Kalzumeus Software

Tarsnap is the world’s best secure online backup service.  It’s run by Colin Percival, Security Officer Emeritus at FreeBSD, a truly gifted cryptographer and programmer.  I use it extensively in my company, recommend it to clients doing Serious Business (TM) all the time, and love seeing it successful.

It’s because I am such a fan of Tarsnap and Colin that it frustrates me to death.  Colin is not a great engineer who is bad at business and thus compromising the financial rewards he could get from running his software company.  No, Colin is in fact a great engineer who is so bad at business that it actively is compromising his engineering objectives.  (About which, more later.)  He’s got a gleeful masochistic streak about it, too, so much so that Thomas Ptacek and I have been promising for years to do an intervention.  That sentiment boiled over for me recently (why?), so I took a day off of working on my business and spent it on Colin’s instead.

After getting Colin’s permission and blessing for giving him no-longer-unsolicited advice, I did a workup of my Fantasy Tarsnap.  It uses no non-public information about Tarsnap.  (Ordinarily if I were consulting I wouldn’t be black boxing the business, but Tarsnap has unique privacy concerns and, honestly, one doesn’t need to see Colin’s P&L to identify some of the problems.)  This post is going to step through what I’d do with Tarsnap’s positioning, product, pricing, messaging, and marketing site.  It’s modestly deferential to my mental model of Colin — like any good consultant, I recommend improvements that I think the client will accept rather than potential improvements the client will immediately circular file because they compromise core principles.

Let me restate again, before we get started, that I am going to criticize Tarsnap repeatedly, in the good-faith effort to improve it, at Colin’s explicit behest.  I normally wouldn’t be nearly as vocally critical about anything created by a fellow small entrepreneur, but I know Colin, I want Tarsnap to win, and he wanted my honest opinions.

What’s Wrong With Tarsnap Currently?

Tarsnap (the software) is a very serious backup product which is designed to be used by serious people who are seriously concerned about the security and availability of their data.  It has OSS peer-reviewed software written by a world-renowned expert in the problem domain.  You think your backup software is written by a genius?  Did they win a Putnam?  Colin won the Putnam.  Tarsnap is used at places like Stripe to store wildly sensitive financial information.

Tarsnap (the business) is run with less seriousness than a 6 year old’s first lemonade stand.

That’s a pretty robust accusation.  I could point to numerous pieces of evidence — the fact that it is priced in picodollars (“What?”  Oh, don’t worry, we will come back to the picodollars), or the fact that for years it required you to check a box certifying that you were not a Canadian because Colin (who lives in Canada) thought sales taxes were too burdensome to file (thankfully fixed these days), but let me give you one FAQ item which is the problem in a nutshell.

Q: What happens when my account runs out of money?

A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.

Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails.

Guess how I found out about this?

I use Tarsnap to back up the databases for Appointment Reminder.  Appointment Reminder has hundreds of clients, including hospitals, who pay it an awful lot of money to not lose their data.  I aspire to manage Appointment Reminder like it is an actual business.  It has all the accoutrements of real businesses, like contracts which obligate me not to lose data, regulations which expose me to hundreds of thousands of dollars of liability if I lose data, insurance policies which cost me thousands of dollars a year to insure the data, and multiple technical mechanisms to avoid losing data.

One of those mechanisms was Tarsnap.  Tarsnap is a pre-paid service (about which, more later), so I had pre-paid for my expected usage for a year.  I tested my backups routinely, found they worked, and everything was going well.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, when idle curiosity prompted by an HN thread caused my to check my Tarsnap balance.  I assumed I had roughly six months remaining of Tarsnap.  In fact, I had 9 days.  (Why the discrepancy?  We’ll talk about it later, I am not good at forecasting how many bytes of storage I’ll need after compression 12 months from now, a flaw I share with all humans.)  I was two days away from receiving an email from Tarsnap “Your account is running a little low” warning.  Seven days after that my account would have run down to zero and Tarsnap would have started a 7 day shot clock.  If I didn’t deposit more money prior to that shot clock running out, all my backups would have been unrecoverably deleted.

I am, in fact, days away from going on a business trip internationally, which previous experience suggests is a great way for me to miss lots of emails.  This is pretty routine for me.  Not routine?  Getting all of my backups deleted.

Getting all of my backups deleted (forgive me for belaboring that but it is a fairly serious problem in a backup service) would be suboptimal, so I figured there must be a way to put a credit card on file so that Colin can just charge me however many picodollars it costs to not delete all the backups that I’d get sued for losing, right?

Quoth the Colin:

But if you’re saying I should have a mechanism for automatically re-billing credit cards when a Tarsnap account balance gets low — yes, that’s on my to-do list.

Lemonade stands which have been in business for 5 years have the take-money-for-lemonade problem pretty much licked, and when they have occasional lemonade-for-money transactional issues, the lemonade does not retroactively turn into poison.  But Tarsnap has been running for 5 years, and that’s where it’s at.

The darkly comic thing about this is I might even be wrong.  It’s possible Colin is, in fact, not accurately stating his own policies. It is possible that, as a statement about engineering reality, the backups are actually retained after the shot clock expires e.g. until Colin personally authorizes their deletion after receiving customer authorization to do so.  But even if this were true, the fact that I — the customer — am suddenly wondering whether Tarsnap — the robust built-for-paranoids backup provider — will periodically shoot all my backups in the head just to keep things interesting makes choosing Tarsnap a more difficult decision than it needed to be.  (If Colin does, in fact, exercise discretion about shooting backups in the head, that should be post-haste added to the site.  If he doesn’t and there is in fact a heartless cronjob deleting people’s backups if they miss two emails that should be fixed immediately.)

Positioning Tarsnap Away From “Paranoia” And Towards “Seriousness”

Let’s talk positioning.

You may have heard of the terms B2B and B2C.  Tarsnap communicates as if it were a G2G product — geek 2 geek.

How does Tarsnap communicate that its G2G?  Let me quickly screengrab the UI for Tarsnap:

15 6 * * * /usr/local/bin/tarsnap -c -f database_backups_`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d` /backups/ /var/lib/redis && curl https://nosnch.in/redacted-for-mild-sensitivity &> /dev/null

I’m not exaggerating in the slightest.  That’s literally pulled out of my crontab, and it is far and away the core use case for the product.

Other things you could point to in describing Tarsnap’s current positioning are its web design (please understand that when I say “It looks like it was designed by a programmer in a text editor” that is not intended as an insult it is instead intended as a literal description of its primary design influence), the picodollar pricing, and numerous places where the product drips with “If you aren’t a crusty Unix sysadmin then GTFO.”

Example: Suppose you’re using Tarsnap for the first time and want to know how to do a core activity like, say, making a daily backup of your database.  That’s the need which motivated that command line soup above.  What does the Tarsnap Getting Started guide tell you to do?

If you’ve ever used the UNIX tar utility, you’ll probably be able to go from here on your own…

If you actually aren’t a master of the UNIX tar utility, don’t worry, there’s a man page available.  (It won’t actually help you accomplish your goal, because you are not a crusty UNIX sysadmin.)

This positioning has the benefit of being pretty clear — you will, indeed, quickly get the point and not use Tarsnap if you are not a crusty UNIX sysadmin — but it is actively harmful for Tarsnap.  Many people who would benefit most from Tarsnap cannot use it in its current state, and many people who could use it will not be allowed to because Tarsnap actively discourages other stakeholders from taking it seriously.

How would I position Tarsnap?

Current strap line: Online backups for the truly paranoid

Revised strap line: Online backups for servers of serious professionals

What does Tarsnap uniquely offer as a backup product?  Why would you use it instead of using Dropbox, SpiderOak, Backblaze, a USB key, or a custom-rolled set of shell scripts coded by your local UNIX sysadmin?

Tarsnap is currently defined by what it doesn’t have: no Windows client.  No UI.  Essentially no guidance about how to use it to successfully implement backups in your organization.

Tarsnap should instead focus on its strengths:

Tarsnap is for backing up servers, not for backing up personal machines.  It is a pure B2B product.  We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise, but we’re going to start talking about business, catering to the needs of businesses, and optimizing the pieces of the service “around” the product for the needs of businesses.  We’ll still be pretty darn geeky, but treat the geek as our interface to the business which signs their paychecks and pays for Tarsnap, rather than as the sole customer.

Why should Tarsnap focus on backing up servers rather than even attempting to keep regular consumers in scope?

• The average consumer is increasingly multi-device, and Tarsnap absolutely sucks for their core use case currently.  They want photos from their iPhone to work on their Windows PC.  They have an Android and a Macbook.  They have multiple computers at use simultaneously in their family.  Tarsnap is absolutely unusable for all of these needs.  These needs are also increasingly well-served by companies which have B2C written into their DNA and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on UXes which meet the needs of the average consumer.  Colin has neither the resources nor the temperament to start creating compelling mobile apps, which are both six figures and table stakes for the consumer market right now.
• Tarsnap’s CLI is built on the UNIX philosophy of teeny-tiny-program-that-composes-well.  It’s very well suited to backing up infrastructure, where e.g. lack of a GUI would cripple it for backing up data on workstations.  (We’ll ignore the lack of a Windows client, on the theory that UNIX has either won the server war or come close enough such that durably committing to the UNIX ecosystem leaves Tarsnap with plenty of customers and challenges to work on.)
• Data on servers is disproportionately valuable and valuable data is disproportionately on servers.  Consumers like to say that their baby photos are priceless.  Horsepuckey.  Nobody rushes into burning houses for their baby photos.  Empirically, customers are not willing to spend more than $5 to $10 a month on backup, and that number is trending to zero as a result of rabid competition from people who are trying to create ecosystemic lock-in.  Businesses, on the other hand, are capable of rationally valuing data and routinely take actions which suggest they are actually doing this.  For example, they pay actual money to insure data, just like they buy insurance on other valuable business assets.  (Appointment Reminder, a fairly small business, spends thousands of dollars a year on insurance.)  They hire professionals to look after their data, and they pay those professionals professional wages.  They have policies about data, and while geeks might treat those policies as a joke, they are routinely enforced and improved upon.

An immediate consequence of focusing Tarsnap on servers is that its customers are now presumably businesses.  (There exist geeks who run servers with hobby projects, but they don’t have serious backup needs.  Have they taken minimum sane steps with regards to their hobby projects like spending hours to investigate backup strategies, incorporating to limit their liability, purchasing insurance, hiring professionals to advise them on their backup strategies, etc?  No?  Then their revealed preference is that they don’t care all that much if they lose all their hobby data.)

How do we talk to the professionals at businesses?  First, we can keep our secret geek handshakes, but we also start recognizing that most businesses which are serious about their data security will have more than one person in the loop on any decision about backup software.  Why?  Because having something as important as the security of their data come down to just one person is, in itself, a sign that you are not serious.  No sophisticated business lets any single person control all the finances for the company, for example, because that is an invitation to disaster.  We also recognize that these additional parties may not be geeks like the person who will be physically operating Tarsnap, so we’re going to optimize for their preferences as well as the geeks’.

What does this mean?

We decide to look the part of “a serious business that you can rely on.”  Tarsnap.com is getting a new coat of paint (see below) such that, if you fire your boss an email and say “Hey boss, I think I want to entrust all of our careers to these guys”, your boss doesn’t nix that idea before Malcom Gladwell can say blink.

We start arming our would-be-customer geeks to convince potentially non-technical stakeholders that Tarsnap is the correct decision for their business’ backup needs.  This means that, in addition to the geek-focused FAQ pages, we create a page which will informally be labeled Convince Your Boss.  Many conventions which geeks would be interested in, for example, let their would-be attendees print letters to their bosses justifying the trip in boss-speak (ROI, skills gained as a result of a training expenditure, etc).  I sort of like Opticon’s take on this.  Tarsnap will similarly create a single URL where we’ll quickly hit the concerns non-technical stakeholders would have about a backup solution: reliability, security, compliance, cost, etc.  This page would literally be 1/5th the size of this blog post or less and take less than an hour to write, and would probably double Tarsnap’s sales by itself.  The page will not mention command line interfaces, tar flags, crontabs, or picodollars.

We speak our customers’ language(s).  This doesn’t mean that we have to suppress Colin’s/Tarsnap’s nature as a product created by technologists and for technologists.  It just means that we explicitly recognize that there are times to talk tar flags and there are times to talk in a high-level overview about legitimate security concerns, and we try not to codeshift so rapidly as to confuse people.

We burn the picodollar pricing model.  With fire.  It’s fundamentally unserious.  (Ditto Bitcoin, the availability of which is currently Tarsnap’s view of the #1 most important they could be telling customers, rather than boring news like “Tarsnap is used by Stripe” or “Tarsnap hasn’t lost a byte of customers’ data in history.”)

Pricing Tarsnap Such That People Who Would Benefit From It Can Actually Buy It

Tarsnap’s current pricing model is:

Tarsnap works on a prepaid model based on actual usage.

These prices are based on the actual number of bytes stored and the actual number of bytes of bandwidth used — after compression and data deduplication. This makes Tarsnap ideal for daily backups — many users have hundreds of archives adding up to several terabytes, but pay less than $10/month.

Colin, like many technologists, is of the opinion that metered pricing is predictable, transparent, and fair.  Metered pricing is none of predictable, transparent, or fair.

Quick question for you, dear reader: What would you pay for using Tarsnap to back up your most important data?

You don’t know.  That’s not a question, it’s a bloody fact.  It is flatly impossible for any human being to mentally predict compression and data duplication.  Even without compression and data duplication, very few people have a good understanding of how much data they have at any given time, because machines measure data in bytes but people measure data in abstractions.

My abstraction for how much data I have is “One MySQL database and one Redis database containing records on tens of thousands of people on behalf of hundreds of customers.  That data is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to me.”  I have no bloody clue how large it is in bytes, and — accordingly — had to both measure that and then do Excel modeling (factoring in expected rate of growth, compression ratios, deduplication, etc etc) to guess what Tarsnap would cost me in the first year.  (Why not just say “It’s a lot less than $1,000 so I’ll give Colin $1,000 and revisit later?”  Because I have two countries’ tax agencies to deal with and my life gets really complicated if I pre-pay for services for more than a year.)

I screwed up the Excel modeling because, while I correctly modeled the effect of increasing data requirements due to the growth of my service in the year, I overestimated how much data compressed/deduplication would happen because I was storing both plain text files and also their compressed formats and compressed files do not re-compress anywhere near as efficiently as non-compressed files.  Whoopsie!  Simple error in assumptions in my Excel modeling, Tarsnap actually cost 4X what I thought it would.

By which I mean that instead of costing me $0.60 a month it actually costs me $2.40 a month.

This error is symptomatic of what Tarsnap forces every single customer to go through when looking at their pricing.  It is virtually impossible to know what it actually costs.  That’s a showstopper for many customers.  For example, at many businesses, you need to get pre-approval for recurring costs.  The form/software/business process requires that you know the exact cost in advance.  “I don’t know but we’ll get billed later.  It probably won’t be a lot of money.” can result in those requests not getting approved, even if the actual expense would be far, far under the business’ floor where it cared about expenses.  It is far easier for many businesses to pay $100 every month (or even better, $1,500 a year — that saves them valuable brain-sweat having to type things into their computer 11 times, which might cost more than $300) than to pay a number chosen from a normal distribution with mean $5 and a standard deviation of $2.

So the pricing isn’t clear/transparent, but is it fair?  “Fair” is a seriously deep issue and there are all sorts of takes on it.  As happy as I would be to discuss the intersection of Catholic teaching on social justice and SaaS pricing grids, let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it.  That quickly aligns Tarsnap’s success with the customer’s success.  Everybody should be happy at that arrangement.

So why price it based on bytes?  Metering on the byte destroys any but the most tenuous connection of value, because different bytes have sharply different values associated with them, depending on what the bytes represent, who owns the bytes, and various assorted trivialities like file format.

Here’s a concrete example: I run two SaaS products, Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder.  Bingo Card Creator makes bingo cards, sells to $29.95 to elementary schoolteachers, is deeply non-critical, and is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me.  Appointment Reminder is core infrastructure for customers’ businesses,  sells for hundreds to tens of thousands per year per customer, is deeply critical, and is worth substantially more than tens of thousands of dollars.

So the fair result would be that BCC pays substantially less than Tarsnap for AR, right?  But that doesn’t actually happen.  My best guesstimate based on Excel modeling (because BCC never bothered implementing Tarsnap, because I’m not mortally terrified that I could wake up one morning and Mrs. Martin’s 8th grade science bingo cards created in 2007 could have vanished if my backups failed) is that BCC would pay at least five times as much as Appointment Reminder.

What other intuitions might we have about fairness?  Well, let’s see, my company is engaged in arms length dealings with Tarsnap and with many other vendors.  I think it sounds fair if my company pays relatively less money for non-critical things, like say the cup of coffee I am currently drinking ($5), and relatively more money for critical things, like say not having all of my customer data vanish (Tarsnap).

I recently did my taxes, so I know with a fair degree of certainty that I spend more than $10,000 a year on various SaaS products.  (Geeks just gasped.  No, that’s not a lot of money.  I run a business, for heaven’s sake.  By the standards of many businesses I have never even seen a lot of money, to say nothing of having spent it.)

This includes, most relevantly to Tarsnap, $19 a month for Dead Man’s Snitch.  What does DMS do for me?  Well, scroll back up to the entry from my crontab: it sends me an email if my daily tarsnap backup fails.  That’s it.  Why?  Because “the backup did not happen” is a failure mode for backups.  Tarsnap does not natively support this pretty core element of the backup experience, so I reach to an external tool to fill that gap… and then pay them 10X as much for doing 1/1000th the work.  What?

(Let me preempt the Hacker News comment from somebody who doesn’t run a business: Why would you use DMS when you could just as easily run your own mail server and send the mail directly?  Answer: because that introduces new and fragile dependencies whose failure would only be detected after they had failed during a business catastrophe and, incidentally, be designed to avoid spending an amount of money which is freaking pigeon poop.)

So how do we charge for Tarsnap that accomplishes our goals of being predictable, transparent, and fair?

• We’re going to introduce the classic 3 tier SaaS pricing grid.  This will give the overwhelming majority of our customers a simple, consistent, predictable, fair price to pay every month.
• We’ll keep metered pricing available, but demote it (both visually and emphasis-wise) to a secondary way to consume Tarsnap.  It will now be called Tarsnap Basic.  Tarsnap Basic customers are immediately grandfathered in and nothing about their Tarsnap experience changes, aside from (perhaps) being shocked that the website suddenly looks better (see below).
• We honor Colin’s ill-considered price decrease which he awarded customers with following the recent AWS/Google/Microsoft/etc platform bidding war.

We’re going to use our pricing/packaging of Tarsnap to accomplish price discrimination between customer types.  Our primary segmentation axis will not be bytes but will instead be “level of sophistication”, on the theory that quantum leaps in organizational sophistication/complexity roughly correspond with equal or higher leaps in both value gotten out of Tarsnap and also ability to pay.

Here’s some potential packaging options as a starter point.  These don’t have to be frozen in time for all eternity — we could always introduce them in April 2014, keep them around for 6 months, and then offer a new series of plans at that point in response to customer comments, our observations about usage, the degree to which they accomplish Tarnsap business goals, and the like.

The questions of what the pricing/packaging is and how we present it to customers are related but distinct.  This is the version for internal consumption — actual design of the pricing grid took more than 15 minutes so I decided to nix it in favor of shipping this post today.

That’s the offering at a glance. What changed?

We’re de-emphasizing “count your bytes” as a segmentation engine. I picked 10 GB for Tarsnap Professional because it feels like it is suitably generous for most backup needs but could plausibly be exceeded for larger “we want our entire infrastructure to be Tarsnapped” deployments. Importantly, I’m *not* segmenting by e.g. number of machines, because I think the market is moving in a multi-machine direction and Tarsnap is so effective and elegant at supporting that sort of incredibly valuable and sticky use case that I don’t want to impede it. (Tarsnap also must implement multi-user accounts and permissions for larger businesses, because that is a hard requirement for many of them. They literally cannot adopt Tarsnap unless it exists. That’s a natural addition at the Small Business or Enterprise level, but since that feature does not currently exist I’m punting from including it in the current packaging offering. Once it’s available I say put it on Enterprise and then grandfather it onto all existing customers to say “Thanks for being early adopters!”, and consider adding it to Small Business if you get lots of genuinely small businesses who both need it but balk at $500 per month.)

We’ve added “effectively unlimited” storage to Tarsnap.  I think Colin just blew approximately as many gaskets at this change as I blew when I heard he was lowering his prices.  Revenge is sweet.  See, Colin has always priced Tarsnap at cost-plus, anchoring tightly to his underlying AWS costs.  Tarsnap is not AWS plus a little sauce on top.  AWS is a wee little implementation detail on the backend for most customers.  Most Tarsnap customers don’t know that AWS underlies it and frankly don’t care.  If you assert the existence of strangely technically savvy pixies who have achieved redundant storage by means of writing very tiny letters on coins guarded by a jealous dragon, and Tarsnap used that instead, Tarsnap would be the same service.

Tarsnap isn’t competing with AWS: the backups being safely encrypted is a hard requirement for the best customers’ use of Tarsnap.  I can’t put my backups on AWS: instant HIPAA violation.  Stripe can’t put their customers’ credit cards on AWS: instant PCI-DSS violation.  We both have strong security concerns which would suggest not using unencrypted backups, too, but — like many good customers for Tarnsap — we never entertained unencrypted backups for even a picosecond.

So we’re breaking entirely from the cost-plus model, in favor of value-oriented pricing?  What does this mean for customers?

They don’t have to have a to-the-byte accurate understanding of their current or future backup needs to guesstimate their pricing for Tarsnap anymore.  You could ask people interviewing for position of office manager, without any knowledge of the company’s technical infrastructure at all, and they would probably correctly identify a plan which fits your needs.  Stripe is on Enterprise, bam.  Appointment Reminder is on Small Business, bam.  Run a design consultancy?  Professional, bam.  Easy, predictable, fair pricing.

Why have the media limit in there?  Because the only realistic way you can count to terabytes is by storing media (pictures, music, movies, etc).  Colin is in no danger of selling Tarsnap to people with multiple terabyte databases — there’s only a few dozen of those organizations in the world and they would not even bring up Tarsnap to joke about it.  (That’s, again, said with love. AT&T will not be using Tarsnap to store their backed up call records.)  You won’t hit a terabyte on e.g. source code.  If someone does, ask for their logo for the home page and treat their COGS as a marketing expense.

How does Colin justify the “media” bit to customers?  Simple: “Tarsnap is optimized for protecting our customers’ most sensitive data, rather than backing up high volumes of media files.  If you happen to run a film studio or need backups for terabytes of renders, drop us a line and we’ll either custom build you a proposal or introduce you to a more appropriate backup provider.”

Colin probably blew his stack about Tarsnap no longer being content neutral, because this requires us knowing what files his customers are storing in Tarsnap.  No, it doesn’t.  You know how every ToS ever has the “You are not allowed to use $SERVICE for illegal purposes” despite there being no convenient way to enforce that in computer code?  We simply tell customers “Don’t use this plan if you have more than 1 TB of media.  We trust you.  We have to, since the only information our servers know about your use is $TECHNICAL_FACT_GOES_HERE.”   If this trust is ever abused in the future Colin can code up a wee lil’ daemon which checks customers accounts and flags them for review and discussion if they hit 30 TB of post-compression post-deduplication usage, but it’s overwhelmingly likely that nobody will attempt to abuse Colin in this fashion because serious businesses take stuff that you put into contracts seriously.  That’s 99.54% of why contracts exist.  (Most contracts will never be litigated.  If anyone ever abuses Colin and does not correct their use when told to, he’ll simply point to the “We can terminate you at any time for any reason” line in his ToS written there by any serious lawyer.)

I will briefly observe, with regards to cost control, that if every customer used 100 GB of data then this would cost Colin single-digit dollars per customer per month, that 100 GB of (de-duplicated, compressed) data is actually incredibly rare.  Since the happy use case for Tarsnap involves virtually never downloading from the service (because backups are inherently write-seldomly-read-very-very-very-infrequently) AWS’ “bandwidth free incoming, bandwidth cheap outgoing” will not meaningfully affect costs-of-goods (i.e. Colin’s marginal expenditure to have the Nth marginal client on Tarsnap).

I will also briefly observe that Colin does not currently have a terminate-your-account option in his ToS.  Why?  Probably because no lawyer was involved in creating it, a decision which should be revised in keeping with positioning Tarsnap as a serious business which transacts with other serious businesses.  Lawyers will occasionally ask technologists for silly contractual terms which have no relation to technical reality.  Reserving the right to terminate accounts is not that kind of term.  If any clients strongly object to it, they can have their own lawyer draw up a contract and pay Enterprise pricing after Colin’s lawyers have reviewed and negotiated the contract.  You want to hear why SaaS businesses should always keep a no-fault-terminate option available?  Get any group of SaaS owners together and ask for horror stories.  A surprising number of them involve literal insanity, involvement of law enforcement, threats, and other headaches you just don’t need to deal with for $29/$50/whatever a month.

What does priority support mean?

It means that Colin will answer emails to prioritysupport@ before he answers emails to support@.  That’s it.

I know, I know, this blows geeks’ minds.  Is it OK to charge for that?  Of course it is.  You advertised what they were getting, they accepted, and you delivered exactly what you promised.  That’s what every legitimate transaction in history consists of.

Why would customers buy this?  Perhaps because they have company rules such that they always purchase the highest level of support, and the difference between $50 and $100 a month is so far below their care floor that that avoiding requesting an exception is worth the marginal cost to them.  Perhaps because when their backups have a problem a difference of a few minutes is actually an issue for them.  Perhaps because it isn’t really an issue for them (if it is, Tarsnap’s SLA is a nonstarter, seeing as Tarsnap has no SLA) but they like to see themselves as important enough that it is.  Perhaps because they’re worth billions of dollars and run credit card transactions for hundreds of thousands of people and why are we even having this discussion of course they want priority support for our backups.  (That’s called “price insensitivity” and every B2B SaaS ever should take advantage of it.)

What is an onboarding consultation?

Nobody buys Tarsnap because they want to use Tarsnap.  They buy Tarsnap because they have a burning need in their life for encrypted reliable backups (or a need for not losing their data in event of a breach or a fire or a hard drive failure or all the other ways you can lose data).  Tarsnap is a piece of the puzzle for meeting that need, but it isn’t all of it.

Can I confess ineptitude with UNIX system administration?  I founded a company, but I’m not a sysadmin.  My first several days of using Tarsnap were marred because the cronjob entry which I thought was supposed to do a timestamped backup every day was failing because of improper use of backticks in bash or some nonsense like that.  Whatever.  Now that it works it doesn’t matter what the problem was, but back when I implemented Tarsnap, that was a problem for me.  I guarantee you that Colin could have dealt with that problem in seconds.  I would love to have had him available to do that.  Now in actual fact I could probably have just sent Colin an email and he would have gladly helped me, but I didn’t do that because I’m a geek and I hate imposing on people, so why not make that offer explicit?

There’s many other ways to fail at backups other than screwing up your crontab.  Did you want to backup your MySQL database?  Did you backup the actual data files rather than a mysqldump?  Sucks to be you, but you won’t know that until the most critical possible moment, likely several years from now.  Did you forget to print a hard copy of your Tarsnap private key?  Sucks to be you, but you won’t know that until your hard drive fails.  etc, etc

Colin is a very smart guy and he has more experience at backups than many of his customers, so why not offer to make sure they get up and running on the right foot?  He does consulting anyhow (or did, back when Tarsnap was not paying the bills), so just do it in the service of the product: ask customers about their businesses, make sure they’re backing up the right information on a sensible schedule, and offer to assist with the non-Tarsnap parts of the puzzle like monitoring, auditing, compliance, etc etc.  (That would, incidentally, expose Colin to real-life justifications for features which should absolutely be in-scope for Tarsnap, like monitoring.)  It makes it easier for clients to justify using Tarsnap, easier for them to succeed with using Tarsnap, and easier for them to justify to other stakeholders why they went for the Enterprise plan rather than the Professional plan.  Businesses are quite used to paying for experts’ time.

(From Colin’s perspective, by the way, the effective hourly rate on these free consultations will eventually absolutely ROFLstomp his highest hourly rate.  I charged $30k a week back when I was a consultant, and onboarding Appointment Reminder customers is still monetarily a better use of my time.  “Hundreds of dollars a month” multiplied by “many customers” multiplied by “years on the service” eventually approaches very interesting numbers.)

What does custom legal / compliance documentation mean?

Many larger businesses require certain contractual terms to buy software, even SaaS which those contractual terms do not contemplate.  (e.g. “You should provide us with media containing the newest version of the software on request, delivered via courier within 7 business days.” <– an actual term I’ve been asked to sign for SaaS).  Instead of saying “We have a ToS which is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition”, say “We’re willing to have our lawyers look over any terms you have, and will either counteroffer or accept them depending on whether they’re reasonable.  This is available at our Enterprise pricing level.”

If your organization is sophisticated enough such that it can afford counsel and layers of scar tissue that generate custom language required to use software, it can afford Enterprise pricing.  If it’s not, you can use the easy, affordable options in the other columns.  (And while we won’t say this in so many words to clients, if you think you get custom legal work done for you at the lowest price, you are irrational and we do not desire your custom.  I’ve had clients ask me to sign their handwritten-and-scanned contracts which all but obligate me to give them my firstborn if Microsoft eats their Googles… and could I get the $29 a month pricing, please.  I’m not even going to waste my lawyer’s time with looking at it for less than $500 a month.)

In addition to improving Colin’s ability to get people up to Enterprise pricing, this opens new markets up for him.  For example, an IT company working with US healthcare clients might ask Colin to sign a BAA.  (I think, as a founder of a company which has to care about that, that Tarsnap is likely out of BAA scope, but somebody might ask him to sign that anyhow.  Better safe than sorry, etc.)  Rather than saying “No.”, Colin should say “Let me one that run by the lawyer.”, who will advise him that while it’s a paperwork hassle the first time it exposes him to zero legal risk.  So Colin would gladly cash that $500 a month check while mentioning explicitly on the website “Do you need HIPAA compliance for your backups?  We can accommodate that!”

Speaking of which: there should, eventually, be a Tarsnap in $INDUSTRY pages on the website for all of the top use cases.  On the healthcare page you could brag about HIPAA compliance, on the payment processing page about “Stripe uses us!” and DCI-PSS compliance, etc etc.

What is the transition strategy from metered pricing?

Simple.  Metered pricing is now called Tarsnap Basic and is available from one weeeeee little text link somewhere on the pricing page, or alternately by contacting Colin directly.  It has everything Tarsnap has as of the writing of this article.  Nobody who has ever used Tarsnap Basic has anything taken away.

Colin will be shocked and amazed at this, but very few customers are going to actually search out and find that link, he will not experience significant decreases in the number of new accounts he gets per month, and — I will bet pennies to picodollars — he discovers that, amazingly, the people who prefer Tarsnap Basic are, in fact, his worst customers in every possible way.  They’re going to take more time, use the service less, and in general be more of a hassle to deal with.

We grandfather in existing Tarsnap Basic clients.  If there is anybody paying Colin more than $100 or $500 a month for Tarsnap currently, Colin can either a) advise them that they should upgrade to one of the new plans (if they’re not using media files), b) immediately upgrade them to the new plan himself, or c) tell them “You’re now on a special variant of the new plans, such that you have no limit on your media files.  Otherwise it just purely saves you money.  Have a nice day.”  I feel that all of these are the right thing to do, and they might be the only recommendations in this post which Colin actually won’t object to.  Yay.

Why grandfather in clients?  It will cost us a bit of money in opportunity costs, but a) keeping commitments is the right thing to do, b) we can justify it as being a marketing expenditure to reward the loyalty of our early adopters, and c) the portion of customers receiving deeply discounted Tarsnap services will quickly approach zero because Tarsnap has yet to even scratch the surface of its total addressable market.

Why keep Tarsnap Basic at all?  Honestly, if this were a paid consulting gig, I would be pulling out my This Is Why You Brought Me In card here and going to the mattress on this issue: Tarsnap’s metered pricing is a mistake and should be killed, not rehabilitated.  You pick your battles with clients, but this one is worth fighting for.  Unfortunately, I believe that years of ragging Colin about picodollar pricing has caused him to dig in his heels about it, such that he feels it would be a rejection of the core of Tarsnap if he were to go to better pricing options.  Since I hope that Tarsnap actually improves as a result of this post, I’d be more than happy with an incremental improvement on the pricing.

What is a PO?

A PO is a Purchase Order.  It is a particular document enshrined as part of the purchasing ritual at many businesses, which often require a bit more ceremony to buy things than “Give us your credit card and we’ll Stripe it.”  Colin can now respond to any requirement for heightened purchasing ceremony with my magical phrase “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”

Can we pay with a PO?  “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”

Do we get a discount for pre-paying? “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”  (Let’s be generous: $500 a month or $5k for the year.  Cheaper than a week of a sysadmin’s time!)

Can you help us work up an ROI calculation for our boss?  “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”

Do you accept payment in yen?  “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”

Can we pay you with a check?  “I can do that with a one year commitment to the Enterprise plan.”

Tarsnap’s clients and Tarsnap will both benefit from Tarsnap charging more money

More money in the business will underwrite customer-visible improvements to the business, such as e.g. buying actual insurance for data which is in his care.  It will allow him to prioritize features that core customers really need, like e.g. the recurring billing thing which has been on the back burner for several years now.  It will let him not have to worry about cash flow as much as he is presumably doing currently, allowing him to take customer-favorable actions like not deleting all of your backups within days of a transient credit card failure.

It will allow Colin to buy his way around the bus number question.  (“What happens if you get hit by a bus?”  Currently: Nothing immediately, but eventually the service might fail.  We hope we fail at a time convenient for you to not have any of your backups?  Later: Don’t worry, we have systems and processes in place to cover business continuity issues.  Our lawyers have a copy of our credentials in escrow and we have a well-regarded technical firm on retainer.  In the event of my death or incapacitation, contracts activate and the business is wound down in an orderly fashion, such that your data is never lost.  You’d have several months to decide whether to keep your backups with a successor organization or migrate them to other providers, and our successor organization would assist with the migration, free of charge.  We have this described in a written Business Continuity Plan if you’d like to take a look at it.)

It also, frankly, compensates Colin better for the enormous risk he took in founding Tarsnap (as opposed to e.g. working in-house at any of his clients).  I know Colin is pretty happy with the living Tarsnap currently affords him.  Bully for him.  I hate attempting to change anyone’s mind about core philosophical beliefs, but on this particular one, Joel Spolsky did me an enormous favor back in the day and I’d like to pay that forward to someone else in the community.  (Particulars elided because it was a private conversation, but Joel convinced me not to just get BCC to the point of self-sufficiency and then retire, and part of the rationale is relevant to Colin.)

What we’re fundamentally concerned with here is an allocation of the customer surplus — the difference between what customers would pay and what they actually pay — between the customers and Colin, in his capacity as Chief Allocator For Life Of All Tarsnap-related Surpluses.  Colin is currently deciding that his customers are the most deserving people in the entire world for those marginal dollars.

Is that really true?  Appointment Reminder, LLC is a force for good in the world, I hope, but it certainly doesn’t match my intuitions as the highest and best use of marginal funds, and it really doesn’t care about the difference between the $2.40 it currently pays and the $100 it would happily pay.  That won’t even cause a blip in business.  As the founder, the LLC’s bank account is very much not my own pocket, but I’m probably the best informed person in the world about it’s balance, and I’d literally not be able to notice the difference after a month.

Can I tell you a story about Anne and Bob?  They’re trying to divide a carrot cake fairly between the two of them.  Carrot cake, if you’re not familiar with it, has delicious carrot-y goodness and is topped with very sugary white frosting.  In the discussion of the fair division of the cake, Bob mentions “By the way, I’m severely diabetic.  I can’t eat sugary white frosting.  If you give me any of it, I’ll scape it off.”

There’s many fair ways to cut that carrot cake, but (assuming that Anne likes sugary goodness and would happily have all of it if she could), any proposed allocation of cake that gives Bob one iota of frosting can be immediately improved upon by transferring that frosting to Anne’s piece instead.  This is true regardless of your philosophy about fairness or cake cutting, or whatever Anne and Bob might contemplate regarding the delicious carrot-y portions.  Even stevens?  That works.  Give Bob extra cake because Anne isn’t particularly hungry?  That works.  Anne has a lethal allergy to carrots and so wants none of the cake?  That works, too.  Anne and Bob belong to an obscure religion founded by cryptographers which dictates that in case of conflict over resources ties go to the person whose name has the lexicographically lower MD5 hash when salted with the name of the resource at issue?  That works too!  Just don’t give Bob the frosting because that’s just not the best way to cut the cake.

This stylized example uses absolutes, but in the real world, Colin and his customers are cutting a cake composed of encrypted-backup-so-your-business-doesn’t-fail goodness iced with whole-tens-of-dollars-a-month.  The customers mostly don’t care about the frosting.  Colin should take all of it that is available to him.  Aggregated over hundreds or thousands of customers it is absolutely lifechanging for Colin, Tarsnap, or whatever people or organizations are implicated by Colin’s terminal values.

Even if Colin desires to subsidize people whose use of Tarsnap is economically suboptimal when compared to Appointment Reminder’s (and thus who can’t afford the $50 a month), Colin should not cut prices on Appointment Reminder to do it.  He should instead charge AR (and hundreds/thousands of similarly situated organizations) $100 a month and then use the $100 to buy, hmm, “a shedload” of AWS storage, allowing him to charge nothing to whatever people/schools/charities/etc he wants to benefit.  You could call even put that on the pricing page if you wanted to.  Tarsnap Dogooder: it’s free if you’re doing good, email us to apply.

Colin has twice proposed that there should be a special optional surcharge if customers feel like they’re not paying enough.  Let’s run that one by the 6 year old with the lemonade stand: “Why don’t you do this?” “Because few people would pay for it, and it would complicate the discussion about buying lemonade, and it would make them feel really weird, and if they wanted to be charitable they’d probably have a markedly different #1 priority for their charity right now than middle class kids with entrepreneurial ambitions.”  All true, 6 year old!

I might also add, as someone who was dragged kicking and screaming into being a responsible grownup running a serious business, that while I personally can choose to donate money the business can’t.  If it isn’t necessary it isn’t a business expense (that’s phrased 必要経費 — quite literally “necessary business expense” — by my good buddies at the National Tax Agency — and yes, for the 43rd time, I really can read Japanese).

Memo to OSS developers: I can pay money for software licenses, even if the license is just “MIT, but we invoice you”, but I cannot just put business funds in your tip jar.

Tarsnap Needs A Fresh Coat Of Paint

I have abominable design skills.  That said, I still wouldn’t ship Tarsnap’s design, because it is the special flavor of poorly designed which could actually cost sales.  (Many non-beautiful sites do not cost sales.  Example: look at every bank or enterprise software company ever.  Very few would win design awards.  They just have to waltz over the very low does-not-scare-the-customer-bar.  Tarsnap trips.)

Here’s what I’d tell a contract designer hired to re-do the Tarsnap CSS and HTML: “Competitors to Tarsnap include Backblaze, SpiderOak, Mozy, and the like.  People who could make the decision to use Tarsnap might be familiar with and generally appreciate Twilio, Sendgrid, and Stripe.  Steal liberally from their designs and keep nothing of the current design.  Heck, you can even copy their mistakes, like using carousels.  No mistake you copy from those folks will be anywhere near as bad as it looks right now.  Lorem ipsum out the text.  If you have any question about a visual element rather than asking Colin or I you should ask any Project Manager or Team Lead you know ‘Would this cause you to run away from the screen in revulsion?’ and you can keep absolutely anything where the answer is ‘No.'”)

A visual redesign will probably cost Colin four to low five figures.  That’s cheap at the price of the business it will bring in within even the first month, but hey, let’s hypothetically assume it isn’t in the budget.  In that case, we go to Themeforest and buy any SaaS template which isn’t totally hideous.  Here’s one.

Pardon me for ten minutes while I pay $20 and deliver a quantum leap in visual experience…

And done.

Old: 

New:

Seriously, I have live HTML for that, and it probably took a whole 20 minutes.  Rewriting the entire Tarsnap website from scratch would be roughly one day of work.

That testimonial from Patrick Collison is, by the way, legit.  It could easily be accompanied by a logo wall of customers in a redesign.

I’m really ambivalent on what could go in the large image that I placeholder’d out, by the way.  Literally anything.  A stock icon enterprise shot would work, a skewed listing of arbitrarily database backups could work, a photo of some model exuding “I feel the thing that can only be felt by people who did not just lose all of their backups”, anything.  Even “This space intentionally left blank” is more professional than the existing Tarsnap site.  That could be fixed after fixing re-occuring billing or the cronjob which goes around deleting people’s backups.

Ordinarily I would suggest A/B testing designed changes, but Colin won’t ever actually run an A/B test and this is a clear improvement, so in this case I’d settle for shipping over certainty.

Getting Started With Tarsnap — Slightly Improved

Get Started Now is probably not my most innovative call to action button copy ever, but it’s an improvement over the existing call to action button… principally because the current site has no call to action button.  If you’re good at scanning blocks of text, you might find the link to [get started with Tarsnap].  Go ahead and load that in a new window, then come back.

Can you tell me what you need to do to get started with Tarsnap?  Feels like an awful lot of work, right?  That’s partially because it actually is a lot of work, and partially because it’s communicated poorly.

The Getting Started guide for software which assumes the user knows what a man page is includes the actual text “Go to the Tarsnap registration page, enter your email address, pick a password and enter it twice, and agree to the Tarsnap terms and conditions. Hit Submit.”  Is there any crusty Unix admin in the entire world who needs this level of detail in instructions to get through a form?  All this does is make the process feel more painful than it already is.  Also, why is that button called Submit?  I lack any information that customers for Tarsnap are masochists and accordingly Submit-ting is probably not what they came here to do, so how about we re-use that CTA “Get Started Now” or something similar.

We then go to the client download page.  Wait, scratch that, the instructions-for-building-from-a-tarball page.

“Hey kid, if instead of lemonade, you were selling a paper cup, a sugar cube, and a lemon, how much of that would you sell?”  “Mister, you ask really dumb questions.”

Colin should pick any five distributions and have the packages ready to go for them.  Heck, you can give people copy/paste command lines for getting them up and running, too, if you’re feeling really generous.

You can demote the build-from-tarball UX for advanced users or people using obscure distributions.  This will substantially ease the user experience here.  Even folks who are quite comfortable with reading pages of instructions to compile software don’t do it for fun.

After successfully getting the client installed, we then have to configure our server’s key pair.  That can (probably?) be integrated into the get-the-right-package described earlier.  (If you wanted to be really clever, you could come up with something such that the user never has to e.g. plug in their username and password because you already know it since they just gave you their username and password prior to navigating to the instruction page, but hey, that will actually take a few hours/days of programming.  We can do it a few months from now.)

There is a really important instruction in the Getting Started guide which is easy to overlook, even with being bolded:

STORE [THE KEY FILE] SOMEWHERE SAFE! Copy it to a different system, put it onto a USB disk, give it to a friend, print it out (it is printable text) and store it in a bank vault — there are lots of ways to keep it safe, but pick one and do it. If you lose the Tarsnap key file, you will not be able to access your archived data.

Tarsnap will appear to work if you ignore that instruction.  Ignoring it will, almost certainly, mean that actually using Tarsnap was for naught, because if your machine dies your ability to access your backups dies as well.

1)  At the very least, Colin should email everyone who signs up a new machine 1 hour later asking them to confirm that they have, in fact, moved their key file somewhere safe.  I guarantee you that this mail will catch many people who didn’t.  (I only noticed that instruction two weeks into my use of Tarsnap because, like many people, I don’t read on the Internet.)

2)  I know Colin currently conceptualizes Tarsnaps as “backups for the paranoid” and this resonates with some of his users, but as long as we’re moving to Serious Business, let’s give serious businesses their choice of levels of paranoia to embrace.  You can default to the current “You manage your key and, if you screw it up, well I guess then you’re totally hosed” but supplement that with “Optional: We can hold a copy of your keys in escrow for you.  [What does that mean?]”  This gives people who prefer Tarsnap to be absolutely 150% unable to decrypt their information to be able to get that, but also lets folks trade modest security for reliability.  Many businesses care about reliability more than the modest security tradeoff.

For example, where do you think my Tarsnap keys are?  Storage on my person is out of the question, and storing in a physical location is difficult when I split my time between two continents, so they’re somewhere in The Cloud.  I’m taking a gamble that that cloud provider and I are at least as good at securing that key file as Colin would be.  I trust us, but I trust Colin more, so I wish there was a simple “In case of emergency, get Colin on the phone and have him securely transfer a copy of the key files backed to me” option in case disaster strikes.  (And again, that sort of thing is historically something people are happy to pay for.  If I were to hypothetically use the “print out a copy of the key and put it in a safe deposit box” option that actually costs more than Tarsnap does currently.)

What Happens After We Install Tarsnap?

Currently, absolutely nothing happens after you install Tarsnap.  It just leaves you to your own devices.  There’s a very lackluster getting started guide which barely reads you the command line options.

Does the user want to read command line options?  No.  Probably 90% of users need one of, hmm, five things?

1)  I want to back up my database.  How do I do that?

2) I want to back up my source code.  How do I do that?

3) I want to back up this entire freaking server.  How do I do that?

4) I want to back up my website.  How do I do that?

5) Somebody told me to get the important stuff backed up.  I’m not sure what is important.  Any help?

It doesn’t hurt the experience of Crusty UNIX Sysadmins (TM) an iota to write a decision tree into the website which would give handy, detailed instructions for people encountering these very common needs.  They’d be more likely to get Tarsnap into a place where it is useful, more likely to spend more money (on Tarsnap Basic), and more likely to ultimately achieve success with having restorable, usable backups via adopting Tarsnap, as opposed to muddling their way through backing up MySQL and accidentally getting files which can’t actually be restored.

What Else Could We Change About Tarsnap?

Lots.

• The marketing site includes no testimonials or case studies.  Solicit and add them.  Stripe seems to be an easy layup here, since they’re already on the record as loving Tarsnap.
• There’s no reason to go to Tarsnap or cite Tarsnap except if you want to use the tool or you personally like Colin.  Colin’s a likeable guy, but he could also be a likeable guy building the Internet’s best set of instructions for backing up arbitrary systems.  How to back up a Rails app!  A WordPress site!  A Postgres database!  etc, etc . They’d get him highly qualified traffic from people who are very motivated to learn about robust, secure ways to back up their systems.  Too knackered to write these pages, Colin?  I sympathize, what with all the exhausting work lifting money off the table and into your pockets, but now that you have lots of money you can pay people to write these pages for you.
• There’s an entire Internet out there of companies whose businesses implicate backups but which do not want to be in the backup business.  Let’s see: Heroku, WPEngine, substantially every SaaS with critical data in it, etc.  Colin could approach them serially and offer easy integration options if they are willing to trade exposure to their customer bases.  It’s a win-win: target company gets the world’s best answer to the “Is my data safe with you?” question, Colin gets scalable customer acquisition, target company’s customers get our-data-does-not-vanish.
• Tarsnap assumes as single-user-with-godmode privileges, which doesn’t map to the understanding of many businesses.  Accounts should have multiple users and access controls.  Audit logs and whatnot are also options.  All of this will help people justify Enterprise pricing and also help people justify using Tarsnap in the Enterprise at all, since — at present — Tarsnap fails a lot of company’s lists of hard requirements.  (You don’t need every company in the world to be able to use you, but there’s plenty of features which unlock hugely disproportionate value for customers and for Colin relative to the amount of time they take to make.  Multiuser accounts doesn’t double the complexity of Tarsnap but it probably singlehandedly doubles Tarsnap’s exposure to dollars-spent-on-backup, for example.)
• Tarsnap doesn’t currently do the whole backup puzzle.  It doesn’t have monitoring, it doesn’t have convenient ways to restore, etc.  Tarsnap could easily create more value for users by filling those sub-needs within backups and could potentially even consider branching out some day.

Ten thousand words, crikey.  OK, I’ve said my piece.  If you’d like me to do something similar for your business, I’m not actively consulting anymore, but you’d probably be well-served by getting on my email list.  I periodically go into pretty deep coverage of particular areas of interest to software companies, and — occasionally — there’s an announcement of commercial availability of this sort of advice.  Speaking of which, I should get back to building the stuff that people pay for, in anticipation of fun new ways to give Tarsnap more money.

One of my favorite conferences every year is Microconf , because it focuses on small software businesses, which is where my heart and soul is businesswise.  I know a lot of folks can’t justify a trip out to Vegas (though you should really come in 2014 if you possibly can — 2013 is only a few days from me posting this and already quite sold out), so I always ask Rob and Mike (the organizers) for a copy of my video so I can produce a transcript and put it online.  My 2012 talk focuses on building systems to achieve marketing objectives at a software company.  I’ve been successful at doing things at a variety of scales, from my own one-man software business to consulting clients with 8 figures a year of revenue.  A lot of the tactics covered are wildly actionable if you run a SaaS business.

[Patrick notes: As always, I include inline notes in my transcripts, called out like so.  If you’d like to see my 2011 talk, see here.  It focused on how to run a software business in 5 hours a week, including scalable marketing strategies like SEO/AdWords/etc.

Video & Slides (Transcript follows)

Transcript: Marketing, For People Who Would Rather Be Building Stuff

Patrick McKenzie:  Hideho everybody, my name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as “Patio11″ on the Internet.

I sometimes get asked what I do, and I’m kind of confused at it myself. I was going to Town Hall recently to file my taxes, and I was across the street from Town Hall, the light was preventing me from getting across the street. By the way, I live in Japan. A guy comes up to me on a cycle, stops right next to me and says, “Psst!  日雇い労働ですか？” [Patrick notes:  I corrected the Japanese here with reference to a dictionary, but don’t remember this as being his phrasing.]  My brain started to flip through all the possible things that could be, and a high probability for those characters, hiyatoi roudou is day labor, “Are you a day laborer?”

I was like, “Wow, there’s only one way I can answer that. ‘Yeah, but my rates are probably a little high for you.'”  [Patrick notes: Unstated background knowledge here: I live in Ogaki, where roughly 90% of foreigners — who are rather scarce — are blue collar Brazilian Japanese who largely work in electronics/car parts factories.  Unemployment among these folks has been rather high for the last couple of years, so if you were doing things purely on a statistical basis, “Day laborer” is a much less insane guess for a foreigner standing outside city hall than “Owner of a software company.”]

[laughter]

If you were here last year, you heard the grand arc of my transition from really overworked Japanese salary man to totally‑not‑working‑all‑that‑much Bingo Card empire guy. It’s really not all that great shakes compared to some of the things that people have done up here, but it’s the little website that could. It has over 200,000 users and 6,056 paying customers.  [Patrick notes: Current counts as of posting are ~300,000 and 8,249.  The last twelve months have been pretty good.] I’m pretty happy with where it got me to, and just for a little update on this story for last year, if you weren’t here for last year, it’s on the blog somewhere.

I’m sure people will tweet out the link to that video if they’re very, very nice and kind to me. [Patrick notes: The Microconf 2011 writeup is here.] Just an update. The blue bars here are the 12 months before attending Microconf, and the red bars are the last 12 months, so after attending Microconf. Since my business is crazily seasonal, if the red bar is above the blue bar, I’m doing something right. As you can see, in the last six months, the red bar is routinely exceeding the blue bar, so I was doing something very right. The thing that I was doing was stopping working on Bingo Card Creator.

So my first actionable tip is, “If you have me in charge of your marketing,” like say Jason Cohen does, “you need to fire me, and your sales will go up by 50 percent.” We’re not going to talk too much about Bingo Card Creator today, we’re instead going to talk about systems. You heard earlier about building the flywheel, being a growth hacker. This is probably one of the most important things I’ve ever come across, but a job is a system that turns time into money, and a business is a system that turns systems into money.

I was once talking to a Japanese guy at a large automobile manufacturer in central Japan that you might know of, and I said, “T‑Corp is known in America as a company that makes cars, and Ford, or whatever, is a company that sells cars.” He patted me on the head like, “Oh, nice. Silly American. Ford might well be a company that sells cars, but T‑Corp is a company that builds organizations that builds cars.”

Why Engineers Get A Cheat Code For Starting Businesses

I thought that was a very profound distinction. All of us are in the business of building things that help us sell things that we build. I think we are ideally situated to this, because, as engineers, we build systems. You heard earlier about the term “growth hack,” which is just on the cusp of becoming a meme, by the way. You’re going to hear a lot about that over the next coming days, because there are huge platforms these days, everything from Pinterest to Twitter, to Google, to the App Store, that give you ready access to hundreds of millions of users, billions of users, many of whom have credit cards and will actually pay money for things.  [Patrick notes: I’m stealing this from 500 Startups’ investment thesis, but I think it is equally applicable regardless of whether one is doing a high-growth startup or a one-man bootstrapped software company.  Again, the most niche app you could think of, run by an unknown guy living in Central Japan, just added 100,000 users last year while in maintenance mode due to effective use of Google as a platform.]

As engineers, we have the capability of exploiting those platforms in a scalable manner. Some of the ways to do it I talked about last year, and I don’t want to give all old content, so if you want to hear about SEO, which is the main reason my sales went up for this year, just watch the thing from last year. [Patrick notes: Or you can read my copious writeups of it in the Greatest Hits section under SEO or Content Creation.] We’re going to talk about new stuff. Oh, totally stealing a slide from last year. In addition to Bingo Card Creator, there were three really big things going on, and I just want to give you updates on them.

The most important one, down in the bottom there. Last year I said something out of school, it wasn’t planned for the talk or anything, it just slipped out of my mouth. I said, “The most important thing in my life right now is I’ve recently met a beautiful young lady, Miss Ruriko Shimada over there, and she is going to be the future Mrs. McKenzie.” That was the first time that thought ever got verbalized, even in the deepest recesses of my mind, so luckily it was not simulcast or anything. That’s official now, it’s happening June 26.  [Patrick notes: Ruriko’s only comment on the presentation was “The 23rd, dear.  Be there.“]

[applause]

Thanks very much. I don’t have a picture of kids, for obvious reasons, but can I just make a note about this? Everyone has shown a picture of their children or significant other. At a less charitable conference, people might be, “Oh, that’s the boring stuff, skip that, get to the good stuff.” All those other pictures, that is the good stuff. There’s a word in Japanese called mono no aware (もののあわれ）, meaning “an awareness of the impermanence of things.” All this conversion rates and equity grants and profits and all this… Vegas?

[laughter]

This will all be dust and memories. The important part of our lives is our families, our friends, that is what we will be known for. If you have a successful business, and your family isn’t feeling it, something is going terribly, terribly wrong. I can’t just stand up in here and say, “My fiancee is the nicest, smartest, most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world,” for the entire hour.

[laughter]

#include <platitudes.h>… wait, the word I wanted is not platitudes, it’s compliments, drats. I don’t speak the Engrish. Anyhow, updates on other things that are going on. I got a slide up from Fog Creek, which was one of my favorite clients I can publicly talk about, but I don’t really have much content in this presentation about running a high‑priced consulting business. Is that something you guys are interested in? Let’s have a show of hands.

I’m a marketing guy, so let me give you the quick elevator pitch, and if you want to hear about this, we can talk about it at the question‑and‑answer session. Is it interesting to you how I turned down $700,000 a year to do conversion optimization for big software companies? Just raise a show of hands. Would that be fun? Oh, OK. We might talk about that before questions. We’re going to talk a little about “Appointment Reminder” stuff that I learned the second time I tried to make a software business from the ground up, and how you can apply it to your businesses.

This is my new thing, which is, by the way, in almost direct competition to somebody who was in the first session of tear‑downs. You might compare and contrast to the way I do it and the way he does it. I actually went up to him afterwards and tried to teach him what I know about this, because people helping people is what this event is all about. We all get better, even if we’re competitors, sharing knowledge. Anyhow, it makes “Appointment Reminder”, phone calls, text messages and email messages to the clients of professional services businesses.

Don’t Make My Mistakes In Picking A Software Business

This is a wee bit more sophisticated than my bingo thingy. Why did I pick this problem? This is the slide in which I give bad advice. The way you should actually pick a problem, skip back to your notes from Amy Hoy’s presentation. That’s the way you should pick a problem. This is not the way you should pick a problem, but it’s true, so I’ll tell you it anyhow. You see this jacket that I wear in all of my presentations, because the color red looks good on me, and I love this company, Twilio?

Twilio came out with this product that let Web developers basically script up phone calls and SMS messages. I thought, “Ooh, that’s kind of awesome.” I like to view the market, “The market” in the sense of the broad, capital‑C Capitalism sense of the market, as a placid lake, which incorporates everything we know about the world right now. When new information gets added to that, it’s like dropping a rock in the lake. Ripples in the lake are change, and the larger the ripple is, the more change there is, the more possibility there is to get outsized profits over the course of the world right now.

Because we learned from microeconomics 101, the natural state of profits in the system is zero. The steady state. Twilio was dropping a big F‑ing rock into the software world, because you can finally interface with the plain old telephone system without having to understand what an Asterix server is, and if anyone here has ever tried to hack Asterix, I’m sorry for you. What could I do with a telephone that I couldn’t do before? I made a list of 400 ideas and just sat on it, because I was still at the day job at the time. Since I spend 16 hours a day in front of a computer screen, my shoulders ache like crazy, so I sometimes go to massage therapists.

This one day I went into a massage therapist, and asked, “Hey, can I get a shoulder massage, because I’m an engineer, my shoulder aches like crazy.” She said, “It’s going to be about two hours,” and I’m like, “Oh, well I’m gainfully unemployed, so that’s no problem. I’ll just take my iPad, browse Hacker News in the corner here for a little while, then we’ll get the massage when you can do it.”

15 minutes later, she comes back to me and said, “Hey, I know I told you it would take two hours, but it would be really, really helpful for me if I could massage your shoulders right now.” I said, “Sure, no problem, can I ask why?” She said, “I had this slot booked up with somebody else, but he didn’t come in, and now he’s 15 minutes late. If I don’t start massaging your shoulders now, that’s going to throw off the schedule for the rest of the day, and I’ll never get the revenue from these next 45 minutes back.”

I’m like, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you call him?” Notable and quotable line from her, she says, “I’m a massage therapist. If my hands are on a telephone, they’re not on someone’s back, and if my hands aren’t on someone’s back, I’m not making money,” and I thought, “That’s interesting.” I asked, “If I had a system that could call someone automatically before their appointment with you, would that be motivational to you?” and she said, “Yeah.” I went through my list of 400 things, and thought, “This is the first one I’ve had an actual customer need for.”

How did I know it would sell, though? That’s one person. I did two things. One thing I did was just whipped up the MVP, Minimum Viable Product, read Eric Ries’s book “The Lean Startup.” Everyone should read that book, it’s amazing. I whipped up the MVP, which is a website, you can get to it, I’ll show you the link later. You give in your phone number, and it calls you, just like you had an appointment, and says, “Hey, you’ve got an appointment. Click ‘One’ to confirm.”

If you confirm it shows right on the schedule here, “This person confirmed.” If you cancel, it says, “This person canceled.” We would email you right now so you can re‑book the slot and save the money. I just threw this up on the Internet, and waited. People signed up for my pre‑launch list, and said, “That is exactly what my problem is.” The other way I did, was I went home to Chicago, which is where my family is from, and took out $400 from an ATM, and walked around downtown Chicago and looked for salons and other massage therapists, that sort of thing.

I walked in and said, “Hey, do you take walk‑ins?” “Yeah.” “Are you free right now?” “Yeah.” “Are you the business owner?” “Yeah.” “OK, I’ve got a weird proposition for you,” and no, not that kind of weird.

[laughter]

“What’s the rate on a 30‑minute shoulder massage?” She would tell me. It’s almost always a she. I would say, “OK, I’m going to pay you the rate for a 30‑minute shoulder massage, but what I’m really interested in, I’m a small businessman, I live in Japan, I’m interested in the business of massage therapy. How about we just skip to that post‑massage cup of tea that you’re going to offer me,” I have learned this over the years. “Skip to the cup of tea, I’m going to pick your brains about how you run your business, and then I’ll go, no massage needed, and you get your money?” Almost everybody took me up on that, and nobody called the police. Yay.

[laughter]

I would ask questions, like, “What do you use for your appointment scheduling right now?” “Pen and paper version 1.0.” “How many people cancel?” “Lots.” “Do you not like when people cancel?” “Yes.” “Do you phone call people every day?” “Well, yeah, I kind of do, but I sometimes forget,” yadda yadda yadda.

Then the money question. “If I had something that I could show you right now that would call, would you pay for it?” “Yes.” “Would you pay $30 a month for it, because $30 a month is close to your rate for just saving one appointment?” “Yes.” “Can I get your email address right now? As soon as this is ready, I’m going to come back to you and say, ‘It’s ready. Let’s get that $30 a month,'” and I just collected those.

I actually didn’t end up selling any one of those people, but the need was clearly demonstrated to me there. I’ve got a better way for doing it these days, because as I mentioned, I am in the talking‑to‑people‑about‑wedding‑things, and I’m learning stuff about selling wedding dresses, because I am the unwitting victim of that. There’s this thing called the iPad, and every salesman at a wedding venue or a wedding dress shop, or whatever, in Japan, is using the iPad. I predict within five years, that every salesman in the entire world will consider that their key sales tool.

The reason is, when you have a sales discussion with someone with the iPad, you’re sitting next to them, standing next to them, hunched over the shoulder in a very intimate, psychologically‑reassuring way, while they drive the iPad and flip through. “Oh, that’s a lovely dress. Oh, that’s lovely, I really like that one.” “You like that one? I’ll show you more like that.” When they get confused, you can just take over for them, do the little slide‑y slide‑y thing, and it is a very, very persuasive technique.

If you don’t know whether a software will sell or not, go to WooThemes, or go to ThemeForest, pay $15 or $70, or whatever it is, mock up three screens from it, or even mock up two screens plus the final output. Put them in a photo gallery on your iPad, and take it directly to people in real life. Stand out and then listen over the shoulder, it’s like, “Do you really have a wedding dress problem? We got these.” If you’re solving a problem people actually have, they will say at this point, “Shut up and take my money.”

[laughter]

If someone says, “That’s kind of interesting, tell me when that exists,” you have not successfully identified a problem that people actually have. Fail to identify problems prior to spending six months of your life building the solution to those problems that no actual human being, aside from you, actually experiences in their life. You will have much better success that way. Brief interlude on pricing. This was brought up in a few things, and we treated it at a high level, so I thought I would dig into the nuts and bolts, considering many of you are in the software‑as‑a‑service business.

How To Read A SaaS Pricing Grid (And Why You Should Charge More)

I thought I’d read a pricing grid. This one’s from Wufoo. You have seen similar things all over the Internets. I can’t tell you about exact results I’ve gotten from customers, but I talk to a lot of people about this sort of things, so if we’re just kind of anonymizing, here’s how you read it. Find the largest dollar‑amount plan. That plan generates 33 percent to 50 percent of gross revenue. Why? Because it’s sold to people who are not spending their own money, they’re spending a corporate budget. Spending your own money hurts, but spending a corporate budget is kind of the happy thing for a lot of people.

[laughter]

Because, check this out, if you don’t spend your budget, it gets taken away from you. If you’re trying to protect your home position at a company, you want to spend as close to the top of that budget as possible, so help people out. They’re trying to protect their status and job security, by helping them spend their budgets. $200 a month is nothing to a company that has actual employees. The cheapest possible fully‑loaded cost for a college graduate is about $4,000 a month.

$200 a month is five percent of that, so if you’re only spending one or two hours of employee time a month, $200 is a total no‑brainer. So’s $250. Anyhow, the one that has the most users. Nobody likes to be a cheapskate, boom, it’s this one. The one that has the highest support costs. Wufoo has a free plan, I’ll guarantee you they get more annoying emails from people on the free plan than anything else put together, probably squared.

[laughter]

The worst customers, I call them pathological customers, are attracted to things that don’t have a lot of money. It’s amazing how many people have told me this. You raise prices, and you deal with less crazy people. At 99 cents, people have very unreasonable expectations. “What? This flashlight app didn’t do my taxes! One stars!”

[laughter]

When you’re charging people tens of thousands of dollars a month for an enterprise‑level service, they say, “Hey, our business really needs this feature.” “Oh, thanks for the email. I would really love to implement that feature, but we are kind of constrained on time right now. Can I get back to you in the indefinite future, if we get time to do that?” You’ll get a one‑line email back, “Sure, that sounds great.”

Would you rather deal with the no stress and get the tens of thousands of dollars, or “One stars!” for 99 cents? It’s almost self‑explanatory. By the way, I’ve sold a semi‑B2C product for most of my life. I really do love teachers, even when they’re kind of exasperating, and can’t tell the difference between the blue Googles and the green Googles, and don’t understand why they can’t get a CD of the Internet. It actually happened to me today.

[laughter]

In terms of, if I had known then what I know now, I would never go into B2C. Charge businesses, charge them a price appropriate to the value you’re providing. By the way, big surprise about software‑as‑a‑service companies, almost every one has enterprise pricing available. Some of them don’t put it on your things, but I guarantee you there’s a way to go up to Wufoo, go up to almost any software‑as‑a‑service company, and pay arbitrary amounts of money for their product. For example, if you have a $500,000 budget, and you talk to somebody at Wufoo, I will guarantee you that they will find an option to spend $500,000.

Maybe it’s we send a trainer and teach everyone how to use their drag and drop form‑building interface, and then the cost of the trainer’s time is $500 an hour, and the business will say, “Oh sure, yeah, whatever.” By the way, you need to purchase a service level agreement with them, and the service level agreement runs $20,000 a month, and there are businesses that will happily pay that.

Software‑as‑a‑service economics 101, why do you want to charge closer to the top of these pricing points, instead of the bottom of the pricing points? Because you have to get a lot less customers to generate the revenue that you want, to either replace the day job, or to meet whatever your own personal goal is. How do you segment plans? First, align it with customer success.

Getting based‑on features can work, but if there’s a numeric thing that allows you to discriminate between customer classes, such that the more value they get out of the product, the more X number that they need, segment primarily based on that X number.

It doesn’t have to be linear segmentation, because the ability of Fortune 500 companies to pay is not linear, with respect to the size of the company. A 1,000 person company is not the same as collecting 1,000 one‑man companies and putting them all in a room together. They have orders of magnitude more money, so you should probably be charging them orders of magnitude more money.

“Names matter.” Back in my time as a Japanese salary man, I was given a project to run by my boss, and I was trying to buy, I think, “Crazy Egg” for it. I did the projection, I wrote up the proposal for my boss, and said, “By the way, we need the $9.99 hobbyist Crazy Egg plan, and could you please approve the purchase for that?”

Boss takes my printed out proposal for the project, looks down at “Hobbyist,” goes over to crazyegg.com, strikes it out in red, writes “Enterprise,” picks the top plan, which was $250 or $500 or something a month at the time, something like a quarter of my salary, and says, “OK, here’s the new proposal. Sign off on it, and then I’ll sign to my boss.”

I said, “Boss, boss, we don’t need the enterprise plan, our projected traffic is clearly under the hobbyist plan.” He says, “F if I’m going to tell my boss that I want a reimbursement request for the hobbyist plan, so we are under the enterprise plan.” I was like, “Can I get the enterprise salary?”

[laughter]

That did not work out so well. That’s why I no longer work there. Anyhow, feature segmentation can work, particularly if you have features where there’s a hard requirement among some customers, that they must have a particular feature. That segments people into, “Has a little money” vs. “Has a lot of money.”

For example, healthcare in the United States has more money than God, and something that a lot of healthcare customers are going to be very particular about is, “Is this HIPAA‑compliant?” Talk to me later if you want the full story on that one, but the magic words, “Is this HIPAA‑compliant?” means you can charge them as much money as you want.  [Patrick notes: The one-sentence explanation: Healthcare providers in the US are obligated to follow the Health Information Privacy and Availability Act to safeguard patient health information, which imposes some technical and process safeguards on anyone who handles most data for them.]

By the way, you can have a system where all accounts are actually HIPAA‑compliant, but you only tell people that the most expensive plan is HIPAA‑compliant. Because they’re not actually caring about HIPAA‑compliance, they’re caring about being able to sign off on the fact of HIPAA‑compliance. If you simply refuse to sign off on that fact for anything that costs less than $1,000 a month, all of your healthcare clients are going to go for the $1,000 a month plan. Which is, by the way, nothing in healthcare.

The Most Important Pricing Advice Ever: Charge.  More.

Charge more, charge more, charge more, charge more, charge more. Anyone have a question about pricing? You should charge more. You’re probably ridiculously underpricing. $4,000 a month is the cost of the cheapest possible employee, you are less than a tenth of that. You are probably creating a lot more value than many employees in the organization, so charge for the value you are creating.

I was doing tear‑downs earlier. Here’s what I put up for my pricing grid about a year ago, and since I haven’t had all that much time to work on “Appointment Reminder,” I made a lot of mistakes. I haven’t fixed them yet, so I’m going to tear‑downs some of my own pricing grid.  [Patrick notes: Compare and contrast this slide with the current version.]

I have a $9 a month plan.  That was a mistake. I actually have a lot of customers on the $9 a month plan. They account for about 80 percent of my customer support requests, and approximately 95 percent of my headaches, and they pay me approximately nothing, and don’t stick with the service for very long.  [Patrick notes: When I did the math recently, customers on the Personal ($9) plan had a churn rate which was literally double that of the Professional ($29) plan, meaning a single signup on Professional was worth more than 6 Personal signups.]

I have an enterprise plan that’s coming soon, any day now, a year later.  [Patrick notes: Appointment Reminder closed its first Enterprise account a few weeks after Microconf.  If you want to hear about this topic in a lot of detail, I talked about it at a presentation for Twilio several months later — I’ll post it in a week or two.]  There’s actually a plan that isn’t even on here. It’s $200 a month, I call it “Small Business 2,” because I’m very creative like that. It’s just small business, and I bumped this number up a little. Small Business 2, plus Small Business, create over half my revenues that are based on this plan. Oh, quick update on “Appointment Reminder,” it quadrupled in a year without me doing much work on it at all. Thanks. End story, just make systems that really help. A tactic you should all probably steal.

The Tactic All The Savviest Software Companies Use: Automated Marketing Email

Can you raise your hands, everybody? Just get a little stretching. Put your hands down if you have not emailed a lot of customers all at once this month. If you look around the room and you’re looking for speakers, you will find almost all of the speakers still have their hands up, and this is one of the things that consistently segregates the really savvy people from people who are not quite at that level of savviness yet, so of course I didn’t really seriously start collecting emails for six years.

This guy Ramit Sethi, one of the smartest people on the Internet in terms of marketing, he says “The one d’oh moment is that I was not building up an email list.” You heard earlier about an email list is creating your own recurring stream of earned media, because they are people who want to hear what you have to say. They trust you on a subject, and they are begging you to sell them on your solution, so you should be getting those emails. Let’s talk about how.

Why does email rock? Some people, because we’re all techies, might say, “If I want to get in touch with someone about a new blog post that I wrote, there’s RSS feeds for that, right?” Email is like RSS, except better in every possible way. Email is actually read. RSS is not read. Quick show of hands, who here is over 10,000 unread items in their Google Reader?  [Patrick notes: Dramatically less people than when I delivered this talk, I would expect. </rimshot>] I rest my case.

Email is actually read by real people too, and by “real people,” I mean folks who don’t come to conferences like this, and who have authority to sign off on $500 a month purchases without breaking a single sweat.

Email is a necessary time, whereas RSS reading is, “I don’t have anything important to do today. If I don’t have anything important to do I might read some RSS stuff,” whereas emails, if you’re an information worker like all of us, email is your job. You live in your inbox. Many, many things in the inbox get read, particularly when they sound interesting.

The psychology of email is really important. If I put a diamond in a trash store, you’re probably going to think that diamond is not worth so much. Think of the things that will be around your message in somebody’s inbox. It will be a lot of important work. If that’s all important, your message is probably important as well. Think of the things that are probably going to be around your blog post or content in someone’s RSS feed, or someone’s bookmark manager.

It’s probably going to be a lot of commoditized Internet dreck that they’re going to get to the first day after never. [Patrick notes: The following is a little brusque for my typical humor, but was an in-joke for attendees of Microconf from the previous year, where Hiten Shah and I had done live analysis of websites of several attendees.  One had a bookmark manager system with a bovine theme.] If you do free association for, say, “What’s the spirit animal of email?” It’s Thunderbird. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it does important shit. If you do free association with, “What’s an animal we can associate with bookmark systems?” What would it be, a cow? It’s fat, it’s stupid… it shits.

[laughter]

Do email instead. When I say “do email,” what do I mean? Really simple. Collect their email addresses, educate them over the email, and then sell them stuff. Let’s go into detail on that. For a successful landing page, you really only need a few things. Just ask for the minimum possible information from them.

Probably their email address and their name, because everyone likes hearing their name, and you should probably put it in subject lines, because that’ll increase open rates on your emails quite a bit. Give them a nice, attractive button that promises value, not pain. Get something cool. Does anyone here run a website for sadomasochists?

[laughter]

There are no hands up in the room, which means that nobody should have “Submit” as the text on their email button.  [Patrick notes: I use this line because it is punchy and inevitably gets a laugh, but seriously, you can pick up totally free double digit improvements by switching to [Get My Free Guide] or similar benefits-focused copy.  Try it in an A/B test if you don’t believe me.]

[laughter]

Minimize distractions on that page. You generally don’t want to be collecting email from your home page. Why? Because your home page has to serve many masters. You’re probably trying to get people into the trial, get them into the pricing grid. You should generally be collecting email on dedicated landing pages. What will you have on your dedicated landing pages? A sweetener. Because people don’t really care about you, they care about themselves, so tell them that giving you their email will accomplish something for them. Let’s go into ways to do that.

The simplest possible way to get permission from someone to send them email is when they’re signing up for the trial, say, “Hey! In addition to that trial, can I send you email?” Just takes adding one box. Downside, it’s going to minorly decrease your conversion rate to a free trial. Upside, you’ll get crazy conversion rates on this. By the way, who here hates email, and thinks, “Man, I hate getting email. I would never click on ‘Yes, I want to get email from you.'” Yeah, hands up. Real people don’t hate email. Some people like email a lot.

I have a newsletter that goes out to the bingo card people, and it goes out about monthly. I sent it out for October and said, “Hey, Halloween bingo cards! You make them by going to Bingo Card Creator and typing about Halloween stuff!” Then the November email is, predictably, Thanksgiving bingo cards. “You make them by going to Bingo Card Creator and typing about Thanksgiving stuff.”

I didn’t hit the “Send” button on the November email, because I just got busy that month. I got three messages from teachers in America, all of them saying, “Hey, I didn’t get the email from you in November. I must have missed it or something, or it got eaten by the Googles.”

[laughter]

“Can you please send me the email for November?” I wrote back, and I said, “There just wasn’t an email for November, because I got busy, but it was just going to be about Thanksgiving stuff.” They’re like, “That’s sad! I want to read about the Thanksgiving stuff?” Whoa! Missed opportunity. A better way to do things than collecting emails with your trials is to create some specific incentive. For example, Ruben from Bidsketch uses beautifully designed templates of proposals, and says, “OK, I will give you a beautifully designed template of your proposal.

You can turn around and make this into money, and all you need to do for that is to give me your email address, so I can email you a link to it.” Works very, very well. You can see incredibly high conversion rates to this, and the people who convert to, “I care enough about beautifully designed templates to give an email address, just to get a link for a download link for them” are not the kind of folks who hang out in Hacker News like it’s their job. It’s the people who really care about this. They make really great prospects for selling to. Third way…

Male audience member:  [Paraphrased] That doesn’t mention that he’s going to send you an email, though.  Isn’t that a no-no, permission marketing wise?

Patrick:  I think it actually does, I just cut it off with the screen grab.

Male audience member:  OK.

Patrick:  A different way, and this has vastly higher development costs, but you should consider doing it. Make a one‑off tool, gate access to the one‑off tool based on giving your email address. For example, WP Engine does this kind of well. [Patrick notes: See here.  Disclaimer: client.] They have a tool that will tell you if your website is slow, and it takes a few seconds to run and whatnot, so rather than just doing Ajax refresh, they’ll say, “Hey, we’ll send you a link to your report when it’s ready,” and they give you a little option there. “Hey, in addition to hearing whether if my website is slow, I’d also like to hear a one‑month course about how to fix that, and make it more scalable, make it more secure, and whatnot.” Get Jason drunk later, and ask if this works or not. This sort of thing can provide very focused, valuable leads for you, and it’s like a great transition moment into the first couple of emails from you. Let’s talk about that.

There’s a cycle here, of how sales‑y you get. Someone’s coming off the Internet, they don’t trust you, they don’t know you from Adam. For your first couple of emails over the course of a month, and you might send six emails or eight emails over the course of the month, depending on how much of a high‑touch complex sales process your service requires. For the first couple of emails you focus on trust building and education, and that’s it.

If you were just talking about someone’s website is slow, say, “Hey, thanks for signing up for the WP Engine one‑month course on improving your WordPress site. Here’s three ways you can make your website faster.” Very focused on value for the customer. Minimal, if any, sales content for WP Engine.

Then, over time, as you have built up credibility with the customer over three emails, they’ve seen your name in their inbox, they’re starting to associate it with your problem domain, and they’re getting value out of it, you start getting a little more sales‑y, and you push up that sales‑y to the maximum point. Then if they don’t buy it by the maximum point, they’re probably not ready for your offering. Back down a little bit, go more on the education again, and then try it again, but sell a different product offering. For example, a different plan.

I just threw up a random thing here for a template for an email that educates someone about something. It’s not really rocket science, it’s the three‑paragraph hamburger essay that you all learned to write in sixth grade. I hesitate to say this, but don’t be afraid of dumbing it down too much. You all live in your problem domain many, many hours a day, for months, weeks at a time.

Most of your customers are not super‑awesome ninja rock star experts at your problem domain, so teach them the basic stuff, because most people in your problem domain are beginners or intermediate, not super experts. Feel free to share of your knowledge, and answer basic questions that they have, and then at the end, just say, “Hey, do you have a question about this? Send me an email. I read all of them.”

Almost none of you have less than hundreds of thousands of customers, would feel any burden from getting email back from this, because most people think, “Oh, he doesn’t really mean that.” In fact, you will get emails saying, “Do you actually read this?” and then you fire back, “Yes! Signed, CEO.” I guarantee you if they have money, you’ve just got a customer for life. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of customers, like this for “Bingo Card Creator,” the email load is manageable, and you can give options for more and more things to do to convert.

When you’re getting into sales‑y hump on the graph, what do you do? First, you eliminate all decision making that they need to do, aside from, “Do I accept the offer, or no?” which means, if you have four plans, you don’t say, “OK, go to the pricing page and pick which of the four plans is worth it for you.” No, give them a recommendation.

Say, “Most of our customers find that this is the best value, you should buy this. Here’s the reasons why you should buy this. It will solve your problems, it will solve your problems, it will solve your problems, your life will get better, your problem’s solved. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.” Offer them a time‑limited bonus. “Yeah, you could have gotten to that pricing page at any time over the last 365 days, but if you take me up on this offer in the next seven days, I will give you something cool.”

It’s up to you what that something cool can be. For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really compelling offer, because wow, you can’t get that anywhere else. Wow, their perceived value for that is very high, and it immediately addresses one of the objections that they have for using your software. It’s like, “Oh god, I have to integrate that. I have to copy‑paste scripts into my web page.”

We’ll do the copy‑pasting for you, and thereby earn your loyalty for the next several years, and several thousand dollars of customer lifetime value, and it will actually be done by a freelancer that we’ve hired and told them how to FTP stuff. I think I stole that one from Rob, works pretty well. Pre‑answer all of their objections in the email, and on any page that you link them to. This is what we were talking about earlier in the tear‑downs.

When you’re talking to customers, you’re hearing their objections, “The price is too high.” Find the customer testimonial that says, “Oh yeah, I winced, but man, it’s so worth it,” and put that right on the page about answering the pricing objection with, “OK, here’s how you calculate the value for this. It’s a screamingly good deal for you. It will save you hundreds of hours of employee time, for only tens of thousands of dollars.” How do you learn about writing email and copy‑writing better? I suggest signing up for a lot of email and getting it from people, because they will convince you to buy all sorts of stuff.

Seriously, Ramit Sethi, did a call out to him earlier, he is a genius at this. He’s a friend of mine, I know he sells info courses for a living, and I’ve never bought an info course on anything. I was reading his email, I sent him an email at the end of it, because he says, “I respond to all of my emails.” I’m like, “Hey, Ramit, this is Patrick. I would crawl over broken glass right now to hand you my credit card. Wow.” Seriously, get his emails. They’re good stuff.

In addition to teaching you how to write email better, they are genuinely worth your time if you’re concerned with increasing your career and/or freelancing business. The Motley Fool does investment advice. It’s bad investment advice, but they sell it really, really well. For any sort of scummy market, like online nursing degrees or anything, people who are paying $100 plus just to get an email for that, probably know what they’re doing or they would be bankrupt already. See what works and use your powers for good, not evil.

Improving The First Run Experience Of Your Software

[Patrick notes: If you’d like to hear me talk about this in a lot more detail, go to training.kalzumeus.com and give me your email address.  I’ll give you a 45 minute deep dive into this topic, totally free.]

More specific to software people, let’s talk about the first‑run experience of your software. Hands up, who here knows how many people come back to using their software after the first time, like that is something we check? OK, there’s a few hands going up here. Almost everyone should check that.

For those of you who aren’t checking it, I’m just going to tell you the numbers right now. It is between 40 and 60 percent of people come back after using it the first time. Which, subtract from 100, 60 to 40 percent of people never use the software a second time, because they did not perceive much value in the first‑time use of your software.

They got bored of it after 10 seconds, or within five minutes, so you should make that first five minutes of the software F‑ing sing. It is the most important five minutes in your lifetime, because every subsequent use of the software is gated based on surviving that first five minutes that most of your users are not surviving right now.

Can you just show your software here? Who here thinks that this is a fun first five minutes for software? Microsoft can get away with this, because your first five minutes with using Microsoft Word were probably in 1992, and you had to do it to pass a class, and Microsoft is Microsoft, and you absolutely have to use this if you want to work in the information economy, but it’s kinda sucky.

There’s just so many options here, it starts you with a blank screen, and you have no clue. If this was a free trial product, what do I do to get value out of Microsoft Word, to make the decision on the go or no‑go for buying this? Microsoft, that isn’t really a problem, because you’ve already bought this if you’re seeing this screen. If this reminds you of your software at all, if you drop people into a blank screen, that is a huge failure mode. You’re going to fix that. How?

You script their first five minutes like it is the invasion of Normandy. “You are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to do this, and then you are going to be F‑ing happy.” Can I give you a great example of that? Who here has played “World of Warcraft?” OK, a few hands. Who here managed a raid guild in “World of Warcraft” for a few years? OK.

The first five minutes of “World of Warcraft” is literally, you talk to this guy, there’s a big exclamation point on his head, and it says, “Right click the guy with the big exclamation point.” You right click him, and he says, “You need to save the world from a wolf. There’s a wolf behind you, you can kill it with Z. Z! Z! Z! Z! Z! Z! Z!” So you Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, you kill the wolf, you go back to the guy, he’s got another big exclamation point, you right‑click, because you’ve learned that that works in the world.

He says, “Great job! Save the world, there’s 10 wolves, kill them! You get Z and X this time. ZX! ZX! ZX!” So you ZX, ZX, ZX, and you have a feedback loop where it’s both teaching you on how to use the software, and you feel like, “Yeah, I’m the powerful level one gnome mage that’s has got to spend the next 3,000 hours of my life playing this game,” but it’s a great, awesome experience for you.

At the end of five minutes, you’ve accomplished something, and you’ve learned how to use the software. All of your software should be that addicting. Sign up for the free trial of “World of Warcraft,” play the first five minutes, then stop!

[laughter]

You measure their activity, then you use A/B testing, like we talked about last year to change their activity. This is where the growth hacking comes in, and making sure the designing of their first user experience with the software is actually motivational. Here’s the, “If you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this, then you’re going to do this” funnel for “Bingo Card Creator,” instrumented out in KISSmetrics, which is, by the way, the way I would go if I had any budget at all to spend on it.

I don’t know what I spend on it, it’s probably like $150 a month, or, you know, nothing. [Patrick notes: I literally was unsure of this until I checked with my bookkeeping software a moment ago.  It was indeed $149.  Relevantly to other SaaS businesses: what does this suggest about the resistance to spending any figure between $50 and $500 at my business?  Right, I don’t care in the slightest. So charge me closer to $500 than you do to $50.  If you provided as much value as KissMetrics does I’d pay without a second thought.] You can write arbitrary code to do something like this, and just throw it into a file if you need to. You can see here where people are falling out of the funnel, if you’re into Bingo Cards, like that’s your life, and you can try things to get them to actually work.

I don’t really have enough time to talk about what really worked here, but the punchline here is that a particular intervention increases the amount of people who successfully get through to printing a bingo card with “Bingo Card Creator” by 10 percent. From 60 percent to 70 percent, which is really powerful for me.

If you read my blog, I’ve blogged about what exactly this was. It actually didn’t increase sales, weirdly enough, but similar things that I did with only two hours of work increased sales by 16 percent for two hours of work, durably. About tens of thousands of dollars for two hours of work, very motivational, you should probably do it. You fix the weak spots in the funnel that you’ve identified, once you have the funnel‑analytics in.

Here’s just some examples of things that work for Bingo Card Creator. Probably not too motivational for you, but they paid for my wedding, so motivational to me. Dan gave a great example earlier in the Growth Hacking talk [Patrick notes: Dan Martell’s talk is available here], about people that have just signed up, and they can tweet something, but they weren’t really planning on tweeting something, and they don’t know what to tweet so they don’t tweet, and then they go away and never use the app again.

You say, “Hey, you should tweet something right now. Let me give you 10 suggestions. Pick which one you like.” From six percent of the people went through and actually tweeted something, to 70‑plus percent of people tweeted something, which is a huge, epic win in activation. “Activations” means happy use of the software. I guarantee you if you haven’t optimized this at all, you can achieve extraordinary gains in activation for not all that much work.

The thing that worked for Appointment Reminder was implementing a tour mode. What’s a tour mode? Appointment Reminder has sub‑optimal things about the way the market uses it, in terms of getting people through their 30 day free trial. I actually collect credit card at the start, and then they get 30 days to decide whether they want to cancel or not. The problem is that people typically make their appointments for the customers well in advance.

By the time the 30‑day mark rolls around, Appointment Reminder might not have actually reminded a single customer about appointments, because they were scheduled that far in advance, so that’s sucky. They get to the last day, they get to the email, it’s like, “Hey, we’re charging your credit card in 24 hours. If you don’t want that, cancel.” They think, “Oh, this hasn’t really done anything for me, cancel.”

Rather than making it take six weeks for them to perceive value from Appointment Reminder, and to have people come in to their massage therapy practice, or whatever their business is, I wanted to expose that value to them in the first five minutes. So I dragged them by the nose through using the software. Instead of calling their customer, I made a special little mode that would call them instead, and say, “Hey, this is your fake appointment reminder. If you actually had an appointment, it would be five minutes from now. Click ‘1’ to confirm it.”

Bing, they click ‘1’. “Great. That’s the experience your customer gets, now let me show you how to do that generally.” It walks them through this crazy, obtuse interface, because I’m not an interface designer. Says, “Yeah, put in (555) 555-5555 for one of the clients, and we’ll schedule an appointment for them.

It walks through every step of the work flow, and tells them, “OK, and this is where someone might actually cancel your appointment. Normally that sucks, but we’re going to send you an email, and that’s going to make you money. Isn’t that great? You’re having fun now.” Tell people they’re having fun now. That’s a big secret in Vegas. I bet there’s people running around in skimpy dresses with a lot of alcohol in their hands, trying to tell you all the time, “Hey, you’re having fun! Hey, you’re having fun! Hey, you’re having fun!”

Because if you tell people they are having fun and getting value from the software, they will tend to believe you. Create value, but also tell them that you are creating that value. If there is a social or viral component in your software, if you tweet about using the software, if you invite your friends, if there’s some sort of friends‑list management, first you should probably pre‑populate that friends list using anything that you can possibly do, because people hate managing friends lists.

Make sure that that goes in in the first five minutes, because it will greatly increase your viral factor, and that literally makes or breaks businesses. Zynga obsesses about this. Not a win for the world. Dropbox obsesses about this, that was a win for the world. If, on the other hand, your software requires a lot of data entry, like you’re mocking up things, or creating documents, or making bingo cards for people, figure out a way to eliminate the data entry as a prerequisite for actually getting the fun use of the software.

Maybe give them sample templates that they can use, or just put in fake data, and give them a “Blow away the fake data” button. This is a very deep topic. I have a 45‑minute deep dive available at training.kalzumeus.com. I’ll tweet a link to that later. If you give me your email address, you can download the video at any time. I’m actually not trying to sell you stuff. In fact, when I actually have something to sell you, send me an email and say, “I was at Microconf,” I’ll give it to you for free.

A Brief Digression Into The Scintillating World Of Running A Software Marketing Consultancy

Patrick:  [After consulting briefly with the audience, I decided to talk about consulting for a moment.] What do I do? We talked about this earlier, the way to extract money from any company is to promise them one of two things. Either you’re going to increase their revenue, or you’re going to reduce their costs. I’m kind of terrible with firing people, and that’s the best way to reduce costs for most software companies. But I’m kind of good at scalably increasing revenue, so that’s what I do. By trade, I am a programmer. If I was less savvy about this, I might describe myself as, “I’m a Ruby on Rails developer who knows a few things about a few things.”  Ruby on Rails developers might be hard to hire right now, but they’re hireable. If you have $200 an hour, you can find Ruby on Rails developers. But don’t compete with all the Ruby on Rails developers in the world, because Github is lousy with them.

Instead, say that you are giving an offering that will increase their revenue by a lot.  I can point to particular customers of mine, that they will find very credible within their space, and say, “We worked with Patrick and then our revenue durably did a stair‑step function.” I said, “What is stair‑step 100 percent increase in sales of your software as a service product worth to your company, if you have $10 million of sales right now?” “Oh, that would make our sales $20 million.”

“Oh, great. Then I’m pretty cheap compared to the $10 million marginal revenue you’ll get,” and you get very little push back on prices, no matter how much you bump it up. Scarily low. Yeah?

Male audience member:  When you make that sale, how do you guarantee it, or say, “If I don’t reach this, you don’t pay more than that,” do you know what I mean?

Patrick:  No. [laughter]

I’m sufficiently credible about this thing. I think most of my customers actually succeed, because most of them invite me back. Let’s say a week of my consulting rate is similar to the fully‑loaded cost of hiring an engineer for a month. [Patrick notes: That was a good ballpark figure a year ago.  My consulting rate tends to increase over time as I get more successful engagements to use as references, get pickier about what clients I take on, and just start writing higher numbers on proposals.] If you have an engineer work for you for a month and the product fails, like most products do, the engineer doesn’t give his salary back, right?

Plus the pricing structure would be very radically different if there was downside to me, if it didn’t work out. If there’s downside to me if it doesn’t work out, there should be substantial upside to me if it works out, so if I double the sales for the company, I think as a close approximation I should own half the company afterwards. I’ve actually used that line on people before [Patrick notes: In case it is not obvious, no well-run company anywhere would even consider that payout structure], and they’ve been like, “Oh, that’s cheeky! But we’ll go with the cheap option.”

[laughter]

Where the cheap option is $20,000 a week, or whatever. That is just a representative number, that is not a quote.

[laughter]

How did turning down $700,000 work out? I went to a company in a far‑off land, which is not the United States, because the United States is a far‑off land for me, but a different far‑off land, and I did some stuff. Can I talk to you about what the stuff I did? Hmm. I can’t talk about specifically what the stuff I did, but if you’ve listened to my conference presentations or read my blog, you know that I really like A/B testing, and I really like Search Engine Optimization.  I really like, say, designing the first five minutes of software, and I really like, I don’t know, redesigning purchasing pages to extract more money from businesses that don’t care about how much money that gets extracted from them.

I did some combination of those things for a particular software company, and made them a lot of money. A company that was making X, so say eight figures of revenue, went to a different eight figures of revenue. But there’s a lot of play in the eight figures range.

[laughter]

That was after working for them for two weeks. The CEO said, “Hey, at the rate…” It’s kind of embarrassing for me, but the rate I quoted them was $20,000 a week. Why am I embarrassed? Because part of me has always thought that I’m really not worth that, and I’m just good at bamboozling people.  [Patrick notes: Nagging doubt monster!]

[laughter]

This engagement was the one that turned it around, because one of the things I generally insist on is, “OK, I like this metrics stuff, I’m going to get metrics for the before and after. We’re going re‑test, and we’ll see if this actually worked.” We came back two weeks later and we looked at the metrics, and I’m like, “Oh, I must have mis‑implemented that,” and he says, “The bank account disagrees with you.” I’m like, “Oh, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.”

He said, “So, what was it? $20,000 a week, or whatever we’re paying you?” A CEO doesn’t even know, that’s not a motivational amount of money to a CEO at an eight figure‑a‑year company, despite the fact that it’s kind of a motivational number for me. He said, “What was it, $20,000 a week? So if you consult 50 weeks a year, that’s a cool million.

“But you can’t actually consult 50 weeks a year, so there’s overhead and whatnot, and you have downtime, and you have to go to conferences to meet people like me, so let’s call it a 30 percent haircut to that, so that would be what, $700,000? Is $700,00 a motivational amount of money to you?” [exhales loudly] I’m like, “Wow, wow, is that on the table?” It’s like, “I’m the CEO, we’re sitting at a table, bam!”

[laughter]

My life flashed before my eyes, and I’m like, “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! No, Wow!” I guess the follow‑up question to that is, “Why did I say no to that?” Consulting is the right thing for me right now. I have a wedding to plan for, I have two weddings to plan for, one in Japan, one in the US. People with iPads are successfully convincing me that I’m probably still in your position, but for the consulting business.

I’d love to help you by coming here and spreading knowledge, and talking to you, and taking your emails any time my email is up on the screen. Doing it as a day job again is not something that’s motivational for me, even for more tea than there is in China, I think is the expression. $700,000 is a lot of tea!

[laughter]

Patrick:  Sorry, not meaning to brag there. OK, questions?

Rob Walling:  Can we get a round of applause first? [applause]

[Patrick notes:

My recollection is that I said something here which unfortunately did not make it on the video, but it is more important than the rest of the speech put together, and since this is my blog I think I’ll take a moment to say it again.  All the speakers at Microconf, and many of the attendees, receive substantial support from their spouses and families, both in the sense of “Hey honey, can I fly to Vegas to talk with some quirky software people?” and in the day-in-and-day-out support for the entrepreneurship career choice.  That’s sometimes risky and sometimes involves annoyances to families that people don’t generally have to deal with when their spouse is in 9-to-5 employment, in everything from quirky hours to weird comments from friends/family to the inconsistency relative to biweekly paychecks.  We should recognize the support of our families as being instrumental to our business/careers, and also keep in mind that they are, ultimately, stakeholders in the business, with a claim superior to even employees/investors/customers, because at the end of the day they’ll be with us when the business is, as mentioned earlier, but dust and memories.

The attendees at Microconf joined me in giving a standing ovation to the (numerous) family members who had made it out for the conference, and also for the folks who were supporting attendees from home.]