SaaS Content Marketing Hacks - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast #4: Uwe Dreissigacker

This is a transcript from my recent SaaS podcast interview Episode #4 with Uwe Dreissigacker.

Uwe is the founder of InvoiceBerry (invoicing software for small businesses) and BlogHandy (blogging software for non-technical people).

He is also an SEO and content marketing expert and coach.

Watch the full interview here: Doing Content Marketing and SEO for SaaS the RIGHT way - with Uwe Dreissigacker.

In this episode you can expect to learn about:
- How Uwe acquires customers profitably with a low-ticket SaaS starting at just $15 per month (6:00)
- The time management techniques Uwe uses to run 2 businesses and still spend time with his family (11:00)
- Why paid ads are a bad idea for bootrappers - and what to do instead (24:00)
- The secret to bootstrapping multiple products successfully (33:00)
- The exact framework Uwe uses to decide which keywords to target for content marketing (48:00)
- Which linkbuilding tactics for SaaS still work in 2024 - even on a bootstrapper budget (53:00)

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

 

 

Also you might be interested in these:

• 10 of the World's Best SaaS Coaches, Consultants and Growth Experts
• The 10 Laws of Freemium
• How Make a SaaS Product That People Want - StartupSauce SaaS Podcast Episode#3 Kyle Miller

 

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[00:00:00] Uwe Dreissigacker: If I'm losing, you know, uh, like 5, 10, 15 cents per click on a few bots, who cares? If I'm losing like three dollars per bot click, no, you know, that hurts me. How do you actually acquire customers profitably? To run actually paid ads? I couldn't see it as viable, to be honest. You have to think about your ICP.

[00:00:24] Uwe Dreissigacker: Well, what's on the agenda right now is Like this week, what's on the to do list? I think my number one advice would be.

[00:00:31] Ryan Wardell: welcome to the show. Thanks a lot for having me on the show, Ryan. So you and I have been friends for a little while now. Listen, for anyone who doesn't know you, can you tell me a little bit about your two businesses, Invoiceberry and Bloghandy?

[00:00:45] Ryan Wardell: Who are they? Sorry, what are they and who are they for? 

[00:00:48] Uwe Dreissigacker: I'm Uwe, originally from Germany, where I also, Um, started a few businesses in the past when I was younger, and that sort of was the starting point of the idea of Invoiceberry, which is an online invoicing software for small business owners, uh, because back then I actually didn't create any invoices for my business partners.

[00:01:10] Uwe Dreissigacker: Until the taxman knocked on the door and asked for them. So then I created them and Actually, it's the following year. I changed my laptops I lost them again and you know in germany I think you have to keep your accounting records for like 10 years or so. So yeah, that was an issue And so the idea of a cloud based invoicing software was born back then And when I moved to the uk You Um, and after my studies, I decided to actually create InvoiceBerry and, you know, that's how it started growing.

[00:01:45] Uwe Dreissigacker: It's now actually 15 years ago, um, since I started it. And, um, probably, so it's a, one of our earliest, uh, marketing, um, Tools at invoice baby was seo and content marketing and probably we will talk a bit more about that later But back then, uh, the only solution for that was so we had a custom coded website Everything is custom coded at invoice berry and then we had to have a blog and we decided to go for wordpress Because that was the only option back then and uh, Except maybe custom coding something but I never liked it.

[00:02:23] Uwe Dreissigacker: So for probably 10 years out of those 15 years. I really disliked wordpress, but it is what it is And then finally a few years ago, I probably five years ago I decided there has to be a solution and I sort of developed that idea of BlogHandy And then around two years ago or three years ago, I started programming it and we launched it a couple of years ago.

[00:02:48] Uwe Dreissigacker: And last year it got really serious. So BlogHandy is a no code blogging tool. You can just drop like this one piece of code into your website and it automatically loads a blog. Uh, you know, it's SEO optimized. It comes with sort of. Uh, an analyzer or helper within the writing editor. And, uh, it comes with a Google indexer to automatically send you blog posts.

[00:03:18] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it's sort of fully integrated and SEO optimized, and it just gets you started with, uh, your blog. You know, your content marketing very quickly and it nicely integrates with existing website builders, custom coded websites, and also no code tools like bubble and web flow and so on. I 

[00:03:35] Ryan Wardell: think sometimes as, as a non technical founder myself, um, I was always told that, yeah, WordPress is super easy.

[00:03:41] Ryan Wardell: You can make all the changes you want to it. And then when you actually get into the nitty gritty details, it's not that easy to work with. Um, I know it's, it's easy now and I know a lot more about it now, but, um, yeah, it certainly feels like there are a lot of people that are in a boat. Where, um, you know, I, I need a blog on my site.

[00:03:57] Ryan Wardell: I, uh, I, I don't have a developer or I don't have the resources to be able to set all that stuff up where I can't use WordPress or I can't use whatever else. And this sounds like a really cool tool to, to solve that problem. I actually 

[00:04:08] Uwe Dreissigacker: think it didn't get easier. It got more complicated, but you feel it got easier maybe because.

[00:04:14] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh, you're more used to it, but actually if you look at it, so even when we started developing and designing BlogHandy, we tried to keep some of the user interface parts, more like an early version of WordPress, which was just simple, right? And, um, if you look at all the plugins you can choose from, and you don't know if there's a security risk and so on.

[00:04:38] Uwe Dreissigacker: So nowadays you have more themes, more plugins, more customization, but actually. Gives you also a big headache at the end of the day. 

[00:04:46] Ryan Wardell: I, I, I agree. I, you see that with a lot of SAS products though. Um, so one, one pattern that I've seen a lot lately is people will start off with a SAS product that does one thing really, really well, and it's super easy to use.

[00:04:58] Ryan Wardell: And you go in and then they decide, Hey, we need to move up market. We need to charge more money for us to charge more money. We need to have more features. And then, so they cram in all these features. into the same user interface and then it just gets really cluttered and difficult. And this thing doesn't work and this thing works in some really bizarre way.

[00:05:14] Ryan Wardell: Yeah. Anyway, anyway, we won't go, I can, I can bitch and moan all day about that. And I'm going to try and not mention specific tools. I'm going to try and keep this above board, but I'll avoid that. Um, but tell me, tell me a little bit more about. Getting, um, the, some traction for both of these. So I know one of the things, a lot of people listening to this, uh, might tend to struggle with is just how do I get my first customers or, you know, maybe I've got a few customers, but that channel is no longer working anymore and I need to find something else that works.

[00:05:45] Ryan Wardell: Um, so, so how do you get traction for. Uh, Invoiceberry and Bloghandy actually, you know what, let me, let me, let me ask you a better question. Let me ask you a very spicy question, Uwe. Both Invoiceberry and Bloghandy have fairly low ticket prices. Um, I think Invoiceberry starts at what is it 15 a month or something like that?

[00:06:07] Ryan Wardell: Um, how do you actually acquire customers profitably at that price point? 

[00:06:14] Uwe Dreissigacker: So especially at Invoiceberry, uh, the idea is obviously that the customer lifetime value of Is, uh, way much higher because, uh, we do have some customers that leave us after 12, 13 or 14 years. So, so out of the 15 year history of Inverseberry, I think the longest, uh, served customer is with us for 14 years now.

[00:06:36] Uwe Dreissigacker: So even the 15, or in his case, he's a UK customer, those are 10 pounds a month. Um, it's equivalent several thousand pounds, uh, now. Um, so obviously once in your, and the reason why he left is because he closed down his business, he retired. So, you know, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm very happy. I just, you know, congratulate him on his retirement.

[00:07:01] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, uh, the reason is because it's a sticky product. So I think if you have a sticky product, if you have a product that, um, People don't want to change because they're comfortable with it. And then it also depends on the customer. So in, in most various case, our number one reason for people leaving us because they closed down their business, either they retire or they close it down, and the number two reason is they outgrow the solution.

[00:07:26] Uwe Dreissigacker: So sort of coming back to what you mentioned previously, uh, if we had a more complex solution where, which then ends up being a fully fledged accounting tool, We could serve them, but that's not what we're trying to do. We rather have some leave and even recommend some, an accounting package, which might be a competition, but I don't see it as a competition.

[00:07:49] Uwe Dreissigacker: So what we're trying to do is we're trying to serve this market of business at Invoiceberry that, um, just it's a small size and say either one to stay small or whenever they grow, we help them to, uh, to find the right solution. And I think um, that means that a lot of people stay with us for a long time So even if we only charge 15 a month, you know, they might end up staying with us for five plus years um, but obviously, uh, it's hard in such a, you know ticket size to say hey, uh, let's um Let's do onboarding calls and so on, but we still actually offer them sometimes to people, uh, just to learn a bit more about, uh, the customers and obviously how they're changing over the years and how their requirements change.

[00:08:39] Uwe Dreissigacker: But obviously, um, a lot of the marketing is based on SEO on, um, lead magnets on, um, you know, downloading different templates and eBooks on blog posts and so on, like the whole content marketing. And that's one of the things I'm an expert in. I became an expert over the last, yeah, like 15 plus years of doing content marketing.

[00:09:03] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh, And obviously it's a nice thing is you produce your piece of content once and you can, you know, with every signup, technically the cost of that, you know, content just like shrinks a tiny bit more. And we have some blog posts that, you know, are five years old, six years old, and they're still generating, uh, signups.

[00:09:23] Uwe Dreissigacker: We have some, you know, lead magnets that we created even more than five years ago, and they're still generating signups and, you know, new payers. And it just. You know, that drives down the cost of acquisition, but obviously, um, what some of our competitors are doing to do, to run actually paid ads, um, I couldn't see it as viable, to be honest.

[00:09:47] Ryan Wardell: That's, that's really interesting. I, I wonder if the reason why a lot of companies sort of, not, not feature bloat, but they, they feel like they need to charge more money, they need So they, they have to move up market. So they have to add all these features in order to justify the price. I've seen that happen quite a lot with, um, VC backed companies.

[00:10:08] Ryan Wardell: They'll sort of enter a space, the bootstrap competitors freak out a bit because they've got much deeper pockets, but then they're under so much pressure to move upstream and work with bigger customers or enterprise customers. They have to charge a lot more money. And so they aren't able to serve. Kind of the, you know, the, the small and medium size of the market.

[00:10:26] Ryan Wardell: And it sort of feels like, um, that's exactly what you've been able to capture with, with invoice barrier, especially if the product's that sticky. That's amazing. Um, I think, I think most people would probably kill to have a customer lifetime value of five plus years. Um, that, that, that sounds really good.

[00:10:40] Ryan Wardell: So, um, especially if you're able to do that without any. You know, with or without many sales calls or onboarding calls, it's all done through lead magnets, through content marketing, just a really slick onboarding process and just a really good product. I think that makes a huge difference. Um, so how, how do you juggle growing Invoiceberry alongside BlogHand and, and you're also a father as well.

[00:11:03] Ryan Wardell: You've got a, you've got a family. So how do you, how do you juggle all three of those responsibilities and still get enough sleep? 

[00:11:07] Uwe Dreissigacker: Well, the question is. If I get enough sleep to be honest, but, um, yeah, so I, that's a very good question. So I'm in theory, I'm trying to focus on one or the other business a bit more from time to time.

[00:11:29] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, uh, especially with invoice, Barry, we have a very good structure. It, it just runs, right. We don't have these growing pains of having bugs in the system over 15 years. Um, so at least on the technical part and as well as you mentioned, because we're not trying to bloat it with features, whenever we get feature requests, um, I try to really analyze if it makes sense to add this.

[00:11:59] Uwe Dreissigacker: And we're very slowly adding all these things. And this comes back to, yeah, like over 15 years ago when I first time read Getting Real by Jason Freed and DHH from Basecamp, because I really liked the idea of, um, having a very clean and minimal and simplistic product. Uh, so because of that, we have not so much development work at Invoiceberry, but obviously still all the marketing and operations, but it's quite smooth.

[00:12:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: Over the years, we implemented a lot of SOPs, have some VAs and so on. Um, at BlogHandy, obviously it, it's a bit more changing all the time. And as we previously discussed, uh, because we're working with all these different platforms to, to add a blog to your website, and we might be working with Cloudflare and Bubble and Webflow and Card and like hundreds of different website builders and, and, and no code builders.

[00:12:56] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it can sometimes happen that someone changes it and like, you know, A number of our customers have an issue and they say it's our mistake even though it's you know Maybe another partner's problem or bug say introduced so it does get a bit more hectic And how to deal with that is a very good question like there definitely have been some burnouts in the past Which I don't recommend but you know they happen I think trying to, like, what I'm trying to do is nowadays to have a to do list that, um, is only 50 to 80 percent of what I really want to achieve.

[00:13:40] Uwe Dreissigacker: Because usually there's always something burning somewhere. And even aiming sometimes for 50 percent in a day, I don't even get that done because there are like a number of other things burning that need my attention. On top of that, I know that kids, You know, get ill and things happen. So there's always some family dynamics as well to, to take care of.

[00:14:04] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, and I'm just trying to, yeah, to expect that I get done less because it's been a quite nice week when I realized on a Friday, Oh, I actually did achieve these points that I didn't really plan to achieve. Um, otherwise it's a sure thing to, you know, show past to, to, uh, burnout, which happened a few times in my life.

[00:14:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, um, yeah, it's not recommended. 

[00:14:31] Ryan Wardell: I've, I've had that happen a couple of times as well. And it's, it, I think that's, that's the thing that probably affects the. The most is like if the CEO is burnt out, everything else kind of falls apart. So, um, yeah, I, and I think, I think we all have a tendency to just, you know, work and work and work and work and work.

[00:14:50] Ryan Wardell: Um, but you can't, you can't do that. So I have, I have a friend named Chris and, uh, one of the things that he always talks about is when you, especially when you're first starting out, um, it's not just that. Everything's on fire all of the time. It's that you have to, as the CEO, you have to decide which fires to put out and which things can you just let them burn for a while and just accept that it's not going to be, it's not going to be perfect for quite a while.

[00:15:14] Ryan Wardell: And you're, you don't have the time or the resources to actually fix it. And he said, it's the most frustrating thing when you've got a bug in the software, or you've got, you know, this feature that customers are asking for. Um, and you just, you know that it's a problem, but you just don't have the resources to fix it right now.

[00:15:29] Ryan Wardell: And you know that you're losing customers as a result, um, or you're, you're, you're failing to convert customers as a result. Um, but I think that is just part and parcel, especially if you're bootstrapping, um, there's 24 hours in a day. You've got the resources that you've got, and it's all about prioritization.

[00:15:43] Ryan Wardell: Um, how do you, how do you structure your week out of curiosity? Do you have, um, So for example, I try, I try to have days where I don't have any calls. It's really hard to do, but I try and sort of cram all my calls onto a few days of the week. And I usually find by the end of, you know, back to back calls all day, I'm pretty knackered by the end of it.

[00:16:01] Ryan Wardell: But that gives me a few days of a week where I can just focus on doing like, you know, actually sit down and bash out that work that I need to get done myself. Um, do you have any sort of little hacks like that? 

[00:16:13] Uwe Dreissigacker: Yeah. So I, um, I'm just thinking, so, you know, on top of running the, uh, companies, I also decided last year to, to do a bit of fractional work and to actually do some mentoring on, uh, growth mentor, uh, as in, you know, the platform as well.

[00:16:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: So I really got into these calls because what I realized, um. For me to sometimes clear my mind and to get energy Like while an InvoiceBerry/BlogHandy customer call um puts me into the position of I need to deliver I need I need to figure out an issue for a customer which Energizes me but also takes energy.

[00:16:50] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it really depends on the call and the day But when i'm doing a mentoring call there is no There's still a bit of stress because I really want to deliver but at the same time I get completely new energy Into the room. So I actually started doing a lot of those calls on purpose throughout my week But now I realized it got a bit too much So I tried to push all my calls as well into one day, which one or two days a week Uh, unfortunately a lot of them on monday which is Not the best I I think thing to do to start your week, but it just happened like that.

[00:17:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, I try to as soon as I get into my co working or my whole office I I try to sort of create a list of tasks for the day You Um, I don't do that the night before, I do that in the morning usually with a coffee and I do a bit of journaling just to, to get some thoughts out and then, um, then it really depends.

[00:17:49] Uwe Dreissigacker: I try to have some days where I'm more focused on BlogHandy, some days where I'm more focused on Invoiceberry. And then within that, it really depends, uh, what's happening in the business. Can I focus that day on marketing alone? What often happens that I have a bunch of recurring. Marketing tasks, if this is outreach, uh, checking analytics, uh, you know, like, like doing a bit of research and then to have a project and this project could be, uh, some programming related stuff.

[00:18:19] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh, product development, or this could be, um, like a new marketing project, maybe setting up cold email outreach, uh, to partnerships and integration partners. Um, so I'm trying to build the structure of some sort of smaller recurring tasks and like one project per day, but. Especially with programming, this obviously might be multiple days in a row, that project, depending how big it is.

[00:18:49] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, but I'm really trying to get projects as small as possible nowadays that I can ship, if it's marketing or coding, that I can ship it by the end of the day, just to, to finish it. And for example, um, at the moment we're working on new landing pages and landing page copy at BlogHandy. So in an ideal world.

[00:19:11] Uwe Dreissigacker: We would be shipping just one new landing page per day rather than getting it all done And then shipping after a week or two so to sort of do incremental small changes um because otherwise I also my head is full of information and I just forget what has been done five days ago And if I can just keep shipping small increments and already get some feedback from customers Um, that usually works better.

[00:19:39] Ryan Wardell: We used to have a system, uh, back when I was running, uh, so for context, so, so startup source used to be a marketing consultancy and we'd work with a lot of early stage funded startups and we'd work out different, you know, we'd figure out a marketing system for them. Then we systemize it. Then we recruit and train someone a bit more junior to run that system and then kind of move on to the next marketing channel.

[00:20:01] Ryan Wardell: Um, so we did that. That was, that was a pretty good model. We did that for a while. Um, so we used to have. When we were juggling that for like four or five different clients at a time. So it all got a bit chaotic. So we had this system that was set up in, um, in Trello. And the rule that my old business partner used to have is like, if so, so we do tasks that consist of 30 minutes, um, if it takes you longer, if you think it's going to take longer than 30 minutes to do that task, break it down into smaller tasks that are only going to take 30 minutes.

[00:20:28] Ryan Wardell: And it sounds like a weird thing to do, but we'd get to the end of the week and you'd look at the, the. The done list and be like, I actually did a lot of stuff this week. Okay. And you feel, you feel a lot more motivated. I think sometimes, um, when you, you look at a to do list and you just, you never end up getting to the end of it because everything you do one thing and then you add three more things to the list.

[00:20:48] Ryan Wardell: It can get a bit. Not demotivating, but it just, you never quite have that feeling of accomplishment that keeps you going. It also helps with content 

[00:20:56] Uwe Dreissigacker: switching. I say like context switching, like if you think about it, because sometimes you just have maybe half an hour, an hour before the next call, or before I need to pick up my son from tennis, or, you know, there are just these things in the calendars that are blocking it.

[00:21:13] Uwe Dreissigacker: And then you have here 45 minutes, say a one and a half hours. And. Um, even if it's maybe a three hour deep work project, if I can break it up into pieces because some pieces might take longer and just to complete it rather than later get back into it. And again, you need to find this context and it might take you 5, minutes to get into it and it just takes a lot of time.

[00:21:39] Uwe Dreissigacker: So, so I started doing that already years ago with sort of business and marketing tasks. But only recently, I also did set with everything, including, uh, product features where I'm trying to take a product feature and even if I know it's going to take 20 hours of development time, we got to break it down into like one hour tasks, or even if possible, half hour tasks, which is sometimes difficult, but I think the extra time spent on trying to break it down helps.

[00:22:08] Uwe Dreissigacker: And to ship like very tiny pieces of it, um, at least to the testing environment and to test it and so on, rather than, um, you know, waiting for this massive project. And we used to have that at Invoiceberry where we would work for six months on an update, and then the shipping itself would take two weeks just to ship that and to get it ready, right?

[00:22:30] Uwe Dreissigacker: And nowadays we don't have that. We do something, we update it, we have a project, we update it and, and we don't just, you know, collect, Oh, we could add this to the update and that to the update. And then the 2022 update became the 2023 update and it just doesn't make sense. Right. And, uh, you don't know where the bugs are and what the issues are.

[00:22:51] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, um, so I'm a big fan of this sort of like just continuous development and, and, and just continuously trying like these small experiments. Within the product development, as well as the marketing itself. 

[00:23:05] Ryan Wardell: I want to switch tack now and just talk a little bit more about the marketing side of things. So what's interesting is I've interviewed a few founders now, and every single one of them has a different marketing mix or a different thing that's worked for them or a different technique or tactic or whatever.

[00:23:21] Ryan Wardell: Um, so, so I guess I've got two questions. The first one is what have you tried marketing wise that did not work? And why do you think that was? That, that didn't work for you 

[00:23:31] Uwe Dreissigacker: to write paid ads. Um, so that are a very long time ago, Google ads and also, um, Facebook ads, but that's also quite some time ago. Uh, I think with Facebook ads, it was mainly retargeting it and, um, it didn't.

[00:23:49] Uwe Dreissigacker: I think because of the cost of acquisition and also probably my lack of experience. And, you know, I, I probably should have tested more. Everyone talks about testing your ads and so on. And probably I haven't done enough of that. Uh, but I couldn't see anything working and I didn't, uh, get an agency involved.

[00:24:09] Uwe Dreissigacker: So, but yeah, paid ads, I I've stayed away. And it's just naturally not really where my experience lies. Even over 20 years ago, when I started my online career, I never got into paid ads. Um, and I think since then I have this sort of aversion to it. We used to not be good in social media marketing. Um, Oh, we used to be good and not good.

[00:24:35] Uwe Dreissigacker: And now, especially with BlogHandy, we get a lot of social media attention. So. Uh, that sort of has its ups and downs, uh, but yeah, we're, we're, we're making a return to social media as well partly, but, uh, that's as well, you know, you, I think it's similar to pay debts. If you get into it with social media, I got back into it and it's not just setting up like some Twitter spam bot, but actually getting into it and adding value to the, um, social like network and to the community.

[00:25:07] Uwe Dreissigacker: And it actually works, right? It's not like going on reddit and posting a link and getting banned but actually adding value to the conversation And now for example at BlogHandy we see A lot of reddit signups because we're actually adding values there So I think it's because I invested the time as well So i'm wondering if I were to invest time into paydex would it work or not?

[00:25:30] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, I do feel if you have like low ticket sales, it's very tricky to You You know, make pay debts work and, and, you know, to make a profit at the end of the day. 

[00:25:42] Ryan Wardell: Yeah. I think you have to really be confident in, in your numbers and knowing your lifetime value and everything like that, because it's, it's probably going to cost you a lot of money to acquire a customer up front and you're going to have to keep them for a very long time to be able to, to make that stack up.

[00:25:57] Ryan Wardell: I think I'm. So I, I did a lot of paid ads when I first started. Um, I kind of cut my teeth on copywriting, paid ads, conversion optimization, and that was sort of my core skillset that said, I don't, I generally advise early stage startups, even if they're funded to stay away from paid ads, at least as a sort of.

[00:26:16] Ryan Wardell: Step one, when it, when it comes to marketing, I think the reason for that is that when you're first starting out, you haven't figured out your messaging. You've got some semblance of product market fit, but you really haven't figured that out at all. And you can burn through so much money so quickly. If you're just sending unoptimized ads to an unoptimized landing page, to a very half baked product.

[00:26:38] Ryan Wardell: I think that happened for me. 

[00:26:39] Uwe Dreissigacker: I didn't even have a landing, like back, uh, when I tried, uh, I think Facebook ads for InWordsberry. We didn't even have a landing page we just sent back to the homepage. There was not a landing page, not the landing page optimized for, for Facebook or any, it was just a sign up or the homepage and it just didn't make sense.

[00:26:58] Uwe Dreissigacker: Right. Uh, but it's also very interesting what you're saying about the messaging, and I think we're maybe a bit more old school there because I know that a lot of, uh, people who bootstrap or a lot of people who built MVP say, oh, before you built an MVP build. Um, you know, just run some ads to a landing page and try to sell it before you build it.

[00:27:18] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, um, you know, fake sell it and whatever. And, and I'm actually in a different camp. I like to build and have a product before I sell it, which you, you obviously have to have a lot of confidence that. You can sell it later on which I have And that i'm adding value to the table and that is not just some rubbish product or that just you 

[00:27:39] Ryan Wardell: know It 

[00:27:40] Uwe Dreissigacker: doesn't make sense.

[00:27:41] Uwe Dreissigacker: But um I do see a lot of people actually and so i'm very happy to hear from you is that you're also sort of Recommending to not start with paid ads because I hear a lot of people they say start with paid ads and I feel I don't know then then it's more about how good is your paid app rather than You Are you solving a real problem and are you, you know, producing a good product?

[00:28:05] Uwe Dreissigacker: It's just half of the story and more of the sales part rather than, are you adding value to the, you know, um, ecosystem and, and, and to the 

[00:28:15] Ryan Wardell: business? I think, I think the, the, the paid ad stuff. So we, when, when we were working with companies that had raised a bit of funding, Um, quite often they, they'd done these sort of one shot, So for example, they, they'd launched on AppSumo or they, uh, they did a big PR blitz and they got a bunch of signups or they emailed everybody, but then you, like they, but that's sort of something you can pull the trigger on once.

[00:28:37] Ryan Wardell: And what they were struggling to find was a scalable marketing system to bring in customers consistently. Um, one thing that was useful if they had, you know, the money to do it, was to do a whole lot of, um, you know, Demographic targeting on, on, on Facebook ads. Cause you could get really granular about, you know, are they male or female?

[00:28:57] Ryan Wardell: Are they living in this city or this country or that? So you could, you could test a whole lot of variations, but that wasn't necessarily to acquire customers. That was just to figure out who is most likely to be interested in this thing. And I think that's sometimes people get those two concepts confused.

[00:29:13] Ryan Wardell: They think, okay, well, we're going to use paid ads to acquire customers versus we're going to use paid ads to do a whole bunch of like quick and dirty tests to give us some idea of what our, you know, if we've got these sort of five different ICPs, ideal customer personas, um, let's quantitatively figure out.

[00:29:30] Ryan Wardell: Which of them is most likely to, you know, to take some sort of an action. But again, it's, you know, just because they click on your ad or they go through to your landing page or they download your lead magnet doesn't mean they're going to be, you know, the perfect fit in terms of a customer. The, the other point there that I think is really interesting is a lot of that idea.

[00:29:47] Ryan Wardell: I have strong thoughts, thoughts about, you know, just set up some ads, drive them to a landing page. I think that comes from, from, you know, Tim Ferriss and the four hour work week and all that kind of stuff. But in that book, how old's that now? He's talking about getting, getting, you know, clicks for a few cents.

[00:30:03] Ryan Wardell: Okay. Um, when you've seen the cost of ads lately, um, yeah, if you could just get a few cents to drive someone to a landing page, sure. You can do a quick and dirty smoke test that way. Um, But, but in most sectors and especially SaaS and especially B2B SaaS, you know, you're looking at a cost per click.

[00:30:21] Ryan Wardell: That's, you know, several dollars, more than 10. It gets really expensive. I've been around for a 

[00:30:28] Uwe Dreissigacker: long time and I used to have ad based products, right? Online games 20 years ago, even over 20 years ago. So I know like back then, right? So CPC, the cost per click, uh, used to be, Like, like you said, quite low and, um, really depending on the product, you could go really low, right.

[00:30:46] Uwe Dreissigacker: But I mean, um, yeah, nowadays, like you said, several dollars, you don't even know how good the quality is. So there's still a lot of bots out there and whatnot. So. If I'm losing, you know, uh, like 5, 10, 15 cents per click on a few bots, who cares? If I'm losing like 3 per bot click, you know, that, that hurts me if I'm charging 15 bucks a month to a customer and that customer still maybe wants a 50 percent discount for the first few months.

[00:31:15] Uwe Dreissigacker: It has a 30 day free trial, you know, and so on and so on. Right. It's going to take me over a year to recoup. Um, it's a cost of a customer acquisition. And I, I think with that, unless you get into say, you know, sometimes when they launch Quora ads or Reddit ads a few years ago, I actually tried it again.

[00:31:38] Uwe Dreissigacker: Cause it's a new platform. Let's try it. Probably the cost is low, but actually even those platforms, it were maybe a bit lower than Google ads and Facebook ads when they launched. Just, you know, they have to launch, they have to do a bit of an offer. But to be honest, they were already set high from the beginning.

[00:31:54] Uwe Dreissigacker: Said it didn't make sense. I mean we're talking about a couple of hundred dollars I would invest like maybe two or five hundred dollars to do some tests, but it would just result in nothing And um, so I think nowadays it's a very difficult thing And I think actually a lot of the whole ad thing comes from the e com guys, like, because they're with the drop shipping in, you know, e com and, and doing their Facebook ads, um, and obviously spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on some of these drop shippers per month on Facebook ads.

[00:32:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: I think that's sort of swapped over to some SaaS people. Um, at least that's my assumption there. Right. I don't really see it working. Like, and it also depends. Like you said, if you have VC. Back company, it's all about speed, right? Because you have like your runway for, I don't know, 12, 18 months or whatever.

[00:32:48] Uwe Dreissigacker: And you need to get users or you just burn and you close down the company. Um, but in my case, I, I don't want to burn money. Like my number one thing is high profitability, right? I want like 80 plus 85 percent profitability margins. And these VCs, they don't care. Right. So they're losing money. They have negative margins.

[00:33:09] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh profitabilities and um, so I think it's that one or on the other side you have obviously some people who Who still may be in a rush for whatever reason, but if you're like a true boot bootstrapper and in my case, you know Inverstory base pays the bills then I have BlogHandy slowly growing and generating money But I had enough time to set up a system, you know seo to slowly grow if you Have like hey here Twenty thousand dollars To grow this business to make enough money to pay for you So you're obviously a bit more in a rush, but if you can actually, you know fund it from your own Like other projects as a bootstrapper and I meet a lot of bootstrappers who have multiple projects, right?

[00:33:55] Uwe Dreissigacker: In in your own community and startup source, right? there are some people with like two or three four projects and the one funds the next one and so on and you build sort of your Like sass holding or you some people call it like the tiny empires and whatnot, you know Like so you so you build set up and then you actually really want to look for profitability You rather have like a few projects generating 5, 000 here 10, 000 there 2, 000 there and you know slowly growing rather than Putting it all in apps and potentially just wasting it.

[00:34:29] Ryan Wardell: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, um, I think that if you make paid ads work, it's amazing because you put a dollar in the top of the machine and spit out a dollar 20 and you can do that all day long every day. Um, but the process of getting there involves often burning through huge amounts of money. Um, it takes months, even if you know what you're doing, I think.

[00:34:50] Ryan Wardell: Yeah, I generally encourage most early stage startups start with either cold email or content or both because they don't cost a lot of money and they help you refine your messaging a lot faster. Um, once you've got your, your funnel, you know, somewhat optimized, then you can maybe experiment with, with paid ads.

[00:35:09] Ryan Wardell: But even then I'd be more likely to maybe go, go after affiliates or something like that because you're, you're only paying when you get a, An actual paid customer versus paying for someone to just come to your website one time. Um, so let's, let's talk a little bit more about the content marketing side of things, because this is something you've got very deep expertise in.

[00:35:28] Ryan Wardell: Um, can you talk me through some of the content marketing tactics that you've used successfully in the past that work really well? Um, and, and if you were starting a business right now today and you were setting up a content marketing system, you know, what would that, what would that look like? I mean 

[00:35:44] Uwe Dreissigacker: content 

[00:35:45] Ryan Wardell: marketing 

[00:35:45] Uwe Dreissigacker: is massive, right?

[00:35:46] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it's sort of Could be SEO, could be, you know, internal linking, building backlinks, um, blog posts, lead magnets, landing pages, videos, in a way, podcasts and so on, like anything that generates any noise or content. So if, if we look at that, um, for us, It's been successful to blog either about very specific issues people have let's say "How to add a blog to your bubble app."

[00:36:19] Uwe Dreissigacker: It's a very specific thing, you know, you might ask yourself Uh, we don't even look at uh keyword data href semrush, whatever. We just know We have bubble users using us right now and previously we just assumed we could get them. We wanted to target them So we we don't look at seo tools at that stage We're just saying 

[00:36:43] Ryan Wardell: it doesn't 

[00:36:44] Uwe Dreissigacker: matter if 10 people or 100 or 1000 look for it.

[00:36:46] Uwe Dreissigacker: We know that bubble is a big platform Uh, we know Uh, says there's an issue and we're solving it. We were solving a problem. So we have a blog post for it and we're ranking well for it. And, and that's sort of it. So if you start your SAS and, um, you can identify either another solution that sort of works with your solution or specific problem, uh, said you're solving.

[00:37:13] Uwe Dreissigacker: This is always one of the first things I would write about, uh, at, in invoice, various case, let's say there would be the, you know, top things to draw on an invoice or what is an invoice in general, because a lot of business people, uh, they start their business, they don't know how to create an invoice. So we have blog posts explaining them how to create an invoice, and those are like in Word or an ax, Excel.

[00:37:36] Uwe Dreissigacker: And obviously then we're plugging. within, um, that blog post. So I think, uh, my number one advice would be whatever the problem is you're solving sort of write blog posts, almost like you would have on your landing pages, where you talk about the benefits of your tool and, and, and, and what problem you're solving sort of elaborate on that in the blog posts, that's probably one of the first things I would do on blog posts before I even start looking at.

[00:38:08] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh keyword tools to look of which keywords are good to rank for and so on and then obviously look at your Industry, so at invoiceberry, uh, we said okay. We have a lot of Cleaning businesses using us. We have a lot of plumbers. So what other content are they interested in? Um, you don't need tools for that You just you know need a brainstorming session by yourself or go to the pub talk to a few friends or you know I talk to a customer who is a plumber and ask them.

[00:38:35] Uwe Dreissigacker: What other tools are you using? You Uh, what, what other things are you doing in your, like on the business side, right? Um, what, what, what are you struggling with? This might also be part, so, so part of our content marketing is having a good segmentation question. So when someone signs up in the onboarding, we ask them a few questions, right?

[00:38:56] Uwe Dreissigacker: Like how many invoices they send, like what's it trying to accomplish and so on. And, um, Then we learn, you know, their language, what they're saying and, and, and sort of what, what they're struggling with. And also part of like customer interviews, like, or customer support. Right. So that's another. Great way of creating blog posts and creating good content marketing.

[00:39:20] Uwe Dreissigacker: And this is sort of all the blog stuff before you do anything technical, like going to Ahrefs and, you know, finding what are the top blog posts and what are my competitors blogging about and whatever you don't have to do any of the, you already have your first, probably 20 to 50 blog posts covered, but just the thing now, and of course, then you can go to your competitor, uh, check what they're writing about and write some.

[00:39:46] Uwe Dreissigacker: Like a better version of the same blog posts, let's say. I think the first 20 to 50 blog posts that easily cover just with your internal data by, by not even looking anywhere else. Um, and it's very similar with the landing pages or lead magnet. So at Inverseberry, we said, okay, where are we in the customer journey?

[00:40:05] Uwe Dreissigacker: And as I mentioned earlier, we don't want to be an accounting package. We used to say accounting because people didn't seem to get the idea of Invoicing alone. So we said light accounting but we dropped that and we said no, we're like invoicing and expense tracking and we're um Like sure that this is our market.

[00:40:26] Uwe Dreissigacker: So in the journey, there are basically three markets There's someone who wants an invoice template or right and there's us and then there's an accounting package And we know we're here and we can do that Generate lead magnets actually for the step before so we started creating invoice templates So you can google for invoice templates you come to our website You download a free invoice template as a pdf as a word as an excel as in like all different formats and styles and You get it completely for free.

[00:41:00] Uwe Dreissigacker: So Coming back to the question if you're building a saas right now, how how can you attract your customers? To build like free tools or free templates or free resources around what they're looking for, right? So sort of the step before because these are small businesses and they're looking for just any solution to set an invoice.

[00:41:24] Uwe Dreissigacker: They don't know if they need an invoicing software. They might even think they need an accounting package. Because that's what they heard someone talk about in the past. But, um, when they find a template, they're like, Oh yeah, cool. I just need a template. And then obviously they see the website and they leave the email address.

[00:41:41] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, you know, you obviously then get subscribed to our emails if they want, and they get some more information and, you know, they might end up signing up for Invoiceberry. So the important part there is to, again, to add value, right? Like with everything we do in marketing, if it's like being on social media, or if it's doing SEO or blog posts, to add value.

[00:42:01] Uwe Dreissigacker: To not just do it for Google, to not just do it for anyone, but like to do it for that potential customer. And, um, I think you can already get the first few tools or lead magnets that way. And then you can just say, hey, um, what else do they need, right? So if we looked at InvoiceBear, we see small businesses, Um, they often, like when in their life do they look at invoicing quite early on, right?

[00:42:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: After the first few customers, maybe after the first, after the fifth customer who asked like, Hey, I need an invoice. That's when they look. So this is quite early. So they might also look for. Um a business plan because they maybe want a bank loan and they need a business plan So we offer them business plans.

[00:42:43] Uwe Dreissigacker: We offer them Business plans we offer them. Um information about business bank accounts in the u. s or in the uk Why because that's sort of what interests that person that small business owner at that Time most likely when they're looking for an invoicing software that you have to think about your icp You Um, what interest, like what's on the agenda right now, like this week, what's on the to do list?

[00:43:14] Uwe Dreissigacker: Is it like to look for like, um, business banking account? Oh wow, if they google that and they find your blog post, and then maybe that week or the next week it was also on the list to look for an invoicing software, so You know them reading our blog post being happy about it and then seeing, you know The inverse berry information there.

[00:43:36] Uwe Dreissigacker: They might sign up for it in the same um step and that's sort of the thinking there to um, To just think about your icp and just think about their week. What what what are they doing right now? And this doesn't involve usually for For me, anything analytical, like in terms of like not looking at any Google analytics or looking at Ahrefs or any SEO tools, this is just human to human what's going through their mind right now.

[00:44:08] Uwe Dreissigacker: And let's create content if it's a lead magnet, if it's a resource, or if it's a blog post, like create something of value to them right now. So 

[00:44:20] Ryan Wardell: your, your, your starting point isn't to load up Ahrefs or SEMrush or something, and just, you know, figure out which keywords and which keywords have volume, which keywords have low keyword difficulty.

[00:44:30] Ryan Wardell: You're not, you're not even starting with that stuff. You're starting with, okay, well, who have I got that's actually using my tool right now? Um, let's create some content for them. And then let's think about what What else is going on in their life right now? What's a big pressing concern? Because I haven't heard too many people talk about getting in the minds of your customer and thinking about what they need right now or what other, you know, concerns they've got in their business or their life right now and creating content around that.

[00:44:55] Ryan Wardell: Cause on the one hand, it's like, well, if you have an invoicing tool, Why are you creating guides on how to, how to set up a business? But when you explain it in, in, in, in, in the context of, you know, I'm setting up my business, I'm going to need this, I'm going to need that. I'm going to need a bank account.

[00:45:11] Ryan Wardell: Oh, and I'm probably going to need an invoicing tool as well. It's very easy to kind of naturally insert invoice very into that conversation. That makes a lot of sense. That's smart. I like it. I 

[00:45:21] Uwe Dreissigacker: think with the tools, what a lot of people are doing, we're optimizing for machines and for, you know, it also takes a lot of time to research.

[00:45:29] Uwe Dreissigacker: And if you were to take half an hour in a pub or a coffee shop to just write down a bunch of thoughts that come to your head, I mean, you can cross it out. Ranking for the word invoicing software, right? The first five results that Google ads anyways, and then, you know, like the big guys are ranking there or like even Forbes or whoever, because, you know, they have their own like parasite SEO and whatnot.

[00:45:55] Uwe Dreissigacker: But, um, then, you know, if you think more about the specific smaller pain points and so on, there's naturally less keyword difficulty, most likely. So if I were to put a lot of the stuff. Uh, we've done in the past into any of the tools it anyway would sort of give me that information. It would just confirm basically more or less what I already know naturally.

[00:46:19] Uwe Dreissigacker: And it's part, partly because I, I've been in said space for so long, but also it just, it's common sense in a way. At least in my opinion, it's, it's, it sort of makes sense if you think about it. But yeah, of course another step is to look at keyword tools at C SEO tools and to just get some additional ideas And I'm not saying we're not doing that we Going back to them from time to time, but it's not that I'm every day checking, uh, what's happening there.

[00:46:52] Ryan Wardell: Do you, do you have any, um, any sort of mental frameworks around what makes a good keyword? Like, is there a certain volume that you look for or a certain keyword difficulty or a certain, anything else that, that, that kind of leaps out at, okay. How do you, how do you, I guess, what does your. What does your decision making framework look like when you're deciding which keywords to target?

[00:47:11] Ryan Wardell: It's 

[00:47:11] Uwe Dreissigacker: quite difficult. So in some of the site, and I said earlier, we said no side projects, but in some of the side projects where you obviously have a new domain and you're just playing around. I'm trying to obviously do like so we talk about niche things, right? So i'm trying to get a very low keyword difficulty 1520 like not really over 20 and that usually means it's a low search volume It's not going to be a search volume of 20 000 and then a difficulty of five, right?

[00:47:40] Uwe Dreissigacker: That's like, uh, what like the golden egg, right? It doesn't really exist nowadays anymore There's probably some automated AI bot who, who scrapes the stuff and creates a page automatically and that's it, right? But, um, I, and, and the thing is for Invoiceberry as well as for BlogHandy, we have, uh, quite strong domain ranks, um, uh, domain authority.

[00:48:05] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, um, so we can also target bigger keywords. So it's not that important, right? And, and especially at InvoiceBerry and alsoBlogHandy, depending what we're targeting, but I'm not targeting, for example, blog, right? I'm not trying to compete with WordPress on those keywords or with Squarespace or whatever.

[00:48:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: But. Especially with InvoiceBerry, like invoice softwares as well as super competitive. So we're trying to go more long tail. And I mean, with the long tail keywords, you sort of have your clusters of keywords and you naturally just all of the, um, landing pages within that cluster then grow together. So you don't have to have tens of thousands or even a thousand.

[00:48:52] Uwe Dreissigacker: Uh, searches a month, maybe is there. I also do feel that, uh, looking at Ahrefs data, often you can just double whatever numbers they tell you. Um, that might be just maybe, like if you look at the US number, so I usually just doubled it in my mind because like, there's a bit of. Uh, you know, Canada, Australia, UK added to it, like, uh, quite a bit of India.

[00:49:13] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, um, unless there's like different terms being used in the countries, you usually can easily double or even like 3x it, the number. And, um, so I'm happy with like a volume of 500 and it obviously depends on the intent, right? If there's a big. Uh, purchase intent. I'm happy with like a hundred searches. If I know that I can rank high, I get a bunch of visitors and they're sure to convert.

[00:49:39] Uwe Dreissigacker: Why not? So it really depends how close, let's say a keyword, like free invoice templates, where we used to be a one or two, then we dropped over the years, but we're still sort of competing at a high level. Um, but we used to get like tens of thousands of visitors a month just from one page and one keyword, but, um, they didn't convert in a lot of signups or they did convert in a decent amount of signups, but not in a lot of payers.

[00:50:10] Uwe Dreissigacker: So, you know, because obviously in a SaaS, you have like your multiple steps, right? And we used to have a freemium version. Now we only have a free trial, but you still get your signups, a free trial without a credit card. So it's sort of almost like freemium. So you get your signups, you have your people in your email, um, system.

[00:50:29] Uwe Dreissigacker: They get their emails, but if they don't, Uh, use it if they're not active, they're not going to start paying. And, um, so for example, for that keyword, we used to be really high. And it was a very competitive keyword. I think it had like a difficulty even back then of 70 plus, and we were number one or two, but I just didn't care about dropping and like competing in this keyword, because especially there's the word free in it, right?

[00:50:53] Uwe Dreissigacker: Free invoice template. So the person shows the intent. I'm looking for something free. If i'm looking for let's say an invoice template for xyz and it gets more long tail The difficulty goes a bit down. It's easier to rank and um, I have maybe only a thousand or two thousand search volume But I still get a good amount of signups and people are actually happy to spend That might be way much more valuable than that other keyword with fifty or a hundred thousand volume.

[00:51:22] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it really depends. And this is not really shown by the tools, obviously. Um, but there should be a mixture if you analyze it by, uh, volume, keyword difficulty, and by, um, like the sort of purchase intent, let's say. 

[00:51:42] Ryan Wardell: So those are the three things you look at. Okay. How do you, do you have any, um, Tips or tactics or, uh, secret ninja moves for acquiring backlinks.

[00:51:54] Uwe Dreissigacker: So we've done a number of things, um, producing good blog content for sure. Right. So naturally you get your backlinks. Um, let, let me just dump a bunch of things off to you. And I, I think any bootstrapper who starts off, they, they pick like a few of them. So in general, good quantity content always works. Um, current topics while I'm basing 90 percent of our blog posts or actually at the moment, a hundred percent on evergreen content content that you literally can share years later and you drive your traffic because I like to pay once to the right and I just keep on getting traffic.

[00:52:39] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, we did try in the past a bit of current. Topics around brexit when it happened. We wrote a bit about and about Pokemon go and that was actually the last blog post. I wrote myself. So i'm not sure how many years ago, but um My content writer was ill at the time and I decided to write a pokemon go article And I remember writing it and actually a few days later We got a forbes backlink because forbes picked up pokemon go Back then when this whole craze was and everyone was walking around With their phones out and they linked to my blog post Um as like a reference so that was nice to get a backlink from forbes And, um, also to show to my content, uh, editor, my content writer at the time that, wow, it's like, this is the one blog post I wrote this year and I straight away get a Forbes backlink, you know, not bad.

[00:53:37] Uwe Dreissigacker: So it motivated him to also produce good work. Uh, little side story, but yeah. So I think sometimes picking up on current topics can help because then, you know, other journalists might pick it up, which also gets me to the third idea. Um, help a reporter out so you can subscribe to harrow. com or dot net or whatever the website is.

[00:54:02] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, uh, so it's help a reporter out and you basically sign up, you, you, you take sort of your interests and say, send you, I think three emails per day about different journalists It's looking for input from, um, experts in that industry or in the subject matter. So then, you know, you, you can quickly scan it.

[00:54:24] Uwe Dreissigacker: And if you know something, you know, about that specific industry, let's say about blogging or about invoicing or also about content marketing, I know a lot. So I might reply to them and I pitch them my reply, say, you know, might add it to the blog or website or whatever. And, uh, they usually send link back to you.

[00:54:43] Uwe Dreissigacker: And also it's a nice way of sort of building up authority in the industry. Um, that's quite time intensive and obviously it's not guaranteed that they publish you, but it is an option, right? To, to try out and to see if it works for you. Uh, the other thing is, uh, sort of hand in hand with that to do guest posting.

[00:55:03] Uwe Dreissigacker: So we used to do a lot of guest posting, um, where, you know, we just reach out to a lot of websites and offer them, Hey, can we write some high quality content for you? We would pitch them some ideas that sort of align with the existing content on that blog. So we give them free content. But also where we can either link to some of our content or where we can sort of plug BlogHandy or InvoiceBerry within the text.

[00:55:31] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um Usually you have to be very careful like what links you add to it. Um But you at least get and see also box your link back to your website. So, um, We used to actually do probably around 20 blog guest posts per month at some point So the other thing, hand in hand with that, some people say, uh, guest posting got replaced by, um, being a guest on podcasts because on podcasts you get also your links somewhere.

[00:56:01] Uwe Dreissigacker: So, you know, uh, depending on how big the podcast is and how they have their website and whatnot, you might get a backlink there and, and, and a lot of these, especially with guest posting, for example, again, like even if you're just starting off and you're bootstrapping. If you're like an expert in your industry, what you're doing, it's probably quite easy for you to write a guest post on someone else's blog.

[00:56:27] Uwe Dreissigacker: And you just have to understand that you shouldn't reach out maybe to Forbes or Business Insider, but basically it goes by domain ranks or by size. So you first go to the small blogs. They're more likely, you know, to reply to you and to work with you. And once you have a portfolio of a few, um, guest posts published on a small blog, you go to the medium sized blogs and then you can go to the big guys.

[00:56:51] Uwe Dreissigacker: So I had like guest posts on campaign monitor and active campaign and like Jeff Bullers and some of the really big blogs, but I didn't straight away go there. We, we basically worked our way up. Um, and you sort of slowly build up your links, uh, and, and your link profile. Um, I think source, uh, usually good.

[00:57:14] Uwe Dreissigacker: Obviously the other thing is to, to build like, if it's not about blogging, uh, if you maybe build some tools or resources and then as well, people naturally might link to you. So we have, for example, Uh, a free invoice generator. We have like a PayPal and Stripe fees calculator, um, which doesn't only rank on Google, but also some people link to it as a resource.

[00:57:38] Uwe Dreissigacker: And that's, you know, also how you can obviously build up, um, some backlinks by just, you know, adding some, um, again, adding some value where people saying, Oh, this is worth linking to, right? If you think yourself. Whenever you let's say send out a newsletter or when you talk in your podcast or when you write a blog post You know, what would I link to like why would I link to it?

[00:58:02] Uwe Dreissigacker: What would I link to and and you know, that's basically what you should Do again just you know thinking from a human perspective what? Makes sense like adding value help a report out. You're actually adding value to someone's piece of content writing it Uh, guest posts, you're adding value to that blog.

[00:58:21] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, you know, having a tool, especially with AI nowadays, uh, loads of these tools, let's say like a name generator or whatnot, right? They are like millions of them, but like, you know, coming up with like a tool that fits into your SaaS and building it out maybe in like, you know, like a A day or two, and then, you know, you, you don't only rank maybe on Google for it, but you also can build backlinks, um, to it.

[00:58:48] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, and obviously you can ask people for their email address to use it and so on and so on. Um, so I think that would first few steps of, um, building 

[00:58:58] Ryan Wardell: backlinks. I, I love that idea about the, the tools and the calculators. I think a lot of people, I, I, so, so in my experience with lead magnets, um mm-hmm.

[00:59:07] Ryan Wardell: People have white papers and eBooks and I've never seen them convert particularly well, just because, you know, I've, I've already read a bunch of information. I don't want to have to give you my email address to read more information that the best lead magnets I've seen have been ones that will help you take action a little bit faster.

[00:59:25] Ryan Wardell: So it's a checklist. It's, um, a list of list of tools or resources. It's a, you know, a discount code. It's a, it's a, it's a, you know, I've, I, now that I've read the blog post, I've got the information. Now I want to take. Take action. I want something that's going to help me take action or do it a little bit faster or condense the time that it takes for me to get from A to B.

[00:59:43] Ryan Wardell: Um, but I think a lot of, for a lot of SaaS founders, especially if you're technical, you could put together a calculator or some simple little tool that will be very useful. Um, but I think a lot of developers kind of get. Get stuck in this mindset of, oh, well, everyone knows how to do this. There are, like, most of the world doesn't.

[01:00:01] Ryan Wardell: And I think, I think a lot of technical founders forget that. So, just by taking a day to code up some little calculator, that can actually be a hugely valuable lead magnet, hugely valuable thing that people can link to. Um, and, and that's probably some, some really easy low hanging fruit if you just think about your audience, especially if you're in a space where, you know, your audience is not technical at all, and that there's no chance they'd be able to, Put something like that together themselves.

[01:00:26] Ryan Wardell: Um, Uber, just a couple of last questions. Um, what is your most controversial opinion about building a SAS business? So 

[01:00:40] Uwe Dreissigacker: that's a very good question. So, uh, so one of them might be, uh, to not do the paid ads and landing page, uh, thing we discussed, uh, earlier. I, I do think I'm sort of against, uh, um, trends there.

[01:00:57] Uwe Dreissigacker: See how we'll see you. Um, when I like some of the stuff, um, Paul Crayham talks about, and you know, you should be embarrassed of your first, uh, version of your product and so on. I do feel there's this trend with, uh, bootstrappers and especially with indie hackers where they're taking it to the extreme where they say, Oh, you have to ship it with box and you have to ship it.

[01:01:22] Uwe Dreissigacker: Um, you know, you, you don't need this, this and that in your product. And that's a beginning, um, I heard people say oh you don't need a dark mode in your product. Okay fair enough I don't have it in any of my products and um I'm probably never gonna add it to them and I understand that point But then people say oh you don't need a logo.

[01:01:42] Uwe Dreissigacker: You don't need a title tag, you don't need you know, and people keep adding things to it and Some people take it actually serious. So initially I thought these are just jokes, but actually people take it serious and I'm looking at some products being launched and I feel, no, this is not, uh, that's not acceptable and.

[01:02:09] Uwe Dreissigacker: This comes from the things that i'm sort of a perfectionist and i'm never happy So after 15 years and multiple complete rebuilds of invoice berry i'm still not happy about it And i'm never gonna be happy because whenever I look at any website I ever created it just feels Not as nice as it should and this is just the internal perfectionist, right if Let's say, you know, you look at the apple website, right and everyone looks at it and it's just a beautiful piece of art But I can promise you if I had built it.

[01:02:45] Uwe Dreissigacker: I would say no it looks rubbish because it's just this thing this obsession, let's say with with um, like there's always something missing and I do feel, um, and, and this comes because I want to be very proud of my products. And I could see that when I first launched, uh, when I had the idea of BlogHandy over five years ago, and then, um, I finally started coding it.

[01:03:12] Uwe Dreissigacker: And I kept them being interrupted, uh, by family and by InvoiceBerry. So I, I stopped it. And at some point I gave it to a programmer and a designer and they worked on it while I just supervised it. And. I was never really proud of it and we launched it and it didn't really take off and it didn't Like it it got customers.

[01:03:34] Uwe Dreissigacker: It got some payers, but it just didn't feel right And actually once I took it in my own hands again, and I actually Let's say fixed it. I felt like oh, wow. I'm starting to feel proud of that. It's sort of my baby and It was partially obviously something emotional but also Because I just know exactly where to look because I talked to the customers and there was this disconnect of me talking to customers And me understanding it and someone else programming it and once I combined that in one person in me I I could really um Sort of put it into the product and now the product has that and it's just like 10x not only with signups and payers and everything like all the statistics, but it also like i'm proud of it and you know This shows up in the product in the communication In the emails and everything And, um, so coming back to, to, to what's controversial that I really saying, if you just ship something or anything, and you're like happy to a box and do not have this, this, and that, how can you be proud of your product?

[01:04:43] Uwe Dreissigacker: How can you be proud of what you choose? Right. Um, so yeah, I, I, I really dislikes that idea of, um, Giving, uh, bad quality, it's almost like a restaurant on purpose giving you, you know, trying to give you bad steaks. I mean, I, I don't get it, right? If I go to the steakhouse, I want It's the best steak possible, right?

[01:05:06] Uwe Dreissigacker: And, and, and not some random overcooked, burned piece of meat, you know. Or, 

[01:05:13] Ryan Wardell: or, or here's a steak, but there's no plate and there's no knife and no fork. And just do, do your best. I think, I think sometimes people, people get too, too caught up in the, when people talk about an MVP, they focus far too much on the minimal side of things.

[01:05:27] Ryan Wardell: And they don't focus enough on the viable side of things. And, and certainly you probably agree with me. Um, Most categories of SaaS now, there are lots of competitors. They're all selling something that pretty much does the same thing, pretty much at the same price point. And so if you try and enter a pretty mature market and your product is just so much worse than everything else that's already out there, like the, the, the, the, the, Bar for what is considered viable is probably a lot higher now than it was when the, the idea of an MVP was first popularized.

[01:06:00] Ryan Wardell: So yeah, I think that's excellent. Excellent advice. Kind of, kind of controversial too. Um, Uwe, it's, it's been a pleasure, buddy. Um, listen, if anyone is interested in finding out more about your products, your businesses, or in getting in touch with you, um, where, where do they go? Can you kind of just, uh, tell us the website addresses, the email address?

[01:06:18] Ryan Wardell: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Uh, 

[01:06:19] Uwe Dreissigacker: so yeah. Anyone who needs invoicing, invoiceberry. com and then if you want to email me, uwe at invoiceberry. com and for the blogging, it's bloghandy. com or uwe at bloghandy. com and, um, I'm trying to get more and more active on X or Twitter, uh, it's uwe tries. U W E D I E I S S, uh, where I'm trying to, you know, um, be a bit more attached with the no code community, with the blogging community, but also with some small business owners.

[01:06:50] Uwe Dreissigacker: So, um, you know, watch out there, but yeah, always feel free to drop me an email as well. 

[01:06:56] Ryan Wardell: Fantastic. Mate, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming on today. And I hope anyone listening to this or watching this, um, got a lot of value out of, out of some of the advice you had to give 

[01:07:06] Uwe Dreissigacker: us, 

[01:07:06] Ryan Wardell: we'll speak again soon, mate.

[01:07:08] Ryan Wardell: Have an awesome day.