Episode 14
· 42:20
Hey product people. Kyle Fox is back this week to talk about what happened when they launched, the metrics they've used since then, and the lessons they learned along the way. If you're doing agile development and your tools are too complicated, you need to try sprint.ly. I use it at work and love it. You can try it free at www.sprint.ly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So how are you building this list? How people hear about it?
Speaker 2:To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. We just built like a really I think our teaser page was kind of compelling. It was a pretty don't know. I guess you could say it was a sexy design. It had a nice damask wallpaper.
Speaker 2:Was all dark and then it had a bright pink logo with a bright pink button which I guess around that time was pretty different than a lot of things you'd see. Okay. And it was intentionally pretty mysterious and overly sensational. It was like, Photo Journal is gonna change the way photographers blog or something. Know, something just like so over the top and like that's all it said.
Speaker 2:So I think the page itself was really compelling. And
Speaker 1:How did people find the page?
Speaker 2:So exactly. So at that time, there wasn't really Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. Man, that makes me feel old to say that. Back in my day, we didn't have the Twitters. We have web browsers.
Speaker 1:How did people hear about it if there was not that stuff?
Speaker 2:So our friends Rob and Lauren, who we were building the blog for, they had a fairly good following on another blog they ran called The Wedding Travelers. So they they they shot a lot of Indian weddings and things like that which like I mean, Indian weddings make for some spectacular photography. It was a pretty awesome blog and they got a lot of readers. So they kind of were alluding to the fact that this new thing was being built kind of alongside with them as partners sort of thing. So we got a lot of the initial traffic through them.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Beyond that, I don't really know. Like how much of it was word-of-mouth and people sharing the link. I'm not sure. Like it We didn't really have a lot of ways to to track that setup.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. We did We didn't do any content marketing or blogging or anything like that. We basically put zero effort into promoting it other than like sharing the link here and there. And I think it speaks to how powerful design can be. Like I think if that page had again, was like my perfectionism.
Speaker 2:That teaser page was pretty nice as far as teaser pages go. Yeah. And I think that's probably what helped boost like I'm I'm not sure what our traffic was like, but I bet you our conversion rate was pretty high. Know, people hitting the page. I bet a lot of them signed up.
Speaker 2:Of course, in retrospect, I wish we had tracked that sort of thing. But the problem probably wasn't getting people to sign up, was getting them to the page. And I think if we had known how to drive more traffic to the page, we probably would have had an even larger launch list.
Speaker 1:So how big was the launch list when when you did launch? I
Speaker 2:think it was around I think it was between 350 and 400 people.
Speaker 1:Okay. You launched by Was that your launch plan? Was to send this email out?
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah. And so what we did was I think it kinda hokey the way we did it. So we launched in April 2010. And I think in January 2010, we picked I can't remember either 50 or a 100 people to be beta testers. Okay.
Speaker 2:And we, like, sent them sent them a link to sign up and create their account and everything. I mean, we I hadn't like we had no idea how to run a beta testing program. We're just like, oh, we'll just we'll just let people use it for a few months first and then find any like big big problems and then launch it. And the problem was because like I I said earlier, like the whole perfectionism thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the beta the beta testing phase was a bit hokey because pretty much we had ironed out all the bugs. It was kind of like we felt like it was almost ceremony because, you know, that's when everyone was everything was in beta. Beta was like the cool thing so Yeah. It's almost like a disclaimer like, hey, this isn't totally finished yet. If you run into big problems, don't blame us because it's just a beta.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we ran this this beta and it it was good. Like we got some decent feedback. Can you still hear me okay? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. We got decent feedback. One, I guess talking about the beta two, one thing that I would change or do differently or say that we at least did wrong was out of all these people, we basically gave them free photo journal for life accounts. Mhmm. Which at the time was like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like they're doing us a huge favor by doing this beta testing. So we'll, you know, we I think it speaks to how skewed our value, our understanding of the value of our product was. Yeah. You know, it's like we'll give them Frodo General free for life because well, it's not gonna cost us anything. Like that's how we approached it.
Speaker 2:It was like a cost approach. Yeah. And in retrospect, I I would like betas are good. Like it's good to like bring on users as soon as you possibly can. But I would never like give free for life again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because really what we did was we picked I think like the first 50 or 100 people who signed up for our list. And really those people should be our most passionate customers. Know, like they were the ones who were like, Photojournal is like what I'm looking for. I can't wait to use it.
Speaker 2:That sort of thing. We really kind of possibly cut out not only the revenue from like 50 to 100 customers. Yeah. But I think people value things differently when they're paying for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It may be more you know, if you're if you're paying if you're paying the monthly fee for it, you might, you know In your mind, it might be higher value to you than it's like, oh, it's this thing I got free once. I
Speaker 1:still use
Speaker 2:it because it's free. Yeah. And which has an effect on how I guess, you know, the more the more somebody values something, I guess the more likely they are to share it and tell other people about it. If I'm using this awesome thing that they gave me six months free because I tested it out, but I'm still using it because it's awesome. In retrospect
Speaker 1:that's a I think two things there. I think people can do a beta that has a time limit so once we launch this will no longer be free and you convert to a paying product. The other thing I've seen is I paid for Buffer while they were still developing the product. It was definitely not completely finished. And I think if you're passionate, there are going to be some customers that are so passionate about the problem that you're fixing that they're going to be excited to be of part of the building process even while they're paying you.
Speaker 2:Oh, exactly. And like since Photojournal, I've worked on other projects where it's been that like, you know, customers pleading, please let me give you money so that I can use this thing that you're talking about building, right? Like it's totally possible to have that relationship which is a lot better because, I mean, if you're trying to build a business, how you validate it. You don't validate it because your beta users who you've given free accounts to Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay, so you launch in April 2010. What's the response? You send out your email. What's the response?
Speaker 1:How many people did you have sign
Speaker 2:up? So well, first, like so it was pretty awesome. So it was like a Sunday night and we were like We're actually at John's dad's office. We had gone there for Sunday and like hauled our IMAX there and we're working on it. We packed up and we're like, okay, like let's flip the switch.
Speaker 2:So we like flip the switch. We're like, sweet, it's launched. High five. And then send out a quick quick message to our list. Like, yeah, we launched.
Speaker 2:And pack up our computers, like, you know, dust off our hands and we're like, all right, now let's go home and like go to bed because it's Yeah. Like Yeah. And as we're like walking to the car, it's like our vehicles. It's like, oh, the site just got slammed with traffic and we're down. So we like bolted back inside like with our huge IMAX, like unpacked them, set them all up and like fit put out a few fires and stuff.
Speaker 2:But Which is like, again, another like lesson. You wanna like, you know, just don't You don't wanna launch on like a Sunday night when you're like, you wanna go home and go to bed because Yeah. Things things will break. But I mean we had our first paying customers within minutes of them being able to sign up and pay.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay.
Speaker 2:Well
Speaker 1:so you didn't have a trial plan, you just had people went straight to paying?
Speaker 2:No, sorry. There was a thirty day trial but I should say people were signing up for it. At the time we had a free plan and then a $9 a month plan and a $16 a month plan. Yeah. And like right out of the gate people were signing up for the paid plans which I guess like doesn't mean they necessarily were were paying customers then.
Speaker 2:But I mean at least, you know, if somebody signs up for a paid trial that's a lot different than a free plan because they at least have the intent to pay if it's good and what they want. Right? So like we had It was compelling enough that they were willing to consider paying that amount. And and actually though, no. Now that I think of it, we did have some paying customers because at the time, and this is one thing I I would say we did right.
Speaker 2:We offered a yearly plan. So I think we offered like 25% off if you bought, if you paid for the whole year upfront. Mhmm. Which is good because, you know, we immediately we were immediately cash flow positive because of that decision. So we've never I mean, there's a few months during development where we were paying $20 a month for our our hosting.
Speaker 2:But we were we're on like a VPS so it was we started off on the basic plan which is $20 a month or whatever. And then at launch, I think we upgraded a few tiers just to be on the safe side. And we were able to do that without being out of pocket because of that yearly plan. So we reimbursed ourselves for the for what we had been paying out of pocket for our hosting costs. And then we also had cash going forward to pay for like better hosting plans.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you say cash flow positive, mean you're able to pay for your kind of fixed costs?
Speaker 2:Right. So not necessarily like turning a profit. I mean, guess we were It's hard for me. I actually don't really remember the numbers and I don't think we have them recorded anywhere. But yeah, like basically we It was like no longer did we have to pay out of pocket.
Speaker 2:And we had we had some money that we could use towards towards like the things we wanted. For example, setting up our tender support site. I think it's 25 or $30 a month. Mhmm. And like suddenly we we could do that or we could pay for other services that we kind of wanted to use but you know, when you're in development you don't want to pay for it.
Speaker 2:It's like, okay, now we've got some cash we can actually pay for things that will help us run this machine better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So do you remember how many people kind of roughly out of your 300 to 500 how many people signed up for a free trial, how many people signed up for some sort of paying trial and then how many paying customers did you have you know, after the initial thirty day trial?
Speaker 2:Right out of the gate. Let me see. I don't I don't actually. And this is probably gets to I would say probably gets to the point of where I think my biggest weakness running a SaaS business was Well, still is to a large degree is the importance of tracking and measuring, that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We kind of you know, we launched it and we're like, well, we'll we'll fiddle with the knobs and like maybe like maybe our revenue will go up and maybe people will find us. Like the whole idea of even, you know, tracking how many people who who sign up for trials lapse versus continue on to be paying customers. Like that's to be honest, we've never actually set that up. It's always just been kind of going by gut reactions to like the data we're seeing as it comes in. We'll be like, oh, this week we had a lot of people sign up for for the pro account.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. And that's kinda where I got got left, right? There's no there hasn't been any really following up on how many how many of those people are still active after a few months or how many people are signing up for free trials versus the free plan. That sort of thing.
Speaker 2:I mean the fact that you asked that question which is a pretty legitimate question and I'm unable to answer it kind of shows. Really? How without tracking and metrics and stuff like that, even basic stuff, you're basically operating in the dark.
Speaker 1:Do you have any sense of like if you had 400 people on your launch list, do you have any sense of how many signed up for an account?
Speaker 2:Let me see. I could actually I can do a quick query here on our database. So in May 2010 we had a 138 sign ups.
Speaker 1:138.
Speaker 2:Let me have a look here. Let me see if I go back a month. Oh, you know what? It must have been at the March that we launched. So right.
Speaker 2:Okay. April. April is actually the month we launched. We had two forty one sign ups in April.
Speaker 1:So two forty one sign ups in April on launch and then the next month you had 138 sign ups. So you had hundreds of people using this right after you launched.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And like that's so I mean we hadn't really done a great job of like the actual marketing side of the product. I mean that's a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In fact, the sales site was built I think the hour before we launched. It was like, oh, I guess we need some kind of thing at myphotojournal.com when they go to it so that they know to sign up. Cause we were like totally like, if we make this thing awesome, everyone's gonna sign up and pay us money for it. And then we're like, yeah, we should like flip the switch. It's like, I guess there should be something at our at our website telling them how to sign up.
Speaker 2:So it was literally like slapped together and it was like that for, I don't know, probably well actually just last year, February '20 we made some incremental changes but last February 2012 is when I completely redesigned the sales site. So I mean for when these people were hitting the site, it was like not at all geared for conversion. It was pretty awful. Like in fact, like the Well, I shouldn't say it was awful. The main thing that they saw was recent activity on the community.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people that I talked to were confused because they kinda thought it was like an aggregator or something. People thought that it was my blog because when you went there, it was thumbnails and titles of all the blog posts that were happening on photo journal. And then in the sidebar it was like, wanna create your own blog? Like click here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So but but even still, like yeah, we had right off the bat like a few 100 people using it. I think if we were to like drive more traffic, if we were if we would have been able drive more traffic maybe like sign ups would have would have been higher. But yeah, so like we've people are using it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are trying it out. And and can you give us a sense like right now two two years later, what kind of like and so how many paying customers do you have today?
Speaker 2:Let me just look here. So without giving you the exact number Sure. Let's say I don't know. It's over 300, let's say.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Wow. So you you've got yourself 300 paying customers now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's that's roughly where things are at now.
Speaker 1:And so where do you think you're gonna go next?
Speaker 2:Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure. And this is I would say this has probably been the other biggest, I guess. Obviously, photojournalism isn't this explosive success. It does grow modestly every month and it does make revenue and customers are happy. But it's never really, you know, it never seemed like that hockey stick growth.
Speaker 2:Not that I even expected it, but like, you know, it's not even to the point where it's paying somebody's full time salary. Yeah. So like the frustrating part is, I'm I'm like a 100% confident that Photojournal could be turned into a business that pays one person at least one person's full time salary, if not more. I would say in terms of finding a market that's willing to pay, I think this has like done that. And every time we put more effort into it, we see we see a return on it.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like this thing that's just waiting for some attention to like tweak it and turn it into a success like a really successful online business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it sounds like the product is solid. It's the marketing that you're thinking about right now.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So like to give a bit of backstory, Photojournal has always kind of been like a side project for me and John. And we were like, we'll grow it on the side. We'll like spend some time fixing bugs like blah blah blah. But it's really hard to to gain like, I guess, not even exponential growth, but significant growth that way.
Speaker 2:Like it it does grow a bit on its own, but it's like, I would say it's cumulative growth. Like it's just it's slowly getting bigger.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is like, I mean, if you wanna turn it into a business like you're that's a long haul. Like that's not the way to do it. Mhmm. And it took us a while. Like it took a lot of learning to realize, okay, if we wanna turn this into our primary gigs, we've gotta put a lot of effort into not just making the product better, but the marketing side of it.
Speaker 2:And then everything that goes along with that, like blogging and running ad campaigns and learning about like so not only like like well I talked earlier about like what a challenge it is tracking metrics. I mean that's still something I struggle with. Like not just knowing what things to track, but what they mean and how to take action on those things. And technically, how do you track it? I mean, churn is a pretty good example where most people immediately think they understand what churn is.
Speaker 2:The number of cancellations over the number of well, there's two ways. Either the number of cancellations over the number of total users in a given period of time or the number of cancelled users divided by the number of new users in a period of time. But Shopify has a great post that's like how we calculate churn. And they go through like go through like five or six fairly complicated examples of how they were calculating it and why it's wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And because there's so many things you need to take into account. Like is lapsed trial, is that churn? What about when somebody goes to the free plan and just stops paying you? Like is that churn? It's an incredibly complicated subject.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In some ways, tracking things and recording metrics incorrectly is is worse than not recording anything at all. For example, if you record churn wrong and you're recording it as, say a percentage of total users who are canceling and your growth is constant, your churn rate is because your overall user base is growing but the number of users who are cancelling is more or less constant, your churn rate is actually going to go down. Like month by month, your percentage is going to get lower and lower. You might think, Pat on the back, we're decreasing churn.
Speaker 2:And it's like, no, that's just an artifact of the way you're calculating churn. So which can lead you to make like bad Exactly. Decisions about what You could be like, okay, we don't need to focus on retention because our churn is decreasing. When that's not like Your problem is that if that's happening, the real reason that's happening is because your growth is constant. And and that's the problem you should be solving.
Speaker 2:You should be figuring out how can we get more users than we got last month.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So there's all these lessons that I mean, it's taken, you know, a year to like learn about all these different things that we need to do and figure out what to do with them. And so last summer, I decided to quit my job at Carbon Made. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna like Now that I'm starting to get a handle on some of this stuff, I think I can turn it into a business. I think I validated the market. We ran a survey which was like incredibly positive results.
Speaker 2:And it was just like super validating to hear people say like, oh actually I should read you one response here. We had a question that was, what alternative would you likely use if photojournal weren't available? Yeah. And it was like a bunch of fixed options, but we also had a free form. And one person wrote, I would I would weep openly in a corner on a pile of ashes.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good feedback.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's and it was positive. Like, a lot of the questions in this survey were based off of I think it was I can't remember, maybe it was Jason Cohen posted on his blog. Like a few questions to ask that'll really help you determine if you've hit if you've got like a good product market fit. And one of them was, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product?
Speaker 2:That's a good one. If you've got something like 40% or higher saying that they would be disappointed, then you've got a promising product market fit. And so in our survey, we had 108 respondents. Let me just add this up here. Out of that, ninety four said they would be disappointed.
Speaker 2:Wow. And 57 of those said they would be very disappointed if they couldn't use the original. So I mean, that's a pretty anecdotal way of measuring product market fit. But in any case, it kinda shows that there is something there that's probably, like there's a nugget of a business there waiting to Yeah. So I was like, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna do a little bit of consulting on the side to pay the bills while I grow photo journal. And of course, in the middle of all that, I decided to try and start a font design workshop which ended up me and me and my partner, Jeff Archibald, tried to well, we we did we had a good great conference but that ate up two months of my life. And, I And then after, you know, a little while of consulting, I ended up coming aboard, GranFi full time. So which is a whole other I mean, I think we've maybe talked about that decision in the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in a way I was like, okay, I wanted to make a go of photojournal. Like there's something there. Granify is kind of like a bigger opportunity for me. So it makes sense to focus on that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I was for a couple months after I started at Granify, my free time was basically spent finishing up all the contracting work that I had lined up earlier. And so it's only been in like the last, you know, couple weeks actually that I haven't had additional freelance work hanging over my head in addition to what I'm doing at Granify. And I mean Granify is still my number one priority. It's far more valuable for me right now to spend my time working on and improving Granify.
Speaker 2:But that being said, I still want to do something with photojournal. So I spent the last couple weeks thinking hard about what I want to do with it going forward. And I think the first, so the kind of the realization I came to was this not being able to Not tracking metrics and being able to measure certain parts of the business.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We're like the number one problem that I'm having with it. Like I said earlier, I'm basically operating it in the dark.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Before I can even really decide what to do with it, I'm kind of just going to of sit back and like I've set up, I started integrating Mixpanel which again, I know I saw Amy Hoy tweet angrily about Mixpanel the other day. But I've got to say, it's actually really awesome so far. And I've just done a light integration. And I'm going to add in some more things and bring in some more historical data. But I answer all these questions that I've been unable to answer such as, at what point does the revenue from a customer tend to start dropping off?
Speaker 2:Or what proportion of new trials lapse after a given amount of time? And how is that changing? Are more people continuing on to pay customers now than they were six months ago. Yeah. And and finding those drop off points so that I can do things like figuring out when to send a life cycle email and to who and what should it be about.
Speaker 2:And so so Mixed Panel is I mean, I'm going from nothing so maybe that's why it looks so awesome for me. But it's already providing a ton of actionable insight for me. So my plan right now is to kind of watch the dials for a little bit and maybe run some experiments. Especially with email, I think that that's the value of doing email correctly has really That's something I totally didn't even think about until probably the last six months. I've started to really see the value that email can have, not just newsletters, but like the life cycle and retention emails.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so there's some low hanging fruit that I'd like to address. And I'm curious to see like what some of this measurement stuff tells me because then from there I'll kind of be able to gauge where to spend my efforts on next.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You know it would be interesting for us to maybe do another episode in about six months and just follow-up on this and say, What happened? Because I think there is quite a few people that have started side projects or maybe they have a bunch of different side projects or maybe they've just launched their own SaaS app. And the truth is that it's kind of like slow steady growth on a lot of these things.
Speaker 1:It would be interesting I think for folks to hear what happened once you started tracking things. What became significant? And how did that end up affecting Photojournal as a business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean I think that's Yeah, I would love to hear more people talking about the nuts and bolts of what metrics they track and what part of the problem is that it's very easy to get sucked into vanity metrics and things that don't really matter. And Google Analytics is famous for this where it's just like, here's an overwhelming amount of information in some graphs. And like, I I think it takes You have You've gotta be pretty savvy to look at Google Analytics and and come away with an idea of what you should do next. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So filtering out all that noise is pretty difficult. Distilling it down to I I can't remember who it was, but I recently read a blog post where they were like, they would only track one metric. Like they would look at one number. And that would be like kind of management would decide like whether it was retention or conversion or whatever it was. They would look at like one thing and just be like, we are going to blow this number out of the water over the next three months.
Speaker 2:We're gonna raise it from this to this. Basically ignore everything else. It's like, we're just gonna like put everything we've got into increasing this one number. And the more I kind of like learn about this kind of stuff, I think that's what you've gotta do. Like you've gotta just figure out where the easiest problem is for you to solve and then just like focus all your effort on that one thing.
Speaker 2:Then, I mean you can't ignore everything else but it's a lot easier than sort of shotgunning everything and not really being sure how effective each different strategy is. Like that's just a recipe for burnout. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that's a good takeaway. I I think that pretty
Speaker 2:much covers that. Like one other thing I would quickly mention like to if anyone is thinking about doing some kind of, you know, starting up a SaaS business is Just a quick note about like pricing. We kind of arbitrarily picked our prices and one thing that I like and we we also started with a free plan at which we've since discontinued. And it hasn't affected actually, I shouldn't say that. It's positively affected our paying sign ups.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of people who will just use something just because it's free. Yeah. And and they don't make ideal customers because, I mean, Patrick McKenzie has talked about this in the past too that your lower lower paying customers are usually the most work to support. And I can say that that's totally true. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not all free users. It's kinda like you know those old logic puzzles where it's like some blurbs are zergs but not all zergs are zorks. Think. It's kind of like It's like that with free customers. It's like most support is caused by free customers, but not all free customers are a pain in the ass.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So
Speaker 2:I'm pretty happy with that decision to no longer offer a free plan. I mean, you lose the opportunity to Like part of the reason you have a freemium model is because you want to convince somebody to sign up for free, get them through the door and then through different strategies try and upsell them on a paid account. But that's a lot of work. Like that's a whole other beast where you've got to like, you've got to have like some machinery in place to keep them engaged and keep making the value of the product evident.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Based on my limited resources, it's kind of easier to just come right out and say, this is why Photojournal solves your problems and this is how much it costs. Yeah. You're either in or you're out. Yeah. And what's funny is that affects how people perceive the value of what you're offering.
Speaker 2:We get a lot of complaints from free users saying, why don't I get more storage? Or why don't I get unlimited storage on the free plan? Basically, and angrily, why aren't you giving me more? This is so dumb that it's not like I can't use it for free or whatever and get more. But I've never had a single paying customer tell me that it was too expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. The people who pay for it, I think they're okay paying for it because to them it's worth $16 a month to not have a hosting account and have to worry about all this stuff. They get it. And because of that, because it's more valuable to them, they approach, they treat you and the product differently, right? Like you're doing them a favor, I guess in a way by letting them use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So And what about pricing itself? Like do you guys feel like you maybe made a mistake in choosing the price points that you chose?
Speaker 2:I would I flip flop between this because a lot of days I think that photojournal should be more. I've kind of I mean, there's actually I basically have the code ready to go that I just haven't actually put it out that increases the prices and like keeps everyone who's currently on a paid plan. Keeps them like grandfathered in at their current prices just as an experiment to see how it goes. Yeah. But on the other hand, there is a lot of competition in this well, not not really with the blogging world, but like in the photography website kind of world, is loosely what we get categorized as.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a lot of competition, but there's also a huge number of photographers out there. And so, like it's almost like an endless, like an infinite market. And so on the other days, I'm like, well, if it was like, you know, $10 a month, like and I we just went for volume. Like, that's where I'm I'm not sure if it's like if photojournal is better as a low margin, high volume business or high margin, low volume business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not sure how to figure that kind of stuff out. So I mean, I'd like to charge more and everything. I was part of a mentorship program this summer and like everyone's the first feedback I got was like, you need to raise your prices. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so I think that's something I'm gonna consider doing here pretty quick. And Mhmm. I mean, if I were ever to launch another product, I would do it differently. I would think what can I build that people will pay $50 a month for? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like I would I would start with a price point and then figure out how to how to like deliver that much value first rather than the other way around. Because it's just, you know, a lot more worth it to like each customer every customer that you bring on obviously you're making more money. So it's kind of more worth it to pursue if you've got like a minimum number. I would set that minimum number at like $50 and probably that's why I would end up if if I do another product, it's like almost definitely gonna be a business to business app just because businesses are okay with $50 a month. Whereas most consumers, you know, dollars 16 a month is like, well, that's getting up to almost 20 a month.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Well, this has actually been really helpful, Kyle. I think especially there's some folks out there that are in this space where they have something they've started and they might have just started it a couple weeks ago, they might have started it two years ago, but they're thinking, How do my metrics or how does my world compare to what other people have done or are doing.
Speaker 1:I think just having someone else to kind of see what someone else has done and where they're at and then also maybe identify with like what are the next steps.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:If anyone out there has you know feedback or even ideas, it would be interesting if people have specific ideas for photo journal to have them tweet kylefox or productpeopletv or even email us. You can contact us through the website and almost crowdsource some ideas for the next steps for Photojournal. That would be interesting.
Speaker 2:That would be interesting. Yeah. Totally I love talking about this stuff obviously because I mean we do a podcast about it. Yeah. I love hearing ideas about my own product or like if people have like if you're building a, you know, a similar product like in the photo space or something like that, I'm more than happy to just like chat about it or or if you're thinking about building something like for sure I love talking about it.
Speaker 2:Hit me up.
Speaker 1:Beauty. Alright. Well, let's end it there. Thanks again, Kyle.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:bet. For everybody else, we'll see you guys next week. And thank you for being our listener. We really appreciate everyone that tunes in week after week, and all those people that have been sending us encouragement on Twitter. That's productpeopletv.
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