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.

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’ve been laid up the last couple days with a glutening (ughhhh fucking gluten), but Thomas is working on embedding Noko reports into web pages (for the Growth Stacking project itself!!) and the rest of the team is working on changing up our trial.

A long, long time ago, we switched to a 14-day trial with no credit card required, and changed up our onboarding email sequence accordingly. It was supposed to be an experiment… theoretically, removing the CC requirement should increase our conversion to trial, and the shorter 14-day limit should have spurred people to act… but then I got sick and never checked back in, and neither did anyone else.

The experiment didn’t work.

We’re going back to a 30-day, CC-required trial.

No, not because we want to rely on people forgetting to cancel. We have always and will always send ample notification.

We’re going back to CC trials because of human nature.

The key to converting trials is creating success.

You can’t create success if people don’t take 5 minutes to actually try the software out.

Yep, you can work on your onboarding interface, and your supportive lifecycle emails. We did work a lot on those.

But a lot of our trials end up not making even one single time entry.

It’s not because they don’t care or aren’t really in the market.

We’re all busy, and have so many conflicting demands on our time, that a deadline (with teeth) is sometimes the only way to get us to take any action, even towards something we want.

I know I’m not the only one who’s immediately signed up for a no-deadline trial, taken 5 seconds to poke around, gotten distracted and forgot it ever existed.

That’s why launches and live events are such powerful marketing tools: they create a deadline to decide, in or out.

The SaaS equivalent is being very aware that you have an upcoming deadline to pay or cancel.

And your level of commitment to trying the app is so much higher when you’ve already gone to the trouble to take out your wallet.

In some cases, more friction leads to better results.

I absolutely know that there’s room for improvement in our onboarding UI and emails, and the app interface itself overall — there are so many ways I can create more sucess, *faster*… and that’s part of my plan.

But first we’re going back to the thing that worked.

I’m not committing to getting anything else done myself at this point because I’ve got one, maybe two days before I spend all day getting an infusion that will leave me groggy if not actually asleep.

I’m going to try to review the trial emails and sketch out the improved onboarding UI. But we shall see.

While Thomas fights with Cloudflare and fixes a few last-minute issues… I thought I might as well lay out my long- and short-term plans for #GrowthStacking, the initiative and the site/design/toolset itself.

My ultimate goal (aside from massively growing Noko) is to come up with a growth framework and a tool for executing that framework which also, coincidentally, will become part of the Nokoverse.

Thereby furthering my core mission of growing my business by helping you grow *yours*.

And specifically, I prefer to execute my mission through research, analysis, design, education, systems, tools.

So here’s the big plan:

1. publicity for Noko +
2. fodder + new products for my biz education business +
3. building reputation for both me and Noko +
4. a lasting, powerful tool that is a compelling reason to use Noko…

It’s a win-win-win-win.

That’s the big, long-term plan.

The smaller, short-term plan is…

1. a landing page,
2. a newsletter, and
3. a micro-blog

That’s what we’re launching today, Feb 7, 2020.

Although I’m not publicly sharing this micro-blog today.

I’m gonna wait a week so there’s some good juicy stuff in here, ripe for binging.

The rough development plan…

Think I’m gonna syndicate this microblog into the nokotime.com/growth site with JSON, rather than direct people here. So I can segment stuff by categories.

Then I’ll work on some custom content pages like timelines, and embedded Noko reports for the GS project.

Then… I’ll work up a rough-ass, internal-only version of my specialized to-do app that is going to power the project, and eventually serve as both marketing (public/free version) and a feature for Noko (increasing the value of the product for customers).

This is a 2-3 month project. Every step of the way is useful, and nothing is wasted.

Big plans. Tiny steps.