ConvertKit open metrics - good or bad idea?, How people use Google and what they click on, & more

All right. So I wanted to talk about, actually there's an email service provider that you use called ConvertKit. I just had Nathan Barry at a founder's retreat a couple months ago. So they do about $41 million in ARR or annual recurring revenue. And they actually, funny enough—

ConvertKit, $40 million?

No. Yeah, yeah. Here, let me show you something. Okay? Okay. Don't challenge me.

Let me show you this. Just put a bare metric. I'm loading it up.

It's not even bare metrics anymore. This is, you know what's funny? Let me give you the high level here. This thing is really cool, right? This dashboard, you know who made it? It's Ali Abdaal's brother. This is causal.app. They raised a bunch of money, I think. Okay, sorry, I lied.

You're right.

$38.8 million is their ARR. And then this is their goal to get to $41 million this year. I think that's what it is. But I think, remember we've talked about Do we think it's helpful to share your numbers openly like this? Because it's actually really cool because when you look at their MRR churn in the very beginning, right? Or lifetime value, you can see all these things, net dollar retention from the early days. You can see how it all went. It got a lot better.

What's that? I love how it says MRR churn used to be high, but is now healthy. I'm not trying to say, ConvertKit is doing a bad job. I'm just saying 3% a month is not healthy churn, but in SaaS, marketing software tends to churn higher. So it's a lot that ConvertKit can't control.

Yeah. Well, I mean, he also hits a lot of SMBs too. Yeah. Because when you look at ARPU here, you know, it's kind of around $9K per year. So it's not like enterprise contracts, but you can see it all down here. So the reason I wanted to bring this up, one, causal.app looks really cool and I like how it's summarized like this. I would prefer not to share metrics publicly. I just wanted to go through it. I want to refresh our take on this. Is it helpful or not to share your metrics publicly like this?

Well, first off, you interviewed Nathan. Did you ask him why he shares his metrics?

I actually didn't touch upon that because my opinion is still the same. I don't think it's helpful to share metrics like this.

I don't think it does anything for you. I think if you want people's input, you can share their metrics with those specific people and you don't have to share with the whole world.

Yeah. And that's what it is. Some people still share their metrics. I know Pat Flynn used to share, like I had him on the podcast recently. He doesn't share his metrics publicly anymore because it also, as you grow more, if you're trying to be helpful to people, it becomes less relatable. And you also start to paint a bigger target on your back as well because this is just how people are, right? That the more The more the wealthier they think you are, the more richer they think you are, the more you become a target. And that's just how it is, right? That's human nature. So I think it's congratulations to his success, but I still wouldn't do it. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that up.

Dude, you want to hear a funny story? So we both know Tim Sykes.

Better be funny.

The stock trader.

Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo.

Tim Sykes. We both know him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. We both probably haven't seen him in a while, but Interesting guy, good personality. He's funny when you hang out with him in person. When he used to talk about stock trading and he was showing how he took his bar mitzvah money, I don't know what the amount was, like $30 grand or $16 grand, turned into $100 grand and then millions of dollars and then kept going up. And then he kept doing more trading and showing like, I was taking $1 million to $2 million or $4 million or whatever the number is. His signups actually weren't doing as well. The moment he said, all right, forget this, I'm going to start over and each year and take like 10 grand or 20 grand or something and grow that, he started doing better in signups, in revenue, and people following him because like you said, it's more relatable. I think sharing the journey, assuming you're targeting SMBs or people starting off from the low end, to getting somewhere that can really change people's life, like 6 figures or whatever, that's amazing and you'll get a lot of followers from it and you'll generate a lot of traffic. I used to do that from aha to oh shit, and I took that from—

You did a challenge.

Yeah, but I did aha to oh shit, and excuse my language, I took this from GrooveHQ, but again, I said from aha to oh blank, I'm sharing my journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors. I'm learning a lot and so will you. Put in your email address to learn more. Did really well and I would blog about that every month. And those stats and data aren't too crazy because I'm not sharing like revenue numbers. But then when I went from the same thing, I'm sharing my journey from 100,000 to 1 million monthly visitors, it didn't do as well. And then when I crossed 1 million, I just stopped sharing because everyone's like, well, you're at 1 million, I can't relate. You know, I don't even know how to get to 10,000. I was like, okay. This works better at lower numbers than higher. And I think if you want to share, it's not helpful in which you don't get tons of advice from people, but you build up a community way faster on the smaller numbers and then just stop doing it once you got the community and you hit the numbers.

We now have a new segment in this podcast because the Marketing School YouTube channel is only at 2,000 subs right now. So you guys will see us go from 2,000 to 10,000, then to 100,000, and then we're going to go for a million. And you know the cool thing with the play button, Neil, is you can buy multiple ones. So once you get one, you can buy it for other people on your team and all that. So we're going to show you guys how to get a silver play button and then a gold play button. And then there's a diamond one too if you get to 10 million.

Did you know that? I didn't. I have the silver and I think I have—

You have the gold too from a million. You have a gold.

I don't know where it is though. I didn't know you can buy it from other people on your team.

No. So, okay, here I have it right next to me over here. So here, check this out. So, here's my silver. I've actually never seen this until right now.

Speak again in the microphone. My bad.

Oh, yeah. So, here's a silver play button, right? And then, this document over here, or sorry, this over here, this card. Well, you can't see the card. Okay. The card says, congratulations on your subscriber milestone. We are honored to take part and recognize your achievement. I want your experience to be exceptional. If you want to buy more, basically, you can buy more for your team. And you basically pay like $150 per so your team can celebrate in it. But anyway, we'll share that journey. That's a good idea, Neil. And going back to Tim Sykes real quick before we move on, the fact that he's redoing it, he was redoing it every year, going back to zero, going back to zero. It shows that it's not a fluke and it's a repeatable process. And that's also more trustworthy too.

Yes. And what he found is he took that model, he started doing really well, and then he brought on other people because he already had a platform. Who were different types of stock traders and they kept rinsing and repeating the same model. And that's how his business grew from $10, $20 million, $30, $40, et cetera. And they just kept—

Yeah. That's actually a good take too because he was the coach, right? And then he hired other people, he taught them and they became the coaches, right? And then he went and started a new brand called Karmagawa, right? I don't know that they're interrelated or not, but the— That's a nonprofit.

The charity, right?

Nonprofit. Okay. Is that— so that's not related. It's probably not worth talking about then. So what else do you have?

No, but here's what's interesting, what he did with his marketing. He ended up making it Tim Sykes, but he had tons of different coaches on there and the company was still called the same and it did well. It just shows even if your brand is related to like Pat Flynn or anything like that, you can bring on tons of other people and scale it and it still works.

Here, this is what it is. Recognize your team. So you see there's a gold one over here, there's a silver one, and there's a diamond one. So Neil, send me your gold one so then I'll act like I have one as well. So just, I can put it in the back. But anyway, over to you because I need to sneeze.

Do you want me to find my gold? Give it. Bless you.

Sorry, I forgot to mute guys. Um, yeah, find your gold one.

Do you want it?

No, I don't really want it.

It's somewhere at the top or something.

I don't know where it is. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

On a side note, we did something interesting the other day. Let's see if I can actually open up my tabs. I have to go find the history.

You can share your screen, you know?

Oh, all right. Let's just share the screen. Screen.

I'm so sad for sneezing because someone said explicitly, I hate it when they sneeze.

And I'm sorry for sneezing, but sometimes we can't control it. So number one, only 11% of people scroll to the bottom of page 1. And in most case, people clicked on a result towards the top of the search results page as they found what they're looking for. So it just shows that Google's algorithm's pretty good at just showing people what they're looking for in the top 3 results. The second thing was from all the sessions, 58% of the people clicked on an organic listing, 8% clicked on a paid result, and keep in mind, not all results actually include ads, and 34% had no clicks. It's kind of crazy, you know? And keep in mind, this isn't like a crazy sample size. To give you an idea, there's 8.5 billion searches a day on Google, so 12,000 is a really small percentage. And we didn't do 12,000 over a day. It took us weeks to collect that, right? Because we needed the collaboration of the people actually searching. 3, when a search result page contained a video above the fold, searchers clicked on it 61% of the time.

Wow, that's high.

If you're creating content like we are here doing a podcast, create video formats and put that stuff on social media because Google is indexing it. And when they're showing videos, there's a really high click rate, especially when those videos are above the fold. For local queries, map results got 52% of the clicks. So if you're a local business, it's really important for you to be in the map results. And a lot of that has to do with Google My Business. Make sure you're getting the reviews, the ratings. 7% of searchers modified their search query. It pretty much means like, imagine searching for something, not finding what you're looking for, so you adjust your search query in hopes that you will find what you're looking for. But it just shows the majority of the people who are using Google on their first search result are typically finding what they're looking for. And 90% of the time, people use one of the suggested search queries provided by Google Autocomplete. So also known as Google Suggest, you know when you type something into Google, they show you a list Prefilled words and phrases, and 19% of the people just click on one of those. So they're pretty decent at predicting what you're actually looking for once you start typing in a word or so. When people search for a product, 14% of the time they clicked on Google Shopping result, and they were 3.3 times more likely to click on a shopping result over an Amazon organic result. Right? And this data is when there was an organic Amazon result. So it's pretty crazy. People will click on a shopping result more than an Amazon result, which I would've never guessed. I would've actually assumed that people would've more so clicked on the Amazon result, but that's not the case. Of the users that clicked on the organic result, 35% of the time people clicked the back button, meaning they didn't find what they're looking for and they're going to another result. And the average search duration was 59 seconds. And of the users that clicked on the listing, 54% of the time they only clicked on one result and that was it. No back button, no nothing. They're pretty much one and done, good to go. They got what they wanted.

You know, one of my takeaways from you reading that is at the end of the day, human beings will be human beings because if 61% of people are clicking on a video, that I consider a rich snippet. If they're clicking on the local map pack, that is a rich snippet to me. And that's always been the behaviors in the past too. Whatever they see, whatever the human sees and whatever stands out, they're going to click it. Which is why when you release a book, for example, if it's a different color than the other books out there, it's going to stand out more. And so food for thought, try to get the rich snippets if you can. It just, it depends on the SERP that you're optimizing for.

Yeah, and if I had to give 2 more takeaways, one would be produce way more video content because the click rates are through the roof. And if you're in e-commerce, you really have to focus on Google Shopping, not just Amazon. It is an omnichannel approach. Yes, you need to marketplaces, but you also should consider Google Shopping. And we see a lot of businesses just take that for granted.

This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization, and has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately, our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. You know, speaking of data, here's something funny. Did you see that study recently that says time-restricted eating, so basically intermittent fasting, is associated with a 91% increase in the risk of cardiovascular death? Did you see that?

No, but I do intermittent fasting, so I'm curious on this.

Okay. So, here, get this because you like to read off a lot of data, right? So—

And specifically cardiovascular death is Death is related to the heart, correct?

Correct, correct. So this is Peter Attia, by the way.

Peter, or is there a special heart attack?

I don't know. I mean, stroke to me is like has to do with the. I don't know as much. Maybe that's the brain more, but maybe it is. I'm not a medical person, nor are you, right? So I don't know. But for for sure, heart attack. So okay, check this out. So Dr. Peter Attia, by the way, he's speaking at that. I don't know if you're going to the event in two weeks or so. But, he's going to be there. So, he said, last Monday, researchers— so basically, look, they concluded that time-restricted eating was associated with a 91% increase in the risk of cardiovascular death. These results are alarming if you take the headlines at face value, but on closer examination, the results from this study are virtually meaningless. So, the researchers used data collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected between 2003 and 2018. from more than 20,000 people in the US and followed mortality outcomes, grouping participants by average eating duration. Food frequency questionnaires are notoriously unreliable data that are frequently contaminated by recall biases of both total energy intake and timing. This analysis was done under the— sorry, parentheses— very weak assumption that the completion of 2 food recall surveys was sufficient data to represent the participants' quote-unquote normal eating patterns, both eating duration and total energy intake for the next 8 years. There were no significant differences in all-cause mortality, the most important metric. However, the TRE, so time-restricted eating group of less than 8-hour eating duration had a relative 91% increase in the risk of cardiovascular death compared to the reference group, 12 to 16-hour eating duration. Almost done with this. But importantly, the time-restricted eating group wasn't just different from the non-TRE group based on eating duration, there were significant difference in the group sizes, other lifestyle habits, and comorbidities making it almost impossible to compare the 2 groups. It's unfortunate that results— this will be the last slide. It's unfortunate that results such as these are being used to scare people away from time-restricted eating, which is a proven way to reduce energy intake and lose weight. Previous research has already supported the notion that how many calories you eat matters more than when you eat them. This is yet another nutritional study that affirms my disappointment in the field, not because the topic is unworthy of research, but because of the willingness to draw sensational conclusions from flawed data, which us marketers like to do.

So, recap for me here, Eric, right? So is he saying that time restrictive eating or intermittent fasting, is he saying, which is similar or same thing based on what it's saying?

Same thing.

Is he saying it's bad for you or good for you? Because he started off saying it caused more heart attacks.

He's saying that's what the research paper said. And he's saying that research paper is intellectually dishonest. And also I think who funded it, that research paper was like food groups, right? Because they want you to eat more, right? So you got to look at who's funding it, but also the way the data was, was combined. Made it like you can basically manipulate data to tell any story that you want. And, that's what happened in this situation. And, yes, it is a sensational headline. When I saw it, I was like, oh crap, should I stop intermittent fasting? But intuitively, it didn't seem right to me. But, you don't know until someone like a doctor like this calls it out. So, that's what it is.

I didn't know you do intermittent fasting.

Dude, I've been doing it since I was 27 years old before it was cool.

Yeah.

I did the sleep tape at 30 years old before it was cool. That's right. Anyway, guys, that's it for this episode. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And go to marketing school dot io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the group that we have, and it's growing. So we'll see you later.