John Nunemaker (00:00)
Hello. You are listening to standing in the fire where Kris, John, myself and Garrett.

The owners of fireside talk about what it's like to be in the heat of SaaS growth. And today we have a timely, I would say topic timely in that I had my annual physical today and no, we're not going to talk about that. It's too soon, but, we thought it might be kind of cool to talk about what would an annual exam or an annual like thing look like for a SaaS app. So that's what we're going to.

Garrett Dimon (00:24)
There we go.

John Nunemaker (00:32)
go through today is basically like, what are some checkups that you should do? And basically from probably our past failures on a regular basis to say, you know, is my SaaS healthy or not? And where should I maybe focus on in the next year? So as usual, I do the intro and then I immediately pass it off to someone else. And today that lucky person is Kris and he's going to talk about one of his failings.

Kris (00:54)
thanks. well, and I think you always, I feel like I'm always the person coming in first. but we'll pro a couple years ago, you know, we set up some automated emails for an onboarding campaign to do like a seven, seven email onboarding to help people get into the application, understand the features. we really want to make sure they felt that when, as soon as possible without having to struggle. And two years later,

we have not touched those. we have outdated logos, outdated, you know, features that maybe we want to highlight a bunch of new features, but since we don't, we weren't getting those emails. it was kind of like a set it and forget it. so we, we have a new marketing guy coming in and looking at everything we're doing. And he said, Hey, like this stuff either isn't accurate or, you know, we need to take a look at those. So I think one of the first things I'd mention is any automated emails.

whether it be transactional or onboarding. I don't know. I mean, we looked at some of the onboarding ones for fireside even of like, here's like your validation email. Let's update that to make it a little bit more straightforward on what we're asking them to do and why.

John Nunemaker (01:46)
Yeah.

Yeah. And that was on box out. don't know if you said that or not. I don't remember. It wasn't on fireside, but yeah, it was on, it was on box out. we, again, we had just totally forgot. I mean, I forgot. I remember when I set up, you know, the syncing of contacts and you set up the drip sequences and we're like high five, you know, both jumping in the air and stuff. And, and then it's like, you look back and you're like, well we featured two features just because those were the two we did first for feature pages.

Kris (02:13)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (02:24)
That's it. Like they weren't necessarily our killer features or the things that people should really care about. so it's always good to have somebody new when you were talking about that. It made me wonder if like we should literally set up like an automatic thing. That's just like every month or every quarter, it will sign up like each of us to fireside with like, you know, John plus whatever at my email and same with you guys that way.

Kris (02:43)
Mmm

John Nunemaker (02:49)
like our accounts are in there multiple times and we can see those drip sequences. And then at the end of the month, like we could probably just delete those accounts and create new ones again so that we don't get, you know, 30 marketing emails every time we do anything new. But I wonder if something like that might be a good, good thing to do.

Kris (03:04)
Yeah, that's my first one is any, any, any emails should be reviewed probably more than once a year, but at least.

John Nunemaker (03:10)
Yeah. And I would say for myself, like the thing that I have done is, every year, and this is probably like the thing that I would say every business owner does is they just say, okay, we close QuickBooks. What are my taxes? And like, you know, did I did we make more this year than we made last year? Cash in cash out, you know, and that's to me, that's like, just it's stupid as just the only thing there's so many other things you should check. And, you know, all of us have either read or are reading software as a science and

they're so focused on numbers and I generally historically I'm just, I've always been more of a product person, not a number person. But reading that book, you know, it really went through like, you know, customer health index or like some number to say, like, is somebody sticking around? Are they not sticking around? And that just seems like a good annual thing is to be like, assign some kind of, you know, number that says this is how healthy this customer is, whether it's how the, the, the breadth of feature usage.

Kris (03:51)
Mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (04:06)
or the depth of particular features to give them, you know, just a really simple algorithm, you know, for box out, the simplest version could be, you know, how many graphics do they create in the last month or in the last nine months or six months or something like that. And assign ranges based on, know, where customers are at right now, and then kind of manually pick a few and say, in these ranges, you know, which ones are green, they're healthy, they're doing great, which ones are yellow and they're kind of at risk. And then which ones are red, like they're going to churn any minute.

I think something like that on a, at a minimum annual basis, probably on a monthly basis would be a good checkup to say like, how healthy are you? It's like the, like blood work, you know, you, gotta get the blood work done to make sure your cholesterol is okay. And your vitamin D is not too low. If you're in the Midwest like us and you don't get any sunshine for four months. So yeah, that's probably, probably what I would pick is this customer health index has really been on my mind and I want to, I want to build something like that for fireside. It'd be fun to talk about what that would be.

Kris (04:45)
Mm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (05:01)
How about you, Garrett, what comes to mind?

Garrett Dimon (05:03)
I mean, I've had a dozen ideas bounce through my head as y'all been talking. I mean, I have mixed feelings on trying to quantify things in that, ⁓ like it's nice, but it's also inaccurate. And I feel like anytime I've tried to quantify something it

John Nunemaker (05:12)
Yeah, I get that.

Garrett Dimon (05:25)
would have been a way more effective use of time to just go talk to customers and get that more like subjective take on things and like what's what pain are they feeling what because otherwise it's as like developers we want to be logical and quantify things and make it comparable and all of this kind of stuff but like seeing okay well our churn went up okay

John Nunemaker (05:31)
Mm.

Garrett Dimon (05:54)
that could be a million things. could be something got screwed up in the product. could be, I mean, anything. so seeing that it changed, you still need to figure out why. And so, you know, if anything, part of it as like, as part of the checkup to, you know, and it really should be more regular, but like have conversations with customers and put it on, you know,

probably quarterly would make more sense, but nonetheless, at some level that checkup needs to go beyond what's the quantifiable data we have, obviously revenue and stuff and churn. The numbers will tell you that something is happening, but they don't really expose what is happening. And so then you can't make informed decisions about like where to focus all your energy without that more subjective, like what's really going on to cause all this.

John Nunemaker (06:51)
Let's go down that path real quick. What? So like, what would you do? Cause what I was thinking of with the customer health index is not necessarily like, sweet. never have to talk to anyone. Like I definitely wasn't thinking that what I was thinking is like, well, and they even said, you know, like focus on the people in the yellow, the red, they're already gone. Like you're not going to be able to get stuff from them cause they are getting no value and they don't want to reciprocate. You know, they're getting no value. So they're going to give back nothing. They were like, focus on the yellow. And so I love this idea of like,

Garrett Dimon (06:59)
No, no, it-

John Nunemaker (07:17)
here are maybe who you should talk to. Like you could talk to some green for sure because you want to know like what's going well and keep getting testimonials and that kind of stuff. But I also like this idea of talking to the yellow and having some idea if you have thousands of customers who is yellow who is even somebody to reach out and kind of what's your process like for you when you're like OK I want to reach out and it's quarterly and whether or not you have you know an indicator of who to reach out to how do you kind of go about that who do you who do you how do you pick who to talk to and.

Kris (07:27)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (07:47)
I mean...

This is the first time since sifter. like, you know, in eight years that I've been on the front lines and, ⁓ but at the same time that's mostly been you and I've just kind of been hacking, which is great. Cause like it's helped me get a lot more done, but generally speaking, my, like, I don't know that I would try to make it like a formal process so much as

John Nunemaker (07:55)
Mm.

Garrett Dimon (08:10)
actively talk to people via support, whoever's, know, the people that are reaching out via support are already engaged and have questions. I mean, a lot of them are probably, not like necessarily power users or the happiest customers or whatever, but kind of like you said, the people who are red are gone. The people who are green,

are happy and you want to talk to them. So it's the people reaching out via support. To me, that's the best channel to just say, hey, you know, or I don't know, maybe you can add a signature and just say, hey, we're, you know, talking to customers and we'd love it, you know, to schedule a call here's a Calendly link and they can schedule some time and just, you know, quarterly, yearly, whatever. So you're actively talking to people. you could, yeah, you could post in the app like a

John Nunemaker (08:38)
gotcha.

Yeah.

Free swag, free swag for them if they fill it out.

Garrett Dimon (09:00)
announcement of some sort. But at the same time too, on the flip side, as somebody who you've got all these products and then they automatically put you on their half-baked newsletter list and then all of that. it's like, okay, it's just more crap. It's just more to ignore. Lately I finally, I don't know, I guess it was probably over the holidays and I

John Nunemaker (09:12)
Ours isn't half-baked though. We're talking about other people's. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (09:25)
I just started unsubscribing from everything, even the crap I like, because I'm like, you know, I'm just so sick of all this stuff. And like I had set up filters so that anything with an unsubscribe link would go into an unsubscribe folder or like, so I could tell it's not important. And, but like, I was like, you know what, even the stuff I care about, it just gets overwhelmed. So I just started and in point being like, it's tough to actively engage somebody and get them to want to talk to you because.

John Nunemaker (09:38)
Yeah

Garrett Dimon (09:55)
Everybody's so busy. Everybody's spread so thin, but to me, support is a place where they're already reaching out and actively engaged. So it's a good spot to say, Hey, do want to talk more? If so, we'd love to listen here, you know, what your frustrations are, that kind of stuff.

John Nunemaker (09:57)
Yeah.

Kris (10:10)
But yeah, my thought to add on is like, wonder though, and I'm sure maybe it's in the, in this book or another post of, I think that's those are, I agree. customer support is a good one spot. However, are there people who are only reaching out to support once they become maybe a red? And so, you know, how do you, if someone, like if I'm frustrated with a piece of software at the point of I'm, you know, doing a support ticket,

Am I already at the point of where I might be switching to something else? And you know, how do we get those people? I think some of that, Garrett, we said of having an in-app, you know, notification somehow of like that, that reach out might be a way to prompt people that may be getting flustered with something to say, Hey, like, how can we help? How can we help make you successful? for those who may not actively reach out.

Garrett Dimon (10:57)
you know, there's part of me that's like, you know, you're going to talk to who you can talk to, you know, you can't push somebody onto the phone with you if they don't care. And, you know, you've got to think about with many products you sign up and, you know, you're kind of kicking the tires and.

Kris (11:04)
Yeah. Yep.

Garrett Dimon (11:14)
for whatever reason you could get busy. You could decide the product's not right or whatever. And if every time you did that, somebody's reaching out saying, Hey, talk to me. Hey, talk to me. Hey, talk to me. You're very quickly just going to dismiss it. Right. And same with alerts and app. Like nothing. Well, there's probably on my list of pet peeves. Like you sign up for an app and there's a stupid little red dot on the notifications. So you can go back and read their change log for the last three years.

John Nunemaker (11:24)
Yeah, that big. Yeah.

Kris (11:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Nunemaker (11:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Garrett Dimon (11:41)
And it's like, no, just let me like, and things like that, that are just so they feel so out of touch. And then it's like, okay, clearly they're not like super invested in communication. And whereas like, if it's an app and I listened to a podcast episode with the founder and they clearly care, then I'll more actively reach out. But otherwise, if I just sign up for something without any context, like I just found it on the internet or whatever.

John Nunemaker (11:41)
Yeah.

Kris (11:49)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (12:09)
Yeah, I'm just going to ignore all that stuff because everybody does it. And so like at the same time as somebody who's running an app, it's like, yeah, we want the feedback. I'm like, I also know how annoying it can be. And it's counterproductive to just pester people for feedback. you just want it to be like clear that there's humans that care behind it and not, you know, a PE firm or, know, whatever, that's just going to

blow you off and ignore you or, you with sifter it happened a lot, with fireside, obviously I haven't been on doing as much support, but like when somebody sends a support request and it's something you're like, I can handle that right now. And you turn it around in an hour and email back and you're like, cool. I'm so sorry about that. It's fixed. like, if it's an enhancement that you were planning on doing and just, you know, it got lost in the shuffle and you go ahead and knock it out and then they're thrilled.

Kris (12:47)
Mm-hmm.

Garrett Dimon (12:56)
And so like that kind of stuff then opens the door to the conversations. And so to me, that's part of the reason support's always felt like the best channel, because you can gauge how that interaction is going and then go from there. Not all people who reach out to support are like inherently upset or, you know, they're just maybe mildly irritated by a silly little thing or, you know, all this stuff slips through the cracks. know, there's nobody's no team's perfect.

John Nunemaker (13:05)
That's good points.

Garrett Dimon (13:24)
And so, you know, you just kind of read it and if you, if you can, you know, talk to them that way and say, Hey, if you ever want to hop on a call, like you're really good about this, you do it with flipper all the time.

John Nunemaker (13:33)
I

try, I get it kind of aggressive. The problem is developers never want to get on a call. I've actually, I've had more people in like, you know, the few months of owning fireside get on a zoom with me than like all of flippers history for like, you know, 3 years. But yeah, I was also going to say to like, on that same topic, like, like one of things I like about Kris is like, that that's a thought process that comes to him. Like I never think like, well, I love the support idea. Like someone comes to support, you know, if they're not like angry,

Garrett Dimon (13:37)
No, of course not.

Kris (13:43)
You

Garrett Dimon (13:44)
There you go.

Well, it's...

John Nunemaker (14:01)
or something, you know, that's one way. Another way, like on Boxout and on Fireside, know, like Kris just not too long ago sent an email to like professional tier customers only to say like, Hey, what, you know, what do you need from us? What can we do better? Like, and I think that's kind of what you're going to Garrett is saying, like, you know, on a regular basis, try and show you care in some way that's not like exactly the same way that everybody else does where it feels like you actually took the time.

to reach out, not just like, here's another automated thing, you know.

Kris (14:34)
And I think then the, know we've been looking at the feedback we've gotten from that email. And if we, or I should say once we continue to knock out some of those and then letting people know that we did stuff, I think we'll also build that trust in that feedback loop to say, Hey, we asked for something. We did some of these things that made sense, you know, so the next time we asked, like, hopefully people will be even more open to share their thoughts and feedback. Cause I think it does get hard.

people keep giving feedback and then never see any of these improvements done. Then they're like, like, you know.

Garrett Dimon (15:04)
Well,

I think like another way to think about that is what is the last time an app sent you an app company of any kind sent you an email about what they've been doing, even if it's focused on like customer centric functionality. When was the last time you got an email like that and cared?

Kris (15:26)
Yeah, I, I get them all the, I, cause I pay for, I mean, we all probably pay for a lot of apps and like, I actually get annoyed. So I'm like, I don't, like, I don't have time to read this like until it's a problem.

John Nunemaker (15:26)
Hahaha!

Garrett Dimon (15:28)
So.

And yet we, want

to send one. So like, that's, that's what I try to think about a lot is like, how would I feel if another app was sending me this email? Like I really wouldn't care. And whereas like in support, if it's somebody and they asked for something and you did it and you go back and you individually reply to a support request.

John Nunemaker (15:39)
Yeah. Well.

Kris (15:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (15:59)
you know, and say, Hey, cool. You I know this, you asked about this two months ago. We just released it. you know, we've been working on it, testing it, let us know what you think. And, know, just, those things people respond to cause it's personal. and like I've had, I've long had, I've got complicated feelings about everything, but,

Kris (16:12)
Mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (16:18)
No!

Garrett Dimon (16:19)
the like drip life cycle stuff. And I feel like in general, everybody kind of one size fits all does a playbook and like, here's what it so many things that and I mean, I get why companies try to do it, but know, showcasing a feature like

John Nunemaker (16:31)
delete them.

gotcha, yeah.

Garrett Dimon (16:46)
It should just be in the app. Like have a little, you know, that stuff in the app. Don't send me an email to come look at this dumb feature. Like it's so.

John Nunemaker (16:54)
But I think you

have to sometimes because sometimes they go in if your onboarding isn't good enough sometimes, which again, you should just make your onboarding better. I get it. But also people at different points in in time have different needs. And so I think it's actually good. I'm turning around. Here's what I think the problem is. And I'm curious if you guys agree. I think the problem is everybody's, you know, sending these drip sequences. Everybody's sending these really regular, you know, newsletters.

Kris (17:00)
Mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (17:23)
and they have a crapped, both of them have a crap ton of information in them. And it's just overwhelming. And I've, what I've found recently is that the ones that I actually care about and pay attention to are the ones and it's tricky. but, but I actually liked the trick cause it works is they'll say, you know, this is like, like Robbie or this is John, like not like this is from fireside. and I realized, okay, that's a, that's one thing. Second, it's a subject line that feels like a human wrote it, not like some automated or like,

Kris (17:27)
Yeah.

Hmm

John Nunemaker (17:52)
Alex Hormozi or whatever kind of thing. Yes, corporate whatever. And then third, it's a plain, it looks almost plain text. It's not plain text. We're not talking like Times New Roman or Courier New or something like that. But it's like a plain white. It's left aligned. It has like, you know, a max width on it. And it's just like some like I would write an email to either of you. It's that kind of an HTML email. And it has like one thing in it. And like on my phone with my phone open, I can see the whole email. And I think emails like that

Kris (17:53)
Like corporate. Yeah.

John Nunemaker (18:22)
I've found myself, I've started taking screenshots of them and saving them. Cause I'm like, this is what I want to try.

Kris (18:27)
You don't know how to write a plain text email. You don't know how to style a plain text email. No, I'm just kidding. I know what you're saying.

John Nunemaker (18:30)
Yeah. Yeah. No, but like it's because

like, love that idea of like, just like this tiny, like where it feels more real. Cause now like you're saying Garrett, the whole point of marketing or having an app or doing any of this kind of stuff is to be different than other people. Like you want to differentiate. I think that's one way you can differentiate these days is to be like, we're not going to blast everybody all the time with like five killer sections and four links at the end.

And yeah, by the way, here's another thing. And did you miss this other thing? It's like, yes, you're doing a lot of things. We get it. That's awesome. Why don't you pick one thing and then try to actually figure out, know me from how I use your app and send me the one thing I would care about. What were you going say, Kris?

Kris (19:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, my two things, my two thoughts are, I've been saving. One is it makes segmentation really important. So it's not just going to everybody. And so the more we can, connect, let's say application data to a email marketing tool so that it's not just blanketed. and then the two though, to saying like, I do want to hear from people. It's like, I actually get frustrated if I sign up for something and I do use it.

John Nunemaker (19:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Very true.

Kris (19:39)
and I never hear from them. And so that I actually never know like if things are getting improved or worked on. so, and I'm like, I gave you my E or if I, yeah, if I sign up, I'm like, sometimes I want to know the things, but not every week. Like I get from certain things, I get almost like a weekly, I'm like, I don't want this at all. tell me, yeah, so.

John Nunemaker (19:45)
Yeah, agreed.

I think those are both great points and I think that's one of the things that going back two years when you started helping on box out that I like the most is that you were like you didn't just send an email to all the people on the list every single time you're like okay who should we send okay these templates are only for premium customers will only send it to them you know or these are only for plus and premium so we'll send it to both

Kris (20:09)
Mm-hmm. Right.

I sometimes change the messaging. So if it was, if there were templates that overlapped, but some of them were only premium, you know, we'd send, let's say one to the plus users and then we'd tease say, Hey, like you could, here's one of the premium ones. So that way it was even not just a blanketed, you know, thing as well of like where it feels tone deaf. If it doesn't apply to me or if you're trying to, yeah, if it was very obvious, you sent the same thing to multiple.

subscription tiers.

Garrett Dimon (20:46)
Well, and there's like to me, it just boils down to like, for any given email or any action of any sort. If you ask like, are we doing this to try and make more money or are we doing this to try and help customers? And well, sure. Right. But like helping customers implicitly.

Kris (20:58)
course.

John Nunemaker (20:59)
Help. Yeah, of course. Both.

Kris (21:02)
Ha ha ha!

Garrett Dimon (21:05)
And like, it's one of those things, again, it's not so easily quantifiable, but like most people are sending those emails because they read in a book somewhere or on a blog post somewhere they're supposed to. And so they're going through the motions because they think they need to do it to grow revenue or whatever it is. Whereas really what needs to happen is how do we make our customers lives better? So that's onboarding that's in like, there's definitely some.

John Nunemaker (21:06)
Yeah.

Yes

Kris (21:16)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (21:34)
value and email in order to communicate with people. like most of us don't want more email.

John Nunemaker (21:40)
But if we get a good email, we're happy. here's the thing. I post hog randomly started sending. Yes. But that's my thing. And so like, I think the focus should just be on quality, you know, and on like brevity instead of on like, here's everything we're doing to all the people. Yeah. Because like posthog sent an email, like a couple of emails recently that I was like, these are awesome. Like, I'm actually going to like bookmark these to read later. I scanned them and I was like, there's some good stuff. And I was like, I'm going to save it and I'll read the whole thing later. You know,

Garrett Dimon (21:43)
because it's so rare.

Kris (21:53)
Hmm.

Garrett Dimon (21:54)
Yes,

one thing at a time.

John Nunemaker (22:09)
So I think it's possible to do it. And even like cursor, I signed up for that, just kicking the tires on the pro version. And I got an email, was like, welcome to pro. Very much like a normal, know, like not like an automated cheesy, like you're a pro now, like blah, blah, blah, blah, you know? And no, no, if I hated your emails, then we wouldn't be working together. So, and then, you know, it was like from, you know, John Doe.

Kris (22:09)
Yep.

Are you hating on my emails? Because I feel like that's what I say. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.

John Nunemaker (22:38)
and instead of like from cursor or John at cursor or whatever. And then it was like, hi John, like your cursor plan is now active. The pro plan gives you access to, and it was like hyphen, you know, this hyphen another thing. There's a five points, super small. And it was like, please don't hesitate to reply and reach out if you have any questions best, you know, so and so. I'm like, I, felt like a real email. I know that that was automated, but it kind of felt like a real email. And I was like, I actually really liked that. That was nice. Cause now I know, these are the things that I just signed up for. Cause honestly,

I subscribed just because I ran out of completions and that was the only reason I subscribed. And so now I know, there's other things that I'm getting too. And I wouldn't have been aware of those. was just, I felt one pain point, tried to fix that. And they gave me a quick short email. That's actually kind of nice. There's a few, and I think more devs are doing that, DevTools. So that's what I think about for Flipper even is like more DevTool focused, like strip away all the junk and just go to like, and we're even doing this at Boxout right now.

we're revisiting all those emails that you had set up a couple of years ago and we're saying, okay, they all come from, know, whatever Robbie Lightfoot or they come from whoever. then, you know, not Robbie at box out or any of that kind of stuff. It's literally just like that. And it's going to be really normal, you know, subjects. then that just like you compose that in an email editor, you know, maybe there'll be some links, maybe there'll be, you know, some images or an image of a video with a play button on it that just links to the video, stuff like that.

Kris (23:36)
Mm-hmm.

John Nunemaker (24:01)
but it's gonna be very toned down compared to historically what we've tried.

Kris (24:05)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (24:05)
Well,

I think the absolute key in my opinion, and like, will immediately write off like companies that don't do this. it pretends to come from somebody at that company and I hit reply and it goes to a generic inbox, like no, absolutely like that's it's, it's, you know, it's just simple authenticity stuff, right? Like if this is from me,

John Nunemaker (24:19)
Mm hmm. It doesn't. Yeah. Yes. huh. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Kris (24:23)
the replyer.

John Nunemaker (24:30)
Yup.

Garrett Dimon (24:31)
you should be able to hit reply and get me not get a support team or any of that. And so like whenever it's like a letter from the CEO and I'm like, the hell it is. It's and then I will go hit reply just to see where it ends up. And if they don't send me to the CEO, then I'm like, all right, well, that was some inauthentic garbage. And I noted as such and like those little things start to add up.

John Nunemaker (24:34)
Agreed.

Yeah, AppSignal does that.

They'll actually, AppSignal will send it from a person and when you reply, it goes to that person and they go back and forth with you. So it's almost like they automatically divvy up the reps. So you know you're getting a real human.

Kris (25:05)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (25:08)
Yeah, yeah. And like that's the way it should work. Otherwise, don't pretend that it's coming from an individual person, even if they wrote it and all of that, like it's an email that's coming from your company. If you're going to dump me into support.

John Nunemaker (25:14)
Agreed.

Garrett,

you've seen things, haven't you? You're just scarred and battled. A double decade saas Go ahead, Kris.

Kris (25:25)
Hahaha

Garrett Dimon (25:26)
⁓

Kris (25:27)
What? But

no, it was interesting. That's like, yeah, you're all perspective is very like, I would say jaded programmer centric reverse versus versus like the common folk like don't know like that. Yeah, they don't know that like all those things are happening, right? Like because there's not technically as technically savvy. And so it's just interesting because like, you know more of what's going on.

John Nunemaker (25:37)
Hahaha!

The peasants.

Garrett Dimon (25:45)
But.

John Nunemaker (25:47)
Yeah.

Kris (25:53)
in the backend versus maybe a typical non-technical customer for any application has no clue like what's happening. So it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting.

John Nunemaker (25:59)
Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (26:02)
But everybody knows how

John Nunemaker (26:02)
Robbie gets replies all the time. Yeah, to those emails.

Garrett Dimon (26:05)
to

hit reply on an email.

Kris (26:07)
But they don't know what's happening in the backend. you're saying like, I don't want to go to a generic support inbox and like all this stuff. But like I would argue that most people don't even know that's happening.

John Nunemaker (26:12)
Yeah.

Yes, yeah, I actually agree. From what I've seen at Boxout, a lot of times they'll just reply to the email and they, as long as they get a reply back, they don't even think about it. They don't realize that like that was an automated email. They think somebody sent it. Yeah, well, I agree that that's insane, Garrett, but.

Kris (26:26)
Yeah.

I'm not saying it wrong, I'm just saying like, I think,

Garrett Dimon (26:29)
Well, no, and that's fine.

That's great if it works for them and they're happy. To me, it's just an inauthentic behavior on the part of the company. And then that means there is a lot of implied information in that fact in terms of their priorities and how they do things. And so I read a lot into that because I know...

Kris (26:31)
yeah.

John Nunemaker (26:35)
Yeah.

Kris (26:37)
Yeah. I, I, yep.

John Nunemaker (26:38)
Yes, agreed.

Yeah. Yep.

Agreed.

Garrett Dimon (26:58)
If you reply to an email that I claim comes from me, it's gonna come to me. Your reply's coming to me. You're like.

Kris (27:03)
Yeah.

John Nunemaker (27:04)
Yeah.

Kris (27:05)
I have a second point in terms of, uh, uh, I've been thinking about this actually, I'm going to throw it out there. Uh, a second point related to cleanup. Maybe we were on the third one, but not past third. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

John Nunemaker (27:08)
Hit it.

I have, we got a few. we have like, you know, automated in-app emails, customer health index, revenue churn,

you know, support, talk to people on a regular basis segment, you know, be authentic.

Kris (27:30)
But I'm also thinking like the checkup is, and I've read a number of articles. It's just hard. You know, I think unless you're looking at the data, it's hard to know the time, but it's like going back to like blog posts and SEO metadata and titles and making sure that those are either filled out or does some of the content need to be updated. So I've there's there's a guy on LinkedIn that I get his newsletter. It's like once a month or maybe every other week that.

He he's really into SEO and talks about updating blog posts with old content and like how that affects, you know, stuff. I think also when I was going into a app that I won't name, I was noticing like there's a bunch of missing, meta descriptions for pages. And so I was like, like it's gone. You know, I did it for a while and then I didn't do it. And so then no one did it. So now we should actually go back and fill in those meta descriptions and titles so that they're not just getting the dump of whatever is

You know, the first text. I think those sorts of things. And a lot of these are probably like small team challenges, you know, of if you have a huge company, someone's assigned to doing those things. But when it's, you know, 10 people or less, there's probably a lot of these things that, you know, it's important for a while. Then you get pulled into other things. And so then that task of making sure it's getting updated is not done. So I think a lot of that like SEO stuff as well, just well, a is it done from what you've been doing? But then are there new things we should do?

another thing I'm just thinking like alt text and images, like it's easy to not do that because you're just like upload, put in the URL and move on. But like, then we need go back and put it in some alt text. So it shows up in the Google image church and you know, and then you're not getting knocked for not having accessibility on your website. would say, okay, I'll add another one. Accessibility, you know, that probably yearly should be reviewed because, I don't know if we've even looked at ours. I've done that for a number of websites, but,

because that can help or hurt Google rankings if you're not implementing those things. And those things change over time to be more friendly for different devices and just different requirements. those are a couple that we can either move on from them or I want to throw them out there.

Garrett Dimon (29:36)
Well,

John Nunemaker (29:37)
No, those are good.

Garrett Dimon (29:37)
in both of those though are things where there's tools out there that you can set up and they'll just watch it and yell at you as soon as something goes wrong. So a lot of that, it's not even...

Kris (29:44)
Mmm.

John Nunemaker (29:45)
Mm-hmm.

Kris (29:46)
I do you know one

of them? Yeah. Do you know one of them for accessibility? I'm just curious. I've always done it manually versus a tool.

Garrett Dimon (29:53)
no, mean not often I've got a bunch bookmarked. ⁓ I know they exist.

Kris (29:55)
Okay. Yeah.

John Nunemaker (29:59)
He'll look them up after and send them to you and for the show notes.

Kris (30:02)
hahahaha

Garrett Dimon (30:03)
Well, I mean, a lot of what I'll do, like I use polypane and so like it has a lot of things where to yell at you. And then there's other things you can do. Like you can add a style sheet that will flag issues. So like if it's an image without alt text, it will then like, and so you can then use CSS to yell at you and be like, cause a lot of times like you'll add an image.

Kris (30:19)
Mmm.

John Nunemaker (30:21)
⁓ border red. Yeah.

Kris (30:22)
Interesting.

Garrett Dimon (30:29)
And even if you plan on adding alt text, you're like, well, I want to go see how this looks before I write up the alt text for this. you know, and then one thing leads to another and things like that slip through the cracks. So like with the right style sheet, and there's a ton of things, you can add to it. And there's a ton out there, that will, you know, or like if you add, an anchor tag and you don't fill in the href.

like it'll yell at you for that. Or if you use the...

John Nunemaker (30:52)
⁓ right, yeah.

Kris (30:55)
Hmm.

John Nunemaker (30:57)
That's a cool idea. I've

never thought about that before, but that makes sense for all the, all this kind of stuff. I mean, it's not, that wouldn't be automated, but you would hopefully see it when you preview the page. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (31:01)
Well...

No, it just helps, right? Like all of this

Kris (31:06)
Yeah,

Garrett Dimon (31:06)
is layers.

Kris (31:07)
yeah.

Garrett Dimon (31:07)
It's, so like you can even, because with CSS attribute selectors, you can basically like force yourself to consistently do the right thing with certain tags. And then with content selectors, like you can have it, complain about any text that says click here, you know, and like, don't do that. ⁓ you know, so there's things like that or.

Kris (31:26)
⁓ right. Yep. Yep.

Garrett Dimon (31:32)
you can write a style sheet and only include it in development and, you know, or help put it behind a flipper flag and you can turn it on and off anywhere you want for yourself. Well, I mean, you know, so there's options. And then same thing with like SEO, there's plenty of SEO tools that will, you

John Nunemaker (31:41)
Yeah, that's true.

Kris (31:41)
Shameless plug.

John Nunemaker (31:43)
The thrill of the shill. Yeah.

Ahrefs

semresh

Garrett Dimon (31:53)
Yeah, they'll

grade you and be like, hey, dummy, you forgot a meta description on these pages.

Kris (31:59)
Yeah. Do you

John Nunemaker (31:59)
Yeah, this page

is too long, repetitive content. Go ahead,

Kris (32:01)
do it? So are, you know, redesigning both our content and design of the public facing page. And so, Garrett, as you're I'm more just curious because I know how I've done it. So I'll say how I don't know. I'll ask you the question is when I'm doing like web stuff, I will do the design, get it, you know, coded from the developers I'm using and then I'll go back.

John Nunemaker (32:07)
Mm-hmm.

Kris (32:25)
and review it and then make them make the edits to make it, know, accessibility friendly, especially when depending on the level of, you know, when it if it's a nonprofit or university thing, like there's different levels they have to do. Do you try to do that as you go or do you kind of like especially when like the tabbing and all those things like do you wait until the end and then go back and do it? Like how I'm just curious how your workflow is when you're doing that for and stuff.

Garrett Dimon (32:50)
it kind of just depends on how, Influx a design is, or, ⁓ if I'm like tinkering and trying to figure out if something will work versus this is straightforward. I know it will work. I know this is how I want to do it. generally speaking, I would say I try to stay on top of it as I'm going, right. As opposed to like coming back. a lot of that though, too, is.

Kris (32:55)
Mmm

Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (33:13)
being inherently anti JavaScript. I kind of end up not screwing myself over with, you know, inaccessible code as easily as somebody would with a very JavaScript heavy thing. And like I've always like from the very beginning with like web standards and everything, but all about accessibility, but golly, it is hard to keep up with. so even

Kris (33:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

yeah.

Garrett Dimon (33:37)
Like

I feel like unless it's a full-time thing, especially like CSS now, like there's so much you can do and it's like, well crap, is this going to be accessible? and you know, there's so much you can know. So it is just difficult. polypane or, you know, an issues style sheet, stuff like that can help. and in a lot of cases I've found some that are educational and like, I didn't know that.

Kris (33:50)
What?

Garrett Dimon (34:01)
And so I try to stay on top of this, otherwise it's just so tedious to circle back.

Kris (34:06)
Yeah. I've

been thinking with features, it's hard, like, with SpeakerDeck, I would say at least once a year, I have Erik go through and, provide some recommendations on front end stuff. Cause he's looking at it all day long, you know, not all day long, but like he's, he's in it all the time, especially from a university standpoint. And so, I, again, I would just probably say like that's on a list of things people to, you know, to have a checkup on, like get, find someone who, you know, is very familiar with it. They can just.

John Nunemaker (34:13)
Mm.

Kris (34:32)
provide these listed recommendations and that way is not bogging down our time to figure it out when we're not the experts at it. And there's a lot of people who look at that all day long. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (34:41)
Well, the

automated solutions can only catch so much. do like so much of it is subjective, which is challenging for developers, but having somebody review it and, know, an external set of eyes can give you a lot of good insight.

Kris (34:46)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, whoo-

Garrett Dimon (34:58)
writing a book and then having an editor looking over your shoulder, you inevitably learn things about how you write words, prose, code, whatever it is. And then you stop making that mistake in the future because now they've corrected you. So it's almost like having a editor for how you're writing code.

Kris (35:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Nunemaker (35:17)
Yeah, I would say also on this front, you you talk about content, you know, that immediately made me think of on the tech side, you know, keeping up to date with, security and dependency updates. Those will be like audits. mean, speaker deck's been going through it. Fireside's going through it. We're now I think six one and three one on that. And I speaker deck is now seven and three one rails seven Ruby three one. So stuff like that is important too. you know, that at least should be more monthly probably, but like,

Kris (35:28)
Hmm.

Yeah.

John Nunemaker (35:46)
If you get behind even just an annual, like let's just get two versions ahead from what we are or something like that, I think is really important on a regular basis. It is, yeah.

Kris (35:53)
I think it's easy to get behind on those because you know, we,

we updated, then we want to do a bunch of features, right? And, oh, like we want to spend time with feature and we just forget, Hey, when's the last time until it gives us the red bar of saying you will not be able to deploy, you know, April 1st, then it becomes a important, but it, and again, I think these are a lot of these are like small team, you know, checkup because large teams might have a whole group dedicated to making sure those things are there versus when you got three people.

John Nunemaker (36:13)
True.

Kris (36:22)
You're putting out fires a lot. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (36:22)
Yeah, everybody's spread thin.

John Nunemaker (36:23)
Hey, screw the big teams, screw the big teams. We're here for the little guy, the little girl. That's

that's awesome. So I think, you know, like we talked about already, we've got, you know, check your emails that are going out. That's a big one. Anything automated in the app or from a marketing standpoint or drip or whatever, you know, check customer health, like on a regular basis, like Garrett said, bring them in on support, things like that. Revenue churn, all the obvious SaaS ones. If you just search like what are,

you know, don't need to go over those. Segmentation, like I think checking that on a regular basis and like, you segmenting to the point that you can be authentic and the things that you're delivering to people and then also be authentic. Don't, you know, cheap out and just send a bunch of junk to a bunch of people. then content updates, you know, security and dependencies. Is there anything else that comes to mind?

Kris (36:58)
Mm-hmm.

The one thing that I know that we probably struggle with on all the different things that we do is like social media and like, are we still talking to them in the the tone and in the content that is relevant for the audience versus did we decide we were going to do, you know, quotes every Thursday or whatever and no one cares about the quotes. But, you know, I'm just as an example. And 12 months later, like, should we try something else? I think it's easy in

John Nunemaker (37:21)
Mm.

Yeah.

Kris (37:41)
like whether it's LinkedIn or, you know, Instagram or Twitter of, you know, reevaluating like what's working, what's not, because I think a lot of companies put out content to say they're putting out content. But when you have making this up like 50,000 followers and like two people engage on, you know, any given posts, like stop doing that type, you know, and I, I don't think that it's just funny when you look at people's content that they have a bunch of followers, but they don't have any interaction. Obviously they're missing.

John Nunemaker (38:08)
Yeah.

Kris (38:09)
what people are interested in, what their audience is interested in.

John Nunemaker (38:13)
Yeah, that's a little Twitter. I've never heard of that. What's that? That must be similar to X or. Yeah, yeah, you know, I and X I saw just got like a what like a 44. So now it's like no longer. I think he bought him for 42 billion. And I just saw things saying yesterday that they had like somebody do an independent, you know, evaluation because somebody I guess is buying in or something or they're doing another round. And so they were 44 billion now. So supposedly they haven't completely tanked Twitter.

Garrett Dimon (38:17)
Hmm

Kris (38:19)
HAHAHAHA

Hmm.

Sorry.

John Nunemaker (38:43)
I think some, or sorry, X, whatever. Yeah,

now I'm doing it already. So yeah, those are great. I like those. Go ahead, Garrett.

Garrett Dimon (38:48)
⁓ another

random one, I did it with sifter, but like I've never seen many others do it is like put in a real credit card and your own product and pay for it. Like, yeah, you're going to take the, the fees hit, but to see every month of how that charge looks in your transactions and what emails you get.

John Nunemaker (38:59)
⁓ yeah.

Kris (39:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, agree.

Garrett Dimon (39:12)
What phone number is displayed on there? What metadata is displayed within,

Kris (39:19)
think I still

have John's phone number on one of my transactional emails because I just don't see it. And I think it's a phone. Yeah, anyway.

John Nunemaker (39:22)
My-

Yeah. My email

Garrett Dimon (39:26)
And so

that's another good little thing.

John Nunemaker (39:27)
is on fireside. I found this out because I got phone calls. It's funny because like my emails are my, my, my phone number has been on flipper for years. Cause you have to put some phone number in. was like, I paid for like grasshopper or something for awhile. And then I was like, I'm not going to pay a hundred bucks for this. No one's using it. So I put my own in never, never received a single developer phone call. Yeah. Fireside I put it in there cause I like, I'll just do the same thing as flipper. I've had so many texts and

Kris (39:30)
Ha

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garrett Dimon (39:46)
Developers don't want to talk.

John Nunemaker (39:53)
and phone calls, I was like totally different audience, which is kind of cool. Much, much happier to reach out much more appreciative when things get fixed. That's been a lot of Cool. I like that. Use your card, actually get, get some feedback. And that goes with the automated stuff as well. Cause you know, you want to see what invoices get sent out. When do they get sent out? Like all that kind of stuff. That's a good point. I like it.

Garrett Dimon (40:16)
Well, and it's

tough because like you don't just want to do all this stuff once a year. What did I miss?

Kris (40:22)
Sorry.

John Nunemaker (40:23)
I know, I don't know. I- Kris is dying.

Kris (40:24)
No, no, it's funny. So like, it's watching you guys and sometimes you'll both do like the same arm gestures. Sorry, I got it. And I like.

John Nunemaker (40:31)
yeah, were both, we both had

our hands on our heads. Yep. Like we're doing a crunch in the air. Yes.

Garrett Dimon (40:34)
But I don't know what to do with my hands.

But no, so what I was going to say was like, it's, it's tough to do it yearly because that's too infrequent. And like, if you did all of this stuff yearly, it would be depressingly overwhelming. But monitoring it monthly and constantly trying to stay on top of it sure feels like it chips away.

Kris (40:39)
Mirroring, yeah.

John Nunemaker (40:41)
Now I'm gonna mirror Kris, make him feel awkward.

Months of work. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (41:01)
at your productivity. I mean, long story short, in my experience, A avoid dependencies like the plague. But B just kind of constantly like set up the tools or whatever so that it's never one big, huge initiative to do all this stuff that you're just constantly working on it. And it's your systems are yelling at you if you do things wrong and just recognize that you've

Kris (41:18)
Yeah. Yep.

Garrett Dimon (41:26)
gotta carve out the time to handle it and fix it on an ongoing basis rather than like, okay, it's gonna be maintenance month. Like, you know, every team will have a different ratio depending on like where a piece of software is at. But you know, like right now with Fireside, I'd say we're probably like 80 % maintenance, 20 % new features. But eventually like we'll wanna flip that around once we're fully caught up. And so hopefully then we'll be cranking out features more and the maintenance will be a lot less intense.

because everything will be caught

Kris (41:57)
The other controversial one I was going to say, I think it's, Garrett are you, you reading software as a science?

Garrett Dimon (42:03)
I am not.

Kris (42:05)
Okay, I'm gonna refer to it. It's okay. I was gonna refer to something. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (42:07)
I mean, I'm willing to bet I

have encountered enough of that information over the years that, I'm sure I should, right? Like it'll reinforce things, but,

John Nunemaker (42:15)
You should read it dude, it's really good. Yeah, yeah. Put it in your queue

Kris (42:22)
It's not getting there. Well, what I want to say was, I think it's in there is evaluating pricing, you know, and, know, because, yeah, see, I knew, I knew that reaction, guys, I knew I gonna get that. But, but, but, but it's thinking, you know, and I don't know if it's yearly, but of just thinking that, okay, it can go years then and not getting addressed of like, are we providing way more value than we're charging? And also just like,

Garrett Dimon (42:22)
Now like

John Nunemaker (42:23)
Okay,

keep going Kris. What were you gonna say?

⁓ yeah.

No, no, no, it's right. It's good.

Yeah.

Kris (42:50)
You know, again, we've talked about this a little bit, but like there's inflation, there are costs go up. And so, you know, I get notifications. I know I've said this, I think, an early episode of like QuickBooks, like how many times I've gotten a price raise from QuickBooks software since I've started using it is like frustrating, but also I'm locked in, right? Like I want to use it. It saves me time. It saves me money. Not that we want to be like that, but of at some point you'll be way low and then it'll be hard to like.

to get to the market again because it will be like doubling prices versus, know, is there, you know, can we add enough value to whether it's add-ons or whatever, or, you know, changing levels a little bit to make it where you can charge a little more when needed.

John Nunemaker (43:33)
And even just on the opposite side of that, not on the opposite side of reviewing pricing, but on like looking at pricing and saying, you know what, some of our pricing is really complicated just because it was like, you know, to have like three tiers and stuff like that. And so like as new owners, we want to, we should at a minimum look at it and say, can we just simplify this? And we, and we have been, but like, can we simplify this? Can we make it easier to digest, easier to understand? And then, you know, you can always do testing, you know, price increases or all that kind of stuff as well.

Kris (43:42)
Yeah.

John Nunemaker (44:02)
like why do we have like, for example, certain templates can't be used in certain tiers. And I'm like, is that really the thing that people are using fireside for is just the template? No, like I don't think that that, I think there's other things more pro podcasting that we can make that differentiates. So let's just give everybody all the templates and let them pick, you know.

Kris (44:13)
Right.

Garrett Dimon (44:19)
Well, when

a lot of it's philosophical, like the, you know, companies will hold back features or push features up into a higher tier to drive upgrades. And it's purely a revenue thing. It's not a adding value thing and I feel like in a lot of cases, if that stuff doesn't directly affect the bottom line.

So like for us bandwidth, right? If somebody's using 20 petabytes of bandwidth, needs to be addressed. But like choosing a different template, like, yeah, it took us time to develop it, but the whole idea is once it's developed, it's done and it's effectively free. all of that kind of stuff should just be included because it doesn't cost us anything.

If it comes down to, this isn't going to drive upgrades, like, okay, well then let's just have one plan. Like, you know.

Kris (45:09)
Yeah, I would. Well, I've said,

yeah, like templates, you know, for example, I don't know what drive upgrades versus if we were, you know, if our business was templates, you know, like there's other companies. Well, yeah, templates, then you do charge for even like Envato themes or theme forests, you know, those sorts of places where that is their thing is they want to sell themes. But like when that that's more of just a yeah, I feel like it's a it's a benefit of being.

John Nunemaker (45:16)
Yeah, agreed.

Yeah. Box out. Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, same.

Kris (45:37)
on our platform versus an upsell, right? To get to, move people from 10 bucks to a 50 bucks to a hundred bucks. Yeah. I don't, yeah.

John Nunemaker (45:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Garrett Dimon (45:46)
Well, and you know, like look at Heroku and you know, other platforms of service, you've got basically if you pay more, you're getting a beefier virtual machine or you know, whatever the right terminology, depending on the platform. And that is a direct cost to them. So yeah, you pay more to get more, but you know, it's Heroku's not charging you, you know,

Kris (46:00)
Mm-hmm.

Garrett Dimon (46:12)
double so like if you want to actually log in weekly then it's going to cost this much it's like that has nothing to do with anything and right

John Nunemaker (46:20)
Yeah, or number of deploys. know, they're like, look, it

deploys a deploy. They're not going to charge based on that. they're, yeah, it does, but it's probably a like templates, you know, it's probably akin to that. So cool. Awesome. So customer health index, automated emails, revenue churn support, segmentation, evaluate your pricing, use a real card and then content and security. Those are all, I feel like pretty good checkups. And some of them are painful.

Garrett Dimon (46:25)
Well, but that does use compute. like, but it's trivial. Yeah. Yeah.

Kris (46:33)
Cool, cool.

John Nunemaker (46:49)
So that's akin to a physical as well.

Garrett Dimon (46:51)
documentation

and it might fall under content, but I feel like that's another thing that tends to fall out of as like new features get added. But really that should just be part of every new feature release. But with small teams, that doesn't always happen, obviously.

John Nunemaker (46:54)
is... yeah.

I'm doing a quick checkup on this episode. there anything else we need to tell people, Kris?

Kris (47:09)
Well, I would say they should subscribe to Apple podcasts, Spotify. You know, if they could give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts, I think that would help our us jump the jump the rankings.

John Nunemaker (47:22)
Yes, not jump the shark, but jump the rankings.