Super rushed post this week. I started working on YET ANOTHER design refresh for the Snip site. I’m actually taking away even more stuff and making it even simpler.

I decided that the account creation tie-in I talked about last week can wait until I further improve demo opt-ins.

I changed my pricing page to a lead-gen form on the existing site. That so far has gotten one inquiry, but it turned out to be bogus. (It was a cosmetology student doing a report for a school project.)

AdWords continues to chug along. It seems that my ads targeting “salon management software” have a way higher CTR than anything else. So I might put all my eggs in that basket: turn off all ads except the salon management ads, and talk mainly about salon management on the site.

I turned off Facebook ads for now. Since my current site isn’t converting nearly as well as I expected, I decided to make my opt-in even LOWER commitment for the new minor design refresh, and I figure I might as well not burn any more money before I have that in place. I still have the AdWords going because that continues to collect valuable information about what people are searching for and what kinds of ads they click on. By the way, my new demo opt-in will be simply a big red button on the home page that says “View Demo” – no email or name required there. THEN, on the next page, there will be a form with a first name and email field that you can fill out to view the demo. I’m basically trying to rip off tripbright.com.

For several weeks now I’ve been dedicating the first hour of each workday to Snip. This has worked out really well for me. I used to have a huge problem with making time to work on Snip. Now I know I’m going to have a bare minimum of 5 hours in each week, usually more.

Now that I have Google AdWords going, the next step of my plan is to create a free trial sign-up form on my marketing site that triggers an API call to my Rails site that creates an account for the user. That means I can do away with my shitty, long trial sign-up page that I have right now. I’ve actually spent the last several days just paying down technical debt because I’m getting sick of putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids and writing each piece of code like it’s the last thing I’ll ever add to Snip. I’ve probably done about enough of that now and I should just get on with writing the account-creation feature.

AdWords continues to slowly do its thing at a max of $15/day. Nothing interesting to report yet except that my ads seem to be ranking pretty well. I also turned on some Facebook ads today. Clicks from FB seem to be really cheap. The AdWords clicks seem to regularly be $5-10 per click, but I’ve gotten 6 FB clicks so far for $2, so that’s about 33 cents a click. Who knows yet, of course, which of the two channels will have a better ROI.

My New Mexico and North Carolina salons both seem to have fallen off the wagon.

In my last report I shared my plan for the next few months. Not shockingly, I changed my mind about what I should do, but not much. Here’s my original plan:

1. Fix all of the products “critical” defects to the point where I’m not too ashamed of the product to recommend it (not a ton of work)
2. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
4. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible
5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

Between then and now I read Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Sales and Marketing at the behest of a mentor of mine. Perry’s advice is that if your sales funnel is not working, break your sales funnel into its pieces and optimize each piece, starting with the top of the funnel. My mentor actually suggested I do this exact thing and I didn’t take his advice, but now that I’ve read the 80/20 book I think my mentor was exactly right. I just didn’t understand before what he was saying. Here’s my new plan:

1. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible…I actually checked into my designer’s availability and she was booked up for at least a good month when I checked. I didn’t want to wait that long, so I went ahead and taught myself the very basics of responsive web design and coded up a non-embarrassing version of my site. So if you go to snipsalonsoftware.com, you’ll see a fully responsive version of the site. It’s not impressive but it’s not embarrassing. And of course, if you’re visiting this site well after September 2014, the version you’re seeing probably has little resemblance to the version I’m talking about. Having a professionally-designed version of the site is definitely on the roadmap. I just didn’t want this step to hold up everything else so I did an okay version myself.
2. Turn on a Google AdWords campaign. (I have this going right now. I turned it on a couple days ago. Again, following the advice in the 80/20 book.)
3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
4. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

So the steps aren’t much different. I mostly just reversed the order. I feel like I’m probably getting closer to knowing what the hell I’m doing because rather than shooting in the dark and fundamentally changing my mind every two seconds, my different plans are becoming more and more convergent.

If anybody’s curious about the details of my AdWords campaign, I’m doing $10.00/day. I have maybe 5 different keywords I’m bidding on and I’m split testing with each keyword. So far I’ve gotten 5 clicks (over two days), all on the same ad. My CTR for that ad is like 1.10%. I understand anything over 1% is considered good, so that’s cool.

I had had a salon in New Mexico sign up for a trial a couple weeks ago. Things seem to have been going good with them but from the schedule it looks like the main stylist, the only one who ever used the schedule, is on vacation right now. I called her yesterday and left a voicemail.

Another salon signed up for a trial last night, this one from North Carolina. The owner had a bunch of questions and put in a bunch of appointments which are both good signs.

I had an interesting thought recently that I think will be helpful to me. I realized that Snip is more important than any particular client project, and that Snip will (I hope and expect) still be around 10 years from now, paying dividends. Yet each week, Snip doesn’t seem to “make the cut”. I usually only work on Snip an hour or two a week, and some weeks I don’t work on it at all. I don’t think that puts me in a position to be successful. It’s been a long-standing problem that the biggest obstacle to growing Snip is nothing within Snip itself, it’s the fact that I have to earn an income, and that takes time. But I don’t know if there’s any great excuse for working on Snip as little as I have been. I think there’s some mindset problem. I think I might have finally found a way to solve the problem.

I thought of the “pay yourself first” concept from the personal finance world, and I thought it might make sense to apply that practice to Snip. So on Sunday I decided I would “pay myself first” and work on Snip for the first hour of each weekday, meaning I would get a minimum of 5 hours in each week. I’m only 3 days into that, but so far it’s working out pretty well. It feels like the wrong thing to do – it feels “irresponsible” – but I think that’s probably just social conditioning. The “responsible” thing to do would be to give up and get a regular job, which I know is actually dumb. So I just have to power through the feeling and do what I know to be the smart thing.

I have a new trial user, which historically hasn’t happened very often. This is someone who apparently viewed a demo some time in July, and then she chatted with me on Olark last Friday. I set her up with an account on Saturday (or rather I had someone do it for me because I was offline). The prospect never signed on and didn’t respond to emails and I thought I lost her. But then yesterday she chatted with me on Olark again (because that’s easier than email??) and today we talked on the phone for a long time and I walked her through some shit. I checked her account again just now and she seems to have entered a bunch of appointments for the future, at least for herself. That’s a good sign. There are 4 other stylists at her salon but none of them seem to have done anything yet.

I discovered earlier this evening – somehow for the first time – that Android doesn’t like Snip’s SSL certificate. You would think that someone would have complained about this by now. I have no idea what the problem is. Gonna try to fix that tonight.

I feel like I’m at a point of unusual clarity with Snip. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling clueless, confused, conflicted, hopeless, hopeful, excited, depressed, sure, unsure, and many other things, usually all within a 24-hour period. It’s been a total roller coaster.

At this point in time I feel like I know exactly a) what I need to do and b) in what order. The “in what order” part is the most significant thing. I’ve been wrestling in my head forever between whether I should work on conversion first, then traffic, or traffic first, then conversion. I don’t think the right answer is 100% one or the other but I think I know how I want to handle that problem, and I stumbled upon the answer in kind of a surprising way.

I had the idea a while ago to build a certain lead magnet for my consulting work. The lead magnet is AngularOnRails.com, and it’s gotten a surprisingly good amount of traction so far. It’s been featured on Ruby Weekly, ng-newsletter and the first page of Hacker News. Given that I’m also working 40 billable hours a week for a client through the end of October, I had the idea that maybe it would be best to just focus on Angular On Rails until the end of October and put Snip on hold. (This is not a light decision since it would be the first time consciously putting Snip on hold since I started it three and a half years ago.)

But then I thought, if I’m going to put Snip on hold and let it run in the background for a few months, there are a few loose ends it would be worth tying up first. For example, the Snip marketing site is basically totally broken on mobile right now. I don’t want to have Snip sitting there and just not collecting leads when for a few hours of work I could be passively collecting leads.

And I seem to be getting more and more prospects chatting with me on my Olark chat. It’s irritating when this happens because I don’t have anything great to do for them when they want to take the next step toward me. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been spinning them up demo accounts (for the two people so far who have made it to that point), but then once they have that, it’s not clear to them what they’re supposed to do. I also had someone sign up for a trial last night, but since I don’t have any kind of automated onboarding process (not even an automated welcome email!), these trial sign-up notifications just cause me pain and irritation, since my past experience with these people has been that they don’t respond to any of my communication, phone or email. I think at least some of the onboarding process needs to be in-product hand-holding in order for it to be effective.

There are also a couple bugs I’d need to fix before I’d feel comfortable consciously putting Snip on hold. Like right now, when someone signs up for a trial, they start getting their schedule sent to them daily via email, and the unsubscribe part of that is currently broken. That bug weighs heavy on my mind, and I can’t just let that sit and have Snip consciously on hold.

So basically I want to get to the point where seeing a lead come into my funnel isn’t a source of pain/guilt/irritation, and that there aren’t any bugs in Snip that are so bad that I feel guilty about them constantly.

I think the first thing I’ll do is fix the in-app bugs, then improve the trial onboarding experience, then see where I’m at.

I didn’t really do much with Snip. A lot of billable client hours.

The report is moving to Wednesdays

The report is moving to Wednesdays. I decided late Friday afternoon is not the best time in the world to put out a blog post and that the middle of the week would be better. My guess is that more people will be inclined to read it this way.

Conversions and traffic

Some time ago my main mentor helped me get to a point of collecting prospects’ email addresses on my website. This is a nice thing to have. Right now the form seems to be converting at between 1 and 2 percent. My mentor is of the opinion that I can get it to 5-10%. Based on the roughly 500 uniques a month I get, this would be 25-50 emails per month compared to 5-10 now.

My traffic also has plenty of room for improvement. Right now I’m reading Ultimate Guide to Link Building as a measure to improve my SEO knowledge. (I already read The Art of SEO and some others.) One idea I got from this book (and also partly from Neil Patel) was to go to ModernSalon.com, see who’s guest posting on their blog, and then see if those bloggers would like to a) write for Snip and/or b) mention and link to Snip on other publications. I contacted six of the guest bloggers yesterday evening and, to my surprise, all six responded to my inquiry. One writer, Carlos Valenzuela even wrote a blog post for me the same evening. Carlos and I also had a good conversation on the phone. It seems to me that this could be not only a good way to earn links and content but also to make allies in the beauty industry. We’ll see how it goes.

Also, my search rankings and search traffic seem to be slowly improving. I say “seem to be” because sometimes my rankings go up, but then back down. But things are better now than they have been in a long time. My rankings used to kick fucking ass before I switched my domain from sniphq.com to snipsalonsoftware.com, so I’m guessing that as my domain ages my rankings will improve independently of any other SEO work I do.

I can’t think of anything else to talk about right now.

I haven’t put much time into Snip this week due to a) having a shitload of client work to do, b) working on my BFL lead magnet (hopefully) site AngularOnRails.com, and c) having networking meetings and prospecting meetings for BFL.

Last week I was in a pretty dark place with Snip. I’m feeling better about it now. Not sure exactly why I was feeling so bad then or why I’m feeling better now. I guess everybody has occasional slumps.

One thing I did do with Snip this week was to improve the marketing site a little bit. It now looks like this:

The color of the theme now matches the color of my business cards. I’m also planning to put my logo in the site but I didn’t get to that in this round.

On the BFL side, I struck an agreement with my client that we’d work solidly through the end of October, which would put me in a pretty good place financially.

At one point in the past I had hired article writers to write a couple articles (two, exactly) for Snip. These articles seem to be bringing me a little bit of traffic so I decided to get the article-writing thing going again. (The only reason I ever stopped was because my income situation became uncertain.)

In the spirit of jumping around all over the place in this post, I feel like I should explain AngularOnRails.com. The reason I created that site is because I wanted to have a lead magnet for Ben Franklin Labs – a permanent marketing asset that would continually bring me leads without me having to actively “do marketing” all the time. Things like networking meetings require my active involvement, but if I have an authoritative website out there helping people 24/7 and I’m perceived as the internet’s go-to Angular/Rails guy, I will presumably get inquiries about my availability for such projects. That’s the hope. So far I did get featured on the front page of Hacker News with it (with my first post!) and so my hopes are high that the site will be popular. One thing there’s no question about is that the world needs it.

An unexpected benefit of AngularOnRails.com is that it shows me that I can attract substantial traffic in a short amount of time. It’s possible. It’s not me that’s the problem with attracting traffic, it’s the “me + beauty industry” combo, which is a lot weaker than the “me + software engineering” combo. So hopefully the long tail strategy I’m using with content creation will pan out for me, and then when I have more revenue I can afford to do things like drive traffic via trade magazine ads, mail campaigns, etc.

I also have some good suggestions from one of my mentors on how to improve my opt-in conversion rate, so I’ll be implementing that as well.

I did a terrible job this week. I’m looking at my calendar for the last week and I didn’t work on Snip at all.

The main reason I didn’t work on Snip at all is because I worked 40 billable hours. I also had a lot of meetings with freelancing prospects. I also worked on my Angular + Rails self-education that I’m hoping will help me get more and better freelancing clients and a higher pay rate.

I’m feeling pretty torn. On one hand, maybe the best thing for Snip is for me to focus 100% for a little while on earning money and building back my savings so money is not a day-to-day concern. But then on the other hand I feel like a wimp for not working on Snip at all, like I’m just one of those lazy assholes who “wants” to run a product business but never actually makes time.

I think focusing on getting BFL healthier is probably the best way to go, though. I technically don’t have any debt, but I do have some sizable outstanding medical bills and a LOT of overdue car repairs, and that stuff is effectively the same thing as debt. I had saved up ten thousand bucks before I went freelance but I ended up burning through it all and now I don’t have any savings. So I feel like I should make getting that stuff out of the way the first priority.

But then again there will always be a bazillion reasons not to work on Snip.

I just don’t fucking know. And the last thing I want is to be all wishy-washy and not be able to make a decision. I don’t want to just run back and forth between BFL and Snip and never really make any meaningful progress on either.

I’ve been thinking more and more that maybe I’m just a “tech guy” and don’t have what it takes to get my own product business off the ground. Three and a half years in and I’m not even close. I know this is a poisonous attitude, and I’ve tried for a long time to squash it, but I’m really starting to doubt myself.

I had been all excited about my new opt-in form but it seems now that people aren’t filling it out anymore. I haven’t gotten a new opt-in in many days.

I’m not considering pulling the plug, though. I guess I’ll just keep trying, knowing that I was evidently born with some good-idea blocker or right-attitude blocker that makes everything take a thousand times longer than it should.

I’ve been totally sucking at the Snip reports lately. I apologize to the eight or so people who have been following my progress.

Shit has been pretty interesting lately. As I mentioned before, I’ve redone my website, now with the low-commitment CTA of “View Demo.” I have this View Demo form wired up to a MailChimp autoresponder, and as of this writing I have 5 subscribers to my autoresponder list. I believe there are something like 14 people who have provided their name and email address so far, but some of those people are from before I had the autoresponder set up.

By the way, I’m pretty fried right now so this post is going to be a total stream-of-consciousness thing. Pretty much all of my Snip posts are like that anyway but this one will especially be.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, one of my very biggest challenges with Snip is the fact that it’s tough to make time to work on Snip due to the fact that it’s not earning very much profit yet (about $85/mo as of this writing) and so there’s a bunch of time I have to spend earning an income. I also have a wife and two kids, and that of course is a slice of the time pie as well. (“Mmm…pie” – Homer Simpson)

So I’ve been working a lot of extra hours lately with the goal of putting away as much money as possible. We’ve had some large unexpected medical expenses come up recently, and so I’d like to take care of that as well as build up a nice safety net as well. I of course don’t have direct control over how much billable client work I can do, but I decided that it would be a good idea to work as much as possible anyway, doing as much billable client work as I have and then pouring the rest of my time into marketing Ben Franklin Labs, and then of course a certain minimum amount of work on Snip. It was pointed out to me that I’m probably not going to make a whole shitload of progress on 2-3 hours a week working on Snip, so I decided to instate a rule of a minimum of 1 hour on Snip per weekday (5 hours a week). That’s been going pretty well so far. I’ve also been getting what I feel like is a healthy amount of leads for BFL, too, which feels good. My goal is to eventually have a marketing system that constantly delivers leads to me whether I’m actively “doing marketing” or not.

That brings me to another thing I’m working on. I read an email from Brennan Dunn about a guy named Ari Lerner, who I know of because I’ve bought one or two of his AngularJS books. My understanding, based on what Brennan wrote, is that Ari basically decided he wanted to be seen as an AngularJS expert, so Ari wrote some books and put some other educational resources out there, and now Ari is insanely booked and making shitloads of money and all that.

The “world’s foremost AngularJS expert” title is probably already taken (well, I guess by somebody has to the world’s foremost AngularJS expert, so it’s definitely taken), and I think “world’s foremost AngularJS expert” is probably a pretty high bar, but I thought that maybe I can define a narrower niche and dominate that niche. So I set a goal (an admittedly nebulous goal) to become the world’s foremost expert on the AngularJS + Ruby on Rails combo. This is actually an idea I had months ago. I thought it was a great idea back then, and then I decided it was a stupid idea, and now I think it’s a really good idea again. I even bought AngularOnRails.com some months ago and put a tiny bit of content on it.

So I guess what I’m doing is putting even more effort into both my businesses. I sure hope I have the right idea with the Angular + Rails thing. I guess the worst case scenario is that I become a total expert but nobody cares. That seems unlikely.

I’m really loving this opt-in form on my website that keeps collecting email addresses. The feeling that my business is accumulating something valuable for me without my active involvement is a really encouraging one.

I blocked off the next hour to be my hour of the day I work on Snip, so I’m gonna go do that. See you next FRIDAY.