Business Systems Explored

Vinay:

Hey, everyone. Vinay here from Business Systems Explored, and I've got another episode that we're really excited about today. Here with my co-host, Tony. Say hi, Tony.

Tony:

How it's going, Vinay?

Vinay:

Doing great, doing great. We've got an exciting guest today ...

Tony:

Yup.

Vinay:

... Which is Walter from "iDoneThis."

Walter:

Hey, what's up. How's it going?

Tony:

Welcome, Walter.

Vinay:

It's good.

Tony:

It's great to have you here with us.

Walter:

Thanks for having me. Likewise, thanks Tony.

Vinay:

Really excited. We've met each other a few times. Obviously we both went through AngelPad, the Accelerator. You're a couple generations before me. I know we caught up when I was in the program. You had some really good input and advice on basically how we could go about scaling our content marketing strategies. Some of those things we've put into place, and we've seen some really great results form. I know that content's being one of the main drivers of traffic, and subscribers, and revenue for your business "iDoneThis." I'd be really excited ... And also I know that you've been really successful as a content writer, getting content published on like a lot of big publications like Business Insider, and Forbes, and Ink, and I think a number of others. Basically, I was really excited to be able to dive into that, and kind of give our listeners some insight into how you go about figuring out the strategy for what content to create, actually creating that, publishing it, promoting it, and basically leveraging content to drive revenue and subscribers for your business.

Walter:

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. Just to kind of jump in. We were able to grow to "iDoneThis" to making about half a million dollars a year with customer acquisition focus that was entirely on content marketing. I think what we proved with "iDoneThis" was that, you can do almost everything wrong and still grow your business with content if you do a few things right. I'm sure there will be a lot of things we're going to ask me, 'hey, how do you guys do x, y, z.' I'm like, I'll say, 'we really did a really crappy job with that.' Well, there are a few things that I think we really nailed, so that's what, how we were able to grow.

Tony:

Yeah, yeah. Before we even get into that, so I've got a question, Walter, I want to know. What did you get done today?

Walter:

Yeah, I'm about to crush this Podcast. It's going to be awesome.

Tony:

Excellent.

Walter:

Make sure to ...

Vinay:

Awesome. For people that don't know, we can give a little bit more detail later on. "iDoneThis" is basically a tool that helps people track what they're getting done each day, and helps teams and managers track like what the team is getting done. It kind of sends out a quick email at the end of each day. You can reply to that, saying what you got done, and logs everything in a calendar, user analytics and reports. It's a great tool for getting visibility, and getting a good heartbeat on like what you're team's doing.

Cool, so that being said. Let's jump into this. You laid out the big guns right there. You generated over $500,000 in a year in recurring revenue or around that number based purely on content. Talk to us. How did you get started? How did you decided that content was the strategy that you wanted to pursue? Where did you kind of start when you're like, 'okay, I have this product that either exists, or is it an MVP, and now we need to start getting muses?' What's the beginning of that? Where do you actually start? Where do you start thinking about what to do first?

Walter:

Yeah. I think this was in 2011 before ... Obviously content was really big, but it wasn't as big as it now. It was really two things that happened inside AngelPad. We did AngelPad the Accelerator in July, sorry August 2011. On the first day actually I met this guy, Eddie Kim, who is the founder of a company called SimpleReach, which now has like 30 employees and is blowing up in New York. He said, 'hey, like have you guys thought about doing content to help promote "iDoneThis," like blog writing blog posts about productivity and that kind of that.' I was like, well I honestly think that our stuff is super boring. What am I going to write about how I spent my day? That sounds really boring. He was like, 'well, if you think about it that way, then obviously it is going to be boring. You're thinking about it totally the wrong way.' There's always the opportunity to do things your own way, in a way that's interesting. To me that's kind of like, that became like the fundamental kind of thing that we go to. Just like doing everything in your own way. Putting that slight twist on it that makes it different.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

That was the first question that got me thinking about content. Gratuitously, there was some young Austrian guy that was in our AngelPad, who know everybody knows, everybody in content at least. In our class, it was the Buffer guys were there. Leo and Joel. [crosstalk 00:04:16] At that time, they were ... Sorry.

Vinay:

Yeah, they've got a great blog. If like anyone hasn't checked it out, blog.bufferapp.com. It's an amazing blog on like content and writing.

Walter:

Yeah, now they're making like $7 million a year, and they got started all through content. Leo at that time, all he did all day was write like 5 blog posts a day, or whatever. That's how he spent his day. We were sort, we got to know them at the very beginning. He was like, 'let me tell you what I know about content.' That's how we got started.

Vinay:

Perfect. You just kind of ran with the advice of Eddie saying, we're going to write about productivity? Or did you actually go out and do some research to kind of try and define what you're audience was or what your theme was going to be?

Walter:

Yeah, that's a really good question. We did ... Everyone today is telling me like oh yeah, they're doing keyword research, and they're like coming up with themes and junks, and they were writing targeted posts on these topics. We put none of that thought into it. Basically, we saw ... And we were, we read a lot of hacker memes. That's one of the things that we really loved, and inspired, you know, Paul Graham's essay "Blah, Blah, Blah." We saw, hey, there's a lot of people on Hacker News. Early on ... Around that time you could still get off on your friends upvote your article, and get to the front page. Hey that's an interesting opportunity here. It's a chance to get your article, basically yourself in front of tens of thousands of people. It's still possible to gain it, in some sense.

Let's write some content. Let's write some articles about the entrepreneurial journey, rather than say productivity. Let's tell our story, get it up there, and see what people think. We wrote some articles about just starting "iDoneThis," and basic things like oh yeah, how we got "iDoneThis" to our first 1,000 users or whatever. Those articles got tens of thousands of views, because we were on the top of Hacker News every time. That's really what kick-started things, because once we ... We were like okay, we can write an article about how we got a 1,000 users, put it on Hacker News, get 5,000 news as a result, and then write another article about how we did that. That's insane, right? That was basically the idea. It was kind of like using Hacker News to boot-strap this audience and get the ball rolling.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Nice.

Tony:

Did you, did you ...

Vinay:

That's like ...

Tony:

Did you have sort of a set process mapped out in terms of getting on top of Hacker News? Or was it just ...

Walter:

We did a fair amount of research of ... We looked on like which articles were hitting the top of Hacker News, what were the kind of approaches, and how they did it. And we we read all the articles about ... These were more relevant than they are now.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

I wouldn't recommend anybody do this now, because Hacker News is so competitive. Anyway, we would research what the right time of day to post was, we would get all our friends at the ready. Then we would post the article, tell them to upvote, but you couldn't tell them to go the ... You couldn't link them to the exact page, you had link them to the newest section which they would upvote so it wouldn't trigger the circle voting. There was some, there was actually a lot like intimate detail there, even though to make it really pop and work, but a lot of it is kind of irrelevant now. We really wanted to make sure we knew how to write something, and how to manage the system so that we would definitely get to the top of Hacker News.

Tony:

Yeah, yeah.

Vinay:

Yeah, we actually experienced some similar kind of early on wins on, in a similar kind of capacity on Reddit versus Hacker News. Kind of getting a few of those posts that spiked and generated like tens of thousands of views. Kind of getting at the the top of like the entrepreneur subreddit, or something like that, of the startups of Reddit. I think that those are really good. Again, kind of same kind of deal. We did a couple of things, or were testing with people doing upvotes and stuff like that. I think that's definitely not, should not be a long-term strategy. What I found it did, it actually gave me confidence, right? And results. It gave me this incentive to continue going with content marketing. I think a lot of people, they get in this flow with content, okay, we're going to implement content marketing strategy, and then it's has this really slow ramp up time, right?

Walter:

Yeah.

Vinay:

It's just writing, and writing, and writing, and not seeing any results. That can get frustrating, and disheartening, and demotivating. I think that if you can get some early wins in there quickly, and you can kind of use ... Either if you're using social media bookmarking, or other things like outreach or whatever to kind of get some early wins. That can really help boost confidence for you internally. Or if you're like a marketing manager, and you have to show results to your boss or something, then at least it gives you some data to like convince him that they should like keep going with this strategy. Right? Getting those early wins I think can really help move the whole strategy forward.

Walter:

I think that's actually a really good point. I think the flip side of that is something to worry about. Something, sort of something to look out for. You get addicted to quick wins. I'm kind of the same way, because I have like a [loser 00:09:05] brain. Every time the number goes up, I'm like 'yeah.' We kind of probably tried to pursue the Hacker News strategy too long. Because I just like, 'oh, man, we just need another hit on Hacker News, and then I'll be happy.' Then we'll feel good. It's like being a drug addict, basically. You want to, and I see this all the time, where people get those initial quick wins, but you want to make sure that you're transitioning to a strategy in which your traffic is more diversified, and you're not relying on single bit hits and home runs that you're able to build your own distribution through your email list, which is basically the most important thing. You want to make that transition relatively smoothly. It's going to be kind of rocky, but you want to make sure that you're doing that. So that, and you're investing in the long-term, so that you're not just like on Hacker News all the time, waiting for that huge hit.

Tony:

Yeah, you've written recently about this thing called the Power Law of content marking. It's seems to be about the small maturity of articles account for the vast majority of results. Can you speak to us a little bit about that? And also about your process, or the process you have in place to make that happen?

Walter:

Yeah, that's a really good question. It's something that's related to what Vinay was just talking about, which is like, it can be discouraging if you write a bunch of articles and no one reads them. Part of the idea with the Power Law, to sort of think ... People have talked about this in a different context. There's some other author, motivational author or whatever that people cite, talks about the Ratio Rule.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

Basically, if you like figure out, one of the things that kind of want to do is, if you figure out that like say nine out of ten of your articles suck, but one out of ten of them is amazing, then that actually is an amazing outcome, because you can, then you just realize you need to write ten articles. Do you know what I mean? This kind of goes to one of things that Leo at Buffer was always all about. Even though you don't necessarily want to talk about it in this kind of frame. This idea that quantity is actually more important than quality, because quantity is going to, in some sense, help you diversify, and help you do more experimenting on what hit.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

That you are able to find more quickly a concept or something that hits, and then write about it constantly. For example, with "iDoneThis," we wrote a lot of articles early on, some were about the entrepreneurial journey, and those were ... We were also trying to write more about sort of our product itself and the problems we were trying to solve. One thing that we found early on that hit often, and resulted in hit articles in a lot of different context, was this statistic from a Harvard Business School Professor that said nine out of ten managers are wrong in thinking that the number one motivator for people at work is financial incentive or stress. Rather than number one motivator is the sense that you're making progress everyday towards a meaningful goal.

Using this statistic in a number of different context, we were able to create a bunch of hit articles. I think we would never have sort of figured that out if we hadn't aimed for quantity over quality. I think that's how ... When you think about the Power Law then you sort of, and you think about building systems around it, then it sort of leads you to thinking about how important quantity in is writing. That's kind of how we made that happen. Another example with LinkedIn. We published multiple articles on LinkedIn, some of it which got like 10 views, some of which got like 3,000 views. Then I wrote an article for LinkedIn that was like one of the most read articles on LinkedIn ever.

Vinay:

Yeah. Something like three quarters of a million views in 30 days.

Walter:

Yeah, exactly.

Vinay:

That's crazy.

Walter:

Now it has like over 900,000 views or whatever.

Tony:

Wow.

Walter:

It's was just like a product of taking different ideas, experimenting them, and then trying to have them fit the medium. I think it's kind of what this law is about, it's about encouraging experimentation, and trying new things, and then making those work for you.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Yeah, couple of things I see there as well is, if you're just starting out writing content, then you probably don't know the difference between like a high-quality and a low-quality post, unless you're experienced and already know what you're doing. Getting that feedback, right, it's almost like testing, but it's like figuring out what's working well and what's not working well. I think also by writing more, either you or your team or whatever, it actually makes you better, right? Because you're getting more practice, you're getting more experience, and by producing more content, you're actually improving at a faster rate.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

You're not just writing more [experiments 00:13:32], but naturally you're learning about like what people are doing, and mistakes that you are making, and how people are responding, and you can kind of integrate that in as you continue build up. The more that you write, the better you'll get, right?

Walter:

Absolutely. I think that's well said.

Vinay:

Perfect. Basically, the strategy was, you didn't really know what you were doing. You decided to throw in a bunch of stuff at the wall, and seeing what stuck, and then basically if something stuck, you went about scaling that. You came about finding a few good themes that started working for you, and then you continued to kind of write it quantity. You did that, I'm assuming for some period of time, like a year or two. Has that changed in what the strategy is from when you kind of started to what it is now? Do you now have a more defined system?

Walter:

I think we have a slightly more defined system. I think what changed is ... It's interesting, and I think what changes is ... Well there are a number of different things that change, but one of the main transitions is transitioning from you yourself writing the articles to hiring someone to do it. When you do that, you try to put more systems in place, and make it more systematic. You don't have to rely on your own spark or genius or whatever. Making that transition form actually writing to managing someone who writes I think is like one of the big major challenges that we succeeded at times and failed at other times.

I think the other thing now is like today, well there are two things. One, the bar has been raised for content, obviously. Right, there's so much more out there, and it's much harder to stand out. Whatever it takes to stand out, you have to do it, because otherwise there's no point in you doing anything. Right? If you're just writing content that's ordinary, nobody cares. Right? No one cares. It's just a waste of time. For example, this means doubling down on things that only you can do. Some of those are like data driven, others are like you're own interesting thoughts, and your entrepreneurial journey, that kind of stuff.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

Then other things are like experiments. I think like Process Street's doing some interesting stuff around embedding and things like that. It's like what you can do that's totally different from what other people do. I think the second shift is, sort of referring to what I was talking about earlier, it's a more mature kind of content operation. You always want to be building your email list. That's one of the most important things. Everyone I talk to, one of things that kind of goes back to is like ... Everyone wants to like, 'hey can you help me with distribution, you know, hey can you like' ... Yeah, we can help you get you're article on the top of Inbound or whatever, or we get you're ... Ultimately, long-term real content growth I think comes from growing your email list, and that's like your number one distribution challenge.

Vinay:

Awesome. When you're going about building systems to bring in say somebody else. Do you have a kind of strategy around these are themes we write about? This is like on average how long a post needs to be. This is like we need to include images, we need to include x number of outbound links. Do you have a kind of structure that you try to follow ,and do you have like a perfect kind of post ideal that you strive for?

Walter:

Yeah. I try to give people ... I try to help people succeed in that way by having some kind of style guide, but you don't want to overdetermine it. Sometimes you work with people, you do a guest post on someone's blog, and they like give you a style guide. You're like, it's cool that you did this, but it's so long it's impossible for me to follow it, and you're kind of like squeezing the life out of me. You know what I mean? You're making ... I'm writing on this blog because I have something unique to say. It's not good for you to cram me into the format of everybody else that writes for your blog. You know what I'm saying? I think it kind of, that same principle, the same principles apply to hiring and running a content team. You want to give them feedback, you want to give them a guide on how they can be successful. At the same time, you don't want to overdetermine what it is that they're doing, because basically you hired them for a reason, and that's because you believe that they can be creative and original. You don't want to squeeze the life out of them, and make them want to kill themselves.

Tony:

Yeah, you don't want to stifle that creativity out of them.

Vinay:

What about when you're receiving, well, firstly, is receiving content from guest contributors part of you're strategy? And then do you give them a style guide of any sort, like the one that you mention receiving, or do you just kind of let them go, go off and write whatever they want?

Walter:

Yeah, I think that's a really good question, so I will sort of put it too you this way. Well, the problem is that, when you offer people to guest write on their blog, on your own blog, they usually will give you the worst stuff that they've ever produced. You know what I mean? Even if it's like someone you think is really cool, and smart, and you like their writing. Once you see the writing that they want to publish on your blog, you're like 'ew.' That's the typical case.

I would say that ... We don't really make guest writing a big part of what we do on our blog. On the other hand, if there are people who you see that are amenable, basically you tell them we have really high standards of our blog, are you still interested? There's you know, we have really high standards on our blog, there's going to be a revision process. You're going to have to put real work into this, are you still interested? And they say 'yes.' And it's someone you think is really good, then basically for me, there's no point in giving them a style guide, because you're asking them, you ask them for a reason. You ask them because they have something, because they are the best of the best, and you think they're going to give you something that's really good. That's kind of the way I'd approach it. I don't know if that actually made sense. Did that make sense?

Vinay:

Yes. You're basically saying instead of giving people style guides, qualify the writers. So that ...

Walter:

Yeah.

Vinay:

... You're getting good writers who will just produce good content anyway.

Walter:

That was well summarized, thank you. I was saying that, it was sort two steps to the qualification. One, is like picking out people who are really good. And then really asking them, really making them commit to doing something that's good, and not something that totally sucks.

Tony:

Yeah, yeah.

Vinay:

Makes sense.

Tony:

Walter, talk to us a little bit you're team structure. Obviously, you're sort of almost at the five year point with "iDoneThis." There's obviously been some growth in there. What was the team like when you started out? And what's it like now?

Walter:

When we started it, it was ... It started off as a side project, it was just me and my co-founder Rodrigo. We brought on a third co-founder who joined us for AngelPad, who was my college roommate, who actually when we were in college, we had a falling out. I just randomly ran into him in a coffee shop in San Francisco. This is San Francisco, I mean, Vinay knows this well. I ran into my college roommate in a coffee shop in San Francisco. And I said, 'hey, do you want to be my co-founder.' That was horrible mistake, and at the end of AngelPad, he left. So just me and my co-founder, we raised a small seed round, and then we hired a bunch of freelancers because we thought we were supposed to spend money. Then we let them all go, then we hired a new team, and then we raised another small seed round. Then we kind of started getting on the right track, and that's when, that was like early 2013, that's when we actually started executing better.

Tony:

What helped in terms of that better execution? What are some of the systems and process you put in place to better execute?

Walter:

Yeah, that's why ... yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I thought that... It was a small stroke of genius, the name of your Podcast. I was like, because people ... I remember to talking to on of our VCs, who is a very smart guy, early on, and he was like, we were talking about putting processes in place, or something like that. This is when we were like three people. He was like, 'startups don't put processes in place. Startup founders just work really hard. You're just supposed to go to work and work really hard.' It kind of made sense, but it was also a really stupid thing to say. We kind of always ... We didn't know that even as a startup, you're supposed to put processes in place. We thought you were just supposed to work really hard. It's through kind of learning and then systemizing the things that work that we started getting better.

Tony:

What were some of those things?

Walter:

Having an actual, for example, hiring process. Where instead of just randomly inviting people over and asking them random questions that popped into the top of our head, and then kind of vaguely discussing it. We actually wrote down what we were looking for. We thought about what we wanted to accomplish, we wrote down what we were looking for. We created a script for it. We wrote down a list of different places that, different sources of candidates, we went out and actively pursued them. We made a list of interview questions, et cetera. We had a formal hiring process where we could actually sort through candidates and that kind of thing. That's just one example.

Tony:

Yeah, yeah.

Vinay:

A big one that we've been implementing now, because before we only just had one engineer, and now we have four, and maybe a fifth one coming on, is processes around development. I mean, I think that's one of the most important ones if you're a startup, and you have more than one engineer. You can't just go and work hard and overwrite each other's code. You need to have some type of processes to [deploying 00:22:30] and pushing and pulling and figuring out how people are going to work together, so that people aren't stepping on each other, and writing over each other's code, or creating regressions that have to be fixed on [releases 00:22:40] and things like. I think that maybe even if you're a tiny startup of three people, you might not write that all down, but it's still a system that needs to be created, and it needs at least to be in someone's head, and needs to be followed. Right? That's probably a very basic one that even tiny startups definitely should have.

Walter:

That's one that we should have early on, that we didn't. Probably like a lot of startups still do, I'm not sure, like we didn't write any tests. We would make one change, and it would break another thing, and then make one change to that, fix to that, and it would break another thing. You know what I'm saying? You'd always be running around with your head cut off because you have no idea what you're doing. That was kind of what we did for a very long time.

Vinay:

Makes sense. Then you've kind of gone through this almost like the full cycle where you've made a lot of your mistakes, and now things are going pretty well. I want to maybe jump into and spend a couple of minutes on the content [insights 00:23:34] specifically. What would you have done differently? If you were like starting this again, and you were like, 'okay, it's day one. I have a year of [one 00:23:43] way, and I have myself, and another writer, or whatever the structure is. Now knowing what you know, what would you have done differently? What systems would you put in place initially? How would you plan out your year? How would you go about, start testing and executing on like a content strategy?

Walter:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the big, like sort of the big picture thing, one of the things that's really important that I see in successful ... This is not a prerequisite, and you don't often don't see this is SaaS. It'd be SaaS because of the nature of it. I feel like the best content is, this sounds a little cliché, but the best content is created by people who are really excited about it. Who are really ... You can sense their enthusiasm for it.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

You get me talking about productivity and ... People get excited about it fine. I remember back in the day, I was in a co-working space, and I got everyone to start playing Star Craft just because I was so excited about it. You know what I mean? That, it was like infectious and everyone was like talking about Star Craft all the time, just because, not just because, but in large part because I was like obsessively playing and talking to everybody about it. Then all of sudden everyone started playing Star Craft. That kind of excitement just helps. It's just like a huge, you can sense it, you can feel it. People get excited and are attracted to it.

Big picture, I would kind of think, [with I'd 00:25:01] done this, like learning about productivity and stuff like that, was something that I had to learn, not something that I was exactly like super excited about. I would sort of ... If I were to start from the very beginning, I would think about, this is really, really big picture, but I would start about, thinking about making sure that I'm starting a startup in an area that I'm really, really excited about. People call it passion, but it's just like a way to ... It's like the subject matter domain expertise and the ability to get really enthusiastic about stuff, and really know it in detail to make it interesting for people. That is like where I would start one big picture.

Two I think I would make sure that I'm building my email list form day one. You see so many people who, they don't build their email list from day so there in a few situations. One, they have no distribution for their content. They're still relying on social news and whatever too far in. The other is that they are, they've built up an email list, but they have two separate email lists. One is for their content, and the other is for their features and that kind of thing. One is for their user accounts, and you send feature updates and stuff like that, but you don't send content to it. And the other is for content. Actually, this is the case with "iDoneThis." We have like a 175,000 emails on user accounts, but our email list for our content, I don't know, we had like 20,000 emails or something like that. We were afraid to send emails to our 175,000 person list just because we had never sent it before. So were always really scared. I think that the discipline of forcing yourself to send your content to your entire list, one is a huge boon because you can send it to a lot more people. Two, it forces you to make content that you're proud of. Do you know what I'm saying? If you don't think you're proud enough to send your content to your entire list, then there's something wrong with it.

I would just from the very beginning, build in that discipline that we're building out email list, and that we're sending our content to our entire list. Later on, of course, you'll refine it. Right? You might some send content to your whole list, others to segments in your list. From the very beginning, it's great to send content. I think companies, like one company that's doing a really great job of this is Wistia.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

They have ... I remember talking to Chris. I think off hand he said something like, this was offhand, and I don't know if this is off the record, but he said something like 'every time we send an email list in email to our email list, we grow our revenue. Well, one we grow our revenue, but we also grow our list by 20 percent.' Every time, you know what I'm saying? Every time he sends an email to his list, he grows his list by 20 percent. That's like what you want. Right?

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

They were doing content that nobody else was doing, which was like video production stuff.

Vinay:

Yeah

Walter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were doing it on a level that's much higher than everyone else. This kind of, their trajectory really went crazy when they ... For the longest time, they didn't have a free plan. In the last ... I think it was 2011-ish, they launched their free plan, and then 2011, 2012, 2012 to 2013, they expanded their free plan. Their user accounts went from like having thousands of accounts to having tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of accounts in a short span. In that time, they were still sending their content to the entire list. They were sending their content to the entire list when it was like 2,000 people. Then imagine sending the content to your entire list when it's 100,000 people. Right? It coincided with making the product free and getting more users, and more accounts. They were able to exponentially grow their content at that same time in conjunction with their free plan, and their changing business model. Anyway, that's what you want. Right?

Vinay:

Oh yeah. I want us to [veer off 00:28:39] quickly, because I've have these problems right now. We're basically, this is something that I'm trying to figure out right now. I actually have the setup that you said first, where we have a user list and a blog list. I'll tell you a couple things to do, we have so that, for example when a user signs up for an account with [Process 00:28:56] Street, we have a checkbox, that's like 'do you want to subscribe to the blog.' That feeds some of the signups for the product into the blog, but obviously it's not like sending to the entire list. We're also this kind pace where we produce way too much conent in mind to be able to send it to the whole list. What we do do is we actually have like on the bottom of every email that goes to like the whole list, we have like a latest from the blog kind of in the footer that has the three most recent posts. Right now we're basically sending about one email per week to our master list, and it's generally around feature announcements.

We have a feature release generally at least once a week, and then we have three or so blog posts that go out each week, and then we have new templates that are created each week. There's no way that I can, that I feel in my mind, that I can send all that content to the list at least not as individual emails.

Walter:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Do you have any ideas around how I should structure that?

Walter:

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. This is something that I hear companies struggle with. I think that one problem that I, you often encounter is that, and this is kind of different from what you're saying, but companies that are producing a lot of content, they'll feel the need to get all that content in front of people. Rather than send one email that features one article, they'll send an email that is a roundup of articles that they've published on the blog in the last week.

Vinay:

Right.

Walter:

The subject of the email will be something like, 'here's your weekly roundup.' You know what I mean?

Vinay:

Yup.

Walter:

The subject of the email will be something that nobody wants to read or focus on. When you get to the actual content of the email, you're like, it's like the paradox of choice. There's too much choice.[crosstalk 00:30:38]

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

You don't know what to read. Someone did a study I think of this, where basically people don't read roundup emails. You know what I mean? The question for you I think would be, I think it's sound smart that you included like here's the latest from our blog at the bottom of the email, but does anybody click on them?

Vinay:

No, the click through rate's really low.

Walter:

Right, right. It's kind of like well, can you kind of simplify things so that you get maximal impact. Would it be possible for you to maybe reduce the number of feature announcements you make, but really, maybe to once every two weeks, but then really highlight something that you're really proud of. And say okay, we made [all 00:31:13] these other feature changes, we're gonna not announce them. We're gonna just announce the really big ones. Similarly with content maybe we'll send one once a week that'll just feature one thing, each email will just feature one thing. Our best article that we published. We're going to tell people basically that this is really valuable, they have to click on it. You know what I mean? In doing that we're going to build up our own conviction about what's important, and we're actually going to get people to click, and we're going to tell them that they have to click on this, that it's really important.

Just kind of like paring things down, simplifying the individual emails, and then sending, not necessarily increasing the number you send, but send, each one that you send, make it like, build a lot of conviction around it. Like, yeah this is an awesome article. People are going to read this, and they're going to love it.

Vinay:

That's being one of the kind of ideas that I've been toying with. Actually I have this one a Trello board somewhere, but you do what you kind do it, so you go okay, this week we do a piece of content, and then next we do a feature roundup, and then this week we do a piece of content, and then next we do a feature roundup. Like that? Or even like, if we have a feature announcement this week, it goes out on Monday, and every Thursday we do a piece of content. So sometimes we do a feature announcement or not, and then every Thursday we do a piece of content to the whole list. Those are kind of the two ideas I've been playing with.

Other ideas I've had around segmentation are like, for example, we have like a free user base, and a paid user base. Right? Obviously the free user base is much larger than the paid user base. Can I send more content to the free users, right? They're not paying me anything, and so ... Right? That's kind of one thing. Or also we have like active users and inactive users. Right? Can I send more content to inactive users that are not actually using the product and probably not very likely to convert, but maybe I can use them to genrrate more shares and distribution of the content. Playing with frequency across those different segments as well, are things that I've been thinking about too.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

I think that's all really interesting. I think, one thing, one issue, kind of just something to look out for, at "iDoneThis" every time we did a feature announcement, we created nine segments, okay? The nine segments were so complex that they had to be explained with mathematical, logical symbols. Basically, only one or two people in the company could actually understand what the segments are. Every time we wanted to send that email, it took a day.

Tony:

Oh no.

Walter:

For one person to create the segment. We were like, 'oh man, we're so clever, we're crushing it on the segments.' We're really segmenting it out, but it got too complex. It was basically became really heavyweight and insane. I think, coming up with a continual process where you go from simplicity to more complexity, but then you get too complex, and you have to simplify again. It sounds like you're at that point where you probably want to add a little bit more complexity to what you're doing, maybe. But you could also potentially be at the point where you could benefit from simplification, too. Where you could just be like, 'well you know I'm just gonna keep, I'm gonna send one, maybe I'll send two emails a week. One is a feature update with just one thing, and the another is a blog article with just one article in it. We're going to see how people react. If we get too many unsubscribes then we'll tone it down to alternating weeks. If people like it, then that's something that we can get really excited about. That's kind of the way I think about it.

Vinay:

All right. Task accepted, we'll be writing a blog past about this folks in the future.

Walter:

All right. All right.

Tony:

That was an excellent free consultancy from Walter.  So appreciate him for that.

Walter:

There you go.

Vinay:

Cool, so yeah. Sorry to interpret. Do your email lists, that would be one of the other things you would change [inaudible 00:34:47] and send to the whole list frequently. I'll let you pick back up from there on kind of some of the other things that you would change moving forward if you were to do it again.

Walter:

Yeah. I think it does seem right now that like people are moving towards doing more longform content that's more comprehensive, rather than like little snippets, shorter snippets. I think it just goes back to, it doesn't ... I don't think long or short really matters, it just, or matters as much. It's really just going back to doing stuff that no one else can do. I think not enough companies think about that. I feel like I see a lot of companies, where I'm like, man you guys could be doing so much more cooler or interesting stuff, you've kind of, you've kind of like, I don't know if it's copped out, but you kind of just like, taken the easy way out a little bit.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

You're not really trying to do something interesting or different. I think for me a lot of, there's a lot of mistakes you can make, and this kind of goes back to what I was talking about in beginning. There's a lot of mistakes you can make, but I think one of ... And you'll be fine. I think one of the ones that you can't make again is like, you can't do boring stuff. You can't do stuff that everyone else is doing. Really thinking through about like what is is you're about, and how you can express that in interesting ways that connects with people in a different way than what everyone else is doing. That's like the core.

Vinay:

Do you have a kind of process that you use to track or brainstorm or come up with ideas around things that you think are interesting, and then kind of prioritize them, and figure out what you're actually going to write? Or do you kind of just, when inspiration hits, go for it?

Walter:

I think you can not do the when inspiration hits version. Right, because inspiration doesn't hit reliably. I think you like for me, we've used like [Trello boards 00:36:33]. It think [Trello 00:36:34] is my favorite brainstorming slash pipeline tool, just because you throw a bunch of stuff in the first, the first like set of cards, and then you, but then you're accountable for moving them along the pipeline. That's been like my favorite tool for that. Other tools that help in the brainstorming process are [BuzzSumo 00:36:52], which is, I don't know if you guys use that?

Vinay:

Yeah, I know it.

Walter:

Yeah, yeah, it's an easy way to see what the top shared articles on different kind of sites are. If I was like, 'hmm, I want to know what kind of articles have been successful on Process Street,' I can go to BuzzSumo, type in Process Street, and it'll show me some of the most shared articles on the Process Street blog. That really helps, because the best way to get a successful article is to do something that's a ripoff a really successful article.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

For example, my friend, this guy Andrew. He wrote this article, he's a freelance content guy, and he wrote an article for [AdEspresso 00:37:30], which is a Facebook ad optimization platform. Which was one of their top shared articles, top read articles of the year. The way he did it was, he Googled Facebook ad, and he saw one of the tops article was an article for like two years ago about how a guy lost $600,000 on Facebook ads. He spent $600,000 on Facebook ads and didn't make any sales.

Tony:

Ouch.

Walter:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. He was like that article at the time, if you click on the Business Insider article, it has like half a million views. There's no reason why, if you wrote that same article with the same catchy headline today that people wouldn't read it, because they would think it's not timely. You know what I mean? People don't know that it's not timely, nor do they care. You're seeing this happen a lot on like Facebook and stuff. You're seeing all these like viral videos from like five years ago resurface.

Vinay:

Yeah, totally.

Walter:

It's kind of like, once something's interesting, it's more or less interesting for all time, for the most part. For a lot of these purposes. So he basically wrote another article for that, AdEspresso blog, about how this guy lost $600,000 on Facebook ad, and it was one of the most read articles this year, right? I saw something similar with The Hustle, I don't know, do you guys follow The Hustle?

Vinay:

Yeah, I'm on the email list. It's really, they're good writers actually.

Walter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy, Sam Parr, who's the founder, we're like friends on Facebook or something. He had published this article about how the artist David Choe, anyways there's this guy David Choe, who did Facebook mural, a mural of Facebook [crosstalk 00:39:03]

Vinay:

Oh yeah. He made like $100 million or something?

Walter:

Yeah, yeah. Instead of getting paid $20,000, he took Facebook stock, and he ended up supposedly, David Choe's been know to exaggerate, but supposedly he made like $200 million. Anyway, lo and behold, I was on Reddit ... This story came out when Facebook IPO'd, which I don't even remember, that was like four years ago, right? Lo and behold I was on Reddit, and on the front page of Reddit, there was an article about David Choe written by The Hustle. Why is this on the front page of Reddit right now? That happened like four years ago. It worked. This article got hundreds of thousands of views. Anyways, going back to the original point, one of the best ways to sort identity something that's going to be successful, just looking at what's been successful, and doing like a ripoff of it.

Tony:

It's almost like taking a song and remixing it, or sampling it, or doing a cover version, and putting your own spin on it.

Walter:

Exactly.

Tony:

Yeah. I've heard other people do it, sort of, taking a popular article say from the wine niche and putting a spin on it, and sending it out to their audience in the coffee or tea niche. Doing the same kind of thing just remixing it.

Vinay:

Right. Defining kind of like similarly aligned [reticles 00:40:12], and just re-framing it. That's a good idea.

Walter:

Yeah, I like that one. That one's interesting.

Vinay:

Okay, how do you go about generating these ideas though? Do you kind of block time in the day to go and research BuzzSumo. Do you have everyone in the team just backfill this  Trello board and then go in and kind of process the ideas? How do you pick which ideas you actually decide to write about if you have like a [backboard 00:40:35] of ideas?

Walter:

Yeah, okay, that's a great question. I think the number thing that I found, yeah you have to set aside time to think about ideas. The number one thing that prevents you from doing so is being behind. Whenever I'm behind we don't come up with good ideas, we just try to get not behind. You know what I mean? You've been behind before, and it's like, I don't have time to think of really good ideas. I just want to write five articles right now so that I can get not behind. The number one thing is to be able to block off time to make sure you are thinking of really good ideas, you have to make sure that you're keeping on track and on schedule. I think that is one of the, that's a hard thing to do, because it's real easy to get behind.

Tony:

Unless you use "iDoneThis." That should motivate you to press on.

Walter:

Right, right, I'm not doing the best job ever advertising myself, because I'm often behind. Making sure you're not behind is a matter of making sure you're pipeline's full, and you're making progress everyday, and you're moving your pipeline along. It's all about setting aside time to make sure that you give enough time for this very important part of the process. Because a lot of people kind of short change this in the process. They're like, oh yeah, it doesn't matter what the idea is. What matters is executing and distributing it. The idea is connected through distribution ... I encourage people to think about distribution as part of the idea, not as a separate concern. When you're thinking of the idea, you need to be thinking of like how this article is going to be distributed, and why it's going to blow up and be big. You need to have a thesis on that. If you're not, you're kind of wasting your time.

Really making the idea stage a first class concern, and making sure that you're thinking it through, not just from what you're going to write, which is the temptation of a lot articles, sorry a lot of writers, but to think about how it's going to be distributed, and why it's going to blow up. Who is going to share it? Who's going to be interested? The best example I saw of this, was an article that was like on one of those news sites, like Mike or, like I don't even know. Maybe it was Priceonomics? It was like, the title of the article was 'why Filipinos are the unsung heroes of World War II.' I was like, man that is a brilliant title.

Vinay:

[crosstalk 00:42:43] Yeah, I might have seen that headline.

Walter:

Yeah, I was like, man if I'm Filipino I'm sharing that article, I'm not even reading it. There's no way I'm reading it. I'm not going to spend time reading that article, I'm just going to share it. That to me is like a brilliant idea. It's like a, probably a story not many people know, who knows [inaudible 00:43:00] is actually true or not.

Tony:

Yeah.

Walter:

It's something that you're going to feel so compelled to share, the moment you read the title. You know what I mean? You're really tempted to actually read it because you're like, Filipino? Those people are short or whatever.

Vinay:

They were in the war?

Walter:

Exactly.

Vinay:

Another interesting idea that I think got from the Buffer guys as well, is actually like when you're writing a post, think about targeting not the people that you actually are targeting as the core readers, but the influences of those readers. Instead of targeting your core audience, think about who are influences of your audience? Who has like [live 00:43:43] social reach, big blogs, big social networks, and stuff like that. And actually writing for the influences of your target audience, instead of writing purely for the target audience.

Because if you get can distribution from the influences, that creates like the flywheel, right? Influences generally are people who are more advanced in the topic than the normal readers. They're not going to share like basic 101 kind of posts on the definition of a topic or something. Right? It needs to be uniquely [insight 00:44:11] for them, for an influence to get excited about it, right? I think, thinking about that and targeting the influences can be an interesting way of kind of automatically creating higher quality more unique content. And also thinking about like the distribution at the same time, as well, when you're in that idea generation phase.

Walter:

Yeah. I think that's a really good point. In the end, it's like, yeah, it raises your game. You want to write something ... I think it's really gratifying not necessarily when a lot, like, you know, 10,000 people could share you article, but it's really gratifying when someone you admire shares it. You know what I mean? That really kind of gives you the goosebumps or whatever. There's a guy who I think is a really great entrepreneur. His names is Chris Muscarella, he's a New York entrepreneur. He's the found of Kitchen Surfing. He's started another startup called Mobile Commons. Anyway, I've hung out with him a few times, great guy, and I think he's really intelligent. We were talking about being CEO of a company, I was like, man this guy is so much better than me. There's times where he's like shared and liked my articles, but he does it very rarely. It makes me feel good. It's like, when I'm trying to do this like CEO thought leadership junk, if he likes my stuff, then that's better than getting shared by like a 1,000 people or whatever. Even if he's not necessarily distributing it, but then that sort of, the ability to have him distribute that to his audience also obviously doubles the fun.

Vinay:

For sure. This has been really good. I know we're kind of getting to end of the time here. I thought maybe to wrap up, you could kind spitfire maybe a few of the resources, and I know you mentioned some of the tools that you use like Trello and BuzzSumo and "iDoneThis" obviously. Maybe a few other tools that you use in the content creation process. And then like maybe a few resources such as like blogs or books that you'd recommended people following or checking to help them define their content marketing strategy and system.

Walter:

A book that I sent people that I think is pretty decent is "Made To Stick." It talks about why certain ideas and sticking and others aren't. I think it's pretty good, and it has a lot of sticky stories. I think that one's a great one. In terms of blogs ... I think one of the advantages that I have is that I'll like read everything that's on Cracker News, Inbound, Growth Hackers, et cetera. I'm reading all that junk. You know what I mean? Anytime anyone talks about anything about content, I basically know what they're talking about.

That's subject matter expertise. It's also like, sort of going to back to like that enthusiasm, that excitement you have for the material, where you're voraciously consuming everything there is. Cultivating that, I don't know how you cultivate that. The places you can go to I think are like social news sites, like again Hacker News, Inbound, Growth Hackers. Those are three great ones. The other is like talking to people who are doing the same thing as you. For example, I'm in a Slack chat with a bunch of founders. I'm in two Slack chats, one for SaaS founders started by Josh Pigford, the baremetrics guy. I'm in this other Silicon Valley founders chat on telegram called the POOP group, where we talk about POOP. Those are like both great for just like people are there like, people like you that are obsessively reading and talking about the same stuff. That just adds fuel to the flame.

Vinay:

The AngelPad group's really good for that, like the email list. When you kind of have question of ideas, you shoot that out.

Walter:

Yeah, exactly. When it comes to tools, I'd say, I've been loving Quip for managing our content, and managing the writing and the workflow. We used to use Hackpad a lot, or directly writing stuff in WordPress. All of those have their shortcomings. I've been liking Quip a lot. I feel like it's got great document management. It feels great. It's like writing in medium all the time. Except it's has a lot of quirks too. It does random stuff because it's a young company. I don't even know. Sometimes you can't copy and paste in the right place. I don't know, weird things happen.

Vinay:

Can you easily export to WordPress?

Walter:

You can not, which is one of the most annoying things. Yeah, there's a script that someone's written to export, but yeah that's one of the most annoying things about it.

Vinay:

Did you see like WordPress, this is probably going to time this Podcast, but did you see WordPress just launched an open source WordPress.com, and [rolled 00:48:32] it out into Java Script, and then released like a desktop app.

Walter:

Yeah, I saw that. I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it. Have you?

Vinay:

No, I haven't yet. But I assuming the desktop app going to be really nice for writing and kind of managing all that.

Walter:

Yeah.

Vinay:

[I'm going to get it 00:48:44] all set up.

Walter:

Sounds interesting.

Vinay:

All right, awesome.

Walter:

So yeah.

Vinay:

Well yeah, this has really very good, Walter. If people want to learn more about you, or follow you on social media, or check out your product, where can they find you?

Walter:

Check us, check me out at iDoneThis.com, and on Twitter, I'm smalter, @smalter. I'm part of the, I don't know, what group of people this is, but people who use their handle that they use to play video games with on Twitter, rather than using their real name. Yeah, that's me.

Tony:

I assume it's an avatar as well.

Walter:

Yup, yup.

Vinay:

Perfect. All right. I really appreciate your time, Walter, and thanks again for coming on this show.

Walter:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Tony:

Nice one, Walter. Thank you very much.