26: A Big Change

The SaaS Venture

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:12.2 Aaron Weiche: Episode 26, A Big Change.

0:00:16.0 S?: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

0:00:44.6 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, and welcome to 2021. I'm Aaron.

0:00:50.3 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:51.6 AW: And Darren did you know that 99% of the time for lunch, I eat a turkey, pepper jack cheese, mayo and avocado sandwich?

0:01:05.9 DS: For how long, is this for the past seven years, you've been eating this for lunch every day? [chuckle]

0:01:11.4 AW: I would definitely say the percentage has kicked up highly during COVID, so the last year now, but yeah, just because I'm home just about every single day that's kinda... If I'm home, that's the sandwich I'm making. And my kids just laugh at me, they ridicule me about just how basic, boring and the same I am.

0:01:39.1 DS: Oh, that's funny 'cause I'm exactly the same. This is a life hack, Aaron, it's like you're reducing your decision fatigue, you don't have to think about what you're gonna eat for lunch, you just know what you're gonna eat and you just go and make it, and it's one less decision to weigh on your brain. It's like the Steve Jobs thing, he just wears the same thing every day, he gets up, puts on his outfit. [chuckle] So yeah, it's a smart... The smart move.

0:02:02.6 AW: Right. I'm gonna choose to look at it as an optimization then. I just got done eating lunch before this, that's why it was on my mind now is just like, I make the sandwich, I have a basically... What do they call it? I think they call it a sandwich cut or a deli cut pickle. So it's not a dill pickle spear, it's like the flat slice but ridged, so it's got some texture to it so...

0:02:28.9 DS: Okay, good.

0:02:29.7 AW: Every day.

0:02:30.0 DS: So that's what we're talking about today, just we're talking about sandwiches [laughter] on the podcast.

0:02:34.2 AW: Totally, I love sandwiches. Someone tweeted this week talking about that they forgot to exclude mayo on a sandwich that they ordered from Jimmy John's, the sandwich franchise. And I was like, "No, it's not a sandwich without mayo, that is the ingredient, that's like sandwich glue. You need that, without it, it's just bread with stuff like." [chuckle]

0:03:00.6 DS: I used to love when I was a kid... This is really weird. [chuckle] When I was like, I don't know, between the ages of 10 and 13, I used to love to eat... This is the weirdest sandwich, it was just two pieces of bread, mayonnaise and jam. [chuckle] It was just this disgusting sandwich that I ate all the time when I was a kid, really weird.

0:03:21.9 AW: Wow, yeah, the mayo and jam combination that definitely... I was waiting for peanut butter, bananas, there's definitely some variations. I don't think I've ever heard jam and mayo. [chuckle]

0:03:34.1 DS: And mayonnaise, I don't... I was just on a jam and mayo sandwich kick for a while.

0:03:39.6 AW: Oh my gosh, for me at that age, it was like peanut butter and jelly and nacho Doritos. I think that was my lunch, especially during the summer at home as a kid, I made that every day.

0:03:52.5 DS: Well hey, you and I, our next SaaS product is gonna be sandwich related.

0:03:56.5 AW: Oh, this is brilliant. I would love a company that was named after a sandwich or something like that, I'm all in, so.

0:04:03.8 DS: Alright.

0:04:07.1 AW: Right, well hey, let's catch up on some other things besides our sandwich habits and our sandwich secrets. I hope our listeners feel really good about what we bring to the table...

0:04:18.4 DS: They've all stopped listening at this point, I think.

0:04:22.9 AW: This is what you got for 2021, sandwiches? [laughter] Anyway, catch us up on how the year started for you, Darren.

0:04:31.6 DS: Alright, it's been a good start. We kinda went out with a bang at the end of 2020. We had a big launch of our Rank Tracker, and it was, I guess, probably in June, we launched our updated local citation finder and man, we've just been on a roll, it continues to grow. We were going through some declines on our subscriptions for a while, and that trend has been completely reversed and yeah, every week numbers keep going up, so it's been great on the software side of things.

Great on the service side of things too, I've just been so busy doing marketing and lots of presentations because of the local search ranking factors, which I officially released at the end of the year, so just been doing tons of webinars and podcasts and presentations around that. So that's been... It's been good and it's been driving business for sure.

0:05:24.5 AW: That's awesome.

0:05:25.8 DS: Yeah, so yeah, it's been good. Got lots of stuff coming up in 2021 as well. It was a good end to 2020, a good start to 2021. And man, we have so much in the pipeline about to launch for in the next month or two, and I think it's just gonna be a great year. Yeah, it's looking good. Lots of optimism.

0:05:50.3 AW: Yeah, that's a really great feeling. One thing, you and I, we did a non-recorded call, just catching up and seeing how things were, and one thing that obviously really stood out to me just 'cause we'd had many other conversations about it, but you were commenting on your engineering team has really found its sweet spot in efficiency and what they're kicking out. And that was great to hear just because prior months we had had talks, it felt like things were... Something was missing structurally or process, or even possibly people, and you were working hard to get your finger on it and change some things up, and it sounds like that's worked.

0:06:32.3 DS: It worked really well. So step one for me was getting myself personally tuned into it, because the software team is busy doing stuff all the time, but I wasn't really hooked in, and I didn't know what they were doing, and so as the founder I just always had these lingering doubts. I'm like, "Are they doing anything?" I'm like, "Why is this taking so long?" But I wasn't really involved enough to know how things were progressing. So I started a daily stand-up. So we now do a daily stand-up. It takes about 10-15 minutes and everyone just kinda outlines what they do.

We're recording all of this in Confluence, which is Atlassian, same company that makes Jira. So record that every day, and it's just so... That immediately dissipated any doubts I had. It was just like, okay, cool, I'm now in this. I'm involved. I know what's happening. It was really helpful for me, personally, to be able to see what was happening, and I think it was helpful for the team too, because it just sets the day every day. Every morning, we set up, like, "This is what we're doing. This is what I did yesterday, these are things we're doing today."

0:07:38.6 DS: And then at the end of the year we did annual reviews for all of our staff, and I promoted one of our developers to a team lead position. So that's been really helpful too, because I'm not the best person to be the team lead, and I was kind of the go-to person for all software team-related decisions, and I was a bit of a blocker in a lot of stuff. And so putting Troy into our team lead position has been really helpful too, and so now we've got processes in place and we got the daily stand-ups, and then we ended up hiring two more people too.

So we've got one more full-time guy, and we have a part-time student developer, and it's just like, "Wow, it's all... " All systems are firing, and the dev team is building stuff faster than I can review it. It's like I got...