S02 E04 - How to build a service from the ground up with Ruben Gamez

Jason Resnick: 00:03 Welcome to live in the feast. I’m Jason Resnick, and for the past decade I’ve been helping businesses translate their goals into online success as a freelance web developer. In order for me to accomplish my why as a freelancer, I needed to live in the feast. Now I’m turning the tables around so you as the freelancer can do the same and build a sustainable business to achieve success so that you can ultimately live the kind of life you want. Content marketing isn’t just a blogging exercise. It touches on so many facets of the business such as lead generation, cold emailing, getting referrals, getting higher quality clients, and maybe the most important one. Creating your service to be a no-brainer. Content with focus and thoughtful planning can obviously be a powerful tool to generate business when starting up, but even moreso to get those better quality customers. Once you’ve been in business for awhile, Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch has grown a multi-million dollar Saas product built on the foundation of content.

Jason Resnick: 01:13 He’s now starting a new venture, and the very first thing he did was start building content, not the actual product. We’ll talk more about why he did that and so much more in this episode and in this awesome conversation. We dove deep into the steps to create great content, how to define your service to make it a no brainer for someone to buy from you, and then we talk about what makes the great cold email. There are so many takeaways from this show that I know you’ll want to listen to it again and again, but in the spirit of Live in the Feast and taking action on your business right now, let’s refine your ideal client. Ruben walks us through three steps in this show to help you craft the best content possible, and the second step is to think about what someone might search for before they even know you and your service exists. So just jot down those notes and then later go on and write a blog post about it and see how it works for you.

Jason Resnick: 02:18 This episode is sponsored by Feast. Feast is the roadmap and community built for freelancers like you looking to take their business to the next level. You didn’t become a freelancer and start your own business because you want it to work more, right? Want better clients, command higher prices, build recurring revenue so you can stay out of the famine for good Feast will help you focus and remain accountable through coaching calls, community and exclusive mastermind group and a ton of resources and tactics that worked for today’s market. Head over to raise.com/piece to check it out and while you’re there, take a look and grab the free lesson and the KPI spreadsheet, which I use to track my own content marketing. So let’s get to it and live in the feast.

Jason Resnick: 03:19 Howdy folks today I’m excited to bring on to the show. Someone who was a developer, turned bootstrap founder and he used content marketing to essentially build the business. Um, but he was very methodical about it in his approach and how we thought about it. And I thought that since this season is all about marketing and I talk about content marketing a lot, I’d invite him on the show to talk about it. Ruben Gamez. Welcome.

Ruben Gamez: 03:48 Thanks. Thanks for inviting me.

Jason Resnick: 03:52 So Ruben, for those that don’t know who you are, um, who are you, what do you do?

Ruben Gamez: 03:56 Sure. Uh, so I am the founder of a web app called BidSketch and that is a use for proposal software. Basically you can create proposal, send them out and get them electronically signed. We’ll notify you when they opened the proposal, how long they took, when they were looking at it, things like that. So that’s our first product and now we’re uh, working on a new product, a new brand called DocSketch as well, and uh, that one’s more in the electronic signature space, so a little bit more geared towards contracts that can be used for proposals and all that. It’s a getting to early access right now. Uh, it’s one of those things where it always takes longer than you want when it comes to software, but we’re getting there. Uh, well we should be in early access pretty soon.

Jason Resnick: 04:46 Awesome. Well that’s cool. I hadn’t heard about that. So one thing that I really wanted to unpack a little bit and I talk a lot on the, on the show about content marketing in that that’s the long game and that kind of thing. For me, I was late to that game. Like that was one of the things that I like in business. I don’t really have any regrets or anything like that, but my one regret if I had one would be not doing the content marketing game long-term and kind of just relied on sales and referrals and that kind of stuff. For my business specifically.

Ruben Gamez: 05:22 What would you say was like the outcome of that? Of Not having done that?

Jason Resnick: 05:26 I feel like now now that I am doing it, I feel like I have a much more stable night. So even if I, you know, I haven’t had this in some time, but if I felt like there was a lull in the business or they might be alone in the projections are the business, I could just reach out to that list or just go out and promote something that I’ve already written or use that as essentially a, use it as an asset for the business to be able to do that kind of stuff. So without a blog, without the articles, that kind of stuff, there’s no way for people to know. I mean I could be just another developer. Right?

Ruben Gamez: 06:07 So it’s all up to you to reach out and get those leads and you know, for your clients to refer you to somebody else.

Jason Resnick: 06:13 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what I want to talk to you a little bit about is specifically with BidSketch. Now I’ve used your product and I’m one of the things that, I mean even still on your site initially, you have folks drop in their email address, right? Like you don’t push like free trials, you don’t push any of these kind of like sas type trial things that folks do. Why is that

Ruben Gamez: 06:42 traditional sas sort of patient generally on most sass sites. When you go to the homepage you’re going to have basically something pushing you like the main call to action. What page is going to be something pushing you towards a trial sign up for free trial a with or without a credit card or whatever. So a yes, for us the main thing on the home page is to get the sample proposal. So we lead with that simply because we get more customers. So um, it’s an easier ask w so more people take that. We get about 25 percent of the people on the home page somewhere like 20 to 25 percent a opting into that. And we’ve changed it. We’ve tested it, we’ve done, we’ve done a lot of testing on that homepage for a trial. Even though lowest friction sort of trial that you can have a whole page.

Ruben Gamez: 07:31 Yeah, you can get up that high. It’s not, it’s not something that’s going to convert that wall and that difference between the commercial rate of even pushing people with straight into a trial versus sort of adding friction. In this case we’re adding friction and we’ve had a lot of people come to her like our site or whatever, especially if they do a little bit of work with conversions or whatever because when one of the things that a lot of people say is like remove all friction to make it as easy as possible and you’ll get more of like kind of maybe. But um, it’s not always that straightforward and simple. So for example, yes, if we put the trial sign up on the homepage like we’ve done in the past, we can get way more trials to the APP then if we lead with the proposal sample because uh, if we lead with the proposal sample were losing people at every step of the way until they get to a trial.

Ruben Gamez: 08:27 So when we did the trial, you know, straight to trial homepage, we’re getting thousands of trials in a month, right? With the sample, we get three times in a month versus mostly [inaudible] people with kind of getting a trial going to a trial. So, uh, so people get the sample and then we lose some people and we don’t get as many, let’s say we get 1500 trials instead of [inaudible] trials. So even though we get less trials than the other way, the people that I get to the trial or more informed because we’ve added friction, so they’ve seen the sample there now on our drip campaign. So they’re getting informed about any tips and tactics that we have around just closing more sales through just creating better proposals then they go to our page. And so we kind of had some friction there on purpose and what we’ve noticed is at the end of the day after that trial, we actually end up with a lot more customers than if we tried to just send them straight into the trial. So at the end of the day we make more money that way.

Jason Resnick: 09:29 Yeah. That’s interesting because what I do is there’s a lot of conversion optimization has an e-commerce developer. Um, and that’s, that’s like the mantra is like don’t put any more things in the way, right. To take a step back, what made you go into, hey, I want to help folks get better proposals essentially.

Ruben Gamez: 09:54 Um, I was working at a, I was a web development manager at the time. I was working for a payroll company and I was looking to build a product just because I didn’t, I didn’t like management and I’ve found myself to new order management and I don’t know, I just needed a new challenge after working many years doing development and being many years in, you know, managing of developers and business analysts at this point that no other people. And there was somebody in the company that was a developer and the had a client meeting. So they were asking about like what fish tank. So I was talking them through like we should do a proposal and all that stuff. So I went online to help them figure out what to give. And I thought in a minute there’s freshbooks for invoicing. I’m sure that there’s something that he could use like this that’s like freshbooks for proposals to send them to that and then I searched and I couldn’t find anything.

Ruben Gamez: 10:48 Like literally at the time there was, now there are a bunch of, you know, a bunch of competitors that we have a. But at the time there was nothing. So I thought this is crazy. Nothing really. And then I did a little bit of keyword research and OK, there’s nobody searching for proposal software, pro pro. They don’t even know that thing like that exists, but they’re searching for these other things that are related to proposal software and I think I can get some of that traffic and convert those into customers. And then that’s, that’s how I sort of built it.

Jason Resnick: 11:20 So you essentially filled a gap because you were going to try to show somebody a shortcut. He realized that shirt right there. That’s interesting. Pretty much so, yeah. So it’s interesting that your software is essentially built to help freelancers, contractors, and businesses who, whoever that needs proposals, but yet the first thing that you’re giving them is a proposal by you’re giving them a sample template or. So I’m curious that strategy, is it because the reason why I’m thinking about this is, is a lot of people think like, OK, if I give this freak thing, that is essentially something that I built, but I’ve given it to them for free, then what would they pay for what I’m giving you wrestled with that? Like, Oh, if I’m giving them a template,

Ruben Gamez: 12:20 no, no, a template strategy. So, uh, it’s something that we invested a lot in, uh, how the homepage, like we have a bunch of different templates for a lot of different industries as well. Um, and the thought really is like you can have a template, um, but the value that our tool brings, you can’t get out of a template which is, you know, uh, you can send a, you can use a template to create a proposal and maybe I’ll see you some time, but we can save you more time because we have things like a built in variables. So when you create a new proposal will automatically replace the client names to a client address and things like that. A very common mistake is like, oh, people taking a template or a proposal and renaming it and then like missing a couple spots that they, you know, that they need to update. So like our software does that automatically. I’m also, we will notify you when it gets opened but there’s, you know, you’re not going to be able to do that with just like an attachment me mail either. So there, there are a lot of things like that where the real value comes in, in other forms plus a lot of the pre. So we do give away a lot of the pre written content. Um, but it’s most useful within the show.

Jason Resnick: 13:39 Sure. Yeah, cause I mean that, that’s, that’s an objection that a lot of people get. Like, especially like if I’m going to give them a lead magnet or an opt-in, like where’s the, the line in the sand that I draw to give them, do I give them too much shit, hold back kind of thing.

Ruben Gamez: 13:55 Well it’s because it’s about most people wanting things done for them more than them wanting to do it themselves so you can get into all the pieces and everything that they need. They’re like OK, this is, these are all the steps and if you give them a good offer of like, or we could just do it for, you know, you have the experience. Obviously you’re telling them how to, they they would trust you with that and if it, if they see like the amount of value that they’re receiving from, from that and being reasonable compared to the price.

Jason Resnick: 14:29 Sure. It’s, it’s funny that you said that because that’s how I found out. That’s how I built my business. I was just a general developer mostly targeting towards e-commerce. But I found a lot of clients maybe not signing up for things and I was like, OK, well maybe I just offer like a low level down sell kind of thing, like an ebook or a how to guide or a series of videos and that kind of stuff. And nobody took me up on it and I realized what it was is that people just want it done for you. Like, all right, well I’ll go the other way, then I’ll just charge a premium.

Jason Resnick: 15:09 So that’s funny. So the one thing that I heard interestingly enough, and I can’t remember, it might have been on Brian Castles podcast, I can’t remember exactly which one, but it wasn’t a podcast where you had actually said, and I found this really interesting before you wrote a line of code on the product itself, you actually pushed out content and build a landing page and all that stuff. Like how did you approach that? Like, I mean, you kind of like said like, OK, these people are going to want this thing and I don’t have it built yet.

Ruben Gamez: 15:44 Yeah. Um, so based off of first thing was I started with who is my target customer, um, and it all works off of that. What might that person be in? I took an Seo strategy, so what would they be looking for? So who is my ideal customer? Um, if they, if they needed a product like mine, what would they be looking for? What are the things that they like? And the easy thing to say is, well, they’re gonna type in proposal software, but let’s say they don’t know that that exists. What are the things that they are looking for that will help them with that problem? Right? What are they looking for on the edges around, around like proposal software, what are they looking for that’s going to help them move, create a proposal or a close more sales or whatever. So targeting those sort of key words is, is how I did it with a new brand.

Ruben Gamez: 16:40 I’m taking a very similar strategy as well. Thinking about the ideal customer and creating content first. And even before we have, even before we have the product release, we already have our first page on the site, so it’s funny to start from zero, like zero traffic, uh, but within a couple of weeks, within a few weeks, we’re now ranking number one for that [inaudible] keyword and we’re like getting a couple thousand a unique visits a month. This was sort of a test for that type of content and it’s like, OK, I think it’s going to work. So now we have a whole bunch more other pages that, you know, 50 or so targeting different industries, same sort of way that we could write. It should give us a pretty good number of uniques a month.

Jason Resnick: 17:27 I mean that, that’s something that I find interesting too. I did something very similar where I kind of plucked a piece of my services and I wanted to see if people wanted this service alone outside of the tip development thing.

Ruben Gamez: 17:43 Yeah, like a up

Jason Resnick: 17:46 and so to isolate those problems, that’s what I feel a lot of people have struggled with. Right? Like so if somebody has a developer or designer, freelancer in a way where they’re, it’s all by themselves and they’re like, OK, how do I find more clients and how do I.

Ruben Gamez: 18:03 well, that’s the number one question, right? Like, how do I. Yeah, you’re right. That’s a really common problem that I got here about that too often. I think there are two main, top two main things really that I see all the time. You know, now we have like thousands of customers I’ve talked to, just all sorts of people who are running agencies, all sorts of consultants and freelancers and uh, see businesses that are struggling, businesses that are growing really fast. Businesses that were struggling, that turned it around. I’m just a lot of really interesting data. There are a couple of things. So first it’s like getting, even asking even myself, just because I’d love to know how people grow businesses and all that stuff and, and uh, asking people that have successful, let’s say someone has a successful agency asking them how they got there, it’s shocking how many times they don’t know really like don’t, don’t say like content marketing or they’ll say word of mouth because word of mouth is always like the top.

Ruben Gamez: 19:07 And then sometimes you know, just content marketing that’s also done. But that’s so broad. It does. Like there’s, there are so many different ways of doing content marketing that won’t work or, or, uh, doing stuff around word of mouth that won’t make a difference that oftentimes it’s not, it’s not very helpful to speak in those terms. And the truth is, unless they had been exposed to a lot of people who’ve been struggling with their business and they see like, oh, this is what’s different between like that type of content marketing and this type of content marketing. It’s really hard to just communicate that and say, Oh, this is what I’m doing that’s different than, than another business. So, uh, one of the main problems that I see people, they’re struggling not knowing what success looks like. I think I read it from like Kathy Sierra, she just communicated really well and I’ve been trying to find a way to just, you know, um, find the right words and she, I think she did it on her book, which is more about training, but it’s a hundred percent true around like growing businesses, which is people need to see.

Ruben Gamez: 20:13 People need to see what success looks like. It’s really, really, really hard if you’re starting a business or growing a business and you’re at a certain place, even if you have a little bit more of a mature business, if you’re at a place where you’re not that happy really would like business is five or 10 times more profitable or you know, whatever your skill is. Bigger and more people are like, I prefer to have less people. And it’s really hard without sort of seeing what success looks like. Meaning one of the, one of the most common things that I see is people not doing enough, not having enough. So they’re trying to grow business of a certain skill with let’s, let’s use traffic and leads with a certain number of leads coming in and certain amount of traffic coming in and if they took a look at five businesses in this sort of same or similar industry and they saw the amount of traffic and the amount of leads that they, that they need to get the amount of business that they get, they would see a big difference there.

Ruben Gamez: 21:20 Usually now it’s always not that number. Sometimes, you know, like quality can also. Uh, a lot of times it is numbers. It’s, it’s as simple as that. Like there’s not enough activity to bring in a what they need for the type of business that they, that they need. So that’s, that’s a really common thing in the, like a lot of the data is out there really on the Internet where people are writing about their success and what they’re doing. And some of the data’s in there and you can just email the authors of these, you know, like an agency or a freelancer that and entered. Just get. Barry wrote about some of it, you can ask them a little bit more and, and bill in, just get a better picture of what’s needed to get there. And the other thing is just around having a really good product or service and this was really tough.

Ruben Gamez: 22:16 Like those are the two pieces that I see I see missing, but basically essentially it’s getting as close as you can to it being a no brainer. So like with the service, so let’s, let’s take design or something. So it may not necessarily be that you have to just be a much better designer. It totally depends on your customer. So if you’re a customer is like a large company, like I used to work for big payroll company with you know, everything, everything’s done through execs and they have all these board meetings and all that stuff. Um, so a good service, a, like a good product for them is not necessarily going to have to do with just so much better. Like a detail and attention to design necessarily as much as how, how well was the, how good was the communication with like executive management? Like how, um, how are the milestones communicated? How was it planned out? How did it fit into the bigger, uh, just, you know, uh, their goals for the year and all that stuff, just all these things that you wouldn’t think like that, that’s what they’re buying, all that stuff, not just the, the, the exact work. Um, so a lot of it has to do with, with figuring that out.

Ruben Gamez: 23:38 Yeah. And you’re a hundred percent right. I mean, I was having this conversation with a couple

Jason Resnick: 23:45 of people over the past month for sure because they were saying things like their leads dried up there doing the same thing, this and that. And I said, well, you’ve had leads coming into your business and maybe you didn’t make them clients, they didn’t become clients or you didn’t work for whatever. Now that they’re dried up so to speak, can you warn them back up and maybe do something a little different this time around? Um, you know, like you said, a lot of times it, you don’t want to compare yourself to everybody else, right? Like if you’re a designer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a great designer over somebody else. Better design over somebody else. It’s the other factors, right? Like you said, communication. That was one big huge thing that my current clients, you know, few, several years back when I revamped my, my business, my current clients were telling me, you’re always out in front, you’re always telling us what’s next.

Jason Resnick: 24:46 You’re always communicating. I always know what’s going on. That’s the level of service that I’m looking for and that’s why I hang on and I want to keep you as a vendor service provider. So I just turn that back around and they said, OK, well I’m going to be a recurring business month over month and we’ll get a set and I classify myself as like an in house developer even though I’m in my own house, but at the same time it’s, it’s listening, it’s trying to fill the gaps. What, what can you do above and beyond other folks to create that great product. Right?

Ruben Gamez: 25:24 Right. Positioning is, is, is, is big. It’s a big deal because their son, that’s part of the like selling your product point, it’s about the offer that you’re making right to people and that means it’s not just about the work or the price that they’re paying everything around that. So the more you can speak to that and the more that that relates to whatever they’re looking for, whatever that client is looking forward to better, the more likely that they’re gonna want to pay for it.

Jason Resnick: 25:57 Yeah. Like you said, a no brainer for you service. If you could do a done for you service, that’s a no brainer for them. You’ll have more clients.

Ruben Gamez: 26:06 Yeah. I got like Noah Kagan from appsumo with sumo, now I’m domain. Um, he’s really good with that. Like throughout the years I’ve known him when he was exploring ideas or selling anything. Just Ah, that’s one thing that he’s, uh, he’s always focused on and you’ll ask me about something. What do you think about buying this thing? That’s a uh. Yep. Cool. To him that’s like, now isn’t a good. No, that’s not. It needs to be. So then he’ll turn around and say, OK, what do we need to add to this? Or what do we need to do for it to be a no brainer, right. There’s, there’s a big difference between the two.

Jason Resnick: 26:59 Yeah, no, that, that’s, that’s great. Yeah. I’m always a big fan of seeing my clients face to face, even if we’re on the other side of the country and stuff like that. Like as a part of my process anyway, I want to have that face to face relationship. I want to know. I want to see the reactions when they say certain things. I want to write, write those kinds of things like you said.

Ruben Gamez: 27:23 So, uh, did give you a specific example. Um, so, uh, just happen just a couple of days ago, there was a friend of mine who runs his agency and he was introduced to me by somebody at. I was looking for somebody a, at a good price that could do seo work and uh, he recommended him and he just quit his, ah, working for an agency to work with his brother on this other agency, uh, to do a CEO. So I’m started working with him, they were doing seo for us and all that stuff and um, it was, I think at the time it was like 500 bucks a month is what he was charging. Like the work was good. He hustled his good, all that stuff. He changes prices and did or has done a bunch of stuff like within a couple of years, not to where the average client was like $10,000 a month or anything like that.

Ruben Gamez: 28:14 Obviously I can be a quite a bit to different sort of client profile, all that stuff that, that he picked out. But it was really interesting to see this sort of stuff that he does. So one of the things that he does that’s different than a lot of people because it’s all like the same thing. So what does he do? Content marketing, word of mouth. But uh, there are lot of things that he does this just in a different. He asks more than other people. Um, he’s more disciplined about asking for referrals. Um, and when people are really shy or afraid or like I’m even trying, I’m trying to learn from him about just being more willing to ask for, you know, from, uh, people that I’m in business worth to, to, to, to help me and he’s, he has no problem doing that and he gets more because of it.

Ruben Gamez: 29:10 So this ties back to the no brainer. Think he, uh, he asked recently during going to do cold cold email outreach, right? Seo, cold email outreach, holy et cetera. How many Seo agencies, you know, reaching out to me, uh, through cold email and they’re publishing some of the worst on a cold emails that were like, I just see anything in the subject line like that and automatically delete really bad. Um, so then he, he is like, OK, we’re going to do cold email for work. We’re thinking of doing. So number one, like I’m the next client, or even if I was a client, even if I was a current client, it’s still asked me this before, he’s actually running the marketing because you could just run the marketing campaign, see, OK, does this work style where he’s doing qualitative feedback like this is big services business says when a with, with businesses like us, we get hundreds of thousands of visits and all that stuff.

Ruben Gamez: 30:16 So it’s easy to just rely on numbers and do tests and get, you know, get the results really quickly. But when you’re dealing with services, you’re dealing with much smaller numbers. So what you have to do instead is you have to rely on qualitative data. You have to go deeper with each and every one, right? So that means you have to have one on one conversations. Um, and he’s really good at doing this. He does this all the time. So a lot of people would be afraid or think, oh, it’s not like, I don’t know what, like I can’t ask somebody that hired me before for their feedback on something truly can. But you can say you were a great client. I’d, I’m looking for to work with more clients like you, um, this is what we’re thinking of doing for a marketing campaign. A would love to hear their thoughts on super simple, but it’s really important, especially for a service type business.

Ruben Gamez: 31:10 So anyway, he, he asked me about, uh, about this and I told them a cold email seo, it’s just the worst type of really spammy. Like I just told him everything, right. It’s not good. But you know, if you talked about like the outcomes more about traffic, getting me more traffic and like maybe not even mentioned seo or maybe not even mention organic, right? I’m more willing to, to listen to that because you’re talking about just getting in more traffic or more leads or whatever it probably from leads to here because I hear that a lot too. But like, um, so that’d be one thing. And then I thought about it and I said, you know, I’ve only responded to one called email before. That was from a Dev shop. And I went through because I had been example emails folder on Gmail and I went through of like anything that I liked, I put it in there and I found that email and I lifted it and it’s like, why did I respond to this?

Ruben Gamez: 32:07 I’m, oh, OK. And I saw immediately and I told him so, um, number one, they uh, they referenced. So it was a dev shop and they were like, um, something about like speeding up rails development. Yes. That’s always a problem when you’re trying to go fast all the time. They’re like, we got a crazy egg and hello bar, these types of results a three times faster or feature release, blah, blah, blah, hundred per cent faster. This like everything around that pain point in their email just list really quick. So it was, I know exactly who crazy egg and hello bar is like, they’re, they work for, they’re using, they’re the case studies that they were using 100 percent relevant to me. What’s brilliant is that they, they probably use their service that like called, like built with that can tell you for all the people that are using crazy egg and hello bar, OK, now we know they’re using them so they know who they are. Let’s do emails to them and treat your, the case studies that are appropriate and mentioned the pain points that. Right. Super, super targeted way, different of a, sort of like a cold outreach campaign. Then hey, we can, we can speed up your developmental w. right? And that’s why I responded.

Jason Resnick: 33:25 Yeah, that, that, that’s a great point. Yet to be able to put a little into the cold outreach, especially just to be able to do that personally

Ruben Gamez: 33:35 like the most, the more personal you can make it, the, the better. And this is just goes back to that whole making a no brainer idea. Trust is a big thing when you’re talking to anybody and when it comes to marketing, whether it’s an ad, whether it’s, you know, a content piece on, on the web, whether it’s, you know, an email. Um, and if you could do something like that where I know them, I know crazy again, Calabar like founders, I can email them and ask them, hey, you worked with them, like what do you think? And I, and I probably would like if, if I was going to work with,

Jason Resnick: 34:09 with them. Yeah, that’s great. I mean you made an awesome point about just reaching out the one on one conversations to be able to, you know, don’t be shy about going back to the past clients all the time. Like just go find a special buy rate one. So he had a great launch, whatever was they were you guys meshed in some way go talk to find out what it was. Because to hear it was, I was reading Pat Flynn’s book will it fly? And one of the first exercise, which is a great book by the way, it’s all about validating an idea and one of the first exercises in that book is to shoot an email out to family, close friends, close co-workers, that kind of stuff. And to say what is my super power? Like what is it about me that you find exceptional or whatever because most of us think we know ourselves, but then the people that are closest to us probably know us better, right? Because we’re going to exaggerate the bad stuff and suppress the good stuff, right?

Ruben Gamez: 35:18 Their objective about like what those things.

Jason Resnick: 35:21 Right? So when I just, I did that exercise and it was surprising to hear what folks folks say about you because you’re like, oh, I never really thought about that before. And so it’s, that was one of the things where, you know, could do that with clients because you may know that client very well by this past client and to say, you know, just say, hey look, you know, I’m looking to find more clients. Like you were saying, I’m looking to find more clients like you could we just have a 10 minute conversation? I’d just like to pick your brain on something. Um, and you know, I’m thinking about offering this kind of a service. Is this something that you think would fit with what I do? Service clients.

Ruben Gamez: 36:04 Those conversations are so helpful and just think about my friend who did that. He, I know he sent that out to several other clients that he’s had and he got all this good feedback. All this information and how much more ahead is he now, like starting back, same marketing campaign done before. How long would it have taken him if he had not had those conversations and just started doing tests after test after to like get to the starting point that he has now.

Jason Resnick: 36:34 Yeah. That’s great. So first, thanks for the time. This is awesome conversation. I want to ask you one final question before we go. What is one process that you would define first to build a business or a new service in a business?

Ruben Gamez: 36:55 It would really like one thing. I’m leveraging a lot more now, but um, then I have in the past, and this is something that I’m doing different with doc sketch is getting the foundation really right before moving on to the next step and getting it right through iteration, through improvement. So like that one page that I was talking about. Um, and this is like a process with everything that we’re going to do, onboarding emails, any ad campaigns, anything marketing related, anything customer related, once they get into the APP features that we released, we’re going, it’s all about knowing that the first thing that we put out, even if we’ve done work to try and make it really good is going to need to be updated. Right? And having a process for making sure that when we put out whether it’s a feature, whether it’s a piece of content, whether it’s an ad, we get data from about how we can make it better and then we make it better.

Ruben Gamez: 37:53 So, so like even for Seo for this, for this one page that we put out when we put it out, we were able to get it to rank number 10. So that was the first try. So then we said, OK, now let’s add a lot more content, added a couple of templates, um, to this page. And then we moved it up to number six, the next iteration. Then we got it up to number three. Like, OK, we’re getting there now. People are bouncing more than they should. People were less people are downloading this thing. Then I started doing surveys to see like why? Like a, what is it that you’re looking for to see how closest matches to what they. I know the key words, so I think I know, but knows I get this data and it’s like, yes, it’s like why aren’t you download here?

Ruben Gamez: 38:42 And then next thing people weren’t answering the surveys. So the next iterations like stuff pop up before you can even get to the page. Tell me then the next iteration on exit. If you don’t get it, tell me. Uh, and then finally to where, OK, now we know now we’re getting people to download. Now the other stuff looks good. Google’s getting better signals like that will last meetings. Like the next step we’re still going to go another step further and we’re going to measure it qualitatively. Like the thing that you’ve got from us, how likely are you to recommend us to other people based off of that? So it’s just this process of getting the foundation right in. Once we have that down, then we know a lot more to be able to scale that out, but like the Prog, the mistake that I did with with bidsketch, with bidsketch too much in every area is move forward with the other stuff before we got the foundation really good, so then later on, even now we’re paying for that where it has to go back and spend a lot of times us repairing that there’s a balance and you want, you want to move quickly as well, but you can do this iterative process of just improving things over and over.

Ruben Gamez: 39:53 You can do and there doesn’t need to take a lot of the time.

Jason Resnick: 39:57 That’s great focus and that’s really what it comes down to. Pretty much. This has been awesome. Ruben. Where can folks reach out and thanks for all of this great information on twitter generally, um, earthingworks on twitter. You then a bid sketch or a doc sketched doc on either one of those. Great. Thanks again.