How to Sell Services WITH Your SaaS - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast Episode #2: Andy Allen HikeSEO.co

This is a transcript from my recent SaaS podcast interview Episode #2 with Andy Allen, founder of HikeSEO.co

Watch the full interview here.

In this episode you can expect to learn:

• How to offer a service alongside your SaaS WITHOUT it becoming a massive distraction

•  How Andy DOUBLED his conversions with one simple change

•  Which pricing experiments moved the needle the most for him

Here's a short 5-minute clip from our conversation.

Also, you might be interested in these:

• 3 Quick & Dirty SaaS Revenue Sources You're Probably Overlooking
• How to Predict Churn (with 90% Accuracy) - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast Ep#1 Aaron Kassover
• How Make a SaaS Product That People Want - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast Episode#3 Kyle Miller - BackupParachute.com

*** 

[00:00:00] Andy Allen: We were like, just send people to the pricing page. Just send them straight to the pricing page. Right, let's just see what happens. What you think is going to work often doesn't. Um, and when you don't think it's going to work, it can work. Just as well as the things you think will. How did you guys navigate that process?

[00:00:15] Andy Allen: It's never a black or a white, right? And this is so important. And you know, it's almost something you have to go through yourself, but it's not a black or white. It's that perfect shade of grey. And what's really important is finding that perfect shade of grey for your business. Where, for us, actually what's best for us is doing a little bit of fun.

[00:00:33] Ryan Wardell: Andy Allen, welcome to the show. So let's, let's kick things off. Last time we were speaking, you mentioned something called the perfect shade of gray when it comes to building a SaaS business. Now I'm assuming you're not talking about another sequel to 50 shades of gray. So Andy, when you're talking about.

[00:00:51] Ryan Wardell: A perfect shade of gray. What does that mean specifically? 

[00:00:55] Andy Allen: Yeah, I guess it's finding the balance between SaaS and SwaaS. So SaaS software as a service, SwaaS software with a service, is how we've always kind of coined it. So we're a SEO platform, but where we're a little bit different to other SEO platforms is that we're built for people who don't know SEO.

[00:01:15] Andy Allen: So most SEO platforms, they're used by people who know SEO. SEO experts, Consoles, et cetera. We've built it for the part of the market that don't know us yet. So small business users, small business markets. That's right. Typically. Um, now our software is do yourself. So the idea being that they can use a software to do it themselves.

[00:01:35] Andy Allen: Um, a lot of customers though, I mean, we've been going for six years now. A lot of customers back in the day were like, can you just do it for us? All right, can you do it for us? Can you come in and just do the SEO for us? And when we were young as a business and you know, we, we didn't raise lots at the beginning, right?

[00:01:50] Andy Allen: We had like a really small round at the beginning, like SEIS investment. Um, we needed revenue. So we were like, yeah, go on then. We'll do that. We'll still focus on the software. Now that for anyone that's done that before with a software business that can grow quite quick Right, it's almost like the software becomes a lead tool Right in a way right if you do if you do it a certain way So that grew that grew to be about like 35 percent of our revenue Nah, maybe a bit less maybe 30 percent of our revenue.

[00:02:17] Andy Allen: So 70 software 30 percent, uh services But that's not really why we built the company, right? Why Kieran and I built the company is because we wanted to be a software company. We've worked in agencies before. It wasn't a model that I particularly wanted to manage or grow a business in that. And we got investment.

[00:02:34] Andy Allen: And, um, as part of the investment, what they wanted was, they wanted to invest into a software company, all right? Because that's, that's the exciting part. That's the bit where the competition's low. And we were like, yeah, that's where we want to go. As well, right? So we decided to stop selling. We called 'em Done for you services.

[00:02:51] Andy Allen: We decided to stop selling all of them, um, which was fine. And then that was about a year or so ago. Uh, and what's happened in the meantime is we've grown the software side of the business really nicely, started last year, so like 60% growth there in terms of like software only customers. Um, but then we've, we've shrunk that 30% of the revenue that we were getting from the fulfillment side, the services side, um.

[00:03:18] Andy Allen: And what we've actually learned now, you know, we were either doing things black or we were doing them white And what we've learned now is that the perfect it's never a black or a white right and this is so important And you know, it's almost something you have to go through yourself, but it's not a black or white It's that perfect shade of gray and what's really important is finding that perfect shade of gray for your business where for us Actually what's best for us is doing a little bit of fulfillment, right?

[00:03:45] Andy Allen: But it needs to be complimentary for the software like our goal and this is how you know It This, this is how, you know, we communicate with the investors and what gets their buy in for this is yes, we can do this service based side, but it's in the, in the goal of growing our software. So if we see that this, these, these services that we can provide actually support our goal, reduce retention on the software side, increase ARPU on the software side, then actually, not only is it providing a service that our customers are asking for, right, meeting the demand, It's not only growing our revenue, but it's also growing towards our goal, right, of wanting to grow in our software side of the business.

[00:04:23] Andy Allen: They're not mutually exclusive. It actually supports that. So that's where like, um, the perfect shade of gray kind of came from. 

[00:04:29] Ryan Wardell: So that's where you draw the line then between, because I can understand there are a lot of people who, Start off with a service business, but they want to get off that rollercoaster of, you know, you get the client work, you do the client work, project's over, now you got to go find a new client.

[00:04:43] Ryan Wardell: And so there's a real temptation, at least among agency owners that I've met, Hey, one day we want to set up a software business so we can have a more predictable, repeatable revenue model. Um, and at the same time, I've seen people start off with a software business and. They get a lot of customers asking them to deliver services or that there are services that they could deliver that would a bring a bit bring in a bit more revenue and and be just legitimately be helpful to the customer to help them use the product and um and reduce churn and and Help them be more successful when they use the product Um, but I think it's a very fine balancing act between those two things So it seems like you've you've found the line.

[00:05:21] Ryan Wardell: So so am I correct in saying that? You do services that are Up until the point that it aids the software business, but that's where you draw the line. You don't go beyond that into because then you're drifting back into the service business. 

[00:05:34] Andy Allen: Yeah, I think a way to another way to think about it is Do your services negate the need for the user to use the software?

[00:05:42] Andy Allen: And if it if that's the case and it doesn't enhance them using the software or you know Can be used to enhance their you never know how they're going to use it, right? All customers are different. But if your services negate their need to use it key parts of the platform Then that's not servicing or supporting your goal of growing the software side.

[00:06:03] Andy Allen: So that's another way of kind of skinning, skinning the cat really. 

[00:06:08] Ryan Wardell: Absolutely. Um, can you give us a bit of context just where, where are you sitting right now in terms of revenue, team size, et cetera, and what's been happening in your business over the last 12 months or so? 

[00:06:18] Andy Allen: Yeah, sure. So we, uh, Just shy of about 2 million ARR, um, we've got about 2, 000 paying customers, um, we've got more customers.

[00:06:29] Andy Allen: We've got some that don't pay, kind of legacy customers. Um, we, team size is 21. Yeah, 21. Um, we're based here in the UK Most or all of our staff are ones based in the UK. So they all kind of either died around the UK, but we get most people in and around the office. Um, the last year, the last year has been exciting year for us.

[00:06:54] Andy Allen: Uh, so beginning of last year, last January, we got, um, seed investment. Um, so we kind of grew organically up to that point. We have very small rounds. We were on in the. a startup accelerator seven years ago, so little things to get us going, but we grew pretty much organically up until January of last year.

[00:07:11] Andy Allen: And we were, we were profitable at the time, so we'd grown into profitability and we got to the point where we were like, we could continue profitability. Or we could really scale, you know, we could really scale this business and we had an opportunity with an investment firm And we thought let's go for it.

[00:07:27] Andy Allen: So that was the beginning of last year So the last 12 months has just been is is is Enacting out the strategy that we agree with those guys right which is to grow that software side of the business Reduce the services sides, although we've kind of found a gray now We went from one extreme to the other now we're back in the middle But still a very small part of the business and launching the features Uh, and the products that will help us get to where ultimately we want to get to in terms of not just revenue and customer size, where we want the product to be, right, what we want the product to ultimately be.

[00:08:00] Andy Allen: And that's going to take a while, but we're, we're knocking down some dominos along the way. So that's kind of in the last year. 

[00:08:06] Andy Allen: What, uh, out of curiosity, when, when you raise that That investment round, like what percentage of it are you devoting to product and what percentage are you devoting to customer acquisition?

[00:08:16] Andy Allen: I can't remember the exact financial split, um, but probably around a half and half. Yeah, it's probably around a half and half. We, we really want to build out the development team, um, because, because that's obviously, obviously for all SaaS is a very key part. But then we also went to scale up the acquisition.

[00:08:37] Andy Allen: Um, and that required increased marketing spend. So increased budget, uh, but then also increased hires. Right. So we started hiring in the areas where we didn't have expertise, the higher specialists in particular marketing roles, um, and to grow that out. So I'd, I'd say I've got a vision. There was a pie chart.

[00:08:56] Andy Allen: There was like a pie chart that we did on one of the investment decks that had the split. It was around half and half or something like that. So yeah, it was fairly evenly. That makes a lot of sense. So an equal, an equal importance for each journey. 

[00:09:10] Ryan Wardell: You know, you know, it's, it's not serious until there's a pie chart involved.

[00:09:13] Andy Allen: So it was a 3d pie chart. 

[00:09:15] Ryan Wardell: Oh, 3d. Oh, yes. Especially that gets me excited. Um, so, so tell me a bit about the, the origin story. Let's, let's dive back a little bit deeper. So when you were starting it, so you mentioned a co founder Kieran. So when, when you were starting out, so for those of you who, for anyone listening, who has a co founder or is thinking about getting a co founder, um, one of the, the, the more interesting conversations is deciding on, you know, who gets to be the CEO, uh, who gets what equity stake and, and, and all that kind of stuff.

[00:09:45] Ryan Wardell: How did you guys navigate that process? 

[00:09:48] Andy Allen: So it is a bit of context, me and Kieran and, uh, are really good friends. We've been friends for years. So we first, we first started, um, in SEO together. Mm-Hmm, as a junior. SEO people. SEO execs at an agency like 12 years ago. And then we worked together for years. I went off different ways, still say really good friends, played lot of golf together.

[00:10:09] Andy Allen: We still hung out. Then we decided to start the business. So. So just to give you a bit of background, we are friends, but there is quite a funny story. When we, um, I think it was when we got our first kind of like friends, kind of, it was our SEIS investment round. And we're our first investment, so a small, fairly small amount.

[00:10:27] Andy Allen: Um, and we were filling out the forms. It was just the two of us, right, running the business at this point. And then he said, I yet to put down your role and we were like, ah, okay. So the conversation came up that we knew we'd always needed to have for a while, which is what role we both going to take. Bear in mind, Kieran is a dev, a typical dev, right?

[00:10:47] Andy Allen: No, he's, he's the best. He was the, he was the technical co founder. I was the non technical co founder. He has more skills than dev. I'm kind of winding him up a little bit there. Yeah. So we decided, right. Who's going to be which role. All right, it was two roles up for grabs pretty much. It was cto. I couldn't be cto I could only be ceo Kieran wanted to be ceo as well and it got to the day where we had to hand these forms in Um, and we weren't there in person.

[00:11:13] Andy Allen: We hadn't made this decision awkward conversation. We just hadn't had Um, and we were on the phone and we were like we have to make this decision and we were like I can't remember who it was. I think it was kieran. I think he said we just gotta do rock paper scissors We have to decide who's ceo. We just gotta do rock paper scissors and I was like, okay That seems fair enough that we were going nowhere in a minute.

[00:11:33] Andy Allen: We need an objective way of doing it. That's fair on both sides. But the problem was we were on the phone, right? So we couldn't actually say it's kind of like, this is like 20 seconds. It was like, no, I was really using zoom about them. It couldn't even do that. I'm sure they were, but we weren't. So. We went 1, 2, 3.

[00:11:50] Andy Allen: Um, and then, I said my response, he said his response, he won. He said his response split second after mine. I think I said like, rock, and he like, uh, paper. Um, and then he won. So he was officially CEO when we raised our, our seed round. Which, kills me to this day, but. The world righted itself. Justice was had.

[00:12:15] Andy Allen: Uh, where we got this most recent investment and um, you know, we both came to the conclusion then that we should switch it around. We'll not switch around, but I'll be CEO and he'll be CTO because he's a great CTO. He's great at managing that and that's exactly where his skills are and I'm not technical.

[00:12:28] Andy Allen: So, um, yeah, I've taken the CEO role. 

[00:12:32] Ryan Wardell: Fantastic. There you go. Rock, paper, scissors. I, I, I think some people think it's a lot more scientific than, than what it ever ends up being. Um, I know there's, um, there, there was a great. I think the website's still up. Um, I think it's called splitting the pie or something.

[00:12:47] Ryan Wardell: There's um, no Foundrs. Um, so there's a, for anyone interested in finding a co founder and deciding on the equity split to take it, there's a questionnaire you fill out and it will tell, you know, so who's going to be writing the blog post, who's going to be the face of the company, who's going to be building the product and it will assign sort of equity shares and stuff based on that.

[00:13:06] Ryan Wardell: And so anytime I've mentored. Entrepreneurs really early on, and they're trying to decide on who gets what and who gets what title and stuff like that. That's always a really handy resource might stick a link in the description to it. Um, but that's, that's a really good, good way. And, and if all else fails, there's this rock, paper, scissors, right?

[00:13:22] Ryan Wardell: Yeah. I mean, we didn't add the complication of equity. We were just going to split it. Yep. Sorry. It was just, it was just a badge in a way. God, I can imagine that's quite difficult. So that does sound like a good resource. How did you get your first hundred customers? So, so you, you, you decided you're going to go into business together.

[00:13:40] Ryan Wardell: You've, uh, did you have any customers when you, when you went for the accelerator round or was that very early on? Yeah. So we had. We'd started another another software before hike so we had another software called the web shed And that's what we were accepted onto the accelerator with um, and that Was an seo platform for seo experts.

[00:14:03] Ryan Wardell: So just like all the other platforms out there. We were seo experts You know, we'd come from seo backgrounds. We thought why not? We want to change a career while I do a saturday Um curing could codes. Let's do it. Um, and we and we built that And we had about 40 customers. I think after about a year and a bit, we were doing about a 500 MRR.

[00:14:23] Ryan Wardell: Like just there's nothing we did working full time and doing this in our spare time We got into the accelerator, which was great. And when we were on the um Accelerator people keep coming up to us saying. Oh, we're founders. We've got a small business Can we use your software and we're like no and they were like, we're like, it's not built for you And then they're like, what can you do rseo for us?

[00:14:42] Ryan Wardell: We're like, no, we've got our own stuff We've got our own company to do it. And that's where the genesis the idea of point came from. Um So when we then decided to, we decided to pivot, well, it was a nine month program. We pivoted, um, and we were like, right, well, how can we get our first hundred customers, we had about 40 customers on the web chat, but they were the wrong kind of audience for Hike.

[00:15:03] Ryan Wardell: Um, so we were like, well, what can we do that's a little bit different? What can we do also that validates that? Fundamentally, it's the idea of Heinker. I think what we did was we put up, there's two parts to this story, I'll tell you how we got the first 100 customers and I'll tell you how we got the first 5000 customers.

[00:15:19] Ryan Wardell: Because they were having quite a quick lead. So we put up a landing page, right? And we put it up on beta list, I don't know beta list is still going. We put it up on beta list and we said, just a landing page. We're building this. It's going to launch soon. We haven't built anything, we haven't done anything.

[00:15:35] Ryan Wardell: Build this, it's gonna launch soon, put your email here. And we had like hundreds of people like, that registered. We were like, oh god that's pretty good. Um, and then we were like, through the accelerator we were on, we sent out emails to loads of different accelerators, they'd shared it, and we had like, I don't know, a few hundred people that had signed up for early access, before we'd even built it.

[00:15:52] Ryan Wardell: So then we were like, okay, this validates the idea, that's pretty good. So then we built it, then we launched it, and we converted a bunch of them. It was what, I think we sold this like, 12 pound a year for the first few customers like a pound a month just to get this to see right. Yeah. Um, So we so we got that and for the first like they were all the people that signed up Um, yeah, all the people that signed up via the landing page got it like super cheap then we're like right now Let's try and get proper customers, you know, like other people do then.

[00:16:21] Ryan Wardell: Um, so that got us about I don't know Maybe 50 odd customers and we're like wow We've got more customers than we had on our old software that took us years to get um Then we, uh, then we got an email. So we launched in September, in October, we got an email from AppSumo. Um, I won't explain it, I'm sure everyone here knows who AppSumo are.

[00:16:40] Ryan Wardell: Uh, we got an email saying, Hey guys, we've been recommended you. We want to see you, you know, AppSumo. And we were a bit like, who's AppSumo? We've never even really heard of it. And then we looked into it and we were like, cool. Maybe they've got like, I don't know, a few thousand people on their email subscriber list.

[00:16:57] Ryan Wardell: Um, then I put a post out on SAS group and a Facebook group and yeah. And then people started responding, saying, yeah, we were on it. We got thousands of customers. We're on it. We got 10, 000 customers. We were like, yeah, that's ridiculous. So we went on there. We were live for two weeks having to be over black friday just lucky um, and five thousand people purchased time wow, uh They pay like a one time deal one time payment, right?

[00:17:26] Ryan Wardell: But it's five thousand people and three and a half thousand of them registered in the account So one and a half thousand we didn't didn't use any data didn't even sign up of those three and a half thousand I need about one and a half thousand used in more than once. I don't know if that's a sign of the type of person that does AppSumo or the quality of hike back in the day.

[00:17:46] Ryan Wardell: Like, I don't know what caused that, but so we only have, so basically we have 5, 000 signups and we've got a million money from each, right? So one and a half thousand users using the platform. But that was a baptism of fire, man. That was a real baptism of fire. You know, Kieran had built a platform that was currently hosting 50 of our customers and now it had to host You know word, you know 1500 customers, uh potentially well three and a half thousand right because they used it once Um, I was managing live chat thinking.

[00:18:12] Ryan Wardell: Oh, we just got uk customers now We've got customers in every single country and every time so finding every single bug possibly I'm like, so I was managing live chat like 24 hours a day like for for weeks and weeks and weeks Um So yeah, but, but all it did, I guess, you know, in hindsight, it was great really, because it, it gets revenue and it gave us a bit of product market fit to then go and get a little bit more investment that fall in January.

[00:18:39] Ryan Wardell: So that that's the long, the long story of how we got our first hundred slash 5, 000 customers. How, how did you go from the AppSumo launch to, cause it's, it's a one time thing, right? They pay once and they get lifetime access. And I know a lot of SaaS founders get stuck at that point. They see a big influx of cash and they think, right, we're, we're sorted now.

[00:19:01] Ryan Wardell: Um, but they, they struggle to then continue building the business and get people to. Move them onto either moving people from the app sumo plan onto a recurring subscription Or being able to attract new customers getting them to pay a recurring subscription fee as well Like did you did you go from you use the app sumo launch?

[00:19:19] Ryan Wardell: As leverage to help you raise a round of capital. Is that the way you used it is or is there something else pretty much? Yeah, I don't think it was as tactical as that. I think we just saw an opportunity We did it. We got a lump of cash, which was great. Um, we got a lot of customer feedback In hindsight, we were very immature at that point, right?

[00:19:43] Ryan Wardell: We didn't have any plan to upsell them onto paid subscription plans Which I think in hindsight, we probably would have done but knowing the abseal audience They don't you know, they're the type of people that want to get these 50 lifetime deals You know Very few very small percentage are gonna are using app sumo as a way to find the jet You know platforms that they don't want to go and spend thousands over their lifetime, right?

[00:20:08] Ryan Wardell: That's just the wrong type of audience. You're not going to get that much success I don't think but we could have got more recurring revenue if we were cleverer, but we were such a young um So for us, it was more like, cool, we got a lump of cash, that's good for me here and right, we could stop doing what we were doing.

[00:20:25] Ryan Wardell: Uh, but then we used it that following Jan to get that, you know, the next, the first round of investment that we got, which was, you know, small amount relatively, but that took us all the way up to last January. And then we, and then we just treated it as two sides of the business, really. We had the AppSumo guys, you know, who were there providing feedback, getting the features, obviously, because we had to get them all the features.

[00:20:44] Ryan Wardell: Um, getting feedback, but then we just went, no, okay. What's our strategy for acquiring customers and growing the subscription side of the business? There are almost two things in our head. Fantastic. I, uh, let's, let's keep on with that theme of pricing. Um, so do you lean more into annual pricing or monthly pricing now?

[00:21:05] Ryan Wardell: And what's, what's your experience with that been so far? There's a few different schools of thought on this. Yeah. And, and to be fair, we aren't really. It's a very relevant question. Very timely because we hadn't really played around with monthly and annual. We, we, we've always had on our pricing page.

[00:21:20] Ryan Wardell: You've got monthly and you've got annual. Um, we'd always default to monthly. We've always had annual there almost because we just had to have annual there. No one ever really signed up for us. So it was like maybe eight to 10 percent of signups per month, which is, um, so it wasn't really anything that we really thought we just, it was almost just there to be an opposite to monthly, you know, to help people sign up for monthly because they saw the annual as a big amount, we'll go for monthly instead.

[00:21:48] Ryan Wardell: Didn't think anything more of it until, um, last Black Friday. We thought we needed some ideas to run a Black Friday sale. We thought, well, why don't we do a discount on the annual? No one will take it off, but we'll just run a discount on the annual. And we didn't really even do anything right. So the annual before was 45 percent off.

[00:22:06] Ryan Wardell: So all year round, we run for, if you sign up to annual, you get 45 percent off the, um, the monthly, we thought, well, let's just bump it up 5%. So it's 50%. Right. And we'll run a sale on it. So, so we switched. So what we did then was we switched the pricing page to annual. To showcase that offer and we had a good amount of signups.

[00:22:27] Ryan Wardell: We were like, that's surprising I'm a really good amount of signups during Black Friday, but it was 50 percent off. So I've switched it back to 45 percent um, and then uh I forgot to switch it back to monthly after Black Friday. So Black Friday weekend ended and I was like, right Yeah, I'll switch it back to monthly.

[00:22:44] Ryan Wardell: So it goes back to monthly completely forgot That's it. Actually, I think we noticed when we were like, why is the annual signup still coming? Like we're still like people sign up doing annual out strange And then the realization dawned. It was really strange for like, this is really good. We're getting like a decent, the conversion rate wasn't, it really changed too much, but we were getting annuals and you know, like annuals are great for, uh, you know, they were great.

[00:23:09] Ryan Wardell: We were like, Hey, we're getting all the revenue up front. That's fine. You have to manage it a little bit because you get hit on the MRR, right? You, you're getting your cost per acquisition is the same, let's say, or maybe a bit more because the conversion rate dropped a little bit, but, um, But we get, we actually got high lifetime value.

[00:23:27] Ryan Wardell: So the, the churn on annual is so much lower than monthly, um, that the LTV is so much higher, right? So that's a bit, so the cap ratio is better if we get an annual and we get a monthly. So actually it was a good thing. So that's just fantastic. So we kept on annual. So that was then through December. So yeah, black Friday.

[00:23:46] Ryan Wardell: So end of November and then December, we were like, right. Conversion rates. Great. We're getting annual, getting this lump cash up from which great. You can fund other stuff, you know, not as much MRR We're getting a high LTV, you know, Kakao TV ratio, but then conversion started to slow down come like January and especially February, it was like, why conversions are dropping down?

[00:24:10] Ryan Wardell: Like really conversion rates really dropped. Now there is some seasonality to it, but it seemed more so than usual. Right. Especially because December was good. And seasonally was December's bad. So why is January so bad? And why is February, you know, it was decreasing, getting worse. And then we were like, well, let's just switch that annual back to monthly.

[00:24:30] Ryan Wardell: And almost, you know, we did that on the Friday, come the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, next week, conversion rates went back. And it was really interesting because we were like, there was a shelf life. There was a shelf life switching it to annual. Conversion rate stayed pretty much where it was then just dropped And then we had to go back to monthly my theory being um That because obviously people don't purchase the first time right when they come to hike So all those returning visitors that came first time and saw the monthly price of What 60 quid, right?

[00:25:04] Ryan Wardell: They're now seeing they can get four now They're now they're landing on the page and they're landing on annual they're coming back to the website Which means they're a warm lead now, right? They're interested. They're coming back. They're seeing annual listings 45 percent off I'm pretty interested already.

[00:25:16] Ryan Wardell: I'm gonna sign up to this Right, so all the top of funnel people had seen the old pricing and now all these Bottom of funnel people that would come back to purchase and seeing the annual and they were converting. So conversion rates stayed the same, but then over time, that audience, those bottom of funnel people were just getting smaller and smaller and smaller because all the top of funnel people landing on the page and seeing annual.

[00:25:37] Ryan Wardell: So they were coming to the website and seeing annual. And then at that point being put off by the. You know the amount you have to pay right which is 12 months times It's that big outlay for the first time we've landed on software. You don't know anything about that software potentially So there's uh, I think there's something for us to there's something for us to uh, Learn and do more on there, right?

[00:25:57] Ryan Wardell: You know if you get someone top of funnel view the monthly if they're interested getting about showing the annual If you want that, you know if you want annual if you want if you If you don't mind taking the MR MRI hit beyond the revenue upfront. Mm-Hmm. then that's a way to do it. But we're back on monthly at the minute and conversion rate and Yeah.

[00:26:13] Ryan Wardell: It's, it's back to where it was. Is it almost, that's a high point. Sorry. Is it almost as if there's a, there's a, there's a certain cohort there that people who have been to your pricing page, seen the monthly price and then come back at a subsequent date. And seeing a pretty hefty discount on, on the annual end that there's a certain pool of people, but you exhaust that pool of people.

[00:26:31] Ryan Wardell: And once, once you, you get to that point, people who, new people have come along, they've been to your website, they've seen the 45 percent off or the 50 percent off and they've gone, uh, okay, uh, come back a little bit later and the price is still the same. So it's almost like there's, that's the new normal.

[00:26:45] Ryan Wardell: Um, and so it doesn't feel like that much of a discount anymore because it's exactly the same as what it was when they came the first time. Is that what you think is going on there? Precisely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly what it is. Um, so whether, you know, we could do retargeting, we could hit him with the annual, we could perhaps the website could adjust and identify if someone's been there once, two, three times, they've got cookies, switch that page to annual price.

[00:27:09] Ryan Wardell: I'm sure there's stuff that we could do there, you know, if that theory is correct. It's definitely worth testing a little bit more. It makes sense theoretically, intellectually, but that doesn't always mean it's right. It's one thing I've learned, uh, running a SaaS company. It's what you think is going to work often doesn't.

[00:27:25] Ryan Wardell: Um, and when you don't think it's going to work, it can work just as well as the things you think it will. So, yeah, we'll try it. We'll try it. I think a lot of SaaS businesses just kind of pick a price and then, you know, it's just putting a finger up in the air and hoping for the best. And then they don't really think too much about it.

[00:27:40] Ryan Wardell: They, they don't. Really want to change it or tinker with it just because they're afraid of, you know, peeing off, um, existing customers or, or, or something like that, or they just don't think to do it. I think one reason you don't want to mess around with pricing is because it's another variable, right? And you want to control when you're, when you're doing stuff and there's a star, it was a sash, you're always doing stuff, right?

[00:28:01] Ryan Wardell: Whether it's releasing a new feature or trying new ads. Or you're building new lambda pages in order to this gets very complex, right? In order to really see the results of what you're doing what you're changing you need to control for everything else You need to keep all those things stable. Now if your pricing page is stable, that's something you're just keeping stable, right?

[00:28:21] Ryan Wardell: So, you know with update, you know Well, you give me a pricing stable, let's say. So you make changes on your price page, change the copy, but you keep the pricing the same and conversion goes up or down. And you can say that probably based on, you know, the, the copy, if you're changing the price and changing the copy, it's difficult to really judge the success of what you're doing, whatever that may be when you're changing loads of things at once.

[00:28:44] Ryan Wardell: So. That's a difficult way, you know, you want to be very strategic. You want to be very disciplined When you're testing and trying to keep everything the same and only and only changing very few bits That that's always been a that's always caused a reluctance for us in the changing pricing so much because you're changing so much else We change the pricing.

[00:29:02] Ryan Wardell: Do you know if that actually? hindered or helped conversion rate, you know, correlation, causation, all that jazz. And sometimes when it comes to something like, you know, churn or retention, you don't find that out if it made a difference until many, many months down the line. Um, so yeah, I, I do think that Um, pricing something that's really important to tinker with, but you're absolutely correct.

[00:29:25] Ryan Wardell: I think you got to be careful with it, um, and not change too many things at once. Um, are there any other experiments that you've run, uh, that have had an impact on conversions? Yeah, I'd say the biggest one we've ever had a game was another. Uh, In a way, right. It wasn't planned. It would just kind of fell into our lap almost.

[00:29:47] Ryan Wardell: So, um, we, when we started, hi, so we launched our first website 2018, right. Up until 2022, summer of 2022, the main call to action on the website was book a demo. You could sign up directly, but, um, the main call to action was book a demo. And that always was the way, right? We just went with that. Um, we always wanted to remove it.

[00:30:09] Ryan Wardell: Every time we removed book a demo, we tried to turn it like a recording of it. Think fancy conversion rate just went down. So whenever we tried to replace demo with something else that was demo like conversion rate, we just got speed to customers. Um, so we were running demos and we had a pretty good conversion rate of demos.

[00:30:26] Ryan Wardell: So we would do, like, on average, like 50, 60% of demos would convert. We were like, that's fair enough. Um, then, um, summer of 2022, mid of 2022. Um, our custom success lead who ran the demos, uh, she had to go on emergency leave for two weeks. It's very subtle. Uh, she was fine, but it was very subtle. And we were like, right, we've got no one to cover them.

[00:30:53] Ryan Wardell: I don't want to cover demos. Busy, other guys, busy. We've just got to switch them off. And we were convinced, we were convinced. But we're obviously conversions are going to drop now. Um, but maybe just maybe if conversions don't drop that much, then maybe because we've gained all those hours about custom success, we can use her resource elsewhere and it would still be beneficial for us.

[00:31:18] Ryan Wardell: Right. So less sales, but we were using less time to generate those sales. So we're like, let's say it'd be interesting. Garen, you know, convinced that sales are going to drop and just a complete Yes, conversion rate just completely increased, probably like doubled. Um, and it was insane. We couldn't believe it.

[00:31:38] Ryan Wardell: You know, it was just the amount of sales that we were getting through. And conversion rate didn't just double. We were doubling marketing spend. Like we were coming every day and we were like, let's increase it by 10%. Conversion rate's still going up. Let's increase it by another 10%. Let's increase it, increase it, increase it, increase it.

[00:31:54] Ryan Wardell: I was for a period of months. It was, it was nuts. I mean, this was 2022, right? This is a very good year for stats, right? We know 2021 and 2022 were good. But still, this was fundamentally down because we removed a demo. Now people didn't have this extra layer before signing up to Hike. Now all they had to do was just sign up.

[00:32:16] Ryan Wardell: Um, and hey, it really grew our business that year. Really, really significantly grew our business. Um, there were downsides we had increased chef, right? We had increased customer success needs Because customers haven't seen the plot a lot of customers haven't seen the platform They didn't know what it was like because with a demo not only are they deciding that they like it They're learning about the form as well, right?

[00:32:40] Ryan Wardell: They're bought into it Whereas if you're just landing on the side and you don't have that engagement with someone then they they handle that experience So churn did go but as a net benefit You It was far greater for us. Our growth was, yeah, it was significant. So that was, uh, that was a big fight. And that again, we've gone four years doing demos and it was only due to that kind of that illness, that absence that we just had to switch it off and never run them since.

[00:33:09] Ryan Wardell: Wow. Never run them since. So, yeah. So had that's almost a blessing in disguise had, had that not happened, you might've continued running demos and you wouldn't even know that. You know, you were potentially letting all this revenue slip through your hands. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, exactly. Have, have you run any, any other page experiments that have led to a bump in conversions?

[00:33:28] Ryan Wardell: Yeah, um, one of the things that we took from, one of the things we took from that was we were like, there was a theory. I don't, we had a bit of a theory going. The, the demo was a point of friction, right? There would be interesting in signing it up. But they would see the demo and go, Oh, okay. I'll try and book a demo.

[00:33:51] Ryan Wardell: And potentially the slot was all right. Like, you know, we only had one person running it. It was mainly UK hours. So perhaps they just didn't have a slot available. Therefore, they're like, I can't book a demo. Maybe a demo. I'm not going to. Potentially they saw the demo and they thought, Oh, it's usually enterprise level stuff, you know, but it's going to be expensive.

[00:34:09] Ryan Wardell: You know, we have pricing next to it, but people might miss that because it was the main call to action. So, but we were like, maybe it's a level of friction. A level of friction that's, you know, putting people off when they would have just signed up anyway, but by us having the demo there, we, uh, we were putting people off and just signing up.

[00:34:25] Ryan Wardell: Um, so we started to play with our idea. We, we reviewed our website and we went, what else is a potential friction, and we went to town on this. Uh, the two noticeable ones, notable ones being, we used to have a lead. We used to have this tool, right? And we still do because. Our agency customers use it to help them generate leads Where people would land on the website a little pop up would come up saying do you want a free seo audits?

[00:34:47] Ryan Wardell: We built this whole tool where you get free. You put in your url competitors url spits out your backlinks and your etc, etc And then they would go into an email drip email and we get a certain amount of those convert Uh, and we'd always try and implement that We can improve that drip email campaign, try and improve the tool.

[00:35:10] Ryan Wardell: Um, and, and we switched off when it just, just, you know, we were getting late, we get like 20 a day, right? 20 people doing that day. So we just switched up, just didn't have any more. Someone lands on the website, can't book a demo, can't get an audit. If they like it, they just got to buy. Right. And again, it increased our conversion rate.

[00:35:27] Ryan Wardell: It just increased our conversion rate. Yeah. People just, the number of those dropped, it was obviously weren't doing them anymore. The conversion rate just increased. And it was like, gosh, there's another example of friction. It's another example of friction. Uh, the other notable example of this is where we, with our paid ads, we tested, we used to send everyone to the homepage or another internal page.

[00:35:51] Ryan Wardell: We were like, just send people to the pricing page, just send them straight to the pricing page. Right. Let's just see what happens. And that that that out beats any other landing page even to this day We send people straight to the pricing page every time that we've tested every time that we've switched It's never been as good whether that's the home page or another features page, whatever it may be Then just sending them to the home page.

[00:36:13] Ryan Wardell: We get a lower cost for acquisition from, um, advertising, paid advertising. If we just send people to that pricing page now, they think they, they convert, but they just want to see what price is it, right? How much is this going to cost me? Go onto the homepage, have a look around. I'll come back later, but it's just that freak people just want to, they just don't want any friction.

[00:36:33] Ryan Wardell: I don't know about say I've said a million times, but yeah, I think that's. And again, it always has its downsides, right? Because. They're learning less amount of your platform. They're not gonna taste through it before which then means you're gonna have to Replace that knowledge during onboarding, right?

[00:36:48] Ryan Wardell: You have to get them up to speed as quickly as possible and all that noise They would have had pre sale you have to replace it in onboarding If you can do that, then you get the benefit of the improved conversion rate without the Route the increased churn example, you're still educating them So that's that became key for us and then improving our customer success And that's what we've 18 months is You Builds out that customer success.

[00:37:11] Ryan Wardell: There's, there's a part of me that died a little bit inside as you were saying that. So I cut my teeth on conversion rate optimization. That was the first skill I learned when I was, I was doing marketing stuff. And so we'd spend hours, you know, putting these, these, these amazing landing pages together with awesome design.

[00:37:25] Ryan Wardell: And we put in an explainer video and we'd rework all the copy and we'd spend hours and hours and hours on this stuff. You could have just sent them to the pricing page and it probably would have I think it depends on the audience though, right? So we sell to We're not selling to A lot of the time we're selling to a customer who isn't there deciding between Hank and all of our different competitors, right?

[00:37:50] Ryan Wardell: They're not a qualified lead like that in a way. They're not making an informed decision. They don't even know, a lot of the time our customers don't even know a solution like Hike exists until they see our app, right? I can imagine if I was doing enterprise B2B, right? And I wanted to sign up those people, and those people were reviewing 10 different tools, right?

[00:38:12] Ryan Wardell: And then they weren't going to make a decision there and then, or, you know, they were going to make a more informed decision. That actually you do need to put them through those people. And you do need to educate them. You do need to do these kind of drip email campaigns, you know, being front and center of their minds.

[00:38:27] Ryan Wardell: Our customers are a bit different. You know, a lot of our customers. Some of the customers have never bought software before. Right? They've used an agency to do their SEO, never bought software before. Some have used SEMrush, Ahrefs, and stuff like that. But then they see our software and go, I didn't know there was a software that's do it yourself, that's built for someone who doesn't know how to use those.

[00:38:45] Ryan Wardell: So, I think it depends on the audience, but test. Test. I mean, that's the key, right? And just see what works best. Don't come in with any preconceived ideas. I think that's, yeah, or, you know, what's the general wisdom that people say? Just figure it out for your own customers, because everyone's different. Bye bye.

[00:39:02] Ryan Wardell: Absolutely. Let's um, let's talk a little bit more about hike in depth. So are you rolling out, uh, I think you mentioned there's a new killer feature that you're, you're about to launch. Um, are you able to give us a sneak peek? Yes. Let me, can you share your screen? Can you show, show us what that looks like?

[00:39:22] Ryan Wardell: So give us an overview about what, what this new feature is and how it works. Yeah, sure. So, so I like to explain, Hike's a platform that, um, Is to be used or we built it for people that know they need to improve their seo, but um Seo experts or haven't done seo before or they might have done little bits of it But then they wouldn't call themselves let's say an expert in it.

[00:39:48] Ryan Wardell: They need support still So the hike platform in its real essence is it? It tells the user what changes to make on the website. So it will go right. You need to make this change, this change, this change, and it guides them on how to do it. And what, what, what happens up until this feature is you show you here, you get a list of things that you need to complete, right?

[00:40:11] Ryan Wardell: And when you click on it, it tells you what you need to do, why it's important and how to do it. But essentially, you still need to go to your website. So let's say you're in Squarespace, you open up your website, you log into the back end, you have to figure out how to make the changes that Hike's telling you what to make.

[00:40:27] Ryan Wardell: And that's all we've been talking about. It's always been a bit of a pain for customers, especially our types of customers, because they still might find it a bit tricky to actually figure out where in Squarespace to make this change or even WordPress, some WordPress themes are a pain, you know, even myself, I can't make some SEO changes on certain themes because they just make it so difficult and it takes a long time.

[00:40:48] Ryan Wardell: Right? And we've got customers who are time poor. A lot of our customers are time poor, right? They need a quicker way of doing this. And, hey, continue with the friction allergy. We need to make sure that in Hike, it's probably true for all SaaS, reduce the friction. Reduce the friction for getting results from using your tool.

[00:41:06] Ryan Wardell: So we're like, alright, what can we do? Ultimately, what we needed to do was connect Hike to their website so they can make all their changes without having to log into Squarespace. And make it super quick. Um, and that's what we've done with our new feature here. So we've called it the, the Onsite Optimizer.

[00:41:20] Ryan Wardell: It's a brand new feature that we're launching hopefully today, maybe tomorrow, but this week for sure. Um, and how it works is you click this button and the demo site I'm using is actually the high casio.co website. So I'm actually testing on the I website. Um, just show the face that we have, that we have in this tool.

[00:41:39] Ryan Wardell: Right. And what it essentially does is it loads your website, but it puts this overlay on top of it. So you can see, so this is the website and you can see there's this white bar at the top, this gray, you've got, you've got this. This is an overlay that we place on top of your website that enables, that brings through all the key height data.

[00:41:58] Ryan Wardell: And what this tool allows you to do is not just bring it through, but it allows you to edit your website here, right here. So you don't have to go to the back end of Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, whatever. You can edit your website right here. So it's super quick doing your SEO, right? Used to take a long time, it's now gonna be really, really quick.

[00:42:15] Ryan Wardell: So I'll just show you some other ways. You can like, you can crawl, you can have a look for all your pages, right? So we're on the homepage at the minute. And It's a little three thing here, it says I've got three actions to this page, so I need to complete three actions. Three things a replacement says I need to do.

[00:42:28] Ryan Wardell: Now, I can, if I want to edit this page, I just edit here real time. So, let's say, um, I'll change this to here, a software that puts SEO on easy mode, right? Yeah, so that puts that live. So that's what it was before. But now let's uh, So that wasn't a very good example because that's pushed it back because I did a demo before and I change its platform So if I launch up the Hike website, the Hike website says a software that puts SEO on easy mode So that's our website.

[00:43:02] Ryan Wardell: If I want to change this now to a platform that puts SEO on easy mode Or let's say that puts SEO on easy, right? I do that. I press publish. Let's continue And what this is going to do is it's going to make the changes on your website. And how it works is you just add, have to add small little JavaScript snippets, your website that connects the two together, right?

[00:43:26] Ryan Wardell: And you do that once, one time, and then you can jump in and use the optimizer. Yeah, cool. Exactly. Now you can see my, my H1 now says a platform that puts SEO on easy. All right, so I can update H1s. I mean, I can change the elements as well. So say I want it to be h3, or even a paragraph, change it. What I can do is I can change the copy as well.

[00:43:48] Ryan Wardell: So I can put whatever I want there. And I can publish that, right? Make that change and publish. But what's really nice is we've, we've built in GPT 4 into this, a training GPT 4. And what you can do is you can click on these two buttons, right? So you can use this to rephrase and optimize. So what this will do, if I click it, it will take the copy, right?

[00:44:08] Ryan Wardell: But it will optimize it. It will make it SEO friendly and it bases it on the keywords that you want that page to rank for, because you've already told Hype, and this is another feature before, you've already told Hype what keywords you want this page to rank for. So I want it to rank for DIY SEO software and DIY SEO, which means all the copy I write on that page needs to be SEO friendly for those keywords.

[00:44:28] Ryan Wardell: So Google knows what it needs to rank for. rewrote it. I provide you precise DIY SEO software. So that's that keyword being mentioned, DIY SEO expert. So it's optimizing your copy for us. It's rewriting it, right? You can expand it as well and make it longer and all that stuff. And it's done for you. So if you're, if you're not the world's greatest copywriter, not only does it rewrite it for you, but it also incorporates all the keywords that you need to be targeting anyway.

[00:44:52] Ryan Wardell: Wow. That's cool. Exactly. That's really exactly that. Other things that you can change. Yeah. Headings. Uh, links, you can change the, the locations of links or you can remove links. Um, let's see. Oh, you can add to image alts as well. Something that usually is a bit of a pain takes time. You can add image alts by clicking it and changing the alt there.

[00:45:15] Ryan Wardell: You can do all this stuff. Um, you can as well, if you click on this SEO settings button, you can edit some more of the technical behind the scenes SEO data as well, so you can update your metadata, so your page title. Um, and your meta description. One thing we've also incorporated, so page styles and meta descriptions really important you optimize them and include your keywords.

[00:45:38] Ryan Wardell: So, you click on this button and we've built the AI to automatically generate your three options. So once this loads, it takes a bit of time, but what it'll do is it's going away. It's crafting three SEO friendly page titles based again on the keywords you want to rank for, right? So DOI, SEO and SEO software solutions.

[00:45:58] Ryan Wardell: Okay, it's got all three of them in there because I've already used one before. But, and it would do the same for your meta description as well. Cool. It'll give you different meta descriptions, all optimized. Because writing meta descriptions is a pain. It takes a long time. But it's also, you want to get that structure correct.

[00:46:11] Ryan Wardell: Um, canonicals, you can update your canonicals. You can update your meta robots tag. You can also inject JSON LD, which is a really great way and Google recommended way of adding schema to pages. The schema is a way of marking up pages and content. So that the, so the Google, when it indexes your page, you can understand more of your content and therefore you can rank better.

[00:46:33] Ryan Wardell: So you can update all of that as well through the, um, through the on site optimizer and you just work your way through it, right? I guess another thing to show is if you click this, you can see. All of the actions that you need to create all the actions you need to complete So you don't have to go back and forth in between hike.

[00:46:49] Ryan Wardell: We're bringing it all into here as well, right? So I need to add missing alt on all these images. I need to choose a new page tile That's got my keywords set in it. Um, but there's some things you can't do in the platform We'll flag back here, right? So You have CSS files that need to be minified. So to help with page speed, that can't be done on the on site optimizer that needs to be completed within your own CMS, but we're still going to flag it here so CMS and do some of these actions.

[00:47:15] Ryan Wardell: Um, so everything that you can do on site, you can do through the on site optimizer, anything that still needs to be done behind the scenes, it'll still tell you to do it. So you're not missing out on that. Um, but it just speeds up everything and makes it, I think it's so much easier when you've got a visual edit as someone who's not Particularly technical.

[00:47:30] Ryan Wardell: Um, and I know a bit about SEO, but I'm by no means an expert. So having something visual like this seems like that would be a massive shortcut and save so much time. That looks awesome, man. That looks great. And if you know, if you ever want to revert it to original click this, I'm going to do that now, just so I did a demo last week, I changed a bunch of stuff on the Hike website.

[00:47:50] Ryan Wardell: And then I, you know, just, I think I put like tests at the end of like that copy. And then I went home afterwards to change it back. So I'm going to kind of do that. This is, this just takes a second. So I'll stop sharing for the moment, but. Yeah, that, that's kind of, that's, that's what that does. Be careful you don't make, be careful you don't make a change on the pricing page and start offering annual pricing again.

[00:48:12] Ryan Wardell: Change the price, something like that. So Andy, just a couple of quick questions, mate. Um, just to wrap things up, if, if you could give one piece of advice to other SaaS founders, especially if they're selling to small businesses like Hike does, um, or if they've got a SaaS plus service, what model like you guys do.

[00:48:30] Ryan Wardell: Um, what's one bit of advice that you'd give to anyone in that, in that position? Turn into small businesses like we do. It's tough. It expects that small businesses, they require a lot of handholding. Yeah. I think that that's one thing we feed our audience is there's a lot of handholding required. So build that into your product, either productize it or deliver it by a service.

[00:48:55] Ryan Wardell: We try to do a mixture of both. We, we have obviously the gray area, right? Where we have, you know, the ways in which we can supplement venues and the platform again, the most out of it, uh, with these paid for services, but then also try and be clever in a way, you know. AI is amazing now. So we we've replicated the process of what the CS team used to see it.

[00:49:15] Ryan Wardell: Just give me an example. The C, um, a small business customer will come into the onboarding, they'll complete some data, right? They'll fill out some fields. They'll set up the tool. Our customer success team used to go through record videos and get them feedback. We realized actually we could build an AI to do that.

[00:49:31] Ryan Wardell: So we trained chat, we trained GPT 4 to basically replicate that. And yeah, it's not a hundred percent, right? It's not. Quite as good as one of our team doing it, but we can do it on scale. We can do it cheap and we can write it instantly. So there's a lot of handholding for, uh, small businesses, um, try and build that into your product somehow and be aware of that rather than just assuming knowledge.

[00:49:55] Ryan Wardell: That they may or may not have you've got to make it as easy as possible and time. Yeah, yeah and time, right? They are time So you need to reduce all anything that's going to stop them from signing up Anything's going to stop them from using the product just remove all of that. Even if even if it seems counterintuitive Just try it.

[00:50:14] Ryan Wardell: You don't know what kind of results you'll get until you try it. You might be surprised. Andy, this has been fantastic, mate. Um, for anyone listening who's interested in using Hike or interested in contacting you, what's the best way to get in touch? Um, if they want to use Hike, head over to, um, hikesco. co, not com, just co.

[00:50:37] Ryan Wardell: co. Uh, if they want to get in touch, we've got live chat on there. And my LinkedIn, if you want to get in touch with me, what's the best way to get in touch with me? Andy. Uh, just yeah, if Andy Allen or Andrew Allen, uh, hi Casio, you'll be able to find me, connect to me on there, drop me a message, happy to help where I can.

[00:50:53] Ryan Wardell: Mate, thank you so much. This has been super interesting and I think a lot of people get a lot of value out of it. Thank you so much for your time today, mate.