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Episode 39: Your Product Business Is An Asset w/Glenn Stovall

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difficult-clientsConquering Client Conflict
Paying late, not responding to emails, arguing about art direction…enough is enough. Get more respect & make more money by resolving these conflicts in your favor – more details

 

Consultant and freelance developer Glenn Stovall joins the show to talk about how he diversified into the product business. We cover the idea of products as a long-term play, the true nature of a launch, and shadow work!

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • Why a product business launch is a process, not an event
  • Why products won’t earn like services – and that’s OK
  • Adjusting from service sales to product sales
  • How pulling back on scale can help you ship
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 Show Notes:
Dependable: Deliver Software on Time and On Budget – Glenn’s new book
Special deal on Dependable for Chasing Product listeners
Glenn on Twitter
Gumroad
Small Product Lab
30×500
Amy Hoy – creator of 30×500, previous Chasing Product guest
Spin Selling
Drip – Lightweight Marketing Automation That Doesn’t Suck
Marketing for Developers
Justin Jackson
Majestic SEO – Marketing Search Engine & Backlink Checker
Thrive Themes – Conversion-Focused WordPress themes
Editflow – editorial calendar for scheduling blog posts
Audience Ops – content marketing service & tools
Brian Casel – founder of AudienceOps, previous Chasing Product guest
Remarq – create stunning documents from Markdown in seconds
Stripe – oh, come on, you know what Stripe is!
War of Art – book about winning the inner creative battle, by Steven Pressfield
Do The Work – overcome Resistance and get out of your own way, by Steven Pressfield

Glenn didn’t start out in the product business.  Like many of us, he started out working in an agency.  After taking a 5-year long “semester off” from college, he found himself in an agency position, managing other developers.  After later making his way into his own business, Glenn spent 3 productive years freelancing before considering launching a product business.

Glenn learned about the importance of scope in the product business after participating in the Gumroad Small Product Lab.  His initial product was going to be a Saas app but he reduced the scope and launched a book instead. This product would serve as seed material when he launched Dependable a year later, providing more valuable experience and asset-building for Glenn’s product business.

We talk about the disconnect between the skills needed for service business sales and product business sales.  Glenn points out that product is a long-term game, and that it won’t earn the same money in an immediate time frame that services will.  We talk about how building a product business is like building an asset, and the fringe benefits that come from having product on the market.

Glenn shares his basic marketing stack with us, and talks about some of his go-to moves for growing his product business.  Then he caps off the interview by sharing 3 action items for his fellow founders.

Episode 33: Following Your Startup’s North Star w/Sahil Lavingia

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90-Day Product Goal Framework
Are you tired of failing to meet long term goals as a product creator? Now there’s a system to help keep you on track and on task as you launch your own products – more details


In this episode, Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia opens up about VC, recent layoffs, the bright future of the company, and how having a startup “north star” has helped him to find his way as a founder.

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • What a “north star” is and why it’s important
  • Why VC is just a tool, not a pair of shackles
  • The role of automation in a small company
  • Important lessons from being an early employee at a startup
Hi there! To help Chasing Product grow, please take a moment to visit iTunes and give the show a 5-star rating. Thanks!

 Show Notes:

Sahil on Twitter
Gumroad
Gumroad on Twitter
Small Product Lab – Gumroad’s contest for product creators
Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad – Gumroad launch in 2011

Sahil lavingia has had an interesting ride. Getting into the game as a teen doing self-taught freelance logo design, Sahil moved on to ad banners, web design, app design and eventually app development to meet market demand as brochure sites became less and less desireable.

The connections he made led him to landing a job at Pinterest in 2011 (which was not “the” Pinterest we know today). Being an early employee at a funded startup taught Sahil a number of valuable skills, including:

  • Learning to adapt to goals
  • Taking charge of one’s personal destiny
  • Managing up/down/sideways
  • Learning to develop & articulate a vision
  • How to not be idle

During that formative time at Pinterest, Sahil came to understand the concept of a startup “north star” – core values that vet every decision a founder makes. Sahils own north star led him to launch a startup of his own, Gumroad. After coding up a proof of concept consisting of a hew hundred lines of code/html/css, the next indicated step was to turn it into a business that scales well.

Being plugged into the Valley startup ecosystem, Sahil discovered that there was a system & process for turning ideas into money. After securing $1mm in seed funding, Sahil proceeded to behave like a bootstrapped startup, building out Gumroad on his own for an extended period of time and letting most of the money sit in the bank. The decision to take funding was guided by Sahil’s startup north star to help creators be able to earn a living from selling their creations.

“My default answer is, yes, I totally can.”

In recent years, that same startup north star led Gumroad away from further VC and back to being a bootstrapped business. Sahil talks frankly with me about his experience with VC – which he says has been very positive – and what recent layoffs mean for the company.

We also talk about how his startup north star led the development of a high degree of automation at Gumroad, why the Gumroad team continues to roll out new features, and why the company never needed more than a few employees to handle the day-to-day operations of the startup. Sahil further tells us how his startup north star will guide him through the decisions facing Gumroad as they continue to operate as a bootstrapped company for the foreseeable future.

“People like saying you’re either bootstrapped or VC-funded, and I don’t think it’s that binary…it’s a spectrum.”

We also talk frankly about what VCs expect from their portfolio businesses, and why this works out acceptably well for Sahil and Gumroad, according to his startup north star.

Episode 23: Building An Audience w/Richard Felix

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Richard Felix joins the show in this episode.  Richard Felix has a multi-product mini-empire going on. From his early collaboration with Chris Coyier until now, Richard has leveraged building an audience and education people into a steady stream of lifeblood for his products.

In this episode, we talk about his start as a big reader & computer support pro as a teenager, his early lesson regarding audience-building and how it impacts success, and his experience using the act of teaching as an audience-builder. We also cover some practical aspects of being a founder and keeping a product moving forward.

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • how having an audience made his first success without knowing it
  • the importance of developing marketing skills
  • opportunity cost and how it changes when you have product out
  • why the term “MVP” has baggage

 Show Notes:

Be Stunning – Richard’s product; stops SaaS app churn by preventing failed payments
Get Retained – Richard’s product; stop Saas customer cancellations before they happen
– Retained tells you what customer to talk to & what about
– Customers need to do certain things to be successful
– Customer questionnaire upon sign-up; use the responses as criteria

Customer Retention Academy – used to build e-mail list
– Creating customers through education

Richard’s Blog
AreMySitesUp – Richard’s project from 2009
Chris Coyier & CSS Tricks
– Chris was building an audience long before the site – this is important

Amy Hoy – product-launching badass
30×500 – Amy’s product-launching course
– never build w/o an audience
– lots of structure
– lots of goals
– sales safari…identify needs & marketing opportunities in peoples own element
– see what people complain about…find enough of them

David Kadavy
Steli Efti
– close.io

Dropp – geo-tagged messages & media

Richard Says:
Build something small first
– maybe solve 1 part of the problem & see if the complainers bite

Marketing skill development
– be social!
– come out from behind the keyboard & meet people (the opposite doesn’t work)
– keep up a constant trickle of communication while building an audience
– losing a lot of customers to easy-to-fix problems prompted a desire to communicate better

Mistake: taking things I read as fact – too much focus
– Now, focus on outcomes
– Don’t get overwhelmed
– There’s a chance people don’t know why they’re successful

Opportunity cost – freelancing takes away from the product business now
– Most of us have the opposite problem

3 things
– build an audience…this is important!
– talk to your customers, or the people you want as customers (do you really want those customers?)
– ship as fast as you can – get as much as you need shipped to see if people pay
WARNING: MVP HAS BAGGAGE

Episode 5: Product-izing Your Consulting Work w/Brennan Dunn

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In this episode, Brennan Dunn talks about consulting work and the product business.  He shares some of the pitfalls of each, while teaching us what he learned as he moved from consulting work into launching bootstrapped product.

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • how monthly retainers can put you in a product-selling mindset,
  • finding people to support & understand your endeavors,
  • why it’s important to understand the sales cycle,
  • the importance of value transactions,

and more, including the story of how Brennan’s had his big “I have to get out consulting” moment, and what’s going on with his newest info-products; how they flowed naturally from his consulting work.

As always, we finish off with concrete, can-do action items for your own product launch. Brennan gives you three homework items that will move you closer to getting product out the door.

Planscope – Brennan’s Saas app for managing consulting work or general projects
Double Your Freelancing Rate – Brennan’s book for consultants
The Blueprint – Brennan’s system for getting more consulting clients
Consultancy Masterclass – Brennan’s workshop for leveling-up your consulting work

Amy Hoy – creator of the 30×500 method for launching products
Joel Spolsky
Patrick McKenzie
Nathan Barry
Rob Walling
Buffer
Mastering Modern Payments Using Stripe w/Rails by Pete Keen
RailsKit – Ready-made Rails code
SmallSpec – Christopher’s app for creating painless functional specs; join the launch list