Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. Hacking on marketing in the first year of a new SaaS product. Something I can relate to all too well. So I wanted to invite my friend Joe Howard onto the show because he is right in the thick of it with his new SaaS product called Driftly.

app. And he is the marketing focused co founder of this tool. So he's in the thick of figuring out how to generate a activity and traffic and first customers for this startup, but it's not his first rodeo. He has previously built up a very successful business called WP buffs, where he grew it for many years.

He has since put someone else into the CEO role. He's taken a hiatus since then, but he's seen the whole process from going from zero to hundreds of thousands of [00:01:00] visitors and many, many customers. So he knows what that looks like once you're more mature in business, but this is back to square one, back to ground zero with a new one.

So I wanted to dig into what he's getting into. And, you know, we talked a lot about SEO and content strategy and lack of a strategy when it comes to that stuff and other tactics that we're both kind of exploring as we're sort of in this, uh, year one of a new SaaS. Here is my conversation with Joe. Enjoy.

Hey, Joe Howard.

Joe Howard: How's it going, man? Doing well, Brian. How are you doing, man?

Brian Casel: Doing good. Yeah. Great to connect with you again. We've kind of known each other for several years here and you know, you reached out to me a few weeks ago and all of a sudden you're working on a new startup. I remember you still run WP.

You don't run WP Buffs, but like you've handed over the CEO role, but you still own it. Is that right?

Joe Howard: That's right. The short story is I'm still the majority owner of the business, but [00:02:00] I've stepped out of the day to day. Nick originally hired as a support person, was continually too good at his job.

Eventually became COO and now as CEO of the company. So yeah, I've stepped out of day to day stuff and yeah, working on new projects.

Brian Casel: That's awesome. I remember when you did that, what, like a year or two ago, and I thought that you were just sort of like off, like traveling, vacationing since then. And then all of a sudden you show up in my DMs with this new thing, Driftly.

Joe Howard: I kind of was not working too much past six or eight months or so. My family's living in Mexico and a little bit here in Florida. That's where I am now. A few couple of weeks, actually, now we're going to be back home in DC, but yeah, I did take some time off and I wanted to kind of organically let what happens happen.

I was relaxing. I was reading a lot of science fiction. I was taking nice. Walks on the beach and it was a great time to be able to spend more time with my family with my wife, you know, son, I got a two and a half year old now. It was a cool time to take like a mini hiatus from business world, but [00:03:00] I started to get that itch again and yeah, I ended up finding a new project.

And I think a lot of people are saying the same thing as you like, okay, he's like back, like, okay, new project. Like, what is this? Like it kind of all happened. Over a couple of weeks, that's how it happens.

Brian Casel: You know, we're going to do another segment here. I definitely want to hear more about this hiatus because I can't relate to that at all, but yeah, we're going to talk about like being a dad and hiatus stuff.

We'll get into that in the other one. But since I came across Driftly, you know, talking to you about it, it looks really cool, but what's interesting to me, what I would really like to focus on here is. You know, your role, correct me if I'm wrong. You're sort of like the marketing co founder, like the marketing focused person and your co founder is the technical person.

Is that right?

Joe Howard: That's right. That's the easy way to put it. That's usually how I say it's like technical and non technical.

Brian Casel: Obviously not just marketing. I'm sure

Joe Howard: There are these gray areas in business that you run SaaS companies. You've run productized services before, you know, is like there's technical, there's like building the thing.

And then there's marketing and maybe sales. If you need that, that's like. A non technical role, but then there's also like customer support and then there's like [00:04:00] customer success and product. There's a lot of things that are like, you know, maybe could go under technical co founder if they have that skillset, maybe it could go under the non technical co founder if they have that skillset.

So. There are some things that are like support. Okay. Jacob, you can work on support since you're working on the product. Like you're probably the best person to like, you can just tell people exactly what they need to hear. And it'd be cool for them to hear from the person who's building it for support.

And then there's things like documentation. It's like, well, maybe we should tag team that because you know, the technical aspects of things, but my role is more. Marketing and like the website copy. So like documentation is also kind of copy. So it's like, I want to be able to write things that are going to be easily digestible for the end user.

You might get a little technical with it. So maybe we can tag team that and like kind of both work a little bit on that. So there are certain areas that are like, could be enveloped by both, but we're kind of figuring that out as we, we go along, that's a good thing about working with Jacob, we're on the same page about like, we'll figure things out as they come and we don't have to have everything figured out today and we can make decisions as they come and that's cool.[00:05:00]

Brian Casel: That's super cool. I'm always like jealous of have a co founder.

Joe Howard: Yeah. You're solo founder on

Brian Casel: Solo on all my stuff. And it's, yeah, it's wearing all the hats. It is interesting how, like there are. Areas that probably can and should fall under both purview. You know, I think like talking to customers, like, yeah, somebody sort of needs to take care of the support tickets and get those resolved.

I mean, talking to customers, if you're focused on marketing and copy, you need to understand what they're saying and what they care about.

Joe Howard: Yeah. We're like CCing each other on like every email we send just so that we're both involved in every conversation. Cause I mean, you're totally right. Especially at the early stages of a company, I'm sure you either are still experienced, but definitely in the early days that it was like.

I don't exactly know what ZipMessage is yet, you know? Like, I have this idea of what I want it to be, but if, like, ten customers come back and they're like, Oh, it would be really awesome if, like, it actually

Brian Casel: Yeah. I mean, we're definitely still in that it's like we're about a year into having customers and it's still evolving in different use cases and feature requests and types of customers who are coming through.

So that's actually a really good [00:06:00] segue into the question I want to get into with you here. Okay. So I'll give you like my understanding of it.

Joe Howard: That'd be awesome. Let's do like a whole, like you're a potential customer. Like, tell me what you think it is. So, and I'll jump off this episode and make some copy adjustments.

Brian Casel: Well, you know, it's clearly like an onboarding tool. It appears to be aimed at SaaS products, or at least to me, that's where it would make sense. Like a SaaS product could like plug this in and it would take care of like the tour and pointing new users and getting them to that aha moment, actually right in your H1, nudge users toward that wow moment.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, like in ZipMessage, you know, we did build custom actually just this week. I redesigned and reworked our onboarding flow for like the third or fourth time. You know, I think it's a super important piece of the puzzle. I mean, for me, I'm technical and I designed the product and then I have my developers who helped push on features.

But the thing like onboarding requires some dev work, but I'm able to build it. That's sort of like a luxury that I have that a lot of teams don't have. Cause like a lot of teams [00:07:00] need to be pushing on the bigger features, but they don't want to spend their developers hours on these like onboarding tweaks or this or that.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Sometimes it's not even the technical person's role. Sometimes like we found like actually like ideal customers for us are kind of like heads of product and like. Customer success folks, and even support folks who want less support tickets about their complex like dashboards. And that's what product tours can do.

I'd be interested to actually ask you more about the ones you've built into ZipMessage yourself, because yeah, so Driftly product tours, it helps with onboarding. It helps with feature adoption ideas to help turn like average users into power users, which increases retention, which increases. Feature and product option increases lifetime value.

Like all those good things. I'd be interested to hear in ZipMessage. You said it's like your third or fourth time doing it, building it internally. How are you like measuring the success of little tours you're giving the folks?

Brian Casel: Well, I'm just a big believer in reworking things early and [00:08:00] often in a SaaS product.

I've been building it for about a year and a half, have had customers for about a year. And, you know, I just reworked the marketing site as well. And I just think like, as you learn more, which happens really rapidly during the first year, things need to change really rapidly. Right. Well, the way that I think about making changes, like it's usually to solve a specific problem.

So right now I wanted to update it so that I'm getting data on the use cases. On like somebody's intended use case for ZipMessage. That's sort of a big challenge that I have with it. You're more focused on like SaaS and software, and then you can get into like product managers and stuff like that with ZipMessages.

It's more wide open. We get SaaS teams, we get agencies, we get coaches, we get podcasters. I added a thing in the onboarding flow that says like, what do you intend to use that message for? It's got like eight choices and check all the ones that apply. And then there's one other with a free form entry. I thought I was like all smart, like, Oh, I'm going to get all this like data and one or two of these is going to turn into the path.

Of course, like every signup that came in this week, they [00:09:00] each check like four or five boxes. It's like, great. That's not helpful.

Joe Howard: Are your percentages like split across like. Absolutely. Every one of those. Yeah. That's a challenge. I mean, that's part of finding your ideal customer. Like there's so many pieces, right?

To like startup and like getting it right and like finding your ideal customer market. Sometimes it's easy depending on a lot of different things, but sometimes it's hard and every startup is going to have those three things that really take a long time to figure out and maybe look different early than later on.

Brian Casel: Totally. I mean, that was one of the things was just the ability to gather some data on users as they're coming into the app. I actually did that very early on in ZipMessage. So like going from like V1 to V2 of the onboarding, I removed that customer research piece. And the goal there was to just flow them right into the app quicker and skip the questions.

And I had that for about six months. And then now I just went back to at least just ask them, what do you intend to do with it? That's all I want to know. The other piece that I'm trying to optimize for right [00:10:00] now is also like getting to that activation. So I am measuring. How many new users come into the app and then actually record their first message in ZipMessage.

We drop them right into their first message, but a lot of people just don't create one.

Joe Howard: This is like feature adoption journey, but for you, it's kind of product adoption. Like that is the big feature, right? Yeah.

Brian Casel: I mean, if you're not going to create a message, then you're not going to share it with someone.

And then you're not going to get the value of having your first async conversation. You know, I'm looking at that number. I mean, obviously most people do go ahead with that, but there's a larger chunk than I would like to see who just somehow sign up. I don't know if it's like, they're not ready to create their first message.

Joe Howard: It's really interesting. This free trial thing. Cause I've never done free trials before. I actually tried free trials with WP buffs, but it was a total disaster because I learned you shouldn't do free trials with a service. Like you're providing a service. People need to pay for it. Like, okay, yes, get that.

But with the. SaaS with the tech company, it's different. The margins are higher. You can give people free access. It doesn't cost you anything more, except a [00:11:00] couple more cents of server costs. But the free trial thing is interesting because you're paying customers, right? For, especially for an indie company, like the people who are paying or the people who you want to like build for.

But it's when you're starting off, you get so many free trials that you're kind of in this awkward spot of like, well, I want to do something to help activate more free trial users into paying users, but who are my free trial users? That's a big question because are your free trial users you're building for the people who are going to churn anyway and not going to upgrade anyway?

Because if you build for those people, then you're not really moving forward at all. And I think about that a lot in terms of like, who are our free trial, like saw free trial coming the other day. And I was like, Oh, awesome. Free trial early stages. It's like. Free trial started today. Like, let's go. It was like someone I knew who I knew was just trying it out, but wasn't going to pay for it.

It was just like a friend of mine. It's like, Oh, I'll try it out. But they're not my target customer. They just like wanted to sign up because they talked to me. That's a tough thing early on.

Brian Casel: For sure. I see a lot of that too. I'm curious. Like even within SaaS companies, that's still a wide net of customers.

So like, [00:12:00] are you starting to learn who are the best fits for Driftly?

Joe Howard: We're starting to, we're still early on. So it's still a learning process, but we have an idea of the kind of customers we want to go after. It kind of started off as like indie hacker, indie maker, small companies.

Brian Casel: Like take care of this piece so that you can build other features.

Joe Howard: Yes, exactly. Other companies that do what we do. Some of them are like huge, big funded companies. Like Intercom has product tours. They're like 400 million funded company. Right. But they're. They're not really a direct competitor. Like a lot of them are funded companies are going more after enterprise level customers.

Intercom is kind of like the giant who kind of is trying to like do it all. So we thought like, there's some people like down in mid market that need a tool like this, but who aren't going to pay 200 bucks a month for it. We have a 25 a month plan now, I think, and also a 99 a year plan. So it's like probably the main two we're, we're pushing right now.

We have an enterprise plan, but that's a little bit, at least for right now, it's more like have a super high priced item so that people. I think the other ones are cheaper by comparison. We started [00:13:00] there and we kind of have shifted a little bit more into mid market companies because we found some people like you are early and they just want to like build it themselves.

That's like actually one of the reasons why Jacob, my co founder has a lot of things he wants to build to make it so that people don't have to build it themselves or like almost ask the question, like, why would I build it myself instead of using this tool? It's going to take a little while to get there.

That's the idea. So we have some sub. Features like analytics. So you can see how well your tours and product tours are doing in your hotspots. We're making it customizable to look enough to look native within your app. We have teams so that if you have a bigger team, you can get three people in there. We have targeting and segmentation.

So you can say, I want to show this tour to new users. And then as soon as someone becomes a paying user, they get this more advanced tours, you know, however you want to target people. So we have some of those features as well to target those folks.

Brian Casel: The thing that does seem attractive about it as someone who does design and build it myself.

What seems attractive is like the ability to rapidly test different options. If we onboard [00:14:00] people this way and go through this flow, let's change that up and try option B and just rapidly go between those without having to rework the code and redeploy and

Joe Howard: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm actually honestly getting good feedback from this conversation, just for like myself, selfishly, like fast testing, I think is a cool idea.

I've thought of Driftly as something that could actually. Implement product tours, analytics behind it could actually tell you not only how far people get in their tours, but where people get stuck in your software, like on step three, people just, there's like a 50 percent drop off here. That probably means that the UI or UX of that area in your app is like something might be off there.

Try to make that easier so you can improve the feature adoption almost like regardless of the tour. Like I still think the tour is going to be really helpful, but maybe that could influence like actually making. The app better. And the other thing you said about asking an initial question, we have the targeting and segmentation.

So that's nice to be able to do that. But I like the idea of being able to target and segment based on information given [00:15:00] by the user, which is kind of a little bit more into like the area of like right message.

Brian Casel: Yeah, when I had the V1 version of it, it was much more free form. I was asking users like open questions, like, how did you hear about it?

And what are you trying to do with it? Type in your answer into this box. That wasn't necessarily to like start segmenting. It was just like, I want to hear the words from their mouth just to see what they're using so I can start to write better copy on the website. Now the new version is more of a multiple choice plus an other option that they can type into.

Joe Howard: It's kind of depends on the kind of data you want to get out because you're going to get more answers with just to choose one thing, a few less with choose multiple things. And then a few less with give me the free flowing type your answer, but the kind of data you're going to get back, do you want to get a new copy for your website?

Well, you want to hear exactly what people are saying. So even if you get five instead of. 20 answers, that's still better for you. But if you want just like to know the percentages of 50 percent of people answered this, that's probably going to suggest this multiple choice or single choice.

Brian Casel: I mean, the other thing I'm starting to do a lot more of now is actually sending ZipMessage to the new users and getting into direct [00:16:00] conversations from there,

Joe Howard: That's easiest way to honestly like vet.

People to see if they're like potential customers, like, do you never apply? Well, you're probably not going to use it message. So that's probably not worth continuing to have the conversation. Like, cool. Maybe another tool is good for you, but if they're enjoying it, then Hey, you should be a customer, you know?

Brian Casel: Yeah, totally. I mean, actually, maybe it's another idea for your product. If you don't have something like this already is to see how far do they make it through the onboarding flow or how active. So when I get a notification, when someone signs up for ZipMessage, I could see, have they actually created their first message yet or not?

And if they did, that's a higher indication that like they're more engaged. And if I do personally reach out to them, I could probably take them even further.

Joe Howard: How do you see if they've created a ZipMessage or not? Are you just like checking your database stuff from the database?

Brian Casel: Actually, what I did was I I'm delaying the notification to myself about 10 minutes after they sign up.

So they have like 10 minutes to get in there and create their first message.

Joe Howard: That's interesting. I just wrote a big word. We're starting to, we've chosen some marketing channels to take a bet on for Driftly and, [00:17:00] you know, I mean, that's what I really want to get into here. Yeah, yeah, sure. I was just going to say, cause you're talking about featured option stuff.

I just wrote this big, big, like blog posts about. Featured option and one on featured option, one on product option in general. So I've been having a lot of these ideas flowing through my head around, like, how do you not just using Driftly to do it, but like in general, like, what are the things you need to know?

Not just best practices, but things you need to test things you need to experiment with. And I was doing the skyscraper approach. I was looking at all the other content out there. I was like, Oh my God, there's so much out there. But.

Brian Casel: All right, dude, this is what I've been seeing from you on Twitter in the last few weeks.

And this is what I really want to dig into. I feel like I just completely like overthink stuff and try to get too strategic and game plan this and game plan that. And then I see you on Twitter, you ask like 10 people for their input on some question and then you turn it into like a 5, 000 word blog posts that features all these people and it gets all these like retweets and shares.

What just happened here? Like you just like generated all this activity, you know, you're just like kind of coming out of the gate with this new product and firing on all. [00:18:00] So I love it. Obviously you've been through the process of starting and building and growing a company before with WP buffs. And I'm sure you've done all sorts of like marketing strategies at different stages of that business.

Now you're sort of like back at square one. How do you think about strategically? What are we doing about growing traffic and getting more users into the top of our funnel right now? Are you just sort of like throwing a lot of stuff out there just to generate activity or how are you thinking about this?

Joe Howard: Yeah, I'll tell you, honestly, this is my second, you know, I've done startups before I did WP buffs, but none of them, you know, they were the stepping stones into the first success. And now I would really consider like Driftly the second real startup I'm working on and you would think I would feel so confident and like, Oh, I just had a good success.

Like I could do this and you know what? I go back and you started at square one and you really feel like you're on square one. At least I do. I'm on Twitter and honestly, I feel intimidated by a lot of other people who are like. Also beginners, like probably more so beginners than me, but they're like at 10, 000 MRR.

And I'm like, that's awesome. Cause that's the [00:19:00] milestone I say you can be self sufficient, but I'm like, we're at a hundred dollars MRR, you know, what am I doing? So that comes back pretty quickly.

Brian Casel: SaaS is just so much harder in general.

Joe Howard: It's so far, it is harder and the experience is helpful. I think I'm more confident in not knowing everything.

And maybe it's even a more confident in like looking like a fool or like, I put a tweet out the other day that was like, because of WP buffs, like our biggest driver was SEO, we got a hundred thousand. Monthly unique visitors, like 150 fairly quickly. And it was crushing it, you know, and like generated a lot of business for us.

I just put a tweet out two or three weeks ago that was like indexed and I got two clicks in Google search console, you know, so like talk about starting from the beginning, but I think I'm just more confident. Most folks don't even know what they're doing. And there aren't really rules, like just kind of like go and figure it out.

And I can use some of my experience, like peek around corners and know what's coming. It's all kind of work and figuring it out. So I think [00:20:00] I'm just a little more confident in that.

Brian Casel: You know, it does help that you have that experience of having built a business where you did use SEO and content to grow to a hundred K visits a month. So you've seen what it looks like when that strategy is. All built out and mature and really driving a lot of activity. So in that sense, I'd imagine, you know, what it looked like to go from zero to that.

I'm sure it took a long time. Like tactically, are there things that you're looking to just like put into place or just get the engine turning to get that like SEO content flywheel going? What are like the very first, aside from like just the first blog post or two. Are you starting with like keyword research?

Are you thinking about long form versus many short form articles? Are you thinking about like buyer intent articles versus how are you thinking about all that stuff?

Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. There's like million questions in there, which is good. This is the thing about marketing. It's all intertwined. Right. So like one question is like five questions, but let me just walk through a little bit of like my mentality of starting to do SEO.

[00:21:00] Jacob and I are both doing this kind of like building public thing. Where we're just sharing on Twitter, the stuff we're doing. You're one of my motivators in that. It was, I thought what you were doing was so cool. It's nice to share little nuggets along the way, not only for other people, but it's nice to have a little diary for myself to do it, you know,

Brian Casel: I feel like some people look at that, like building in public thing, like it's a tactic.

Yes. Of course I want it to drive activity and traffic to my website, but like, I do it for fun because I want to share stuff because I want to get feedback, especially from friends who I trust and as a consumer, I love seeing what people are working on. I just show me what you're working on. I

Joe Howard: think that's the most interesting and it sparks your own ideas.

Yeah, we should do a third episode on building public. That's a whole nother thing, but okay. So like SEO, I'm actually doing it a little bit differently this time. I'm going to be honest. The content, we have four blog posts up on the Driftly blog. They're probably the blog posts I'm the most proud of. That I've ever written.

I think the WordPress specific content I wrote, I started not writing pretty quickly, like we hired writers and had a content team, a lot of WordPress content is like, it's so easy to shift into listicles and the [00:22:00] 50 best themes for speed and it's like, that can be helpful for sure, but like, then you see someone else writes one that's 51 and they have 51, the title, I'm going to do 52 just to like, Oh, and it's just kind of like, is this really helpful for the end user, maybe fractionally, but let's be honest, we're just.

Trying to get that number one spot in Google with the content I've written now, I think is just, I've taken a much more, I think, serious approach, really. I talked to her a little bit about this, but the skyscraper approach, people may know it from like backlink go back in the day, still works pretty well.

Apparently, well, TBD, cause I'm not ranking too high yet, but just literally it's looking at all the other content out there and building your own skyscraper. That's like the best piece of content and learning along the way.

Brian Casel: Yeah. It also sounds like you're going after something a little bit more than just purely search and it has to be higher value, just more interesting, more share worthy on Twitter and stuff.

And especially if you're talking to SaaS founders or people who work in SaaS. They're much more savvy,

Joe Howard: A WordPress beginner user is a little bit less [00:23:00] mature in their business sense. And they're, I don't know, but exactly what you're saying. The SaaS folks know what's up, right? They see a listicle, right?

They see a poorly written article. They're clicking the back button really fast, you know? So the things I'm focused on much more this time is that really, really high quality of content, all encompassing, but also concise, not long for length sake, but as comprehensive as possible, but getting directly as possible.

Brian Casel: That's a really interesting point, right? Cause like the skyscraper thing, of course, is like write 10, 000 words and it'll do well in Google. But when I land on one of those from a Google search or something like that, just the length alone makes me click the back button. Cause I'm just like, I can't get it.

This is too much.

Joe Howard: So the way that I try to battle this, because honestly, that long content, Google does love that long content, but you have to find a way, not only to. Have Google like it, but more importantly to have a user like you to come and read it. So what I try to do for users like you is not only organize it really well with my H1, H2, H3, which also helps you jump into the auto answer that Google does, but [00:24:00] also make really nice table of contents for each piece.

And at the end of each of those sections, you put it back to top. So I'm really trying to make it like a modular sort of like jump up, down, jump up, I try to bold the, uh, in the table of contents, like the main pieces. So like here are the main three pieces. You were looking for ways to drive product adoption.

Like here's some background, the first three sections, but these three are like, these are bolded so you can jump right to those. I think some people are hesitant to do that because they're like, I want more time on page, but like, that's so stupid. You want to just. Be as helpful as possible to every user quickly.

Just before I lose my train of thought, the high quality content is one thing I'm focusing on and performance is something I'm focusing on big time. Yeah. Just the speed of the website. If you go to the blog, it's like the most simple blog you've ever seen. Maybe each blog post has like four or five images, all web P formatted, all as small as possible.

There's some super small images for like tweets that I like included in there that are not embedded. I put the text in there to make it load faster. So [00:25:00] I'm. Testing this theory that if I can get a few links to my content and I can write really, really good content, I think it's pretty good content. I'll continue to go back and edit and make it better over time.

And it's just high performance. It's just like loads really fast. All four of my pieces right now, I think are like 99 in Google page speed, web core vitals.

Brian Casel: Yeah. That's something I got to get more into is like really analyzing that.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. That's a big thing now, especially on mobile.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. I want to ask you also about planning out each topic that you're going to tackle and then sort of like building up the list of priorities.

I'm starting to work with some SEO folks right now to get going on like a content strategy for, for ZipMessage. The way that I think about it, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. I'm going to have somebody plus myself working on the keyword research and basically building up a long list of topics sorted by like best opportunities and what makes the most sense for our business.

And then I would hand those to a writer to develop content. And, you know, I'll be sort of giving input on both ends. And we would do a bit of link building as well. I [00:26:00] imagine like just building up a queue of topics that are well researched in terms of like search opportunity and meaning for the business.

Like, is that how you're thinking about it?

Joe Howard: It's the most overlooked thing when people are doing keyword research, because most people are like search volume and difficulty to rank. And if you have something that's like, has a good ratio of that, like a high volume to difficulty ratio. Then you say, I want to go for it, but you may forget what's the intent of that search and who is making that search.

So is the intent of that search to buy is the intent of that search to gather more information. Buying is obviously the best, but gathering information is good too. Who's making that search. I just wrote a blog post. On for Driftly, one of my blog posts, it's not targeted very well. And the reason I ended up writing it is because I wanted to get my juices flowing.

I wanted to get things rolling. It was honestly something I just wanted to write about. I thought it was a good topic that would, you know, keep me learning and you got to start somewhere. And it was like how to generate SaaS ideas for real businesses. And who's a Driftly customer? Is it someone [00:27:00] who's starting a SaaS company?

Probably not. Probably most people doing those searches are first time SaaS people. If you're a second time SaaS person, Brian, I wouldn't think of you as someone who would Google that. Like you have your community, you have Twitter followers, you have other ways.

Brian Casel: I might land on it and start to get some shiny object ideas.

Joe Howard: Who knows that's right. And so maybe some second time founders, but is that going to like target our core customer? Probably not, but I mean, you're right. That would be a big thing I would focus on is just like what's available to rank on, what's the low hanging fruit, those long tails you were talking about.

And also how can you focus on people who are going to have intent, the kind of people who are not just going to do a free trial of ZipMessage, but the people who are eventually going to become. Paid users. The one last thing I'd say is just that there's a lot of new searches happening every day, right?

30 percent of searches done every day are like completely new searches.

Brian Casel: Yeah. When it comes to volume, how much does that actually matter?

Joe Howard: Yeah, a lot of people do SEO, right? You're never going to find like the perfect 50 keywords to write 50 blog posts on and [00:28:00] like, you're going to be like me. You're going to write some that aren't focused as well on the buyer.

You're going to write some, what are my blog posts? I wrote the volume I found was like under 10 searches a month and I wrote like 4, 000 words for it and that's okay. You have to be okay with SEO is going to take a little bit of time to get going. And you're just going to build into those 40, 50.

Searches a month and eventually a hundred. But once you get to like a hundred, that's difficult to compete in almost no matter your industry, like the top three are going to be high domain authority sites, usually so.

Brian Casel: That's the other thing that I'm seeing. I was just recently, you know, I feel like I've researched how to do SEO content, like so many times in my career and every single time I feel like I'm learning it for the first time.

Joe Howard: Absolutely. And every like five years, Google is doing something different. When I was doing SEO for WP buffs. It was actually like pretty easy to get going. I'm thinking back and I'm like, I wasn't like pulling my hair out. I don't have any hair to pull out, but I wasn't going crazy over it. I mean, people have seen Google has changed a lot, right?

They're driving a lot more traffic to their ads, right? They're like squeezing out their [00:29:00] auto answers. I think now the majority of searches actually don't get a click. It's kind of scary, right? SEO is not dead, but it's changing.

Brian Casel: The whole top half of the page is ads too.

Joe Howard: It's ads or auto answers or Google places.

If you're searching for something that that's something like that's going to come up, it's AMP pages. If you're like a news organization, not very good for people like us. They're trying to like convert email addresses or new customers, but for like a news, you need to have the AMP stuff set up. Cause all news is coming in through that.

Brian Casel: One thing I noticed as I'm trying to learn more, like, you know, I'm going through the videos from like Ahrefs, which are really great. You know, there's a lot of good information out there. They always use the case study of like, Oh, let's say you're a flower shop and you're trying to sell to consumers and search for keywords that have a thousand plus.

5, 000 plus search volume, right? And in the world of B2B SaaS, that doesn't exist.

Joe Howard: That's a flower shop thing where you could have a Google, a flower shop is a local company, most of them.

Brian Casel: Or even if it's not local, right? Like even if you're like an e commerce brand selling shoes or something [00:30:00] like that, or a weight loss program, there's going to be thousands and thousands of search volume when you look at tools like Ahrefs.

Joe Howard: Totally. And that's like in the U S and you're like, well, especially if you're local, it's, you need to have your local search volume as well. And then you need to Google places for lots of reviews there. That's what's going to be the most helpful. SEOing for blog posts is not helpful.

Brian Casel: It took me like several rounds of watching the same videos over and over to start to realize like, you know what, in B2B it's a different game and especially B2B SaaS.

It is lower volume. You do have to focus more on the intent. And I think you're right that there are definitely searches happening that will not show up in the search volume results in these tools.

Joe Howard: Honestly, if you're trying to rank for something like that one, I blog post wrote that's under 10 searches for volume.

That was for that specific keyword. They're probably like. 10 or 20 other searches that are like variations or plurals or something similar. That's actually that 10 you're seeing like multiply that by the 20 different variations or keywords you're talking about under 200. So if you're a small [00:31:00] company, 200 clicks, doesn't sound like a lot.

And in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot, but it's way more than zero or one or two. And that can, if you have even a like small conversion funnel going, you know, five out of those 200 a month join, that's like five new customers every month. Like that is the starting of a business growing. And so SEO, it seems like everyone's competing, but there's so many new searches done all the time.

Be patient. Go after that long tail. You search for those smaller, smaller keywords, and you just write the best. Content you possibly can make your website fast. If you commit yourself for six months, I don't guarantee you'll find customers cause there's a lot more to it, but in six months, you'll be on your way till figuring it out.

I'm pretty sure.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. You know, we talked a lot about SEO and content and growing traffic that way. I mean, again, you're still very early on and we'll just sort of wrap up this segment here. But the other question that I have is what else are you thinking about in terms of. Customer acquisition, new user acquisition.

Are there different channels, like outside of SEO and content [00:32:00] that you want to start executing on for Driftly?

Joe Howard: Yeah, we would like to do a referral program. We've talked about it. So my co founder, Jacob, he just had a baby, his first, so I'm like. Dude, don't even work on it. And he's kind of like, he enjoys working on it.

So he's like jumping in every once in a while, maybe when the baby's sleeping or something. So we're on like this slow roll of stuff right now, but that's like an internal tool we want to build just to like test out a little bit, referral model, see if that has legs and then build it out a little bit more, we also want to launch that when the product itself is at, we've at least feel comfortable about our product market fit or approach thereof.

I think we're like in a good approach vector right now. But in three months, if we started to crank that up, I think we'd be in a better place because we'll have more features built, we'll have more feedback from users. We'll have all that set up. So referral program or affiliate program and SEO are like the, probably the two bigger ones.

The other smaller things are the build in public, which we talked a little bit about. I do like these little, I don't know. I call it like guerrilla marketing. Like some people don't like that term, but I just think about it [00:33:00] as we like do whatever you want on Twitter. I search like every blog post I wrote, I like search product adoption.

I wrote a product adoption thing and I was like seeing who was talking about it. And I was interacting with those people. And if they asked more, I was like, Hey, check this post out.

Brian Casel: Definitely has value. You know, like people, especially in the SaaS space, they follow people, right? Like they don't necessarily follow brands.

Joe Howard: Who's going to follow my Driftly company things. A lot of our competitors, I see them, they're doing their like buffer, like scheduled tweets, all their blog posts and no likes, no retweets. It's just like, this is so worthless.

Brian Casel: It's just a job that a low level marketer.

Joe Howard: Exactly. I love ZipMessage. The tool itself is great.

But me as like a fellow SaaS person, like, I'm like, what's Brian doing? Like, what's he building? Like I'm invested in your journey of building ZipMessage. It's almost bigger than ZipMessage. It's like the entrepreneurial journey of ZipMessage.

Brian Casel: It's not necessarily like a sustainable traffic or customer source.

It's super helpful in like the first year to get traction, but there's also still value hearing from the founder years later when they're a much larger established company. You know, I still [00:34:00] follow favorite founders who run multimillion dollar businesses. That keeps me loyal or watching that brand of products.

Joe Howard: And everybody wants a million customers, right? I'm sure they're like, I'd love a million customers, but the reality is when you start, how are you going to get your first 10 customers? It's going to take a little bit of work and that's just like the reality of it. And the easy way to get your first 10 is to just like personally.

Do the work. And those early adopters are going to like push you forward. They're the ones who want to give you feedback. Like we've got guy Wilson. He does a bunch of different like little SaaS companies, but he's one of our early customers, Roberto from cat links. These folks are like, we're emailing them like every other day, like talking about the product and like in chat, give us some feedback.

Like, what do you want? Oh, this thing would be cool. And it's like really helping with. Not only features that we think are going to be helpful, but little details that are going to make a big difference in terms of the experience of people.

Brian Casel: You know, I get so energized from that too. I took several months off from sending messages and talking to customers.

It was just happening naturally through like customer support and [00:35:00] stuff like that. But now I'm getting back into the rhythm of sending ZipMessages and literally hearing and seeing my customers on video. You know, I'll get into a funk for weeks at a time. If I'm not talking to customers, I'll be like, it's all not working.

The whole business is going to fail. And then I hear from people and it's like, okay, now I have energy again.

Joe Howard: You got to take those little wins as they come. I want to highlight that because I like growth a lot. Like I want to see new customers join. And if I have like three days of no free trial started, I'm like, kind of bums.

But if I'm able to like publish a great blog post that I wrote, or we got a new link from somewhere and domain authority jumped, we just went from zero to 10 domain authority. Like we just figured out, we were like having a little base camp celebration about it, Jacob and I. So like those are the wins are really important, honestly, to keep you going and to keep you positive, because this is the life of startups.

It is, it's up and down, it's side to side, and often you may not have more bad times and good times, but in your head, you're going to think back. Probably, and your brain's going to highlight those bad times because they're tough sometimes. So I'm with you [00:36:00] on that. Celebrate those wins, baby.

Brian Casel: Too true. Well, Hey, Joe, let's leave it there.

I mean, I feel like we covered so many rabbit holes that we could do entire episodes on it. We'll have to do that again. Yeah, this was good talking about like kind of hacking through the first few months, first year of a new SaaS with some marketing stuff.

Joe Howard: Totally. Yeah. Thank you for having me, man. If people want to check out Driftly, it's a Driftly. app and the blog is over on the sub domain. I'm always looking for feedback on content as well. And if you read anything, hit me up on Twitter, just at Joseph H Howard. Feel free to follow along for the journey of Driftly. If nothing else than just to like a tweet, that'll be my small one of the day. I like to tweet.

Brian Casel: I highly recommend it. We'll get all that stuff linked up in the show note. Yeah. Thanks Joe.