Using Customer Feedback To Build A Better Business

a lot of times as startups we're so focused on the next sale we might not be looking at low hanging fruit I'm going to be talking about a simple strategy for retention and product Market to sell like crazy so let's dive in let's get this done at the end I'll have a link to a doc where you can download or access any of the links or things I mentioned throughout the presentation I want to start by saying this quote by Andy Rachel if he says if you screw almost everything up you can still succeed how else would you be able to explain how a 25 year old running a billion dollar company if the market a major product and pulls it out of your hand this just goes to to break it down where if you find a great product Market fit you can sell your product even if it's not the ultimate product out there there's a lot of things that you can do to make it really competitive and side note I was inspired by the amazing crystal in my presentation he's actually giving me tons of tips and tricks on just being able to provide and Captivate an audience so I'm excited to jump in without further Ado my name is John Saunders probably didn't let you know I'll know that you're probably like who is this bald black guy talking to me right now but uh as a member of the ball gang with Chris you know I'm happy to be here so I'm a creative director and founder I'm also a geek and family man I'm also the founder of 54 digital which is a branding and design and development agency in Miami Florida I'm the founder of blackillustrations.com with myself and our team we create illustrations featuring people of color and then also the founder of urban log which is a financial literacy blog that was acquired last year with all that being said yeah yeah which is pretty cool congratulations man thank you thank you wow Bravo yeah yeah thank you thank you I I'm excited to talk today because a lot of things that I'm going to break down are things that I've used things that I've used well things that haven't you so well so this is going to be all based on experience I want to make sure that I'm providing a massive amount of value to to your audience first thing I want to talk about is product Market fit customers are buying using and telling others about the company's product in numbers large enough to sustain that product's growth and profitability product Market fit if you have to look at it visually think of the market right you have the entire Market it's a big circle then you have price right and they have a meeting point right in the middle where it's market price so if someone's looking for your product and you're in that same market and the price is exactly what they're looking for you're right there in that middle space and what gives you the secret sauce of all that is product product Market fit is right in the middle of all of that you've got your product right let's say it's a Transformer like Optimus we have in the background the market is Nostalgia right I'm a nostalgic guy I love the 80s and 90s and the price is just right I like it it's a little bit more expensive than I would usually get but Lego you get that quality so as you can see Optimus in the back is perfect product Market fit for myself now another visual is you have overall product and you have a Target custom we'll go back to Optimus right the Target customer is me I grew up with a Transformers lunchbox trying from her toys right so that Nostalgia piece I'm the target person now the underserved need is there hasn't been anything done by Lego in that space right and I'm a big Lego fan now the market is the value proposition meaning they're proposing that hey we have this Lego set that's amazing that actually transforms without you taking pieces apart we know that you're the perfect fit for it the feature set everything that it comes with and what makes that product unique and of course that user experience the unboxing the design and the visual aspect of that product all these items culminate into an amazing piece or product that I want to purchase that makes that product Market fit perfect for myself so today's goal is really to unlock product Market fit to gauge the health of your business and increase organic growth and lower acquisition costs great thing is a lot of the tools that I'll mention are completely free and you can use them without even signing up on some of these platforms and it's just going to give you a good idea of what's working in the market me coming from a design branding background it took years me to kind of learn some of these things so I'm hoping that I can translate some of these things over to you all today let's talk about the journey it's essentially six complete steps you have a problem and solution then you have determining your Target customer and some of you might be further along in this journey than you think the finding that value proposition implementing the product measuring the impact of that product which I'm going to show you some free tools that you can add onto your website today to get that done and then of course identify power users and sell like a madman or woman or non-binary problems and solutions we want to talk about the the core problem we want to First refine it so let's talk about this a little bit when you think of the problem and solution that you're solving for your specific business you want to think of the core thing that you're working through at our agency we work primarily with startups a lot of times startups don't really have like brand Direction they don't really know where they're heading in that regard so we need to think of that core problem and really refine that goal next list the solution literally take out a notion doc or who Doc and list the solution to that problem in The Branding and design world of that solution could be we craft profitable websites for startups right not only do we create websites but we make sure that they're profitable so that way the startup can either raise funds convert sales or sign up consumer and then connect it to a user type meaning you're a key demographic or key buyer Persona that you want to be able to go after and that audience you want to equate Let's do an example here and this is coming from being a branding and web designer for more than a decade when we were doing illustrations for clients especially custom builds there was just a lack of diversity in the illustrations I just didn't see any black representation on websites if I did the images looked a little strange and wonky the solution to this was dozens of illustrations that represented different types of people so the problem that we saw was a lack of diversity and illustrations the solution was a platform where we could sketch design and release illustrations featuring people of color in the examples that you're sharing right now it seems like the solution is the mere opposite of the problem are there instances where you see a problem and the solution isn't that way because sometimes it's not as obvious so if we see a lack of diversity in illustrations and we see that we can all kind of feel that is it always that okay then we just need to have illustrations that represent diverse groups of people or is it something larger more systemic underneath the surface of all of this as to why there isn't a representation in stock art it absolutely is systemic and that's from just technology as a standpoint as a whole historically there haven't been there hasn't been a ton of diversity in the design in the brain in the development space a lot of folks are creating content and it's not like to be malicious it's just they're creating content and structuring online entities based on what they know right you don't know what you don't know or you're not paying attention outside of like your realm of of reality I think that when we think about these questions it's like you said we need to think of the bigger picture and think of okay this is one solution but the solution could be bigger than this because it all stems from X it really depends in regards to problem and solution I think as a business owner start with the short hanging fruit and then you can always work out basically As you move forward the reason why I asked this question as a brand strategist and a facilitator working with your clients problems I'm reading this book it's called what's the problem and it says like you know people get frustrated at elevators because it takes a really long time right and always feels longer than it needs to be you would say well the solution is to get a faster motor to to have the elevator move faster or upgrade the operating system so it can anticipate certain traffic flows and anticipate the needs of where people are going to be in the morning they're going to go down to the ground floor probably towards the evening and afternoon they're going to go up and so it might do that but it said that oftentimes what we need to do is reframe the problem the problem is people are frustrated while waiting for the elevator not that we need faster elevators that the problem isn't that this elevator is slow so when they understood that by reframing it they found that the solution was to put me mirrors in the lobbies where elevators are or interesting artwork so when you push the button people check themselves out they're like how do I look okay I'm looking good and they are distracted by that and so that is an elegant solution to the problem that's what I was trying to get at with you know like I have a problem solution you see where I'm going with this no I love how you said that because as soon as you brought the elevator I was like that made me think of that you know what I mean how the solutions are like I got an elevator when I was on vacation they had the big mirror and you're looking at yourself making sure you look good and then by the time you stop you know you're at your destination or like the close button which doesn't really work but it's more of like a uh a placebo right where yeah you feel like the button's closing faster because you're pushing that button but no that's a good point and yeah sometimes that solution is out of the box and not the complete opposite of the problem so the next step after after you've kind of solved for that smaller low hanging fruit a problem and solution it's really about determining the target audience what I usually do and I've launched a few businesses I'll first analyze the product and service it's sounds obvious of course but you also want to look at the competition I want to spend some time here because I want to show you some tricks that I've used and leverage that help me look at competitors in the space because you don't necessarily want to emulate those people but you do want to be able to borrow components and look at what they've done that's done well and be able to to use that in your facilitation of promoting your brand and finding that market so when it comes to the top three you want to analyze your product and service you want to pique the competition or look at the competition in your space and then you also want to choose a segment in regards to your target market now if you go back to number one analyzing your product and service you want to look at what need do you fulfill right what's the main focus and what need do you fulfill for your main clients also what problem does it solve and then lastly who would benefit if we looked at this from thinking of a brand like Lego right what need do I need to fulfill you want to help children or even adults be able to purchase these toys and be able to build these beautiful sets the problem you solve is great for stem right these are educational motivational toys so the problem you're solving is that downtime that a kid might have they can use that time being able to build Legos and be constructed and then who would you benefit the buyers the child who's working on that Lego set and then you're also benefiting the parent because if the child gets good enough they can go and do something else while the child is working on that Lego set improving their motor skills so think about those when you're going through that Target Market fit then you want to ask questions so I actually want to break this down because I feel like as company owners agency owners or Freelancers we're not asking enough questions a lot of times we're making assumptions we need to be able to ask those right questions to be able to make informed decisions let me show you an example if we look at this from a perspective of our business black illustrations we at for every single illustration pack that we create we ask our audience so the way that we've done this is one we make a request you can go to their website you can add in your name your email your business name and then you can add details for the illustrations that you're looking for now this could be women in Tech Sports children and parents whatever that user is looking for now what we've done is we've connected that to an airtable database so we're asking our audience questions to understand what they want now what we've done is we've created an airtable database which is pretty much like a form completion platform where they add in that information and they add in the details now the biggest part here is what we've done is with airtail we can pull out keywords so if I type in healthcare or I type in health anything in that regard it can tell me how many people have mentioned that keyword so now I can look and say okay I know that 500 people have filled out this form 45 of them mentioned Healthcare we know that that's a priority for a lot of users that use our platform let's go ahead and create an illustration pack based on that I tell you eight times out of ten times that we've done this we'll release that pack and our audience goes crazy because it's something that the majority of them ask for and so we'll work down that list working through keywords finding content that would resonate with that user and then creating an illustration pack around that that would resonate with the largest audience that we have on the site all that comes from the form we have that's prominent on the website that we promote and tell people about people about on a continuous basis that way they know okay well if I didn't get my illustration pack this week maybe they'll release it next week and it just helps us create a repository of potential content that we can create for an audience for our target audience and it really helps us focus and find that Niche and so what we've realized a lot of people ask for Education packs so we've done Stem Elementary education high school education college education because we've seen a lot of our users and our target market our Educators and so we want to create content that will work well with that audience how often are you releasing new packs how responsive are you and your team and able to address the requests yes we release one pack every week so about four per month so right now we have I think about 40 illustration packs on the site now we continuously roll through that list so we're going to increase use that to probably about two or three in this next month or so but uh we're able to roll them out fairly quickly and each pack usually has between like 50 to 60 or 70 illustrations is it the same illustrator and artist doing the packs so there's a consistent style it's all different no it's all different styles because we want to make sure we hit all different Market types and illustration types you know black and white line realistic cartoony 2D 3D yeah yeah so we can um our audience with all those and and we look and see like which ones are selling more and which ones are selling less and then we also have free ones as well that we offer to our audience next thing I want to talk about is and again this is my guy tanjiro he's a character from Demon Slayer probably one of my favorite animes he's definitely a leader and he's always looking to improve and he looks at the competition he works with the competition to make sure that he's using that to improve his skill set I want to talk a little bit about looking at the competition making a visual board which I'll go over and show you all that I know you know a ton about that with with Chris and skyscapes uh research sales and tactics and then view content strategy and engagement you also want to look at their technology as well which we'll go into detail on these ones highlighted in purple I'm going to go through that example now so I'm just going to pull up figma really quick what we like to do is create like just a visual kind of inspo board what we usually do is create like a website inspo this is similar to soundscapes and what you've done Chris and so what we do here is we'll we'll take screenshots of these different websites there's actually a Chrome extension called full page which I'll share in the dock as well where you can download the full page of a website and then what we'll do is we'll drop them into a figma file and then we'll just add comments we'll say okay four fun Forerunner is a favorite which is a website competitor this website actually has a clearly defined Focus area bold movement on the page the dislikes might be like maybe too much movement so we usually put the URL we'll put the lights and the dislikes on these that way this can either help the design team with inspiration but also it helps us look at the competition and take notes on what's working well and what's not working well show you some ways to figure that out as well ultimately what we'll also look at is we'll look at some of their technology so website called appalyzer and what it'll do is it'll tell you what technology a website's using so if you click a website you go to it for example you'll hit the button web elizer the Chrome extension and it'll break down all the technology that that site's using so I can see that this sites using Microsoft Clarity you choose the Google analytics you choosing webflow as a page builder the CDN is fastly and so now I can look at the competitors like if I'm an e-commerce and see what platform they're using what third party they're using now if you want to do a deep dive into that technology you can actually go to builtwith.com and it'll break down every single entity on that website so if I do nike.com I can know all of the technologies that that site's using down to analytics and tracking any widgets language apps content delivery Network so now I get a bird's eye view of every single thing that that competitor is using in that space now lastly if you want to know the type of traffic and info on that website you can use a website called similar web and similar web is really cool because I can put a URL in again it works the more traffic that a website has the more details and data you'll get but you'll receive information that's pretty awesome like for example you can get info like your Global ranking of your website an average or estimate of total visits per month the bounce rate the average visit duration also traffic and engagement right where that traffic is coming from you'll also get audience demographics which I think is huge which will break down how much how many male and how many female are using the website and their age distribution right are they Millennials or the hnz you also get a pull or an aggregate of all the competitors and similar websites so if you're like okay I need to create a list of competitors you can just go to that bottom part of similar web and you'll see all your competitors in that space and their category ranked so then you can go in and look at those other competitors and one thing that I like to do is look at their top performing Pages they're their top performing social media networks and then I can start to build a strategy around that based on what's working for competitors so it's just a really great way and a free way to do that and be able to grab that low hanging through without you know spending a lot a ton of cash up front to find out a lot about these competitors in the space I don't know any of these tools but it's awesome that you dig that deep into it to kind of find out this information it's super helpful awesome no glad to help when you're determining that Target Market you made a visual board you've researched the sales and tactics of these competitors and you view their content strategy engagement tools like similar web and you also look at their technology through appleizer and built with now you're at a point where you can choose a segment so I usually recommend creating a buyer Persona now a lot of people just pull this out of thin air I think leveraging your competitors and looking at that information from similar web like how excuse in regards to them and female what the average age group is that almost gives you kind of a general idea of your ideal audience here's an example this is Loyola you can pull it an image I usually pull over from like Google images or someone I think would fit that criteria you can add gender age their education occupation marital status their location and then description and then based on your business type you can add even more right whether likes whether interests or their Hobbies I usually suggest creating two to three and Max just so you have kind of a benchmark to work from and again all this is rooted in real life data from your competitors so you're able to formulate this buyer Persona and ultimately someone that you'll be able to Target now this might change over time as you see more and if you have tools like Google analytics you might be able to see that more in detail But ultimately this is going to give you kind of a general idea of who you want to Target in regards to that but what I would recommend is in other ways that you can look at finding that audience review your contacts right anyone that's filled out the form if you collect information like their phone number or their email or their age make sure you create a database or a doc for that data to be able to review your contacts and look at them and then look at sales feedback talk to current customers ask them questions ask them about their experience talk to them about how you worked with them or work to to really get some feedback on that after experience and then also you can just interview customers like it's it doesn't take much time to jump on the phone and just talk to them ask them about their experience and really just get an understanding of who they are because one that's going to help with product Market fit and two that's really going to help them become a brand advocate for everything that you do so we talked about problem and solution we talked about the term and Target customer now let's talk a little bit about defining that value proposition and this part I'm going to make this as simple as possible your value proposition details what you offer customers and why they should choose you just use a simple formula this will help you nine times out of ten it might be a little bit long-winded but I think it's going to be really helpful you can have something like we help and then in Brackets Target customer your ideal customer do the customer need or Problem by offering the product feature and benefit so there's three kind of buckets there so one example would be we help startups do conversions online by offering profitable website design with that one sentence I can get an elevator and I can tell someone hey we help startups do conversions online or increasing for inversions online by offering profitable website design and then that individual will know exactly what I do just from that one sentence and that is going to help you cultivate that value proposition that you can use across the board in all of your marketing and visual materials and so if you go to like our agency website it says we craft profitable Brands and websites for starters really simple really effective and you can get everything you need to understand what we do above the fold without even scrolling so let's talk about implementing the product y'all as y'all can see I got Optimus up here uh which you talked about earlier three ways you could do this of course there's a ton of other ways but promoting the product you want to have of course a website social media and then you want to be able to show your work so I'm going to go into detail on these because you know if she's just at the first few you'll be like okay I know that already but I want to show you some some caveats and some ways that you could do that website we all know we need a website we use webflow for most of our builds just because it's a great platform they have webflow templates that are available if you don't want to design and work with figma then development I always recommend doing that when you're building out your platforms I'm going to focus more on social media and showing your work because I those two items that could completely change my life what I always recommend is working and creating audience around what you do specifically so since we work with startups since we work with web designers branding folks a lot of the content and things that we create are around that with YouTube videos that's what I'm doing I'm basically answering questions that I get from individuals in YouTube content so for example I'll create an Instagram story showing my work and I'll say hey if anyone has questions let me know that list of questions that I get I'll turn those into bite-sized pieces of content that'll either be Tick Tock content or YouTube videos that way I know these are questions that people are asking and I know that this is stuff that will resonate with my audience I understand the fact that if I'm able to take this question and answer in a long format they'll feel like this is something that they can use that's actionable in the future one example is that when we create wireframes I get a lot of questions comes on wireframes and creating them and how to do them more efficiently so I did a video on three ways to wireframe your website in record time and now that content can live on YouTube Forever the great thing about that is YouTube is essentially a search engine so that content can resonate for one month three months six months a year two years three years after that now if you want to go a step further you can add some type of call to action or some type of conversion in that description for that video whether it's a course or checking out content or or looking at some other type of other resource that content just lives on for a long long time I know Chris can attend to that having an amazing YouTube channel of content that's just phenomenal I know that that content might live there for one two three four years and it still resonates with audiences today the third piece about this and I want to talk about one of my favorite books is show your work by Austin Cleon essentially he talks about just showing what you're working on right if you're working on a wireframe or website design or a branding strategy just showcase where you're at in the process show your sketches is show how you came up with ideas and Concepts you're essentially documenting your journey and what you're doing in that is you're creating a a repository one of all of your work you're staying top of mind because you're sharing that content with your audience on a consistent basis and if they're not in the market to buy now six months a year from now they might be in the market and if they're thinking of working with someone that does what you do if you've been posting that content consistently they're going to want to work with you I have this example where a client approaches two years ago and they're like hey we want to do this build out we gave the proposal they're like hey that's a little bit higher right now we can't do it but you know we want to come back two years later they got the series a they came back to us and said hey you're the only agency we want to work with you've posted all this content consistently you know you can do a great job and so it just solidifies you and creates brand advocacy all over you have all these people talking about what you can do based on you just showing your process and that could be the ups and downs of your business that could be your processes and then if you are sharing client work you do want to make sure you get permission for that but otherwise make sure you're showing your work and documenting your progress next uh thing I want to talk about is measuring impact that I'm going to open up some tools here and you'll be able to use some free tools so let's go ahead and dive in so as you can see I've got uh writing or Ryu from Street Fighter I'm a huge Street Fighter fan so if y'all want that smoke let me know I'm online and I'm happy to play so measuring impact I I chose this image just because uh Ryu is doing the hadouken which is a very impactful move so track your progress uh first things first Google analytics we all know Google analytics uh analytics 4 is actually coming out soon which is going to cause a lot of of issues but not something outside of this so track your progress Google analytics that's one and Microsoft Clarity if you install these two tools on your website and your online platform and listen it could be a freelancer website agency website whichever website you have these two tools will help you make super informed decisions decisions on your website and impact that you have also lastly look at your social media engagement most websites have insights that you can use to find out more about your audience and just so you all have a clear understanding Google analytics is essentially a tool that you can add on your website that tracks your data and analytics so you can find out where people are spending time what pages they're spending time on how many new users you have and so forth it's really a detailed and free tool that most websites should have now the overview section shows your website's current audience at a glance acquisition will tell you where your visitors originated from Behavior will tell you like what pages are performing well and what the top pages look like your audience demographics will literally tell you the age and gender of your users coming to your website the more aggregate data you have the better so the sooner you can install this the more data you have to play with to make those decisions also social media engagement look at tweets feedback and responses if you haven't already this is one of our tweets from one of our users one once you have analytics installed you'll be able to pull data on your website I'll show you on an example of one of the websites that we manage here I'll pull up like 90 days of data that way you have a little bit of something to work with so first off you want to go to audience overview now here you'll be able to pull an aggregate amount of data here so I'm going to pull up let's do 90 days yeah so we've had 56 000 users visit the website we've had 55 000 new users right so about so that's a lot of a new users average duration on the size about a minute and 10 and two pages so now I can go and like look at demographics so let's look at demographics overview most of the users 30 are 25 to 34. 35 to 44 or 21 are 21 and then excuse about 55 female 44 male so these things are already giving me ideas of what type of content that things would resonate with that audience also I can look at their behavior right how many are new how many returning audience and I can I can look at that to look at okay how can I bring more drivers into this ecosystem one thing that I always look at is acquisition overview because it tells me how people are getting into excitement and seeing what I have so I can say Okay 27 000 people were direct 14 000 from social media the third one is from organic search next is referral so this tells me okay I need to double down on our direct process right maybe we can do more SEO maybe we can do more content that would resonate with our audience so it just helps you make more decisions better decisions in regards to measuring your impact for social media engagement what I would always recommend is creating a repository of any positive or feedback that you receive or social proof so screenshots of slack messages posts from Twitter from social media create a folder and just call it reviews and tweets or accolades or something like that and now you can use that content for social proof on your website on visual aspects of course you want to get permission from that individual as well but now you can use that content to to promote your brand and you know Garner social proof from your audience and now you have this huge repository of all these testimonials and positive feedback from your customers that you can then use to make decisions in your brand John are you scraping that manually are you doing that automatically no it's uh manual yeah so it's basically we just taught our team anytime you see like positive feedback or reinforcement just take a screenshot of it and then add it to like our drive folder and you know what I missed one actually I need to talk about Microsoft Clarity so Microsoft Clarity is another free tool it's actually a heat map and screen recording software so you can install this snippet on your website you're able to find a plethora of ways that you can make decisions on your site so I'll show you visuals so for example when I sign in I can hit recordings and now I can look at real life recordings of people as they're interacting with the website if I look at this video right they spent five minutes and 11 seconds on the website I can click play and now I can watch as that user walks through the website and what's great about it is it can tell me okay well these menu items they didn't clip there but the clip to this page or they didn't click this one but they went up to the top we've made menu changes based on this we've changed our search bar based on these and a lot of times it'll tell you how a user is actually interacting on the website so now I can see okay they went to this page they're scrolling down right they're scrolling through that illustration pack they're looking at the images and now they're clicking download okay great that was a conversion so now I can look and I can see okay well maybe I need to add or remove the download page higher so that way it could they could they could convert at a faster rate so we actually went and put the Download Above The Fold right next to the type and so this helps us make decisions now you can look at recordings and then you can also look at the heat map in real time and that way you can see where people are clicking what type of flow they're using to go through the website so Microsoft Clarity recordings and heat Maps phenomenal job at this and you'll be able to make this you'll be able to use this to measure the impact of their website lastly I want to talk a little bit about defying power users to sell like crazy this is the last piece of the puzzle so as you can see you got He-Man right there he basically says I have the power some of y'all might be too young to remember that but it's horrible so power he was like all right I believe it starts with by the power of gray skull yeah see thank you Chris see you know man you know exactly I know it's it's so funny too because uh it was like on TV one day and it was on and my son he's five he's like watching he's like Dad this is this is kind of cool he like liked it I was like I was kind of shocked but anyway so power users uh they are the most engaged customers you have of course we've talked about that they interact with your product the most when compared to other users so if you think of like your power users I think most businesses have this you might not have thought about it or maybe you haven't documented those individuals but when you think about okay I need to maybe make a definitive list of my power users because those are The Advocates that have really help sell what you do think of repeat users or regulars folks that you know them on a first day basis maybe the email told you a few times maybe they contacted you out of blue but you know them on a first name basis also people that are vocal or share their insights and again these insights might not always be positive they might be like yeah I love your platform but XYZ those are the people you want to talk to and those are the people that could be considered power users because they're using your platform so much they're able to find the issues that you need to fix or they see the holes in what you provide I think they can fill it with a specific solution they're also influential they're either talk about you on social media they share it they scream your name from the rooftops and people actually listen to them and take them into account so you might get a new client be like oh yeah I was referred by Jimmy and then lastly their early adopted let's say you launch a product you get it started you get it out there these are the people that are hopping on as quickly as possible so four things repeat users regulars vocals and they share their insights influential people and early adopters now let's look at the adoption Journey as a whole let's say they're going and they're trying to find out what you do who you are you e-commerce store it's the aha moment right maybe they found it on social media maybe a friend told them about them they found out who you are so that's the first major step now activated right they're visiting your website they're scrolling they're looking through okay what can I buy let's see what what's the product like how's the information structured now selected right they see a product they really like and now they're getting ready to buy boom they checked out you get that chain signature on your phone you know that transaction went through and now they're paying customer now a paying customer is great but they might not necessarily be a power user now they're becoming a pro right maybe they've come back to your website and made a second purchase maybe they left you a testimonial or maybe they told two or three of their friends about it now they become a complete Advocate and so when you think of the adoption journey and you think of overall a power you where a power user sits in this whole mechanism it's Pro and Advocate someone that's a pro at your product right that uses your product on a regular basis that buys from you that tells others about it and then Advocate which is someone that is actively saying this product is amazing I need to let everyone I know know about this product so it starts out aha then activated then they selected a product they paid and now they're a pro and Advocate that's when you want your power user to sit the benefits of a power user are increased ACU or average customer value you think about a customer that purchases a product they come back once twice three times like myself I would consider myself a power user of the future products because you've taken like eight or nine courses at the agency uh we're always looking actively on ways we can invest back and so our that customer value can go from fifty dollars to you know five thousand dollars and so instead of going out and trying to find all these different clients who have a power user that can supplement you know five to ten other people also it reduces CAC customer acquisition cost this is relatable to ACV or average customer value because that customer is staying longer that customer acquisition cost drops right because now I have with someone that's coming in spending 2 000 and it costs us 50 to acquire them now that acquisition dropped costs as we get them to purchase more products you also get instant feedback that person will hit you with ah this kind of sucks y'all need to update it or hey this is great I think you need to change x y z then they can also identify sources of value there might be things outside of what you're thinking about that might be really beneficial that a power user being in it every day can look at and say and identify and say wow this is a great piece of value I think this is something you could offer here's an example of one of our power users her name is Tiara this is a review that she left she's purchased tons of our illustration packs she works well with us here's another one and it's Kenya as well she does an amazing job also so when you think of this power user once you identify them make sure that you find ways to incentivize them and keep them coming back to your product listen update and connect with them to get feedback so if you look at the journey as a whole you have your problems right you determine that Target Market you define a value proposition for your company now you're implementing that product once you implement it now you're measuring the impact to make informed decisions on where you should go from there and now you're looking and you're identifying these power users that can help you sell like crazy so that's it y'all these are the tools and resources I posted a link to all the things that I mentioned today if you want to learn more about myself or the agency you can check out our agency website or my personal site or my social I'm pretty much John D Saunders on everything so check me out ask me questions you have and yeah that is a wrap well done John thank you very much oh thank you Chris I appreciate it I I have a few questions for you as you're going through this presentation who did you create this presentation for this presentation is for startup Founders folks that are starting out trying to really own in on their products and services and really find that product Market fit so that they can create power users in their business great and how do you define startup I'd say someone that's Scrappy someone that has a business an idea they probably have a website they might be selling a bit but there's still any infancy in regards to their MVP or minimum viable products so they might have hit in the market but they're not owned in on where they want to Target Their audience When I Look up the definition of a startup it says something like it's a it's a scalable business there's certain parts of it that make it a startup so like if I am a graphic designer and I start a website I'm not a start up per se do you have a same definition are you referring to the term more broadly I would say yeah I guess a little bit more broad so like if I sell a widget if I provide creative Services then I could be in a if I have a website those are the requirements right I would say a startup is it's a viable business model that you could potentially scale so someone might have a business idea that they've started but it still is infancy it hasn't gotten to the point where they've built it to a point where it's you know self-sustainable I guess they're still involved in day-to-day but you can see it as a scalable business model so I want to apply by the presentation to my line of questioning to you as it relates to this presentation what problem did you see that startup Founders have in their business that warranted you to sit down and try to walk them through this whole process I think a lot of times as startups we're so focused on the next sale we might not be looking at low-hanging fruit such as a power user right because you might have someone that's using a product that loves it but if you just gave them a little bit more attention they'd be able to give you feedback right on your product to help you improve it be able to say okay I feel like I'm influential in what they're creating I'm considered a power user I want to go and tell all my friends and family about this and that one person can bring in five or ten other people right and so I think that starters will always Focus about okay let's go get the next dollar let's go get the next client when you can look intrinsically and say okay we have these five clients that are amazing why don't we leverage them to help them bring in more or essentially build in more quality and products you leveraging those people I think it goes to the saying that it's easier and more profitable to keep the customers you already have than to chase the customers that you don't have but we often get that shiny object syndrome where we take for granted the customers we have we neglect and ignore how we can improve the customer service experience and then we go chase like oh there's a new customer there and there's a new customer and we keep chasing and then they're saying hey what about me and now I've gone from being an advocate to one who's going to slowly just check out mentally and I'm not going to talk about you anymore yeah I mean look at Instagram right Instagram had the perfect model images my I follow 500 people I see 500 people in my feed I have static images even carousels that was I feel like that was an improved product because now I'm able to swipe through and look through this carousel right but now they're like oh no we need to be like you know Tick-Tock and now it's like a whole video feed of people you don't even know it's like they're not listening to their main audio you just want to see our friends and we just want to see the pictures that they post but again it's just like you said shiny object syndrome well you've opened up a major can here I would be remiss if I just walked away from this so let's have a conversation about this has nothing to do with everything you've talked about before so you obviously have some misgivings about the direction of where Instagram is going right what I would like to do is just to have a chat with you about this because Instagram and Facebook same company used to be by quite a wide margin the number one and two social media Platforms in the world and then there's this little sleeper called Tick Tock and Tick Tock keeps growing and growing until recently I saw a report or somebody said Tick Tock now has more hours logged in and then Facebook and Instagram combined no way yes and their trajectory given their their rate of growth in terms of their business model they are tracking ahead in terms of Revenue than where Facebook and Instagram were at this point in time and so if you're Zuck you're sitting there thinking I'm not going to lie down and go out without a fight I'm not going to become the my space of whatever and so you can see why they have to change their business model because Tick Tock has figured out a way to hook people and keep them on platform that seemingly no other algorithm has been able to do so you see here there's there's a war happening on the front and we're not even privy to it because we're just like hey why are you show me all these things I I don't want to see and why is everything vertical and video now hmm there's a reason why interesting that's an interesting perspective and it's true you know I mean maybe maybe people are just so Dynamic now they don't want to see those static images maybe I'm just like this old guy now trying to hold on to it hold on to the Past well there's a couple of things if you think about it static images and carousels require you to work as the user you have to read you have to flick through it and you have to kind of keep swiping and the amount of time in which you spend doing that is relatively low compared to the amount of time you spend watching a one or two minute video I know this because I know my own consumption habits I used to not like Tick Tock at all I'm on Tick Tock I'm afraid to get on Tick Tock because I know it knows what I want and I can't even do what I want I've never seen an algorithm like this ever in the history of social media it's right it's literally you go to the for you page and it's everything that you're interested in down to the team like I've never seen anything like it it's insane and what is insane about it is it doesn't require you as the content creator to find the audience you don't have to write captions you don't have to do hashtags it uses machine learning to study the video and listen to the audio and it looks at the patterns of people who watch the things that you like to watch it builds a massive Network and it figures out you must like this I'll tell you something I went in there to answer a few questions I couldn't even go to my page because I was swiping through one piece of content after the other I forgot why I was even on there right I'm not the only person it is super addictive I put a limit on like 25 minutes per day and then I have the app notification do you want to bypass this yeah five more minutes it's like yeah right man I've never seen anything like this and it's for everybody you know um you know I'm 36 so it's myself my sister my nieces deaf they're all everybody's using it there's something they've done and Zuck and Company are trying to figure out how to do something very similar it's not that we're all trying to be Tick-Tock it's like Tick Tock has figured out something and then they're trying to reverse engineer that thing that secret sauce the Colonel Sanders 11 herbs and spices is that sort of thing that's what's happening that's an interesting observation yeah I I didn't see it from that perspective yeah I mean could you imagine five years from now uh when when Tick Tock is the most dominant platform and Facebook and and Instagram are long forgotten like Distant Memories We'll be asking ourselves this question did Zuck respond in time and in the right way because if they don't do anything for sure the outcome is going to happen all right back to the topic at hand here okay um I don't think I have any other questions but I want to say something funny for the recording here uh let's see how this goes and you can just give me your honest reaction to it all right okay okay hey everybody what is up I'm super excited because we've done something you thought was nearly impossible we've resurrected someone from the dead he is not a hologram we've resurrected DMX he's on the show today to talk about what's up John [Laughter] you got it you got to do the DMX you're gonna drop some bars oh man I remember listening to his first album in high school man what a legend what a legend oh yeah you know what I find also fascinating about you I thought you were a little bit older because of your pop culture references not from your face uh how is it that you're watching He-Man because what were you like for yeah man oh yeah man He-Man is um so I watched He-Man Voltron I've always liked I don't know man I've always liked the 80s yeah yeah I love I love the 80s I love Nostalgia that's why stranger things I'm just such a big fan yeah they took all the best things of like sci-fi and and just designing the visual aesthetic of the 80s I was born in 86. so yeah apparently yeah yeah so I was like literally just born but it's so crazy too because even in the 90s and like 2000s like my mom one of her favorite movies is aliens so I watch aliens with her because she just loved it and I just fell in love with that like age of Cinema so I've seen like really old stuff too like uh Stanley Kubrick all his old classic stuff like I've always been like a cinephile so yeah I guess that translates to my my pop culture references and so who got you into the 80s animation because you're talking about Transformers He-Man uh Voltron I forget the other ones but there's a bunch there oh man so I'm trying to think of like when it all started you know I I did watch Akira when I was young I was maybe like six or seven oh yeah I was like the first like anime yeah and I love the design style that's what kind of got me started so I started watching that you know the original Dragon Ball I started watching a lot of like the older like like lupon was a Speed Racer and that's just kind of it was just going down the rabbit hole you know and I just loved kind of animating that stuff at a young age comic books so I would go back and like see the classics you know that I could find because they had comic book stores back then so I go to comic book stores I get like the VHS tapes from like the pawn shops and stuff so I guess I don't stem from that but I was always like into like sci-fi and and that type of stuff Perfect Dude hey you nailed it man awesome awesome all right that's all those YouTube videos man I'm telling you okay hey everybody this is John D Saunders founder and creative director at five four digital I also founded a company called black illustration.com where we create illustrations featuring people of color and I'm happy to be here with Chris to chop it up today let's jump into it