Keith Perhac and I recorded our 3rd podcast episode with special guest Brennan Dunn.  Listen to it (or read the transcript) for:

• why you should increase your freelancing rate
• how to discuss your value with your clients such that they’re happy to pay your increased rates
• how to scale to a multi-employee consultancy, without being bankrupted by poorly timed receivables
• three stories from successful consultants on three very different trajectories in their businesses
• how you can use drip email to sell more product (and consulting gigs, too)
• a bit about the business of selling info-products: pricing anchors, marketing tactics, list building, and more

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~90 minutes, ~211 MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Running a Consulting Business, With Brennan Dunn

Patrick McKenzie:  Hi everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internet. This is the, I think, third episode of the Kalzumeus podcast, with my buddy, Keith Perhac.

Keith Perhac:  Hello.

Patrick:  And our special guest, Brennan Dunn, of Planscope and “Double Your Freelancing Rate.”

Keith:  Woo!

Brennan Dunn:  Hey there.

Keith:  That was our live studio audience. Last time, we had a theme song. But I don’t know. Do we have a theme song this time as well?

Patrick:  I think we are totally theme‑song‑less.

Keith:  OK.

Patrick:  This is still a third‑rate podcast.

So, Brennan, recently you had a product launch. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that, and we’ll segue into the discussion about it.

Brennan:  Absolutely. So, for the last few months, I’m been thinking about putting together an info product, specifically one that is targeting, really, a passion point of mine, which is freelancers who undercharge for their services.

It’s something that really came from my own experience. For way too many years, I charged dramatically less than what I was worth, and only recently have I fixed that. And since I’ve fixed that, not only has my income gone up, but the caliber of client that I work with has gone up also.

And I really wanted to just not only spill the beans as to how I got there but also back it with pricing research that I’ve done. So I’ve done a lot of reading of really executive‑level books on the science of pricing and really targeting factories and massive companies that produce products, and I wanted to find a way to distill that into something consumable for an independent service provider.

So I took that knowledge. I took my background. I interviewed, I think, six or seven what I deem “premium” freelancers, people who either charge a lot or have, really, a very good business around themselves. They’re not just developers. They’re not just designers. They’re true businesspeople. I condensed that into a book that I launched last week.

Three Very Different Consulting Businesses

Patrick:  So, feedback that I frequently get from people when trying to tell them similar things is that “That’s great for you, but you are a coding übermensch. I am merely a PHP coder. How would I ever make that transition into being a business kind of guy?” So I think that’s maybe something that’s worthwhile for us to discuss.

Just for background, for those of you who don’t know, all three of us do consulting work on a semi‑regular basis. And without revealing anyone’s rate cards, they’re pretty up there, versus the, say, $20‑an‑hour commodity PHP coder that you might know or perhaps have in your household somewhere. A good portion of our business success has been that we started out there when we were young and stupid.

[Patrick notes:

I run a solo consultancy focused largely on selling more software for B2B software/SaaS companies, which often involves the sort of marketing-by-building you see on this blog.  Keith runs a development consultancy with several freelancers on staff, and personally does a mix of project management, strategic work, and tactical-level design and development.  Brennan does business consulting with a twist of Ruby/Rails, and has previously run a company with approximately 10 full-time W2 employee consultants.]

But we are no longer young and stupid. And our universal experience, and that of lots of people in our, say, social and professional circles, has been that, just like Brennan said, when you start charging more and you start positioning yourself as being more valuable to your customer’s business, you deal with radically better clients.

Brennan:  Oh, yes.

The Many Benefits Of Charging More

Patrick:  They’re savvier. They are smarter about using a consultant’s services. They’re more respectful of your time. They have less random problems with things. Your advice is more likely to get adopted. Everything about life gets better as you charge more. Also, charging more tends to make you a little more money. I think that’s a mathematical identity or something. Don’t discount having a little more money, because it really makes life better.

Keith:  I want to go off on that a little. You were mentioning, the more you charge, the better your client. And that is completely a perception of how much your time is worth. And I’m sure, Patrick, you’ve had experience like this; I’m sure, Brennan, you have as well; and I know I’m guilty of this as well. We have a tendency to want to give people who we know the “friend rate.”

Or it’s a new client and you’re like, “Oh, I’ll just do it cheaper this once.” And as soon as you say that, your perceived value of your time goes down so much. I’ve had clients call me up for 30 minutes, an hour, just to talk about random shit that they want to talk about, because they don’t value my time. Because they’re paying me $50 an hour and they’re like, “Eh, he’s got time to talk about whatever it is I want to talk about for a half an hour.”

Brennan:  What starts to happen is your standards start slipping when you do that. What you’ll find is clients will then start paying their invoices late. They will start doing a lot of things which hurt your business. This always happens. Oftentimes the relationship basically changes dramatically. Instead of it being a business relationship, it becomes, I don’t want to say a friend relationship, but more of a relationship that’s very fluid and has no standard.

Patrick:  Yeah. I think people treat a given business relationship with a certain, fixed amount of professionalism in it. And if you come in and set the expectation that you are a… The Japanese word is kichin to shita (きちんとした).

Keith, can you help me translate that?

Keith:  Proper? Solid, business?

Patrick:  Yeah, a solid, proper professional, like a lawyer would have with their clients.  People will tend to treat that relationship inside that solid, proper, professional schema. You’ll naturally have a certain amount of human rapport with your clients, but they’re going to expect that if they don’t pay an invoice on time, there will be negative consequences.  They will show up to meetings on time because that’s just the way we do professional things.

Whereas, if you treat yourself like somebody’s kid’s brother who’s been hired as a favor, you will get treated like somebody’s kid’s brother. And if you’re 15 minutes late to a meeting that you’ve got set up with a kid who you’re doing a favor for, well, the kid’s time is kind of worthless and he can wait. It’s no problem. And if you’re a couple of days late on paying him, he lives with his parents. What’s the problem? So, yeah.

Keith:  Right. Nothing, I think, will drive this point home more than, I’m sure any freelancer listening to us has proposed something, any idea about a website or a project that they’re doing, and then a consultant who is paid maybe 100 times more than they are comes in and says the exact same thing, and the boss is like, “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea.

Why didn’t we think of this?” Right? Because having the high‑paid consultant, having the high‑paid person, has a perceived value attached to it, so anything they come up with is generally going to be perceived in a better light.

Brennan:  It’s not only that. Their presentation is usually entirely different. So one of the problems with most freelancers is they talk in code or design. They think that, for instance, I know Ruby, therefore I market myself as a Ruby developer.

I’m doing some work with somebody who wants to kind of rebuild it an all Microsoft Access system that they have that has kind of accumulated over 10 years.

If I were naïve about this, I would market myself to them as a coder, and say: “I’m going to rewrite your code to be Web based instead of using Microsoft Access.” Instead, my positioning is “I’m a business consultant, we’re going to look at what you have currently and see where we can optimize and what that will do long term. It’ll save you a lot of money because I’m focusing on your business.”

I’m not focused on the code necessarily. I’m focused on what code do I need to write and I’m really internalizing this. What code needs to be written in order to make his business more successful? And that’s something that I see so many people mess up. They look at themselves based on what technologies they happen to know and use instead of the outcome that the clients actually hire us for which is make more money than they spend on us.

Patrick:  My buddy Thomas Ptacek, who has a zillion karma on Hacker News, says that one of the differences between freelancers and consultants is that consultants own the business objectives of the code that they write.

[Patrick notes: I am referring to this post in particular ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615 ), which is possibly the most value in the least words of anything ever written on HN.  Seriously, it is an executable roadmap to building a multi-million dollar consultancy, from someone who has done it… in under 500 words. Go read it and come back.]

Imagine you’re building a scalable content generated system or something. That’s basically like the Ruby On Rails five-minute-build-a-blog demo with a slightly different objective. But the slightly different objective is designed to directly create business value for the customer?

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  “We’re going to get you more traffic from Google. You are going to convert X percent of the material and a free trial that is going to convert to incremental revenue.” And rather than you delivering these scalable content system and saying, “OK, stuff can now appear on your website, so I guess I’m done,” you instrumented it out so that you can directly measure how much revenue that gets produced.

And then the crucial bit is that when you produce revenue and other meaningful results for clients, and you gain a reputation for doing this at previous clients and for this particular client, then you present yourself as someone who accomplishes these business objectives rather than someone who is coding.

Rather than doing the Underpants Gnome narrative where Step #3 is ????, you fill in the blank. Then your client proceeds directly to Step #4: Profit.  After you demonstrate that you can do this, then you charge numbers that would shock the conscience of commodity programmers.

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  So, speaking of numbers that would shock the conscience, all three of us are in kind of in an awkward position because there is absolutely no reason to say your rate publicly. [Patrick notes: I defend this position later in the interview.]

Let me talk about past rates. I think all of us at one point probably charged $100 an hour.

Keith and I used to work for a Japanese megacorps. Well, mine was a little more mega‑corpy than Keith’s. But Japanese engineers make nowhere near $100 bucks an hour. So, I thought $100 an hour was quite a high freelancing rate.

It turns out that if a given software company has, say, $10 million in revenue, and you successfully add a percent to that by improving their conversion funnels, then that is worth a sizable amount of money… virtually regardless of the time taken. $100 an hour no longer makes sense for your services.

[Patrick notes: Some of the things you’ll need to convince people to do to make big, motivational wins for their businesses will be literally placed outside your authority if you charge $100 an hour. My consulting clients are typically on the small and nimble side, but if I was just hired on as a commodity Rails programmer for a few weeks, it would be very difficult to convince the company to let me e.g. redesign the onboarding process. That can, by itself, raise growth in revenues by plural tens of percentage points, so if revenue was otherwise growing by say $100,000 a month, this could add over $X00,000 of revenue just within the first year.]

Brennan:  I think we tend to be very bad at quantifying the amount of success we bring our clients.

Patrick:  Yes.

[Patrick notes: Many of your clients are not set up to measure the success you bring them.  Some are not even aware that such a thing can be measured.  In your messaging to them before and during the engagement you should educate them to the point where they can anticipate the specific change that will happen and then measure the magnitude of that.  Write the reporting logic for this if you need to – it is a great investment in happier clients and higher paychecks. (This can be as simple as convincing them to install off-the-shelf tracking like Google Analytics or KissMetrics.)]

Brennan:  And we’re very bad at charging for that. We look at ourselves as you rent an hour of my time and for that hour I’m going to write code instead of looking at the big picture. The big picture is that we can spend X weeks to build a system that will increase revenue by 1%. If they’re making $100 million, that’s a million dollar increase of revenue. And the amount of time or effort or whatever else that went into that is immaterial as long as it’s less than the net result of that investment.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  You pretty much took what I was going to say. I was going to say that one of the key things, and we had talked about this with Amy Hoy as well is rephrasing what you are and what you’re doing.

Brennan really touched on this and he said, “I am not a programmer. I am a business consultant that is doing X.” Reframe your value in a way that the client can understand.  Especially for non-technical customers, programmers are a commodity component which they can buy for $5 an hour on oDesk.

Programmers build tools. Business consultants solve problems. I always felt that I was solving problems with programming. However, the problems I was solving were things that other people were identifying, and the solutions I was delivering had to be adapted by other people to be used by the business.  [Patrick adds: And guess who got the credit? That’s right, the idea guy, who was smart and reported how he transformed cheap labor into a big win for the business.]

I was solving technical hurdles and technical issues. I never made the business 10%.

Brennan:  A good parallel to that is saying to a carpenter that you’re solving problems by cutting wood. The benefit is, to the end consumer, you’re building a comfortable chair or you’re doing a wardrobe that holds all of their clothing. [Patrick adds: I don’t love this analogy.  If I were a high-end carpenter, I would sell my beautifully handcrafted wooden desks as demonstrating success and status and thus helping my lawyer clients win more deals. Since IKEA doesn’t sell anything that does that, I won’t have to compete with them on price anymore!]

The carpenter tasks a lot of craftsman’s pride in how they cut the wood and what tools they use, but it typically doesn’t matter to the end customer.  [Patrick notes: Notice I just positioned the carpenter such that it does, because their desk comes with a narrative – handcrafted by an American with a lifetime of apprenticeship and only the finest sustainably organic hardwoods — and the IKEA desk does not. I’m not joking about that, by the way, I would call my trees organic trees.]

Patrick used the word commodity, which is something I used throughout the book. If I’m a $100 an hour ruby developer and I market myself as a developer who writes ruby and then a $5 an hour ruby developer comes along on oDesk, there is absolutely no reason, if I’m a commodity, that my potential client should not be hiring the person 20 times less expensive than I am.

It’s like corn. I don’t care what field corn was grown on. I want to eat corn. When we position ourselves as a commodity like corn or oil, or whatever else, it becomes a race to the bottom, which you really can’t escape until you start positioning yourself differently.

[Patrick notes: Have you noticed that people are routinely trying to sell you corn-that-is-better-than-corn?  Organic corn?  Sustainable corn?  Locally grown corn?  This is because they’re searching for a point of competitive differentiation with efficiently raised corn because the price of corn has declined in real terms over time, due to efficiency gains caused by industrialization and improved farming practices, and it will asymptotically approach zero.]

Keith:  This phrase from your book hit home with me: you said we devs have “personal vanity” which causes us to believe that how we work intrinsically matters to our clients.

I like to think that I write clean code. I write extensible code. I write clean HTML. My designs are responsive.

[Patrick notes: Ever had a designer pitch you on code which validates? I’m really glad grocery stores haven’t figured out a corn validator yet. This cheap corn doesn’t validate! You should buy validated corn, it’s like unvalidated corn except it costs three times as much and if you eat it Google will love you more.

(P.S. I am being slightly unfair in this analogy. I apologize, farmers, for suggesting by implication that corn consumption is as ineffective at raising SEO rankings as code validation is.)]

Selling Better Code As A Benefit Rather Than A Feature

Keith: Clean code doesn’t surface any value to the customer.  I know from a technical standpoint, there are a lot of merits to it, especially for people who have to come in later.  Explaining this to a non-technical customer off-the-bat is difficult.

Brennan:  The clean code you’re writing is the feature. You just need to explain the benefit. You need to explain your maintenance cost will go down.

Keith:  Right, exactly.

Brennan:  You won’t be getting as much of having somebody come in a year from now and clean up the mess. We call this technical debt. Oh, by the way, don’t ever use that prahse with your customers. It just sounds bad.

Basically, just say, “I work in such a way that the amount of money you will need to invest in the system after this initial fee as the work is complete, will be less than it would if I didn’t work that way. That’s how you position the benefit.

Patrick:  Honestly, learn the language of your customers. It’s not universal across all customers, but many customers would phrase that as a “lower total cost of ownership.” [Patrick notes: TCO in MBA-speak.] If they talk like that, I understand that you’re a programmer and you hate sounding like a guy that has an MBA. If your customers talk like they have an MBA, perhaps because they are indeed MBAs, then you need to learn to speak that language.

You need to learn to talk like: “We have a lower total cost of ownership. There is lower risk of failing to execute on our strategy in later quarters due to unbudgeted maintenance work required by this system.” Or, “the system will be insufficiently flexible to start handling newer initiatives that you want to bolt on later.” That sort of thing.

In addition to just the money thing, I think there is also a status gain in moving up the ladder from commodity web programmer or designer, or what have you, to business consultants Take a lawyer, for example. A lawyer’s professional competency is writing letters. But no lawyer in the history of mankind has ever described themselves as a “professional letter writer for hire” or a “letter writer, specializing in empty threats.”

Lawyers are smart about law being a profession and having their time and advice be valued. They reliably charge extraordinary rates for that time billed in six‑minute increments. [Patrick notes: Engineers often think this is solely due to licensing requirements and/or the ability of lawyers to drum up demand for legal services by suing people. This is not the sole point of differentiation. After all, lawyers capable of reviewing e.g. a consulting contract are ubiquitous and the work is routine, but they universally charge more than all but the most successful developers.] Also, the notion that they’re providing outsized value for the business with their relationship to the business, allows them to be perceived as more credible and to be at the table when the important decisions are made.

As you level up in consulting, you might reasonably work directly with the CEO at your smaller clients – say, one with about 30 employees.  [Patrick notes: 10 ~ 30 is the sweet spot for my practice.] One level below the CEO, you’re talking to project leads. Even as an outside consultant, you might be in charge of things that are core to the strategic outlook for the business. “With great rewards comes great responsibility” on that, and vice versa.

It’s kind of a nice place to be. You’ll spend less time having the minutia of your craft get micromanaged and more time being able, within reason, to pick the tools/processes/people you want to do your work with. [Patrick notes: Nothing like the notion of a four figure invoice coming in for a meeting to convince people to stop bikeshedding.] You’ll be allowed to succeed in your work in a way that if you’re charging $20 an hour and you’re perceived as somebody’s kid brother, you won’t really be allowed to succeed in the work.

[Patrick notes:

This is incredibly important guys. As an outside consultant, you depend on the cooperation of several people within the company for your projects to have any impact. One of your core professional skills is a) securing their cooperation and b) making them look like geniuses for doing it while c) getting enough of the credit to get invited back. There are several failure modes here, such as “Presenting a worthwhile initiative which would reflect poorly on the employee who did the work closest to that in the company, causing him to torpedo it to avoid looking bad.” You have all the fun of office politics without necessarily having an office.

Resolving political issues is itself a skill clients will pay money for. Your paycheck is, occasionally, a burnt-offering to the gods of Trusted Third Party Opinion, just like it is sometimes a magical talisman against Blowback If This Goes Sour.

In addition to picking clients with an absolute minimum of dysfunctional workplace dynamics to them, one way I like to avoid these issues is making explicit efforts to share credit for everything I do with internal employees. For example, in the (somewhat rare) case where clients don’t arrange for it, I’ll invite employees out to dinner on my nickel. I make a point of praising specific accomplishments to their bosses. When I do post-engagement write-ups internally I give them credit explicitly, by name.]

Brennan:  The really big difference is you go from being an outsourced developer to a really a close advisor that has a huge opportunity, where they can help steer the direction of their client’s company.

If you do a good job and you basically end up creating a very strong ROI, you’ll be able to use that in so many different ways in the future to your advantage, which will make your life easier. Like you said, Patrick, you’ll be able to be more selective. You’ll be able to choose to work with people you really want to work with, instead of just choosing to work with whoever happens to contact you.

Different Business Models For Consulting Companies

Patrick:  Switching gears slightly. We’ve talked about waking up from being a freelancer to being a business consultant which again that’s partially just a semantic difference, but partially not so much. Like words actually do have meaning.

Another related topic, which you two have a bit more of experience from me, is expanding from a consulting practice to a consultancy. That is not actually the right word. Basically, making the leap a solo individual producer of whatever it is that you are awesome and good at, into somebody who manages a firm which produces that thing that you were once good at.

That was a major step for businesses that quite a lot of people take, actually. I think our listeners are probably interested in it, so why don’t you guys just describe how making the leap was for you?

Keith:  I’m still in the middle of leaping, so I’m kind of mid leap. I have four people with me right now, none really doing the consulting side. I have sales and some developers with me, but mainly I’m still at the head of the consulting. [Patrick notes: Keith subcontracts work but is ultimately responsible for deliverables, project management, and client relations.]

I guess the pull of having a consulting agency is being able to do more stuff with your limited time, right? There’s definitely a monetary aspect to it as well. But at the end of the day, there’s only so many hours in a month. That means that there are only so many clients you can take.

If you want to increase that, the only way to do it is to increase the number of people working with you. So that’s where I am in it. I just in the midst of trying to start it. Brendan, I know, has successfully completed that subquest, I guess.

Brennan:  There comes a point, where if you do good work and you’re providing positive benefits for your client or clients, that you’re going to get more work than you can handle. There are two paths you could go down. The first path is to just say, “I’m booked. Maybe we can try to squeeze you in, in a few months after I have some more availability, or I can refer you to some people I know and trust.”

So that’s path number one. That path doesn’t really warrant itself to positive financial growth. [Patrick notes: Slight disagreement with Brennan here. If you’re at capacity, charge more until you aren’t. This really does have substantial financial rewards to it. A lot of the “consulting doesn’t scale!” objections are really “consulting doesn’t scale beyond mid six figures” and, well, at that level many people might say “Scaling, hmm, nice to have but not really a hard requirement.”]

Brennan: You delay the project, which hurts your customers, but you still get the same amount of money as delivering the project immediately.  Instead, you can offer your customers predictable scheduling for more money by going down the second path, which is, “OK, I’m not going to turn you away or delay this project. Let’s try to figure out how I can get subcontractors or even employees to help me handle the surplus of work I have.

So that was the path I went down, that second path, and I went down it at first using what I really do think is the prudent path, which is pull together a network of independent contractors who you trust, who you know, who have the same standards that you have, and basically, strike a deal with them saying, “I’m going to handle the sales and marketing, the invoicing, the money collection.

You will get to focus on your craft. In exchange I will be taking a significant percentage of the project rate, and I will give you the rest.”

That’s the easiest to define because there’s a very clear bottom line. It’s basically they work an hour. You get paid X. They get paid Y. So that’s what I ended up doing for a while.

And then I ended up making the move to basically taking out a lease on an office, which I really didn’t need to do, but I ended up wanting to do that, and you start actually hiring full time employees, which I would not recommend doing if a cash flow issue, where cash flow tends to fluctuate month‑to‑month dramatically, because one thing about employees is they’re fixed expenses.

Patrick:  Huge fixed expenses. [Patrick notes: The fully loaded cost of an American developer can easily be in the $15,000 to $20,000 a month range to keep on the payroll.]

Brennan:  Exactly, with variable income, in October you might have a lot less active projects than you would in September. So that also includes having either yourself or bringing on somebody on who is competent in business development, because you will need to always keep your pipeline full, especially as you scout more billable employees.

And you’re going to quickly realize that you’re really going to need stop wearing the hat of a technician, and start wearing the hat of a business owner. Your life will revolve largely around accounting, and payroll, and possibly even legal things, and maybe even HR…Or really, not maybe HR, definitely HR. It becomes a much different ball game.

Keith:  So was that a hard transition for you, because I know all three of us really started as programmers. I mean we started programming because I assume that’s what we loved to do. I know Patrick and I loved programming. I assume, Brennan, you love programming as well. Was it really hard for you to switch into that more business managerial role?

Brennan:  It was, because I ‘m really not that great of a manager. It’s really never been…

Keith:  I think your success begs to differ, but…

Brennan:  Well, no, I, frankly, there are people significantly better than I am who would have done a much better job than I did at times. You know I made many, many mistakes. I made mistakes hiring. I made the biggest mistake I ever made was thinking everyone works the way I do. Just the mistakes where in the dozens. Mistakes that really ended up costing me a lot of money.

So for the first really year and a half after creating this consultancy, I made less money than I did as a freelancer. That sounds strange, right? How it could be possible that when I have 10 people I’m making less money than I was when it was just myself?

It didn’t make sense on back of the napkin calculations. But I had fixed expenses and highly variable income:for example, I’ve had to cut a refund before due to us basically really messing up when we were hired to do something.

And it is ultimately the consultancy owner’s fault. They’re the ones who need to own up to it, but you’re really responsible for other people’s actions, which I’m really not the best at, but you know it took some time to really get to be comfortable with that.

The Difference Between Charge Out Rates And Employee Wages

Patrick:  So I think folks who might be a little early in their careers or less experienced with this might not have a very reality‑based view on like the difference between, say, charge out rates that a client is getting charged and what the business pays for that. So this was news to me so I’ll go into what I’ve learned about it for the edification of people here.

When I was just getting started with my consulting business back when my rate was $100 an hour, I remember talking with one of my clients who also runs a consulting business, and I said that this math sounds very attractive:

I want to hire someone on at $80 an hour, charge him out at $100 an hour, and pocket the $20 difference.  $20 * 40 = $800 a week profit for doing nothing.  Yay.

This math is catastrophically wrong. [Patrick notes: Hat tip to Thomas and Jason Winder, who warned me off of this.]

It is not possible to have a business be successful on that sort of margin, for a variety of reasons. You’ll have collection issues on invoices. Employees always cost more than the sticker cost even if you’re paying them strictly on an hourly basis. [Patrick notes: Substantially more if they’re salaried employees, because the fully-loaded cost with healthcare, benefits, vacation, employment taxes, etc, can be 150% to 200% of their salary.] It’s unreal.

The actual number that that math works out at is employing someone at $40 to $50 an hour and then charging $100 for their time. If they’re a salaried employee, less than that, since they’ll have to be paid every month regardless of whether you have the pipeline for that or not.

The kind of universal experience of everyone when they first staff up to two people at the company, or three people at the company, is there is a few months where they do sharply less well than when they were doing in their solo practice. As a solo consultant doing very well, you typically have 80% to 100% utilization at the senior partner’s rate.

Then pretend you bring on two guys as full-time employees and pay them market wages.  For a Ruby on Rails developer who is billable [Patrick notes: “Billable” is a term of art meaning “of sufficient quality to be allowed to work on a client project without intensive supervision” – green developers are not billable], that would be $8,000 a month, cash, which – crucially — costs you $12,000 a month, because you have pay for taxes, health insurance, various overheads on paid vacation, all that fun stuff.

So if you staff up to two people, your fixed cost is $24,000 a month for those two people. At 50% utilization, if you’re charging less than $6,000 a week, you’re losing money.

You should be charging north of $6,000 a week, but that is neither here nor there.

So the way that you eventually make money under the model is to consistently get your utilization rate up into like the 70, 80 percent, and then only hire up once you’re basically exhausting everybody.

Keith:  Exactly.

Patrick:  This was not obvious to me, so I’ll tell you what smart people have told me. It is my natural inclination that when the business gets upside it shares a substantial amount of that upside with the employees. This is incorrect: employees trade most of the upside of the business for predictable paychecks every two weeks.

The actual way that successful consultancies work is: If you promise your employee a salary of $100,000 a year, or $8,000 a month, you make payroll come hell or high water.

If you can’t pay payroll then you don’t eat, but you still pay payroll. As far as there is a sure thing in the business world, the sure thing is that you make payroll every month. In return for that, when your business blows it out of the water, your employee does not get an automatic 20 percent raise.

They get the sort of three to five percent raise that salaried employees generally expect, and then you get to take home a bit more money in return for all the risk that you’ve taken earlier in the business.

[Patrick notes:

So, for example, in the case where we have one senior consultant and two employees he has brought on:

Senior consultant: 50% utilization at $10,000 a week, with remainder of time devoted to prospecting

Junior consultants: 75% utilization at $6,000 a week, $12,000 monthly fully-loaded cost

The senior consultant “earns” approximately $32,000 a month.  This math scales straight on up with headcount and utilization.

This has interesting implications.  One fairly obvious one is that two friends who found a consultancy and scale to five employees will, fairly quickly, end up more than modestly wealthy, with (probably) less execution risk than doing a product company.

]

Brennan and Keith: That sounds about right.

Brennan:  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I missed paying myself. When you have a consultancy it is an expanded freelancing operation, and there’s always risk in freelancing with clients paying on time. Many of us, myself included, tend to naively assume that everything will just work well, that I will invoice, and within 30 days I will get a check for that amount, and everything will go smoothly.

What you tend to find is that that is the furthest thing from the truth. Your employees will largely not expect this, especially if you’re recruiting from bigger companies that have massive lines of credit, or a lot of cash in the bank, who have never had any payroll issues.

When you have a small consultancy, you probably will have payroll issues, and it’s very hard to approach an employee and say, “Oh, by the way, I know I’m supposed to pay you twice a month, but you’re going to need to wait.” Even one day really starts to breed… I don’t want to say hostility, but…

[Patrick notes: Cultural side-note: Keith and I, who have largely internalized working at Japanese corporations, both went literally sheet white when we heard Brennan mention missing payroll as a possibility.]

Keith:  Well, it makes them nervous. Not being able to hit payroll, even by a day is like, well, what’s going on? Should I start polishing up my resume, start looking for somewhere else? It’s like it gets really nerve‑wracking.

Brennan:  And that’s exactly what happens, and the thing I wish I would have done in hindsight was have…I heard from a very reputable source that whenever making a hiring decision, even if you know you have the work for them immediately, it’s good to kind of set aside probably about $30,000 in savings just for that one employee just as a buffer.

And the biggest thing that most freelancers who turn to consultants, or consultancy owners mess up on isn’t really having the work, because nowadays there’s more demand than supply, it’s making sure that your cash flow situation is working well, is working fine. And cash flow issues are the biggest way to really mess up a good thing.

Patrick:  Young technologists coming from a consumer background know that PayPal exists, credit cards exist, and therefore expect transaction processing to be more or less instantaneous. It therefore follows that a) the traditional 30‑day terms that you extend to your clients are absurdly generous, because it should be very easy to pay people within 30 days if you have money, and that b) if you actually give people 30‑day terms than they will invariably pay within 30 days.

This is very at odds with how the world actually works. Coming from the three people here, do we want to have a complaining about clients anonymously session? What’s the longest it’s taken for an invoice to get paid?

Keith:  Infinitely.

Brennan:  Yeah, I would have to say never paid is the longest.

Patrick:  Let’s scope it to invoice from clients you are happy to do business with. Good people. What’s the longest it has ever taken to get paid? I think my record is nine months.

Brennan:  And you’re still happy to do business with them?

Patrick:  Yeah.

Brennan:  All right. My record was six months, but I can tell you a pro tip that has basically solved all of my cash flow issues, and the pro tip is to prepay everything.  You simply do not do a week of work unless that week is paid in advance.

I don’t know when it became standard to say, “I’m going to do all this work for you. I’m going to shoulder this risk. And then I’m going to have this window of a month before I see anything, any sort of compensation for that.” And yet that is the standard payment term. [Patrick notes: This is “Net 30” – the client has one month from the invoice date to pay.  It is a very standard payment term.]

Brennan:  I know especially if you’re working with a big organization where your client who you talk to each week probably isn’t the one who signs the check, Net 30 is standard. Smaller clients, though, can be moved.

I made the mistake once where I billed twice a month, so on the 15th and 30th of each month I would send an invoice.

They had 30 days to pay that invoice. With one client I had sent two invoices covering four full-time employees.  Our client ran out of money and stuck us with $60,000 of unpaid invoices.

Sure, you can go the lawsuit route. You can do a lot of that kind of overhead work, but the problem is, according to my attorney, because they’re behind a corporation, all they’re able to do really is request that their business’s bank sends the amount that they owe. You can’t go their house. You can’t go after their personal assets.

[Patrick notes: By the way, has Thomas convinced you to incorporate prior to doing business with serious businesses yet? If that company had not been incorporated, Brennan would have had legal recourse against the owner’s house.]

What I’m starting to do now, positioning‑wise, is telling people, “I’m not in the business of debt collection, and I’ve had to be a debt collector way too many times, so if you want to work with me, you’re going to need pay me a week up-front. If the check clears, then we will work that week.” That solved everything, honestly.

Patrick:  I’ll put a little asterisk on that. If you work at any company which is large enough to have a purchasing department, as a sole consultant or as the owner of a small consultancy, it is highly unlikely that you will have sufficient pull to pull that off. I’m just putting that out there.

Some of my mentors have made that abundantly clear for me. I don’t typically get companies of that size, but my more successful clients are right on the cusp of this: they have a standard contract for consultants, and you get what the contract says. It’s kind of a take it or leave sort of thing. The purchasing cycle is what it is.

On Consulting For Large Companies: Payment Terms Are More A Suggestion Than A Rule, Really

Conversely if you’re working at any company that has a purchasing department, you should be charging more money than you can even countenance.

Keith:  And the other side of that is, and this is in my experience. You guys might have different experience, but I’ve worked with a lot of larger companies, and I’ve never worried about them paying on time. Like the big companies, they have the purchasing department. You send the invoice. They’ll generally pay. Let me rephrase that in saying I have had them dispute the amount of the invoice before, but I’ve never had anyone just completely not pay.

Patrick:  Large companies may not fail to pay, but there are a lot of big companies where the purchasing department as a matter of policy has a understanding of how that 30‑day clock works that is different from the way that, say, a normal human being or a computer understands the way that 30 days is measured.

For example, you might assume that it’s 30 days after the date on the invoice, because that’s what actually printed on the invoice. The purchasing department might assume that’s it’s 30 days from the start of the invoicing cycle after acceptance of delivery, and those two numbers are very, very different things. That can be like a three‑month difference.

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  So if you’re dealing with, say hypothetically (not a client), Bank of America, you will not budge the Bank of America purchasing department, because they just don’t care. They’re not graded on paying you in a quick fashion. In fact, to the extent that their department has any KPIs, it’s paying the money that is owed as slowly as possible. As long as they’re not getting sued on a weekly basis, they just don’t care.

Brennan:  Right. Which when you have fixed expenses monthly within your company, and it’s not just your income on the line anymore, that can be very risky, and that’s why make sure you have the cash. Make sure your cash flow situation is good before you start getting reckless is my best advice…

Patrick:  And with large companies like that, they know that dealing with them is a pain in the butt. That’s one of the reasons that they pay so much for this kind of service in the first place.

Man, this is like freelancer tip number one. Never underbid with the goal of getting more business. It never works out well, ever.

Brennan:  Exactly.

Why Businesses Are Happy To Pay More For Contract Labor Than For FTEs

Patrick:  There is a reason that a fulltime developer costs $100,000 a year, but the same developer working on a contract basis costs bare minimum $8,000 a week. Everyone knows that there is overhead and risk involved. You have to make that back somewhere. Conversely, the business, they care more about themselves than they care about your financial situation.

The things they get out of having a person available is that, even in America, which is a very many America states are employment-at-will [Patrick notes: I misspoke and said “right to work”, which is related to unionization]. “At will” means they can fire you at any time for any reason [other than a few exceptions explicitly contrary to the law or public policy]. It generally takes a lot of time to onboard a new employee, both in searching for them, going through the candidates, hiring somebody, training them up, getting them actually productive on the project, evaluating their performance, seeing that it doesn’t work out, and then firing them.

Even though a business can theoretically fire an at-will employee in a day, typically it takes from three to six months after you’ve reached the point where, OK, it’s clear that it’s not working out. You just need to get all your ducks in a row to avoid a possible lawsuit.

One of the reasons that companies come to consultants like us in the first place is that we can credibly promise that the business needs that they have will be delivered like two weeks from now. There is a number that they write that number on a check and, bam, it gets done. And in return for bam, it gets done, the number on that check has zeroes in it, lots of zeroes.

Brennan:  One of the core things I really tried to include in my book is the mistake I see a lot of people making with basically, reverse engineering their prior salary to come up with their rates should be.

Patrick:  Oh, god, yes. Particularly if your prior salary is $2800 bucks a month. High‑five to Keith and I.

Brennan:  I mean there is a ton of these rate calculators where you plug in your mortgage, and you plug in all your living expenses, and then it’ll print out some sort of number. I didn’t want to say it outright in the book, but that’s really the self-centered way. Deducing a rate from your needs ignores how your client receives value from the work you do for them.

And that is why the selfish route, the route based on, “OK, I need $5,000 a month to live, therefore my rate will be whatever that will be.” Many people make this mistake. I get to see many consulting rates because I run PlanScope, a tool for consultants, and folks enter their rates as part of the normal use of the tool.

And with one simple SQL query I was able to really get a grasp of, OK, what are people charging across the board? There is a chasm in rates between $50~75 and $150+.

I wanted to really understand why it was like this. So I reached out to a handful of these different people, some on the high end, and some on the low end, and got to know them and their businesses.

[Patrick notes: The money graph in the money post about money!]

Brennan: It is almost surreal how the people changing three times as much are not three times as better developers. The reason for the huge discrepancy is how they communicate their value and how they refuse to allow fear and uncertainly to rule their businesses.

Patrick:  Keith and I have both been consulting for about two years now.

Keith:  More of a year for me, actually.

Patrick:  I think the difference between my first going rate and my current going rate is more than 7.5x. I think Keith has also ranked up quite a bit. I’m not 7.5 times a better Ruby on Rails programmer or A/B test implementer, or email marketer than I was two years ago. I’m better, but not seven and a half times better.

What I’m seven and half times better is identifying the right clients and then communicating to them that working with me is going to do wonderful things for their business and then actually delivering on that.

And to be honest, I’m probably undercharging by a lot, even at my rate, which is quite healthy. (I won’t say the number out loud, because there’s absolutely no good that can possibly come out of quoting your rate publicly, but it might be shocking to a lot of people who read my blog, which it’s funny.)

It’s like how many times do you read something and it’s like, “OK, I’ve made X company Y percent, which we all know is over a million dollars”, but if I were to say or put a number on what my week cost, a lot of people who like me, and who want me to succeed, would be like, “Oh, wow, that’s way, way, too much for only making people a million bucks.”

Keith: Well, of course, because you’re just the bingo card guy, right? I mean you make bingo cards for teachers.

Brennan:  I don’t agree that rates should be completely private. I found that when I started to publicly put my rates out there it’s helped me really initially get a much better…And it might be different for you because a lot of your referrals they come via referrals through they know about you.

You know I was talking to one of the owners of Thunderbolt Labs last week in Dublin, Randall Thomas, and we were talking about one of the things…I referenced him in my book, and I say they put publicly on the front page of their website. They say, “This is what we charge per hour. You need to book us in pairs of two. And this is how much it’ll cost if you want to train you for a few days.”

And in talking with him regarding this same thing. And in talking with him I realized that it provokes a lot of interest. People see a high number, and they kind of scratch their head and say, “Wow, he must have a lot of cajones to be putting this large dollar sign on the front page of his website.”

Because the traditional way of approaching things is be vague. Get people to contact you. Now you have a lead and then pull their price right at the last moment. And that’s like standard sales, right? You know it’s hard to acquire a lead, therefore don’t put any impediments between you and having a new lead in your CRM.

But what we found is it’s reduced the amount of qualifying we’ve had to do, which is always a good thing, and it’s allowed us to get off the bat a different client who treats us differently than I think they would otherwise.

Keith:  Right.

Brennan:  It’s hard to test a consultancy website because gauging conversions might not be as easy as it would be otherwise for a product site, but it’s something to try out. I’m starting to be swayed in the direction of publicly putting up your rate. It’s like on a menu.

Keith:  You talk about pre-qualifying the customer and vetting the new clients. I’ve had so many clients that because I don’t say my rate upfront, we have the huge discussion. We talk about the proposal and everything, and I’m like, this is how much it’s going to cost, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t have that type of money.”

And there goes 5, 10 hours, 15 hours of my time, having thought about all this, and you chalk it up to a loss. I mean that’s just how the business runs, but to be able to prevent them, like you said, saves a lot of time, and a lot of headache and heartache.

Patrick:  Not to be persnickety, but: If it takes you five to 10 hours to get to the point where you understand if someone is willing to drop $10,000 bucks, that might be an opportunity to improve your qualification process. Obviously I’m out of the price range of a lot of people who come to talk to me for this, and that’s OK, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a period of longer than an hour where I was totally in the dark about whether someone was a good prospect for a consulting relationship or not.

Keith:  I’ve had clients where I have given a vague estimate at first just to test budgets, and no batting of eyes, no nothing, and then when I come back with the proposal, which is exactly that, they’re like “Oh, by the way, we have no money.” So I think there are people who, maybe not purpose, but they either think that our time is not worth so much or they just want to get a free consultation. [Patrick notes: After a certain level, free consultations are a cost of doing business. This is just non-billable overhead which goes into lining up the 70%ish of your schedule which is billable. This is, again, why you set your rate so high. Proper rates pay for a lot of coffee dates and free proposals.]

Brennan:  So one thing that really helps is when somebody contacts you saying, “I might be interested in hiring you,” have kind of a list of a few questions you send them, one of them being, “Do you have over X amount of dollars for this project?” You’re not publicly putting out your rate, but you would be amazed how many people have contacted us as a consultancy where it’s very obvious that we have a lot of people on payroll, saying, “Hey, what can we get for $1,000? ” (This is clearly unrealistic.)

And unless you want to be putting up with things like that, the quicker you can qualify, the better, because the last thing you want to do is to kind of lead them on and then spend all this time. And one of the reasons I’d do putting my rate public is it makes it less likely that people will try to negotiate that.

It’s a lot like if you have a restaurant, and you charge $10 for a sandwich, it’s rare that people are going to say, “Can you give it to me for 8?” You know you have in effect a set price I’ve found that people stop trying to go lower.

Patrick:  I have the endless respect for both of you. I think it would not really work out very well for me. One reason is that my rate goes up on a fairly regular basis, and I don’t want my rate from three months ago being quoted as evidence against me in a future negotiation. [Patrick notes: For similar reasons, no divulging salary histories.]

And also the client pool is kind of heterogeneous. I don’t know if I actually pronounced that word right, because English is not my native language anymore.

My favorite clients are in the Fog Creek zone: successful, independent, closely held companies. In rough terms, most of my clients have eight figures of revenue and two to four dozen employees.

But that’s not 100 percent of the people I’ll ever do business with, right? Say that, hypothetically, Google decided to call me up one day. If Google calls up and asks for my thoughts on making AdWords 2% more effective, the rate that I quote Google will not be within an order of magnitude of the rate that I quote anybody else.

Keith:  And that goes back to the value, because the amount of value…Google’s about at what, adding two percent to Google’s bottom line is not the same as adding two percent to a company that’s only making a million a year, for example.

Brennan:  Yeah, I think that’s a very valid point, and I think…I mean I know for a fact you and I do very different forms of consulting. I deal with a lot of unknown startups and people who are single founders, or they are the CEO of a smallish company. It’s harder to gauge whether they can afford me, it’s very easy to Google Fog Creek and know who they are. I don’t know, but I think if I were doing more of the consulting you were, I might not publicize it as much or at all.

Patrick:  I think my favorite post that was ever on Hacker News was about this guy who was saying that all the animals get together, and they try to discuss what’s the best way to be an animal, and the lion say, “Oh, you need to run fast, eat things, and spend most of the day sleeping,” and the ants say, “Oh, you need to add 10,000 of us,” and the monkeys say, “you need to eat fruit and live in trees.” [Patrick notes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 ]

What’s the best way to run a consultanc?. There are a lot of successful ways to run a consultancy, a lot of successful offerings that you can have for clients, charging models, yada, yada, yada. With that said, there are some definite failure modes like charging too little money, and there are also things I think are wins for almost everybody.

One which I would like to suggest to both of you, because I know you both charge an hourly basis, the best tip I’ve ever gotten was to start charging weekly. It makes life so much better, both because it tends to make scheduling better. If you charge hourly, you will often end up having weeks that don’t kind of cleanly bucket, right? That decreases your effective utilization rate, which like we discussed earlier has major impacts for the business.

Another being that people have a kind of very constrained dynamic range for the amount of money an hour of someone’s time is worth. They typically know what every hourly salary they’ve ever worked for is, and they’re all low numbers. And they know what every other hourly employees’ numbers are, and those are low numbers, too.

It gets difficult once you get past $100~200 an hour to continue increasing one’s hourly rate, and people feel inclined to make adjustments to that hourly rate in ways that seem reasonable when you’re talking about a number, that low number, but they’re huge with respect to the business.

Like if you quote 250, they might say, “Ah, 250’s a little tough. I can do 225.” And that’s 10 percent off your bottom line right there.

If a client needs a small win to feel good about themselves or to bring back to their bosses, I would much rather have them slice a few hundred dollars off an invoice rather than slice $25 off an hourly rate. [Patrick notes: If a client actually tries this, offer to cut scope rather than cutting rate.]

Brennan:  Right.

Patrick:  If you’re quoting a weekly rate, $25 moves your outcome not at all, whereas if you’re quoting an hourly rate, it moves it quite a bit.

Brennan:  So I’ve actually starting shifting towards a weekly rate also, and one thing I would advise everyone is to A/B test your new leads. ou should always be experimenting with different tactics about whether you’re pricing by the day, the hour, the week, and everything else.

[Patrick notes: I have to be the picky statistician here and complain that it is virtually impossible to A/B test this because unless one is negotiating hundreds of deals in parallel one will not have statistically confident results from this experiment in any reasonable timeframe.]

Brennan:But one of the things I’ve found, and here is kind of a punch list for why weekly is better. First of all, if you’re charging hourly, you might as well just be a contracted employee, and they’re going to get very particular about scheduling. They’re going to…

Patrick:  That is so true.

Brennan:  Look at line items. They’re going to start being very particular, because frankly you don’t have a product. You’re selling time. Whereas when you approach it as a weekly flat rate product, that’s really what you have, and there’s no nitpicking that goes on with, “Well, you know, I actually like the way Bob worked over Jim.”

Or, if you have any product management overhead, every client on earth hates seeing that as a line item, you can include that in that one set price without needing to justify those line items come invoice day.

Patrick:  Right. Here’s a fact of life: clients will not always have their act together. I was working at a particular consulting site, and my point of contact for whatever reason was not going to be available for the next couple days. I said to them, “All right. No problem, I’ll just use your WiFi, and I won’t invoice you for the next two days.

Someone older and wiser said, “Shut up. Never offer free work ever again. If you’re working on a weekly rate, and the client doesn’t have their act together, that’s fine. The client is paying for not having their act together.”

Whereas if you’re working on an hourly rate, if you send someone an invoice that has a line time of 16 hours of “waited for Bob to get back from vacation,” your client is going to be very, very pissed off.

Brennan:  Exactly.

Patrick:  If you’re not well established enough or you’re not comfortable enough to go up to a weekly rate, even going up to a daily rate it will get you all the scheduling benefits and you won’t be micromanaged like you’re a teenager working for a restaurant anymore. [Patrick notes: Ever felt the need to itemize a consulting bill with entries like “Conference call about the email migration: $46”? Why? Do either you or your client really benefit from that level of detail?]

You’ll also tend to catch the benefit of things that were previously getting lost to inefficiencies in the business.

One of our mutual friends, Amy Hoy, runs that time tracking software, so I don’t want to smack on time tracking too much, but I think that time tracking is a technological/process patch on top of a hole in the business model, which is that if you are explicitly selling time then accurately tracking the time is really, really important because you will be leaking time out of your bucket, and then that leaks money for the business.

If you switch to the daily rate then your entire time tracking solution is a calendar that has circles or checks on it. No matter how the business or your particular schedule for that day or importantly your clients schedule for that day works out, you will stop leaking quite so much value in sort of like dead weight loss of the business.

Selling Info-Products

Patrick: So we’re about an hour and ten minutes into the interview, and there’s one more topic that we would like to talk, so let’s move a little bit away from the making awesome consulting businesses thing. So Brennan, you just released a product that is online course/eBook offering. Keith has significant experience working with info products as well, and I am dipping my toes in that water later this month with an online video course offering teaching people how to do lifecycle emails better.

Let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve learned about that, but before we get into what we’ve learned about it I know I had a comfort issue with this before I got started. What’s the difference between what we are doing and the scamming info marketers who are hawking books on AdWorks about how to make money online with the tip that some mom discovered in their spare time?

Keith:  Absolutely nothing. Nothing. We are just as horrible as them.

Patrick:  Stab in the face, Keith, stab in the face.

Brennan:  I remember I posted something that got to Hacker News, on how I had originally sold, I think the first 2000 dollars in sales. It had a link to the sales site. There were people who said, “Wow, you look like a scammer,” because I use bolded fonts and italics in some places and I lead things in with questions like, “Are you unhappy with your rate? Does doubling your rates scare you?”

These are the tried and true marketing tactics that need to be done if you want to quickly capture somebody’s attention and then convince them to keep reading. We joke and we laugh at a lot of these infomercial products that you see on late night television, or you see these little landing pages for “how to work from home and make a million dollars.”

I think the tactics we use tend to be pretty similar. You have a clear call to action. You have a headline that captures people’s attention. I don’t think there’s a clear difference in medium between us and them.

Keith:  I think there’s a difference in product.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  I also think we provide value outside the products themselves, by for example educating the community outside the scope of our products. The sleazy marketers, they really don’t give anything back. I know, Brennan, you talked about how you had used your email list and how you had emailed peopled and funneled peopled and made your 2000 dollars in presales.

I mean, Patrick is pretty much famous for always talking about his sales numbers and what he did and what his actual sales numbers have been, as far as Bingo Card Creator.

So I think both of you, and I try to do this as well, are very open with the business aspect of what you’re doing. I mean, info products are info products. There is no way to really draw that clear line between scammy and not scammy, other than how each individual person feels. But at the same time, I feel that you guys give a lot more back to the community, showing how you are building this, showing how this is working, and teaching other people who have not bought your product.

Patrick:  I think that there has to be an element to the discussion: does the product actually provide value? The biggest difference between what we do and what the typical ClickBank funder does is that the “Three Quick Tips for Slimming Down Your Tummy” will not actually work. The big difference between us and them is that our advice actually works.

Keith:  I don’t know. Have you seen my tummy? I have a six‑pack right now.

Patrick:  I do not want to see your tummy, Keith.

Keith:  It’s beer. The six‑pack is beer.

Patrick:  We’re not selling to un‑savvy folks who typically get taken to the cleaners with “Make Money Online.”(99 percent of them will not make a single dollar.)

We’re selling to savvy and, frankly, very, very skeptical professionals, who are capable of evaluating claims that we make on how our advice will make their business better, just like they’re capable of evaluating claims that two weeks of our consulting services will create a software product that will make their businesses better. What we sell works.

Brennan:  I took Amy Hoy’s “30×500″ course, and one of the principles in the course is what are called e‑bombs, which are education bombs.

Especially to the audience that I’m marketing to, you can’t just throw them a sales site, right? What I’ve found to work really well is to basically give a lot of information away for free, whether it be…”If you’re looking at writing a book, here us some of the things I ran into when I was writing my book, and here is what worked and didn’t work.” What you’re doing through that is you’re breaking down any initial trust barriers that people intrinsically erect.

Basically, what we’re doing is we’re getting people to trust us. And then the natural segue is to say, “If you appreciated what I had to say here and this jives with what you’re looking for, I also have a product that will do X, which you might be interested in.” And that’s the proverbial call to action. And you can do this through blogging. You can do this through a lot of different outlets.

I think the biggest instrument to success, both with PlanScope and now the book, has been doing that. I mean, I’ve done articles for freelancers on how to estimate a new project or something, and that will get shared to quite a few people.

And then, basically, what I’m saying is this philosophy that is in this post, if you like this post, it’s represented in this product that I’ve built and you might enjoy it. And I’ve found that to be a huge win in terms of, not only is it a free avenue for sales, because it’s your time that you’re spending writing these educational blog posts, but they really establish yourself as an authority in subject X, and that helps tremendously.

Patrick:  I already hate myself for what I’m about to say. I’m going to say that it’s Content Marketing 101. Why do I hate that?

Number one, because I hate the word “content.” It auto-commoditizes the valuable information and insight you had to share.

And number two, because I think that’s unnecessarily disparaging, because that is a tactic that, indeed, will actually work. Many savvy people don’t necessarily use this to nearly the potential that they could be using it to.

But there are variations on that that have made it more effective, in my experience. One of them is, if you write a post of interest to your market or to people who are adjacent to your target market, a more effective call to action at the end of it is to ask people to sign up for a newsletter rather than asking for a sale.

Offer an immediate incentive for their email address and permission to contact them. Tell them that over the course of the next few weeks you will send you things they will enjoy.

And given that you have just proven that you have some level of expertise in something, people will tend to think that the incentive that you were dangling in front of them it’s likely to be valuable.  (Naturally, you should make it valuable.)

So, you will get their consent to get email from you. And then converting people via email, just absolutely rocks full stops over the conversion rates you will get on websites. [Patrick notes: There is abundant evidence for this in the industry, but I’ll give you a fuller breakdown in a later post about my email course. Spoiler: email converts to purchases 70x higher than… well, wait a few weeks.] And you get to control the entire experience. You get to kind of like be within their decision making cycle over weeks rather than over minutes.

You get to produce more trust with them and ethically and every possible way.

To see more, sign up for my email list.

Keith:  Not too subtle there.

Patrick:  Brennan covered this in his book, but consultancies also benefit from this tactic. “We’ll give you some sort of like report that we’ve prepared about your industry or your use of solving some problem in your business in return for your email address.” This is an epic win for selling services.

Within two hours of starting my email list back in May, I had an email address from a CEO at a company which was, to put it mildly, an awesome prospect. Since he had asked for email from me, I proceeded to – naturally – send him an email. It worked out well for all parties.

Even if I never had a sort of product to offer the list, the list would be worthwhile for my business purely for the lead generation value. [Patrick notes: Much like my blog and HN participation, I’d continue writing even if it was never worth a dollar.  It is one of my favorite hobbies.]

Brennan:  Especially for consultancies, our clients – often MBAs or other business people — tend to not think email is as bad as some of us.

Patrick:  Oh God yes.

Keith:  Oh, yeah.

Patrick:  I think engineers radically over-report their own distaste of email. I have a very like engineer focused audience. A majority of people who are on that blog are kind of squarely in that wheelhouse. Many of them report that “I hate email!”, but 4,000 of them signed up for a weekly email from me. I ask people to reply if they like it, and that nearly breaks my inbox every single time. People routinely tell me things like, “I have never liked getting email from anyone else. But, man this is awesome.”

This is not because I produce emails that are better than anyone else in the world. It’s just because everybody, regardless of whether they say they hate getting email or not or they hate being marketed to, is happy to receive things which produce genuine value for them.

Keith:  Exactly.

Patrick:  So, we are not talking about tricking anyone to sign up for this.

Let me give you a quick pro tip here. If you write a newsletter, where everyone gets the an email at the same time, this puts you on a content treadmill. You constantly have to play “feed the monster”, just like a blog, or your list gets stale and you (and they) lose the value from it.

How To Avoid The Content Treadmill

Patrick: I started with nothing written for the email list. So, the first week I wrote something. I think it was on software as a service pricing. And then the second or third week I wrote something on selling to enterprise businesses.

I then set up an autoresponder where anyone who signs up for the email list today, gets the email about software service pricing, which is totally new to them, tomorrow.  This means that I’m not on the content treadmill with respect to new users: they have several weeks of buffer. I only have to continue producing for existing users, and as I do so, my buffer for new users gets longer.

This means that those “archive” emails (MailChimp’s term, not mine) have created value for thousands of more people than they would if they had been buried in the archive somewhere or, like many of my blog posts, were written once and they’re totally not discoverable unless you had been paging through the archives from 2008.

Speaking of commoditization of content, the perceived value that people get from an email versus a, say, blog post, is very, very different. My experience has been that, over the years, I’ve developed a style that works for me. I typically write 2,000, 4,000, or 8,000 words on a subject at once. I focus more on producing an opus than I do on producing bite-sized easily-consumed daily updates. [Patrick notes: While I do like short-form writing I find that I do it much better on forums than on my own properties. And, obviously, even 8,000 words is substantially less depth than a book.]

The typical reader on my blog will be on the blog for about three minutes, which means they’re either skimming or they’re not reading much of it, or they’re absolutely superhuman with their reading speeds, and then it’s done, and maybe they’ll be back in two weeks. But if I send the same caliber of stuff to the email list, I get lots of really good comments that are both motivational, and I love getting my praised button pushed.

Also, the comments really indicate that they’ve read it, and reacted with that email. I ask people explicitly, “Write me back, and tell me about the change you made in your business as a result of this advice,” and people have written me back and said things like, “As a result of the software and servicing mail, we changed our software pricing. It increased sales by 90 percent,”

I got a blog post out of that one.  That made me happy.  Not that I was happy to get a blog post, I’m happy because a business and its employees benefited from that decision.

Brennan:  When you’re reading a blog post, you know it’s a web page, right? You know you’re looking at something that is sitting up on the Internet. It’s not personalized, it’s not for you at all. Emails are how we communicate directly to people, and when that content shows up in their inbox, especially if you start it with, “Hi, ‘first name,'” or even, “Hey there,” if you don’t have their name, that, I think…

I’m speculating here, but I’m willing to bet that the psychological implications that emails are usually targeted to me makes me more willing to read through it, and to absorb the content, than I would be if I just stumbled upon that same exact email put as a blog post.

Keith:  It also depends on the positioning of the email. I’m on all my clients’ email lists, and I actually work with my clients building email funnels for them. Even though I know it is my client, and I know that I’m signed up on their list, so I’m getting about 10, 12 emails of theirs every day from their blog posts and stuff, really looking at the way that the emails are structured, I feel an emotional response depending on that.

I have some customers who want to put their blog name first, and then the title after that, or whatever, and when I see emails like that, they don’t have the personalization, and the subject line says title of blog, and then blog title, or post title, and it feels like a form letter. Those generally get deleted right away, and then there are other ones that it’s like, “Hi Keith, how are you doing?” Or, “Hi Keith, I just saw this great email or tweet,” or, “I just saw this great blog post.”

I see it coming from my client. It has their name in the center. It has “Great blog post” as the subject, and it says “Hey Keith” in the front. I think, “Oh, they’re emailing me,” and I feel like the email is personalized – even if I wrote it or designed the funnel it is in.

I know that it’s automated, but at the same time, there is just that visceral response, so I think you’re right on with that. Email is the way we communicate with people on a one‑to‑one level, and even if we know that they are for mails, it still connects with us.

Patrick:  Also, people have a much different mindset when they’re in their email client versus being in their browser. If you think what’s probably above and below the email that you’re writing versus what’s above and below the blog post you’re writing, what is above an email that someone is reading is probably important work.

Knowledge workers spend all their day in their inbox because that’s their job. Accordingly, anything in the inbox is, likely, Important Work.

There’ll be their boss asking for a status report above it, and a client asking for feedback on yadda yadda below it, and then your email is sandwiched in between there. It kind of inherits the presumed importance from all the other stuff that’s in their inbox that day, whereas if you write a blog post, people are probably going to be consuming through Twitter, or some sort of aggregator, or an RSS reader.

For example, I like to think that my blog posts are worthwhile. They sometimes show up in aggregators like Hacker news. For the 30 things that are on the top of Hacker News at any given time, if one of my posts is up there, it should be a lot better than 15 of them. It’s probably a lot better than more than 15. If it wasn’t, I shouldn’t have written that article. [Patrick notes: Because attention is a perishable resource and because I don’t like attaching my name to drek, I throw out about one post for every one I publish.]

If your writing is seen in a context where the stuff around it is dross, it is more likely to be perceived as Internet dross that I should bookmark and maybe read if I have extra time to waste. If it’s seen in the context of important work, then it’s going to inherit that aura of being important work itself.

This is why I literally see 10X more engagement for email versus blog posts.  That is an absolute figure: my typical email gets seen by like 3,000, 4,000 people, versus my typical blog post getting seen by 20,000 plus. So 10X engagement on one‑seventh of the audience is, what, a comparable 70X engagement? That isn’t an exact number, but it would blow your mind.

Brennan:  It’s incredible how when I first launched the book, I didn’t launch it into a vacuum, because I had my products mailing list. Within half an hour of the initial email I sent out to everyone on it announcing my book, and letting them to know how it would benefit them, or could benefit their business, and chances are, if they used my product, they’re a consultant.

Within half an hour, there was over $1,500 in sales.

Patrick likes the term “printing money”, and sending an email to a carefully cultivated list is one of the best ways to do that. [Patrick notes: I will provide substantial data on this later, but suffice it to say “Yes!”] I know for a fact I can write an email right now delivering some immediate value to my subscribers, upsell the book through it to a related list, my opt-in mailing list, and it will generate sales. Having a strong, healthy email list that trusts you and is used to engaging with you is a very good thing.

I think the way a lot of people mess up is they build an email list, and then there is silence for months, and then they try to sell you. It’s like, “Silent. Silent. Silent. Sell.” They wonder why MailChimp starts yelling at them about their unsubscribe count being so high. It should be a gradual trip to sales.

Keith:  I don’t want to go too much into that, because that’s one of the big things that Patrick talks about in his product, but…

Patrick:  Let’s go into it.

Keith:  You want to get into it?

Patrick:  Yeah, why not?

Keith:  All right. All right.

Patrick: “Create outstanding amounts of value, and then charge only the two percent of people who want to pay for it.” [Patrick notes: I’m echoing back to a thought from the recent Ramit Sethi interviews here.]

Keith:  Sounds good. Sound good. So we actually talked about this when we did our mentoring talk about email funnels, and…

Patrick:  Backstory on that. Keith and I went to Silicon Valley last year to 500 Startups, where I’m a mentor. We talked with their incubator companies about how to improve their marketing. Many of the founders are from technical backgrounds and just now becoming business owners, and we thought we could help them out a bit about acquiring customers.

One topic we discussed extensively was drip campaigns. Keith, what is a drip email campaign?

Keith:  A drip email campaign is pretty much what you had described. You take emails that you have already, or emails specifically customized for the drip, and when a person signs up to your newsletters, it doles them out over a set period of time. Let’s say you have a two week drip campaign, so the first day they sign up, they get one email. Then on the third, the seventh, the eighth, the 12th, or whatever days you want, they get another email.

The purpose of this is to eventually sell them on a product, but what you do over the drip, like Brennan said, and like Patrick said, if you just are radio silent for a month and then you say, “Hey, buy my product,” no one’s going to buy your product. So what you do is you… Well, you’re the one with the product, Patrick. Why don’t you explain it?

Patrick:  Just for a total avoidance of doubt here, people are only getting these emails because they’ve explicitly asked to get emails from you, typically because you’ve given them some sort of incentive, with the quid pro quo for that incentive being that you are going to get in touch with them. You can position the drip campaign such that the drip campaign is, in itself, very valuable.

A great example of this that I did for a client of mine, which I can talk about publicly, is for WP Engine. They do high‑end WordPress hosting, so there is a page on their website that you can go to for an automated diagnostic of your WordPress site, and they’ll just say, “It took 4.7 seconds to load. You could make it load faster if you turned on gzip. Here’s how to do that,” yadda yadda yadda.

On that page, it will ask you, “Do you want to take a free one month course in improving the speed, scalability, and security of your WordPress site? If so, give us your email address and click “Yes,” and they get a very high opt‑in rate, because it’s clearly aligned with the thing that brought people to the page in the first place.

So what does the drip campaign do? The goal is, we’re going to educate, persuade, and only then sell. We’re going to start by just giving people outstanding amounts of value in terms of educational content that we’re delivering for them.

For example, in the WPEngine thing, we’re going to send you an email about various under‑the‑hood server/code tweaks that you can make to your WordPress site that, since you’re not a technical person, you probably weren’t aware of, and that these things will make your site faster. “gzip is a setting. Here’s how you turn it on, and here’s where you’ll need to make that setting in Apache’s httpd.conf. It will always make a site faster. If gzip is off right now, turn your gzip on. This always wins.”

That sort of thing is a win for the user, and they will see it being a win. Then we come back to them a couple of days later.

“Previously, we talked about increasing the speed of your site. Scalability is subtly different from speed, we’ll explain to you why. Here is the sort of architecture you would use to make a WordPress site more scalable, so that it would stay up.”

For example, Hacker News crushes WordPress sites on a fairly frequent basis, including mine more than once. Grr. Apache KeepAlive needs a stab in the face.

The email will explain that Apache KeepAlive is kind of a stab‑in‑the‑face option if you want your WordPress site to survive.

Anyhow, the idea is that we’re gradually building a trust in the user via educating them about this stuff. They start to trust us as an expert about this, because hey, we are experts about it.  We’re experts who are in their corner.

After we’ve established that we are credible experts on this thing, then we say, “OK, you have these problems. These are connected to this thing we have been talking about. We have a solution to these problems. Let’s talk a little bit about that,” and now you are no longer just some anonymous page they flipped to on the Internet.

You are their trusted expert at this field. You’ve been in their inboxes for the last two weeks making their lives better. They are much more inclined to trust representations that you make about your product. For example, if you just come up to someone and say, “You should probably pay $200 a month for blog hosting,” people will have significant reservations about that. I know I would.

I actually do pay $200 a month for WPEngine, simply because they convinced me, over a period of time, talking to their CEO, that the optimizing the speed and scalability of my site was just a black hole of my time, and that I should just let them take care of that. The drip campaign lets you do that credibility boosting thing in a scalable fashion over many, many thousands of customers without you having to continually do sales discussions.

It leads into sales discussions a lot, because you can tell people in your drip emails, “Hey, do you have any questions about this? We love getting emails from you. Just hit reply.” This is the best of both worlds: a low-touch self-serve offering for customers who can make the decision by themselves, and a low-friction entry into a high-touch sales discussion for customers who require a bit of guidance.

Applying Drip Marketing To Services Businesses

Brennan:  These same exact principles, by the way, apply directly to consulting. I think actually, Patrick, you’re the one who mentioned this as an idea, but if you do something like how to go about hiring your first web developer, or how to make sure that you’re basically business‑centered educational material for people who are on your list and might end up hiring you, the more you do this…

We post to user groups, and conferences, and things like that. I’ve closed six figure deals in 15 minutes because there’s no sales needed. I’ve educated them enough about this arena that they’re entering into, hiring people to build custom software for you. I’ve educated them, and I’ve inadvertently swayed them over into the way I think about that. I become the benchmark.

Patrick:  Star this, guys. It’s probably the most important thing in the interview. If you’re in the position of educating someone, you largely get to determine their outlook on all further things in that space. If you are already someone’s trusted expert on the subject at issue, it really isn’t even a sales discussion anymore. You sit down at a table and you’re just talking. It’s just the natural outgrowth of the discussion you would have earlier.

If we talked for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve explained why A/B testing is a win, and told you how I would structure an A/B test routine for your company, and how you can make your organization do more A/B testing and whatnot; if the CEO sits down with me and opens a page on his laptop, and starts saying, “What would you do on this?”

Then that is suddenly a sales discussion, but nobody at the table perceives it as being a sales discussion. It’s a foregone conclusion. I’m winning that engagement.

Brennan:  I tend to be naturally shy. If you don’t want marketing your freelancing business to be like selling a car, this approach will make it so, like you said, it’s not even sales anymore. It’s then you’re figuring out the details of a transaction, and the need to convince has already been done, and that’s really what sales is, right? You’re convincing somebody to buy your product.

The sales has already been done through valuable material that you’re giving away to these prospective clients, and that has worked wonders for my business.

Patrick:  Same here.

One of the make‑my‑bones steps for my consultancy was publishing so much on my blog about the sort of things I do, first for myself and then on behalf of clients.  My field is largely “ways that engineers can improve marketing outcomes”.

I have a certain amount of expertise in that area, and I am seen as having a certain amount of expertise in the area. (Note: This are, sadly, not co-extensive. There are many underappreciated geniuses who couldn’t sell an engagement to save their lives, and many poseurs. Don’t be either.)

It makes the sales discussion radically easier. It’s not even sales at that point. It’s more like order taking. They’ve come to the decision that they want to do this. You are the natural person that they would want to do this with, because they trust you and feel a bit of soft social obligation to you. If you have a favorite teacher from college, wouldn’t you want to do business with them, versus a random person who happens to be in the same industry?

Also, you’ve so informed their thinking about this subject that you’re the benchmark everybody else up against.

I’ve occasionally won engagements over highly regarded firms in the industry. I have asked, “I’m just curious, can you help me help out my business here? Why did I win engagement over competing firm X?” Clients have literally said, “Oh yeah, we had a talk with that guy, but he kept disagreeing with you.”

Keith:  Oh, that’s awesome.

Patrick:  But the only person who’s going to agree with me 100 percent of the time is me, so that literally means that I’m the only person that can get hired for this job.

“Oh, that’s awesome.”

Brennan:  Well, here’s the thing. Patrick, imagine cloning yourself, and this clone has none of the comments you put on Hacker News, none of the blog posts you’ve written, none of the podcasts, and they are offering the same exact service as you are. The amount of work they would need to put in to get probably the kind of rates you justify would be…

Patrick:  It would never happen.

Brennan:  … A mountain.

Patrick:  I want to clarify this, because this is something that Hacker News‑ers sometimes get wrong. When I say “Internet famous,” that is always tongue-in-cheek . They’re the right couple of thousand people, but only a couple thousand people know who I am. The fact that I have that Internet reputation is not the sole driver of the consulting business.

One of the main things that drives the consulting business is the “hush hush” discussions between CEOs on what happened the last time I got hired for an engagement. Getting in the door at the first couple of high profile companies was helped, quite a bit, by having a bit of a reputation due to publishing/speaking/whatnot.  But these days, people hire the results, they don’t hire the comment history.

Not Internet famous and don’t have a portfolio of results? There are ways you can get around that, for example, by networking. But Keith and I live out in Ogaki, in Gifu prefecture, which is a place that we love, but it’s kind of the middle of nowhere relative to tech companies with 10 to 100 million dollars in revenue, and there are not really solid options for networking with… We’re not exactly rubbing elbows with Joel Spolsky on one hand and Paul Graham on the other here in Ogaki.

So to the extent that networking matters, and guys, capital N, capital M, “Networking Matters,” it’s Internet participation was a major greaser of the wheels that got it going. After and concurrent with that, being able to execute and actually deliver the kind of results that my clients are hoping for is majorly important.

Reputation alone is not sufficient. If I routinely failed to execute my career would fold up like a origami crane, but happens to be case that at least some companies working with me get a substantial amount of value out of that.

BTW, every time the company gets a substantial amount of value out of it, I immediately attempt to get a public case study out of that. You can do this, too, and your customers will often be inclined to say Yes if you present it correctly.

I never ask clients, “You should totally help me get my next 10 engagements.” It’s typically, ” Why don’t we get a mutual win here out of talking about this, such that you get your name in front of my audience, and and I get my name in front of your audience, attached to a number, like, say, I made you a million dollars.”

That sort of thing works.

[Patrick notes: This works even if you have lower profile clients. Even if your largest client is a pizza shop, then do an interview with the owner on how pleased they were about your new website and how often people are ordering the special promoted on the homepage. You can climb the ladder up from pizza shops to insurance agents to real estate brokers to bank branches to…]

Keith:  You say that it is for getting your clients. It is a mutual win, because let’s take WP Engine, for example. I had worked with WP Engine before you started using them, and we had actually talked about that a lot, and I had never seen them on Hacker News until you blogged about them. And now I see them once every week or once every two weeks or so. They get mentioned for something. So there is a huge positive‑feedback loop for getting the case studies up there.

Patrick:  [Patrick notes: Keith just scared me here, because it is easy to listen to that and hear “Hire Patrick, it gets you on Hacker News” rather than “Hire Patrick, the article about you making a million dollars will get you on Hacker News”, and I want to sell results rather than attention.]

I enormously respect the Hacker News audience, so I want to clarify: I have never and will never take money for placing somebody on Hacker News. I do generally talk about things that are interesting to me on my blog. Particularly when clients give me the go‑ahead for actually talking about what we did and how it worked out, I will often blog about that. [Patrick notes: I, similarly, want those posts to rank not because they’re attached to my name but because I’m going to go in-depth about strategies and tactics which actually worked and which are generalizable to other businesses, like those of HN readers.]

There are also lots of clients who we don’t talk about their stuff publicly, either because there’s nothing, really, to talk about [Patrick notes: I can only write “We did an A/B test and it increased sales by 2%” so many times], or, surprisingly for me, given my philosophical take on the matter, some businesses treat my advice as strategic information which they don’t want their competitors to have.

I’m generally a “share all the information and the pie gets bigger” kind of guy. If you’re competing with Bingo Card Creator, you can literally pull an entire business plan for that off my blog, and a couple of people have done that .Some of my consulting clients are not quite copacetic with that kind of open‑source philosophy regarding core business initiatives.

My single biggest win ever for a client will never see the light of day. This saddens me.

This is one of the reasons why I don’t just do consulting full‑time. I was paid wonderfully for that engagement, and it was great fun. We created a lot of value. The world is better off for it having happened.

But there is a clenched fist in my stomach right now. I really want to tell you what we did, because it was awesome, and I can’t. They bought my soul. OK, they didn’t buy my soul. It’s just professionalism/NDA/I want to work in this town again, and as a result, I can’t talk about it. But I really want to talk about it.

I do consulting. I like consulting. I don’t want to have consulting be the focus of my business for forever. Right now, though, consulting is the center of gravity of my business. That’s what I make more money doing. It makes a heck of a lot more money than Bingo Card Creator.

I don’t talk about my Appointment Reminder revenues publicly, for a few reasons. That could be its own episode.

Man, I’m talking way too much about me..

Keith:  We can beep you out. Just beep out every other words.

Patrick:  Let’s talk about something more interesting than me.

Keith:  Yeah, we’re at the two‑hour mark. So yeah, why don’t we start wrapping this one up. I actually just want to mention one more time: Brennan, I just want to say it was great you coming on the show and talking about this. I also want to say, I read your book. I know Patrick read it as well. The book is $39.

Patrick:  I paid for a copy.

Keith:  I paid for mine as well. Yeah, we did not get comped on this. And it was worth every penny.

Patrick:  Man, I tell everybody charge more. But I got to tell you, Brennan, charge more…

Keith:  Charge more. Charge more.

Patrick:  Because it’s absolutely ludicrous. Literally, the value proposition is you’re going to take this and double your freelancing rate. Presuming that your freelancing rate is already above $50 an hour, you’re going to make this back in your first hour. It’s totally a no‑brainer. You should buy it before Brennan gets sane.

Keith:  Right. Yeah. He’s actually mentioned he’s going to raise the price, so before he does that, you should go buy it. And honestly, in the first five pages, I had three new ideas. Right? I got so much value out of that book, and it was only $39. It’s just a no‑brainer. Go buy it, honestly.

Patrick:  Brennan, you want to give out the URL for listeners? We’ll put it in the show notes as well.

Brennan:  Absolutely. It’s http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com. It’s a very simple, straightforward website.

Yeah. We could talk another two hours on pricing info products. But unfortunately, books have a range attached to them that people are willing to pay because it’s a book, regardless of what they get out of it.

There are a lot of things that I want to do now that I have an audience of people who have, really, the same world view. They’re consultants and they feel they’re undercharging, just like I feel I am undercharging with the book.

And there’s a lot, I think, of value that I can deliver to them, especially since I’ve gone from being a freelancer to, at my peak, having a consultancy of 10 employees. The current lifetime value of these purchasers is $39. But as an aside, there’s a lot more that I think I can give people that will mutually benefit both sides of the equation.

Patrick:  Absolutely.

Brennan:  I do think, possibly even before the podcast is released, that the cost of the book will go up.

Keith:  Well, give them a special price for just this podcast, then.

Brennan:  Patio11 is the coupon code, which will get you the book for $39.

Keith:  Very nice.

Brennan:  We’ll keep the price for the podcast.

Patrick:  I love talking to small businesses, because we can totally make a decision like that without talking to somebody.

Keith:  Brennan, don’t you have to talk with your suppliers and your distributors and everyone about that? You can just make that decision right there?

Brennan:  No, I don’t.

Patrick:  I don’t know if the CEOs are going to approve that, and you have to run it by marketing first. Is that messaging on‑brand? And do we have rights to the “patio11″ name? Maybe we should circle Legal in on this. Let’s get in a meeting.

Brennan:  But no, seriously. I’m extremely passionate about this because, for the first two and a half years, really three years, I charged really low. And the word “free” is in freelancing, and people become freelancers because they want some degree of freedom.

And unfortunately, when you’re trading in a 40‑hour‑a‑week job for a 40‑hour‑a‑week contract that makes you maybe a little bit more but not much compared to your prior life as a salaried employee, you’re not going to get any noticeable freedom. Sure, you can say you own your own company, but at the end of the day, you’re still working full‑time and making not much more than you used to make.

So that’s really what inspired me to really put the pen to paper and get this book out there.

Keith:  It’s a great book, Brennan. It was really good to read.

Brennan:  Thank you.

Patrick:  Awesome podcast as well, I think. Especially, even folks who have no interest in either the marketing of info products or the consumption of info products, go back to the sections on consultancy, as there are some really core stuff there for taking your business to the next level. So, Brennan, thanks so much for making the time and talking to us for almost two hours now. Yeah. So, let’s see. Next time, we will have a different special guest, hopefully, probably within about a month from now.

Keith:  Hopefully, yeah.

Patrick:  So thanks so much, everybody, for sticking with us with this podcast. Please drop Keith or I an email with what you liked, what you didn’t like, and how we can make this better for you.

Keith:  And everyone, honestly, go buy Brennan’s book. No‑brainer. The coupon code is patio11. Good for $39.

Brennan:  I don’t know how to set up coupon codes. I’ll do it before the podcast comes out.

Keith:  Yeah, the podcast will probably be a week or two before it gets up, knowing our schedule.

Patrick:  Well, all right. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

Keith:  All right. Take care, guys.

Brennan:  Bye.

Keith:  Bye.

[Patrick notes:

Easily clickable links:

DoubleYourFreelancingRate (use coupon code “patio11”)

Patrick’s course on Hacking Lifecycle Emails launched after this podcast was recorded but before it was released. A later post will cover the business aspects of that. If you run a B2B SaaS business, it is worth a look. (Some of it can be adapted to a consulting practice, as mentioned by Brennan during our discussion about drip email campaigns, but the ROI isn’t nearly as obvious as it is for those of you doing B2B SaaS.)

Want to get a weekly(ish) email for me about the business of software?  Sign up here.  You’ll also immediately get a 45 minute video on improving the onboarding experience of your software, which — let me use a favorite expression — prints money for many of my clients and confidants.]

NYT bestselling author Ramit Sethi and I continued our earlier discussion about getting your first consulting client by addressing a common pain point for freelancers/consultants, particularly those just starting out: how do you price your offering?

If you want me to tell you “You’re a Rails developer?  $100 an hour if in Iowa, $150 an hour if in SOMA, best of luck” you’re in the wrong place, because you should have learned in our previous installment that you need to present yourself as someone solving business problems rather than as a mere technologist.

Instead, we’re going to go beyond the tactics and talk about the psychology of customers (and consultants) that poison cheap relationships, why we typically underprice to begin with, how to walk up your rate in such a way that your customers continue to perceive outsized value from your services, and more.

When we recorded this, our agenda was to talk primarily about freelancing/consulting rates, but both Ramit and I have run product businesses for many years, so we couldn’t resist tossing in a bit about pricing for e.g. SaaS companies and info-products as well.

(Want to hear even more about this topic?  There’s a podcast coming up next week with Keith Perhac and Brennan Dunn, where we talk about how we transitioned our three very different freelancing/consulting businesses from where they were when we were young and stupid to three different models which work out fairly well for different reasons.  Subscribe to the podcast to hear it when the audio engineer gets done with the editing.)

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 download (~40 minutes, ~35 MB): Right click to save.

Podcast format: either subscribe to http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie On Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More

[Patrick notes: I have annotated the transcript heavily with my remarks, in this format.]

Patrick McKenzie:  Hey everybody, my name is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as patio11 on the Internets. I’m a small software entrepreneur who has run a series of software as a service businesses for the last six years. Concurrent with that, for the last couple of years, I’ve run a consulting business largely helping software companies make more money by delighting their users and increasing sales. I’m here today with my friend Ramit Sethi to talk about how you can price your freelance or consulting offering better.

Ramit Sethi:  Hey everybody, Ramit Sethi here. Patrick, thanks for having me. I am the creator of a site called iwillteachyoutoberich.com. I also have a New York Times bestselling book by the same name. My background is in psychology and persuasion. I teach people how to use behavioral change, principles to change their own behavior, and to influence other people. That may mean learning how to automate your money, how to earn more money through negotiation or freelancing, or even to find your dream job.

I give away about 98 percent of my material for free and then I offer information products, also known as online courses, and they tend to be premium prices and they tend to be for the right customer.

Today, I’m really excited to talk about pricing, qualifying your customer, and working with the right people. God knows I have contemplated suicide many, many times thanks to the freeloaders who run rampant and wild on the Internet. What do you say, Patrick?

How You’re Collecting Pathological Customers And How To Stop

Patrick:  Yeah, I have a word for them I’ve been calling for the last couple of years, “pathological customers.” The kind of customer that even if, technically speaking, they’re giving you money, they are giving you radically less money than other folks in the space. They feel a sense of entitlement towards you as a result of that.  The general thing that people find both in pricing products and in pricing services is that at the low end of the scale you deal with people who perceive less value from you, less value from your offering, and have more and more unreasonable demands. Like if you’re writing iPhone apps, you’ll receive reviews like “This 99 cent flashlight app didn’t do my taxes, one star!”

[laughter]

Patrick:  Or in a service business, if you make the terrible decision to sell your engineering services for $3,000 a month to a Japanese megacorp (like someone here might have) then you’re going to have people with expectations like, “Oh, you should totally be willing to come in at 3:00 AM in the morning for nothing.” Versus if you get to a better point where customers start perceiving more value out of your services, there will be no talk of 3:00 AM in the morning and also no talk of any number in the general vicinity of $3,000 for a month or anything else. That’s a little brag-y, oh well.

[Ramit laughs]

Patrick:  Yeah, we’re going to talk to you about not under‑pricing things. In particular, I love Ramit’s advice on this. It’s really informed my thinking on the subject.  Ramit’s advice has helped me 7X my consulting rates in the last two years.

Why Ramit Has Happier Customers at $12,000 Than He Had At $4.95

Ramit:  I like that. I like the sound of that. OK. Let me start off with a couple of thoughts on pricing. Some of these seem straightforward and some of them seem a bit controversial. I’ll say this, in terms of consulting rates, I have started my consulting career back when I was in college, I charged approximately $20 an hour. I now rarely do consulting. I turn down the vast majority of clients. When I do charge, I charge $3,000 an hour.

So I have gone up the gamut of consulting rates and I’d like to share some of the findings and insights I had along the way. In terms of products, my first information product was a terribly priced, terribly positioned eBook called Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass, that’s right, and it was $4.95.

[Patrick notes: Let me elaborate on reasons why Ramit and I probably agree that was a poor decision: the eBook is very underpriced, because at $5 it competes with lattes and Ramit’s advice is substantially more valuable than lattes, hurting uptake among people who stand to benefit from it.  Putting 2007 in the title of theBook destroyed any residual value he could hypothetically have gotten out of it in 2008 ~ 2012, whereas his other course offerings go into “evergreen” status after launching successfully and continue contributing meaningful amounts of money to the business every year.  I also feel, audience mostly unseen, that Ramit would attract a less mature audience who would be less likely to make meaningful progress as a result of the advice than if he had positioned it to someone just a little more advanced in their careers.  For example, note that when Ramit talks to young, competitively oriented men these days, he talks less about “kicking ass” (helping college sophomores manage beer money more effectively) and more about “top performers” (helping, let’s pick an example, 27 year old men in professional careers land $15,000 raises).  That’s a fairly small change in target audience and messaging but a huge change in customer perceived value.]

Ramit: I had been writing for free on my blog, no ads, no nothing. This was the first thing I ever released and predictably the comments went something like this, “Ramit, you jumped the shark. You’re just trying to make money off us now. I could find this kind of stuff for free online. You suck.”

OK, compare that to a recent course I launched which was $12,000 and compare it to another similar course, which was $2,000 or $3,000. That course called Find Your Dream Job, and over a million people heard about it. I can tell you exactly how many complaints I had about price, because I tracked them. The answer was five. Not five percent, five.

We learned how to change and radically become more sophisticated with our positioning. So today, I want to talk about how you can actually charge more, deliver more value, get better customers, and also choose who not to serve.

One thing I’ll mention is that I have policies that cost me over $1 million a year because I don’t want to serve certain parts of the market. I’m going to tell you about those and tell you about how you can use some of the same principles to choose who you want to work with, charge more, get better clients, help them more, and actually not want to kill yourself every morning when you wake up and look at the kind of emails you have in your inbox.

Patrick, have you got those kinds of clients?

Patrick:  I have had [pathological customers] in the past. I’m largely getting to a point in my business where I don’t have to deal with them anymore.

There are spectrums within spectrums here. My first software product was priced for $24.95, as a one-off purchase, and that’s something I will never, ever actually do again.

[Patrick notes: Don’t ever sell a product without a reoccurring revenue component.  Starting with $0 revenue every month and then having to fight your way back to last month’s numbers sucks.  Words cannot express how much easier it is to grow revenues at Appointment Reminder, which is SaaS on a monthly model, than it was at Bingo Card Creator – equivalent levels of savvy are rewarded vastly better over time with the recurring model, because a $29 account sold once contributes literally almost a thousand bucks in AR when a $29.95 account sold once for BCC contributes, well, $29.95.]

Patrick: Be that as it may, BCC debuted against perhaps six other similar products.  I think the very day I launched I was the second most expensive. [Patrick notes: There was one product sold directly to school districts for 10x the price, and I didn’t want to have to deal with purchase orders and whatnot to address that customer segment.  I was about double the pricing of the next software under me.]

I have a very manageable support load with that product, even though the users are very non‑technical and I occasionally get emails that make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon, like, “How do I download the Googles to my printer?”

Ramit:  What? That’s a reasonable ‑‑ [laughs] to your printer?

Patrick:  Yeah.

Ramit:  [laughs] You had me until you said printer. OK, that is ridiculous.

Patrick:  My users occupy a place of love in my heart. So I say this from a position of love, and not to make fun of anyone, but rather to tell you that real people really think like this: I’ve had to convince people that there are not two physically distinct Internets entitled “the blue Googles” and the “the green Googles.”  This means they can use their login on my website regardless of whether they’re on the blue Googles or the green Googles.  Believe it or not, any site that you can reach from the blue Googles is available on the green Googles as well.

(Wondering how someone would come to this misconception?  A particular customer used the Internet using IE opening to MSN at school and IE opening to Google at home.  They did not realize that Microsoft and Google were not the same company.  They interpreted this as “the blue Googles” and the “green Googles”, because the Googles is the Internet to them.  When they typed stuff into the two different boxes on the two different Googles, different results came out.  Their natural inclination for, “Why does this strange, devil box work in different ways?” was, “Oh, they must be two different devil boxes.”)

Yeah, I deal with fairly few people like that these days.

The next time I make a software business, it will intentionally not include that sort of client in the scope of it.

Ramit:  But I feel like there are certain types of people who have really dark senses of humor, and they tend to be people who work in the dark or deal with the general public at large. These people include radiologists. They include anyone who deals in video, and of course, engineers or in particular, system administrators. God bless you all for still existing on this earth, despite the kind of things you have to put up with every day.

Patrick:  Ah, well. I think, honestly, sometimes we could stand to learn a little bit more from the non‑technical customers, particularly about how we pitch them on the value of our services, because we always pitch them as tech services rather than as solving an actual problem they have in their lives.

Ramit:  OK. So let’s…

Patrick:  We talked about that plenty on the last video. Let’s talk about how we can work up our prices to get better customers who are happy to pay the amount of money that we’re actually worth.

Why We Fear Charging What We’re Worth

Ramit:  Yes. So, first of all, in general, we can just stipulate that the basic message of this call is if you charge more and deliver more value, you’re going to get better customers and have better outcomes. OK. That seems fairly obvious. So the question is why don’t we do it? Just like it seems obvious that we all know we need to work out more, we need to eat better, we need to manage our money, we need to call our mom more. All those are obvious. They’re axiomatic. So why don’t we do it?

Primarily, one of the biggest reasons is our own psychological barriers. When it comes to pricing, we are afraid of charging more for all the reasons that I myself went through. When I first charged, I was truly petrified. And you can actually see it. I’ll direct you to the page. Go search for “Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass.” You can actually see the fear in my copy. My copy was rudimentary. It was pedestrian. I even justified why I had to charge.

Do you know when I charge for a twelve or three or four or five or ten thousand dollar course ‑‑ I don’t justify that? I tell the people who I don’t want to leave. And I let the rest come and bubble up to the top.

So you have to understand that if you make an amazing product and you’ve tested it and you know it will help, it is your obligation to get it out to the market as aggressively as possible.

Now, if you have a shitty product ‑‑ you’re just trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes, or you haven’t tested it at all? Then, of course, it’s going to come across as fearful, because it should be. You don’t know if your product is good or not. If I know my product is good, if I have tested results, it’s my obligation to get it out to the market.

[Patrick notes: I think this is important enough to emphasize, twice. If you got into this business to make peoples’ lives better, and you have produced something which will succeed with that, and you are aware of truth about reality such as “better marketed products beat better engineered products every single bloody time”, then you have an obligation to get better at marketing yourself. To do otherwise is to compromise the value of your offering to the world based on selfish desires such as appeasing your own vanity (“Everyone should realize how great my work is without me needing to tell them”) or indulging your own unspoken fears (“If this were really good, it would sell itself, so if I try selling it, it must not be good.”)]

Ramit: Here are some of the fears I went through when I was first charging. I’m scared of finding out that people won’t pay for this product that I spent 12 months building. I’m scared of making them mad and them calling me a sellout. And my favorite one, which is exclusively the paradigm of engineers: is if I have customers who pay me, then I’m going to have to offer customer support. That is seriously the most crackpot crazy thing I’ve ever heard. If you have people paying you, money solves many problems.

[Patrick notes: Ramit is a very responsive guy, but also has had a team of people working for him for the last few years, answering customer support inquiries.  Can I mention that I also thought that CS would be a major timesuck prior to launching my products?  Turns out, nope, not so much.  I support hundreds of thousands of users, and thousands of customers, by myself.  No CS team or virtual assistants involved.  I even did it when I had a full-time job.  If this notion scares you, read Start Small, Stay Small – Rob Walling gives great ideas on how to systemize the process then ship it off to virtual assistants.]

Patrick:  Yes.

Charge More, Get Less (And Better) Customer Support Email

Ramit:  If you have money, you can hire a customer support rep to deal with your customers.  By the way, when you start charging, you’ll find that paying customers ask for support much less often than free customers do. What do you think, Patrick?

Patrick:  That is absolutely the truth. This is very relevant to people here who run products. You can actually draw a graph versus whether someone is a free user or a paid user of the product, and see the support request decline. I have four tiers for one product of mine. The level of support requests per account per month (lower numbers are, generally, better)  in the various tiers goes something like:

• The cheapest tier ($9 a month) has 7X
• The Professional tier ($29) tier has 4X
• The Small Business tier ($79) has 3X
• The Office tier ($199) has X

Patrick: Customers who pay more also tend to be more sophisticated in the use of the software. They have more internal resources that they can ask questions to, rather than emailing me “How do I reset my password?” or “The Internet’s aren’t working. Can you get me back the Internet?”

Instead, users on higher tiers tend to ask questions like: “We’re using this to create value for our business. We have this scenario that we don’t know how to work with in your tool. Can you explain to us how we can do that to get the next big win for our business?”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  I’d much rather answer that email than “I forgot my password. Can you reset it again? The find account box didn’t work for me.”  Particularly because the problem was likely “I didn’t type my email address correctly.”

Pricing Your Consulting Services Cheaply Does Your Customer No Favors

Patrick:  You talked about mispricing your first product at $4.95 and how it was partially out of a fear of charging people money for value. The first time I ever consciously started working on consulting was I went to visit a business friend of mine in Chicago over Christmas one year. The only thing on the agenda was we were getting coffee. A couple of minutes into the coffee date, he locked me in a conference room with him and one of the cofounders of the company and said, “We just want ask you some questions about the stuff that you do, in terms of search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, that sort of thing.”

I love talking about this stuff. We talked straight,for the next three hours. Then he said something to me, literally life‑changing words, at the end of that. He said, “I just want you to know that if today had not been a coffee date, you could have charged for this conversation and I would be pulling out my checkbook right now and write you a check for it.” I was a young engineer. I had this mental model that a young engineer’s time is worth a hundred dollars an hour and that is an iron law of nature.

I said, “Well, I’d expect that would be about $300, and $300 doesn’t feel worth worrying about right before Christmas. I don’t even know if I would have been comfortable doing that.”  I was inventing excuses – in real time! – as to why I couldn’t have possibly delivered the value he already reported having gotten from the conversation we just had.

He said, “No, I think I’ve got $15,000 worth of value out of this. I would write you a check for $15,000 right now.”

He asked his cofounder, “Do you think $15,000 is about right?” His cofounder said, “Well, I don’t know about $15,000.” I’m like, “Oh, thank God. Sanity.” His cofounder said, “For $15,000, I would need to see a printed report about it too. But $5,000, yeah. We could pay that out of the petty cash. It blew my mind.”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  If you are genuinely creating value for businesses, you are no longer in the “trade defined small units of time for defined small units of money” business model.  This is what most employees do.  This is how you have spent most of your life working.  You have left that life behind.

You’re suddenly judged against the price of other strategic initiatives. Amounts of money that are mind blowing to an individual human’s personal experience are nothing next to what a business pays for even the most trivial of things.

Ramit, you run a pretty motivationally sized business yourself. You have probably spent more on, I don’t know, website hosting in the last year than my Hacker News buddies could countenance spending for the next century.

Would You Rather Work With Successful Businesses Or Bottom Feeders?

Ramit:  [laughs] For me, it’s very simple. It’s not about cost. It’s about value. Let me just tell you all the things I don’t want to do, as a non‑technical guy. I don’t want understand how web hosting works. I don’t care. Just make it work. I don’t want to understand how security works and I certainly don’t want to read textbooks about it. I don’t want to get paged when I’m out to the bar on a Friday night. I don’t want to do all these things. I only want to do a few things.

Let me pay for the rest. Listen, you can find clients who are willing to pay. They are the ones whose businesses are already doing relatively well and they want to do better. Or you can go after bottom feeders, who are going to try to negotiate you at every single turn. They will question the value of what you’re doing. They’ll say, “Can’t I get it cheaper? Can’t you do this? Can’t you do that?” Those are not the clients you want.

We have talked about how to find those. We’ll talk about those on a future call as well. When it comes to pricing, again, we have talked about the main axiom we are covering today, which is deliver a better product, charge more, find the right customers and everybody wins. That’s how you can go from thinking, “Oh, I’m only a hundred dollar an hour engineer,” to actually charging gargantuan amounts, but, more importantly, delivering gargantuan value.

There are a couple of people who have influenced me. I’ll share one. One is Jay Abraham. He is a very, very famous marketing consultant, particularly from the ’80s. He is one of my mentors. He has talked about putting the client at the center of everything you do. One of his books, called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, made me six figures in one month. Then I got on his email list, after buying his $10 book and making six figures a month.

Let me just tell you how I paid Jay a lot of money. I got on his email list. He announced that he was having a course, where you would have to fly out to LA once a month for 15 months. I live in New York. You would have to apply. You would have to get your references checked. By the way, if you doubled your revenue during that time period, you would have to write him a big fat check. Do you know what I said? I said, “I’ll do anything to be in this course.”

I applied. I haven’t written an application like that since college. I had him call my references. I met him. Here’s what I paid for it. I paid thousands a month to fly to LA on my own dime, sit in a chair next to him and asking questions for 45 minutes ‑‑ 45 minutes a month. I paid him thousands. That investment alone, and notice I called it an investment, not a cost, has already paid off in multiples of what I paid.

These are the customers. You want to find the customers, who look at the thing you are charging for, the service or product you are delivering, as an investment. It doesn’t just have to be ROI financially, although that’s the easiest to justify. It could be, “Look, I’m sick and tired of having to wake up in the morning and do all these tasks. I want an assistant.” That’s ROI for me. It could be to take away fear. I fear that my data is going to be lost. Therefore, you have solved my problem by giving me arrayed storage or cloud storage or whatever it is you want to do.

Understanding what it is and who your customer is, which would have covered before and will cover again, can help you determine your price. Just in general, then you want to look at the band of pricing that you have available to you. You want to think, “Am I in that band? Can I be higher than that band? What do I want to format my pricing at? Do I want to charge hourly, weekly, et cetera?”

Working For Free (Don’t!)

Ramit: Patrick, why don’t we talk about working for free? Also, you and I somewhat disagree on how to quote our rates. Let’s talk about that as well. What do you think about free work?

Patrick:  This is largely from the perspective that we are talking about technologists here. If you aren’t aware of it already, the market for people across most of the United States and increasingly other parts of the world too, who can successfully execute technology projects is just absolutely on fire right now. If you have heard the whole “software is eating the world” thesis, it means that the people on the top of the food chain right now are the people who can get software to do what they want.  This is particularly true if you can solve business problems using software. If that is you, the world is your oyster. There is no reason you have to give away the pearls for free.

I understand that there are other people in the world, who might just be getting started or not become comfortable with that, who might actually benefit from building a portfolio of a project or two delivered for free. If you put a gun to my head and said, “You are doing a project for free. Get value out of it,” I might think of telling the client, “OK. Look. As a prerequisite of doing this project for free, I would like the ability to turn it into a case study that I can put on my blog, put in my portfolio, and shop around to other clients as social proof.”

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  “You, this company that people have respect for, entrusted this part of your business to me. Therefore, they should also feel that it’s less risky for them to entrust a part of the business to me.”

Ramit:  I love that.

[Patrick notes: Let me pull back the curtain on why I use words like “entrusted” and “ownership” when talking to clients. Peons do “work”, where tasks are created by other people, carried out by the peon, and then judged by other people. I have never desired to be a peon, so I have always made a point of not talking like a peon.

Can I tell you a little anecdote?  I was once a $10 an hour CSR for an office supply company (had to pay for college) and was, in actual fact, a peon.  When I applied, I a) very much wanted to get the job and b) wanted to never work as a CSR again.   When I went into that job interview, they walked me to the telephone bank and started going through a sample call, then the CSR started explaining some minor trivia about how to arrange a dropshipped order in their systems.

She started to explain: “A dropshipped order is…”

And I finished “A dropshipped order is when, rather than shipping from your warehouses, you take the order from the customer and transmit it directly to the manufacturer of the product, who ships it to the customer directly.  Most relevantly for our purposes, this means that dropshipped orders don’t use the standard shipping service, and as a result aren’t quite as flexible with regards to delivery options as we generally are.  They can only get delivered to the front door if there is no elevator or, if there is an elevator, to the floor which the customer physically resides on.  For $45 we can instruct the dropshipper’s shipping company to use a dolly and take the order to the customer’s actual location at the site.”

This rather surprised the people who were interviewing a 17 year old for a near-minimum-wage job, so I said “Umm, page 78 of the catalog.  I called up and asked for one last week.  I made it my business to learn your business.”  (I knew, as soon as I said that, that I was a mortal lock for that job.)

They offered to make me head of that department the next year, but I didn’t really want to manage CSRs doing paper sales for the rest of my career, so I passed.]

Things Clients Value More Than Money

Patrick:  That’s a big thing, by the way. Clients pay for two things in the main, either increasing revenue or reducing costs. But they will also pay, in a very direct way, for trust and for the perception of reduced risk. One of the things that allows you to increase your rates over time is think of it that there is a tremendous fear in every client’s mind, when they get into a new technology project (or any kind of project really), that the project is just going to totally blow up and they will get no value out of it. So they discount the rate that they are paying to you, the maximum rate they think they can afford to pay you, by the chance of the project totally blowing up. If a client thinks that, “OK. The last five times I hired a tech guy, I only got one project which created business value,” he is probably going to discount the rate that he could pay you by about 80 percent.

But, if his perception is that you are not a 20 percent chance of success guy, you are a 95 percent chance of success guy, then it’s worth paying you much, much more that he would pay the 20 percent chance of success guy, just for that feeling that you are more likely to actually deliver on this product.  This is true even if the business value you are claiming is the same as the other guy.  It is true even if maybe the other guy is technically superior to you.

There are ways that you can influence that perception of likely success. One is by being able to actually communicate what you are doing, better than the typical engineer can. If you are talking about RAID arrays, performance optimization, HTTP headers, and all the other stuff that engineers love so much, we run the risk of losing business folks.  Instead, we should say things that they understand and will perceive value from, like: “Here are other people in the industry that I have worked with. Here are their problems. Here are the problems that I surmise you have, because you are in this industry. Am I right?  Awesome. Here’s how we can align our work together such that it influences these core things that you care about in your business.”

He is thinking, “He gets it. He can talk with me. When I have a problem, I can talk to him and get it fixed, rather than that other guy I worked with, where I sent off an email and didn’t get a response for two weeks and then it was two lines, “OK. I rebooted the server.”

The Unreasonable Difficulty of Shopping In A World Of Infinite Choices

Ramit:  [laughs] What you are talking about, I love it. It’s really understanding the client’s hopes, fears and dreams, in many ways better than they understand it themselves. With my students, I want to be like the wife, who knows her husband better than he knows himself. She can predict what he’s going to say. We know this from research. People will be reading my sales page and they are about to have an objection. They will say, “Does that work, because I live in a different country?” Right as they are about to consciously think that, they are scrolling down the page and they see, “Yes. This works for international students. In fact, here are 10 from the UK, Spain, everywhere.” What do they think, after that happens two or three times? They think, “This guy understands me. He gets me.”

It is so rare in today’s day and age that someone understands you that you will pay almost anything. I’ll give you an example. Put yourself in the mind of, let’s say, a 30‑year‑old young woman, living in Manhattan. She is shopping at Nordstrom.com. She sees this shirt and it looks incredible. She says, “Oh.” She clicks it to enlarge it. She sees a model wearing it, who is 27 or 28 and looks just like her, walking down the street with her purse. She says, “Yeah.”

Then she clicks the next button. She sees another photo, but this time it’s some 16‑year‑old girl, who has got a punk look to her, wearing the same shirt. Then she clicks the next button and she sees a 78‑year‑old grandmother wearing the same shirt. What’s the first thing she does? She closes the window, because, in a world where something isn’t made exactly for you, in a world of infinite options, if it’s not made for us, if it doesn’t speak our language, if it doesn’t speak to my hopes, fears and dreams, I’m gone.

When you can actually do that, when you can deliver that, pricing really becomes a mere triviality. My competitors will often charge $49 for an e‑book. I’ll charge $3,000. Is my course better? Yes. Not only does it have more in it, it is tested with thousands and thousands of people. But selling a $3,000 information product is difficult no matter what, no matter if you have 80 TB of video. It’s about understanding the customer and client better than they understand themselves.

Why I Go Out Of My Way To Say “This Product Is Not Right For You”

Patrick:  Let’s circle back to a point you just made. The notion that a particular product is not right for other people is a very powerful one in sales. When you are doing client qualification, about which we will be talking in the next talk, you are explicitly telling people that, “I only work with people who stand to get a lot of value out of doing business with me and I stand to get value out of doing business with them. It is entirely possible that we might not be the best fit for each other. So, for example, if X, Y or Z is true, maybe we just shouldn’t do this and I can recommend someone who is better suited to your needs.” When you say something like that, when you tell people that you are upright and ethical and would rather turn down perhaps a motivational amount of money right now, just because it won’t be the best thing for them, if they hear that, “OK. I wouldn’t work with people, whose situation was X or Y or Z. But, when I am listening to your needs, you seem to be totally in the sweet zone. We should do this,” they will think “Hell, yes.”

Ramit:  Yes.

Patrick:  Let me give an example of that. These days, when I’m talking to a new company, basically, if they are not a software company, I’m not interested.

There’s no one thing that I do in my consulting practice. I guess I could call it, “Rent my brain and I make you money.”

[Patrick notes: The CEO at a prospect recently recommended me to someone internally and introduced me as “the [UX design] consultant I was telling you about earlier.”  (It wasn’t actually UX design – think “something that a software company would reasonably want which I have done before, successfully, but I wouldn’t actively seek out engagements for.”)  Pro-tip: “I don’t know if I would call myself a [UX design] consultant, per-se” would not have been good client relations.  Clearly, if the presentation I did for the CEO was impressive enough such that he is recommending me to their UX design team later, they stand to get some value out of working with me, and one should not dissuade happy clients from paying you money for advice which is in their best interests.]

Patrick:

I have previously worked with clients that I didn’t understand as well as the software industry. I couldn’t have that feeling of customer connectedness, when I was talking about them.  For example, I once worked with a company that sells something similar to… high‑end men’s shirts. I don’t really understand the market for high‑end men’s shirts. People in that market don’t tend to think the way I do.

People who have made high‑end men’s shirts their life’s work don’t naturally feel simpatico with me when we sit down at the table and start talking about things. Whereas, software? Man, I love software. I can get everybody at a software company, whether they are the marketer or the CEO or the head of engineering, to like me and feel like working with me will be valuable. When we talk, they’ll enjoy the experience and think that I’m someone they want in the foxhole with them on the next project.

When we are starting the Getting To Know You dance with the client, I just say, “Look, I’ve had client relationships in the past that have been very successful, generally when I’m selling a software product and specifically generally when that software product is sold to businesses. If your company is primarily interested in increasing their B2C sales, that probably isn’t the best fit for us. I have some ideas on how you could take that forward.

“But really, if we’re looking for a big win, the last times I got a 20 to 100% increase in revenue was with a client with parameters X, Y and Z. Does that sound like where you are and the expectations you have with regard to an engagement?”

I’m reasonably competent at using both the green Googles and the blue Googles, so I’ve presumably learned by now what their core product offering is, at this point, they’re like, “Uh huh. uh huh, uh huh. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, 20 to 100 percent. That sounds pretty good.”

Ramit:  One of the key takeaways that I am hearing here and that I want to highlight for everyone is study people who have mastered pricing. It’s remarkable to me how many start up websites you go to and it says, “Plans and Pricing.”

[Patrick notes: Copywriting microtip: this is the suckiest possible headline for your Plans and Pricing page.  I know you did that because WordPress put it in my default.  Is WordPress going to go home hungry if you don’t sell anything?  You are.  Get ye to CopyHackers and rephrase with something that your customers actually care about in the headline, like “Start [Core Value Proposition] In 30 Seconds.”]

Ramit: You click on it and it says, “$9 a month for $WHATEVER.” This kills the little Patrick and I have left in our souls, leaving us a vacuous void of what used to be human beings. It’s actually sad, because, first of all, just mathematically, it’s almost impossible to create a serious business on nine dollars a month. Those companies never actually run the models. They never actually say, “Hey, wait a minute. With customer churn and LTV and all these things, how can I ever justify nine dollars a month?” You can’t. It’s very difficult.

By the way, we all know the first dollar problem. Getting people to spend one dollar is the problem.

If you can get them to spend one and you have a very, very good product, you can get them to spend ten. You can get them to spend 100. Now, there are different gradations. For me, there is a taxonomy in my market of information products.

• eBooks: you can charge roughly $27 to $47
• eBooks plus video: $47 to $97
• Video courses: $497 to $997

There is this taxonomy that exists. It exists and it’s real. But it is also malleable. You can move things around. You can know that, to justify $1,000 for a product, there’s certain things that you’re going to have to do.

Patrick:  I love that point about the taxonomy of value. We were talking earlier about having different billing increments for consulting services. I often try to put things as weekly rates, which are roughly aligned to business goals. In a particular week, we will be able to get X, Y and Z accomplished, which accomplishes a meaningful result for the business. The reason I quote weekly rates is that I feel that people have a taxonomy of value for labor, based on how that labor is packaged.

If you quote hourly rates, engineers figure, “OK. A week is 40 hours. This means a weekly rate is mathematically comparable to an hourly rate, trivially. Why make this meaningless semantic distinction, foolish math-averse marketer guy?”

Why?  Because of the taxonomy for labor. People have a preconceived notion of the proper cost of one hour of time. An hour is worth, “Well, OK. Two figures, maybe low three figures at the high‑end,” where the equivalent amount of hours, balled up into a project aimed at accomplishing a business goal, occupies a different level of the taxonomy.

If you are in the taxonomy of strategic initiatives that can increase my business’s sales the next year from 20 to 100 percent, that is not priced against the, “high two figure, low three figure rate” for our wages.

Ramit:  Right. What we know what marketing is, for example, there is a reason why the maximum you can get for an eBook is roughly $97. Because of the race to the bottom in Amazon pricing, people often say, “An eBook? That should just be $13. Why should you charge more?” That is why marketers add video to the equation. It’s difficult to compare an eBook plus video.

However, don’t let this immediately make you think that this is a scam. It’s not like these marketers are just trying to get one over on you. Virtually every information product out there has a money back guarantee. For me, you can take my entire course, which costs thousands of dollars, depending on what course you join and if you don’t like it, just ask for a refund and I give you all your money back, even the credit card processing fees. Why? Because I have to prove myself and so do most of us.

With engineers it works a little differently. You prove yourself up front. Then you probably have milestones. There is rarely a money back guarantee, although that something you could experiment with as well.

[Patrick notes: Customers who ask for a money-back guarantee for consulting services are typically signaling a poor match between you and them, because they have high uncertainty that you will be able to deliver what you claim you can deliver.  In general, I would be hesitant to work for someone who believed this, because even if I successfully execute everything I set out to execute, it is highly likely that a client who is not trusting of me will not perceive that as a win.

Here’s an actual line I use on the few occasions where this comes up in prospecting: “We live in an uncertain world. I’ll be totally honest with you: not every engagement I’ve ever had has been an epic win. You’re a businessman – you know better than anybody that e.g. software development is risky, and sometimes you spend 6 man-months on something and end up with nothing to show for it.  That’s why, when things work out, the business profits way the heck more than what the fully-loaded cost for 6 man-months of engineering time is.  My clients often benefit substantially from the upside to our engagements.  If you need a guarantee from me for results, you’re asking me to shoulder the downside risk for this engagement.  I don’t typically do that, and here’s why: if I shoulder the downside exposure, I should likewise partake of the upside exposure, and my pricing for that upside exposure would sound like ‘Well, if I double your sales, to a first approximation I should end up owning half of the business.’”

This is not an offer presented for negotiation.  No successful software business will countenance giving 50% equity to an outside consultant, ever.  It will never happen.  Even an early stage startup, which I virtually never work with, would have a hard time getting sign-off for more than like a 1/4^th of 1% equity grant. (Worth mentioning: For a variety of reasons, I would almost certainly not work for that.)

This is a way to frame a discussion. I am just trying to reframe the discussion away from “Risk of a negative outcome” to the (true fact) that I have, in the past, delivered huge wins for my clients, and that next to the enterprise value of a huge win, my consulting paycheck is a tiny, piddling number. The only way that math works out in a mutually satisfactory manner is if the client pays the sticker price. Many do.

For folks who aren’t willing to, oh well.  Things cost what a buyer and a seller mutually agree on: if the buyer can’t make the seller a mutually satisfactory offer, no sale takes place.  I enjoyed the conversation and would be happy to introduce you to someone else if I know anyone.  As a consultant, you should be thrilled to let prospects go if they signal that they would not benefit from working with you, such as by not agreeing to your rates.  As the monopoly supplier of your time, you get to be choosy.  (P.S. This directly implies that if you have a more solid situation, via a filled pipeline or external financial resources or what have you, you can get away with charging more.  That’s Microecon 101 but people don’t seem to apply it, so let me say this for emphasis: If you’re scheduled at or near capacity, charge more.  If losing a client would not meaningfully impact your standard of living, charge more.  If you have a product business partially subsidizing consulting, charge more.

]

Ramit: But the point is, when you are pricing your service or product, make it congruent with the market.

Patrick, you know that your customers, on a weekly basis, care about their goals, how much they are allocating and stuff like that. You have properly priced it, as a result, like that.

For my students [of Earn1k, a course where Ramit teaches people to freelance without necessarily quitting the day job], hourly charging is a good way to get their feet wet. [Patrick notes: That’s an important point. I turned down all consulting offers prior to quitting my day job, and literally have never thought of balancing the two at once.]

Ramit: But my most sophisticated people then use other strategies, like retainer models, and packages and things like that. That’s how you can really get really rapid growth in terms of revenue and pricing.

[Patrick notes: That’s really good advice, if you and your clients are mutually amenable to that.  I have a baseline of recurring revenue, and an infinite sink for future hours, as a result of running product businesses.  Retainer models, which might commit me to future work with a particular client, don’t uniquely offer anything to me, and they also might commit me to working with a client while my businesses would really like the first crack at my attention.

But if selling your time is your main source of revenue, retainers are a great thing for you.

How might that work?  Well, let me spitball some numbers.  Say you charge $100 an hour for Rails programming.  You have delivered a project for a client.  You might write them a monthly retainer contract for up to 20 hours of maintenance work.  Crucially, you get paid $1,500 regardless of whether you do any maintenance work at all.  You tell the client that any time above the retainer is available on a new contract at your then-prevailing rate, subject to availability.  The client pays for the certainty that you will be available if they need you, not primarily for actually getting you to code patches.]

Ramit: The main things for everyone here to listen to are that you have to deliver a better product or result than anyone else. Without that, you can’t put lipstick on a pig.

[Patrick notes: Weak disagreement here – I think Ramit is overcorrecting to avoid a common criticism.  You don’t have to be better than everyone else.  Every doctor in America, save one, is not the best doctor.  Every lawyer, save one, is not the best lawyer.  Every Rails programmer, save one, is not the best Rails programmer.  Being the best isn’t a prerequisite to running a successful business.  You need to be capable, and to deliver fantastic value to your customers.  That does not require being a ninjedi gurumensch.  A lot of fantastic value can be delivered with capable, workmanlike coding. Enterprise Java, not exactly a well-known spot to find ninjedi gurumenschen, makes the world go round – planes don’t fall from the sky, cities don’t descend into bedlam, stores don’t run out of food, banks don’t suddenly discover they’re insolvent.  Well, most of the time, and that isn’t really a Java problem so it isn’t here nor there.]

Ramit: Two, make sure that you are charging as high as you can to find the right customers. If I were Target, I wouldn’t charge $500 for a scarf, because no one would pay it. However, if I am Barney’s, you had better believe I’m charging $500. It is strategic. The type of people that walk into a Barney’s are very different than the people that walk into a Target.

Finally, run some goddamn numbers. If you are charging eight dollars a month for your product and you think that’s going to make you a very healthy lifestyle, just run the numbers. Factor in churn. Factor in cancellations. Factor in support costs and realize that that’s a very difficult way. If you can charge eight, maybe you can make a better product and charge $57 or $97.

[Patrick notes: Or re-target the same product at people who will perceive more value from it.  Bitwise identical codebases support 10x to 100x ranges in pricing all the time.]

Patrick:  Yeah. Here’s an admission against interest, given that I actually help companies decide pricing strategies and therefore should be competent about it:

Even knowing that charging nine dollars is a stupid amount for business, I succumbed to my engineer weakness last time I launched a SaaS company and had a nine dollar personal plan at the bottom. I’ll tell you exactly what my self‑serving justification was for putting that nine dollar a month plan there. I thought that I would get blog articles out of productivity bloggers, if I had something that would appeal to their needs.

A) It was a total failure. I never got one single blog article out of a productivity blogger about it.

B) I refused to admit that I was a failure and kept that plan up there for a year. I had ungodly support headaches. That entire pricing tier made less money than individual other clients on the higher tiers.

Ramit:  [laughs]

Patrick:  You don’t even want to hear about the, “I got called at three AM in the morning Japan time, because the text on the website is gray. I think it would look better black. I emailed you about that 20 minutes ago, but you didn’t respond. So I figured I would call you in Japan at three AM in the morning with customer support issues.”

Yeah, don’t underprice your stuff.

Ramit:  Yeah.

Patrick:  It’s the same with services. You will get the most demanding clients, when you’re under‑pricing or when, God forbid, you are trying to compete with people on Elance or the other freelancer sites. Someone asked me why I’m not on Elance.

“Well, I don’t want to compete with people on Elance and the customers that are really in my wheelhouse and get a lot of value out of working with me would run screaming if they saw me on Elance.”

For the same reason that, sorry, what was that high‑fashion place that is not Target that I’ve never heard about?

Ramit:  Barneys?

Patrick:  Barneys. Barneys, if you were some sort of fashion house that’s trying to make a name for yourself and you go to Barneys and you say, “Look, we can get our scarves made in China, so we can afford to sell them to you for $5 and you can put them on your tables for $10, the buyer for Barneys is going to say, “Oh hell no. We’re not interested in that at all. We don’t care if it’s the reincarnation of some famous designer and some other famous designer who had a love child, someone who understands fashion. Please put in names for me here.” But it just would do so much damage to their brand and to their perceived positioning in the market being available for $10 that it is not even worth picking up that revenue for them.

Price For Dear Or Price For Free But Never Price For Cheap

Patrick: Similarly, you can price it for free or you can price it for dear, but never price it for cheap. You will just have lots of headaches and it makes life difficult both with that customer and with any other customer who will ever discover that relationship.

Ramit:  Wow. OK, so Patrick, you just said something that everybody needs to hear again. This was taught to me by my mentor, Jay Abraham as well. My students were clammering for a low price product. I’ll cover this in the qualification talk, but I don’t allow people with credit card debt to join my flagship or very expensive courses. That decision alone cost me over $1 million a year, but it’s the right thing to do.

So people were saying, “Hey, can you give me something low priced? How about something around $9 or maybe $20?” I asked Jay, “What would you do? The market is begging for this.” He said, “You know what? If I were you, I would actually just create something incredible and I would give it away for free. I would make sure that I tell them why.”

I did something very similar, I actually interviewed another one of my mentors, BJ Fogg. I spend 16 hours preparing for that call. I read my old textbooks and I pulled up my notes and we had a great call about behavior change.

Then I wrote an email to my list and I said, “Guys, this interview is incredible and I’m giving it to you for free. But I want to tell you something. I could charge $1,000 for this interview. I would easily sell it. But instead, I’m investing in you. I want you to take it seriously, treat it like a thousand dollar product. Close your computer. Turn off all your other stuff and really treat it with respect. Treat it like a $1,000 purchase because that’s what it is.” The response was incredible.

The point here is do not try to serve everybody and also decide what market you want to play in. You want to play in the high‑end market? Then just give away your stuff for free at the low end and make sure people know why you’re doing that.

Overall, as Patrick said, your pricing is strategic, your pricing will communicate to the market what type of clients and customers you’re willing to put up with and what kind you want.

Patrick:  Right. I turned down potential client work all the time. My minimum engagement is a week, and I’ve only deviated from that once or twice, this time for good strategic reasons. I just don’t want to deal with the overhead of selling a one‑hour, two‑hour engagement. That immediately prices me out of affordability for many, many people… who would largely not be good fits for getting excellent value from working with me.

I’ll often get emails inquiring around my hourly rates and what it would cost to get me on a phone call for an hour or two. I say, “Look, I’m not available for formal consulting for an hour or two. Because I love the space and because I like helping out bootstrapped entrepreneurs, if there is time available in the schedule, I will be happy to get a Skype chat with you or whatever. We’ll talk. I’ll give you some ideas. Then I’ll point you to the right blog post and then you can go execute on those. But I am not going to be the one in charge of your marketing for what you think an hour would be worth.”

If I quoted them a rate for an hour (by taking my weekly rate and dividing by forty), they’d probably think, “Oh God, that’s an insane amount of money.”

Ramit:  Right.

Patrick:  In addition to there being a karmic benefit here [Patrick notes: I’m using karma here in the loosely metaphorical sense to mean “one should act in the service of others; this will be rewarded / this is its own reward”], there are occasionally knock-on effects for the business.  For example, somebody told that in one context will occasionally mention that they got really, really good results to someone who does have the resources to pay for a week of my time.

I can’t tell you what clients that’s gotten me in the door with, but you know their names.

Ramit:  Love it. So Patrick, Let’s wrap here. Where can people find you? What’s your URL and what will they find there?

Patrick:  I’m at www.kalzumeus.com/blog for my blog [Patrick notes: you’re here!]. It’s mostly about topics of making and selling software. Generally what I’m talking about in any given blog post is whatever I’ve been working on recently. If you want a more structured, deep dive into things, go to training.kalzumeus.com and there will be a video on improving the user experience in the first run of your software.

Ramit:  So anyone who makes software or serves clients or customers would be really well served to check out Patrick’s stuff. It’s very much similar to I Will Teach in a sense that I Will Teach seems like it’s a money blog, but it actually has very little to do with money. It’s about psychology. It’s about understanding people. It’s about improving your communication. So I love reading it. I don’t build software. I build information products, but I love reading your stuff, Patrick, because you really dig into test results, data, and my most favorite of all is you dig into why people behave the way they do. Why do they chronically undercharge even thought they quote “know” that they should charge more? Why do they think that technical skills matter most when in business that’s questionably true? And why do they not trust things that have worked in other industries like marketing for years and years?

So I love the way that you show your own test data, you communicate it beautifully to engineers and it happens to communicate beautifully to me as well. So thanks for putting up your site.

I’ll share my site as well. I put up a special giveaway for people listening here. It’s iwillteachyoutoberich.com/kalzumeus-pricing.  That’s a free mini course on pricing that should help you really change the way you think about pricing and again, how I went from charging $4.95 for one product to $12,000 for a recent product with a dramatic fall in complaints and whiny freeloaders. Hopefully that helps you guys.

Patrick:  Let me give a quick little mini testimonial for Ramit here. We had dinner a couple of years ago. He gave me some advice on pricing my consulting services. For a variety of reasons I never quote my rate publicly, largely because it goes up all the time and I never want to have my own rate quoted against me as evidence that I should cede ground in future negotiations.

That said, it went up hugely as a result of some of the advice he gave, particularly regarding how you position the rates in the context of your discussion with the client. You cannot possibly waste your time listening to him on that subject.

Ramit:  I appreciate it Patrick. All right, we’ll talk soon. Thanks.

Patrick:  All right. Talk to you later, bye bye.

Patrick notes: Hiya long-time blog readers.  Last year I wrote two articles on career advice for young engineers, largely informed by conversations with a buddy of mine, Ramit Sethi.

Over the last twelve months, I have tagged every message in Gmail I’ve gotten from someone who applied the advice in those articles to effect in their careers.  Sample comments: “Your advice made me $20,000 in two minutes.”, “Your advice made me $35k”, etc etc.  The running total is at about $280,000 (a year!), which makes those two articles probably my highest ROI ever from just writing blog posts.  (n.b. If this were the whole of my business I’d need to have a quick heart-to-heart with myself about obvious inefficiencies in that monetization model but, luckily, the business does well enough to cross-subsidize the blog.)

Ramit offered to do a series of interviews about freelancing/consulting, which I know is of interest to many of you, so I naturally took him up on the offer.  (Though I think much of what we talked about applies just as well to the software business, to be honest.)

If you weren’t already aware: I don’t talk about it on my blog that often, but I do high-end consulting,  typically for improving the engineered marketing of software companies.  Ramit is a NYT best-selling author who makes a living teaching people how to do this sort of thing better.  Ramit is extraordinarily credible on this topic — in addition to his take on most things jiving with mine, I have word-for-word stolen some suggestions from him for e.g. client proposals, to the mutual benefit of my clients (they took the engagement) and myself (they paid $$$ for the engagement).

This is the first in a series of three interviews — the other two will be out later.  Want to make sure you don’t miss them?  Either subscribe to the podcast (details below) or to my email list.

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 download (~50 minutes, ~120 MB): Right click to save.

Podcast format: either subscribe to http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Ramit and Patrick on Acquiring Your First Customer

[Patrick notes: Shoutout to CastingWords for this transcription, which I paid $75 for.   I always use them for transcription and then make a hand-pass to make things flow a bit better and format for the Internet.

Can I mention they have an interesting pricing strategy, since it is relevant to y’all?  They price per-minute, but there are three levels based on how rapid you want the estimated turn-around to be.  I picked $1.50 a minute for the 6-day turnaround.  You can also buy 1-day turnaround for $2.50 a minute.  The same exact service, sold for a 67% premium based on expressed customer urgency.  I sometimes even get 1-day delivery when I paid for the 6-day delivery, but you understand I’m not paying for outcomes, I’m paying for predictability of outcomes, right?  If I need a video transcripted for a paying client with delivery scheduled for two days from now, I pay for the express service.  If, on the other hand, I have flexibility as to when I publish a podcast, then I can pay for the standard service.  That’s beautiful market segmentation.  You can do very similar things for your software applications (and, yes, consulting gigs) and your clients will thank you for the opportunity to pay more to get guarantees of things which are valuable for them.  In addition to delivery timeframes SLAs are often useful pricing levers in that way — including SLAs which just formalize a guarantee of something which is, in fact, available on a best-effort basis to people without the SLA, too.]

[Patrick notes: I’ve included somewhat extensive commentary in-line with the transcript.  It is all called out like this.]

Patrick McKenzie:  Hideho everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, and I might be better known as patio11 on the Internet. I’m a small software entrepreneur who, over the last couple of years, has run a consulting business largely focused on making software companies more money by delighting their users. I’ve invited my friend, Ramit Sethi, here today to talk to us a little bit about how you might be able to supercharge your freelancing and or consulting business. Ramit’s going to do a bit of a self intro now.

Ramit Sethi:  Thanks for having me, Patrick. My name is Ramit Sethi. I run a site called iwillteachyoutoberich.com. It’s a very modestly titled site, and I have a New York Times bestseller by the same name. My background is in psychology and persuasion. I help people use psychology to change their behavior and change other peoples’ behavior, whether it’s with money or with their careers or learning how to negotiate.

The way that I run my business is actually through information products. About 98 percent of my stuff is free, and then, occasionally, I will release a course. Usually, these courses take me a couple of years to develop, and then they tend to be pretty premium prices. If people join them, great. They might use them to earn more money or find a new job or find their first profitable idea.

And so, Patrick and I became friends, especially talking about marketing and pricing and just shaking our heads at some of the stuff we see on the Internet. Hopefully, we can share some of our stories from behind the scenes that we haven’t revealed before, which might help you raise your rates, get more business, and get better clients.

Patrick:  Yeah, and all this sounds very good. I think some people might feel a bit of disconnect in getting advice from us because for some reason, and this surprises me more than anybody. I seem to have fallen into that “Internet famous” thing, where people think that I’m some untouchable celebrity, which is absolutely not the case. And you are…

Ramit:  You are a celebrity to me, Patrick. I had to go through 10 assistants just to get this time with you on the phone.

Patrick:  [laughs] Those were all your assistants. You’re a New York Times bestselling author, but honestly, the techniques we’re going to talk about worked for us when we were much earlier in our careers. They helped get our careers to the point where they’re at right now. They’re generally applicable even to people who might not have an audience or any asset built up yet. (Although there is no time like the present to start building…)

Ramit:  Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I think one of the biggest psychological barriers people see is they see advice from people, whether it be here or on Mixergy or any other place, and they say oh, well, that might work for him because he has an email list of 100,00 people or whatever it may be, but really, these techniques can be applied, maybe in a smaller setting.

If I say, and I’ll tell you how I collect 100,000 data points for one of my courses. You don’t need that. You can start with 20. It’s, frankly, very effective, and then at a certain point, you’ll be able to get 50 or 500 or 5,000. Patrick, what do you say we start off by actually addressing that main thing, which says, “Hey, sounds great, Patrick, but I’m not an Internet celebrity like you. How do I get my first customer?”  What would you tell them?

Getting Your First Job When You’re The Outsider In The Middle of Nowhere

Patrick:  Before anyone on the Internet knew who I was, before I even started commenting on the forum that I was on before the forum before the Hacker News (that I gained a lot of my audience through), and way before I had a blog, I worked at a technology incubator in central Japan.  I’m in Gifu Prefecture, and I love Gifu Prefecture. Gifu Prefecture’s contribution to the world is a particular type of bird [Patrick notes: ukai (鵜飼) – I had to look it up after the interview, apparently the English is “cormorant”] where you leash the bird, take the bird to the river, and have the bird fish for you… then you make the bird regurgitate the fish.  Gifu is not exactly, like, high tech central. [Patrick notes: This is a slight exaggeration for comedic effect – we might have more iPhone developers per capita in my town than almost any city in the world.  Ask me why some other day – it’s a great story.  In general, though, I generally tend to laugh at suggestions that I enjoy an anomalously privileged access to the IT industry.]

I got my first job in software because I was working at a tech incubator here, and somebody needed 3,000 PowerPoint slides translated about CAD software.  If you’re not familiar with CAD software and PowerPoint slides and technical translation, it’s the most boring job ever.

But I did good work on it. There’s no reason to work on stuff if you’re not going to do a good job on it. When my contract expired for that day job, and I was looking for the next thing for me, I went to the guy who I had over delivered on the 3,000 slide PowerPoint presentation and said, “Hey, I find myself needing a job in the next couple of months. I know you might not be hiring right now, but you know a lot more people in this neck of the woods than I do. If you know anyone who needs a programmer or needs a technical translator, would you mind introducing me to them?”

Ramit:  What happened then?

Patrick:  He took me to a meeting with two of his clients, and the meeting was…It was explained to me that the meeting was like a job interview, and it took me years to figure out what actually happened. But basically, behind the scenes, he went immediately to two of his clients and said, “Look, I have an American. He’s an engineer. He’s done great work for me. He’s got this list of successes behind him at his old company. You’re going to hire him as a favor to me.”

And so, we went to this “job interview,” and I thought I was doing the whole interview dance.  I wondered why they were not asking many questions of me. We got to the end of it, and I said “I’m a little uncertain of where we are in the conversation right now.”  They said “You were hired before you walked in the room. We’re just getting to know you right now.” This surprised me.

When I tell that story to Americans, people say that, “Wow. Those Japanese people, they’re so weird and wacky.” But honestly, man, the truth of the world is that that is how a lot of jobs are allocated in America, too. It’s not based on the whole resume dance and the “Did you meet the 16 bullet points we put in our advertisement. Send in a resume. Maybe if we like you, we’re going to interview you.”

There are lots of jobs passed along on the private communication level where you’re scratching somebody else’s back that’s done something for you. So definitely, if you’re just starting to get into the business, whether you’re looking for a job or you’re looking for a freelancer/contracting/consulting engagement, find the people who have some reason to respect you, to feel a little bit of a social obligation towards you. And just ask them, “Hey, can you help me out on this?”

Ramit:  I love that because I love the part about oh, those crazy Japanese people. Because we always hear these great stories, and then the first thing we naturally psychologically do is create an us versus them. We say that could work, but XYZ. I call that the special snowflake syndrome: “That could work, but I work at a nonprofit.”  Or “…but I work in Kansas.”

You worked in the most remote place I could imagine, and it worked for you. One of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you was I want to expose what happens at high levels of business to everybody. I want to open that veil.  It’s funny, because the way…for example, the way that jobs are gotten is very similar to the way you get clients.

There’s something I always teach my students, which is 85 percent of the work is done before you ever sit down in the room.

Patrick:  Absolutely.

Ramit:  That applies to a negotiation, that applies to getting clients, that applies to getting a job. Many of my students who go through my career course, by the time they sit down for an interview, it’s not an interview. It’s a discussion. By the way, it’s a discussion with someone they’ve already been out to coffee with two or three times.

Think about the caliber of that discussion or the contours. They’re completely different than you genuflecting and saying please, give me a job, please. Instead, it’s like the job is assumed. Now let’s discuss the details. Let’s actually talk about that in terms of clients, Patrick. You’ve done a lot of client work. I’ve done some client work as well, and I’ve taught a lot of people how to get clients.

When it comes to getting your first one, two, or three clients, what are some important things to note, and what are some common mistakes that people make?

Don’t Underbid to Get Early Clients – It Hurts Your Pocketbook And Credibility

Patrick:  The most common mistake I see when I’m talking to other engineers is that people radically undercharge for the first client.  This often comes from a perceived desire that goes like: ”I need to make my bones before I can start charging what I’m worth, so I’ll do this for you for really cheap, 10 bucks an hour or whatever.”

I was similarly overly needy with my first few clients.  I undervalued myself in the first couple of engagements. We’re going to talk about pricing in general later [Patrick notes: upcoming in the second installment of this interview], but you don’t want to ever come off as needy:

• It will hurt your financial situation in a very direct manner.
• It will also compromise your client relationship, because when a customer gets something for $10, they assume it is worth other things which cost $10.

$10 is not a meaningful amount of money to any business. [Patrick notes: I hear you, bootstrappers – I started a business with $60.  But after you’re selling something, $10 which buys something additive to revenue is a joke.] If you’re charging Starbucks latte money for your consulting offering, you’re never going to get buy‑in at the CEO level of a software company to get your initiatives adopted. You’re going to be treated like somebody’s kid’s nephew’s brother and only allowed to make copies.

If you actually wanted to make copies, you can get a low skill job anywhere to do that. But we got into this business to be respected for our advice and to be valued and to actually do stuff that matters. Charging 10 bucks an hour is not on the easy, straightforward path to doing stuff that matters. People that do stuff that matters have a ground floor which is higher and then they go up from there. [Patrick notes: I think there’s actually an interesting “social justice” type of point to make here, in that to the extent that there exist durable social classes in America, one quick way you can identify them is whose ground floor starts at minimum wage or menial gruntwork and who never has to do that, even when they’re unskilled labor, due to a combination of credentialing and connections.  That’s neither here nor there, though, and I almost hesitate to mention it because I think “Waily waily, I have neither credentials nor connections, life is unfair.” tends to obscure choices that we can make to better our situations.]

Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.

[Patrick notes: This is, if anything, an understatement.  There exist multiple paradigm shifts which separate $20 an hour from $X0k a week, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any client will make that transition with you.  Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.  Concrete example: you can sell Rails programming at $20 an hour (to bad clients, as a newbie freelancer who screams please-take-advantage-of-me), and then you can sell Rails for $100 an hour (baseline clueful Rails programmer in 2012), and then you can sell Rails at $150 an hour (intermediate/senior consultant on a strategically important project, say).  Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I’m going to go with “almost certainly yes.”  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails… though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]

Ramit: I happen to know that because on a product side, the first product I ever sold, the information product, was a $4.95 eBook. One of the last products I sold was a $12,000 course. I’ve gone the entire gamut of information products. When we talk about pricing, I’ll go into more detail on that. But suffice it to say, it’s extremely difficult to climb that ladder.

Never Work For Free As A Software Developer (Asterix)

Ramit: The other thing you mentioned is how many people go in saying, “I’ll just do this first, and I need to make my bones.” And you know what? There is a time and a place to do free work. I do believe in free work occasionally. But I always tell people if you’re going to do free work, make sure you are clear about your messaging.

For example, let’s say that it was my first time out there getting my first client. Let’s say I just want to build a portfolio so at least I have something to point at. Now, I’m generally not a fan of free work, but I can be strategically. This is what I would say to the client. I would say look, my normal consulting rate is $85 an hour, or whatever format of pricing you’re using.

However, I really like what you’re doing, and frankly, I want to build up my portfolio. I would be willing to do this for three weeks for free if, in exchange, you agree that if I do an extraordinary job, then we can discuss working at my normal rate. Well, who’s going to say no to that? If you do an extraordinary job, everyone’s going to want to pay you.

But in this case, yes, you are working for free. But you are explaining why. That is so important. It separates you from, frankly, the people who are new. They’re new, and you can tell that they’re asking to be taken advantage, because they’re like OK, I’ll work for free. It’ll be fine. Somehow, I’ll go from free to $500 an hour. Doesn’t work. Explain your messaging. Explain your positioning, and people will respect you way more for it.

Patrick:  I’ve got to be totally honest with you. I don’t think I would ever work for free as a developer, just because of the way the market is laid out right now. You just don’t need to. Hypothetically, if you’re going in for free, you should have a larger upside than just having a pot-at-the-end-of-rainbow outcome be working at your full rate. You might make it a condition of the free work that the works gets discussed publicly.  This gets you a public case study that you can use for your portfolio and the social proof that you have done this meaningful work for another company in the industry.

[Patrick notes: You will then aggressively leverage this portfolio when attempting to get work at your current billing rates.  I have projects which I did at $X per week which I will use to justify new $5X per week projects at new clients.  If clients ever picked up on the discrepancy – which would require me being stupid like mentioning that somewhere publicly… wait… d’oh – I would say something like “My previous client took a chance on me earlier in my career, when I didn’t have a track record of delivering results to people just like them.  I now have that track record, which is why you are paying the sticker rate.  After I deliver a win for you, if you give me permission to mention it publicly, it will go into a presentation just like this when I tell another person why they have to pay $10X rather than $5X.]

Patrick: In addition to that publicity being a benefit from you, that the public/private distinction there makes a very natural thing to charge around. You mentioned that 98% of your material is free. I do a whole heck of a lot of stuff for free. I’ll speak at conferences for free. My blog posts are free. I do open source software, which is free.

If you want me to do something so competitively sensitive that you don’t want me shouting it from the rooftops to anyone I can get to listen to me, then that always has a price tag attached to it.

Research The Customer To Win The Engagement Before The Interview Starts

Ramit:  That’s right. I want to talk about one of the secret sauces of my business, and it’s something that actually nobody really cares about. People think they care about it, but they don’t care about it. It is the research that I do going into building a product or getting a client. And I know you’ve done this as well.

It’s funny. The other day, I was asking people, “Hey, if I speak at South by Southwest, what would be a good talk?” Somebody wrote back on Twitter saying, “You should talk about your research methodology.” I said that would be great… for the three people who would attend.

Research is what allows me to charge 100 times what my competition charges… but nobody cares. Nobody wants to see [the hard work which goes into] how the sausage is made.  They just want to see the shiny tactic – the A/B test where you tested the color of this button.  [Patrick notes: I have to tweak Ramit’s nose here and mention that he got a 60% increase in sales from A/B testing literally in the week which we recorded this interview.  But hey, I sympathize with his general point that people want to hear quick fixes rather than actually doing the work.  Oh, let me bang my favorite drum – how many of y’all actually run A/B tests?  They’re Ramit’s mental characterization of a magic-bullet no-effort-required diet-pill-of-business-success and I can’t even get people to swallow the freaking pill.]

Ramit: Let’s actually talk for a few minutes about customer development and research going into a product.

I’ll talk about on the product side, and I know you’ve done quite a bit of work on the client side as well. For me, when I build information products, they can be anything from an eBook all the way up to a full‑featured, eight week course with gigabytes and gigabytes of video and thousands of pages of material. So when I start off, for example, with my course on earning more…

I have a course called Earn 1K, and it’s about how to take your skills and turn them into freelancing income by getting multiple clients and earning 1K. Many of my successful students earn 5K or 10K in a month on the side. So, very relevant to the people listening here. When I started off doing this research, I actually didn’t even think of doing an “earn money” product. [Patrick notes: Ramit started in the personal finance space.  Read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, but his wheelhouse would be passive investing, creating systems to move money around, and maybe a bit of optimization about e.g. credit card rewards.]

But when I went on book tour [for IWTYTBR], I went to all these cities around the country and I asked people, “Hey, what do you wish I wrote more about?” Almost to a person, they said, “I love your stuff on automation, but I really want to know how to learn more money.” I was surprised. I was like, really? Isn’t that scammy?

They were like, “I don’t care. I just want to know how to make more money.” And so, I started doing research, and I pulled my team together. The first thing we did was basically just what we call cloud research. We wanted to understand the dynamics of the market.

There’s about five or six ways to earn money.

You can negotiate your salary. You can get passive income, which for most people, never works. You can get freelance income. You can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  [Patrick notes: Ramit would probably round out this list with 1) buy real estate and rent it to people, 2) invest in the public capital markets, and 3) start an honest-to-goodness business.]

We looked at it, and we’re like, “OK.” We think we’re really good at freelancing, and we think that the market is particularly bad at that. And so we started asking people survey questions.

Now, you can get good survey data with as few as 20 responses.  For all the engineers listening, listen closely: Statistical significance is irrelevant when you’re doing customer research. I don’t give a damn about P values and anything like that. It’s almost all qualitative. That’s what I care about. I want to hear the words they use.  [Patrick notes: Engineer reporting for duty as audience stand-in!  Oof, critical hit, advice totally warranted by actual experience!]

We started off by saying…We didn’t say here’s a key insight as well. When you’re doing customer research, I’ve seen a lot of early surveys. They’ll say something like this. They’ll ask a fake question. They’ll say, “Ramit, if I told you I could solve all your storage needs in five hours for less than 25 picodollars, would that interest you?” [Patrick notes: Ramit is making a reference to Tarsnap, which is a technically jawdropping backup service which has abysmally bad pricing.  Ramit does not know what Tarsnap is or why he’d care about it – he literally only knows it “We should bring up an example of how engineers are terribly bad about connecting prices to business value, like that picodollar bullshit.  Seriously.  They don’t even price gestures to the dinner we are eating potato chips in picodollars.  And you know why?  Because if you went into any restaurant and offered to buy potato chips for a penny apiece – which is, like, a lot of picodollars, right? — they’d throw you out.”]

Ramit: Look, guys, [asking leading questions] is BS. That is the worst type of marketing. Because you don’t really want the answer. You’re trying to sell them. Instead, you should ask open-ended questions like “Tell me about your biggest frustration. Tell me what you’ve done in the last six months to improve your financial situation.

“Have you ever thought about earning money? If so, how have you thought about it? Have you ever tried it? What happened?”

We start to understand the words that they used. We collected approximately 50,000 data points, through everything from chat, email, surveys, one-on-one interviews, phone calls.

Now, you don’t have to do 50,000.  Honestly, 100 gets you farther than most people do. [Patrick notes: I think talking to ten individual people who could actually buy your product prior to writing a line of code puts you ahead of the curve, judging from my inbox.  You’ll learn a million times more from 10 people than you’ll learn from your IDE when coding a product built for nobody.] Now what happens is most people will retreat into a room for six months, they’ll build their product or their service and realize that they got it completely wrong. Just to give you a sense, Patrick, for us, Earn 1K on the side. It took us six months to figure that out that title: “Earn 1K”. Why didn’t we call it “Earn 10K”?

Because most people don’t believe that they can earn 10K, even if they can. On the side, because most people believe if they have to earn more money, they have to quit their job and the start the next Google with venture capital. That’s not true. The research is really what allows you to distinguish yourself from your competition so that when someone comes to your site. They start nodding their head uncontrollably, and they say yes, and price becomes a mere triviality. I’m curious if you’ve had that experience.

How To Parlay Interests And Expertise Into First Consulting Gigs

Patrick:  Absolutely. I told you how I got my particular job in the past, but I didn’t talk about my first consulting client yet. I used to be active on forum for lots of SEOs, search engine optimizers, who often, they have a side business themselves or their main source of income is publishing a particular thing and then getting traffic to it via SEO.

Many of them are less than technical or they have enough skills to, like, hack together a site in WordPress, but they don’t know how to take that to the next level. The natural engineer thing to do in this circumstance is to ask someone OK, what are your technical problems? Oh, you have problems with WordPress sites? I’ve done WordPress sites before. Let’s talk WordPress, WordPress, WordPress.

No SEO wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Damn, I have a WordPress problem.” They wake up in the morning and say, “Damn, I have a business problem.”

[Patrick notes: This is generalizable to any group of business owners.  Even software companies.  Pick a software CEO you admire, I can guarantee you that they don’t wake up with software problems.  Heck, freebie for you: solve identification and sourcing of highly talented programmers and every software CEO I know will write you a check for last month’s gross revenues.  After hiring, the next biggest problem most of them have is selling more of the software they have already written.]

Patrick: The SEO continues: “My business only made however many thousand dollars last month, and if I could get more pages on the website, then I might have more traffic and be able to drive more revenue for it.  But I don’t see a clear way to doing that without me doing all the writing myself. “

After you can talk to them and establish that rapport, that you are actually listening to the problems that they are talking about, you can suggest how to address those problems in ways that you are uniquely capable of doing.

I might tell the SEO, who is a potential client: “You’ve gotten this level of traffic so far with your existing site. You want to double that over the course of the next year. You were saying that the roadblocks that are stopping you are a) you’re on an outdated architecture where you, personally, have to write everything, and b) it’s been impossible to find someone who is a subject matter expert at this who can also make web pages, because that combination of interests just does not exist.”

Ramit:  Yes. I’m nodding my head right now. I’m like yes.

Patrick:  Yeah. “I totally understand that it is impossible to find someone who is both good enough of a journalist in the space to work for a genuine published magazine and also can edit HTML pages. I have an idea for you. I’m going to make a CMS for your website. That’s just a page that they can go into, like WordPress, and they can do their writing like they do so well.  The CMS will ship it over to you, and you figure out which business model that you experimented with will work well with this content. “[Patrick notes: In context, I’m suggesting that the SEO will either have in-house advertising, display advertising, an affiliate/lead-gen relationship with another publisher, or products of their own with which to monetize marginal traffic.]

“You click two buttons to hook it up to that page, and boom. That’s it. It’s live on the Internet, and Google will start sending people to it. Does that sound like it’s something motivational to you?”

By this point, the SEO is going “Hell, yes.” I’m like, great. Now this project, I think I can deliver the minimum version of it in two weeks from now. Two weeks from now, you get the CMS. You can start having your magazine quality writers putting stuff in, which will look beautiful, have pictures on it, and start generating traffic on Google.

By that point, everything else about the engagement is a detail. They want it.

Ramit:  That’s right. They want it. That is the number one thing. Do they want it? Not what does your website look like, not how big is your button, not how optimized did you get your conversion funnel. Most of us could focus more on building something that people want.

That comes with the early research. I love the way you talked about how you communicate with a client, because it shows you really listen.

Actual Experience From Someone Who Pays $X00,000 Yearly For Engineers

Ramit: I want to emphasize something, especially for the engineers listening to the call. I am a client that I work with engineers. I have engineers on staff.

Ramit: I pay them pretty well. I have passed on hiring engineers who may be more technically proficient, but they didn’t understand what I wanted. Honestly, guys, as a business owner, do you think I care if you’re using this technology or that? I just don’t give a damn [about technology]. I really don’t.

What I care about is, is my business going to generate revenue? Am I serving my customers? Is my website going to go down, and I have to be the one who tells you? Or can I go out on a Friday night and not worry about my business?

Those are the things I care about as a client. I’m reminded of a great story that somebody…one entrepreneur told on a Mixergy interview with Andrew Warner, and is it a great story. He was in the relationship market. His buddy actually started an information product in the relationship space, for women. [Patrick notes: No clue what interview this is referencing – feel free to drop me a note if you remember it.  By the way, you should be listening to Mixergy.  It is what the New York Times would produce if the NYT cared about producing value for people in our line of work.  It occurs to me that mentioning the NYT in the same breath with Mixergy is likely the most positive thing I’ll ever say… about the NYT.]

Ramit: The guy was doing very well. I believe he was making either 40k or 400k a month. He was doing very well. This guy got pretty interested, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got to take a look at this market.” He spent about four or five months really doing deep research. Lots of stuff, including ad words, including customer research, including buying all the other products.

He finally built his own product. Within two or three months, it was making more than his friend’s. It never stopped. I happen to know that that business is now a gigantic business. Why? What separated him from his friends?

His friend called him, frustrated, like “Hey, I don’t understand why your site’s making more than mine.” He said that he had found some very subtle things in the research that his friend had not. I will tell you that we had that same exact thing happen. When I built my Find Your Dream Job course, it took us about three or months to build the first version, and we’re pretty experienced at this.

When we went out to test it with about 20 people: The first person failed. The second person started crying. And the third failed as well.  At first I thought, “They’re just dumb. They don’t know what they’re doing.” No, then five people failed. Then 10. It took us about…I believe it was 15 or 16 versions to get it right. When we looked back, we had skipped over some very subtle things in the research process.

Once we got those right, sales skyrocketed.  [Patrick notes: cough read writeup in Fortune Magazine cough] I’ll just say that it’s very, very important to understand the words that your client or your customer is using and be able to explain how and why you can help them.

Patrick:  I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the exact words people use. Maybe we would if we came from a communications background. Nothing motivates people like having their own words repeated right back to them, which is something that you should try to do more often. It’s just an easy conversational hack to sound more persuasive.

[Patrick notes: Engineers take heed: your clients will often make mistakes about engineering reality when talking to you.  You will feel the urge to correct their misconceptions about engineering reality, perhaps by rewording their requests such that they match the way the world actually works.  Don’t do this. You will never delight a client by teaching them what a web service actually is.  You will absolutely delight clients by mentioning that the “web service” (cough iframe cough) which you implemented for them, allowing them to get data from System A onto System B (cough displayed on pages served by System A, they never talk to each other cough), provably increased sales by $200,000 in the last quarter.]

Patrick: But you have to make your prospective clients feel like you understand where they’re coming from. And that starts with both understanding where they’re coming from, and then communicating like you understand where they’re coming from. Even if you’re building a website for someone, it’s not just a website, right?

There is some particular need that they have for that website, whether it’s for their business purposes or because a lot of business owners are very personally invested in their business. You need to communicate to them that you understand that they are personally invested and that you are also capable of treating this website like it’s important, like it’s more than just bits on a server somewhere.

Here’s a hypothetical example for you. I live in Japan. I happen to have lots of Asian friends, so I just know that there is one particular niche market in America, that if I really wanted to stop my business right now and start a totally new market, I could do it. A lot of people who might not be English as first language themselves have a worry that they are going to have children who do not learn how to speak their native language, and as a result, will never be able to communicate with their grandmothers.

And so, there’s this market in America for schools to teach the children the language of their parents, basically. [Patrick notes: The term of art is “heritage language school.”  I think I probably butchered it during the interview… I don’t get much practice speaking my own heritage language out loud these days, what can I say.] If you’re building websites for those schools, you’re not really building websites, so much as you are selling the person who runs that school on getting a website done.  She [Patrick notes: overwhelmingly female and underserved by technology available to her, where have I heard this song before…] is generally exquisitely sensitive to the emotional needs of her clients, who are typically mothers.

Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the project — it’s going to have pages and an admin system and a this and a that – you sell that you understand the business and the emotions driving the business.  The business purpose here is that success for your business, the school, is primarily dominated by how many new students it can enroll.  [Patrick notes: This is overwhelmingly the case for almost all educational businesses which do not receive direct state subsidy, by the way, from “piano tutor” all the way through “second tier universities.”  First tier universities are anomalies in that they’re actually choosy about who they let in.] I understand that parents enroll students in your school because they feel that there is a connection to a trustworthy source of authentic information about their heritage.

[Patrick notes: This is the money-line for this particular pitch.  I manage to execute on a gets-to-the-heart-of-the-business line that good in only one out of three or so of my pitches.  If I get a line that good into the interview, the engagement is sold.  I can even point to identifiable moments of time when a company has hit me with one of these, and seriously, in the full knowledge that I’m being successfully sold to, if you get me that well I’m in and damn the price.]

Patrick: I might hypothetically continue “Because I do lots of work in this space, I can deliver a website that embodies trust, authenticity, and tradition for you.” If you can present that pitch, you will be 10,000 times better than anybody who might be better at technical infrastructure, better at the design, whatever. If you can empathize with them on where they’re coming from, you’ll be better off.

Patrick:  In the same fashion: you were asking earlier about some problems people have in their first couple of clients. I was a little too overeager for work, and I worked with people whose businesses I understood on an intellectual level but did not understand on the feel it in my bones level. I’ve since gotten a bit more choosy about that.

Almost all my customers run software businesses. But, at one point, I worked with an eCommerce company, which was also a startup, so I thought “close enough.”  They were an eCommerce company in the men’s fashion space. Let’s say they sell dress shirts. Ramit, you’re a pretty nice dressed guy, but I’m wearing a t‑shirt right now with a startup logo on it.  Haute couture is not my strongest skill.

When someone says “OK, you need a fine-cut silk, black shirt,” [Patrick notes: is that even a thing?  Heck if I know.  I’m pretty sure they come in “silk” and “black”, give me a third attribute you can group shirts by.], my eyes just glaze over.  My ignorance was even hurting my ability to execute on parts of the engagement that I actually understood, like say site architecture for SEO purposes. I literally told the client “You’re going to silo some pages around that. like, fine silk shirt, blah, blah, or blah, blah, or blah, blah.”  With the blahs in there.

My client has made this his life’s work. You could literally see him disengaging from the conversation as I was dismissive about the subject. I was kicking myself. So one thing that I did to get better, in terms of that particular client relationship, when I realized that I really didn’t know anything that I was talking about, even when it was material to his business, was to say, “Look, you know me. I’m not going to lie. I’m not exactly a fine dresser. Can you just tell me, a geek who knows nothing about this, what is the one thing I should learn about men’s shirts?  If I only learn 10 minutes of material about dressing myself in my entire life, what would those 10 minutes be?”

Bam, his eyes lit up. His life’s work is men’s shirts. Do you think he likes talking about men’s shirts? Oh, heck yes. He loves to share that knowledge to people. (If I was savvier about it, I would have asked for that at the initial interview.)  [Patrick notes: If a client talks about nothing but themselves for the entire interview, you will get the job. They’ll remember you as being tremendously responsive to their needs, and people care a heck of a lot more about themselves and their businesses than they care about you and your business.  Conversely, if an interview is ever the you-you-you show, you probably will lose that engagement.]

How Startups Fail At Communicating With Customers

Ramit:  It’s amazing how powerful it is when you actually put yourself inside the mind of your prospect. I want to talk about this for a few minutes. You see very similar copy on most startup websites, similarly terrible. Here’s what it says. It says easy, fast, free. Those three words should never, ever, ever be the headlines or sub‑headlines on your page.

Do you know why? They don’t mean anything. Easy? What does that mean? When you say easy to me, to me, that means I don’t have to check my text messages on a Thursday night when I’m out with my friends at a bar. To a 45 year‑old mother of two, it means something very different. I don’t have to learn this weird HTML syntax with these brackets. [Patrick notes: Ramit co-founded PBWiki.]

Easy is not a descriptive word. It’s a word that engineers use or even amateur copywriters because they don’t have anything else to say. Why? Because they’ve been lazy. They haven’t actually figured out the words that people use. People don’t say I was really looking for an easy, fast, and free solution. They say I was looking for a way to earn more money, and I was sick of getting scammed.

Therefore, that’s why if you go to one of my pages, you’ll see the fact that I was on the Today Show or the fact that I’ve written for the New York Times. That’s not just there to feed my very large ego. It’s there because the customer indicated that it was important to them. I’ll give you another story about communicating with your clients.

Doing $80k of Engagements In 8 Weeks In The Super-Lucrative Field Of Violin Tutoring

Ramit: One of my star students is a young woman named Jackie, and she lives in the Midwest, and she’s a violin instructor. Now, she’s quite good at violin, but that wasn’t really what interested me. The fact was she had clients, but she came to me saying, “I want to learn how to grow my business.”

And so, she had a few clients, but it was just like middling, and it wasn’t doing very well. I said, “Who’s your client? Who’s your client?” This is where most people stop dead. They say, “People who are looking for storage solutions.” Oh, really? What type of person? What gender? What age? Other people will say, “I’m building a product on love.” “Oh, really? Who’s your customer?” “Oh women between the ages of 27 to 54.”

A 27 year‑old woman has nothing in common with a 54 year‑old woman when it comes to love, clothes, or virtually anything else. The way they describe love is completely different. Her customers were kids, parents, moms, dads, everybody. I said no, no, no, no, no. I worked with her. This is what happened. I’ll cut to the chase.

In eight weeks, she was able to generate $81,000. How did she do that? She quickly found out who her customer was. Any idea who the customer was, Patrick?

Patrick:  I’ve read this story from the year before, so I have a good idea. But want to spoil it for the rest of the people?

Ramit:  The customer was not the 10 year‑old kid. It was the mother of the 10 year‑old kid. By the way, that mother tended to be ethnic, tended to be Asian. Not a surprise when you think about it. But this isn’t obvious prior to starting to do the research. Now, by the way, what does this Asian mother want? She doesn’t really just want her kid to play like Yo‑Yo Ma.

Why does she want that? Because she wants little Timmy to get into Harvard. And so, when you deeply understand that, then everything about your positioning, your marketing can change. For example, imagine a new testimonial which says: “My son used to be really shy and withdrawn. Now, after going to Jackie’s class, he’s so talkative. He’s made so many friends. I can already see his grades going up because of the new discipline that he’s learned.”

[Patrick notes: I know every engineer in the room just got the willies, because you think that using that testimonial to sell violin tutoring is somehow unethical.  It is perfectly ethical if Little Timmy’s mom actually reported that as her experiences.  This is, in fact, how middle-class parents justify virtually every extracurricular.  You have probably used a variant of this exact sales pitch yourself, except it was probably promoting video games rather than violin.  Video games help teach problem solving and hand-eye coordination, not just that you should Spirit Rush to Charm/Deathfire Grasp the Corki outside of Baron for the easy ace so you can push mid for the gg, right?

(Man, that might be my best double coded joke ever.)

(P.S which somewhat spoils the joke: If you’ve cottoned onto the fact that that is actually a totally comprehensible statement and feel repulsed by it welcome to being every client ever.  Those of you who play League of Legends just went “Dude, what’s wrong with you, was Spirit Fire on cooldown?” and those of you who don’t are zoning out almost as fast as a has-money-but-can’t-program client does when told about Ruby DSLs and test driven development.)

<Sidenote type=”semiPolitical unfortunateReality” forwardLookingPromise=”thisBarelyEverHappensOnThisBlog”>

P.S. To people who might have a Little Timmy in their life: from the perspective of someone who knows how the admissions game is played, Little Timmy should really be looking for ways to sound like anything other than Asian-smart-kid as possible, because Harvard has a declared policy of racial discrimination, and because in addition to racially discriminating against Asians they have a particular narrative stereotype of an Asian who they think they have quite enough of already.  That stereotype gets good grades, plays violin/piano, and has no personality.  I mention this to accurately summarize the preferences of bureaucrats whose professional competency is racial discrimination rather than to agree with them.  “Talkative” helps him – quite a bit!  I would actively avoid mentioning violin at all… unless you can write with humor (and a touch of pique) about how you abominably suck at violin, hate the stereotype, and enjoy subverting things, because humor and subversion play much better in admissions essays, and because humor/subversion are good mental hooks to make you stand out against the other Asian applicants you’re explicitly judged against whereas “smart, good grades, violin player” do not provide hooks.

Even if you haven’t won genetic lottery that Harvard optimizes for, it is still within your power to market your existing product offering (and/or tweak it to make it more marketable) such that you can improve your chances of passing their (biased) decisionmaking process.  I think that is largely a more productive use of a single student’s time than lamenting that Harvard’s admission department is unfair (which it is, no question, but if you really want to go to Harvard I’d suggest betting your chips on making you more acceptable to Harvard than making Harvard stop systematized racial discrimination in admissions in time to benefit yourself).

</Sidenote>

But that’s neither here nor there, from the perspective of selling Little Timmy’s mother on the value of violin lessons.  She wants to buy violin lessons.  OK.  Customers wants do not always align with their needs — often, selling them successfully involves a) understanding their wants, b) getting to the root issues behind them, and c) proposing to deliver solutions to those root issues by — wham, switcheroo — giving them what they actually need.

Some of my most successful projects were exactly not what the client first thought of engaging me to do.]

Ramit: Wow! That speaks directly to the heart of what her clients want. By the way, it’s not a lie. It’s completely accurate. This is marketing at its best, where you are actually listening to the customer and then delivering value on what they want, totally ethically.

So, for all of us, when we’re writing worthless copy like easy, fast, free, stop. You’re being lazy. Go out and talk to your customers and figure out their real pain points and write you don’t have to check your pager every Friday and Saturday night. That is a very, very powerful message.

Or “silk shirts that don’t wrinkle when you’re getting off the subway.” That is very powerful to the businessman in Manhattan. All right? So that’s all I’ve got to say about copy when it comes to relating to your customer.

Patrick:  I totally agree with that. Also, something that people don’t realize is that this is particularly easy for engineers to do. They think I am trivially capable of doing this, or I am trivially capable of using from free open source solution for doing for their…Therefore, no one else in the world wants it.

My original claim to quote, unquote fame on the Internet is a little program called Bingo Card Creator. It makes Bingo cards for elementary school teachers.

To this day, despite the fact that I’ve been publishing about this for six years with a constantly updated stats graph that shows, like, $200,000 plus of Bingo cards getting sold, people ask me: how could anyone possibly need that? You can do it in Microsoft Excel in, like, five minutes. All you need to do is know how to use Microsoft Excel, like someone that has an engineering degree.

People with engineering degrees don’t teach elementary English. That’s just a fact of life. The reason I know that teachers really genuinely need that is because I’ve talked to literally thousands of teachers by this point, and I know that they have a very particular need for getting ready for class tomorrow.

It isn’t bingo card software. They have a particular need to teach a particular lesson plan that they already have laid out about, say, the American presidents, and they want an easy to use activity that they can just slide into that. And, at no point, do they start thinking of OK, I can open up Microsoft Excel and start scripting up some quick macros, and only two hours from now, I will have something that works for my kids.

They want something that they can go to their local Google, type “American presidents”, pause for a second and remember back to their class about incorporating more fun activities in the classroom, type in “bingo”, hit enter, and get something on the first page that works. And that’s fundamentally why that business works.

Ramit:  Love it. What you said when you said like, I can just open up Excel with my extremely simple knowledge of macros betrays a complete lack of understanding about the customer. In fact, this is what I want…I’d like to talk about stepping out of your own comfort zone and understanding the other people, the people that you’re trying to serve.

Most people are not builders. Engineers, understand that. Most people do not talk or think like builders. They do not want to sit around and build a bunch of stuff. I’m talking about myself. I hate building stuff, except the stuff that I’m really good at, building courses and stuff like that. Do you think if you put a bunch of LEGOs in front of me…I’m going to pick that box up and throw it straight in the trash.

I just don’t care. I don’t like it. I don’t want to build a macro. I don’t want to do all that stuff. The second thing is I have a limited amount of time, and if your customer, for example, has a family, they have extremely limited amounts of time. So for them, paying 5, 10, 20, 100 dollars is nothing. Because to them, they get…especially if you’ve segmented your customer to people who have income and are willing to spend it, as opposed to people who have no income and have unlimited time and unlimited technical skills…

Hint to anyone building stuff for other engineers, who haven’t segmented out their pricing or positioning, that’s bad. I like to talk about this. I was just reading something on Hacker News. There was a comment about email newsletters, and the funny comment to me was who still uses email newsletters? It just made me smile, because it’s a classic, classic mistake we make of thinking that our world is everyone’s world. Just to give you a sense, I make over 98 percent of my revenues through email.

Patrick:  I facepalmed quite a bit when I heard that line, too.  [Patrick notes: I’ve sold a couple hundred thousand dollars of software with email campaigns.  I will – hopefully by the end of September – have a product offering to help software companies do this without having to bring me in for consulting.  If you want to hear more, give me your email address.]

Ramit:  Yeah, you almost cannot pay me money on my site. My conversion funnels are pretty sophisticated, and we’ve built them and tested them for many, many, many years. Email works very well. However, in this day and age, when people talk about oh, you’ve got to get on social, got to get on Facebook, get a Twitter account, my suggestion for people trying to get your first three clients, forget everything that will not immediately get you three clients.

So, if you’re putting up a Twitter feed, ask yourself how is this going to get me clients? And then you’re going to start realizing that you’re giving yourself BS answers, like, I’m getting into the conversation. I need to be at the top of mind. Really? Is that going to help you get three clients or is reaching out to 10 people with custom emails, showing how you already understand their business and suggesting a couple things, is that going to help?

There are the things we talk about in earn 1k, but you can do them anywhere. When I first started off writing copy about four or five years ago, I started studying the really, somewhat dark arts of long copy pages. My sales pages are approximately 40 to 50 pages long.

People say, “Ramit, that doesn’t work.” Really? I have the data. I know for a fact that it does work. In fact, there’s a very sophisticated marketer. His emails are about 20 or 30 pages long. People said [laughs] who reads these emails? Does anyone actually read this? He laughed and said [laughs] only the buyers.

Patrick:  [laughs] I love that line.

Ramit:  It’s really incumbent upon you to stop thinking that your worldview is everyone’s worldview and realize that marketing works for a reason. As one of my professors said…in communication, she said, the value in this material is not in the difficulty of it. It’s in the usefulness of it. It’s not important how hard it is, what you’re doing. It’s important how useful it is to your customer.

Patrick:  This ties back into how…really understanding who, exactly, can afford to buy your product or service offering is, and how important that is. For example, I’ve slagged on social media quite a bit, and I have not slagged on it nearly enough. The person who has the authority to buy your offering at, say, a company which…

By the way, guys, for all the engineers in the audience, you sell engineering services to for profit companies because they are the only people who can pay actual professional engineer rates. There are vanishingly few private individuals and or non-profits who will actually pay engineers the going rate.

Anyhow, so who at the company has the authority to make the decision to bring you on? It’s probably not someone who has a Twitter feed. People look at my business, and they might naively think that I get lots and lots of leads off the blog or on Hacker News, but if I’m getting brought in by, like, the CEO level, or the head of product or the head of marketing at a company, they’re probably, well, a little bit older and have…They would tell you in so many words, I’ve got better things to do with my time than to stay on Hacker News.

I don’t, apparently. But [laughs] I don’t meet those type of people typically off Hacker News. I’ll often meet them at something like a conference that’s organized for the explicit purpose of generating more sales for software companies, which by the way, people who pay $2,000 to go for a conference whose tag line is “Sell More Software” are often interested in paying money to sell more software.  [Patrick notes: I was thinking, in particular, of the Business of Software conference, but I’ll bet you there are a dozen of these in any industry you care to name.  If your prospective clients go to those conferences, you should probably try to go, too.]

They’re meeting people for conversations in between the…the lectures at that place is a great use of my time, I have found. “Who still uses email and newsletters?”  Gahhhh… multi‑billion dollar industries are multi‑billion dollar industries for a reason. You need to have an appropriate level of business awarenesss to back up your technology skills [and if you had that level of awareness, you would not be skeptical about email.]

I would not have a business but for being technologically good at what I do. I would not have a business if I was not able to actually deliver on the things that I offer to my customers. But there’s a huge business knowledge that needs to be present to also successfully run a business.

That starts with knowing the market outside of your narrow specialty. If you don’t already know what businesses are likely to have websites that drive huge amounts of their total business value, then you’re not going to be successful at selling people on engagement to improve their website such that their business gets more revenue.

You need to know, like, what the transactional model for the business looks like. Take two industries which look similar to each other, say insurance or retail finance. Thank God I don’t actually have to do work with either of these.  But play along for a second [Patrick notes: I don’t endorse the following conclusions about this, just making an example]: if you want to sell engagements to these guys, you should understand e.g. that an insurance company might have a very, very direct path to revenue via the use of their website.

They can actually take leads on the website and start converting those directly into transactions and or into applications for their high-margin insurance products with very little work on top of that.  The core business at say, a bank might be more relationship based, where they have longer sales cycles, and they’re only capturing the lead generation on the website or only doing low margin services like checking accounts or whatnot.

[Patrick notes: Checking accounts are loss-leaders with godawful terrible margins, used mostly to get people in the door for credit cards and home loans.  Ironically, the only checking accounts which make appreciable amounts of money are the ones used by the bank’s “worst” customers, who get eaten alive by fees and penalties.  Ask Ramit about that stuff, though, he’s the finance expert.]

Patrick: If you were looking at two similarly situation businesses, you would go with the one that you could provide more value to. So you need to know that about the business. If you can’t sketch someone’s business model on a napkin, I don’t think you can ever sell them anything worthwhile.

Learning Long Copy And Other Unexpected Sources Of Business Value

Ramit:  It reminds me of something I call going from D to C. And that means going from Disparagement to Curiosity, and when you see a comment that says who still uses email newsletters. That’s disparagement. You’re basically saying I’m smarter than this company. Who would ever use email newsletters, which is ironic, because this person happens to be exactly wrong.

And it, therefore, makes them look far more foolish because they’re disparaging something they simply do not understand. I would, instead, rather have people say, “Wow, these guys are using an email newsletter.” They seem to be doing pretty well. They get a lot of press. They seem to have a lot of customer testimonials. What do they know that I don’t?

From D to C. Stop the disparagement and start the curiosity. Like I said, when I started studying the dark arts of long copy, I first looked at these long copy pages, infomercials, and I said these things are scams. I started off with a disparagement model. But as I started getting deeper and deeper into it and learning what works, what doesn’t, what is ethical and what is not, I learned that there are very, very good reasons that direct response marketers have been using long copy for over 100 years.

What do they know that I don’t know? The answer is they know a lot. They know a lot more than I could ever hope to learn, and it’s all encompassed in this knowledge in direct marketing. So instead of disparaging things that we don’t understand, let’s actually try to say, hey, for 15 minutes, I’m going to try to understand that maybe these guys know something I don’t.

When you can do that, why…for example, of the reasons I moved to New York was all my Silicon Valley friends said it’s all about direct ROI. Those companies are so stupid that pay for ads in Times Square. I looked at them like that’s interesting, because those companies have been around for 50 years. Why does Louis Vuitton have billboards that they spend $200,000 a month on or 500,000?

What do they know that I don’t? As I moved here, the answer is they know a lot. They know a lot more, in terms of brand, and not everything is directly measurable. It’s important to be able to say, “Look, I may not know everything. Let me try to at least understand the basics of it.” When you do, you’ll see entire worlds open up. Like for me, I saw entire worlds of pricing, monetization, long copy, upsells, cross sells, AOV.

I saw all these things open up that I had never, never, never had an idea of. It was all because I first was disparaging them, and then I said all right. I better learn what these guys are doing. And that changed everything for me.

Patrick:  I’ve had similar experiences myself. Something that I often see in our industry is people have a fascination for the new. So anything that smacks of the old way of business or that technology is so last year or that thing tends to turn people off. Here’s a heuristic for everybody: it is entirely possible that you are the smartest person in a particular industry… but I would heavily bet against that.

If everyone in an industry does something in a particular way, like if every enterprise software company doesn’t put their prices on the website, and you think “That’s so stupid.  I would never buy anything without the price being on the website”, consider the somewhat radical notion that every enterprise software company since ever is not simultaneously making the exact same mistake and that maybe there’s something about that model you don’t know yet.

Ramit:  God, that is the best example ever. Because I see it all the time. Oh, whenever I see a site where they don’t give me the price, I just close the page. And then you say to yourself OK, that’s great. What is your budget, by the way? Oh, I don’t have a budget. I’m just looking around. I could just build this on my own. You’re not the customer. You’re not the customer. The customer…

Patrick:  “How many millions of dollars in software purchases have you authorized in the last quarter?” [laughs]

Ramit:  Exactly. Like, are you kidding me? I’ll give you an example of a purchase I made just this week. I have been looking at some retention issues and improving some retention flows in my funnels, and I happened to be on some newsletter that I signed up for years ago, which by the way, I read once in a while.

They happened to release a new eBook on retention. It has 75 pages of charts and retentions and strategies and this and that. The email came. I read…It was, I would say, about a four page email. I read the first 15 percent, clicked the link, looked a couple pictures, saw a couple of keywords in the bullet points, like how XYZ company plugged their retention problems. I sent it to my assistant.

I didn’t even buy it myself. I sent it to my assistant. I said buy and add to cal, which means add to my calendar for me to review it later. That was it. The purchase was about $199. It took me less than 15 seconds to make that purchase decision. But why? Because I was the right customer at the right time. I had a burning pain point, and I had the budget.

So no matter what their website looked like and all that, yeah, that may have mattered a little bit. The most important thing was they understood their customer, they understood the code words and the problems I have, and it was already sold before I even looked at it. It was already a sold thing for me.

Patrick:  I’ll give you an amusing anecdote about that. So there are tools I use in my own business, right? One that I use a lot for designing mockups of user experiences is called Balsamiq Mockups, and I think their entry level pricing is, like, 80 bucks or something. A lot of my engineering friends say “Wow, 80 bucks is a lot for something that’s like Microsoft Paint++”.  [Patrick notes: The sarcasm drips from my voice here.]

Anyhow, so I frequently sit down with consulting clients looking at three pages of mockups that I’ve prepared that the engagement. The story that I’m trying to sell them on is “OK, if we do it like this, our revenues for the next quarter are going to go up by 20 percent.”

I got a question from someone who is similar to me at the company. Techy guy, young 20s, et cetera. He said, “That looks cool. What’d you make it in?” I said, “Oh, Balsamiq Mockups. It’s this thing that a company puts out which lets you mockup pages very quickly.”  “What, you paid money for that?” And the CEO says…by the way, notable and quotable… “Get one for everybody. Put it on the company card. You were talking about the plus 20 percent in revenue, Patrick?”

It’s two totally different mindsets looking at the same artifact, right? The CEO only sees it in the “This is the tool that someone I trust is doing something incredibly valuable with me on. It is cheap at any reasonable price.” Whereas the person who could potentially have, given the next two years of his life, actually implemented that tool, is valuing it at nothing…because clearly, he didn’t have anything planned for the next two years.

Ramit:  Cost versus value. This is something that we’ll talk more about in pricing. But if your first inclination when you look at something is how much does it cost, chances are you’re not the customer. And chances are you would be a terrible customer. In fact, I did this just yesterday. I did a web cast where I actually opened up a new course.

I was testing it. People when I start talking about the course, there will be some people on these webcasts. There’s usually hundreds of people there. They’ll say what’s the price? What’s the price? How much does it cost? What’s the price? I quickly tell them if your first question is about price, this course is not for you.

Because if all you’re concerned about is price, then you haven’t even factored in the calculus of value. If my course can teach you how to negotiate a $10,000 raise, then does it even matter what it costs? It could 100. It could be 500. It could be 5,000. If you believe in the material, and there’s a guarantee, then cost should be one of the last things.

Now, here’s the key. Certain people think like that. Businesses think in terms of value. Generally, individuals do not. And so, that is when you start choosing who are the customers I want to go after? Are they people who have no money or people who complain about money all the time or people who have no time to actually use this?

Or are they people who look at a…an information product or an engineering project and say, you know what? This might cost me $10,000, but I’m going to make back far more. Maybe I’m going to make back more money. Maybe I’m going to get peace of mind. That is value versus cost.

Patrick:  Amen. And that’s, by the way, a good heuristic when you’re looking at customers. So you’re going to be selling them on a relationship which is going to, at the end of the day, there will be an invoice delivered, and that invoice is going to have a bunch of zeroes in it. So you are probably not going to be the first professional relationship someone has ever had.

In fact, if you are, that’s a bad sign, because they have no idea how to work with you. They are not going to have a maximally happy result no matter how well you execute on that relationship. So look at how they comport their business in other ways. If someone has an accountant that they’re paying $300 an hour for, they understand that an accountant is generating some value for the business that is worth $300 an hour.

If someone doesn’t have an accountant, and if you ask them “Just curious, why don’t you have an accountant?” And they say something like “Heck if I’m going to pay $300 an hour when I could do it for myself in QuickBooks”, that’s a leading indicator that this person is not going to value your time as a professional either.

Ramit:  Exactly.

Patrick:  Now, conversely, if someone says that they pay their accountant $300 an hour because accountants provably make the business money but that the riff‑raff techie guys are just crazy for demanding 40 bucks an hour, then also, again, leading indicator. Have a nice, firm handshake and try to get introduced to someone else, hopefully someone a little more sane. But you’re not going to have a successful commercial relationship with them.

Ramit:  That’s right. Focus on taking your B+ customers/prospects to be A customers. Don’t focus on the D people, trying to turn them into A customers. It will never happen.

Patrick:  Never happen.

Ramit:  It will never happen. I will talk to you and Patrick will talk to you more about this. Patrick, I love how many times in your life you’ve used the word pathological customers online. I, myself, have many of those as well. And, in fact, I will talk about how I turned down over one million dollars in revenue per year to avoid the type of customers I do not want.

We’re going to talk about that in our next call, which will be on pricing. But for now, let’s leave our URLs so people can find us. Patrick, do you want to go ahead and start? Where should people find you?

Patrick:  Sure. My blog is at http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog [Patrick notes: You found it!]

Ramit:  What can they find when they go there?

Patrick:  I largely talk about the business of making and selling software. If you want the specific deep dive into that, as in whatever I happen to be thinking about at any given day, that would be at https://training.kalzumeus.com.  [Patrick notes: Ramit and I touched on the topic of how email makes serious money for businesses earlier.  If that subject interests you, or you would like to learn more about how you can use engineering to improve the marketing of your software business, I strongly suggest trading me your email address.  I promise not to waste your time.]

Ramit:  I love Patrick’s blog because not only does he talk about selling software, but I sell information products. I don’t sell software. But I find so much relevance in what you talk about, and I love how you delve into the psychology of being able to turn your worldview around and deliver value to people, and then charge accordingly.

I’ll share my URL as well. I actually put up a special page for anyone listening to this, to give away some free stuff for you. It’s http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/earn1k/kalzumeus-start/. That’s a mouthful. You’re going to get some stuff there on how to find your first few clients, including a free video and a free mini course that I put together for you. So take a look. I hope you guys enjoy it. We’ll talk to you on the next call.

Patrick:  All right. Let me give just a quick mini testimonial for Ramit. We met for the first time a couple of years ago in New York and had dinner together, and some of the advice that he gave me at that dinner was extraordinarily valuable. It took me off of one trajectory that I was on with my consulting business and put me on a much better trajectory.

I’ve always known him to say really, really valuable things when I’ve talked to other engineers about some of the advice and, like, salary negotiation that he’s given me.

I have a stack of emails in Gmail, like I think it’s somewhere 20 something, and the running total is 200 and X thousand dollars of extra money that that’s made my readers. I really trust Ramit. There is no BS here. You can’t possibly waste your time on it.  [Patrick notes: Usual disclaimer: no money exchanged hands for that recommendation.]

Ramit:  Appreciate that. All right, Patrick, we’ll talk soon.

Patrick:  Talk soon. Bye bye.

Ramit:  Thanks.

Keith and I recorded the second podcast, this time with special guest Amy Hoy. (If you missed the first podcast, see here.) We’re still searching for a format which really works for us, so this is a work in progress. Please share your thoughts with us on what you like/don’t like about it.

This podcast was recorded two months ago, largely because Keith and I got too busy to do the editing and post it. We’ll outsource more of that in the future. Of particular note: the 30×500 class that Amy talks about is already started, so if you’re interested in it, sign up for her email announcement (link waaay down on that page) for when it opens the next time.

Major topics for this podcast included:

• why businesses are not price sensitive and how to price SaaS directed at them
• how bootstrapping product businesses with a side of consulting worked out
• the psychology of happiness

Download Links

Podcast link (MP3, 23 MB, approximately 80 minutes.)

Subscribe in iTunes &tc: The feed http://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/atom/ technically includes all posts on this blog, but if you put it into iTunes or your iDevice, it will slurp in only the audio posts. (Have a more finnicky client than iTunes? Try http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed/ instead.)

Transcript

Patrick: Okey-dokey. You guys want to get started on the formal talking to people aside from the three of us thing?

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: Alright. Sounds good. OK, so we do the intro music [mimics intro music]. We don’t have intro music.

Patrick: We don’t have intro music.

[laughter]

Patrick: This is a third-rate podcast.

Keith: Welcome back to the Kalzumeus podcast and…

Patrick: This is episode two with…

Keith: Episode two, well, 2.5, because we actually recorded an episode two and then trashed it because it sucked.

Patrick: Yeah. This is uh…

Keith: Two alpha? Two Beta.

Patrick: Two Beta. It was an MVP of a podcast and then we shot it in the head because it was not accomplishing customer goals or anything.

Keith: Exactly.

Patrick: And we are joined today by special guest Amy Hoy.

Keith: Hello Amy.

Amy: Hello.

Keith: For our people, you want to do the introduction, Patrick?

Patrick: Oh, introduction, yeah. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Pattio11 on the Internet and…

Keith: I’m Keith Perhac, not at all known on the Internet. Joining us today is Amy Hoy, who is the founder of Freckle and the new product 30×500, which seems awesome. We’re going to have Amy talk about that a little more coming up. Amy, do you have anything you want to add?

Amy: There are a couple more products other than those. [laughs]

Keith: Those are the big one’s that I know of, that I’m most familiar with. And, of course, your blog Unicorn Free, which is freaking awesome, by the way.

Amy: Thanks.

Keith: I was actually… I listened to the 5×5 podcast where you talked about where you came up with the name for Unicorn Free, and were explaining all that. Ever since then I’ve really enjoyed that.

Amy: Oh, well thank you. Yeah. I figure like, I was drunk and I wrote a note that I forgot and there was a Narwhal horn involved. It was a pretty good story.

[laughter]

Patrick: Ba dum bum.

Keith: Ba dum bum. Alright.

Patrick: So, let’s see. So, the 30×500 classes opening up in the near future [Patrick notes: We didn’t get this episode out on time, so if you want into 30×500, you’ll have to do it the next time Amy opens up the course.] and I feel it’s probably of interest to some people that are listening to this so why don’t you give us the rundown on that for the folks listening at home who don’t know what it is?

Amy: I’d love to, if I can pronounce my own product’s name. Sidebar, don’t name your product with numbers in it. I never can say 30×500 properly unless I do it like that in slow mo. In 2008 I got absolutely sick and tired of consulting, even though our consulting business was doing really well, mine and my husband’s. I knew that I didn’t want to be a consultant forever, I just fell into it because I had these skills.

I knew the way to make money was product. I had been watching 37 Signals from their rise back when they had zero products and were just designers and then they had products and all this stuff and all these people I knew who were starting businesses and were making money not by the hour but by the product.

I pushed my husband to help me make a software service, which is Freckle, which is nearly three years old now. We also wrote, after that, an e-book on JavaScript performance and from there on we built our product empire and weaned away from consulting entirely. During this process I felt entirely alone. There was almost no discussion about this stuff.

I knew what I knew by reading business books, which were not tailored to me, a two person company who was starting on the side. They were tailored to larger business but I was able to extrapolate the advice and apply it to myself. I read startup stuff, most of which was totally useless for what I was doing.

I wasn’t trying to get millions of users, I couldn’t spend money to acquire users, I couldn’t use venture capital, I couldn’t hire the best people. My husband and I were pretty great, but it was pretty much us and we were free.

Keith: You were pretty much stuck between the two worlds, weren’t you? What you wanted was a standard business model, but there weren’t any real books or information on standard business models in the Internet age and what information there was, was for startups and startups generally assume venture capital, which of course you weren’t going for, which is a great role to go down.

Just because you’re a startup does not mean you need venture capital and does not mean you need to do the seven billion users in two months for a free medium app, whatever.

Amy: But the hockey stick. The hockey stick. How do you survive without the hockey stick? I don’t know. In fact, I was anti-venture capital, for me. I feel like a lot of venture capital is quite deceptive, but I don’t begrudge anyone for taking it if that’s what they want to do. I’m like go after the dealers, not the users. I really didn’t want anyone else in-between me and my customers and my success.

I didn’t want anyone fiddling with my stuff. Until 2008, I had not been able to ship a project I worked on for years because management kept screwing with it, whether it was Behr Sterns, well they went out of business, or Limewire, where my CEO was a 12-year-old multimillionaire boy scout on crack. I never did anything for years and I was dying. I was like no more intermediation. No more between me and them. I was like no venture capital.

You’re right, there was nothing really to rely on other than old school business books and what I had detected by working around and following 37 Signals and Mail Chimp and these other businesses. I observed them over the years, lurked. They weren’t writing about it at that time. Even 37 Signals was not writing about their Bootstraps and Proud series. That was not in 2008, that was a lot later. So it was really lonely.

Patrick: Yeah. I start Bingo Card Creator in 2006 and, man, the state of the art back then. I was literally unsure it was legal to actually just setup a shingle on the Internet and start selling software. I tried to get advice from people in our community, which has some issues about things like that. They’re like no, God man. What if someone does a refund? You can get sued. You should never, ever, ever try to get away from the day job and, besides, they own your soul.

Keith: Going back to that a little, as much as we are three people on the Internet giving advice, you should never listen to people giving advice on the Internet.

[laughter]

Amy: Yeah, just us.

Keith: Yeah, just the three of us. I think that’s a very safe assumption. I would preface the “don’t take advice from people” with “random people on the Internet.” Find people who are successful and who are practicing what they preach, essentially.

Patrick: I think that’s life advice as to hanging around with the kind of people you want to be with rather than anybody else.

Keith: Rather than people who scream the loudest, yeah.

Patrick: This goes to picking your community, both in real life and in the Internet. If you routinely hang around people who run businesses, your perception of the world is going to get influenced by people who run businesses, and if you’re routinely hanging around people who will perpetually have a business some day you have a risk of that warping your perspective on things.

Amy: Absolutely. My rule of thumb is also that even if someone has what you want and people ask, “What’s the secret of your success?” and they say, “Hard work,” stop listening. Let’s face it, it’s a lot more than that and if they don’t have the insight or the willingness to share beyond the phrase “hard work” then there’s nothing you can learn from them from what they explicitly try to teach you. You can observe and be the learner and analyze.

Yeah, it really sucked and there were a lot of naysayers. Not maybe quite as serious as Patrick: did because we’re a couple of years later. Honestly, I really don’t listen to people.

Keith: Very good advice. Probably the best advice we’ll get out of this podcast is don’t listen to people.

Amy: Don’t listen to people. [laughs] People are like no, no, no, no, no. I’m like whatever. We started making a product business and it sort of was harder than I thought. A lot of it was easier than I thought, but it was all hard because we were alone. We were doing this on the side with consulting and we had these short bursts with super intense consulting contracts, mostly for Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 50 companies.

Thomas did a lot of JavaScript security and JavaScript performance. We did a lot of these media art installations based around Twitter and other APIs, Foursquare and stuff, for like Pepsi, who was awesome, and all the other people we worked for who weren’t awesome. So these intense projects that paid a lot but they demanded a lot of us.

So we were doing that and trying to build this product (Freckle) and then ship this product and then support the product after we shipped it and add new features and stuff. And it was really chaotic for about a year and a half.

And at the end of 2009, I knew that I could not do that anymore. That’d been nearly a year and a half, 18 months, 24 months almost, of doing this. And I was like, “I cannot consult and do this other stuff anymore. The product’s suffering. I’m suffering. I have to quit. I’m going to quit now.”

We just got this big check from this two-week project that turned into two months of hell. Then I quit, and I thought, “What can I do to help shore up this income?” And I thought, “I know. I can help people who are like me two years ago.” I wasn’t sure if people were into it or not, so I did a three-hour teleconference and invited some people. (Patrick notes: This idea is genius. It’s the MVP of a more involved product.) They paid me, not a lot.

And the number-one feedback was “more,” which I wrote down in my notebook as “M-O-A-R-R-R…” I counted the R’s the other day. I was like, wow. [laughs]

Keith: Just love writing those R’s, huh? [laughs]

Amy: I did. Everyone was like, “I want more.” That was the number-one feedback. So I was really excited, I guess, so I put extra R’s.

And that slowly turned into this three-and-a-half-month-long class that it is today, 30×500. I built the first one with my friend Alex Hillman, who’s awesome, who’s bootstrapped a community and a physical office space, for co-working and a whole bunch of other stuff, in Philadelphia. He’s amazing. He’s been a business consultant as well as stuff, and he helped me with the first version, and then he couldn’t do it anymore, time-wise.

And I flipped all the stuff around and created a community to go along with the class. I say, “created a community.” I basically meant open the mailing list and invited people to talk on it. The students have really created the community.

And so now I have this three-and-a-half-long mentorship program, which includes a lot of kind of mind-bending lessons an exercises that will help somebody get away from what I call “idea quicksand,” where you have a fantastic idea and then you either see someone else already did it or you get depressed.

You’re like, “There’s competitors. Is the market saturated? Can I validate this idea? What if I can’t validate this idea? What if I can’t build the whole thing and it won’t be like I thought it was?” Basically, everyone goes… [makes bomb-dropping sound] It ends in death, and never shipping anything, or shipping things no one wants. And so the very first thing we do in 30×500 is turn that around. I say, “No ideas,” [laughs] for the first month almost.

It’s all about learning about business, about how to come up with an infinite number of ideas, valid ideas which are pre-validated. You don’t have to have the idea then validate it. It’s all about turning the process on its head, coming up with as many potential profitable products as possible, learning to do market research, learning to really sell those ideas to people before you build it, and all sorts of good stuff: marketing, productivity, how to trim it down to a tiny thing you can ship, all that stuff.

The class is all about that, and it’s pretty intense. But we’ve had an amazing wave of launches lately, and I’m so happy.

Patrick: Yeah. People will not be surprised, based on my karma score, but I get most of my news through Hacker News and saw multiple of them on the front page in the last couple of days. Let’s see, there was, oh, shoot, projector, the one that does designer stuff and client stuff. (Patrick notes: I was thinking of PlanScope). I’m sorry, I can never…

Amy: It’s like project management and budget and scope management for freelancers and agencies to use with their clients. The client sees where their money is going, which is a huge problem, as you may know.

Patrick: Right. Yeah. I think you’ve mentioned this before, but there’s… so, a piece of received wisdom in the community, which, I will be totally honest, I have said this many times, is, “Don’t make things for people who are like you, because developers/designers, et cetera, don’t pay for software.”

I think you have an opinion on this as somebody who successfully sells time-tracking management and who just had multiple customers, or multiple, I guess, students from the program launch straight into the designer community and totally kill it. But what’s your opinion on that?

Amy: It’s not true.

[popping sound]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: My water bottle. That was dramatic! That was my water bottle going, “Pop!”

[laughter]

Amy: It’s simply not true, pop, which is a polite way to put it.

[laughter]

Amy: I mean, if you look around at all these companies that are making so much money off the developer and designer audience like, GitHub, linda.com, Basecamp started exclusively with developers and designers. That was their market. They marketed to people like them, the small agencies and the individuals, and it grew out from there. Massively, it did. But they started with that core audience. That’s how I knew about it. I found out about it on an invite-only design community way back in 2005.

I usually have a whole list. PeepCode, look up PeepCode. Jeff’s does very well. Let’s see, Rueben from Bidsketch. It’s a total one-man operation. He just dramatically increased his prices, and he’s doing fantastically. Bidsketch is all about preparing beautiful, templatized proposals for your clients. There’s so much, FreshBooks, Harvest, all these other time trackers which make way more money than I do. There’s a lot. A lot.

And not all of those are exclusively designer/developer anymore, but a lot of them started that way and they branched out as they grew. But there are a lot of developer-only ones as well. Look at all these apps for server monitoring (Patrick notes: use it, love it) or Rails Screencasts from many different people, not just Jeff. There’s just tons, and tons, and tons of stuff.

So, I don’t know where the idea that they don’t buy comes from because there are products everywhere that are successful.

Patrick: I think it’s partly a projection thing, like, “I don’t buy anything and therefore people like me must not buy stuff.” Which, there are many issues with projecting your behavior onto other people.

Keith: And really, I think there’s also a… so, this is not just the Hacker News crowd, this is not just the Slashdot crowd, this is not just the techie crowd, there are a lot of people. I think the naysayers are the people who have more time than money, is honestly what it comes down to.

Because, honestly, if I had a ton of time, if I was working a nine-to-five job, had a set number of hours a day I worked at a fixed income, at that, and I needed time-tracking software, I would probably write my own on the weekend because I have more time than I have money at that point.

For someone who’s trying to run or start their own business, they suddenly have more money than they have time. Not that they’re making tons of money but because their time is much more valuable because there are so many other things they could be doing.

Patrick: and I have actually talked about this because I need to write my own invoicing software and stuff like that. I finally did not because I thought I could set up an MVP in about a week and take another week to fix any bugs so that’s two weeks of my time that it would take to build just my invoicing software. Or I could pay $20 to $50 a month for someone else’s invoicing software. That’s a no-brainer. Two weeks worth of billable work versus $50 a month. No-brainer at all.

Amy: Absolutely, but how long did you think about buying the podcasting equipment?

Keith: Actually, we just kind of fell into that.

Amy: A lot of people say they don’t buy stuff. They actually buy stuff left and right, they just weren’t paying attention. Not that you bought it mindlessly while you were sleep walking or anything. When you think back in your memory you think when did I buy things? It just doesn’t pop up.

Keith: I’m gradually getting better about it. The podcasting equipment, I was like we need podcasting equipment. OK, done. A couple years ago I started Bingo Card Creator on a $60 budget and when you only have 60 in the budget you get very creative about not spending money, but these days the budget is much more than $60 and I have to sometimes slap myself and say no, implementing this myself is absolutely not the right call.

I was talking to a buddy of mine and asked, “Is there any way I can optimize Redis such that it will use 15 megabytes less of RAM on the server? Then I won’t have to upgrade to the next higher tier of VPS.” He said, “What’s the next higher tier of VPS?” “$20.” “Do we need to have the rest of this conversation?” “OK, OK. I get it, I get it.” Gradually, very gradually I’m starting to get it.

Amy: It takes time. Most people aren’t like you, even developers. That’s fairly unusual. Most of us, especially Americans, we just tend to throw money at stuff.

Keith: I think we’re very much conditioned by living in Japan. It’s weird. Once you get to certain price points, like low price points for some reason people hee and haw over much more than they would decide over something of a large price point. If you’re spending $1,000 it’s easy to spend another $100. If you’re spending $10 or $15 people seem to think about it a lot more.

Amy: It’s true.

Keith: The old president of my company, multi, multi-millionaire (Patrick notes: he is credited with bringing the Internet to Japan, you do the math), he does a lot of donations and stuff to colleges and stuff and he had done this multi-million dollar donation to a college and he had just finished signing the contract and he’s leaving and he goes to a convenience store and picks up a bottle of water and he just goes, “I can’t believe water at a convenience store is 135 yen. That’s just so expensive.”

I’m like you just contributed millions of dollars and you’re complaining about $1.35.

Amy: I think we all fall prey to that one. The other day I was in a convenience store and I realized I needed a toothbrush and I bought a toothbrush and I was like why is this toothbrush $1.75? I’ve been paying like 3.50 each. I caught myself thinking I’m going to buy my toothbrushes there from now on. I was like wait a minute.

Keith: You actually consider should I go to a different store to get the cheaper toothbrush?

Amy: It only passed a moment, I have to say, to my credit, but it occurred to me. I was like come on, Amy. I’ve occasionally thought I should have kept the exact amount, 20 percent or whatever, and I’m like come on, really? Am I even wasting a cycle of my brain on 50 cents?

I’m not like that with buying software tools for business at all, so I think what you said earlier about selling to businesses is totally true, but I think there’s a lot more people who are just not commenting on things who just quietly buy the things they want or need whether or not they have a business.

Keith: This might not be a new thing for the 30×500, but you’re starting to focus more on building apps and things for businesses than for B2C stuff which, as somebody who knows and loves many B2C customers for his Bingo product, is totally the right way to go.

Amy: I like how you used love in a negative way. [laughs]

Patrick: I do love my customers.

Amy: I understand.

Patrick: I love them even when they write I can’t access your product from the blue Googles, only from the green Googles, can you please help me out? That’s still from a place of love.

It’s just from a place of I can do my math on what my hourly is on that versus an appointment reminder where I get to charge a car dealership every month. I’ve had car dealerships say is it 200 a day or 200 a month? I’m like it’s 200 a month and they’re like “Whatever. Either would have worked.”

Amy: That’s nice.

Patrick: In other news, I’m re-pricing.

Keith: The correct response to that is not $200 a month. If they ask is it 200 a day or 200 a month you say a day. If they say that’s too expensive you say then a week. [laughs] Start with the expensive one first.

Amy: You’ve got to capture that customer surplus. You want that.

Patrick: We were thinking about talking about pricing grids. One of the things that you can actually learn if you spend too much time hanging out on the Internet and talking to people about this is that a lot of SaaS companies use the four column pricing grid strategy typically.

I’ve talked to a lot of folks about this one. The one that really prints the cash, usually about 50% of sales, is the one to the extreme right that’s priced at businesses at prices that people think no one can will pay. Say, $250 a month for Wufoo.

It’s just that people who are spending essentially other people’s money, it just comes out of a budget so it doesn’t matter to them whether it’s 200 or 250 or 500. As long as it still only requires one signature or zero signatures it’s whatever it is.

Amy: Yeah. I hear the amount per signatures for an employee generating expenses in a large company is usually around $500. I think under $500 it does not require a signature.

Patrick: That’s consistent with my experience. Anybody who’s doing a SaaS pricing grid where the top price tops out at $20 or $30 should really…

Keith: Rethink what they’re doing.

Patrick: …put anything you need to just get an enterprise level, even if you don’t necessarily call it the enterprise level, and price it at $250 or $500. This is free money. And, oh, goodness…

Keith: So, not even looking at this as a huge business. When people think of business, they think of huge corporations. But even for small companies that are making a good amount of money, let’s say that a company has maybe six people working there that are contractors.

And a good contractor will run you about 100 to 200 an hour, depending on what they’re doing. If a product on the Internet costs you the same as one hour of that person’s time and saves them over an hour a month, then it’s a no-brainer to get that, right?

Amy: And that is exactly why, actually… Patrick, you asked this earlier. I’ve always told people, in 30×500 and “Year of Hustle”: do not sell to consumers. And some people will say, “But I have this idea.” I’m like, “No. You can do it, but I’m not going to support you because you’re going exactly against what I told you to do.” For that reason. For that reason.

You can sell on value to businesspeople. You can say, “You spend $80 an hour on this freelancer. I can save you 45 minutes of their time and charge you $60, and that is a win.” It’s certainly not a loss. I think I did the math wrong; I think that’s exactly $60. But let’s say half an hour of their time for 50 bucks or whatever. No, that’s still wrong. [laughs]

Patrick: We get the general idea.

Amy: You know what I’m saying. [laughs]

Keith: So there is really two places that you can really provide enumerable benefits to your customers. One is saving time. Because a consultant takes time. The amount of money that you save is directly related to how much you can charge, right? The other one is anything that increases sales.

Amy: Totally.

Keith: For example, Visual Website Optimizer prints money for customers. Anyone who is using Visual Website Optimizer is literally printing money with every single test that they do.

Patrick: This is the A-B testing software we often recommend to clients.

Keith: It is so amazing. So their largest for enterprise is “call us.” That’s fine. Their second-largest is $250 a month. OK? $250 a month for increases of sales starting at two percent, five percent, 10 percent, 50 percent. As good as your test can be, that’s how much money you are making with their $250-a-month service. It’s amazing.

Amy: It is amazing. They could probably charge more for that.

Keith: They could.

Amy: Ruben Gomez, who does Bidsketch, I mentioned earlier, he tweeted repeatedly and told me personally how much more money he was making when he drastically increased his prices. And I’ve been nagging him to write a blog post. So I’m going to keep nagging him until it happens, but his story is pretty incredible.

I’m not going to release the numbers because he hasn’t done it yet. You would think that he’s looking at private bids instead of people, the freelancers and consultants. And it worked out so well for him, so well. It’s such a big deal.

Patrick: I think he’s coming to MicroConf. We’re going to lock him in a hotel room in Las Vegas and not let him out until the blog post is written. (Patrick notes: Did not actually happen at MicroConf.)

Amy: Yes. Yes!

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: I vote yes. Let’s do that. [laughs] He’s a cool guy. I like him a lot. So yeah, you were saying more sales, or saving time. And I also think of, people usually go for cost reduction, I think, when they talk about monetary value. But I don’t see nearly as many products being successful for reducing costs, unless it’s extreme, because penny-pinchers aren’t people who spend money.

Patrick: One thing that’s great for software is if you can tell a story. Ultimately, all sales is about telling stories and painting the right picture in peoples’ minds, but tell a story where it reduces the amount of employee labor required to do something, particularly if that either allows them to switch them to tasks that actually generate money or, I hate sounding like a business, but “decreasing headcount.”

If you can successfully pitch to a business that you are going to “decrease headcount,” that is a total win in 99.95 percent of cases. So, Appointment Reminder, my software that does phone calls to the clients of professional-services businesses. I often say that if you have an office manager who costs you $4,000 month, who half of her time is literally talking to people’s voicemail to attempt to get them into the office at the proper time, then spend $200 a month and save $2,000 on salary costs.

One of my more successful clients is saying that, basically, I saved him enough on that to put his daughter through Harvard.

Amy: So you need to raise your prices. There’s that customer surplus.

Patrick: I need to raise my prices. Yeah, I so do. I did something very stupid when I launched Appointment Reminder, and I’ll just tell it to everybody to have you avoid doing it. I launched with the four-tier pricing structure, like usual, and the bottom plan was $9 for a, quote-unquote, “personal plan.”

So my idea was, “I don’t really care about the $9. I just want people using this.” I should’ve wanted people using it at 30 bucks a month for the cheap plan, because the people who pay $9 are, my word is “pathological customer,” for people who are penny-pinching, and they have every kind of support issue that you could possibly imagine, like, “How do I record telephone calls if I don’t have a telephone? Can I log into the website from my Kindle, which doesn’t really have a web browser in it?” Yadda-yadda-dee-da-da.

And they expect turnaround times of two minutes or less to customer-support issues arising at 3:00 AM in the morning.

Keith: I would really like to see someone. I don’t know if anyone has done a blog post about this, about a breakdown of the number of support calls and support messages you have, broken down by which plan they’re in.

Patrick: I will totally bet that it is the cheap-o Charlies who contribute a vastly, vastly disproportionate…

Keith: Like 80 percent…

Amy: Me too. Heard that over and over again from everybody. Also, this is something that you could absolutely do with our upcoming software-as-a-service product, Charm, which is a customer-support and true customer-relationship management tool. Everyone says CRM, they mean lead tracker, which I find to be terribly dishonest. [laughs] It’s like, one, they’re not customers yet, they’re leads.

And then after they are customers, doesn’t help you at all. The only exception I’ve seen is Intercom, which is pretty neat. But they don’t call themselves a CRM, I don’t think. But Charm will let you filter requests by plans or price points.

And so you’ll be able to profile feature requests and issues, specific ones, like, “Please add invoicing feature,” that kind of thing, by which plan or how much your customers are paying you. But also, you will be able to see how many incidents you get from which type of customer. But everyone I’ve…

Patrick: That would be great blog-post fodder if you can get anonymized data for that. Well, it’s not a great idea, but yeah.

Keith: No. I mean, that’s easy to get anonymized data from. You say, “My support numbers are X, and they belong to the lowest tier.” You can use even general numbers for that, I would think.

Amy: Do you mean if you blog about it, Patrick, anonymized?

Patrick: Well. So, I’ve already retracted this idea, but the idea I have now retracted was, oh, you could aggregate across all Charm customers, whether it was the cheap-o plan or whatever that generated the most customer support inquiries. I’m like, “No, that’s a wee bit aggressive.” [laughs]

Amy: Do you think that’s like a cats.jpg moment? Because I don’t really think so. I don’t think it’s a cats.jpg moment.

Patrick: The rational part of me thinks that it’s not a cats.jpg moment, but I think that loud people will perceive it as a cats.jpg moment. Really, this is inside baseball here, so let me tell everyone what a cats.jpg is.

Keith: First of all, yeah, I have no idea… [laughs]

Amy: Sorry. [laughs]

Patrick: So, 37signals said, “Oh, the 100 millionth file has just been uploaded to Basecamp, and it was called cats.jpg.” And they tweeted that out or put it in a blog post or something. And the folks who were worried about the Facebookization of all services were like, “Oh my God! 37signals can view all this data that we’re uploading to their servers, and they’re not treating it in a privacy-conscious manner! Brar!”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: So, OK, yes, A, it is totally technically possible for people to view data that you upload to your servers. That’s kind of how it works. And if you don’t trust them on that, you definitely should not be using Basecamp. But it was kind of a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of thing about whether it’s OK to publish that even if it’s a trivial amount of customer data. No one’s business is going to collapse over the words “cats.jpg” getting out, where if it was “letter of intent to dismiss Mary Smith for sexual misconduct.doc…”

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: They might’ve anonymized that. [laughs]

Patrick: Right.

Amy: I don’t think they would’ve put that up there. I think people were more upset over the idea that they were looking at individuals’ accounts. But there’s a lot of apps out there which say how many bookmarks or how many dollars have been invoiced or how many hours have been tracked. I’ve never seen anyone ever complain.

Keith: Complain about that, right.

Amy: I think FreshBooks and Hunch, they all do these infographic-style breakdowns of the data. But it’s totally anonymized, like you said, so it’s totally in aggregate. I can’t imagine. Well, you know what? I’m going to do it with Freckle anyway, so we’ll find out. [laughs]

Keith: The noisy people, the people who are complaining, I think, about the cats.jpg, I mean, aggre-data… [sputters] Aggregate data.

Amy: Aggre-data.

Keith: Aggre-data. There we go, aggre-data.

Amy: That’s great.

Keith: Aggre-data is brought from individual data, right? So if you have source to create the aggregate data, you have the original source data. So there’s really no difference in the privacy, right? It’s not like they purposely were looking at anyone’s single Basecamp to find cats.jpg. They just did, “Query, item number one million. What is name of that item?” Right? I don’t know, like Patrick said, tempest in a teapot.

Amy: How different would it feel if I wrote a blog post on Freckle, which is a time-tracking productivity tool, that said that 30 percent of all hours logged yesterday were overhead hours that are non-billable, versus I said the 100 millionth hour was logged to a project called “Cat.” You know what I’m saying? I don’t think people would care.

Keith: They didn’t even mention the project name, right?

Amy: No…

Keith: See, I think it would be different if you said that. But if you said, “The millionth task that was logged was overhead,” I don’t know how interesting that is. [laughs] See, me personally, that’s perfectly fine.

Patrick: See, this is the reason why it’s a tempest in a teapot. The only reason that anecdote was put into the post anyhow is because it’s harmless and silly and trivial.

Amy: Hilarious. [laughs]

Patrick: And if the 100 millionth item had been a business document, it just wouldn’t have been mentioned, because, A, privacy issues, but B, it isn’t funny. But because it’s stupid cat photos, it’s funny. And, brar, tempest in teapot. I avoided commenting on those threads because I thought commenting would make me dumber.

Amy: [laughs]

Keith: [laughing] We’re doing a whole podcast about it.

Amy: It’s true. I’m sorry I brought it up. [laughs]

Patrick: I feel myself getting more stupid with every sentence that comes out of my mouth.

Amy: Oh, no! I killed Patrick: McKenzie’s brain cells.

Patrick: What were our value-creating topics we were going to talk about…?

Keith: OK, so value-creating topics. Number one was the cat picture that Basecamp…

Patrick: No, that was not on the list.

Keith: Oh, that was not on the list. OK. [laughs]

Patrick: We were going to talk about…so, Amy, your business trajectory has been from one where you were consulting and not really loving it, to put it mildly. Now you’re 100 percent on the products. I started with the product/day job and got quit of the day job as of two years ago this week, which was the second-best decision ever.

Amy: Happy anniversary!

Patrick: Thank you.

Keith: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Patrick: But I kind of got sucked into consulting, starting about the same time I quit the day job, because people threw motivation on my company at me. And it was just hard to say no to the checks. And they generally come from people who are not Fortune 500 companies and have a little less BS associated with it, like the minimum BS that you can possibly have while still taking money from other people, I think.

So I’m pretty happy with that. But in the future, I would love to transition back into 100 percent product. And Keith is kind of at the end of the totem pole. Keith also quit. Like we talked about on the podcast last time, he quit his crazy Japanese day job and now works for consulting clients who are much better. But he also nurses dreams of having a…

Keith: A product and actually creating something of my own, right?

Amy: Yeah. That’s an awesome feeling.

Keith: It is.

Amy: I can tell you, from over here, it’s great.

[laughter]

Amy: Why didn’t I do this three years earlier? Keep at it. It’s worth it.

Patrick: So people have told me that they’re actually interested in how the lifestyle works out. Everyone grows up knowing lots of examples of people who work day jobs, and everyone kind of knows, “OK, you work for about 40 hours a week. You go commute to an office.” You know what the packaged lifestyle deal of working for a day job is, whereas they don’t know what it is to run a product. So, can we just spill the beans and say it’s F’ing awesome all the time?

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Keith: Except for customer support.

Patrick: Even for customer support…

Amy: Whenever I have to touch any other institution, like government or healthcare or banking, I kind of want to kill myself.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s true.

Amy: But it’s no worse than working with marketing people, [laughs] which is what I was doing as a consultant.

Patrick: And we never have to talk to an HR department, which is worth its weight in gold.

Amy: I haven’t worked at company big enough to do that, so I’ve avoided a special kind of hell. I feel very lucky for that.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: One of the things that I’m really appreciating this year is I’m getting married in June — yay — and pretty much taking off. I just told my consulting clients that, basically, either get themselves in by the end of May or it’s not happening till September, and just took off the entire stretch in there and will just not be working.

Amy: That’s awesome.

Patrick: I get a lot of people asking me, “How can you do that? The servers are going to burn down in a fiery badness.”

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: Just verify for me that I’m not insane here. That’s not really how things work, right? These businesses…

Amy: Of course it’s how it works. The moment you turn your head, everything explodes in a fireball, then Godzilla comes out of the ocean. [laughs] Come on.

Keith: This is half-true, especially with Patrick’s track record.

Patrick: That’s not actually true.

Keith: OK, let me put it this way. [laughs]

Amy: Uh-oh. Is there dirt here? Is there dirt to dish? Do we get to dish dirt? [laughs]

Keith: No, no, there’s no dirt. He’s actually blogged about this. Whenever he is fully available, he generally has no support costs on his products, right? I think like, what, an hour of support a day or something like that?

Patrick: Way less than that, dude.

Keith: Way less than that. OK. Maybe 10 minutes…

Patrick: 20 minutes a week.

Keith: 20 minutes a week. OK. Anytime he gets on an airplane, or anything where he has no Internet connectivity, the server goes down. [laughs]

Patrick: This is not actually true. It just happened…

Keith: One out of 10 times. [laughs]

Amy: Just seems like it.

Patrick: It happened when I was doing an intercontinental flight back at Halloween, which is unfortunately the busy season for bingo cards.

Keith: You had another one when you were moving. You were moving and didn’t have phone access for one day, and the server crashed.

Patrick: Oh, God. [laughs] So this is two events in six years.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: The key that we were trying to emphasize to impressionable youngsters who are listening to this podcast is that you can step away from the business and it will not consume your life.

Keith: You can.

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: People will happily pay you money, even if you’re not working on the product every day, because people don’t care if you’re working on the product every day, they only care what they’re getting out of it.

Keith: The point I’m trying to make is, and what you say is true. 20 hours a week, you can go off and do what you want. People don’t care if you are working eight hours a day on your product, and you really shouldn’t be after you’ve launched to any certain degree. But keep your phone on. [laughs]

Amy: I’m sorry, I couldn’t parse that sentence. You can only not work 20 hours a week and people don’t care? I’m confused. [laughs]

Keith: Sorry, sorry. Did I really say that?

Amy: Yes.

Patrick: The English…

Keith: English? OK. So, as I’m sure everyone knows, we’ve been in Japan way, way, way too long.

Amy: OK.

Keith: So your customers do not care that you’re only working 20 minutes a week, or they don’t expect you to be working eight hours a day, because as long as the service works, they don’t care.

Amy: That’s right.

Keith: And you should not be working that much once your product is launched. However, you should always have your cell phone or some sort of Internet connection on in case things do explode, or someone to watch it for you.

Amy: So, we just took a month off in New Zealand. And then we came back for a week and a half. We’re doing city hopping in the US, San Francisco and Atlanta. And I actually did do email every two to four days, because I wanted to keep up with my class. We had somebody handling front-line support for the two apps.

We did have a server problem with Charm, but we haven’t launched that product publicly yet because we’re still ironing out those infrastructure kinks, right? And so I think my husband actually worked like two hours the entire trip, because he doesn’t have his class that he’s running. And nothing bad happened.

So here’s the thing, right? When you have a lot of customers, something bad can happen, and you can lose a few and you can be like, “You know what? I lost $200 a month of business and I took a month off. Who cares? Who cares?” And you can just gain those back. You come back, you’re like, “I’ll get new customers.” It’s not a big deal.

Someone will always cancel for some reason. It doesn’t really matter. In Freckle, we’ve gone down quite a few times. But it’s a product where you’re not in it all day, and something goes down once in a while. People don’t even get mad as long as you try to get back on and apologize. If it happens in the middle of the night, so be it. I’m not getting up in the middle of the night. No way.

Keith: And this is one thing. I think a lot of people on the Internet think that there is a limit to the number of customers you can have. They always talk about market shares and stuff like that. And talking about market shares when you’re going after big companies or products that need millions and millions of users is one thing.

So Bingo Card Creator is a very good one, because people always say, “How much of a market is there for teachers that need bingo cards?” Right? And there’s, compared to the number of programmers in the world, probably not many. But there are a f-ton, right?

Patrick: “More than I could ever hope to get to my website” is the short version.

Keith: If you were to even get one percent, you would never have to work again.

Patrick: I hate the one-percent math…

Amy: Oh, me too.

Patrick: Just as a comparable for folks, Bingo Card Creator, which is almost like the canonical example of, “Oh, God, that was a poor choice in niche selection, Patrick. Why did you do that?” has over 200,000 users and 6,000 paying customers. So if you think your thing for programmers is going to be more niche than that, you probably need to recalibrate expectations.

Amy: You’re probably wrong, also.

Patrick: And if I only had recurring revenue. That’s another thing.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: Recurring revenue, man, that’s the best kind of revenue, isn’t it?

Amy: It is crack, in a good way. It’s crack that doesn’t make you sick. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And it’s legal and stuff. And you don’t have to inject it. I don’t know. How do you take crack? Stop me now… [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Our street cred is going down the toilet right now. [laughs]

Patrick: So, definitely, if you have the opportunity to make a SaaS business, do the monthly charge thing that all the cool kids are doing, because it does wonderful, wonderful things for your cash flow. It helps you absorb advertising costs better. It will allows you to have high customer lifetime values without your customers perceiving the service as being expensive at all.

Amy: It’s true, that is a very good point! Recurring revenue is the Holy Grail and I love it. And back to your market share comment, recently, I mean it seems recently but it was like six or eight weeks ago, people were like…someone on Hacker News like, ‘Do people still pay for porn or these other things?’

And you were trying to be like, ‘I don’t know about that but I know people pay for a lot of these other tools, among which what you deem time tracking.’ And then the same or different person, very skeptical is like, ‘People don’t pay for time tracking!’

Keith: All people pay for time tracking! [laughs]

Amy: That’s how I read Hacker News, by the way. And then mentioned me and that’s just one example. In any industry there can be one example which makes money and I had to try them and then go, ‘You know what? There’s at least six to eight companies which make geometrically more money than I do!’ [laughs]

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: And then it went silent, surprisingly. [laughs]

Keith: [laughs] Always does!

Amy: I think a lot of people don’t, they don’t have any clue but they think that they do, about market share. What I hear a lot is, ‘Oh, but that market is saturated.’ You don’t even know what that means. That’s not what you think it means. Saturated means people don’t buy stuff anymore but they do.

If you have a pool that is very popular, has a lot of customers, there’s got to be a significant portion of those customers who are being ill served by that product.

Keith: Right, right.

Amy: It cannot be all things to all people. So someone like us who just needs a few thousand customers to live like a king, can swoop in and serve a segment of those customers, which were created for you by…

Keith: By someone else.

Amy: …this competitor which is allegedly saturating the market.

Patrick: That’s something I’ve been telling people for a while, it’s that competitors are a wonderful thing because it’s an engraved invitation from God that tells you that there’s money to be made in a particular place.

Amy: Yeah.

Keith: And there are always going to be people using your competitor’s products that are not happy with them that might want to go somewhere else. If you have a feature that other places don’t have, and even if you have a combination of features, so everyone else in this space might have the exact same features but they don’t have them in the same combination, you then have a niche of an already proven market share that want the features that you’re offering.

Patrick: We shouldn’t be the engineers here, either . We start talking about feature, feature, feature but we can honestly take something which is feature equivalent or even at less than the feature parity and just market it in such a way that, you know, it actually worked for people who it isn’t working for right now.

And that would itself justify a different business. Like, you know, there must be 500,000 big freaking enterprise project management/time tracking/Sa* , yada-yada things. Freckle doesn’t have to compete with them because you’re addressing just a different market than the kind of folks who want to buy consulting ware from IBM. So even with just a fraction of the “feature set,” you can just say, “Look, it will do what you need to do and get you back to charging your customers money.” Then that makes it a viable option for them, whereas the IBM consultingware wouldn’t be. Who would you consider to be Freckle’s big competitors?

Amy: Harvest.

Keith: Harvest.

Amy: “No Tool At All” I think is our biggest competitor.

Patrick: That is a big one.

Keith: That is a big one, that is a big one.

Amy: It’s huge! [laughs]

Patrick: Folks ask me how I convince people to stop using whatever their business’ scheduling software is and start using Appointment Reminder because you have to have the appointment schedule to send out the appointments reminders at the right time. And the easiest answer to that is, all you have to do is out-compete paper. It’s not very hard.

Keith: Moves people, especially techies, think that there is a solution out there already that people are using in the space that they don’t understand. And one of the things that I’ve seen with my clients especially is, they don’t have a solution other than Excel and a piece of paper.

Amy: Oh, it’s so true.

Keith: If you can beat down Excel you’re winning.

Patrick: Yeah.

Keith: The sad thing is how many don’t beat out Excel, right? [laughs]

Amy: Be careful about that because a lot of… so, I teach my students a lot of different things, one of which is a list of failure archetypes. Type one failures, failures that cannot be resuscitated by more work and marketing and repositioning and all that stuff.

And one of them is a “Cure for Religion:” trying to solve something that people don’t see as a problem.

Keith: Don’t want to see, right.

Amy: Lots of people love Excel and you will never pry it from their cold, dead fingers. Because they friggin love it. So you can be better than Excel and they’ll be like, ‘I don’t care, I’m not interested. I love Excel.’ And a lot of people cannot be reformed by software! [laughs]

Keith: It’s actually funny. My old company, they were having, not cash flow issues but reporting issues on their invoices and monies received and everything. It was taking so long because they were doing it over seven or eight Excel files and nothing was tied together and the sales guys were not reporting right.

So they commissioned me as an employee to spend a month or two creating an invoicing system that would tie back to all their sales and everything and just make it really easy to use.

I got all the requirements, made it all. I thought it was probably the easiest thing to use ever. Everyone said, ‘Oh, this is so easy to use.’ No one used it. [laughs] Like what they would do …

Amy: I think that was worth where that was going! [laughs]

Keith: Yeah, actually the sales guys really like it. The sales guys would put it the data, copy it into Excel and send it to the accounting firm. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah!

Keith: I mean, the saddest thing ever, to have your software simply be a copy paste solution for Excel. [laughs]

Amy: Yeah, that sounds really terrible.

Patrick: I don’t know if that’s sad or opportunity because I have definitely created things where for, largely not in publicly accessible parts of the product but if people say “the workflow requires X at the end of it”. If that is the issue that’s preventing you from paying me a motivational amount of money every month then wham! There’s a button on your dashboard now that exports CSV files. Go to town!

Although that’s an issue I think we’ve all talked about before. Customers, the things they tell you are they reasons they’re not buying the software are generally not the reasons they’re actually not buying the software!

Amy: They’re usually, yes. I find it is a mistake to listen to people. Not just in like, I don’t take their advice, this is different. I watch they do, so the whole ‘programmers don’t buy things’, I see people saying that, meanwhile they pay for like Apple products and GitHub and PeepCode.

And they say it with a straight face when they say it, “I would sign up for your service if XYZ.” And I’m like, “What would that look like? Why do you need that?” And they come up with something that’s so bizarre. I’m like, “Why don’t you do it this way?” And they’re like, “Oh…”

Because when people ask for features, like a client, most of us who are experienced consultants know that you can’t take anything they say at face value. You’ll be like, “What is your purpose?” They’re like, “I need this animated Flash widget, blah blah blah.”

And then you find out they need something really simple, and they just came up with that because it looked likely and they like to sound like they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. [laughs] It’s our job to figure that out and look at what they actually do.

Keith: Customers, businesses, clients, all of them together, most of them have really no idea how their business runs, I think. Patrick: always says that there’s a key number to any business that directly influences the bottom line of sales. And the number of companies that actually know that key number are few and far between, I think.

Amy: What kind of number are we talking about?

Keith: I did a recent re-jiggering of an online registration service (Patrick notes: more natural English might be “a hotel booking website”), and I did some consulting for them, and they were under the impression that 90 percent of their reservations came from the website instead of phone or walk-ins. And they were under the impression that they were having about a 60-percent, or a really high, conversion rate from people who came into the system.

And once we brought out the actual numbers, they saw that there was only 20 percent actually using the website. And of those 20 percent, only, I think, like nine percent actually completed a reservation on the website. And so it’s not that those numbers were necessarily bad, but they had a completely opposite view of the reality of their business, right?

And they had been doing that for five, six years. If they had noticed that five, six years earlier, they could’ve completely changed their strategy, but instead they were poking along because they were under a misconception.

Amy: Right. That’s a pretty big misconception.

Keith: That’s a pretty big [laughs] misconception, I know.

Patrick: That happens over and over again in my consulting career. I’m lucky I get to work with savvy, intelligent people. I mean, hey, they pay me.

Keith: [laughs]

Patrick: They’re all good companies run by smart people, and yet many of them don’t have the infrastructure in place to tell them material facts about the business that you can’t get just by looking at a screen in Google Analytics. That directly influences decision-making about those material facts.

Amy: Right. We tend not to notice what isn’t there. We just work on whatever’s in front of us. We don’t look for the thing that’s missing.

Patrick: That’s an interesting topic. As one business operator to another, what kind of things do you track for your business?

Amy: So, since we last talked, it hasn’t really changed that much. [laughs] We have a lot more… Actually, that’s not true. We set up KISSmetrics, since we track a lot of things now. But we do not have a very good sales funnel tracking, and that’s because we plan to redo the sales page completely. This is my white whale, perhaps, or some other thing that will never get finished…

[laughter]

Amy: …and I should give up on before I become a horrible novel, or something. Because that’s going to happen. But we track a lot of revenue, we track churn rate, we track feature adoption now. But, I’ll be honest, I haven’t looked at it lately. And by lately, I mean the last three months.

We’ve been totally occupied with other stuff. In fact, we haven’t developed, or even deployed finished features, for Freckle for months because of the international move, all the other drama we had in our personal lives, travel, and Thomas getting his immigration stuff sorted out. It’s kind of like your three month vacation, only we weren’t really having fun but for one month of it.

[laughter]

Patrick: Back to a previous topic, because you charge customers monthly, the revenue went up every month anyhow.

Amy: Yes. It did. It did. It went up no matter what. What’s really awesome is that I, a few years ago, got sick with mono for the second time.

Keith: Oh my God.

Amy: I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, which kind of blew. For a while I was so sick I couldn’t do anything. The best thing I could do in the day was to get up out of bed and go to the sofa and watch stupid TV. I couldn’t even watch smart TV because it felt like I was having an agoraphobic attack in a crowd with all the facts.

Literally, I was averse to facts. I couldn’t cope. It turns out that was low cortisol, believe it or not. I couldn’t make any decisions or do anything at all for three months, work wise. Zip. Thomas manned the support, he talked to the one developer who was doing work for us, and it was fine.

Our business grew even when I was on practically bed rest, and that was a really transformative moment for me. I knew we could take these vacations. I knew we could do this stuff. But that was like a, “Holy shit!” moment. Am I allowed to say that? [laughs]

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: Awesome. It was. I was just like, “Oh my…”

Keith: [laughs] We’ve been cursing like sailors the whole time, so…

Amy: Oh, OK. [laughs]

Patrick: You have, I haven’t.

Keith: Patrick: doesn’t.

Patrick: My half of the podcast is PG, his is PG-13.

Amy: Once I felt better and actually had the cortisol to think about it…

[laughter]

Amy: …it was like a sky has opened up, ray of light, choir of angels singing and throwing cash.

[laughter]

Patrick: I love that image.

Amy: It was the best. I was like, “You know what? I can’t be fired. I cannot be laid off. I do not have to worry about unpaid sick leave. I have it made.” I think that’s one of the big reasons that I’m such a tireless promoter of what I call Bacon Business. Products that bring home the bacon, that make money that you sell directly to people who buy them. Not advertising, not marketplaces, not venture backed, because they can change lives.

To get all philosophical for a moment, it’s epic to be able to live this kind of lifestyle. Isn’t it? It’s amazing. I think not enough people promote it in a way that isn’t like, “Oh, well, they’re just super successful. That’s not standard and I could never live like that.” The examples out there are just too lofty. And then there are people like us.

Patrick: Yeah. I know, so I’ve been hanging around with the small software developer crowd for a while and there’s a lot of businesses that might be like Bingo Card Creator in terms of scope, but maybe up to an order of magnitude and more in terms of revenue, just by doing things that you wouldn’t expect that people could do as a full time thing that they’re doing as a full time thing. They get all the benefits of the lifestyle.

It’s like being a rock star minus the groupies. You never have to show up anywhere at any time. Money just appears magically in the bank account. Seriously, guys. For any of you who are on the fence try it. It’s awesome.

Amy: It is.

Patrick: I’ve got a lot of respect for the Silicon Valley startup types and I’ve kicked around doing that myself a couple of times and have been offered motivational amounts of money to do that. “This is awesome!” is something that you will not hear from lots of the folks over there.

Amy: I wonder why.

Patrick: It’s like being a lawyer or consulting like management consulting. There are people the lifestyle works for and there’s people that the lifestyle just does not work for. I don’t know if I could think of anyone off the top of my head who has started their own software business and went full time at it and was like “no.”

Keith: “I want to go back to my nine to five.”

Patrick: “I really want more challenges in life.” That’s something I hear from a lot of people. “Don’t you feel bored like you don’t have enough challenges?” No, I can spin up challenges any time I want.

Amy: No one has ever said that to me. I think most people assume it’s way harder and more stressful than it is, and I understand why. I actually had a short Twitter conversation with Jason Cohen who I absolutely adore. He writes a fantastic blog, A Smart Bear. Before I say this, I want to say that I just think he’s great. I wanted him to speak at Schnitzelconf, but it was just too far for him to go.

He tweeted why do startup founders beat themselves up? It’s like why do hamsters eat their young? They just have to. I was like no. For starters, I didn’t say this in the Twitter conversation, but I used to breed gerbils and none of them ever ate their young because I took good care of them so I feel like I’m sort of an expert on both parts of this equation. I was like that’s not true.

My gist was that people do it to themselves. He said it was easier to be lenient after you’ve had objective success. I said I wouldn’t call it lenient, I call it self-respect. The truth is it doesn’t get easier after you’ve had objective success. I think a lot of people, they actually are worse to themselves after they’ve had objective success because they feel like they have something important to lose.

I know a few people who run businesses like ours, they may be more involved, some less involved, and they feel like they can’t go on vacation, they feel like they have to answer email in the middle of the night, and they do it to themselves. It’s not external. It’s all internal and I don’t think Jason believes me. [laughs]

Patrick: I’m constrained at how much I can say because he’s one of my wonderful, lovely clients, but I’ve heard that feedback from other people who, again, much like Jason I respect.

It is a psychological thing that this is a meme we really need to kill, but I think there’s a deep seeded… zeitgeist. Is that the right word? People are afraid to allow themselves to be happy and believe that success must require a certain quantum of suffering and if you’re not suffering you’re clearly not on the successful route.

Even people who are clearly by any objective measurement successful. It’s kind of a personality thing, too. Jason is a very hard-charging, type A kind of guy. He’s got a ridiculously successful company right now, he’s sold one successful company previously. If you want to look at somebody who’s got it made, Jason has it made.

There’s no external feature that would necessarily need to make Jason feel the need to beat himself up. Actually, something you said to me was very profound, that if there’s ever an issue between you and another person it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Amy: Absolutely. So true.

Patrick: I think that recompiled part of my source code when I heard it because it was just so f’ing true. I find myself quoting that to people a lot.

People have asked me, “You didn’t answer my email. Was it something I said?” I’m like, “Nope. Just an FYI, any time someone does something it’s probably because something that was just going on in their life because they’re in their life 24 hours a day and they’re in their relationship with you for like 36 seconds a day. Just don’t worry about it.”

Similarly, don’t worry about what other people are thinking of you because they’re probably thinking of you a lot less than you think they’re thinking of you. They’ve got better things to do by their perspective. Same with software, by the way. We see our own software eight+ hours a day. We know where all the skeletons are buried. We see every little imperfection. Customers, by and large, don’t care about the little things.

Amy: They don’t.

Patrick: If it makes their life better, great. You’ll have complainers who largely won’t buy it anyhow.

Keith: Especially on the backend.

Patrick: 90 percent of the customers if it accomplishes the big 48 point font promise that’s on the front page of the website they’re good. If it gets better over time, that’s great, but fundamentally they’re good. If it has a bug, no problem. Computers eat things all the time. Whatever. They will say “I’ve got better things to do than worry about it.”

Amy: All those things come from the same route, if you ask me. What Terry Pratchett called being trapped in the dark behind the eyes. It’s just that we go through our lives 100 percent privy to everything that goes on inside us, even if we don’t understand it, which most of us don’t. This has been proven by research.

When we make a mistake or we choose something we have an elaborate reason why. When someone else does the same thing we get really glib and superficial like well, I did this because I made a mistake but he did that because he’s a jerk. It all comes from being self-involved, which is the default nature of humanity.

I think you were saying it’s like a zeitgeist. That was the right word. I think it’s just human. I think a lot of us, especially in Western cultures, we tend to self-flagellate for no good reason. People call it the Puritan work ethic or whatever.

Keith: Well, it’s not just Western. I was going to say…

Patrick: Japan could teach everybody about self-flagellation. (Patrick notes: If I were not talking in real time I’d say “I could have a very long discussion on the degree to which Japan counts as ‘non-Western’ here if you wanted me to.” Side effect of getting a degree regarding that subject.)

Amy: [laughs] Fair enough.

Keith: Looking at it from the Japanese perspective, I wonder how much of it is almost like an arms race. So one of the things that happens in Japanese companies…

Patrick: Oh, God, yes. Oh.

Keith: So, going back to the startup, where people have to suffer. So they have to work the 20 hours a day kind of thing, only four hours of sleep, constantly working, not taking care of their health and stuff like that. There are people out there who only need eight hours of sleep, who enjoy working 15, 18, 20 hours a day.

I’m actually close to that. I love working. And I work much more than I probably should, because I enjoy it. It’s my hobby to be creating things. And I think people see, especially people like that who have become successful and think, “Oh, this person is successful because he only sleeps four hours a day. In order for myself to be successful, I have to only sleep four hours a day as well.” And I think it becomes an arms race for trying to be successful.

And in Japan, there’s a very similar thing with the amount of hours people work. So people think that people in Japan work long hours and they are productive for all those hours. That is the furthest thing from the truth on the planet. They sleep. They clean their ears. I had my coworker assemble a bicycle in his cubicle [laughs] during work hours, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

It’s assumed that, just like in the startup business, there are people who work long hours because they are really good and they are successful. There are people who work long hours because they are idiots and not successful, and it takes them time to do everything. But the longer the people are there, if everyone is there, it’s so much harder for you to go home, right?

Amy: Right.

Keith: If successful guy number one is working 12, 14 hours a day, you think, “Oh, I have to be there as long as he’s there. Otherwise I’m not going to be seen as being as productive as him.” So what it comes down to is a bunch of people sitting in an office for 14, 16 hours a day, only doing about four to five hours of actual work.

Amy: So it’s cargo-culting mixed with social contagion. (Patrick notes:Great line!)

Keith: Exactly.

Amy: Right.

Patrick: And like a massive game of chicken…

Amy: Yeah. [laughs]

Patrick: Chicken or prisoner’s dilemma, I guess, one of them. The first person to decide to go home gets the evil eye. I think that’s part of the startup culture, too, in that, “Oh, you quit after only 10 hours today. You must not want success enough.” We construct our own cultural pathologies, because people don’t have enough exemplars of folks in companies that said, “We worked four, six, eight hours today, and we go home to the kids, and things are fine.” The cultural pathology of overwork ends up getting celebrated.

Keith: We need more Fog Creeks of the world.

Patrick: Fog Creek, the office is a ghost town after five o’clock.

Amy: As well it should be.

Keith: Except on game night.

Patrick: Except on game night. (Patrick notes:Every Thursday. Third-best reason to work there. They’re hiring, go work for them.)

Keith: [laughs]

Amy: So you were saying, Keith, the examples you had were the guy who works 12 to 14 hours and is successful and then the guy who works, I think you said 12 to 14 hours and was not successful.

Keith: Yeah.

Amy: I thought you said lower numbers for the second guy. But anyway, when you said that I was thinking that what you don’t have room for in Japan, apparently, but also not in Silicon Valley, is the person who works five hours a day and actually outperforms the person who works 12 hours a day. And that’s not uncommon.

Keith: Right.

Amy: I have a lot of people who use Freckle who’ve written in to me and said, “You know what I discovered, which is really freeing, is that I actually only get two to four hours of work done at my computer done every day. The rest is dicking around. And so I’m going to spend all the rest of the time that I would waste on the computer going out and playing music or walking around or reading, and then I’ll get more work done in the two to four hours I actually work.” And I think that’s true. It’s backed up by a lot of research.

Keith: Oh, definitely, definitely. And going back to the Japanese side of it, the problem is that when everyone is forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, you then have the problem of, why would I work smarter? Why would I try to automate my process so that I can work more during those 12 to 14 hours instead of dicking around?

So it’s actually, because you’re in a trapped system here, then there’s no reason to better yourself. But using a product like Freckle, and especially for consultants and people who define their own time, it’s the biggest win you can possibly have. If you find out that you are dicking around on the Internet for two, three hours a day while you’re working, and a time-tracking software like Freckle actually makes you realize that, and then you gain two to three hours a day…

Amy: That’s true.

Keith: Because, as soon as you realize that you’re dicking around, you go, OK, I’m just going to leave the computer. I’m going to de-screen. I’m going to go off, play with my child, play with my friends, go out drinking, get slammed, or whatever you want to do, right?

Amy: Absolutely.

Patrick: This is one of the benefits of doing your own thing. You have social pressure coming from yourself, which always happens, but you don’t have social pressure from other people who can tell when you leave the office. The vast majority of days, I have a two to four-hour peak of productivity, and after that I’m pretty much shot. And since I know this about myself now, I just don’t work the rest of it.

Keith: You probably shouldn’t say that. Your financier probably… [laughs]

Patrick: I will tell this to any client. (Patrick notes: Any clients in the audience? You presumably know I have a sense of humor and can judge my pace of working, having sat next to me for a while. Any prospective clients? Productivity for me tends to be bursty, interspersed with periods of introspection, much like your engineers.)

Keith: That you only work two hours a day? [laughs]

Patrick: This is why I have you pay the week rate, guys, because work gets done, but assuming 480 minutes of equally productive time is not a good assumption for working with me, which you will probably notice as I check Hacker News in the middle of the day.

Amy: [laughs]

Patrick: But, no. It’s funny, though. There’s people who I respect enormously who have found out the same thing about themselves. Four hours a day is kind of the productivity limit, and after that it suffers. I know one friend in particular, and I won’t mention his name because he asked me not to mention it publicly, but the point is that he asked me not to mention it publicly.

He thought people would think less of him if they thought that his business, which is wildly successful, was just a part-time gig. Which, that breaks my brain. Half the reason I do the blog and the podcast and whatnot is to give people examples of there being multiple paths to the cheese of success in life.

Amy: Hear, hear.

Patrick: I wish everybody happiness. That’s kind of like a foundational philosophical thing for me, but once you introduce people to other ways to getting to happiness, which can include not working all the time.

Amy: Or much at all. [laughs]

Patrick: Or much at all.

Amy: That was not a slam on you or anything. I was actually thinking about myself when I said that.

Patrick: It’s no problem.

Amy: Not that I thought you would think it was an insult.

Patrick: I’m lazy like a fox.

Keith: He’s very proud of that. He’s very proud of that. He gets on my case all the time for working too much.

Amy: I thought foxes were pretty brown.

Patrick: I’m going to convert Keith.

Keith: You converted me to quitting my day job, so you might be successful yet.

Patrick: I’m only saying I’m going to convert Keith because Keith is my best friend so the less he works the more time I have to play League of Legends with him.

Keith: And the more time he has to exploit me for his own product development and stuff.

Patrick: Keith, in addition to being my best friend, is also the designer, but I can’t get any of his time because it’s been filled up with client work. Anyhow, what was I saying? If other people are sincerely happy working 16 hours a day in the coding salt mines then bully for them.

But I know because I’ve talked to and met a lot of people who are doing the 16 hour days in the coding salt mines because they think either that’s required to be successful or because they are strongly socially pressured by people that that is the behavior you should emulate.

If you are folks out there like that, if it makes you happy, thumbs up, go for it, but if you’re not truly happy by that then start doing something that will make you happy because there are so many ways to succeed in this. In business, in life, in general.

Amy: Absolutely. You’re not talking about runners up, either. We did not quite hit my revenue estimates for 2011, but we did have $550,000 of revenue and in 2008 we had zero.

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Patrick: High five.

Amy: I’m sorry, what?

Keith: Not too shabby, right?

Amy: Not too shabby, right. Exactly. I was hoping for 600 grand and we didn’t quite make it, but that was with a lot of drama where we didn’t work for a lot of that year. I had surgery, I was really sick. That was the three months. That was last year. I had surgery. I was out of commission for six weeks then. We had this hiring and firing drama. That year was screwed and we made $550,000. I’m basically retired and I don’t want to be this way forever.

I really enjoy working and I enjoy having impact and I enjoy touching people’s lives with my software and my course, and I do spend a lot of time on my course. 30×500, that is. We could sit on our asses and rake in $550,000 a year and really work just a couple hours a day on average and we could really cut our overhead.

Most of our overhead we spend on developing new features and our new app, Charm. We spent a lot of money on that the last year. That’s because I had bigger ambitions, but I’m never going to work a 40 hour work week. I had this near death experience, basically, with chronic fatigue. I had this priority change. I was a workaholic. No, no more. Now I’m a hippy, but you can be a hippy and earn $550,000 a year if you pick the right product and if you keep at it.

The first year and a half kind of really sucked, but we got over that and now we’re making really good money and it’s not that hard. Patrick, I found out about you because you blog about this stuff because you’re trying to be a positive example and I also don’t understand why the person you know refuses to be named because he’s afraid of being shamed and that’s just really sad, I think, that by telling people you make the world a better place.

I understand why he’s afraid, but I would rather put it all out there and be a positive example because there are so few of them.

Patrick: I think that is one reason, too. Going back to a topic we were just talking about, like you said, we’re not runners up here. How do I want to phrase this? I like celebrating other people’s successes. You guys make more money for me, bully for you. 37signals can buy everybody in Chicago a sports car these days, bully for them. It makes me happy to hear that other people are doing well.

Where is this topic going? Just a life tip for everybody listening, if you compare yourself to other people and think you’re not successful unless you’re beating them by some metric you will generally be less happy than you are if you’re comparing yourself against either where you were previously or what your goals are.

Success, for me, is either beating where I was last year or beating where I thought I was going to be this year. That generates happy points for me, whereas I never really cared about comparing with other folks. I think folks like the friend of mine who success is partly defined as being seen as successful, that kind of screws up your priorities a little bit, although I’m not totally immune to that myself.

That was rambling. I’m sorry.

Amy: Not as much as me.

Keith: I think we’re going to have to close this down because we’ve gotten complaints in the past about us talking too much.

Patrick: This one is only an hour and a half or so.

Keith: We also shot the shit for about 15 minutes so after editing it’ll be about an hour. That’s pretty good.

Patrick: OK. Only an hour. Thanks very much, Amy. Let’s give folks the actionable information with the call to action at the end. If they want to sign up for 30×500 how would they do that? (Patrick notes: Again, you can’t, because it took a while to get this posted. Sorry about that.)

Amy: First you actually have to apply. We’ve been creating more and more successes each time I run the class and I want to keep that turned up, so I want to basically help decide with you if 30×500 is right for you at this time. That application is launching on April 13. That’s Friday the 13th. All the information is on my blog at unicornfree.com.

Patrick: Sounds great. Thanks very much for doing the podcast with us, Amy. It was insightful as always.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Keith: It was great to meet you and looking forward to seeing more about 30×500 and more Freckle stuff, too.

Patrick: For all you folks in the audience, we’ll probably be doing this again in a month or two. See you next time.

Keith: Depending on when we can all get together with the microphone. All right. Thanks for joining us, Amy. You take care.

Amy: Thank you for having me.

Special Bonus Prize For People Who Read The Whole Transcript

I did a 45 minute video on improving the first-run experience of your software, to increase customer happiness and conversion rates. Some of the folks who have implemented advice from it have already told me that it made them appreciable amounts of money. You should probably watch it. Click here to give me your email address on the right side of the page, and I’ll give it to you free. You’ll also get an occasional email from me about things you’ll find interesting, like e.g. a new podcast getting posted, not-for-the-blog thoughts about software/marketing/etc, and (possibly) a product announcement someday.

Hiya guys.  My good friend Keith and I decided to do something a little different and tried recording a podcast.  We’re still rather new at this, so it took for form of a freewheeling conversation.  Major topics included:

• the experience of working at large and small tech companies in Japan
• the Japanese web application market
• career advice for programmers don’t call yourself a programmer
• us trying to sell you on starting A/B testing
• conversion optimization stories, including actionable tips which have actually worked for people
• a wee bit of generic geekery.

Podcasts take a metric truckload of work to put together.  If you like it, please, say so.  If folks have interest in it, we’ll do it again.  If not, well, one more data point as to what the market wants.

Podcast Link (M4A.  Click to play, right click to download.  The play feature may not work quite right in Chrome.  Feel free to put this on your iDevice.  (You may find this URL helpful: http://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/atom/ That technically includes all the posts on the blog, but iTunes and similar software will automatically pluck out the audio ones.)

Podcast Link (MP3, for Chrome. Click to play, right click to download.)

Transcript (Because We Love You)

Patrick McKenzie:   Hi, everybody. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internets.  This is my buddy Keith.

Keith:  Hi, I’m Keith Perhac. I live next to Patrick’s and I’m pretty much unknown on the Internets.

Patrick:  So when we tell people we’re right next to each other, we’re right next to each other in Ogaki, Japan. How the heck did we end up here?

Keith:  Long, long story. So I’ve been here for nine years, you’ve been here for eight, pretty much. And we came here on the JET program. I was working as an English teacher, you were working at Softopia, which is apparently our prefecture’s gift to web development and iPhone development right now.

Patrick:  Yeah, the prefectural technology incubator.

Keith:  That was an interesting little incubator because it’s been losing money for the last seven years. And then when the iPhone came out, all of the iPhone developers and everything moved in there because rent is cheap. And suddenly the incubator is making tons and tons of money thanks to iPhone apps.

Patrick:  Yeah. That was crazy. The number one, number two, and number three most popular Japanese iPhone apps of all time were literally right next door to each other, all in Softopia. They’ve been saying that they were going to make Sweet Valley, the name of this region, into the Silicon Valley of Japan. And I always thought it was a pipe dream. And now we have three successful software companies in literally like a 10‑square‑meter space in one building here. [Editor’s note: Perhaps not quiiiiite Silicon Valley yet…]

Keith:  Yeah.

Patrick:  It blows my mind.

Keith:  Yeah, essentially we’re in the Kansas of Japan. There’s nothing here, like literally nothing here.

Patrick:  Yeah, the engineering culture of this region is much less startup‑friendly than say a Silicon Valley or a New York would be. It’s dominated by one monopsony employer of engineering talent, which we’ve both had business dealings with.

Keith:  We’ll just say a very large automaker which everyone knows of and who pretty much pioneered the idea of kaizen, which I’m sure you all know of right now.

Patrick:  Yeah, the big buzzword for the lean startup movement was lean manufacturing before it was lean startup and before it was lean manufacturing it was just the [REDACTED] way. Whoo, shoot.

Keith:  [laughs]

Patrick:  Sorry, we’re editing that out.

Keith:  The T way.

Patrick:  Yeah, T. A big T-Corp here. Somewhat surprisingly, T-Corp and its various affiliated industries don’t really apply the T-Corp way to software development, do they?

Keith:  No, and I think the real reason that they don’t do that is because software development is not seen as a manufacturing process. It’s really seen as this kind of artsy‑fartsy kind of thing here. And it’s interesting because Web is definitely seen as artsy‑fartsy, and programmers themselves are pretty much seen as code monkeys.

Patrick:  Yeah.

Keith:  They’re seen as people on a factory floor that can… you just give them the spec and they punch out the pieces and that’s what programmers are for. And so what you have is a lot of managers who are used to managing assembly lines then trying to manage software projects in the same way. And it doesn’t really work quite as well.

And unfortunately, when big T feels that way about programmers, you find out that all their subsidiaries and everyone who works for them and everyone who deals with those subsidiaries and everyone who deals with the people who deal with those subsidiaries, the whole sort of culture kind of filters down to that.

Patrick:  This is true. Even at my old day job, which was a multinational corporation in Nagoya, which there is no company in Nagoya that does not have business with the big T in one way or another. It’s like Detroit times 1,000.

Keith:  Very true, very true.

Patrick:  Everyone is connected with the automobile manufacturing industry here. Even if you’re not directly connected into your day‑to‑day work. And it trickles down into things like the way engineers are treated, the way the discipline is treated, and the prevailing salary and wages for engineers here.

Even at a large multinational corporation as a salaryman, which is a full‑time employee who is expected to be at the company until death do you part, the wages for programmers are not that great here. Would you say the algorithm is $100 per year of age, per month, give or take?

Keith:  About that, yeah.

Patrick:  So Keith and I are right around 30 right now. That means we’d expect at a regular company here to be making $3,000 a month more or less, which as you might have seen is a wee bit less than you guys get in Silicon Valley.

Keith:  Yeah. Now I do have to say, the pricing structure for payments for programmers and for anyone really, is a holdover from the bubble days. And when you retire, you are guaranteed a very nice retirement fund. And every year because the company will do so well, you’ll get a big, fat bonus check, sometimes three times a year. And the problem is that Japan has been in a recession since about what, I think it’s ’90, ’92, something like that?

Patrick:  Yeah, somewhere in there.

Keith:  Long, long recession. And we don’t get bonuses. There’s no more job security for this until you retire at 60, now 65, soon to be 70. So we’ve lost all the benefits of working for peanuts at these companies and yet we’re still working for peanuts. That’s pretty much what it comes down to.

The salaries have not evolved with the change in Japan’s social contract, pretty much.

Patrick:  Mm‑hmm.

Keith:  We had a social contract where you go onto a company and they will take care of you until the day you retire and now it’s you go into a company and it’s pretty much hit or miss.

Patrick:  Now, for the peanut gallery that doesn’t know, the peak of the salaryman/lifetime employment system was in about the 1970s or so. And at that time it was about 30 percent of the Japanese labor force who was both working in a large multinational corporation and had this particular seishain [editor’s note: “full company employee”] status that we’re talking about. The rest of the 70 percent were not subject to the lifetime employment guarantee including, most prominently, women.

Keith:  Women, yeah.

Patrick:  Who we have many, many stories about how Japanese companies do not treat ladies right.

Keith:  That’s for a different time.

Patrick:  Yeah, another time.

Speaking of the social contract, a lot of Japanese society is built around this presumption that if you go to a good school you will get a good job at a nice megacorp like T-Corp and then have this lifetime employment guarantee. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to hire for startups out here, because basically you get one shot at that brass ring of lifetime employment and if you don’t take it right after you get out of the university, you are damaged goods for the rest of your life.

Keith:  Well, I do want to cut in there. That’s not really how it works, but that’s how everyone thinks it works.

Patrick:  I agree with both parts of that statement.

Keith:  And the problem is when everyone thinks that’s the way it works, especially for people who have just gotten out of college and don’t know what it’s like in the world, they’re going to go where it’s a safe bet. And we’re talking about lifetime employment and stuff and how that’s no longer a guarantee. However, if you get into a place like NTT, which is the phone company, even the big T, in most cases if you are a proper contracted employee, then you will probably be there until you retire.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  However, there are only a handful of those companies left. I would say that there’s less than 100, maybe less than 50 in all of Japan that are large enough to really be able to take care of you for your entire life like that.

Patrick:  And there’s definitely a difference in statuses at those big companies. For instance, one of the ways they manage to have a lifetime employment guarantee is that T-Corp has this… it’s like an industry within an industry of supporting companies, built around themselves, like suppliers, vendors, that sort of thing.

And while they won’t cut their employees come hell or high water, they’ll cut their vendors like nobody’s business and/or tell the vendors, “Listen, we can only afford to pay you a quarter of what we did last year, so make the appropriate adjustments.” And then the vendors will go down and cut their regular employees or, most commonly, cut their contractors.

Keith:  And T-Corp themselves have a lot of contractors. And when you think of contractors, you usually think of consultants or stuff like that. I’m talking about contract employees working on the assembly lines and whatnot. And those people do get cut.

Patrick:  Right, for example, right before the recent economic crisis, which is known in Japan as the Lehman shock for some reason, right before the Lehman shock there were about 6,000 foreigners, mostly Brazilians, living in our town of Ogaki. And so I go to a church out here and after the Lehman shock for about a year, every week at church we had a family X or a family Y or family Z having lost all the jobs in the family is going back to Brazil. So that population of foreigners, who were almost all contract laborers at the local manufacturing industries ,went from about 6,000 to about 1,000 in a little less than a year.

Keith:  That was a heavy, heavy downturn. But that gives you a pretty good idea of what the labor force is like in Japan. And why it’s difficult to get a good startup community here. I go to a lot of programming conferences and stuff and we really, as programmers, picked a really crappy place to be, to be perfectly honest, because the entire area is ruled by T-Corp.  Also, there’s just a very different way of thinking about business in Nagoya in the Nagoya area than in, let’s say, Tokyo and Osaka. And even for Japanese people, and other Japanese programmers, looking at Nagoya they say it’s very difficult for people who are not in Nagoya to start a business here. And it’s very difficult for new businesses to start here.

Patrick:  So we’ve been doing this for the last couple of years and we know how it actually works, but people in America always tell me I’m lying when I talk about working conditions for professionals in Japanese societies.

Keith:  [laughs]

Patrick:  Why don’t you tell me about those lies I’ve been telling for the last couple of years.  Just sketch some out.

Keith:  So I’ve heard some of the lies Patrick has been telling all of you and I have to tell you that I don’t think any of them were actually even slight exaggerations.

Patrick:  Well, let’s recount some stories, shall we?

Keith:  Let’s recount some stories. So coming home every night at 12:30 AM, if you could get home.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  OK, that’s definitely true.

Patrick:  Last train of the day is 30 minutes after midnight, I missed that train quite a bit of the time.

Keith:  Yeah, the business hotel near the station actually knew Patrick by name and face. And Patrick had this thing Tuesdays where there were longhalf‑day meetings.

And so you get pretty much nothing done on that day. So you’d have to work until about 12:30, 1:00, end up missing the train and he would arrive at the business hotel and they would have a room ready for him. And if he wasn’t there one week, then in the following week when he did show up, they would ask, “Why weren’t you here last week?”

Patrick:  It got so bad at one point I left my Kindle there overnight on a Monday and it was waiting at the front desk for me the following day with a note, this is Mr. McKenzie’s Kindle, he’ll be in, it’s a Tuesday.

Keith:  So really, no exaggerations about the workload. And I, fortunately, was not as bad as him. I could usually get home every night. I usually got home around 11:00 or so. So I was very lucky to get home at 11:00.

Patrick:  So what are we doing for this 12‑to‑19‑hour day? Is it actually programming for the entire time? No, not so much.

Keith:  OK, so Patrick and I had very different employers. He worked at a very large, how many people were in your company?

Patrick:  Well, let’s see, at my office there were about 70, but companywide maybe 1,000‑1,200 employees or so.

Keith:  So he’s with a very large company that does only programming. I, on the other hand, was in what is pretty much the Japanese startup.  A startup is called a “venture” here. It’s generally a single person putting his money on the line, getting a loan from the bank, and trying to make a company out of it. I was the only programmer at this IT company. So we were a company of around seven or eight people, and I was the only programmer left after my boss, the other programmer, quit.

So pretty much I had a lot of free rein in what I was doing, but, on the other hand, for any product that my company had to ship, I had to make it from scratch. And that’s not just programming, that’s the design, development, graphic design, figuring out what the customer wants, how we’re going to accomplish it, pretty much everything. The other people in the company were sales and management.

Patrick:  My company was a multinational consultancy.  Think of like an Accenture or IBM, which goes to a client and say, “Hey, we’ll fix your problem, whatever the problem is, and we’ll sell you smart people to make it happen.” We were in the wetware business. I was the least wet bit of the wetware, we’ll put it that way.

My official title was “System Engineer.” That’s one of these things in Japan, programmers are considered code‑monkeys, but system engineers, who tell programmers what to do, are assumed to have a bit of discretion and professional ability. Maybe half the company was people in sales or support, who would sell a university on, “You should use our systems for doing your backend course management or payroll or whatever.”

Then the other half of the company was the engineers like myself who would talk to the customer and figure out what they actually needed for integration with their systems and then build out the code to do it. Or assist outsourcing operations for outsourcing the business process management to low‑wage countries like India.

The feeling in the company was that even though we were a software company, writing software did not add value. That’s almost a direct quote from the CEO. So, we would figure out the software that needed to be written and then actually get the software written by cheap people because that would provide more value for our customer.

This resulted in me doing outsourcing management to India for about three years because I was the only one in the company who could speak good enough English to manage it. That was an experience.

Keith:  You had actually told me about some of the technical docs that they had sent before you were on the project where they would actually put the Japanese technical docs into Google Translate and then just ship them over.

Patrick:  Yeah. I tried to stop that and was less successful than I wanted to be. At one point I told my boss, “Listen, boss, we’re shipping out several thousand pages of technical documentations for this particular subsystem which just absolutely puts the ‘critical’ in ‘business critical.’ You need to clear the next month of my schedule so I can translate them.”

He said, “Your fully loaded cost as an engineer is about $6,000 a month [ salary of $3,000 times a factor of two for contribution, taxes and other overhead involved with hiring me]. $6,000 a month is too much to pay for translation. We want to get it done for about $4,000, so we’re going to have an Indian company to do the translation for us.” I said, “I don’t really love that plan, but I’ll do it. But I want to spot‑check the quality of their translation just to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth.”

The first day I get back an Excel file. I can’t remember exactly what the error was, but on the first page that was describing black as white, a clear error. I mail the Indian subsidiary and say, “Hey, I was spot‑checking the quality of your translation and there’s just this glaring error on the first page that makes me worry about the rest of the documents. Can you please tell your translators to be careful.”

They mail back to me a few hours later, “We don’t agree this is an error.” It’s literally a translation of black is white or something. So I mail back, “This is absolutely an error. I haven’t had the opportunity to discuss it with a native speaker of Japanese, but there’s no possible way that your translator is translating this correctly.”

I get a mail back, “We don’t agree.” I said, “You need to put your translator on the phone with me now because we need to discuss this. The project will not proceed if you have this level of understanding of what the requirements are.” They said, “We discussed with three authorities and all of them agree with our translations. So you’re outvoted.”

I said, “Who are your three authorities?” They said, “Google Translate, BabelFish and AltaVista Translate.” So I was outvoted by three computers who all use the same dictionary apparently. That sort of thing happened all the time. They had billed us literally $4,000 for having people do the manual copy‑pasting work into Translate and billed it as translation services. Yeah. That project didn’t work out very well.

Keith:  I actually want to jump back real quick. You had mentioned the difference between the System Engineers and programmers. You had a blog post, I think it was two weeks ago and it got put on Hacker News. Everyone was like, “Oh, I’m a programmer, so that’s what I’m going to call myself. I’m not going to call myself System Engineer.”

This is really one of the places where it’s a very clear‑cut difference. It doesn’t matter what it is that you do all day. A simple name change raises your pay grade pretty much double. The amount of things that you are trusted with, the amount of things that is decided that you do. This is not to say that programmers are not given system engineer responsibilities, they’re just not believed to able to accomplish them.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  So, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing in Japan, as long as you’re a programmer, call yourself a system engineer and you’d double your pay.

Patrick:  Right. Actually every time I had a bug for about the first two years of working on a company, often because I didn’t quite understand the requirements in the document because all the documents are in highly technical Japanese. And my co‑workers would be berating me for the bug or the absence of testing, which failed to reveal the bug. Or just being careless, because I’m often careless. They would say, “Listen, Patrick. This isn’t acceptable, you are not a programmer. This should have been taken care of.”

Definitely with regards to Japan, call yourself a system engineer if you have the choice, even with regards to America.

I do programming, I like programming, I love programming. The craft and actual activity of programming really, really appeal to me. But as a consultant when I’m talking to businesses, I never describe the value that I’m adding to the business as, “OK. I’m going to program some stuff for you in Rails.” Because businesses don’t really see it on that same level.

Even businesses that are run by really engineers’ engineers, like the Fog Creeks of the world, which really love programming and the craft of programming: at the end of the day they are a business.  So you need to be connecting to them on that business level of, “Here are the concrete benefits you’re going to get from doing this engagement with me.”

Keith:  It’s just like when you sell a product, you don’t sell the features, you sell the benefits.

Patrick:  Right, right.

Keith:  You are programming, and that’s the feature that you’re selling. But that’s not the benefit. The benefit is not, “I’m going to write code for you.” The benefit is, “I’m going to make a system that does this awesome thing. And this awesome thing is going to make you a million‑up in dollars.” And that’s what you sell. That’s why you call yourself a system engineer instead of a programmer.

Patrick:  Or providing solutions instead of providing software.

Keith:  Solution Architect. It was so funny. My job title in my company has changed so many times. I think it changed seven or eight times in the last four years. And my favorite one was “Solution Architect,” because it just says nothing about what I do whatsoever.

Patrick:  But civilians, or whatever you call people who aren’t engineers, sometimes respond to things like what is printed on your business card. That being the reality, adjust yourself to the reality rather than what you think your ideal world would look like.

Keith:  Yeah. Really, if you want to put “programmer” on your business card, write it in binary on the back or put it in as part of the design or something.

Patrick:  Right. You can always call yourself what you want when you’re around just us geeks, but when off Hacker News and you’re talking rate negotiations with customers, adjust to their view of the world.  It will make you happier in life.

Keith:  Exactly, exactly. Don’t believe us, A/B test it. I actually did this. I went to a prospective client with a programming friend of mine. We do the exact same thing. We have the roughly the same levels of technical and business acumen. We decided, “Hey, we’re going to try this out.” He called himself a system engineer, I called myself a programmer. For the rest of our meeting they deferred to him over me for every single thing. [Editor’s note: You’re right, this is not an A/B test.]

So just changing that one little word on your business card or when you introduce yourself makes a huge difference. It’s really just you have to change yourself to fit your customers’ expectations.

Patrick:  Obviously the culture of businesses in Japan is very different than what many of our listeners are used to.  Well, I say the culture of Japan: Japan is a big place. It’s like saying, “the culture in America.” Kansas is a different place than Texas, is a different place than a tech startup specifically in Mountain View, California. But the business culture of, say, metropolitan Nagoya, Japan is very different than the business culture of New York City, or at a tech startup in New York City, or at a financial services firm in New York City, or specifically Goldman Sachs in New York City.

You have to adjust yourself to whatever that particular situation you find yourself in. That being said, there’s very, very few places I’m aware of calling yourself a programmer is a career enhancing move.

Keith:  Yeah. Let’s stop berating everyone for calling themselves programmers.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  What do you say? You want to move on to kaizen?

Patrick:  Sure. Let’s move on to kaizen.

Keith:  OK. Everyone, I’m sure, knows kaizen.

Patrick:  Actually, I don’t think that’s true.  Why don’t you explain what kaizen is.

Keith:  Really? Because I got a photo from one of my friends in Nashville of all places. She went to a burger joint and had the Kaizen Burger. This huge burger with Kobe beef and cheese and all the stuff, and they just called it “Kaizen Burger.”

Patrick:  That sounds delicious, but I think the rest of America is not caught up to Nashville yet. So let’s go.

Keith:  Everyone should catch up with Nashville, I swear. [laughs]

OK. Kaizen is a term in Japanese which means “improvement.” That’s the general translation. What it has come to mean in American English is the reiteration and iterative improvement of systems and processes that were founded pretty much by Toyota. Essentially it’s reiterations over a design in order to get rid of flaws and to make a better product.

This is pretty much the the cornerstone of any physical manufacturing process. Any car that you see is built with kaizen. Apple does it with their Macs. Everything is iterated and iterated. They make a design, they put it out there, they find out what’s wrong and they slightly change it, they slightly fix it and they keep reiterating and reiterating. Then they finally get a great product. That’s how Toyota has worked, that’s how most manufacturing works.

Patrick:  I think this idea is so powerful. There have been hundreds of volumes written about the Japanese economic miracle. Honestly this and the related Toyota process improvement were so powerful that they were able to cover up every mistake made at the same time. If you have that going for you and the rest of the world hasn’t caught on too it yet, you can do all manner of stuff totally stupidly, like work your people to near death by exhaustion. You’ll still ROFLstomp over the competition.

Keith:  Exactly. Where kaizen comes in to our conversation now is that kaizen has left the physical manufacturing world and is starting to go into the software development.

Patrick:  If you read Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup, which by the way is a fantastic read and you should read it if you haven’t already, it’s one of the ideas he touches on a lot.

Keith:  Yeah, yeah. I actually want to pick up a copy of that. I saw that in your house when I was over there.

Patrick:  One of the ways that kaizen is relevant, not just to people who are manufacturing physical products but also to software developers who are making software or an experience delivered over the Internet, is that we can do things like A/B testing. So we can tell in almost real‑time which of multiple versions of a website, once exposed to users, causes those users to have a happy experience. You could define “happy experience” in a few ways: judged by business goals like whether they buy more software or sign up for your email list more often, or judged by whether they achieve success with your software.

For example, I sell software that makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers. If the schoolteachers can’t successfully make bingo cards, that’s a problem for me. So, I can redesign the interface of my software such that they actually achieve task success.

Keith:  The great thing about this iteration, when we’re dealing with software and especially web apps, is that the feedback is so immediate and the cost for doing these iteration tests, these split tests is so low. How long does it take you to make a split test?

Patrick:  One line of code, it’s the only way to do it.

Keith:  One line of code. All right. In one line of code you can test which creates the better user experience.

This kaizen originated in manufacturing. In manufacturing, it’s a much more expensive process. You have to build it, which means you have to use the raw materials, you have to create the building process, then you have to ramp up production and ship it to the customer and the customer has to give you feedback. We’re talking, maybe, two or three years to get feedback on a single design before you can iterate.

Now, we can iterate… If you have enough users on your site, you can get an answer with a split test in about a day.

Patrick:  At Facebook or Google scales you can get it literally in seconds. Even at fairly minor scales, like the Bingo Card Creators of the world, I can throw out a test every Monday and have a statistically confident results generally by the following week. It’s a wonderful thing when you don’t have much time to work on a site.

If you’re getting about a hundred visitors a day then you can throw some up, come back a week later, and have results.  Doing the A/B test doesn’t block any of your other activities for the week. You can continue talking to customers or continue writing documentation, continue producing the new feature. Then, when you’re ready for it, take a look at the results of the A/B tests and generally just make a one click to pick result A over result B or whatever the stats tell you to do.

Keith:  What we’re actually seeing… Patrick’s A/B testing software, he made it himself. It’s called A/Bingo. It’s amazing and you should pick it up. I use Visual Website Optimizer, which is a great software, all JavaScript based, works on any page, I recommend that as well.

But what we’re seeing is a change from manufacturing where in manufacturing you can have a thousand ideas, but your iteration time is around maybe six months at the fastest, a year, maybe two or three if you’re talking something huge like a car.

With the software iterations, one line of code takes me five minutes to implement. VWO does the same thing, it takes me 5‑10 minutes to implement. What takes more time now is to actually think of what we’re testing. The time it takes to test something is so infinitesimal that thinking up good tests takes more time. Which is amazing that we’re in this technological area that we can test things as fast as we literally think them up.

Patrick:  Right. Also it prevents a lot of waste in the company. Have you ever been a really pathological meeting? I once had a six‑hour meeting involving four people to discuss the text that was going to be placed on a button for signing up to a mailing list. The mailing list was only getting 50 sign ups a week anyhow. There’s an actual cost to that. The fully loaded cost for that meeting was on the order of $300 an hour times six hours, so almost $2,000 spent just to determine the call‑to‑action on a button that didn’t really matter anyhow.

If you have a culture in your organization of testing things, that would literally have been a 45 second discussion. Like, “I think it should be, ‘Sign up for mailing list.'” “I think it should be ‘Sign up now.'” “OK. We’ll throw it in the test.” Done. And you save that $2,000 and spend it on stuff that actually matters to your business and your customers and the world at large.

Keith:  Yeah. Going back to the Japanese side of things, this is a big thing where they don’t consider software to be a manufacturing process. Testing in Japan… Now, we have unit testing and testing like that, but the idea of user‑based testing is pretty much non‑existent, almost completely non‑existent. Unless you’re going into the very large, very in‑the‑know tech companies. I’ve dealt with one or two, and they’re not common at all.

Patrick:  For example, one of the several big startups based in Tokyo are in the mobile gaming space. There’s an American company you’ve probably heard of, they allow you to make virtual cabbages and water the virtual cabbages. Sometimes the virtual cabbages rot.

This company is very, very sophisticated and they iterative improvement processes including A/B testing and collecting user metrics and what have you. They recently opened a Tokyo office and somebody there said, “Yeah. We’re pretty much planning on effing killing all the Japanese companies in the this space.”

I do not love that company, but I think they’re likely to achieve that goal.  Just like Toyota versus the American manufacturers, if there are 10 people in a fight and only one of them understands how to use science, I already know who’s going to win.

Keith:  I like that science is the thing that’s going to win the fight. [laughs]

Patrick:  It seriously is the revenge of the geeks out there right now. Really.

Keith:  Really it is. For the first time in history we have so much data that we don’t have enough people to process it. We have so much information that really what we need to do now is just process all this great information and put it to good use. And we just don’t have the resources yet.

Patrick:  Right.

Keith:  What we need is mathematicians and statisticians to find, look over, and analyze this data.

Patrick:  Yeah. Also, this is a good thing for you to pick up for your career. A/B testing is a skill set that is not really all that hard to pick up. Grab a book, study it for a week. The mechanics are dead simple. After that, it’s just a matter of coming up with what actually to test.

But that skill is fantastically rare, much more rare than, say, skill with creating web apps in PHP or Ruby on Rails. Because it has direct bottom‑line implications to the business, to the tune of, “What’s five percent of your sales for the next quarter?” When you’re talking to a company the size of say a T-Corp or just the line of business from Bank of America’s website, five percent is a very significant number.

If you can routinely quote numbers like that, you are no longer in the $60‑to‑$100‑an‑hour bucket with other programmers, you are in the bucket with strategic initiatives that add five percent to Bank of America’s bottom line. Scary stuff.

Keith:  I really hate to keep coming back to this. System engineer versus programmer, implementing an A/B test takes one line of code, takes five minutes to do. If you are the person that used that one line of code, changed the color of a button from blue to red, and added five percent to a multi‑million dollar company’s bottom line, you’re no longer the programmer who implemented that, you’re the guy who added five percent to a multi‑million dollar bottom line. That’s what matters.

Patrick:  Right. Billing also scales right to match, particularly when you get clueful clients. I won’t be comfortable talking about mine. Suffice it to say if you have a portfolio website… Not that I have a portfolio website.

Keith:  You need to make one.

Patrick:  I don’t know. Yes and no. When someone comes to me and says, “Hey, we’d like to hire you for this thing, do you have an example of people that it’s worked for before?” I can informally say, “Well, I’ve worked for XYZ, and XYZ have reported this kind of result.”

That’s, by the way, a trick when you’re dealing with clients… It’s not a trick because both of you will benefit from this. But say, “Look, if we have a successful result with this project, I would like to write that successful result up as a blog post or something. That will be to our mutual benefit, you’ll get additional attention because of me writing the blog post, and I’ll get something to keep for my portfolio.”

Phrased like that, many clients will say yes to it. It is a wonderfully, wonderfully wonderful thing to arrange for yourself as a consultant. For example, when I was working with Fog Creek, when it became obvious that the engagement was going to work out for both of us, I said, “Hey, you guys are always looking for new topics for your blog post, why don’t let me ghostwrite one about what we did for the marketing?”

They said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s do that.” So I wrote something called “Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek and How We Fixed It” or something to that effect. Where we talked about things like we made changes to the website and as a result Fog Creek’s conversion rate went up by, say,  10 percent. Just make a guess of how much money Fog Creek makes in a year, add 10 percent to that, it’s meaningful, right?

So, Fog Creek is obviously very happy with this. But in terms of dealing with my other clients, when they say, “Oh man, Patrick. That number you just quoted to me is a lot of money. How do I justify that to the investors or how do I justify that to my team?” I say, “Well, if you look at this post over here by Fog Creek, they said I added about 10 percent.” And done, that’s one way to deal with pricing objections.

[Editor’s note: Patrick wasn’t clear on this, but 10% was a handwavy approximation number here.  The actual number is undisclosed.]

Keith:  And that’s something I’ve been working on with. We were talking earlier about how this split testing your stuff is not known in Japan. I’m trying to bring split testing and  modern iterative development practices into Japan.

One thing I found when dealing with my customers is that they feel the same way, it’s like, “How do I add this to my bottom line?” I say, “Well, I improved such and such company, who makes a million dollars a year, by 10 percent.” Sometimes they understand it and sometimes they don’t.

When they don’t understand it I say, “Well, why don’t we do it like this. You pay me half of what I’m charging. And for every percent improvement we see over your current baseline, you give me another X dollars.” People seem very happy about that. Until, of course, the results come in and they end up paying me three times to what they were originally going to pay me.

Patrick:  Yeah. Pay‑per‑performance is an interesting model.

Keith:  It’s not the best.

Patrick:  Yeah, I am not a big fan of pay‑per‑performance arrangements. Not to say I would never do them, but I typically try against them.

Here’s one reason. In any sort of project you have execution risk. Generally as a consultant you want to be responsible for your own conduct, but not risks external to your own execution. If, for example, you want to do a pay‑per‑performance arrangement for search engine optimization or for A/B testing or conversion optimization for a startup, that startup’s priorities might change on a dime.  This can happen one week after you get out of the building. That actually happens frequently. The project you were working on can get shelved.  This even happens at multinational corporations.

If this happens, you’re not going to make your pay‑per‑performance numbers no matter how good the quality of your underlying work. Typically, with a pay‑per‑performance arrangement you’re going to be getting a smaller number upfront, plus a payment if you hit particular milestones. You won’t get that milestone payment and you’re going to end up working for a fraction of your rate. And working for a fraction of your rate is not the purpose of the exercise. Unless it was client who had a clear reason not to pivot on the…

Keith:  Right. I should have prefaced that with saying that these are clients that I have had worked with before in my previous companies and that I do trust. And who I know are not going to shelve the entire project and I’m going to get put in the works.

These are things that part of the contract of doing the performance‑based payment is that I’m going to be setting it up and they are going to be putting it out there and that it is going to run. Like you said, it’s not a 100 percent, nothing’s ever 100 percent. But I would never do it especially for a large company that I’ve never worked with before, I would never do a performance‑based review. I don’t think.

Patrick:  Right. Engineers have a funny notion of what the price of things is. If I say “$3,000″, that sounds like a lot of money for us because, hey, we worked for months for that. But $3,000 for a real company that has real assets and real employees, that’s literally below their capability of measuring stuff. It isn’t a line item on the annual report, it isn’t even in the appendix to an appendix on the line item of the annual report. You really have to get into the five‑figures to even hit on the radar screen at all.

Given that, if you were thinking, “OK. We’ll could charge a variable price between $3,000 and $15,000, or just charge $20,000 fixed,” there’s a lot of businesses that will say, “Give me the higher $20,000 price, because that will make my life easier. Getting a variable charge approved through the accounting division or my higher‑ups or whatever is going to be more difficult, because that’s not our established process.”

If it is just a fixed  $20,000 coming out of budget X, well, budget X has hundreds of thousands of dollars in it because there’s employees in there, too.  [Editor’s note: Employees are very expensive.  There is a cynical but true saying: “Overhead walks on two legs.”] So $20,000 out of that budget is not difficult to approve.

Keith:  Right. Working, not with T-Corp in particular, but with other companies of that size, we would have our sales reps on their side come to us and say, “Our budget is X amount of dollars. Make it under that.”  That’s not their maximum possible budget, that’s the budget they have before they need additional signoffs.  You could spend within $1 of that, and it would be no problem. However, if they go over that line, they have to get the sign off of their manager or, god forbid, the vice‑president or someone. As long as it’s under that number even by a dollar, they can sign off themselves and that makes their lives so much easier.

Patrick:  You were saying something interesting earlier, which was that you hope to bring in A/B testing and these modern techniques into Japan. That’s something I’ve heard a lot in working with my other companies, because the Japanese engineering, with specific regards to, say, Web engineering, is kind of lagging a couple of years behind the U.S. right now, right?

Keith:  Oh, so far behind.

Patrick:  Let’s talk about the status things. So the Joel Test is getting almost 10 years old now.

Keith:  Is it 10 years already?

Patrick:  Almost 10 years I think. [Editor’s Note: Even older!]The Joel Test is about basic things like source control, having a quality department, yada, yada. Japan, not quite there yet. So I worked with a company that worked with other companies. We had source control, thank God. Subversion, though, not git. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be a snobby geek there. Subversion is an excellent source control system. It’s heads and tails better than no source control system, which is the competition here in Japan.

Similarly, we write big freaking enterprise applications in Java with homegrown web frameworks, which were absolute pain in the butts to work with. One of the reasons I have like 60,000 Hacker News karma was there was a compile and deploy step that literally took like five minutes to run. So if I wanted to change, say, the number of columns on one particular table on a page, testing that would take upwards of an hour.  Oh, whoops, I had a one‑character bug in my HTML, rerun the compile. It’s going to take five minutes. Yada, yada.

The amount of friction involved in that process destroyed my productivity.  [Editor’s Note: It didn’t help that I’m fundamentally a lazy git.] However, we measured productivity by number of engineering hours expended, so by that metric I made my department look very good. But modern web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, all the fun stuff, make life so much better.

Keith:  It’s really ironic that Ruby was created by a Japanese man, and yet Ruby on Rails is pretty much unknown here.

Patrick:  Maybe this will change a little bit. I think EngineYard has hired Matz, right?

Keith:  Right. Was it EngineYard ? I thought it was Heroku?

Patrick:  Yeah, it was Heroku. Sorry. Heroku by the way, is the most Japanese name on an American company I’ve ever heard. [Editor’s note: I heard at Startup School that they were explicitly inspired by the Japanese aesthetic… in case the samurai and Godzilla on the pricing page had not clued you in yet.]

Keith:  Yeah. I know. But actually there are Rails conferences here and it’s getting more and more popular. The problem is that web apps themselves are still not that popular here. I think part of that is done in by the fact that, there are maybe four or five countries in the world that have IE6 shares above 25 percent.  [Editor’s note: I don’t know about this one, but wasn’t sure enough to correct him.]

I believe they include Thailand, China, and Japan. China actually has I think 23 or 22. It’s really quickly dropping. But Japan still relies on IE6 so much. And the reason for this is that back when IE6, when XP came out, we were still, not really in the recession, but we still have a lot of money as a country. And so everyone had their IT departments, and everyone had these huge reduxes and they made all their systems compatible with XP. And it was great and wonderful. And then the money starts drying up, and the first thing to go is the tech departments.

I’ve worked with couple large companies that literally had outsourced their entire IT departments. And so there was no one at the company anymore who could even do anything. Let’s say they needed a new computer setup or new proxy or one of their NATs died or something, there was no one at the company who could fix that.

Patrick:  That brings up a great topic. You’ve probably heard that engineering productivity is worth pretty much any amount of money relative to engineering salaries.  Everyone tells you to get two big wide screens, as it’s only 400 bucks extra.

Despite my previous employer being a software company, they had outsourced the internal IT. So then rather than buying each programmer a computer, they would lease a computer through blah‑blah‑blah, whatever, for 80 bucks a month. And by default, it was a years‑old computer with, let’s say, one gig of RAM, a processor from 2003, and a 14‑or‑15‑inch monitor for a desktop system. And there was literally no button you could push at the company to get a better computer than that.

Keith:  Once the rules are set, it’s not worth the bureaucratic hassle and even the time to think about to change it in a company. What it does, in the end, is it just hurts everyone.

Patrick:  Another factor about web apps in Japan is that a huge portion of Japanese use of the Internet is not actually on real browsers, it’s on the lovely fake browsers that you find in old pre‑iPhone Japanese feature phones. That’s an entire topic in itself. Japan, hardware‑wise, were probably the most advanced cell phones in the world until…

Keith:  Also software‑wise. When we were still dealing with WAP and wedge TML and WEKO, WACKO, WACO, WACO, whatever the hell we had back in early ’90s and stuff, Japanese cell phones had iMode, which is a full-featured HTML subset, and they were browsing websites in ’91. On their cell phone.

Patrick:  Websites with pictures and JavaScript. It was amazing. And then it didn’t really change for like the next 15, 16 years.

Keith:  Yeah, they’re still browsing the same Web pages 20 years later.

Patrick:  Yeah. They call this the Galápagos effect. Like the Galápagos Islands, which have a variety of different finches that are found nowhere else in the world, Japan had a variety of very advanced hardware platforms found nowhere else. The software for each of the hardware platforms would be literally handwritten assembly each time a new model came out. That was the dominant way to do cell phone development, with improvements like, “OK, we’ll put a JRE on it and allow you to run Java code.” But that was the dominate cell phone paradigm up until the iPhone came out. And the iPhone proceeded to ROFLstomp over the Japanese carriers. Right?

Keith:  Pretty much. Pretty much. And now we have Android phones as well — a lot of Android phones. The problem is, and I think it’s pretty much the same in America right now, is that you don’t get the updates. The Galápagos model is still the common way of thinking for any cell phone besides the iPhone. So you have this Android‑based amazing phone that is outdated in one to two months. You will never receive an update for it through the life of the contract.

Patrick:  Just a feature of the Japanese consumer electronics market. People tend to upgrade devices very quickly here.

Keith:  Very quick. Very quick.

Patrick:  Japanese cell phones are marketed under the assumption that the core of the market updates their cell phones at least yearly.

Keith:  Yeah. In America, because everyone is on the two year contract, the companies assume that you’ll update your phone when you’re two year contract is up. And in Japan, even though there’s a two‑year contract, most people update their phone, I would say, once a year. And depending on how trendy you are, even more.

Patrick:  One of the main early adopters for the cell phones in Japan, and I swear I’m not making this up, high‑school girls.

Keith:  Oh, yes.

Patrick:  Their use of the phone as a mobile/Internet platform drives quite a bit of the development here. I can never remember which of the companies it was, but a couple of years ago when smartphones were starting to get popular, one of the companies was literally pitching them as a fashion accessory item.

So in addition to pitching, “It has a camera. You can take photos with your friends. And here’s what the software does.” They would pitch like, “And here are the varieties of things you can stick on the phone to make it look different but similar to your girlfriends’ phones.  This way, you can be trendy in your own individual-but-not-too-individual way.” [Editor’s note: If you think I’m cynical about the social motivations of teenage girls, you should hear me talk about geeks.]

Keith:  Right. And they’re starting to do that with the Androids now. So each of the Androids has pre‑installed software for each kind of clique for the Japanese high‑school girls. It’s really interesting to look at. It is a bit depressing as a programmer. It’s like, “You could just customize the wallpaper yourself and not have to pay the $600 for the new phone.” But, oh well.

Patrick:  Yeah. Meet the customers where they’re at. Right?

Keith:  Right. Right. Do we want to go on to websites as… I still not have been able to figure out how to really put this other, not in Japanese.

Patrick:  Well, say it in Japanese and I’ll translate for you.

Keith:  Now I’m going to forget it in Japanese. What was it? Ore ore homupeiji kind of thing.  [Editor’s note: The rough sense of this: “Me-me-me home page!” ] So what it really is, so you have the ore ore framework.  It is the framework that you built, and you love to death, and is not used for anything at all.

So the web page is pretty much in a lot of cases… OK, here’s how I’m going to say it. The business card web page, I think really is the best way to put it. [Editor’s note: Brochure site, maybe?] A business card web page that doesn’t accomplish anything first of all. And in addition to not accomplishing anything, is made in a way so that the president of the company feels vindicated that he has spent enough money on his web page.

So even if they have like a goal like get customers or tell customers about our company, it’s not something that they’re working towards. They are not investing any time or effort into the home page other than saying, “Oh, we need a home page. I spent $6,000 on a designer to design me a home page in Dreamweaver.”

I think we should talk about those.

Patrick:  Let’s talk about this.

Keith:  Yes.

Patrick:  So we’ve got this idea of having a brochure website for maybe an offline corporation or even for companies that are SaaS Internet startups what not. The home page is not designed for the interests of the business but rather for interests of stakeholders in the business, which are two very different things.

Man, I’ve seen home pages that were literally battlegrounds. There was a war between the engineering department and the marketing department and both sides lost. Engineering said “We want to build features. We don’t want to work on any of that crap on the home page that doesn’t require any technical expertise whatsoever.” Marketing said  “We have this message and this brand that we want to get across.” The result of that war was a page that didn’t convert anyone and wasn’t clearly owned by any group in the company.

There are excellent companies which have little dysfunctional issues like this.  Engineering’s job is to ship more features to the customer. Marketing’s job is to brand or whatever their magic stuff is. But nobody’s job was to measure the conversions on the page, or to increase those over time.

I’ve gone into very smart, successful, well‑managed companies and asked questions like “So, how many trials did you guys do last week?” And the answer would be, “We don’t know. There’s probably a SQL query we can run somewhere that will tell us that.”

Keith:  Yeah. I had a similar thing. This was actually very eye‑opening. I did a reservation system at a really cool place.  They have online and phone reservation systems.  The phone reservations have a backend to their online system, which the front desk uses to place reservations.

So I could see, when I was doing the analytics for their site, how many reservations they had but not where they came from. I couldn’t see if they were self-service reservations online or assisted reservations over the telephone. So I asked the person in charge. I said, “What percentage is online? And what percentage is phone?” He said, “I think at least 80 percent of our reservations are from online. I only think 20 percent are from the phone.” I said, “Wow, that’s much more than I thought. I thought that the phone would be much, much more popular. And he said, “Yeah, but those are the numbers I think.”

So I installed Google Analytics, and I dug into the numbers. It turned out that less than 20% of their volume was online, and more than 80% was on the telephone. So they had no idea of even the number of reservations that were coming in and where they were coming from. And doing a little more analytics, I found out that those 20 percent were the customers who had survived through the reservation process.  The system was difficult to use and the conversion was horrible: only about 15% of people who started a reservation actually got done with making one. That was very eye‑opening for them.

Patrick:  It’s easy to laugh at them in hindsight, but I guarantee if you run a business right now, there is some number that is key to your business that you are not tracking and that would be very eye‑opening to you. The one that I routinely bring up for clients is, what percentage of people who use the software/free trial/etc stop using it after the first time, versus what percent use it at least twice?

The number that use it at least twice is almost always depressingly low. When I started tracking it for Bing Card Creator it was only 40 percent of people came back a second time. These days, it’s up to 60 percent, which a 50 percent lift, did wonderful things for my business, but still 40 percent of people would not even give it a second look.

40% is a decent ballpark number for people who don’t track this.  That has been fairly consistent across a lot of clients of mine. No one ever gives you a book that says you should be tracking this because it’s abysmal right now and you should improve it, but if you’re not tracking that, I guarantee you it is probably abysmal right now and you should probably try to improve it.

Keith:  You should write a book about that. You should just write a book about these are the things you should be tracking, why the hell aren’t you?

Patrick:  Yeah, everybody tells me I should write a book, but writing a book is a terrible idea.

Keith:  Maybe a pamphlet. [laughs]

Patrick:  It’s funny. If I write a blog post people will read it and maybe comment on it for Hacker News. I know it would be forgotten the day after. Ideally, if I wrote a book it would be referenceable by people. Despite the underlying information being essentially the same product, if you put 2,000 words in a book it is perceived as having value, but if you put 2,000 words in a blog post your readers are going to be “TL;DR dude.”

That is the theory at any rate.  The reality is that putting 2,000 words in a book is a terrible, terrible use of my time business‑wise.  Even if I sell the book (or e-book) at $20 or $50 or $100 a piece, and sell hundreds of copies, that is not a meaningful amount of money relative to getting one of my happy consulting clients on the phone and saying, “Hey, I have an idea that I want to try for you guys. Hopefully it will do as well as the last time. Let’s get this going.”

Keith:  However, one thing you might want to try is even just a blog collection and get a physical, printed book. One of my clients, he’s actually considering giving his book away just because of the amount of press it gets him. We did some welcome page tests.

The first one was a picture of him, where he graduated from, and the things that he’s accomplished.

The second one was a big old picture of his book on the “New York Times Bestseller.”

The third one was “I’ve been on NBC” with a video of him in NBC.

The one that says “I’ve done all this” did fairly OK. The one that says “I published a book that was a bestseller” I think was 100 percent better. 100 percent better than that was “I was on TV.” Pretty much once you get on TV, people will buy your shit, no matter what you’re hawking. If you have a clip of you being on TV, they will buy anything you want.

Patrick:  This, by the way, is hilariously underexploited by engineers and people in the startup community, but it’s well known among direct marketers.  After you have press about you, if the New York Times blurbs about you, even one sentence worth: in all your copy from that point out you put the logo of the New York Times and you say “as appeared in theNew York Times” and that will increase your conversion rate up the wazoo.

You’ve suddenly jumped from “A website that I’ve never heard of and don’t trust” to “Endorsed by the paper of record.” You will routinely see this on some of the skeazier direct marketing pages. Even if they haven’t actually been on the New York Times, they’ll say the product category’s been endorsed by the New York Times.

For example, if they’re hawking a social network, they’ll say “As seen in the New York Times.”  They haven’t actually been reported about, but a social network — probably Facebook — has been reported about. I wouldn’t be happy about doing that. That said, if you’re a Fog Creek or a company with  is legitimately high enough profile to getink from the New York Times, that should probably be on the website somewhere.  Fog Creek has even had their office written about before. [Editor’s Note: Like Lonely Island says, “Doesn’t matter, still counts.”]

I don’t know if that is on their website, actually.

Keith:  You should just talk to Joel about that. One thing I do want to say you don’t want to put on your site is “as seen on TV.” Never put “As seen on TV”, especially the red circular logo with all the explosions that you see on $50‑dollar abs stretchers or whatever. That’s not the best thing.

Patrick:  Yeah. People may have cottoned on to the fact that that means they paid for an infomercial. However, retrofitting an explanation like I just did is witchcraft. Have your intuitions and have your thoughts about what would probably work for the site. Like we mentioned earlier, it’s so cheap to be test these things, you should be continuously testing them.

Keith:  Even if you have a banner space on your home page, just switch out the banners. Do an A/B test with that, switch out the banners, see which one performs better. It’s so simple.

Patrick:  It’s so simple and it’s absolutely crazy the amount of lift you can get for an established business that produces value and has been doing so for a decade just by switching out banners.

Keith:  Speaking of which, are you going to tell about the recent A/B test result you got from Bingo Card Creator?

Patrick:  I should tell about the Bingo Card Creator story, right? OK. I went on a six‑week America tour recently, partly to drum up consulting business, partly to go see Silicon Valley and meet the people I’ve only been reading about in Hacker News, and partly just a change of place. So I went to New York City, went over to Fog Creek, chatted with them a little bit, and while I was in New York City I went to something called Hacker School.

It’s a bunch of people who are learning to become better programmers. They gave me an opportunity to talk to everybody and to teach a lesson on anything I thought they would find valuable. I think a lot of hackers don’t know about A/B testing, so I did a live demo of A/B testing using A/Bingo and I said, “This is literally how easy it is to make an A/B test. We’re going to live code one for my front page right now.”

“I’ve told you in like two sentences what Bingo Card Creator does and for whom.  Now, I’ve been doing this for five years and none of you all heard about it for more than 10 seconds, but just throw out a new headline for Bingo Card Creator. Try to beat my champion headline,  ‘Make Bingo cards on your computer.'”

Someone said, “Why don’t you try ‘Create Your Own Bingo Cards Now?” I said, “That sounds like a great answer. It won’t possibly beat my best thing, but sure, we’ll just try coding it up.” I come back a week later and there was literally a 40 percent lift. 40 effing percent.

Keith:  And that’s on sales.

Patrick:  Yeah, that was tracked direct to sales.

Keith:  That’s not trials, that’s not, “Oh, I want to know more,” that’s direct sales. 40 percent increase to sales.

Patrick:  Yeah. Somebody who knew virtually nothing about my business was able to beat something that I’d worked on for a couple of years. Granted, with A/B testing there’s often a bit of reversion to the mean. You get a confidence interval for whether there’s a difference between A and B, but with the typical way that you do stats with A/B testing, you don’t get a confidence interval on what the percent lift is.

It could be anywhere from say two percent to 80 percent and you wouldn’t know where unless you do more sophisticated statistical techniques that I don’t usually bother doing.  Then, that results in a reversion to the mean effect, where a couple weeks later you’ll see it’s only a 20 percent lift now.  You think “what gives?” It was probably only 20 percent that whole time, you’ve just got a bit of a ghost in the machine there. [Editor’s note: This is not the only way reversion to the mean can happen.  For example, it may be the case for some sites that change itself tends perform well, irrespective of whether the changed version is distinguishable from the old version from the perspective of users who haven’t seen the old version.  I generally just ignore the possibility of that, but it is certainly possible]

Be that as it may, you would be amazed how often, big, successful, established companies, like 37 Signals, Fog Creek, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, see huge lifts from A/B testing.  They run tests years or decades after having released products and that has a meaningful impact on their bottom line without a huge amount of work.

Something I often tell my clients who have 10‑year‑old products, “How much work would it be to increase the value of this product to your customers by one percent? If you have a team of 20 engineers working on a project for 10 years there’s 200 man‑years invested in it already.  You’ve probably already snipped all the low-hanging fruit in terms of features. Making it one percent better by adding features is going to require five man‑years, 10 man years, 20 man‑years of work.  Making it one percent better in terms of perceived value  can be as simple as changing button copy or changing a headline that you use on your product’s landing page.” [Editor’s note: Remember, the last feature added to the product gets seen by a fraction of a percent of the user base, but the headline gets read by most folks who open the site.]

One percent is definitely not the ceiling. You can get 5, 10, 20, 100 percent in some cases. Basecamp has done many A/B tests, but just tweaking the header on the pricing page was worth 40‑60 percent. That should blow your mind. [Editor’s note: Not sure whether I was remembering my facts correctly here: just trying to Google for a citation, the only article I’m quickly bringing up is a story about Highrise, another 37signals product, getting +30%.]

Think back. A week ago you were doing something for your business, right? What were you doing last week? Did it get you 40 percent to 60 percent improvement in your business’s bottom line? If not, why weren’t you doing A/B testing instead? When you phrase it like that, it always scares the heck out of me but it’s kind of true. [Editor’s note: I often get very handwavy with that phrase “bottom line”: SaaS math does not work out such that 50% growth in rate of new account signups results in 50% to the bottom line. Work with me here — I’m from the land of one-time purchases, where modeling the effects of an A/B test is simple without having to literally start using calculus.]

Keith:  You do need the other stuff, you can’t just A/B test your way to a successful business, but at the same time if you have down time, if you have any amount of time, like we said one line of code, five minutes, it’s not hard to do. If you have that time, you should be doing it.

Patrick:  This should be your routine practice.  If you make a new feature and you’re wondering if users are actually going to respond to it or not, put the new feature in an A/B test. It’s as simple as putting an if block around it. [Editor’s note: I’m trying to sell you something, not describe engineering reality here.  Yeah, it can get substantially more complicated than “Wrap that in an if block.”  Buy what I’m selling — you’ll be happy you did.]

Keith:  I’m sure a lot of people are thinking, “But then you have to hire a designer and they have to make a mock‑up.” Even though it takes one line of code, it’s a pain to think about all these things. I do graphic design as well, but I show all my stuff to my wife and my friends to get a different perspective.  Even if I don’t agree with their comments, even if their comments are batshit crazy, I test it because the cost of testing is so low.  [Editor’s note: I do not endorse testing batshit crazy ideas.]

If it fails, it failed for three days and then it’s off the site and we’re never going to see it again. Sometimes you get nice results. I had a very nicely designed welcome page. My wife looked at it and said, “It’s too busy. Why don’t you try having no background?” Tried no background. 40 percent lift.

Patrick:  You often see in design advice, for example at Smashing Magazine. I love designers — Keith is a designer and Keith is my best friend — but on the medical science scale, the discipline of design is closer to leeches than it is to medicine. I don’t like this design, so let’s add more leeches. We should make design more rigorous, like medicine: we’re going to test a treatment against a placebo and then see if it doesn’t kill people. Less leeches, more penicillin.

There was an article recently on Smashing Magazine that said if your body copy is less than 16 points you’re losing money. That’s a great headline, isn’t it, because that is a prediction about the measurable nature of reality.  So you should be able to test that. I actually did test that. For Bingo Card Creator, I changed the body copy sitewide to 14 points for half of the population  and 16 points in the other half of the population. [Editor’s note: BCC has used 14px for several years.]

Sure enough, I got a null result. “Null result” means that after a week and 20,000 people or whatever saw both variations, there did not exist data to conclude that 16 percent was different than 14 percent along the axis I was measuring. Good to know, right? [Editor’s note: 49,000 participants, actually.  It was a good week.]

Keith:  I do want to follow that up a little, doing a lot of graphic design myself. A lot of it is gut instinct. There are a lot of rules to design, but when you say something like “anything less than 16 point font is unreadable,” that really has to do with each page. You can’t just take any page, make all the font 16, and you’re suddenly going to have increased conversions. [Editor’s note: Bah, designers.]

Smashing Magazine spinning the story in that fashion was essentially linkbait. That’s the whole reason they did that. For some sites it might get you 20‑30 percent. It’s worth testing and in Patrick’s case it didn’t work. It all has to do with the design, it has to do with how the site feels, and for the particular users. Some users may want a green button, some users might want a red button.

If your users are the ones who want the green button and you give them a red button, no matter how well it converts on another person’s page, it’s not going to convert well for yours. For any design for anything you should test it on your own users instead of following just what other people say.

Patrick:  That brings up a funny anecdote about users and culture. One of the versions of my Bingo Card Creator website was designed by a lady in India.  (Editor’s note: Gursimran Kaur, whose name I avoided saying because I am unsure of the pronunciation, having never verbally spoken to her.)  I asked her to design a pair of buttons for me, to represent downloading and creating cards.  She thought that the action associated with creation was getting something from the website.  Think of your hand going out, grabbing something, and taking it back to you.

So her button looked like a palm with splayed fingers oriented upwards on a red background, which in America means “Stop!”:

I had to say, “Hey, in America, this gesture does not suggest ‘Come get this!’ It means ‘No, no, no! Before you click this button think carefully. Do you really want to download this software? It will give your Googles a virus.'” [Editor’s note: I am poking light fun of my composite customer, who is not very technical, and as a result might use “the Googles” to mean, variously, the Internet, the web browser, or the entire experience of using a computer.]

We settled on a design of the download button that did not give their Googles a virus.  It probably worked better.

Keith:  You’ve made many buttons since then, of course. You’re very big into the color contrast. You want big, flashy buttons that say download this now.

Patrick:  People make fun of me. I’ve been saying this stuff about A/B testing and whatnot for years. I make buttons bigger and it almost always works better. One of the English as a second language folks in one of my forums was talking one day and he’s like, “I know Patrick loves his big, orange, pancake buttons.” Big, orange, pancake button is my keyword for this now because big, orange, pancake buttons really effing work. Go ahead.

Keith:  Except for these ones you tried last time. You had put these ones in and we were working together and he just turns to me and says, “I have these huge, new buttons and I really like them, but they’re just not converting well.” I look at them, they were really the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. They completely did not fit with the site at all. They were just offenses against God, honestly. [laughs]

Patrick:  Right. I’ve been trying to get Keith to be my cofounder for the last couple of years. We’ll see if that happens.

Keith:  We’ll see if that happens.

Patrick:  One of the reasons I have been trying to recruit Keith for this kind of thing is because there’s this, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s a skill, maybe it is an aptitude, maybe it is something your born with, but it is called taste. Whatever day God handed out the taste I was studying stats for D&D characters or something and totally missed it.

Keith:  For action buttons for Patrick it’s generally bigger, oranger, more pancake‑y. It’s pretty much the order it goes in.

Patrick:  With a little bit of rounding on the side.

Keith:  You love the rounding.

Patrick:  Good pancakes should be rounded and huge. Huge, rounded pancakes.

Keith:  I think your Bingo Card Creator is just going to have a giant orange circle on it that says “Buy now.” You should split test that for April Fool’s Day.

Patrick:  People wanted me to test that for a while. I was about to put an 800 by 600 button on my landing pages, but that would violate the Google AdWords content policies, which is problematic because most of the traffic to the landing pages comes from AdWords.

Speaking of which, interesting result from Fog Creek. Fog Creek decided to replace their FogBugz home page. It’s text‑heavy and tries to sell software to enterprise users. They replaced it with their kiwi logo and text similar to “FogBugz: The World’s Best Bug Tracking Software.  Start Now.” No text.  No screenshots.  No philosophy.  Just “Kiwi.  Start now!”

Conversions went way up. At the same time, they fell off the Internet in terms of SEO.  SEO and A/B testing exist to help the business. The business does not exist to help them. Despite the fact that that A/B test was successful, we couldn’t justify burning their Internet brand to continue it, the result was amusing.

Keith:  Right. Actually, one thing you got from a similar test from Fog Creek is that people love to watch Joel talk.

Patrick:  People love to watch Joel talk.

Keith:  I love to listen to Joel talk. I actually listen to the StackExchange podcast just to hear Joel talk.

Patrick:  This is why we’re doing a podcast right now, by the way, because Keith was so inspired by listening to the StackExchange podcast.

I don’t want to give the impression that all Fog Creek’s optimizations are my doing, by the way. I helped Fog Creek a few times with regards to their marketing, A/B testing and whatnot, but there are people in the company that are doing it pretty much every day. [Editor’s note: Fog Creek folks are ridiculously smart and they’re a wonderful company to work for.  Does being their data-driven marketing guy interest you?  Get in touch with them or get in touch with me — they’re hiring.]

One page frequently tested is the front page for FogBugz. For example, a page with a flat photo versus a design with a short three‑minute feature video versus a page with Joel Spolsky talking for an hour.  The video is indirectly a sales pitch for FogBugz, but it’s mostly a pitch of how we should do software development better.

People watch that video for the entire hour. This just blows my mind. They’ve shown me a graph of what the level of attention is at various points in the interview. If you can imagine the graph for a Justin Bieber song on YouTube where everybody is listening at the first second and then X percent listen through the entire song, it’s that graph… but stretched out to an hour.

Granted, there’s probably not too many 14‑year‑old girls in the market for bug tracking software. A very different audience wants to watch Joel Spolsky talk for an hour about FogBugz. After they watch him for an hour, they are effing sold. Where is that button? They want it now.

Keith:  Actually, that is an interesting trend. Joel talking for an hour is definitely above and beyond what I think most other companies can do. Video has always been the anathema of landing pages. You never put video on your landing page and stuff. Video now on landing pages is converting so much better than just text and I think it’s really going back to people don’t like to read.

Patrick:  Right. People do not read on the Internet. If you take one thing from this podcast, people do not read on this Internet. [Editor’s note: It’s a pity that of the tens of thousands of people who see this post, only about five will actually read this comment.  You’ll know who they are because they’ll race to mention it.]

Keith:  They will click on a play button and listen to a 10 second clip over reading a paragraph.

Patrick:  Yeah. It’s insane. This is one of those things where engineers have a totally different grasp of how the world works because most of us were precocious readers. We devour 600‑page Lord of the Ring books with no problem. That is severely anomalous behavior among the population at large.

If you install Crazy Egg, Crazy Egg will show you what percentage of people actually made it to a particular portion of a blog post or whatnot. The world, in general, is TL;DR after four words. It’s crazy. That’s why headers matter so much, by the way, because if they’re only going to read one sentence, make that sentence count.

Keith:  Crazy Egg, if you use their scroll map, you will have so much wonderful information on your pages, especially if you have any page that requires scrolling for more than maybe three clicks.

Patrick:  We just got done saying people don’t read on the Internet, but man, long copy. Long copy is those lovely pages that have hundreds and hundreds of paragraphs of talking you to death about the product. They just beat you into submission and then give you the buy button and then you actually buy. Do people actually buy from these, Keith?

Keith:  One of my clients has very, very large long, long, long sales pages. I think it’s 68 pages printed. I looked at them and I was like, “There is no way people read these.” While 100 percent do not read the entire thing, 40 percent read the entire thing. 40 percent.

Patrick:  That just blows my mind.

Keith:  It absolutely blows my mind. The interesting thing now is that the sales button is not at the end of the page, it’s somewhere in the middle, and yet people read, go to the sales button, actually continue reading, and come back to the sales button in order to click it. That’s just amazing.

That’s 40 percent. 60 percent either don’t read it at all or just skim around. It’s really cool because you can see exactly where on the page people will stop, even for a slight amount of time. There’s this picture of a kind of cute girl with a blue Mohawk on. I hope I’m not giving out too much but it’s not a public page so I think it’s OK. 60 percent of people stop at that picture. It’s 40 percent, 40 percent, 40 percent and then blue Mohawk 60 percent. The area is just bright yellow on the heatmap. Everyone loves looking at this person.

Patrick:  People love faces, by the way. Dave McClure has a great quote about this.  [Editor’s note: profane, amusing, and not paid attention to nearly enough.] If you put faces on anything, you’ll draw attention to both the face and to everything surrounding the face.

One of my buddies, Ian, runs HelpSpot. It’s customer help desk software. He just put a photo of himself on the front page. It’s the size of the author photo at the end of this post — really tiny. He just put a photo of himself under the main content area of both default and the front page with the preexisting copy about I’m the founder, this is wonderful software, here’s why, yada, yada. Just adding the photo increased the number of trials by 20 percent.

I think it’s hardwired in people — biologically —  that we track gazes very well.  If you find photos of people looking at something and you track where their eyes are on the page, all the visitors are going to be looking on that line of sight too. Have that line of sight terminate in the form or the sign up button or whatever it is that you want people to take action on. Really, really works well.

Keith:  There’s a lot of good articles on that on Google if you search for, I can’t remember, what is it eye tracking and product placement?

Patrick:  I think it’s gaze. The magic word is gaze.

Keith:  They’ve done actual eye tracking experiments and it amazing that people will look first at the face and then where the face is looking. If you have a face with someone looking to the left and to the left is your purchase now button, then you have a much higher chance of people clicking on that button than anywhere else on the page.

Patrick:  Speaking about the faces, who here has seen a comely young lady in a headset? Girls in headset photos are the visual equivalent of Cosmo’s top 10 things that your employer doesn’t want you to know headlines. Those persist over hundreds of websites done by hundreds of different highly sophisticated companies because they effing work. Go to HeadsetHotties.com. [Editor’s note: Some people claim they thought of Facebook before Facebook.  I thought of HeadsetHotties.  I have really really tiny sour grapes about getting beaten to market.] It’s a real website. Take a look at the comely photos of young ladies with headsets. Put it on your page. A/B test it. You’ll see it go up.

I’ve seen also great variations on that. A lot of engineers told that their software will do 20 percent better stuff for customers if it just had a photo of a young lady with a headset get very skeptical of that.  They’re just not willing to try it on their website for whatever reason. Hey, it’s your business. Ultimately that is your decision.

I once worked for a particular company.  They had an employee who they wanted to get contacted from a particular page.  Let’s call him Bob.  Bob is very much not a female, blonde, 20‑something with a headset, but we put Bob in a headset and took a photo of Bob and just put a photo of Bob on the pages with a line that said, “Bob isn’t pretty, but he actually works here. Send Bob an email.” Bob got a lot of emails.  This was a happy result for the company, since people were practically begging Bob to tell them about a five-figure enterprise solution.

So authenticity works too, but if you’re going to be authentic, be authentic by using a picture with a person’s face. It helps.

Keith:  All right. We’ve gone almost an hour and a half now. Some of this is going to go on the cutting room floor. I think that’s about time to wrap up.

Patrick:  All right. Thanks very much, Keith. We’re going to probably be doing this later. Feel free to drop us a comment either in the comment thingy below or on Hacker News or through the emails. You want to give your contact information? We’ll put it in the post.

[Editor’s note: Patrick is patrick@ this domain.  Keith Perhac is k dot HIS_LAST_NAME@delfi-net.com We’ll also read your comments on the Internets.]

Keith:  We’ll put it in the post. As always, Patrick is patio11 and I’m harisenbon on Hacker News and Twitter.

Patrick:  Thanks so much for listening everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Keith:  All right. Good talking to you.

Patrick:  Take care.

Keith:  Bye bye.

Transcript by CastingWords, with light editing by me.  It cost about $100, and was worth every penny, since it freed up basically an entire day of my time.  Assume any remaining errors are my fault.