Ajay Goel — How To Scale A SaaS While Eliminating Customer Support

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

I love how Matt gives me no heads up that he hit the record button.

I know I do that on purpose because every time I'm about to, like, do intros, Joe always goes, wait, wait, wait, wait. What are we gonna say? And I'm like, just. Just be in the moment. Just be in the moment, Joe.

Yeah. Be present. Just be present.

Be in the moment. We make it through this, we'll make it through together. Do you want to hold my hand?

No. God, no.

Not your hand. Good, because I didn't wash them.

Jesus. Just got back from.

What were you doing over there on the podcast? We've got AJ Goyle on.

We do. So this. This dude's doing some interesting things with a platform that we have experience with, surprisingly. But a lot of people don't know anything about the Google Chrome Store. Yep, I believe is what it's called. Yeah, this is. He's built what. It's. It's. What is he doing per month on this? I don't think we even mentioned it in the episode.

I don't think we mentioned the sales numbers, but we have them. Did we get them from him?

I believe so.

I don't know if our assistant gave them to us or if he actually gave them to us. Well, we know he's got 10,000 customers. Let's just say that, because he did say that on the show.

So you can do the math if you really wanted to and figure that out. But the point I'm trying to say is the guy has done some amazing things using a very simple seeming platform, one that's kind of undercover that a lot of us don't really think about. To grow software like a platform, use that. And then also the way that he gets traffic.

Yeah.

He's not a marketer, he's a developer. And it's super cool because he's done this.

Yeah, yeah. And so the tool is called gmass is gmass Co. And it's a mass emailing platform that ties into Gmail and allows you to send bulk emails through Gmail. And, you know, on the surface level, I do want to sort of disclaim something. It almost sounds like it could be used for the wrong purposes in the wrong hands as like a spam type tool. And we do get into that with him in this episode. But I definitely wanted to clarify that this tool actually does follow the spam rules. You can't have an unsubscribe link in it. You can put. Put your address in your emails, all of the can spam laws, if you were to look them up. This tool is actually in compliance with the can spam laws if you decide to use it in the right way. Of course, there are ways to use this tool in less ethical ways, and we're not going to explore those. We're going to explore the ethical ways.

Well, can't you do that with pretty much anything? Yes. Out there. So. Yeah, and actually, yeah, in the podcast, we didn't know, like, the spam rules and all that stuff, so we actually did look it up after that, after the interview, and we're like, oh, yeah, okay, you can do everything with this, no problem.

Yeah.

So just wanted to clarify that because on the actual podcast, we didn't have those stats right in front of us or the facts. The other thing I thought was really cool is customer service.

Yes.

AJ Friggin hates customer service. Don't blame him. So the dude runs a very successful SaaS and he doesn't really. He has a different approach to customer service. We'll say he serves his customers very well and he has a using for. He'll dig into. I think it's really cool. It's one that I think, Matt, you and I should probably swipe for a lot of stuff. I think anybody. It's quicker answers. And he has a cool method.

Yeah, yeah. So basically built the software without customer service. We dove into things like SEO. We talked about Reddit, we talked about how we got the tool built. We talked about.

He gave us some cool tools at the end and some functionality I won't mention now, but one that probably would have saved me hours and hours a week when I had an old design agency.

Yeah, that.

Now I'm pissed that.

And at the end, we also talk about some. Some cool, like, email strategies that you can test to get more effectiveness out of the emails that you do send. And they're relevant to anything, whether you're using gmass or even like a, you know, a mass autoresponder, like a Weber or a Drip or that kind of thing. All right, so with these podcasts, we have somebody on our team who actually takes notes on every single episode. So the backstory, the tactics, the tools, the resources, this. Any sort of tips or any sort of tutorials he gives us on the, on the show. Those come in the notes and we make those Notes available when this episode goes live for a couple days. Go to evergreenprofits.com, go to the most recent episode. Click on the button. It should be in the sidebar or in the post that says get the companion, and we'll shoot you the notes for this episode, assuming they're still available, because they actually do expire now. So you got to get the notes quick. You got to get the notes quick. They expire. So pow, pow. Evergreenprofits.com and then find this episode. I need to make a better link and tell people where to go.

What was that link again?

Hustleandflowchart.com Companion.

Companion. How do you spell companion?

C O, M P A N, I O, N. C, C O, M P A N, I O, N. Right. Did I get that right? Sure. Go to hustle and flowchart.com comp.

Oh, there we go. C O, M, P. Co fast. This forces Matt to make it better, faster.

Link.

Comp. How do you spell comp?

C O, M, P. Okay, got it.

Cool.

So hustleandflowchart.com comp. If you go there, you'll get the details on how to get the companion, assuming the companion is still available, because, again, it goes away. Let's go talk to aj.

I want to say more, but. All right. Aj. Hey, aj. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, guys. Happy to be here.

Yeah. So this is. We've been actually very anxious about this, and we're talking right before this on some of these.

Anxious in a good way.

Anxious in a good way.

Yeah. We're excited to talk about this stuff.

Excitedly, anxiously bouncing around in our chairs.

Oh, yeah. I hope I don't intimidate.

I mean, you're. Yeah, no, you're good, man. Maybe by the end of this, we're like, holy crap, it's brilliant. Yeah. So you're just. I think what caught our eye is that you're just doing some massive things with very simple, seemingly simple platforms and doing stuff that's totally different than typical. You know, software owners, marketers, and just founders in general.

Well, one of the notes that we have is that you're building SaaS companies by not focusing on customer support, which is very interesting because we have had other SaaS entrepreneurs on here who. Part of what they like, part of their business strategy is to really focus on customer support and make that the main focus in their business. So it'll be interesting to really hear kind of the flip side of the coin.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I feel like I tend to do the opposite of what Everyone else does just to be different.

Is that actually like just to be different or are you just like. Is that you as a person too?

Yes. I don't like to conform.

I like it. Okay, so let's take us like, is this what helped you kind of get into business from the get go back in college? I think it was, yeah, sort of.

I mean, my. I have several entrepreneurs in my family, but my path from college was actually to become a doctor. I was in college because I was in this combined medical program which allows you to get acceptance into medical school straight out of high school and you don't even have to take the mcat.

Got it. So that's huge.

So my path was kind of to be a doctor right out of high school and I dropped out of that program to pursue software and web development and entrepreneurship.

Got it. So how did that kind of come to the picture, the whole software stuff?

My dad has been a software developer his whole career and my older brother was working for Microsoft at the time, so he was a software developer. We always had computers around the house growing up. We'd be the first one on the block to have a laser printer in the late 80s. We just always had the latest stuff in our basement.

I always liked it. And my older brother and my dad knew a lot more than I ever did. I was more of a tinkerer. And then I just got a more serious interest in it when I was in college because of the Internet. I went to College in 1995. That was my freshman year. And that's when everybody was excited about setting up a homepage, as it was called back then. And I got excited about that too.

Got it.

So let's talk about the software that you've got now. You've got GMass and you've got Wordzen, right?

Yeah.

So how did those ideas come? Well, let's just. We'll start with one at a time. Where did the idea for gmass come from? And you know, what was the inception of that?

So the idea of gmass actually came.

From.

Something that I was doing when I was working on Wordsen. Let me start there. The initial idea for the company was around this product called WordZen, which is a service that edits and writes your emails for you.

While I was working in that and managing my team of editors who are actually doing the writing of the emails. It's a human based service. I found that I needed a way to communicate with my staff in an efficient way. But I also wanted that communication to be personalized because I Was sending out some data points specific to each editor, and I assumed that someone would have already written a plugin for Gmail that would make it possible to do that. Because I live my life in my Gmail account, like all day. Highest number of hours that I spend in any app is inside Gmail. Gmail has a big ecosystem of plugins and extensions. I just assumed that something had already been written. I was pretty surprised to find out that nobody had written an easy to use tool that makes this possible inside a Gmail account.

That was the genesis of the idea. And I had had background in email marketing with my prior company, and so I kind of decided that I would be the one to build this. So GMask was kind of an offshoot of Wordsen and Gmas is the name of the product that came to be this email marketing plugin for Gmail.

Got it. Yeah, that's where. So GMass was the one that we were like first looking at and then just our research are actually words that popped up. And some things we were looking at yesterday and we just pulled it up again. Matt and I were looking at it. We're like, holy crap. That service paired up with software. It's kind of a combo thing. Damn, that looks so cool.

This is the literal conversation that happened. So Joe's got his laptop sitting next to him right now. He pulled up Words end to look at the site and see what it was all about. And he literally said, holy shit. I think this site just saved my life.

Well, I have some news.

A few days ago, I decided I'm going to shut down the Word Zen service.

Can we buy it from you or acquire it somehow?

If you guys want to talk about.

That, then sure, let's negotiate an offer on air. No, I'm just kidding.

That'll be a first.

So what led you to that decision?

Yeah, well, I've been losing money on it for a while. I only had about. Right now, I have about 50 paying customers using Wordsen. And my costs in terms of managing and paying my editors outweigh the revenue I was generating from the 50 subscribers.

And I just haven't been able to figure out a way to grow it.

Interesting. Okay.

For a while, we were getting a consistent flow of new subscribers every week, and that's kind of stopped. And I'm not sure what to do about it. And on the other side, gmass is growing and it's requiring a lot of my time because it's a more technically complex product. And I just want to. I want to laser focus in on gmass and I don't want any distractions.

And yeah, so it's kind of like an 8020 decision. You're shaving stuff off. Gotcha.

That makes sense. Yeah, sorry. Didn't think we'd put you on the spot kind of.

No, no, I'm happy to talk about.

That was cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, we'll look into that and like, maybe there are some ideas there, but either way, great idea and concept of a service like that.

Yeah, it's interesting because I still think it's a good idea and I still don't know why it didn't work.

Yeah, well, could be something there.

Yeah.

But yeah, so that kind of helped you. So GMass was a spin off of that, which is really cool in itself. And is this. So this is now after college, right? Because I know you kind of started in college, kind of making that transition from the doctor program.

Yeah, I mean, I dropped out of that medical program and my first business was a web development business. So I moved back home to Dayton, Ohio, which is interesting because I was listening to your most recent podcast episode where that guy was from. Dayton, Ohio too.

Doberman Dan, I believe.

Yeah, right, right. Cool. I started my career just making websites for people, friends of my dad who owned small businesses.

Doctors, engineering practices.

The small businesses around the Ohio area. And that led to the creation of a product which was called Django Mail, which is an email marketing platform. And that I built and ran for like 10 years and sold that in 2013.

And then I goofed off for a.

While.

Pulled myself back into mode of sanity after having run this company for a long time and started thinking about what I want to do next. And that's where the idea and the work on Wordsen began.

So it'd be crazy to think that with wordzen and gmask, because you kind of take this contrarian approach. Was that from the whole screw off period? I don't really want to have to build a. I'm just totally thinking this out loud. But the no customer support, the lean, and it seems like everything you develop and do is very lean. It's not a typical approach.

There were two things. There were two aspects of running Django Mail that I never liked, and I applied both of those to gmass. So one of those were providing customer support and. And just being able to do that well was something that I never really enjoyed spending my time on. Like I. As a software developer, I enjoy creating things and building things and putting them in the hands of users and getting feedback, hopefully positive feedback, because Then that reinforces me and pushes me to keep going.

But like, hand holding a customer through setting up their first email campaign was just never something I personally enjoy doing. And I feel like my companies have always been a reflection of my personal values with gmass, because I never liked doing that. I wanted to build a system where I didn't have to do that. Like with GMask, we provide customer support, but we do it in a lean way and we've set up a system so that users can mostly support themselves.

Then the second thing that I never liked about running Django mail was I've never liked building user interfaces for product. Again, my personal skills have been more in backend software development, backend web stuff, and backend database stuff. I've never liked building forms and designing stuff and even having to work with the designer and then integrating that into my work. I never liked that process.

Gmass is specifically a plugin for Gmail where we're using someone else's interface rather than building our own. So the entire application runs within the context of the gmail ui.

Got it? Yep.

Can you just real quickly, can you explain what gmas is and what the features are and why somebody would use that over, you know, just like a.

I don't know what normal email or.

Even like a mailchimp.

Right?

Yeah, yeah. So what GMS is, is it's an email marketing plugin for Gmail. So it lets you send low volume email campaigns from your Gmail account. Sending an email campaign is exactly the same as sending a person to person email. So you would, in Gmail you would hit the compose button, you'd put in a subject, you'd put in a message. The only difference with gmass is that we add a button to the compose window and so you would click that button instead of the normal Gmail send button if you're sending out a campaign. And in terms of why people would use us over a regular email marketing provider like a mailchimp, two primary reasons. One, just the ease and simplicity of the interface and not having to learn a new tool. And two, there's a deliverability advantage to using a tool like ours. And deliverability refers to getting your emails into the inbox versus the promotions folder or the spam folder. And the reason there's a deliverability advantage is because your emails are being sent from Gmail's own servers. And oftentimes you're sending emails to other Gmail addresses just because Gmail kind of dominates the email ecosystem. And so just by the virtue of the fact that you're sending from Gmail to Gmail generally gets you higher inbox placement than if you are sending an email from a mailchimp or a Constant Contact or any of the major email services you've heard of.

Gotcha. But it's a low volume sender. So we wouldn't go and load up our mailing list of 50,000 subscribers and send them email through Gmail.

Yeah, I mean we've kind of devised a way that you can still do that. But the target where people get the best results with us is when they're sending like a couple of thousand emails, not like 20,000 emails.

So what are some common use cases that you see people using like top handful or so?

Yeah, so the most common use case is for what's become known as cold email. So cold email is getting a list of warm leads that are very specific to your industry and what your business does and then sending them an introductory message saying hey, I'm Bob and I've got this great software that I think could benefit your business and I'd like to set up a demo.

Sending that to say like 100 well cultivated warm leads and then setting up a sequence of follow ups that kind of go out based on when people take action. So based on when people open the email or based on if and when people reply to the email, you can devise a system of follow ups that keep pinging your prospect until you get a response.

That's the typical use case.

Gotcha. Now I don't want this to be taken the wrong way, but I feel like I have to ask it. How is that different from spamming?

No, that's a great and often asked question. I mean so you know, depend there's multiple definitions of spam and if you look, if you talk to the most hardcore anti spam activists, they would say that cold email is absolutely spam. And so.

You know what a lot of my users do would be considered spam if you ask a certain number of people.

Then on the other side of it, on the other side of the coin, spam is only considered spam if it's like completely unrelated to what somebody does or if it's a scam or if it's a phishing email, we are trying to collect information that you shouldn't be collecting. So there's different definitions. But yeah, some people would say this is spam, but guys like me wouldn't be in business if they like weren't. If it wasn't still like an effective marketing channel.

Totally, yeah. And I would agree with that 100%. Is it, you know, it's not saying, you know, go, go, you know, email everybody under the sun, but hey, in this vertical or from this specific area with this customized message, that's not a blanket statement. It just makes. I mean, look at. There's worse things that get sent to our houses every single day of the week. You know, just blanket kind of, you.

Know, culturally, I feel like. I feel like spam has become a little more legitimized today than it was say, like 10 years ago. Like, I remember because I was in the industry with my former company Django Mail way back when, like the can spam law was passed and there was like all this talk about, like, how spam should be handled and whether it should be legal or illegal and what the punishments should be. Now, now I feel like people just kind of accept it as a part of daily life and sometimes it benefits them.

Sure, yeah. I mean, look at things like text messaging and messaging bots. Like, there's not really any filters for anything these days. So as long as I think you have the right intent and you're not spending, you know, sending loads of email, but, you know, having a good reason and a good message behind it, it's communication. All you're doing is trying to give value at the end of the day.

So don't go scrape a.

Which is one of the core strategies of a successful cold email campaign is to deliver value in those emails.

Yeah, totally. 100%.

Yeah. I mean, I see some great implications just as far as, like, outreach too. Like if, let's say you can find a list of podcasters and you're trying to get on some podcasts, you can use something like this to get on it.

Is that what you did?

Yeah, yeah, totally. And then there's a whole other side of non commercial uses as well. Because we're integrated with Gmail and because Gmail has over a billion users, we have teachers who are using it to communicate with their students, or a church pastor that's using it to communicate with his congregation. Lots of private club or membership people use it to communicate with people that are in some formal organization with them.

Oh, yeah, I see that. I see that as like a huge value. I can definitely see that. Like, like my, my kids are both in, you know, my son's in T ball, my daughter's in softball. And you know, we get, we're on these like group email threads of like, everybody on the entire team's parents of like, what's going on? And like, in The T ball thing. And I feel like something like this would be actually really perfect for that. You've got all their emails, they expect you to email them. And this is a real simple way to do. And I'm assuming, just so I kind of understand the difference between doing this and let's say BCC ing 50 people on it, this is actually sending a separate email to each individual, right? It's like a.

Exactly, yeah. So with our tool and with any commercial email sending tool, individual emails are sent that can be personalized.

So like if your son's T ball team was using this, you know, they might be sending, let's say your son's stats from the last game to you so you can review them. And that would be easy to do with a tool like mine.

I'm just thinking of another use case.

I think it was Steve Sims. I was listening to how one of his approaches to get on podcasts is to use some outside service, but essentially to send the emails on his behalf. And then he has a follow up with another email address that's basically him and he communicates in there. But he does all the initial outreach and follow ups. It's all kind of automated. And I mean he should probably be using gmass for something like that.

He's probably using a competitor, which isn't as good a tool.

Yeah, I think it was like some outsourced even like service. So it was all manual still. But the fact that you guys have, you know, you have the spreadsheet it looks like, and a Google sheet and that pulls the data with a bunch of different personalization factors.

Okay, I was actually about to ask that. So you guys aren't actually like storing the names and emails. You just basically make like a, like a Google sheet with the names and emails and that ties into Gmail and then it pulls from the sheet.

Exactly. Yeah. We use Google sheets as sort of like our data store. So in a traditional mailchimp like system, you might upload your entire email list into mailchimp. So with gmask, you don't really do that. You just, you kind of upload it into a Google sheet. And so as long as you've got your spreadsheet set with your email addresses, then GMask can connect to it.

Gotcha. Now this is sort of in the weeds question, but does Gmail have any sort of like sending limit on like how many emails you can send in a day?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So they do. And that's why the best case, the best use case for gmass is when you're sending low volume campaigns. So a regular gmail.com email account can send 500 emails a day and a professional G Suite account. So if you're running your company on Gmail, those accounts can send 2,000 emails a day.

Got it. And that's what's so cool with Gmail kind of dominating is that there are so many people at these G Suites, you know, like that's how ours is. And you know they just masked with your domain name. It's still a Google account. So you're probably going to hit the top of their inbox, not get filtered out.

Right. That's the idea. And you know Google has like there's basically two companies that dominate email. Google and Microsoft. And Google and G Suite are more popular amongst tech companies. Startups.

Generally like newer age companies, whereas the Microsoft Suite is more popular in traditional industries like.

The pharmacological industry and medicine and manufacturing and the automotive industry. So it's kind of split in.

Yeah, I remember that construction company I worked with tons of time. It was all Outlook like ah, Microsoft, get off the.

Who are these people that are still using Hotmail then?

Yeah, well hotmail is now outlook.com?

Hotmail is owned by Microsoft, isn't it? Yeah, I totally forgot that. Yeah, okay.

They own it, man. So I want to go back really quick to the customer service. Unless you had some ideas.

No, we can go there. I want to talk about customer service. I also want to talk about how you grew gmask. But we can start with the customer service stuff.

Yeah, just because we brought it up. That was one of those two things you hated from your previous company is this customer. And I don't blame you either. That's typically everyone's first hire for a company. If they're flooded with emails, it's an assistant slash someone for support. And Matt and I were looking through how you do support and it's really cool because it seems like it has a lot of FAQs. You have these layers that you're essentially trying to get people to self answer. It seems like. Is that kind of the approach?

Yes, we're trying to get users to self support. The approach we've taken is to write an article on every question that we can imagine that someone asks. When we get asked a question that we realize we don't have an already published answer for, then we create that.

The idea is that we want users to search our blog for their own answer before contacting us. Users can be lazy, so sometimes they don't always do that. So when they do ask us a question, oftentimes we won't even respond with a full sentence. We'll just respond with a link to a blog post that we know sufficiently answers their question.

Part of that is, as I mentioned before, I don't enjoy spending my time. I like spending my time creating stuff and so obviously hire a support team. I don't have to do that myself, but what I realized is that I can target a user of a certain sophistication that one probably enjoys supporting themselves. I don't think any user of a software as a service system really enjoys filling out a support form and explaining their issue, hoping that someone will be competent enough to answer the issue. I think most users want to be able to solve their problems because if they're given the resources to do that, they can solve their problem instantly rather than having to wait for a support agent for a few hours.

Sure.

Then the other benefit of that is we have this large library of technical content which is indexed really well and that drives a lot of SVO traffic to us.

So the blog itself, it looks like you have a ton of different posts on there.

Yes, that's our biggest source of leads. Gotcha. And that's also kind of something we've done differently from our competitors. You can pick pretty much any of our competitors and if you go to their blogs, their blogs are mostly business focused where they're talking about the best subject lines to get a great response or the time of day you should send your email campaigns to get the best response. We have a little bit of that. But the majority of our blog is technical content.

Okay. That essentially is answering the tech behind your actual software or just like kind of do you have content that leads people in? Or are these folks that pretty much know the problem they have and they're just looking at what you got and you're giving them so much value it seems like a no brainer.

Yeah, both. So some of our articles are geared specifically for our existing users to solve some technical support issue they're having. But the most valuable blog posts we have are the ones that are not specific to gmass itself, but more specific to maybe Gmail or cold email or email marketing in general. For example, one of our most highly trafficked blog posts is a detailed blog post that I wrote about Gmail sending limits, which is what I mentioned earlier, the 500 and the 2000. But there's some more in depth information that goes along with that. Regardless of whether you're using GMask or some other email tool that connects in with your Gmail account. That article is probably relevant to you.

Yeah, I love that. So SEO being the massive. Is that number one for traffic? Yeah.

Oh, definitely. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'm sure. How does it look like? Because you guys are only in the Chrome App Store or extension store.

Correct.

Not sure what you thought. Is there some SEO work being done there, Things that you can do to optimize a little bit?

So the data is pretty opaque from the Chrome Web Store. So with Google Analytics, you can obviously see pretty much anything you want about what's going on on your website. With the Chrome Web Store, not so much.

Being present on there does drive traffic to our website and does get us signups, but it's actually kind of hard to say what impact that's having because Google just doesn't make that data available.

Yeah, we had an app in the Chrome Store for a little while, didn't we?

It was a little while. We had no clue what we were doing. We had an outside developer do all that kind of work. We were the marketing arm.

I never even saw any sort of.

What was your Chrome extension?

Oh, my God. It was actually not there anymore. It was a like tool, an auto. What was it? So any.

Basically, when somebody, if you made a post on a Facebook fan page and somebody liked it, it would automatically invite them to like your page as well.

That's right.

Okay. Okay.

And it worked. It worked really well.

For a little while it worked and then I think either Facebook changed some sort of API or Google changed sort of API.

You were basically hacking like the Facebook page model.

Yeah. I don't remember exactly how it was built. This was something that we had like two years ago and we gave it away for free. And then eventually it wasn't working with Facebook anymore and we just took it off the App Store.

Got it.

Right. Well, it's actually interesting you mentioned that, because the GMask Chrome extension is basically a hack for Gmail, where we're kind of hacking up the Gmail interface to add some of our own stuff. One of the challenges of being in a business like that is that Gmail doesn't officially endorse what I'm doing or my product.

Every week or two weeks, Gmail itself changes its own code and they. When they do that, gmask breaks.

When that happens, I have to rewrite my code to accommodate Gmail's changes.

Got it. So are you the lead and only developer for GMAs?

I'm the lead developer. I have a little bit of help now, just from some freelancers, there are some functionality and code that's above my pay grade, and that's when I reach out for help.

Got it. Yeah, that's interesting. Cool. How about for your content and all the other aspects, what does the team kind of breakdown look like?

I actually am writing most of the content on the blog. I have a couple freelancers that work with me on that. We have a newsletter that we publish called the Gmail Genius, which is a newsletter about being productive inside your Gmail account. I have one person who works on that. Then I have an upwork freelancer who writes some of our more general content that's not specific to gmass functionality.

That's really cool, just super lean.

Just to give some context for the listeners, how big is gmass right now as far as user base? You don't have to give exact number, just a ballpark. Out of curiosity.

Yeah.

We'Ve had about 350,000 signups since the product was launched three and a half years ago, and we currently have just over 10,000 paying customers.

Wow. Got it.

What just keeps blowing my mind is how much opportunity there is in the whole the Chrome Store. And would you say that's a first good place for someone who's interested in software to kind of look into or.

Maybe just develop an MVP off of or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, you know, there's upsides and downsides to taking a Chrome Extension approach. So the biggest upside is that there's not a whole lot the competition is less in the Chrome Store than it is, say, in the iPhone app store or the Android Play Store, or just in the general world of web apps. The downside is that your software is only going to work on the Chrome browser and only on Chrome os, Windows and Mac. Your software won't work on mobile just because Chrome extensions only work on the desktop.

Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there are limitations, but it's definitely. It seems like.

Well, it seems like a decent mvp. And then if things work out really well, then maybe you figure out how to get it into more of a open platform.

I don't know, maybe you fully develop the thing out so it's not relying on something else.

It's been changing. So when I first launched GMask, the Chrome Store was kind of like a. How do you say it? Like an open system where anybody could publish a Chrome extension that does pretty much anything. But in the last year or so, Google has really been clamping down on the Chrome Store, so now they have all sorts of Review processes and humans that actually look after what developers are doing and publishing. So it's a more.

Looked after environment than it used to be.

Got it.

That makes sense. Well, let's talk about how you actually grew this thing. When you first opened up gmass. Was it always a paid thing or did you start as like a free model? How did it start out?

It started out completely free. I didn't have any timeline for monetizing it. My main interest was just getting users to use the product.

So, you know, with my prior company with Django Mail, which was also this more traditional web based email marketing platform, one of the things that always bothered me about that business is that Django Mail was never really well known. It made decent money and had good margins, but I never felt like anyone had heard of Django Mail and that kind of bothered me. So with GMass, when I found this niche to do this integrated inside the gmail environment.

My objective wasn't to bring in revenue right away. My objective was more to get popular. I felt this need to want to build something that was used by a lot of people that a lot of people liked. So I wasn't even thinking about revenue or monetization when I first launched it.

Got it. So get the user base, get the list. I mean, can you grow a list off of the Chrome store? I'm sure there's a way to do it.

Well, yeah, when people install your Chrome extension. So you actually don't get any data when somebody installs your Chrome extension. Like you can't get somebody's email address just by virtue of them installing your extension, but you can then direct them to a signup form.

In our case, what we do is we direct them to link their Gmail account to our backend and when they do that, that's when we get their email address.

Interesting. What we did with ours was we put basically an activation screen where they had to enter their email address and then it sends them a code and activated it.

That's a standard way of doing it.

Yeah, that's a good way for sure.

Except the way that we did it was we had one code and we just sent everybody the exact same code over and over and over again. So if anybody just shared their code, they would be able to install the Chrome plugin. But we weren't selling it, we were just trying to collect emails.

We're marketers, we're not developers.

Yeah, no, it's just really cool to hear that.

So how did you kickstart it? So you opened this thing up you made it free. What was your sort of marketing plan? Just to kind of go for that mass appeal.

So I didn't really have a marketing plan per se, just because marketing has never been my expertise. I just wanted to get it in front of some certain communities that I knew existed to get some initial feedback and traction. And so for me, those two communities were Reddit and Product Hunt.

So how did you. Yeah, what was the plan on each of those, if you don't mind? Maybe start with Reddit.

Yeah. So you know, Product Hunt, and this was back in 2015. Product Hunt was pretty hot back then. And for those that don't know, Product Hunt is a website that features a bunch of new products every day. So a bunch of new products hit their homepage every day, usually 30 to 40 new products, and most of them are software products. And.

We got someone who agreed to post our product for us, which basically guaranteed that it would end up on the homepage. It did well. We got a ton of comments and feedback. I remember that day, I was getting a new signup every three minutes. And that went on for the 24 hours that we were on Product Hunt. That was really exciting to see. I kept refreshing this page I had built that gave me a user account because it was so exciting to watch that number keep going up.

Yeah, interesting.

Then the other thing that happened around that time is.

Actually a few days before the Product Hunt launch, I had posted on Reddit under the startup subreddit that I had built this thing, and I just wanted people to try it out and give me feedback. And it ended up as the number one thread on that subreddit for, like, a good amount of time, like 36 hours, I think. And what's interesting is that now you can't do that because the rules have changed. Reddit doesn't. Or that particular subreddit doesn't allow you to post the name of your product or your startup. It only allows you to ask, like, general questions about how you should handle a particular situation. Like, maybe you're having a conflict with your founders or you want to know how to hire a software developer. But back then, it was kind of the Wild west, and you could post whatever you wanted. But what I did then to get, like, that initial boost in traffic, you can't do now.

Got it. Yeah. And I guess you'd have to go to other subreddits. I know there's advertising now on there you can do.

Yeah, I mean, the subreddits, the way it works is the, like, each one has Its own moderator and its own set of rules. So even though the startup one that you posted it in, it no longer allows you to do the exact same thing, there's probably 20 other subreddits out there that are similar. Maybe not as big of an audience, but are similar, that probably still do allow you to do that.

Probably, yeah, probably, but just not as big.

Yeah, because we actually sort of a side tangent, but we actually had a course on Udemy for a little while and our biggest marketing strategy was to just go give away free access to that paid course on Udemy on Reddit. And we basically just did the same thing. We said, hey, we're making this course, we're selling it for 50 bucks, but we want to give it away for free to the Reddit community. Use this coupon code. And it hit like the top of whatever subreddit we posted in at the time and it just really kicked ass.

No, it was very similar. We were refreshing and it was like new subscriber, new subscriber, new subscriber.

Yeah, that's a great feeling while that lasts. But.

There'S always like the coming off that high at the end of it, right?

Yeah, that's a very good point.

Wait, I refreshed and nothing happened. What?

This isn't normal.

My new normal is not interesting. Okay, so I just love that you were able to achieve all this and you are not a marketing guy. I think that's the coolest thing.

I feel like almost some of the best marketing stories are the ones that were more stumbled upon versus.

They went in headfirst knowing what they were doing.

Yeah, I mean.

I've always hoped that if I build something useful or good that people would somehow find it like that. You know, if you build it, they will come mentality.

Sure.

And you know, I think as time goes on, that's a harder and harder thing to make happen. Just because the barriers to entry in creating something are coming down. Especially in my world. In the email world, the barriers to entry to creating some sort of email business are super low because there's all these off the shelf third party components that you can clobber together to have a product that does something.

Sure, yeah.

So, you know, I read a lot. So any like any marketing skills that I have have come from like reading a ton of articles on Medium.

Yeah, that's a good source.

So do you pay for the upgrade on Medium?

No, I'm a free user.

I think that's most people.

And actually, and I've noticed recently that I'm Getting blocked a lot. That paywall keep showing up when I'm trying to read stuff.

You're like, damn, you, paywall. There's always a way around just VPN.

Their browser because maybe that doesn't have the cookie.

Yeah, I know. See, yeah, you're tech, you know vpn.

Yeah, just install vpn, you'll be fine.

Yeah, right.

Just switch between states or countries every time you want to look at Medium.

Hey, Medium's listening, right?

I'm just curious now that you said, you know, product hunt was big back in the day. Reddit was, you know, that strategy you can't really do so much with the approach you took. Knowing what you know now, like, is there a strategy you would use, say if you started gmass right now or something similar, an approach you would take to market this thing?

Man, that's a great question. So, you know, I. I don't know. The approach would definitely have to be different because I think what worked then, which was not that long ago, three and a half years ago, I don't think would work as well now. I mean, I hate to say it, I hate to rely on this, but I might have to. If I was launching now. I might have to rely on a paid ad campaign to get the word out.

Yeah, yeah, don't worry, you don't have to hate that.

I think paid ad campaign are really hard to get a good ROI on. I think it's expensive. There's a ton of click fraud. I mean, I've tried Facebook ads in the past and they did not work well for me.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of. You got to know the right strategy and it changes all the time.

So what works today is not going to work tomorrow. Just like, just like they changed the rules on Reddit, they change the rules on Facebook and Google all the time as well. So.

Yeah, yeah, I'm curious now that, like, so you have GMass and it sounds like you're just going to be a perpetual entrepreneur slash developer for a very long time. What do you see in the future for gmass? Like, do you want to keep it the same with Gmail's interface and all that stuff, or do you like, do you think they can cut you off at some time? Do you have a plan for that? Potentially, yeah.

So actually there's an interesting thing happening right now in the whole Gmail ecosystem.

Everybody that's built their software on top of Gmail is having to go through this extensive review and audit process with Google. They just started this in the last few months.

Actually a lot of independent developers and some of the smaller guys who've built like side projects or things that aren't their full time job are disappearing, their products are disappearing because they can't afford to go through this review process.

So that has gotten me thinking about whether I want to remain 100% loyal to the Google platform or if I should be thinking of turning this into a more full blown enterprise email marketing platform. And I haven't really arrived at any conclusions there yet. But we have been building more stuff that can be used by any email marketer, not just someone using Gmail and not just someone using gmass to send their campaigns. We've been building like more technical tools, like things that can analyze your email campaign and tell you if any of the domains or IP addresses are on a blacklist. Things to help you.

Solve your spam issue if you're having one. So we are starting to think like in a grander way, just outside of Gmail.

Yeah, that's actually a cool opportunity. If people can't hack it out with the review process. Maybe it's a money thing, time thing, whatever. That could be a good opportunity for you to scoop up some of these and for really cheap reach out.

I mean, you're on a different wavelength. You're like, oh, I'm just thinking of.

Like, these are users that might need your service.

Oh, I see what you're saying. So you're basically saying like, all these Chrome apps are getting shut down, so we should just start buying them up and taking their users.

Oh yeah, actually, yeah. I mean, if I had like an investment banker that worked for me, that's what I would have them do right now. I just, I don't have the resources myself to like reach out to all these guys.

That's where my brain immediately went to.

So you read a lot. Have you read the book how to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital by Nathan Lotka?

Oh, geez. No.

Okay. It's a fairly new book. I'm not holding that against you or anything.

I know the book and I know.

Nathan, you gotta read that book because he literally has a Chrome plugin business and he talks about his growth strategies and marketing strategies around it.

I know.

So Nathan and I have talked.

I don't like the guy that much.

He's never been very nice to me. So I know about his book. I'm friends on him, I'm friends on Facebook with him and I'm actually very familiar with the Chrome extension that he purchased and tried to grow.

I think he embellishes a lot. I'm not a fan.

I will say he definitely is a. A divisive figure in our sort of industry.

Totally.

Yeah. You either like him or hate him.

He's a good marketer, I'll give him that. He is an excellent marketer.

Yeah. But despite the, you know, the personality aspect of it, there is some really amazing nuggets in his book. So I gotta give him credit where credit's due, 100%.

Okay, sure, sure. I just don't think I can. Even though the book is like 10 bucks or whatever, I just can't buy it knowing I'm going to be putting some money in his pocket.

Hey, man, stay true to yourself. That's fine. Hats out to you for that. You staying in your lane?

Maybe on, you know how Amazon has the, like, look inside this book feature? Maybe I'll do that.

Yeah. Or if he's ever in the free Kindle book or whatever.

What's the book, Joe, that you're always talking about, that talks about, like, negotiating? This kind of thing?

Never split the difference.

Yeah.

So that's more. Yeah. General negotiation. But if you ever, I guess, you know, got. I don't know. Why did you bring that up?

I don't know, just because we were talking about maybe going and buying Chrome.

Extensions, talking about books, and I brought.

It up because with the. The concept of like maybe buying up some other Chrome extensions came up and, you know, there's other ways to buy them without actually your own money, but any capital.

Yeah, that's true.

I'm going to change the subject because I do have.

We're.

We're kind of getting towards the end of the call and there's a few other things I wanted to touch on. But. So you. So you built the list of 350,000 users and then. I mean, I don't know the chronological events of it, but at some point you had a lot of users for free and you decided to go paid. How did that transition work out?

So the reason I wanted to make that transition was because we were getting so many spammers and phishers using our platform that it was starting to make us look bad.

So by monetizing and restricting the amount of emails you could send if you were just a free user, I, like, put a serious dent in that problem.

Now, it was also nice to be able to turn this into a real business that was making money. But that was the original thinking. I decided I've got to do it because I've got to cut off the flow of spammers.

You know, it was kind of, it was a scary transition to make because I think at the time, maybe I had like 50,000 users at the time. And I was afraid of what the reaction would be when I announced, hey, starting on this date, you know, I'd like you to subscribe and pay. And it was interesting because when I sent out that first email, most of the replies I got were like, fuse. Or you said the product was going to be free and you lied to us. Or, or we can't afford this. I hope you change your mind and keep the product free. And just so you know, GMASS is like a. It's in the range of like 10 to $20 a month based on the plan you choose. Yeah, so I was like, man, like I thought the pricing was low. I thought this would be an easy decision for people to make. There was a lot of, a lot of negativity around it. And so I was scared to flip that switch. And I remember when I did flip that switch, I'm like refreshing my email, waiting for that first new subscriber notification to come in. It's a scary thing because 10 minutes go by and 30 minutes go by and an hour goes by. There's not a single subscriber yet. I can see that people are trying to send their campaigns but getting blocked because the way we had it set up is if you tried to send a campaign over a certain amount, you got this pop up saying, hey, to send this, put your credit card in. I knew that was happening, but I knew that people weren't putting their credit card in. So I was like, man, what's going on? And this was late at night, so I went to bed and I woke up the next morning and we had a handful of subscribers. So that was nice. And over time that number obviously grew. So there were a couple of things that I kind of, in retrospect realized about when I flipped the switch. So when I flipped the switch it was late at night. And so most of our active users were overseas, India and China. And so it made sense that nobody subscribed right away because to pay 10 or $20 a month based on the currency, there is a bigger ask than it is for a United States based person to pay that.

So that was one thing. And then the other thing is that when I sent out that first email announcing monetization, there were plenty of people that were fine with paying, but those aren't the people that replied. And I think it goes back to the general principle of how when you're upset with something, you tell 10 times more people than you would when you're happy with something.

Oh, yeah.

So even though it seemed like the world was ending.

It turned out it wasn't.

Yeah, that's standard. And you just dealt with another customer support issue that you're like. Ah, but yeah, that's typical customer support across the board. You get the angry ones, but the happy ones are usually quiet. That's why it's kind of interesting. Like with this podcast, a lot of folks listen, but you don't hear a lot from them. But whenever we prompt or ask a question and give the support email, we're pretty much flooded, inundated by it. And we're like, oh, okay, there they are. So it's. Yeah, I could see that with the negative stuff.

Well, that's interesting too, because I read this article once that talked about how users are more loyal when they have a little bit of a problem that you then solve than users who never have a problem with your software at all.

Yeah. I wonder why. There's gotta be something there where you support them, you give them a solution. You're there to prove that, hey, you're there for the long run, you're not there.

Yeah, I think they turn into a happy, happier user at that point.

100%. Yeah. Because I think that's a big. Because we promote a lot of software as affiliates and if they're free or if it's not a subscription or recurring element, typically people kind of question. They want to make sure that that software is going to stick around for a while. And that's kind of a commonality thing that we run into when promoting tools in general. Yeah, so it's. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. So I don't know if you have anything else, Matt.

Yeah, I was going to touch a little bit maybe on some, like some email tactics that maybe some of the users can. Or the users, the listeners can take away with them. Are there any sort of. I'm trying to think of the best way to word it.

I want to see if maybe strategies.

Like a strategy or a tactic or some way to maybe use like this, this gmass sending in your business. That. Like a cool case study or a cool tactic or some sort of like email strategy that are.

Here's a process to use that you can. Yeah. Using GMass or manually a million times.

Let me just go over a general strategy that's not specific to GMAs but is specific to just outreach in general.

So because a tool like GMask and all of my competitors have the ability to do this sequence of follow ups like after the initial email.

That ability to do that is so critical because in most cases when you're looking for someone to reply, that reply won't come after the first email, but it will come after the second email. So if I reach out to a warm list of 100 people saying, hey, I've got this cool new software that I think will help your business, I'd love to set up a demo. Chances are I'm not going to get a reply to that. But a few days later when that follow up goes out, that's attached to that same thread that says, hey man, I sent you this email below. I'd really appreciate it if you'd respond that gets a response.

It's so funny because just yesterday I had some random salesperson reach out, say they hit me up on LinkedIn to some sales thing that we don't even do. Of course didn't do their homework. Right. And then I think I opened it and I'm sure that probably triggered something. And then what? It was like 20 minutes later some other person from the same company said like hey, I just wanted to check in on that email that blah blah blah sent. I was like, I know what you're doing and I like it, but I'm not going to respond to you because I want to see more automations. Let's see where this goes. Yeah, but it's interesting. The power's there though, the follow up. Yep.

So in that case, the more sophisticated companies would have something that prevents that from happening. Like two people hitting you up at the same time.

Ah, okay, got it. So there's all these rules happening behind the scenes.

Yeah, yeah.

So cool. So yeah, so walking people through. So that's kind of a strategy. So obviously, definitely follow up with emails.

Yeah, don't just send once and then expect a reply. It's usually that second email that gets the reply.

Yeah, right.

And there's a reason for that. And the reason for that is that in that first email people assume that that's automated, that that's a machine sending that. And that second email, it looks like a human is sending that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I like that. Okay, how about subject lines? Are there some go to principles around that to get the opening?

Yeah. I've done years of experimentation with my own subject lines. I'll give just one nugget that I've realized recently from my own work.

I used to use, I think it's called title case with my subject lines. Where the first letter of each word was capitalized. Now I've been going all lowercase.

Okay. So it's very casual.

Yeah, all lowercase. And I've been getting better open rates.

I like it.

Interesting.

How about follow ups? And this is always one that I'll play around manually, but you can change the subject line after the first say, you know, keep it on the same thread. But you can always modify the subject line like, you know, put a, I don't know, something in the. In the beginning. Re, colon, you know, whatever.

Yeah. So, you know, I kind of consider that a bit of a shady tactic.

Yeah.

And I've actually seen that. I've seen more emails go to spam that are doing that than before. And I think the reason is that when the subject line starts with re. So like the Gmail spam filter is going to expect that to be attached to some thread because it starts with re.

Yep.

And so when it's not, I think the filter kind of flags that and penalizes it.

Now, I could see that. Yeah. And then because you see all these larger marketers or with a big autoresponder list will do an email like that just to try to get that open. I think I fell for it from someone today. I was like, oh, that was good. I know the guy. I'm like, oh, it was a marketing email.

Those damn scammers.

Damn them. Yeah. So let's see, time of the day, sending emails, brevity, and the length of emails. Any principles or strategies around those?

So on length, I've experimented with this too. I used to write novels in my emails. I'd have 20 things to update my user base on. So I quickly learned that wasn't a good ide. I think the most impact comes from sticking to one subject, one link, and maybe four or five sentences. And then if they want more information, direct them to click that link.

Got it. Okay, cool. So that's good for company emails and for getting responses.

Like, if your goal is to get a reply, it depends on what your goal is. Sometimes your goal is to get them to click that link to buy something or to get that clink to click that link to read something. But if your goal is to get them to reply, then it should be under five sentences for sure.

Okay, cool. And time of the day, I'm sure time of day.

So from what I've seen, I think time of day used to be something that was important in email marketing, like five or 10 years ago, where you're gonna send the email specific to the Recipient's time zone. And a lot of the bigger, more enterprise email marketing players had a feature where they could figure out what time zone or recipient was then and they would send an email, you know, during work hours of that particular time zone. Now, I've been testing this. I'll send my emails at any time of the night and day, weekends, mornings, evenings. I don't think it has an impact on response rate anymore. Just because our culture now is that people generally kind of work all the time. And with mobile, people have the ability to check their email all the time. And they do. So I don't think time of day has any bearing on email marketing success anymore.

Yeah, I agree 100% because I've experimented with our own mailing list a lot with that kind of thing, and I've pretty much determined the same thing. I remember there used to be sort of rules of thumb of like, you know, send it at 7am and their time and. And these days I feel like you're right. They're either like checking their email all day and they're going to get it when you send it, or they're like. The way I do it is I literally check my email once in the morning and then once at the very end of the day. And I just have two windows that I look at and I'm not paying attention to what time any of the emails were sent. I just kind of want to clear them out quickly. Flip through my inbox.

Yeah, right, right.

Wow.

Twice a day. I'm like twice a minute.

Yeah.

No, I'm not a big emailer. Joe will attest I am.

That's why I said about the word Zen. I was like, oh my God, I love this. Cause I'm. Yeah, I'm more in the Gmail.

Yeah.

I gotta use your service before you shut it down.

Yeah, right.

Well, cool. So just to wrap up, unless, Matt, you had anything else. Nope. Sweet. So we typically like to ask if there's a book or some resource, something that you just love to go to all the time, just kind of sharpen the tools and maybe it's coding or marketing or software, whatever it is, or things that you just like to recommend to friends, something that impacts.

So the book that's had the most impact on my business career is actually a book on how to recruit. And it's a book called Top Grading.

That's a new one.

I haven't heard that one before.

In the book you're taught a very systematic method of how to interview people. And more importantly for me, what I got the most out of was the section on how to check references.

Mm. Okay.

Can you repeat the name of that book?

Yeah, yeah. Top grading. Like top grading, one word.

Got it. Cool.

Cool.

We'll make sure we link that in the show. Notes. Do you have any really cool tools or. We just kind of started asking this question on the show, but like software tools. Like software tools that you can't really live without now in your business. Like for me, for instance, I kind of live in two tools, Slack and Omnifocus. Omnifocus is like my sort of daily checklist where I kind of keep track of all the things I need to get done today and this week. And then Slack is obviously our internal team communication.

We also use what notion for project management and kind of keeping a lot of stuff in one place.

Yeah. So do you have any sort of like, tool stack that are like, integral to your business?

Yeah. So for us it's Slack and Gmail, but I feel like that's not very interesting because everybody uses Slack and Gmail, so that's not a very unique answer.

So instead, let me tell you about two cool software things that have nothing to do with the business that I think are just really cool that I discovered recently.

Love it. Let's do it.

So if you do any kind of photo editing or if you've ever photoshopped something, you might often find the need to remove the background of the photograph. And there's a really cool new service called Remove BG where you upload any photograph of yourself, of your spouse, whatever, your dog, and it uses AI to remove the background so you end up with just the subject of the photograph.

Why didn't Jesus all these good tools? Because I used to have a design agency and that was the bane of our existence. That would take so much time and I just wish I had that tool back then.

Yeah, then I'll share another one that I just discovered the other day. So I've been a Dropbox user for years and years and years, but Dropbox just launched this feature a few months ago that is life changing for me. And that's the ability to search for text inside images. I take a ton of screenshots. Like every time I buy something on Expedia or buy something on Amazon, I take a screenshot of the confirmation screen just as proof. But I never had a way of doing anything with those screenshots because I couldn't search for anything inside them because it's an image.

So Dropbox now uses OCR to index the content of your images.

That's cool. I think Evernote does that right now too, doesn't it?

I believe so, yeah.

Oh, really? Okay.

I think so. And I don't know if it's a setting. Yeah, Matt's kind of naughty.

I've got the premium version. They don't do it like the free version. I think they only do it in the premium version.

Maybe that's it. But Dropbox, that's game changing too, because everybody has Dropbox. Exactly. That's cool. Good tips. I didn't hear about any of those.

Yeah, that's very cool.

Awesome, man. Well, cool. AJ, where should folks go? I'm assuming GMast is a pretty good place to start.

Yeah. The website is gmass Co. Someday I hope to have the dot com, but it hasn't quite worked out yet. And if you want to find me personally, you can find me on Twitter. I'm part time snob on Twitter and my email address is my first nameordzen.com.

Awesome, man. I'm curious, what are you most snobby about just to wrap it up with us?

Oh, man, everything. I don't like going to concerts unless I'm sitting front row.

Okay. I like it. Get another quick one.

I don't like drinking orange juice unless it's fresh squeezed.

These are awesome. Okay, cool. We can go all day. We'll stop it there. Thank you, aj.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Joe.

Thanks, everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. For taking the time to listen. We want to give you something, something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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