that really took us in the direction of content, which is really where our vision is these days.
And that was our status ideas database.
So our status ideas engine is what we call it now.
And that was a kind of database full of pre written status ideas, questions, quotes, fill in the blanks, those kind of things.
And you can see that quickly I noticed that the pain point of the customers was that they didn't know what to post.
They needed content to post.
I had known that since back in the day of building these custom Facebook pages is that we'd build a beautiful Facebook page for a business.
We'd hand it over to them and they'd just say, okay, awesome, now what do I do?
What am I supposed to post?
They didn't really know what to post.
So it was that pain point that kind of led me to build this status ideas engine.
And that was the beginning, kind of the first salvo in our effort to create a complete content curation app.
And nowadays you can use the app, like I said, to find photos, images, articles and status ideas, texts and pretty soon videos as well.
So we run the gamut in whatever kind of content you want to find and publish on social media.
You can, you have a one stop shop inside of Post Finder to do that.
Omer (13:01.790)
How are these people finding out about your product
Joshua Parkinson (13:08.030)
now or in the beginning,
Omer (13:10.030)
the first few customers that you got?
Joshua Parkinson (13:12.590)
Well, we had some write ups.
We had a article in TechCrunch France on the launch date, just a brief little article that brought us some customers in Europe.
And you know, we really from there we just were really active on social media, reaching out to people, reaching out to influencers to try it and that's really what drove everything.
We didn't do any ads, we didn't do any paid media at all really in the beginning.
And we blogged just a little bit, you know, like once a month or once every couple months.
But we really didn't have a clear strategy on how to acquire customers in the beginning.
We were just kind of shooting from the hip and doing whatever we could like in a guerrilla marketing way to get people to try the app.
It certainly wasn't a fast start it just gradually grew.
And even throughout the first year, we didn't have a real business that was, I don't know, like self sustaining to a degree.
But I mean, with.
In the first six months, we weren't making enough money to make any profit or really to pay for me to pay myself.
And it wasn't until, you know, let's say six, eight, nine months that I started even taking some money out of the business to pay myself.
Omer (14:40.020)
So do you remember how much revenue you were doing roughly by the end of the first year?
Joshua Parkinson (14:45.570)
By the end of the first year, I think we were in the, in the 20 thousands.
Like 25, 30,000, something like that.
Omer (14:52.210)
And that was all based on still having this $5 a month plan?
Joshua Parkinson (14:56.130)
No, actually not.
So like in the summer, right after we launched, so the summer of 2011, we came up with an idea for a kind of a more premium app that we started charging $15 a month for, which is so funny when I think back on it.
Like, $15 a month.
the time, that seemed so like such a step up and, you know, an expensive app, quote, unquote.
But Now, I mean, $15 a month even is so little.
I mean, I don't think a business can survive.
A SaaS business like mine could survive on just $15 a month.
Our price points are much higher now, and justifiably so.
But yeah, I mean, we launched that $15 app along with our $5 app, I think it was August.
And that quickly became really popular because of the value it provided.
We allowed people to name the app whatever they wanted with their brand name, and then their name would appear below their posts.
So, you know, several years ago, and this, this has stopped now, but Facebook would allow attribution of the app below the post.
So when someone would post with our app, it would say, you know, 16 minutes ago via post Planner, you still see that on the posts of, you know, personal profiles.
On Facebook, if you have a friend who's using like Post Planner, for example, to publish something, you'll see that it says, you know, 16 minutes ago via post Planner, they removed that from Page Posts.
So now it doesn't matter what app you use, it doesn't show up on Page Posts anymore, that attribution.
But it did at the time.
And so what we'd do is we would build a custom app for every single customer at that premium level, and we would name it there.
We'd let them name it whatever they wanted.
So it would say, you know, via Omer Khan, for example, underneath their posts and people love that.
They love their own, you know, people love their own branding.
So that was kind of our first premium product.
And then we added another price level above that at like 25amonth, which was allowing team members.
So pretty quickly we had these higher price point, you know, we had a clear path for people to upgrade and you know, the value proposition for them to do so.
And then we've just raised our prices several times since then.
We don't have that customization anymore because it's irrelevant at this point.
And it's also not scalable.
We just have one single post planner app now.
But anyway, those are the days, man.
Omer (17:31.260)
Yeah, I mean, what was one of the biggest lessons that you learned about pricing going through from initially offering your most expensive plan being $5 to I think today it's $99.
What did you learn from that experience?
Joshua Parkinson (17:49.260)
Well, on the basic level, I learned that you can't, you can't sustain a business with a really cheap product like that unless you have, you know, we bootstrapped our business.
We didn't have funding so we had to, you know, we had to make revenue in order to keep the business alive.
So, you know, the first thing is that five bucks a month, you have to have a lot of customers paying five bucks a month to make significant amount of revenue.
That's the first thing.
Second thing is that it's so easy to under undersell your product.
Our product was worth more than five bucks a month.
And I mean maybe the first version, that $5 version was not because we were competing at the time with the likes of hootsuite and a couple others that some of them have gone down since then.
But hootsuite was the main player even back then and they had a 5 or 6 $8 something app version.
So we had to kind of, I think we kind of competed with that.
Pricing is a crazy thing.
I mean no one really understands it and it's really kind of a trial and error type thing.
But I, you know, now I would advise anyone listening out there to err on the side of higher prices.
That now that doesn't mean that you have to start high.
And maybe that's another lesson I learned is that you can raise prices at any time and not affect your current users.
Just grandfather them in at the price they signed up for.
And if you're using, we use Chargify for our management of our sales.
Some people, I think the competitor is Stripe.
I'm sure that they're the same way.
It's just automatic that you can raise prices on a product and the people who signed up for the product before the price raise, they get grandfathered in at that lower price.
So.
So you really don't risk much at all other than perhaps decreased signups going forward if you raise the price too much.
But it's just really easy to start at a low price and then just kind of ramp up the price month by month and see it's always best to charge as much as you possibly can and not too much.
Right.
So you got to find that balance.
But yeah, it's a tough thing, pricing.
Omer (20:07.420)
So looking back at the first year, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Joshua Parkinson (20:14.460)
Well, the obvious mistake looking in, you know, in retrospect, is that we, we didn't block, we didn't blog enough and we didn't really take content marketing seriously as an acquisition channel.
We blogged probably twice in the first, you know, three or four months and then we pushed out an infographic which did pretty well.
And so we were kind of trickling out on the content marketing side, but we didn't really take it seriously as like the idea that it could drive the business, which is what it does now.
Like our whole business is driven by content marketing, our blog traffic, that's how we get signups to the app.
And we didn't really know about that or envision that in the beginning.
And had we started earlier with our content marketing and taken it seriously and done it consistently, we would be so much further along than we are now.
We've had great success in the last couple years since we really have devoted resources to it and hired full time writers and editors and that kind of thing.
But if we had done it a little bit earlier, we'd be even further along.
So I think that's the biggest mistake we made.
Omer (21:27.370)
Now, how many visitors did you have to your blog in the early days?
Joshua Parkinson (21:35.290)
Early days was really low.
Obviously it was like hundreds a month and then it gradually grew to thousands a month and by, let's say about two and a half years in around the end of 2012, which is right before we hired our first full time writer, our traffic was 9,000 uniques a month in December of 2012.
And today our traffic last month was 510,000 uniques.
So we went from 9,000 to 510,000.
Half a million unique people visit our blog every month.
Now in two years, that is huge.
Omer (22:16.140)
And we're going to talk more about that in a lot more detail.
But in the early days, were you the one who was doing most of the blogging?
Joshua Parkinson (22:26.760)
Yeah, yeah, I was doing it.
And I even hired a guy, one of my students actually, because during this time, the first couple years of postponer, I was still teaching online classes.
So I was teaching writing still.
And I just had this guy that came through one of my classes who was just a great writer, very funny and entertaining.
His name's Ryan Haight and his pen name was Hate Mail.
And so I hired him and I.
He started writing kind of funny stuff about social media, really wacky weird stuff.
And I just kind of went, try that out.
I thought maybe we could, you know, this was pre.
This was pre, like what's the, what's the site buzz?
All these sites like upworthy and you know, that have come to the fore recently getting, you know, millions and millions in traffic.
This was pre those days.
So I was kind of trying to go that route kind of in a weird way with him, but it wasn't consistent.
It was like once every week, once every couple weeks.
We didn't get a lot of shares on them and I don't think it was the best strategy in terms of what our product was.
But anyway, in the early days I did have that guy who was riding kind of on an ad hoc basis.
But it wasn't until January of 2012 that I actually hired a full time serious social media marketing writer.
Omer (24:01.530)
At what point did you feel like you were getting some meaningful traction with this business?
Joshua Parkinson (24:10.740)
Well, I thought we were getting traction from the first couple months.
And in fact, remember we started Post Planner with the idea that it was going to be one of many apps in a whole suite of apps.
And two or three months in, I still had that mindset.
So I was still planning apps, putting the specs out there for my co founder, Slav to build the guy in Bulgaria.
So we were already commencing building more apps and I think it was in, let's say July of 2011, so three or four months after launching that it really came to me that, hey, Josh, you don't really need these other apps.
You can just put all your effort into this one app.
Post Planner, it already has customers, it already has proven its kind of concept.
We just added the status ideas engine and people love that.
And it kind of just came to me that, you know, I didn't need any other apps.
I should focus all my energy and resources on this one app and make it work.
And I didn't really foresee, I didn't really see the publishing side as a standalone business.
When we launched Post Planner.
But I realized in three or four months that actually that was the future, that was the future of social media marketing.
It wasn't these apps that provide promo and contests and custom Facebook page tabs, as they used to be called.
That wasn't the future.
And actually it hasn't been.
They've been kind of, that business has really kind of been decimated by the actions that Facebook has taken.
So, you know, I predicted well that it was the posting, it was the publishing on social media that was really going to be where the business opportunity was because that's.
Think about it, when you go to Facebook, you don't really go to pages.
You go to Facebook to see the news feed.
You want to see items coming through that newsfeed.
So, you know, any kind of technology that helps facilitate those more content into that newsfeed has a future.
And that's really the case on any social network.
Twitter, Pinterest, you name it.
So, you know, that's what I kind of realized in the first, probably three or four months in.
And that led me to be like, focus all my energy on Post Planner and just have Post Planner be the startup.
Before Post Planner was just an app in a big suite of apps, and three or four months in, Post Planner actually became the, you know, the startup.
Omer (26:55.010)
Looking back at the last few years, what do you think has been one of the hardest things about building this product and business?
Joshua Parkinson (27:04.530)
Well, you know, it's always about customer acquisition and customer retention.
Those are the two things that every SaaS app developer has to worry about.
You know, every, every SaaS startup, that's all they care about is getting customers and keeping them.
And we don't have a problem getting customers anymore because of the traffic I just told you about.
We have thousands of people hitting our website every day so we can convert them into users relatively easy.
The real bane of my existence is churn as it is the existence of many other startup founders.
Getting people to stop canceling.
That's what it's all about.
So, you know, that's been the biggest challenge and it's.
And frankly it's still a challenge.
It's held back our revenue tremendously and it's something that we're fighting day in and day out to stop.
And you know, in the end, my advice and what I'm learning more and more is that it's not enough to create a badass app.
You got to create badass users.
And you know, that's not my term.
I think someone I read a blog post on this A few years ago with that exact term that you create badass users, not badass apps in the sense that you want to create.
You don't create a powerful app, you create a powerful user of the app.
And if you have a powerful user of the app, that user is much less likely to cancel.
So your imperative then becomes to make sure that the people who install and start using your app quickly start getting value from it and quickly start customizing it as well.
There's a really smart guy out there, a guy named Nur Eyal, I think actually say his name.
Nir.
Nir Eyal.
He wrote a book called how to Build Habit Forming Products.
Awesome book.
You should check it out.
His website's called near and Far N I r&far.com he has this process of how you get your customers hooked.
And the final part of the I can't remember exactly, but you have a trigger that triggers the customer to do something, like a notification, for example.
They come, they visit the app, they engage with it, but the final step is that they invest something.
And that's really what we're trying to get our users to do, is make that investment.
Because the more investment you get your users to make in the app.
So, you know, with the idea that you're creating this badass user, you're getting him in the app, he's getting value from it and he's investing in the app, which will increase the switching costs.
Right.
If he decides one day, if he gets the idea one day that oh man, maybe I should go and check out a competitor, maybe I should switch to a different app instead of this one.
The more investment he's made in your app, the more customizations he's made inside of, you know, your app customizations to actually draw extract more value from the app, the much less likely he is to, you know, move over to a competitor because it will just be too hard, it will be too much, the cost will be too high, he'll have to go to that competitor and he'll have to, you know, do start from scratch basically and add, you know, all the customizations that are possible there.
So I mean, that's really what we're concentrating on is trying to get our users to, you know, become badass users in the sense that they customize the app in such a way that it gives them way more value than if they were just using our app in a vanilla way.
Omer (30:53.690)
I'm going to include the link to the book and that website you mentioned in the show notes.
Excuse me.
And I really like this term, you know, between a badass user versus a badass app.
Because in many ways it.
It sort of is this philosophy I think that you can interpret in many ways.
And it's not just about creating these high switching costs for your users, but also, I guess in many ways figuring out how you can empower them.
Right.
To be more successful, to get more things done.
And it's just, it's just a much better way, I think, of looking at how you can help your customers.
Joshua Parkinson (31:41.430)
Yeah, it entails product market fit to a certain degree.
Right.
If you actually have created a badass user, then you know that there's product market fit.
If you.
Anybody can create a badass app, there's a billion of them out there that don't have any customers.
Right.
That don't.
That no one wants to use or no one wants to pay money for because they don't have product market fit.
But, you know, if you have actual badass users out there using your app, then you know that.
That you got that fit.
Omer (32:12.060)
Let's talk about the business today.
So you mentioned that you have over 500,000 monthly unique users visiting your blog.
What about revenue?
Where are you guys right now?
Joshua Parkinson (32:29.600)
So basically the numbers are we're around 100,000amonth.
In rev.
We are.
We have about 100, I think 80,000 total installs from day one.
And then we have about 25,000 monthly active users and about 3,000 paying customers.
Omer (32:47.650)
Those are really impressive numbers.
And I think for you guys, I mean, you've totally bootstrapped this business.
And getting to, you know, your first $100,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue is just an amazing accomplishment.
So, you know, huge congratulations for hitting that milestone.
Joshua Parkinson (33:04.930)
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
We're not done yet, though.
I mean, when I actually say those numbers, I don't like them.
I don't like the number 180,000.
I want a million.
And I don't like having only 20,000 monthly active years.
I want 100,000.
So I appreciate the kind words, but we're not done yet.
Omer (33:22.650)
I love that.
I love it.
Okay, that was part one of the interview with Joshua Parkinson of Post planner in episode 53.
You can listen to part two of this interview where we'll get tactical and talk about content marketing.
A couple of years ago, the Post Planner blog was getting about 9,000 unique visitors a month.
Today they get over half a million uniques every month.
We'll talk about the step by step process that Josh and his team went through to grow their audience and build a powerful channel for new customer acquisition, which is helping them generate well over a million dollars a year.
