Last Friday was the first week I just totally whiffed on a Snip update, but it was 4th of July, so maybe that’s okay.

New Website, AGAIN

I’m getting serious with some shit on the Snip site. Check it out. I have a kick-ass mentor who’s been kicking my ass about certain aspects of my website/business/life, and it’s prompted me to do some things I would not otherwise have done. This is, of course, the whole point of a mentorship. So I have a good thing going there.

There are a few things different about my site:

• It doesn’t look like absolute dogshit anymore. I bought a $100 theme from StudioPress and plopped it in there. I’m not done grafting in the new theme but I’ve already gotten a number of compliments on how much better the site looks now.
• I have what I believe to be a clearer and more compelling opt-in form. My new opt-in is above the fold and the commitment is really low (view demo). The old opt-in form got no opt-ins, ever, and the new one has already gotten 2. (I hope you’re not too jealous of my opt-in success.)
• I have Olark on there. I’ve had Olark on the site before but for reasons I can’t recall I took it off. Now it’s back on, and it’s connected to my phone so I can be “available” 24/7. I’m usually not a fan of being just available for stuff all the time but Snip is a special exception.

Articles

Using Writer Access, I hired a couple article writers to write articles for Snip. They are:

• Stop Sniffling! Stock up on Fragrance-Free Shampoos to Keep Your Sensitive Customers Happy
• 7 Ways to Attract Clients at Hair Salons

I’m still a novice when it comes to SEO and content marketing and all that stuff but I’m pretty sure the second article is way closer to what I need than the first one. It’s pretty inexpensive to have these articles written, and the content seems pretty decent so far, so I’d like to continue pumping the site full of content and see what happens with search engine traffic.

Real Life Stuff

In addition to the stuff I’ve done online lately, I visited a couple beauty schools in town. I wasn’t really sure what to say to the people there, which is something that was reflected in how smoothly my sales conversations went. I’m still not sure what I might want to get out of a relationship with those places. I’m just kind of sick of people constantly asking if I’ve visited the beauty schools. Now I can say I have.

Live Chat

Since the time I wrote the preceding paragraphs, I had a salon owner start chattin’ it up with me on Olark. Our chat session escalated to a phone conversation and, by the end of the hour-long call, the salon owner was full-swing into a free trial. I thought I had one in the bag, but then later the owner said she didn’t like how Snip worked on her phone and completely bailed. Fuck!

But, you know, what the heck. The people who are going to be embracing Snip at this point are the “early adopter” type people and I guess the VERY FIRST person I caught on my live chat didn’t happen to be an early adopter. So boo hoo.

The encouraging takeaway from this is that I got my first fish on the hook just a few hours after putting Olark on the site. I don’t get a shitload of traffic (GWT shows me about 100 search clicks per month) so that’s pretty remarkable. I’m kind of afraid it was just a fluke. Time will tell.

Better-Converting Opt-In Form?

Another interesting thing: on like Tuesday I moved my opt-in form above the fold and changed the button text from “Get Started” to “View Demo”. This opt-in form that had gotten ZERO opt-ins EVER got TWO opt-ins in just a few days. So again, maybe just a fluke, but hopefully not. It stands to reason that a clearer, lower-commitment, more visible opt-in form would see an improvement over the alternative.

Rejuvenated

So that little “taste of blood” I got, combined with the couple of opt-ins, combined with the fact that my website is at all-time high levels of being totally awesome, has totally rejuvenated me. And I don’t know if I communicated this before but I was feeling kind of un-juvenated. Felt like I was in a doldrum. So that doldrum can FUCK itself because I feel like I have shit in a way better place now than they were before, although I of course still have a ton of work to do.

Logo/Branding/Business Cards

My Snip business cards are finally done, as in I have one in my wallet right now. As you can see, these aren’t Vistaprint cards. I spent several hundred bucks to have a logo and some minimal branding developed.

My thought is that now that I have an “official” color scheme for Snip, I can now apply that color scheme and typeface to the marketing site and product. Right now I have the somewhat comical situation of my business cards, marketing site and application all having completely disjointed looks and feels. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

SEO

Ever since I switched from the domain of sniphq.com to snipsalonsoftware.com my search rankings have been LITERALLY in the toilet. At one point I was at #3 for [hair salon software] but I’ve been at #15 (or worse) now for like six months. I’m getting like no online trial sign-ups.

A friend/mentor of mine suggested that I hire an article writer to add some content to my currently fairly content-free site so I can hopefully see those rankings start to climb back up. (I understand that as snipsalonsoftware.com ages, that will help as well. Sniphq.com was old as fuck.)

Ben Franklin Labs

I realized yesterday that I don’t have any annual financial goals for Ben Franklin Labs, which is silly. I had a goal at one point of earning $10K in a month, and I did that, but then I didn’t know where to go next. I think I’ll make my annual goal $120K/yr, or an average of $10K/month (gross [yuck]).

I have a loose plan in my head that when I get to the point where BFL is doing great, I’ll start running a recurring ad in Salon Today every month, which would cost between $900 and $2500 plus the initial design.

I think that’s about all I have to report for now.

Number of Customers: 7

Thanks for the comments

Before I start I want to say thanks to those of you who have been leaving comments. It’s very rewarding to see that there are people out there getting something out of this blog.

Business cards, branding

My business cards and branding for Snip are motherfucking DONE! Maybe I’ll post what the cards look like here after I’ve paid for everything and it’s all 100% finalized. It feels good to finally have business cards, or at least to have them on order.

Problems

This week had some problems. One of my consulting clients had their project unexpectedly paused, and so I’ve been without income for at least a couple weeks. This week I started to get panicky about it.

This made me realize that my sales/marketing pipeline for my consulting business is still pretty weak, and I suppose that my financial safety net could use some work.

So I might pull back a little bit on Snip and focus more on my consulting business for a little bit, because having emergencies on the consulting side doesn’t serve my interests on the Snip side at all. I’d like no have a no-income-emergency-ever kind of business.

I’d write more but I’m out of time. More next week.

Number of Customers: 7

Logo/Branding/Cards

I have a designer working on a logo and business cards for Snip right now. She showed me some logo ideas and I liked what I saw, and I picked one to go with. Now that that’s out of the way, business cards can be created, and now I won’t look like a stupid loser when salon owners ask me for business cards! This also paves the way for brochures and any other printed material I want to develop in the future.

Distribution Rep Relationships

One thing I’ve been focusing on this week is to find distribution reps with the ultimate goal of forming referral partnerships with them. I’ve been given this idea from several different people, and I have evidence that it’s probably a good idea in that a number of the distributors I’ve talked with so far already have exactly that kind of partnership in place, just with a different salon software company.

Distribution reps are proving hard to find but I had some surprisingly good luck this week. I called one certain beauty supply store and the person who answered happened to know of a stylist who was just about to open her own salon. I met with said stylist yesterday and we talked for TWO HOURS and she seemed to like Snip, so that’s good. She also had a bazillion references for me to supply stores and reps, so I’m definitely going to follow up on those.

In addition to that stylist I also found a rep who just got let go and is as of right now unoccupied, as I understand it. I have a meeting scheduled with her next week.

Website/SEO

I’ve tweaked the copy on my homepage per the instructions of a mentor of mine, and I plan to do some more tweaking. My mentor also suggested hiring an article writer to produce some content, which for some reason I’m finding it difficult to bring myself to do. I guess I’m afraid of spending the money and then getting shit for articles or getting decent articles but then not getting any results. But I think I just need to get over that and pull the damn trigger on it. My search rankings these days are pathetic, so I definitely want to improve in this area.

Product Changes

I recently put Honeybadger back on Snip, finally, and it’s come to my attention that there are a number of production errors that are occurring semi-regularly. I think I’d like to squash all those because I know bugs left unchecked have a strange way of multiplying as time goes on.

Number of Customers: 7

First Out-Of-State Customer

I’m happy to report that minutes after I posted last week’s report (which was actually last Saturday instead of Friday), I called my Florida 30-day-trialer and he happily gave me his credit card number. The significance of this event is that he is my first out-of-state customer, all my other 6 customers being in West Michigan where I live.

The significance of having an out-of-state customer is that it proves my online marketing system can work. This is the first time a salon has ever found me online, signed up for a trial, and then become an actual paying customer. Before that, for all I knew, I had some gaping hole in my sales funnel through which 100% of my prospects would fall 100% of the time. My conversion rate was 0%. Now my conversion rate is something like 2%. (I’ve had about 50 trial sign-ups since the ability to sign up online has existed.)

Local Leads

I also have two good local leads, both referrals. I’ve met with them both in person and they both seem interested. If I get both of them, I will be at 9 customers which would put me at $400/mo in revenue.

New Goal

In September 2013 I set a goal of getting one new customer for each month in 2014. Here’s how that’s gone so far: no, yes, yes, no, yes.

I’ve been thinking lately that 12 new customers for the whole year is probably a pretty wimpy goal.

I think I’d need about $5000/mo to be able to live reasonably comfortably off of Snip without having to have any other income (i.e. freelance/consulting income). Just for ease of measurement, let’s say $5000/mo in revenue, since expenses will probably change and not go up much.

So when I thought about that, I thought, “Let’s set a date for when to get there. When?” I decided to be a little more aggressive and say let’s get to $5000/mo in revenue by December 31, 2014.

So that’s my new goal: $5000/mo in revenue by December 31, 2014.

That goal would require 100 customers at $50/mo.

Business Cards

I might have mentioned last time that I’m finally, after three and a half years in business, getting business cards. I’m also having a logo made. Part of the reason I’m doing this is because I plan to do a lot more personal networking in the beauty industry and I’ll have to have business cards to pass out or else I’ll look like a dummy.

This past week has been kind of a blur. I went to a marketing conference on Thursday and Friday in Chicago put on by GKIC. (If you don’t know GKIC or Dan Kennedy and you run a business, check em out.)

As far as I can think, the only new thing that’s happened with Snip is that I scheduled a follow-up meeting with someone I had met with last week. She seems pretty interested, so that’s cool.

Oh, and another new salon signed up for Snip but their name is “A Cut Above” which is a really common salon name, and googling the person’s email address didn’t turn up anything. I emailed the owner but those emails for whatever reason get an abysmally low response rate.

An idea that’s been ruminating in my mind for a really long time is that of what GKIC calls a “shock and awe” package. I received one when I signed up to be a GKIC member. They sent me a big cardboard box full of booklets, CDs, DVDs, etc. So I think what I want to do is when someone signs up for a Snip trial, ask for their mailing address on the next page after they give me their email. Then I can send them a package containing an audio CD, a video DVD, an interactive CD/DVD to put in the computer, some booklets, and maybe some kind of candy or something stupid like that. Because what happens now every time someone signs up for a trial is I just try calling them a thousand times, and so far that approach has worked never.

And just anecdotally it seems that online sign-ups are starting to pick back up, which is super awesome.

Oh, and I’ve been told by my printer that my BFL mailing went out last Friday. I haven’t gotten a single call or email from it. So I guess next time I need to put together a better sales piece. Glad I tried it, though. Excited to do more with direct mail in the not-too-distant future.

This week was good. I had two in-person meetings with stylists and some phone conversations. Two people signed up online within the last week, and there was a super long period where nobody signed up, that’s pretty cool.

The guy who signed up last Friday is, as far as I can tell, chugging right along with Snip. I’ve talked with him on the phone several times. This is by far the most engaged any online signer-upper has been so far. What’s good/bad about that is that I haven’t changed anything; the difference is on the customer’s end. That’s good because it tells me there are people out there who are inclined to engage with my marketing system and product just the way it is, but the other side of that coin is that I can’t take any credit for this “success” because it’s still basically the same onboarding system (using the term “system” generously) I’ve always had.

Another person signed up today. I did a little googling and it looks like it’s a competitor. I actually see that as a positive indicator. Nobody gives a shit about losers. If a competitor of mine sees me as enough of a threat to want to check me out (an admittedly low threshold, I would guess), that’s an indication that I’m not an absolute nobody. Feels good not to be an absolute nobody.

Yesterday I visited a salon at the suggestion of a friend of mine who knows the owner. That went well. The person I met with, who was not the owner but still evidently a decision-maker, wanted a couple certain easy-to-add features, easy enough that it’s probably worth adding them if that’s a necessary condition of making the sale. We agreed to meet in a week or two.

I also met with a stylist this morning who I thought was one of the owners but is not. She wants her salon to use a scheduling tool but it doesn’t sound like the owners are very motivated to do so. This sale might be a little tougher but as a next step I’m gonna try to get together with the owners.

Last week I mentioned that I was doing a direct mail campaign for BFL. I paid the postage on that yesterday, so I guess it’s going in the mail pretty soon, like maybe today. Looking forward to hopefully getting something back out of that. Getting any calls or emails at all seems too good to be true, but getting nothing at all seems too bad to be true, so either way I’ll be surprised.

One of my biggest problems with Snip throughout its whole existence starting in January 2011 has been that it’s been a “side” thing and I haven’t been able to put much time toward it.

In addition to the fact that I have to earn an income somehow, I have two young kids and a wife who all need attention. There’s not really a whole heck of a lot of discretionary time I home when I can justify sneaking off to the computer for some Snip work. I’ve tried it and the inevitable result is frustration for everyone.

Being self-employed, which I have been since October 2013 (and previously from June 2011 to January 2013), allows me to have more choice over how I spend my time. If I want to take a whole Tuesday off and just go prospecting for a day, there’s nobody to tell me I’m in trouble.

On the flip side, it’s also up to me not to get off balance with Snip, which is not currently earning me any meaningful profit. There’s also the challenge of earning enough money with my consulting, period. Even if I were to put 50 hours a week into my Ben Franklin Labs, my consulting business, that’s no guarantee of prosperity. And if BFL is sucking, that affects Snip. If my business is so fragile that the unexpected early end of a client engagement represents a financial emergency, then the bloodflow to Snip gets cut off entirely, which is of course a failure of the system. So the stronger and steadier and more reliable I can make BFL, the more time I can comfortably spend on Snip. The better BFL is doing, the better Snip can do.

Lately I’ve been doing better with BFL. I’ve been charging more and more, I’ve gotten smarter about managing my time, and I’ve been learning more and more about how to market myself effectively. I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride.

Business Cards and Branding

I have business cards for BFL but I’ve never had business cards for Snip. Part of the reason is that I, perhaps incorrectly, haven’t believed business cards would have been very helpful. I also guess I haven’t wanted to be one of those fuckin dummies who starts a “business” and goes out and has business cards, brochures, etc. made up before they even have a single customer or anything. And another part of the reason is that I didn’t want to have shitty business cards that didn’t match the look and feel of the marketing site or application itself, which currently don’t even match each other.

So in a move that’s probably overdue, I’ve finally decided business cards wouldn’t be premature. I reached out the other day to my (fucking awesome) designer who did my BFL cards and told her I’d like to have business cards made for Snip.

But since I don’t want all my Snip communications to have an awkward, disjointed look and feel, I think it probably makes sense to do some at least really minimal branding before I have the cards made. At least a common color for everything or something like that. Maybe a simple logo.

So that will be exciting to have business cards for Snip. I might go out and do some more canvassing just to have an excuse to give out some of my cards.

Free Guide as Lead Gen Tool

A long time ago on the I Love Marketing podcast I heard marketer and former carpet cleaner Joe Polish talk about a “consumer awareness guide” he had put together in the ’90s to help consumers not get ripped off by unethical carpet cleaners. My understanding is that the guide contained an invitation to call a free recorded message, which included an invitation for a “carpet audit,” which included an offer for a free room of carpet cleaning, at which point the prospect was finally offered the actual service of cleaning all their carpet.

I decided to copy Joe’s idea and put together a guide called something like “5 Costly Mistakes Salon Owners Make When Choosing Salon Software – And How To Avoid Them.” The idea has been ruminating in my mind for several months but there were certain prerequisites blocking from execution. Mainly, my marketing site used to be in Rails instead of WordPress and I didn’t want to invest anything more into my Rails site because I would just have to duplicate that work later after I switched.

Well, as of this Monday there were finally no blockers in place of me getting my guide out there anymore, or maybe I just decided to stop being a pussy and get the guide out no matter what. So I put up one of those things on the Snip site where there’s a bar at the top. It says, “Warning: Don’t Make These 5 Common Salon Software Mistakes” and then there’s a button that says “Get Your Free Guide.” In exchange for your first name and email address, you can have the guide sent to you.

The hilarious thing is that I “lazy loaded” my guide. (Lazy loading is a programming concept.) What I mean is that I offered the guide for download on my site, but the guide’s not actually done yet. Nothing happens if you request the guide. I told somebody about this who said, “What, in case nobody ever downloads it?” It was more like I wanted to remove any possible excuse for not getting the thing out there. My plan was that if someone requested the guide, I would write the rest of the guide real quick and get it to them.

Well, yesterday evening someone requested the guide. So, “Yay!” Also, “Shit!” because now I have to write the guide real quick and get it to the guy. What’s kind of funny is that I developed the guide thing as a lead generation tool, but the same guy who requested the guide first called me, and then later he signed up for a free trial and requested the guide. So he was already in the funnel by the time he requested the guide. Still, I’m glad he did because I think the guide will help get him engaged and help move him onto the next steps in the funnel.

Referral Program

Another thing I did in the last week or so was to start a referral program. I think I got this idea from something in my GKIC membership. First I went to all my users (among my 6 salons there are like 60-70 users) and asked for their birthdates. To incentivize them I offered a drawing for a $50 gift card. Now that I have their birthdates, my plan is to send birthday greetings to everyone for whom I have a birthdate, and remind each person that if they refer me a new customer, I’ll buy them a certain $500 pair of shears. (This, according to a few of my users, would be a highly desirable gift.) So hopefully that proves to be effective. It’s obviously a longer-term kind of thing.

Direct Mail

I’m getting closer to my direct mail campaign for Snip. For some reason I had fewer apprehensions about the idea of first doing a direct mail campaign for BFL, so I’m doing that first. Getting customers via direct mail with Snip somehow seems too good to be true, but for BFL it for some reason feels totally natural. I know that’s not necessarily logical but whatever.

For BFL I bought a list of about 1,100 businesses across the US. I’m sending them a sales letter in which I invite the prospect to email me or call me. A more sophisticated funnel would of course be possible here, as would better targeting, but if I wait until I have all that stuff in place I’ll just never fucking do it. So hopefully this mail campaign will get me at least one new client. It looks like the mailing will cost about 1,000 bucks.

Unless something terrible happens with this first BFL mailing that tells me I should never try direct mail again, I plan to do subsequent mailings to the same list. Then, after that, I plan to do some mailings to salons.

I’m not sure what my offer will be to salons. Suggestions welcome. For starters I might just offer my free guide, either through mail or by signing up to get it via email.

Despite my busy-as-fuck-ness it’s been a fairly eventful week for Snip. I don’t deserve any of the credit because everything that’s happened has just fallen into my lap.

I moved into a new co-working space and met two new people, each of whom gave me a good lead. I have a meeting set up with a salon owner in a couple weeks, and I’m in talks with another.

I also got a call from a certain company that’s potentially interested in doing some kind of licensing type deal with me for Snip. I don’t want to say much more than that about it until the talks are concluded.

Still super busy with my consulting work. This morning I met with a printer to finalize a direct mail campaign for Ben Franklin Labs (my consulting business), sent to 1,123 businesses in the US. If that turns out to be anything better than an absolute disaster I’ll be doing more of them over time. I wanna automate my marketing as much as possible and raise my rate as high as possible so I can work on Snip (and spend on Snip) as much as possible.

This past week, just like the two weeks before it, were really busy with client work. I’m on an engagement that’s 40 billable hours per week, which if you’re a freelancer you know is kind of insane. This is scheduled to last through mid-June.

The good news is that I think I’m making better progress toward having a better balance between Ben Franklin Labs (my consulting work) and Snip. My problem before was that I was just barely scraping by with the consulting work, which had all sorts of negative side effects. For example, a freelancer with no financial cushion is going to be an overly conservative negotiator, and therefore doom himself to continued financial suckiness.

But this gig I’m on now is at a good rate and good number of hours, and I’m fixing the hell out of my previous financial troubles. Oh, and before I was trying to work for multiple clients and the same time, which I realize now is probably stupid. The only problem now is that I’m already more than maxed out even before I spend any time on Snip. But one thing at a time, I guess. I made the not-enough-money problem go away, and now I just have to optimize for number of hours worked.

I decided some time ago that what I need to do is get to the point where I’m charging 2X, 3X, 4X my original freelancing rate so I can work less and still earn the same amount annually (or even more). It would be great if I could a) work only 10 or so billable hours per week, b) have my BFL marketing system mostly on autopilot, and c) still be earning a “normal” engineer salary. This would presumably allow me to spend 20+ hours per week on Snip which would allow me to actually get some serious shit done on Snip in a reasonable amount of time, and then be able to chuck the consulting work entirely.

One thing I plan to do, and I think within the next week, is to get a direct mail campaign out for BFL. My hope and intention is that I can have, via direct mail, a steady stream of good leads coming in without me having to scan craigslist, attend leads groups and networking events, etc. If I can have a system that brings me leads without me having to spend a whole shitload of time pounding the pavement, and if I can just sit back and relax knowing I won’t have to worry about continually finding consulting work, than that would free up a whole bunch of time and mental energy to focus more on Snip. I’ll let you know how that goes.