Episode Transcript
So, I didn't want to announce this Just yet, but this week we acquired user ping.io. So originally it was MailBoat and we changed the name to user ping, which we'll get into in a second. But the gentleman who we acquired it from posted something on Twitter. And so. I guess the cat's out of the bag. I was hoping to get a little bit more time. Cause it's still sort of wait-list and I'm like, you can't just sign up for it and start using it. It's there's there's still a wait list in front of it. So I don't love weightlifting stuff. I've never run a process like that.
It's I think it's as a user, it sucks. And the whole FOMO thing, like what am I 12 years old? Like, dude, I'm not standing in a line for anything anymore. So. I don't like releasing products like this. Some people love it, but that's not, that's not my style anyways. So all that being said, it's still waitlisted. So if you're interested in signing up.
You still have to click on join the waitlist, but we'll try and funnel people in as quickly as possible. The reason that we bought this, this falls into one of our kind of boring bets here. So I know last week we were talking about all the fancy self with generative AI this week is back to boring. What does boring mean email stuff?
User paying, lets founders send onboarding emails. So one pain in the ass thing that you have to do almost every time you set up a new company or a new idea is once the user signs up, you want to kind of send them a drip onboarding sequence and just say, you know, welcome. Here's you know, some, some more information.
Here's our link to our discord channel. Here's our community. And, you know, maybe in day two they say, okay, you know, there's a sequence to the emails step. So they won welcome day two might be. Here's how here's a case study on how so-and-so got value from the product, or however you want to run that process. But either way you need some kind of tool. That's going to be sending this drip email sequence and setting those up as a pain in the ass. And it's also really expensive. So.
For us now we have nine companies that we are, we have not, we've done nine acquisitions. So across our, just our own portfolio, the tooling can get quite expensive. So for the price point at which we bought this company, we'll already be saving money as compared to another tool that we're switching from, which is called loops. So no shade on the, on.
I think his name is Chris awesome guy, the products, the products. Nice. But it turned out that we found user ping and it's, it's basically. At feature parody with loops and we decided to buy it. So, no matter what we're going to win here, right? We're going to win just based on the fact that we're going to save money by using this tool across our own portfolio.
If we get any marginal customers above that, which we will. That will be just bonus, right? I've talked about a thesis like a thousand times on here. We still don't have one. But another idea that I kick around is the idea of becoming more vertically integrated. So. For us, that means we are using tools that we own to manage our own software companies. One of those tools could be user ping. So again, user paying, you would send your events to user paying and then you could do cool stuff like.
If the user takes action X in the app, then send them this email or add them to this drip sequence. You can do things like if they take action X, but not action, Y then send this email. They signed up, but they'd never actually took the first step to activate whatever that is for you in sheet best that might be adding like a Google spreadsheet and screenshot API. It might be taking their first screenshot.
We know roughly how many screenshots it takes before somebody signs up and starts paying. And so if they're not there, but they're on their path there, maybe we can use these small. Nudges to get them to activate faster. It also just reduces customer support. So people aren't asking the obvious questions and still people will much prefer just to hit that little chat bubble, as opposed to going and searching and digging for the answer on their own, which is why we bought support guy.
For that exact reason. So where's this going? So right now, user ping just does email. That's all it does. It just does the email side of things. So you can send events to it and the sequencing works and you can do the, if user signs up, then send the Well email sequence. If the user takes action X but not action. Y then.
Then send them, then send them an email. Does that today? What I think is also needed is the ability to send an app notification. So not necessarily those, those annoying, like Google Chrome, like, oh, subscribe to get updates for all those shady news articles. But. More, so like a pop-up. So the next time they log into the app, after they've taken.
Action X, but not Y you can prompt them to take action. Why inner calm has a tool just like this, but being able to broadcast notifications like this, either as an email or as an in-app notification. Is lovely and the idea to. I, you know, Tik TOK does this actually really well. The next time you log into the app, it'll replay your notifications. So it looks like when somebody followed you two days ago, but you haven't logged in for two days. You'll log in and it'll say, so-and-so followed you.
And it feels more it just feels more responsive, right? Like the stuff that's happening right now, right in front of you. And so the next time, the user logs in to prompt them at that time to take the next step to. To become activated is really, really helpful, not only for the users, but also for getting your conversion rates up.
So I still struggle mentally with where this product ends and an analytics product begins. The reason is basically I will have all the necessary information. To build a really cool analytics product. If you're sending me all of your events from, from all of the activities that somebody is taking in your app. So they clicked on this button, they tried this new feature, all of that data. If you send it to user paying in theory, we'll have that. And we could build a really cool analytics dashboard that says.
Show me all the users that have, have used feature X, but not Y all that kind of cool stuff. So I've tried and failed to build a product like this before for XO, just for us internally. And I always seem to revert back to using this product called megabase, which is not one of our own, but I just love this thing. They do have a free tier, but even if you upgrade to pro it's like.
Usually 500 bucks a month when you really need to upgrade to pro is not, is really not that big of deal, otherwise, 85 bucks a month. And then I think they have still their, they have their free open source version. So this is what we use and it's amazing. Just connects to your database and you can run queries and you don't have, you can write SQL, but you don't have to. So we have a bunch of cool dashboards that tell us everything. So here, I mean, I can show you this. I can show you this for.
Super send for example. So here's our Metta base dashboard for super send. So I have to make sure that our hourly Crohn's are working a user count events by day. So, you know, okay, good. Yesterday we sent about 22,600 emails. Okay. That. That feels about right. You know, we're kind of going up into the right on events by day.
30 day, active users, user count number of paying customers. Number of Events by different types of, and super send. You can send like LinkedIn or Twitter emails. So we have all that broken out. This dashboard took like, you know, 20 minutes to create. And I look at it every day. And this tool is free. So hence why I kind of still get confused about where I feel like the, a product like user pink would end and an analytics product would begin, even though we might have in theory, the same data to build.
To build the To build an analytics product.
I just can't quite wrap my head around what the correct feature set would be for a product led growth analytics tool. And, you know, we've logged into June dot. So, and, and played around with most of these tools and nothing's really just hit quite yet. So at this point, we have a lot of little things. So screenshot sheet, best, those are kind of flying, not a lot of engineering effort required, low customer support.
These things are beautiful. They're growing it's lovely. Analytics has been a little bit of a problem child, but since the rewrite. And the launch of version two things are stabilizing, looking good. It's on a path. Called DM. We're still investing pretty heavily into engineering. This is taking, we have three full-time engineers. So one to two of them are spending most of their time on cold DM right now. I'd say like 85% of their time on cool. DM support guy is still getting a lot of early love. We just acquired that one recently.
It's got some features missing. It's got some stuff that's confusing. But we're working through that. So all of these ones on the left are kind of in-flight they're on, you know, they're assigned engineering resources. We kind of have a plan for growth or they're already generating revenue and things are solid.
On the right-hand side or are things that are potentially dangerous. So user paying doesn't have any users yet. Again, we're not really in the business of buying zero MRR products or pre-revenue products, but we did in this case again, mostly because we can save money just using it internally and we will make it available to, for other people to subscribe to. But that was the primary.
Value driver is that we will win by buying this product just because we can use it ourselves, which is great. Sales that is something we built and SAS deals is something we are launching.
And SAS deals is an AppSumo deal site. So we as acquirers often see that these companies will run lifetime deals. And then cite that as their revenue and think that that is going to increase the value of their company. Whereas for us, from our perspective, when you have a shit ton of free users that already paid you and they're lifetime deals, we're never going to see revenue from that. Those are liabilities to us.
And so we're trying to create a different path for founders who obviously need. Customers, but don't want to offer lifetime deals. So SAS deals we'll offer once a week. We're going to pick one cool tool and we're just going to have a Stripe discount code so that they can still get monthly recurring revenue.
Even if it's at a reduced rate, because if the discount, it will still add enterprise value and, and it will increase their, the product's value of. If, and when they decide to sell that company,
Now that we have all these different products that are kind of floating around and a lot of them need a shit ton of help getting off the ground. It's times like these, when I feel like it would have been better. If we could have bought a bunch of the same tools that we could sell to the same audience,
so, not only would we be able to build the software once and sell it twice, of course, but we'd also be able to acquire a customer and potentially cross sell them on different products. We tried that with screenshot and sheep S early on there's relatively little overlap. I feel like between those two customer bases and when we tried to cross sell it, it.
Just straight up didn't work. I think we got like two or three customers and you know, at 20 bucks a month. Right. So it just, wasn't a very effective strategy for us. However, if we narrowed our focus into sales tools, for example, and we had a massive list of people that are, that are engaged in sales activities.
They may very well buy one or multiple of the products. And that's an interesting thing I keep thinking about is could we be come vertically integrated? Could we start acquiring tools that have the same audience? Could we buy bigger? Could we buy smaller? We're still even after nearly three years of operating, figuring these things out, but this is one of the great benefits of not having any investors is that we don't have to answer to anybody and we can just.
Run these experiments and see what works for us. We're still on the path or on a war path to bootstrap our way to a million dollars in recurring revenue. Annual recurring revenue. And of course, if that's still not enough, I can't help. But to, well, Cody, most studio has been around for a while and super center has been around for a while now, but I'm still have a bunch of other little projects that
I can't help, but, but build and explore it's it's it's mostly how I learn about new technologies by thinking of a new product that might use that new technology and Trying to figure out how to, how to make it work.
And that's it. Acquisition number nine, user pink.io. Came out a little earlier than we wanted to, but that's life sometimes. See you next week.
