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Y’all, way too much fucking stuff has happened since I last wrote.

Until today, I was way too out-of-my-mind to consider recapping the situation, but here we go:

1. we discovered a huge Noko customer account — $5,000 a month, more than 10% of our revenue — on the day they wanted to cancel
2. our old house in PA, for sale since August, is under contract (yay!) but there has been tons of drama with negotiating and suddenly finding lead in our left-unused-for-months well (*internal screaming*) and having to make eight million calls to get more tests, quotes, etc. try to negotiate to calm down the buyers — all remotely, so effectively powerless — and naturally we found out about this the same day as the mega-customer writing in, of course, because why spread the misery out?
3. …coronavirus…
4. I was passively (but extremely stressfully) waiting for the approval and deliver of my immunoglobulin Rx, which I hadn’t had for weeks, and which I need to have an immune system to fight off, like, normal shit
5. we had delayed the 30x500 launch for several reasons,
6. and there’s a legal thing I’m working on that I can’t talk about yet, which is both expensive and stressful

During all this adventure, my husband — and Noko biz partner — has had a cold for three weeks and Alex, my Stacking the Bricks biz partner, was jetsetting around Asia while I sat around and metaphorically bit my fingernails to death.

Waiting for one Sword of Damocles to drop is bad enough… but I had a beowulf cluster of those menacing fuckers hovering over my head!

Like I said: Too fucking much! And I’m not even counting worrying about my friends.

So. Here’s the sitch.

The mega customer?

Welp, they canceled. I tried to persuade them to stay with a huge discount, but lo, they were not persuaded. This move wasn’t triggered by coronavirus or the economy; Cannon looked them up and there were actual news items about the state of their business (and it wasn’t good news). They, like so many others, got out over the edge of their skis and then had to massively cut back.

I started a growth project and suddenly find myself having dropped $5,528 the other way.

But, thanks to our sales efforts and the quality of our product, they have come back with a massively scaled down account. As in, 1.7% the price of their old account. Sob.

But to me, this is still a testament to the quality of our product and the user experience.

And we have now built an alert system to warn us when any given account gets too big.

I honestly had no idea we had any accounts more than about $1,500 a month — because those Cannon had talked to me about when he was doing the custom plans for them. And this mega-customer just kept growing with virtually zero touchpoints.

Now I’ve always harped on product businesses as being more stable than clients.

1,000 customers > 5 clients > 1 employer.

It’s still true.

Having a single customer be 10%+ of our revenue is exactly the thing I wanted to avoid. The pain of having to rejigger our consulting agreements over this is why.

Egg on my face. I should have seen this coming. It absolutely will not happen again.

Sidebar: When I tweeted about this awful experience, my friend Michele replied that she did a thread about auditing your customers a while ago… and I asked her to turn it into a blog post. Here it is.

Our house sale stuff is close to resolved (we hope).

After a frenzy of calls, communications, and research, we worked with our agents to flush the well for several days and now we’re waiting on a re-test, which we hope will go back to the normal levels we’ve had tested before. Supposedly our buyers are no longer panicking. We will probably have to cough up more money to install filters. At this point, we’ve already accepted an offer less than we paid; we just want it over and done with. Cutting out the expense of an additional mortgage will be a huge relief. I’m on-and-off anxious that the sale won’t go thru, because, hello, pandemic. But on the other hand, the buyers will need someplace to live assuming their house sale goes thru. And their buyers, likewise. So.

That’s the economy in a nutshell: we are all connected by webs of demand!

I got my IVIG.

Hooray! A relief. And then I experienced 2 days of increasing breathlessness, which only led me to think “I’m dying!!” every other hour or so. It was “just” a side effect, thankfully.

The pandemic doesn’t mean our businesses can’t recover and even grow.

It is a temporary thing that will pass (however painfully), not a fundamental unsoundness in the businesses affected — and all major governments are working on stimulus plans to put money in people’s pockets while they’re out of work, so the soil of the economic cycle (in-person service businesses) doesn’t shrink to nothing.

But it does mean we’ll have to make some changes.

We are talking internally about offering discounts to our most at-risk customers — and have already saved another (granted, smaller) account this way.

We are talking about features that will help folks in the great migration to remote work; help them to focus and communicate in these difficult times.

And what content will be most beneficial.

We’re thinking about how to tweak our sales messages.

None of these things are very different from what I’ve already planned — value is value — it’s more that the expectations are tempered.

The things we can do to create success in this kind of climate lead to even better success in a better economic climate.

We initially launched Noko in December 2008, so I know.

I’m going to focus on helping others, and helping myself.

When times are tough, it’s easy (and tempting) to become completely insular, worried about your own issues. And to be frank, I have a lot of issues; my overall shitty health puts me at special risk. On the flip side, it’s easy to obsess about everyone else’s problems, because so many have it worse, and it’s unjust, and maddening.

The balance is hard to strike, but I am going to try like hell to find it.

This past weekend, Thomas, Cannon (our employee), and I worked with an epidemiologist and a healthcare policy expert to create Social Distance Game.

I was talking with that policy expert and political influencer, my friend, about how we could help him in his advocacy; the simulator was the result. There’s absolutely no business use case. There’s no payback. It’s not about us at all. We worked our tails off in the hopes it would reach & persuade the right peope to take the right actions. We won’t ever fully know if it did. But it felt good to focus totally on helping for 3 days straight.

Now I am going to turn my focus back to helping my customers — which helps their business, and also my business, which in turn helps the economy — for a few days, and that is going to feel good too.

I don’t expect to work at my full capacity and have told the rest of the team that I don’t expect them, too, either; but maybe when you grind more slowly, you grind more finely.

Well, that’s the recap. I’m tired. I’m sure you’re tired too.

But, as they say, a change is (almost) as good as a rest.

Expect more detailed biz updates shortly.

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Are credit card trials impacting trial success? We switched over to requiring credit cards to start a trial on Feb 18.

My thinking was: If people enter a credit card, they’re more invested and more likely to take the time to actually… try the app, at least once. (We know from past tests that people who make any time entries at all are much more likely to become paying customers.)

It’s too early to say for sure, but the trend? Looking goooooood.

I’m comparing the recent new trial period with the last period when we were doing explicit marketing (the Freelancember advent calendar), which brought in tirekickers.

Last week, I took a couple days off and then got sick. Just a little secondhand smoke exposure was all it took to knock me on my ass with a week of wheezing and exhaustion, and then side effects from my nebulizer, FUN TIMES. Got myself a now-regularly-scheduled IV fluid appointment and that’s making a huge difference so far.

I did, however, get all the posts I’d commissioned up on the blog in draft mode… and fully edited/expanded and published one. And I did the design for Focus.

This week, a friend is in town — yay! So I’m going to go easy until she’s left, because LIFE IS SHORT.

After she’s left, my focus will be…

1. launching the new features for Growth Stacking itself,
2. segmenting our email list with an eye towards sending out blog content and freelance goodies, vs agency and corporate and internal biz stuff
3. setting up the first of our public tool marketing; I’m thinking a checklist

Stats are down again 😭 Back where we started. But I’m not giving up.

So, sales copy.

The thing about sales copy is that it works best when it makes your reader sit up and cry, “Hang on… they’re talking to ME!” And the best way to create that personal resonance is through what I call crispy writing — specific, concrete, vivid details.

Not ‘save time’ but ‘spend less on ‘just one more little thing’ change emails.’

Not just ‘earn more’ but ‘understand your true hourly rate by tracking and including your non-billable time spent on sales and communication’.

I’ve written a lot about landing pages and sales copy:

• 6 critical mistakes you’re making with your landing page
• How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting — specifically about the current Noko sales copy

Bottom line: You can’t get that “That’s For Me!” feeling without also creating an equal and opposite “That’s NOT For Me!” feeling in people for whom those crispy details do not resonate.

You can’t make plans for your sales copy without making plans for your customers.

Here’s where I’m at with this:

Our current sales copy is currently tailored for consulting agencies.

Consulting agencies and larger internal departments are our Best Customers…

1. They stay longer
2. They pay more
3. They’re easy to work with wrt support

Because sales copy can’t serve two masters, I chose to totally de-emphasize our solo plan, for freelancers/individual consultants.

Freelancers are the easiest customers to acquire, but they churn faster. In part because they have no inertia to fight (e.g. retraining their teams etc), in part because they go out of business pretty often, or — and this is distressingly common! — they just decide to wave their hands and do package quotes without tracking their time at all, simply… trusting… that they’re not ripping themselves off. (Sidebar: This is bad business!!)

Easy to acquire is good. Churn is bad. Result: it’s a wash.

According to Growth Math, we should ignore solo customers.

But solo customers also tend to spread Noko — they leave, sure, but pretty often they get hired into teams, and advocate for Noko internally, or they tell their friends. We’ve heard this a lot, direct from the source.

And that’s a major part of my Growth Theory for the future:

More solo plans = more long-term growth, despite short-term churn.

My other Growth Theory is capitalizing on my assets.

In case you didn’t know, I write about bootstrapping business over at Stacking the Bricks. People know me. People trust me.

Those people, like you (like me!!), would get a lot of benefit out of tracking their time.

So I plan to “borrow audiences” — from myself, and from my fellow entrepreneurs and bootstrappers and startups, like me, wherever I can find them.

Our current sales copy won’t work resonate with the entrepreneur audience.

Nor will it resonate with internal teams, our other Best Customer.

And it will not quite resonate with freelancers, being as it is focused on groups of people.

That’s my dilemma, my challenge, and the huge potential rewards.

The tentative way I’m going to solve it? Funnels.

Yeah, I can customize and segment the landing page using RightMessage — and I plan to!

Before that, though, I’m going to create super-targeted ebombs, micro-sites, and tools. Those will lead naturally to super-targeted landing pages and sales pitches that will resonate hard for them.

Rather than attract everyone to the same place, I’m going to try to attract different folks to different places.

1. Solo folks? Freelancing + consulting advice, resources, and tools; one of them is gonna be a rate calculator that doesn’t suck, ha!
2. Consulting agency folks? Similar to the solo folks, but bigger picture, because managing a team and keeping your pipeline usefully full is totally different from filling up your own calendar
3. Entrepreneur folks? Growth talk, biz strategy, inside dirt, goals, tools (hi—you’re soaking in it!)
4. Internal teams? Honestly, don’t have a plan for these folks yet; I treasure them, but am not quite sure how they end up at our door (aside from being spread by Solo folks who get hired)

It’s easy enough to lay this strategy out in a blog post. It’s much harder to execute.

Plus, of course, when people share, they’ll naturally share the main landing page — we’ll still have to accommodate that. It’s not without challenges.

That’s why I’ll be blogging about it, every step of the way.

PS: In case you’re wondering… I’ve spent 43 minutes today, so far, writing up plans like this, and I know that because I’ve been using my trusty Noko timer 😂 I’m going to set up a goal to do 45 min to an hour a day of this meta-work to be sure I’m on the right track.

What’s the plan for this week?

I already wrote a new trial account today (email sales) and reviewed our support inbox & stats.

Next I’m going to work on freshening up our blog — by loading up, tweaking, and scheduling a backlog of new ebombs written by a freelance writer I hired.

Then I’m going to examine our existing email course assets with an eye towards freshening those up.

And I’m gonna sketch out a plan for some tailored landing pages and sales cophy. More on that in my next post.

I took a couple days off to visit friends and we got back last night, after a long ass drive, and I proceeded to have a nightmare last night about dropping a huge drop in MRR (don’t drink Red Bull after noon, guys!!) and… uh… it actually happened.

We lost like $300 MRR in a week — erasing most of our gains.

(To be fair: I dreamed about a much bigger number.)

This is normal and to be expected. The course of growth never did run smooth, said Shakespeare (or he would’ve, if he wrote tragicomedies about business).

But what really gives me a pit in the bottom of my stomach? I don’t know why.

We don’t have a nice, clear audit trail so I can’t tell you what happened, or if there’s a bug in our calculations, or what. More importantly, I can’t tell MYSELF what it means, and if it means I have to do something specific to correct it — or not.

So while I’m working today to fluff up our blog with fresh new educational content marketing (aka ebombs, in 30x500 parlance), Thomas is working to create that audit trail.

So a few days ago I wrote a little bit about a feature called Focus that I am, ha ha!, focusing on.

This feature is necessary for growth because it’s not about expanding the app and trying to be more competitive on features… it’s about delivering instant success for trial customers (as well as less friction for our current customers!).

Here’s the problem:

Right now when you want to track time in Noko, you can do it from any screen using the floating Quick Entry box. You can also log using a timer, which pops up in a separate window, or the equivalent on your phone. And that’s… it. (Not counting the API.)

We don’t have a *dedicated area* in the app for tracking time.

Big mistake, and it makes our onboarding more difficult, because the Quick Entry box is delightful and very very useful — people love it — but it’s a bit weird and that means there’s a learning curve. We dump folks into the dashboard, and then use a series of tooltips to guide them around. It’s… kind of a mess right now.

Focus will fix that

I was struggling with figuring out how to meld manual time entry and the timer in my wireframes… until I broke out ye olde pen & paper. When in doubt, go back a few steps and stick to the basics.

This was the result.

And turned into a wireframe…

The interface metaphor is split: “Time tracking happening” in the Focus box up top, and selection down below. It’s sort of modal… if you select the manual time entry form, the form will expand, and the area below will show your entries as you make them in rapid-fire… or you can begin a timer by typing what you’re doing (like a tweet!) and select a project at a later point, or you can click a project and get a blank note field with your timer, which is how the timer works now.

PHEW. I’m back in the saddle and today I thought I’d write a little bit about our roadmap for this Growth Stacking project: what, how, why, when, where!

A few weeks ago, newly Ritalin’d and finally able to work again, I was hunting around on the internet for solid advice on How To Set Daily Priorities, and found… nothing.

Lots of handwaving and proselytizing of the power of daily priorities…

Lots of platitudes about importance…

Lots of Eisenhower matrices…

But nothing concrete about choice, except in terms of urgency or importance.

But… how do you decide what is urgent or important? Or not?

Much like Getting Things Done, the Eisenhower matrix is all about triaging work that drops in your lap… reacting to external stimulus, not creating new things that don’t yet exist.

The Eisenhower matrix is a tool for a moment. But I’m looking at a one- or two-year project.

Here’s the thing:

I know how to plan. And I know how to prioritize when time is tight!

But I’ve come to realize that I’m excellent at planning, prioritizing, and executing in bursts leading up to a launch — even extremely long bursts, like the year it took to remake 30x500! — but not so consistent over the long-term.

Ironic, maybe, since I’m always praising the power of stewardship and investment.

So I took stock:

1. I’m good at launches and deadlines.
2. I’m good at putting out fires as they arise.
3. I’m not good at the daily grind.

And what I’ve come to understand is that the best way to get better at the daily grind is to make the grind more like a burst.

The thing that led me to think this is a book called The 12-Week Year. It’s one of those books, you know, where you don’t actually have to read the book to get the gist? It made quarterly planning sound exciting. Any number of the summaries and reviews out there will give you what you need to know.

Here’s the bottom line: Instead of setting yearly goals, set them quarterly, and focus on things you can do versus outcomes, and set up a system of metrics and checks for along the way.

I took what I read and designed my own worksheet, and laid out a plan in Preview (yes, as a PDF).

And here it is.

It’s already not quite a source of truth — I’ve changed and moved things and I’ve fallen behind (me, specifically; yay stupid bodies). Changes so far are in pink.

Today I’m going to edit it some more. But it’s invigorating and clarifying to have it!

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” as Eisenhower himself once quoted.

With the remains of this week, I’m going to:

• get a bunch of new blog posts queued up for our site
• do sketches for an easier time tracking interface

I believe this new interface, called Focus, will massively increase success during trials and retention over the long term

Why am I working on features rather than inbound marketing? Isn’t that exactly what I warn people about? Marketing 90%, product 10%?

Yes and no.

Because there’s a hole in our funnel, dear Liza, dear Liza. If we don’t increase customer success during trials… there’s no point in feeding our funnel a bunch more traffic, only to have potential customers leak out and spill onto the ground. Well, that came out weird. But you know what I mean.

If your ship is sinking, yes, you must bail water. But if it’s sinking because of a hole you can patch… you need to fix that shit ASAP, as soon as the imminent danger is over.

It’s not about perfection. I’m not redoing the whole app or every source of friction or disappointment for our customers. I’m working on the first interface they interact with, and the thing they do the most.

Just like when we shipped the first version of Noko (then called Freckle).

I focused on time entry above all else.

And that’s what I’m doing with Focus.

The faster we can create success for a trial, the more likely they are to become a customer. And the more we can create success for an existing customer, the more likely they are to stay.

I haven’t updated here since last Thursday (3 week days missing). WOOF. Had to get my infusion on Friday and have felt like crap ever since.

Here’s what’s happened while I was gone:

• The devs (Cannon, Pedro and Thomas) have shipped the changes for us to go from a 14-day no-CC trial back to a 30-day paid trial, and updated what few emails mentioned it
• Our number of paying accounts and MRR have found a new level — going up and down a little bit day to day but no major moves for a week or so
• I’ve talked with a designer about coming in for some visual refreshes a month or two from now

Yesterday: Alex sent a really lovely email to the Stacking the Bricks list yesterday, announcing the Growth Stacking project for me.

Today: 332 subscribers! Basically doubled overnight.

I just sent out the very first RSS digest email with a little personal note. Huzzah!!

I forgot to log stats yesterday — we had actually dropped like $40-50. And from 699 paying accounts to 694. Normal everyday fluctuations in terms of dollar amount, a bit of a ??? with respect to the sheer number of paying accounts closed, but the reasons 2 of them gave were the usual “no longer freelancing” type.

But, this is notable because for the first time in a long time, I logged in and saw a drop and didn’t mind — didn’t feel that horrible sinking feeling — thanks to days of otherwise uninterrupted growth ☺️

A dip or a blip is LOT different than a consistent slide.

Today I gave a discount to a new customer who needs 2 separate accounts. It’ll drop the MRR number slightly but should increase our LTV a lot!

What makes a good lifecycle email?

• interesting, exciting, or compelling
• tailored to the customer’s needs & wants
• tailored to the customer’s situation/level/status
• supportive
• a single, well-defined call to action
• a distinct style/voice (as appropriate)
• timely, urgent — not manipulatively so, but just enough of a deadline to get the reader to look, think, and take action (even if that means closing their trial)

Exciting and compelling can be ‘positive’ such as valuable insight or new features — or ‘negative’ such as “don’t lose access to Noko!”

This email is weak sauce.

• “Noko trial period expiring” is just 😱 extremely terrible as a subject line
• there’s no exciting or compelling reason to open, it doesn’t even have a # of days
• “expiring” sounds like bad milk
• it doesn’t make a case for using & staying whatsoever
• it doesn’t talk about what I’ll gain or lose
• it just announces facts on a plate — date, link
• it’s kinda “me me me”
• the CTA is small and weak
• while it’s fine to offer assistance, this is not really the ideal time? the extra text pulls away from the CTA

The “Noko universe?” I mean, sure, it’s fine to talk about the Nokoverse, but… not now.

My trial hasn’t ended yet, so I’m hoping there’s another email or two. These emails come from our app itself rather than via customer.io so they have a different sender name and there’s no easy/graphical way for me to dig into them…

I forgot there’s also a second weekly report email: an individual activity report, for me alone. I’m the account owner so I received both. An individual user would only receive this one.

Good: The embedded pulse!! And the fact that it exists. There’s a CTA to update/edit the time…

Bad:

• the CTA to review & edit is at the very bottom
• most of the criticisms for the group weekly report apply here as well
• on blank days, there’s no CTA for adding time

Idea: an opportunity to reflect on the week.

Good: the weekly activity email is automatic! People love reports and our reporting is pretty powerful.

Bad…

• “Weekly activity” is a weakass subject line
• the email is ridiculously long, even tho we’re only 3 people and haven’t been logging a full 8 hours a day
• clipping is super bad!
• there’s no click thru target
• if they have more than 3 people logging a small amount, this is absurdly overwrought
• there’s no excitement
• no CTA to add missing time
• no CTA to see a more detailed report

This needs to be more active and forceful, with a summary of data rather than 8 million individual lines, and we need to have something to do like click to view and explore the full report, learn about reporting etc, etc.

Observations:

• “Welcome to Noko” as a subject line is just… so boring and static
• this email has waaaaayyy too many things going on
• E_TOO_MANY_BOXES
• we should focus on getting people to track their first entry or import data, even, rather than repeat details they probably didn’t forget because they JUST did it…
• far too many things to click…
• honestly I don’t like the photos
• don’t think it focuses enough on the trial aspect
• doesn’t help the person DO anything
• the tone is kinda smarmy

I would really love to ask a question here, or in the app onboarding, to learn why they want to track their time (if they bill or don’t bill etc). To then serve up relevant content. Because the rest of the onboarding is mostly about billing.