Christopher Gimmer — The Founder Of Snappa Shares His SEO Secrets

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Yo, yo. Alright, so.

Matt had to pry my hands away from Photoshop at one time, did I? Yes.

Like literally.

Almost. Almost.

Well, so, alright, so I'm known for just being a little bit of a perfectionist in some cases and taking things a little bit too far, like designing. Matt did mention on the podcast, actually this episode that neither of us are graphic designers. I'm going to call BS bullshit on that because that is actually what I did for a long time. So I was going to call you out in the intro.

But at the end of the day, I realized that after using Snappa, which we're talking to the founder today, Christopher Gimmer, and it's a tool that we use that has allowed me to replace Photoshop out of my daily repertoire, which I felt like was a kind of a black hole, at least for me. Personal Snappa just makes it freaking easy. And literally every piece that we use in any graphics that you see that go out, including our Hustle and Flowchart artwork that's in itunes, Stitcher, all that fun stuff was all made in Snappa, which is super cool. And we're talking to the co founder today, Christopher, how the hell he made it. He's not a software guy. So we dug into how he does that with software, how he manages a team, how he can produce stuff quickly, and also how he uses SEO and other content marketing strategies to grow this fricking company. And it's doing amazing. So we broke all that down in this episode.

Yeah, we also talk about growing teams and stuff like that too. So.

Why are you getting all creepy with that?

I don't know. What else you got? What else? Yeah, what else are we talking about?

Oh, man. We just really dove deep on like the development of Snappa, the building, the team getting.

We really.

What is this? What is happening right now?

Dad needs to raise his energy level some.

All right, so here's what you should do.

There we go. There it is.

So we actually have a really cool blog post. I want to share this at the front of the podcast too. If you actually go to evergreenprofits.com snappa review so it's evergreenprofits.com snappareview but there is a-snappa review.

We don't like to make it easy on you.

No, Snap a dash review. If you go there, you can actually see this blog post that I wrote about all the different ways we use Snappa. We use it in like 30 different ways. Pretty much all the graphics you see on our website are Snappa. So if you go to that blog post, you can get a breakdown of all the ways we use Snappa.

It's badass.

And if you just go to evergreenprofits.com snappa or no go.evergreenprofits.com snappa yeah, we.

Don'T make it easy.

We make it. We want to make it as hard as possible. So if you go to xyj432674.com. Yes. No, I'm just making shit up now.

You just got to make something at the URL now. I swear someone's going to type that in.

You know what, just go to evergreenprofits.com snap a-review.

Perfect.

All right.

And then you can see all the ways we use it. There's a link for you to buy it through our affiliate link. And let's just go talk to Christopher and learn everything there is to know about Snappa.

By the way, don't you like how Matt just got really loud and he started. He talked really fast. I said amp up the energy.

Well, I follow directions. Let's go talk to Christopher.

Hey, Christopher, how you doing, my man?

Pretty good. Yourself? Great.

Yeah, this is. We just always love chatting with more people on the podcast here, especially ones you know that we're actually using your software, you know, some stuff that you prod produce and we love it. So we're actually really stoked to have you on the show so we can kind of deep dive into that and introduce it to more people.

Yeah, I love talking to people who do software. Software is a world that we've never really dabbled in but has always fascinated us. And so it's always fun to talk to software dudes and learn some of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on in the software world and getting it developed and getting new members on board and all that. So a lot of rabbit holes we.

Can go down there.

Yeah, looking forward to it.

Sweet, dude. Well, you're a software guy, but not a trained developer. Correct yourself.

Yeah, that's right. I have a technical co founder who built the app and I've been a lot more focused on the marketing and business side of things.

Yeah, so you're the guy we want to talk to because that's us as well. We're a marketer's first, but we've definitely dabbled in software. But we're not going to go code the thing out. Yeah, take us back because you have an interesting history of startups, some being very successful, some not, which is the case of a good entrepreneur it seems like. But take us back to how you kind of got into this whole thing of just running your own company and software.

Yeah. So I'll tell you the short version and then you can kind of pick away at whatever you want to kind of dive into. But so my background is actually in finance and accounting. That's what I did in university. And then I got a government job, which I did for five years. And then I went to Southeast Asia and it was kind of like a life changing experience and suddenly I just didn't want to go back to boring cubicle office job anymore.

Around that time I ended up meeting Mark, who's my current co founder at Snapup and kind of found out that he did some development stuff on the side. He was self taught, he never went to school for it or anything. And then I kind of got the genius idea that we should start an online business together. And the first thing we started was a student dating website called Classmate Catch. And we ended up getting about, I think it was like 1,000 users. But at that point we just didn't know how to scale it outside of our own city and learned pretty quickly. I didn't know really what I was doing, so that's kind of when I really just went all in on just reading every blog that I could about marketing and listening to a lot of podcasts. And then we just kept trying different stuff and then we did about two or three other projects and then eventually it led to Snappa. So it was about like, I think when we launched a student dating website, it was 2012, so it took about like 2015 is kind of when I quit and went full time. So it took about like three years to really get it.

Ah, okay. So yeah, we started around the same time. Well, earlier than that. But you know, we had these evolutions, but we just kind of dove right in without thinking much about it. Just that we'll figure it out. So yeah, you probably had some smarter thinking going through this. Maybe it was a finance background.

I had a finance background. What are you saying about me?

That is a good point.

I actually went to school for finance as well.

Interesting. Okay, so after Classmate Catch, then you moved on to new things, I'm sure.

Yeah, so like I said, started learning a lot more about actually how to do online marketing. And so I started getting really into SEO and keyword research. Because what was cool about that is you didn't actually need any money. It was like A free marketing channel. Around that time, I also started reading a lot about dropshipping. I was essentially looking for some sort of niche website that we can start and start drop shipping. Then Mark had kind of stumbled across Bootstrap themes and Bootstrap templates, which is essentially like a front end development framework, kind of like selling WordPress themes, but just for a different framework.

And so we launched this website called Bootstrap A, which was a marketplace for themes and templates and started to get pretty good at content marketing. And so we ended up scaling that business up to about 10k in revenue strictly through SEO and organic traffic. And then at that same time.

Kind of had the idea for Snappa because I was working on the blog and it was a pain in the ass to create these images and I was struggling my way through Photoshop and stuff.

At that same time I also wrote a blog post about where to get free stock photos that ended up going viral. And so next thing you know, we have this blog post that's ranking for free stock photos, which is like, you know, super competitive keyword as you can imagine. And then that led us to create our own stock photo site.

So basically what happened was we, you know, we're running Bootstrap A, it's doing okay, but certainly not enough to really support us full time. And then we had this stock photo site along with this blog post that was getting a lot of traffic. So that's kind of when we thought, why don't we try building this SaaS app? Because we had an audience that we can market it to. And that kind of led us on the path to Snappa.

How did you get the idea for Snappa? Where did that come from? I know you had the stock photo site and you were doing that, but what led you to creating an app? That there was design templates for advertising and for featured images and all that sort of thing. How did that evolve and where did that idea come from?

Yeah, so like I said, I was writing all the content for a blog at the time and it was just a pain in the ass to create the featured images and any sort of graphics within the content. And so I figured, I'm sure there's other people like myself that are struggling with this too. And so what we did was we had an email list for the stock photo site. And so the first thing I did was kind of survey and get a sense of what they were using the photos for. And sure enough, a pretty big percentage of them were using it for their blogs, social media. And that Kind of stuff. And then so I sent out just a basic email to the people that responded that they were using it for social media and blogging. If I could do like a 15, 20 minute call just to kind of ask them a few questions. And so what I did on that call was just kind of figure out how were they actually creating images for the marketing, what kind of tools that we're using, trying to just get a sense of whether they were experiencing the same pain points that I was. And at the end of those calls, I realized that there was indeed a pain point there. And I thought that Snappa could be a product that people would. That it would resonate with.

So you did the brilliant idea of actually talking to your customers and asking what their pain points are. Most people don't do that. Bravo to you, dude.

Yeah, well, the first two failures that we did was not doing that. So I finally learned the third time around that we should probably do that before spending six months to build something.

Right. That's brilliant. So really quick. For folks who don't know what Snappa is, in your words, can you describe that and why it's so damn useful for content creators?

Yeah, I would just describe it as a really easy to use online graphic design tool and just makes it super easy to whip up graphics for blogs, social media ads, that kind of thing. Essentially, it's a graphic design tool for marketers and entrepreneurs. Really?

Yeah, we use it for everything. Blog, podcast, even our freaking podcast image.

Anybody listening to this? If you want to see what it can create, you can look at our featured images on our blog. You can look at any of our Facebook ads. You could look at the. The actual podcast cover image that we created for this show. Any of the banners that you see on our website in the sidebar.

Well, we were even pretty lazy about that. We just literally took the templates someday.

Oh, yeah, yeah, No, I just took the templates that were already there and just changed the words on them.

What do you know? They convert pretty dang well just without tweaking much.

All of the Instagram memes that we post that have quotes from these podcast episodes, I could probably name like nine or ten other things. I actually wrote a blog post, which I'll link to below this episode of like, here's the 30 different ways we use Snappa in our business. And I shared that and it. It was a pretty popular blog post, so I'll make sure I share that in the show notes. But if you want to see what it does, pretty much look at any images in our brand. And you can see Snappa's handiwork.

It's been the one tool that has allowed me to rip my dirty fingers away from Photoshop. And that's mainly because Matt told me to stop wasting my time. And I'm serious because I love Photoshop, still do. But it's like more of a dirty habit than a useful tool that can get shit done.

Yeah, there's a lot worse dirty habits.

To have, I guess. Yeah, Snap is pretty legit. So thank you for that, man.

Yeah, that was a super, super impressive post when I saw that come out, I have to say.

Yeah, man. Well, sweet. So what's so Snappa? Yeah, so the benefits are there. What's in the future? And this is we won't stick on this topic the whole time because we're curious about like SEO and the free stuff. So we'll get into some of the marketing tactics. But what's in the future works of Snappa. So like what's coming up later?

Yeah, so the first few years we're just really focused on just cranking out features and what people are asking for. And so we've kind of got to the point now where we pretty much knocked out. I mean there's always more features to build and we always have a list, but we're really focusing at least short term on the user experience, just making it super easy to use. Clean up the UI a little bit. Then we're actually going to be doing quite a big refactor and that's going to allow us to build some really long term stuff which I can't go too into detail right now, but it's really going to allow us to level up the tool and make it even better than it is now.

Are there any more like specific templates in the roadmap? Like you know, you've got your Facebook ads and your Google Ad images and your featured images for blog post. Are there any more template ideas that are in the roadmap in the future?

I mean we just like.

We kind of just add them as we kind of see that there's the need there. So whether that be customers just asking us like, hey, can you add this? Or if we see a new platform that's kind of starting to take off, then we'll go ahead and add that. So that's always kind of on evolving case. Yeah, got it.

Cool.

Sweet. Yeah, well maybe we'll come up with some ideas, we'll send them your way just for the heck of it and see what happens. Well, cool So a lot of this, you were saying that organic traffic, this is something that we're big on. We're just big on any kind of traffic. But organic is amazing because it's free and it's kind of like this perpetual thing that keeps coming and you have all these other things you could do once you have that pixel people or whatnot. What are some of the SEO drivers, the principles that you use at Snappa to really be effective?

Yeah, good question. So it's interesting because when we started our blog, we're really kind of all over the place, to be honest, and weren't doing that great of a job.

We took a step back and thought, like, okay, if someone's using Snappa, what kind of stuff might they be searching for, what kind of pain points or whatever? And so I started just like plugging in the different kind of graphics and stuff that we cater to in Ahrefs keyword explorer. And so, for example, typed in Twitter header. And then I realized that there's a shit ton of search volume for Twitter header size. And so I thought, okay, that's pretty interesting because I'm sure if someone's searching for what the Twitter header size is, they probably have a need to create a Twitter header.

I went ahead and created that article, built some links to it, and then within about a month or two, we were ranking number one for Twitter header size, and it was bringing in pretty substantial traffic. I thought, oh, okay, that's really interesting. We ended up just replicating that across all the different.

Banner and graphic sizes that we cater to. So now we rank for things like Facebook cover size, Twitter header size, YouTube banner size, YouTube channel art size. And that has really just been killer for us in terms of our SEO strategy.

And each one of those things you're ranking for, that's a blog post or a piece of content, just about just the size of those graphics. I mean, what kind of content are you sending people to?

Yeah. So.

Basically the blog posts are typically called like Facebook the ideal Facebook cover size and best practices. The first section will be about the size and the dimensions. The thing that's interesting is Facebook. For example, the Facebook cover. Facebook will tell you, okay, here's the size to use. But what they don't tell you is that on mobile it will look very different. Then people are always wondering what parts of my image are going to be cut off on mobile versus desktop. In these posts, we're actually showing a diagram with here's how many pixels you need on both the width and the height. However you Also need to make sure that you don't put any text or any logos and stuff on this area because that will get cut off on mobile and this will get cut off on desktop and vice versa. We actually go into quite a bit of detail, not in terms of just here's the width and length that you need, but here's how you should go about creating it, what kind of safe zones. And then we go through some best practices in terms of how to actually create an effective Facebook cover. The main stuff that we're ranking for is Facebook cover size, Facebook cover dimensions, but there's actually quite a bit of detail and useful information in those posts as well.

Very cool.

I love it. Yeah, we use Ahrefs as well to find these gaps in the market and figure out what are our competitors doing. Or just random keywords like that just stumbling across and it's like, okay, put some content there. So yeah, Ahrefs is amazing. Any other things? So once you're creating the content specifically for that keyword, are you doing anything else on site or off site for SEO?

I mean, we're definitely doing just like the basic kind of best practices, so clean URLs making sure the keywords are in our title tags. We found that long form content typically works well. All our articles are generally at least 1,000 words, sometimes going up to 2,000 words. Obviously images is important. Make sure load speed's good, alt text, the typical on page stuff. Then in terms of off pages, really just trying to build quality links through that. And we generally do that through a combination of manual outreach and also if we guest post on other blogs, then linking back to some of those cornerstone pieces of content that we've written.

Got it. Is this something you just picked up over time just by just tinkering around, or is it more or less something you picked up somewhere else and kind of hodgepodged it together until it became this?

I mean, just in terms of SEO in general, I got pretty good at it through even before we launched Snappa with Bootstrap A. And that's kind of where I realized if you do the keyword research, you find the right keywords, you write the articles, make sure you're on page SEO and build a couple links to tends to work pretty well with Snappa. It was just a matter of figuring out.

What content was going to work best. And this is kind of what worked good for us, is just building content around the things that people are actually trying to create graphics for.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Now, is there any other sort of other than SEO, has there been any other sort of growth strategies that you've used to grow Snappa outside of the SEO?

So in the beginning, as I mentioned, we had that free stock photo site, stocksnap IO. And so I would say like 80% of the signups for Snappa in the early days were coming from that website. So essentially what we're doing is we had like banner ad in the sidebar that was kind of directing people to it. And then whenever someone downloaded an image, we would show like a pop up that says, hey, have you tried Snappa Easy to use graphic design tool with a call to action to sign up for the product.

That worked really well in the beginning and that's where quite a big chunk of our signups came up. And then over time, we started building out our content and SEO because as you know, SEO and content is a long term play, right? Especially when you have a new domain, it definitely takes time to snowball. So that's what worked well in the beginning. And because we have a freemium product, there's pretty good natural word of mouth. So obviously a lot of our existing users will recommend us to their friends and colleagues and whatever. And we tend to get written up in blog posts and through influencers and stuff like that. So that kind of has been the bread and butter of our marketing from the beginning.

Got it. So no, like paid media buys, Facebook ads, Google Ads, nothing like that really.

No, we haven't. We tried dabbling a little bit in paid ads, but.

It wasn't working too well. And at the time, like, I didn't want to pour a ton of money into it because you kind of have to spend the money to learn whether it's going to work or not. And the thing for us was the content and the SEO was just continuing to work really well. So I felt for us it was just a better idea to just double down on what was working rather than try to spread ourselves thin and try all these other marketing channels that may or may not work.

Right. So I know you guys have affiliates as well, and we are affiliates in full disclosure because we love the product. That's the only reason we are affiliates of it is that a big part of your traffic play in addition to all the organic stuff you're doing.

So to be honest, we haven't really focused that much on affiliates. We kind of threw up the affiliate program. There's a couple affiliates that do pretty well for us, but that's actually something we might want to are going to try to focus a Bit more on moving forward.

Yeah, it's good. And we'll do the best we can for what we got. But yeah, so it's interesting. So, I mean, going into software as a whole, just developing this thing out as not being a software guy, I'm just kind of curious how that works with your co founder, who is more the tech guy.

How does, I guess, how does it, like, daily life look like for you guys?

Are you.

Do you guys talk to each other about, like, do you guys mastermind together as a team, or is it kind of, do you run pretty independent to develop the stuff you're good at?

Yeah, so we have. We have a pretty good relationship and we, you know, we essentially trust each other with what we do best. So. So in terms of development, essentially, we'll talk and strategize about the product direction, what features we think are the most important. But then once we decide on that, in terms of the implementation, the actual coding, that's essentially 100% on him. Now we have another developer as well. In terms of my role with the actual development is really.

Prioritizing what features I think are important, just direction for the product in general. But I definitely am not involved in any way, shape or form with the nitty gritty coding and how it's set up and what kind of packages and different infrastructure that we're using. I definitely leave that up to them because they definitely know a lot more than me.

Yeah. Just the fact you were saying earlier, you know, you got some concepts, you figured out feedback from people who were your customers already. It seems like that's a good way to validate ideas that. Or ideas for new features, even engaging the customers. Are there any other things that you currently do now to kind of validate, like, okay, this is the next best direction for anything you're working on.

Yeah. So a lot of it now is a combination of just customer feedback and surveying. In the beginning, it was really easy to know what to build next because the support tickets would just pile up for certain features or certain things that they were trying to do within the app. So just tracking the tickets that were coming in and help scout and either tagging them in help scout or just keeping a tally for what the different feature requests were. And that's pretty much all we did for the first year or so was like, literally whatever the customers wanted. We just kind of build and prioritize based on the number of feedback. And as we've kind of built out a lot of the key features now we do a lot more like Proactive serving.

And then that gives us a bit of an idea for product roadmap as well as where we think.

Where the world is heading and what Snappa needs to become a year or two from now to keep up with that. So that's a combination of customer feedback, surveying and our own kind of intuition.

Gotcha. Yeah.

Now, do you have any specific strategies as far as, like a retention standpoint? Because I know that's kind of a. A big key when it comes to SaaS platforms is making sure people stick as long as possible. Do you have any strategies or advice for maybe anybody listening who maybe they have a SaaS, but maybe they just have like a membership site or something. Like, what sort of ideas would you give people as far as keeping members around longer? Because in my mind, that's probably just as important, if not more important than acquiring new customers.

Yeah, very good question. So, couple things there. Number one, definitely want to have some sort of survey or feedback when people actually do cancel. So what we do is, and this has evolved over time, we've probably had like four or five different cancellation strategies. But the one we use now is when someone actually does cancel their account, we ask them, is there anything that we could have done to keep you from canceling? And then sometimes you'll get feedback like, oh, well, you didn't have this feature, or I wish it could do this. A lot of the times what we find for Snap, especially because we're dealing with smaller businesses, a lot of the people that churn out just the business doesn't go well or they don't have an ongoing need for it or what have you, but sometimes there will be that good feedback where it's like, oh, okay, maybe we should build that. So definitely have some sort of feedback system in place. And the proactive surveying that we do as well really helps. One of the questions I like to ask is what is the number one thing that we can do to make Snappa better? Sometimes it's not a feature. Sometimes it could just be a feature we've already built, but just.

Making it better. Or sometimes people just want more photos or a different variety of photos, that kind of stuff.

That's a big thing. Just placing a big importance on as well as the user experience. As I mentioned, the first couple of years we really just focused a lot on just feature building. Now we're really taking some time to dissect the ui, do a bit of user testing, and we're implementing some things that we think will make things a bit easier, especially in the Onboarding process.

When it comes to things like ui. I'm curious, is that your side of things or is that your partner's side of things? Who decides what everything's going to look like and how it's going to function and what goes where? How does that look in your business?

Yeah, that's one of those things that we definitely will talk together and strategize on. Now Mark is really good when it comes to design and that kind of stuff. I'm definitely not a design guy, but I might have, I might say this particular thing is just a bit confusing and then he can kind of come up with, well, what if we did it this way? And I'll say, yeah, that's actually a lot better.

Or I'll say, for example, right now with Snappa, you have to pick a size, then you have to pick a template and then you get tossed in the editor. And if you want to change one of the templates that you're working on, you have to go back to the previous screen. We're actually in the process of making it so that when you click a size, you go straight into the editor and then you can pick templates from there. So that way you can cycle through the templates on the same screen. So that's the kind of thing where like you don't necessarily have to be a developer to kind of look at that and say, well, we can knock out an entire step in the onboarding, but it's really up to him in terms of how to like implement that, if that makes sense.

Right. This is just, I'm just listening to how you work with your partner, how you've, you know, you talk to your customers about how to, what to develop and you continued to listen to them throughout the first year to build the features. And then now you're in this phase of you're beyond all that, but you're refining the ui, refining what you know works already to make it better.

What are some of your biggest lessons of building this whole SaaS program, this thing as a non developer yourself.

So the.

Number one thing is to learn patience. That's a good one. So.

We had this running joke where when Mark will say, yeah, it's probably going to take two weeks.

You have to at least double it. And so we started calling it a mark estimate.

So now at the team I always joke and say, so what's your best mark estimate?

That's awesome.

And on the same line, you should never give anticipated release dates to customers. That's like the worst thing you can possibly do. So I've learned to use the words coming soon or something similar to that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But yeah, patience is honestly the biggest thing because with software you just never know Snap. And in Snappa's case, the browser is not meant to be a graphic design tool. It's really not meant for that. So we're just pulling a lot of hacks, especially in the early days, just to get the damn thing to work.

When you think that you're two days away from releasing a feature and then all of a sudden you discover this huge bug that's going to take a week to fix, it's just really hard to predict that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So with Snap, I'm very curious now that you mentioned that, like from the time that you guys conceived the idea to the time where you were able to let your first user get in and start using it, how. What was that stretch of time?

Yeah, so Mark was.

Like, when he first started writing code on it, he was still working full time. So I believe it was around March where he started working on it, essentially nights and weekends. And then we released an alpha version maybe two or three months later, which was really just. You can pick a background image, slap some text onto it and an icon. I think that's about all it did. And then we kind of realized if we're going to launch this thing, he has to go full time on it.

And so he, you know, he had taken a year leave of absence from work and then started going full time on it. We ended up releasing like the first beta on July 1, 2015, and then the full version was November 23, 2015. So yeah, from boat from March to November, from like first line of code to launching the product officially.

So like eight months.

Ish. And is it mainly Mark doing everything himself? Or at least at that time, he.

Coded the first version completely on his own.

That's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking like, you compare something like what you have to Photoshop, obviously different. Not saying the same exact features, but the fact that you said browser is not made for what you guys are doing, and you were able to pull it off so fast to get to a point that you can launch be a solid product, that you can bring recurring revenue customers in. It's pretty.

Yeah.

The funny thing was the first version was built with this framework called Fabric js. And two weeks after we officially launched it, we kind of started realizing that we needed the image resize feature. So when we first launched Snappa, if you created a Facebook Posts or whatever. And you wanted to convert it to Twitter, you literally couldn't do it. You had to create like a brand new graphic from scratch. And we knew. Right. Like, we realized right away that we really had to build that in and the framework we're using just was not going to cut it. And so two weeks after we launched, Mark pretty much had to like, rewrite the thing from scratch. And so I don't think we launched a new feature for three months after that.

Understandable.

Yeah. I've learned to chill out a lot more. Like, I used to get really stressed out and worked out, but yeah, that's just part of building software.

Totally. Yeah. We've always been on the selling side of software. We feel like we could do that pretty well. And we've dabbled with software ourselves. But like I said, we're not coders. Matt knows some stuff, but you're not going to sit around and code all day, Matt. So, yeah, it's an interesting. We're just asking these questions because it's cool to hear what you're going through. It's kind of like as if we were to do it ourselves.

Yeah. The one nice thing that I realized along the way is that users are way more forgiving than I kind of anticipated. And so it's interesting because for me, I feel like when we don't release a new feature for like two weeks, it feels like we haven't released a feature for like a year. But from the customer standpoint, they don't really see it that way because they're not working on or using this product like 8 hours a day for you know what I mean? Like, they're using it here and there. They have like, other things. They have their own lives to worry about it.

And so that was just kind of something I kind of learned is that, you know, they, like, I think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the customers do.

100%. Yeah. And I feel like that's all business owners. Yeah. We always think that we're under a microscope more so than we actually are.

We think people are paying attention to us closer than they really are, for sure.

Totally. I mean, we're, we're. I feel like we're pretty power users and I mean, I have no clue, obviously, but I feel like we're in there almost daily. At least someone on our team is. But like you said, it's probably for 5, 10 minutes max at a time, you know, crank out an Instagram image, show notes image, and then done. You know, we're sticking to what we know is true to us, the way we use it. We use templates, you know, and we have a handful of templates that we can just have our go to's.

Well, to be honest, we use images because we're not graphic designers. We don't have a good eye for design. So. So we get in there and go, oh, look, this looks pretty already. Let's just change the words and use it again. I mean, that's pretty much how we use it. We want to take all the sort of subjectivity out of designing graphics and just use what already looks pleasing to our own eyes.

Yeah, no, totally. That's definitely what they're intended for.

Yeah. So as a business model. So the thing that pulls us to software is the recurring revenue. Monthly, monthly, your annual, whatever you want. It is. It's just that subscription revenue. What was your. Was that one of the pulls to get into the software game rather than a website or some other variation?

Yeah, 100%. So going back to Bootstrap A, the theme marketplace.

It was almost like we're selling a commodity, right? And we were paying like we weren't creating the themes ourselves. So we would pay out like 55% to the authors. Some of them would be selling on other marketplaces. So it was a combination where.

Every month you're kind of starting from zero and you kind of have to build that up again. And the other thing was there was nothing proprietary about what we were doing. And so we really liked the idea of A, the recurring revenue and B, having something proprietary that you're not just one of hundred T shirt companies, you're not one of thousands of millions of other website templates that exist. So that was definitely the draw for us to build a SaaS product.

How did you settle on the pricing, specifically how much you would charge for it? Because I know we have consulting clients and things like that, and I feel like that's something that always comes up with everybody. It's a struggle to figure out what price tag to put on the stuff you put all your hard work into. In our minds, we probably tend to either overvalue or undervalue our work, depending on your own sort of mental state and personality. But it seems like everybody's either overvaluing themselves or undervaluing themselves. How did you settle on the price that you guys ended up going with?

It's funny you say that, because we get people all the time being like, this is too expensive. How can you charge this? And then we have people that are like, how are you so Cheap. This tool is so amazing. So that's another thing you learn as a software founder is like you just have to kind of ignore the people that tell your product's too expensive. But to answer the actual question, I mean in the beginning it wasn't really sophisticated. We kind, we. So I mean, Photoshop is like, I think it's 20 bucks a month or something. And even though we're not like, we're definitely not a Photoshop competitor by any means, we just kind of looked around at similar products like, you know, Buffer as a social media scheduling tool, Photoshop, some other stuff that was out there, some other competitors. And it just seemed that everyone was kind of in this 10 to $20 range. And so we kind of just said, okay, well that's kind of what all these other tools are pricing, so let's just go with that to start.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the easiest way to start, you know, and it's, it's, it's easier to raise your prices typically than to drop them in the future.

A personal opinion question. Do you think right now that the price is. This is probably a loaded question. Do you think it's like, do you think it's too cheap for what it is and everything that goes into it or do you think like the pricing is just about right?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's some room to go a bit higher I think for our product and our market. I think like the $20 a month is probably the ceiling now. We do have a team plan that's 30 bucks a month. So that's actually something we've really been thinking a lot is how can we increase that lifetime value. So for us we're kind of thinking about maybe not necessarily just raising prices, but.

What other value could we add that could then make it just a no brainer to charge 20, maybe 30 bucks a month or offering other services within the product, you know, that could be, you know, paid photos or what have you. So yeah, so Always as a SaaS product, you're always trying to figure out ways to increase the lifetime value. So that's definitely something we always think about.

Yeah, yeah.

And I definitely think it's either like, in my opinion, it's either undervalued or valued. Right about right. Like, I would definitely never say that Snappa is like too expensive for everything we use it for. That's for damn sure.

It's a nobody brainer. We see this as an investment, as a time savings and I think that's been a perception Change for ourselves. And I think most business owners, after you get to a point, you're just like, okay, well this is going to save me hours every week for all the different images that we use. Cool. Yeah, that's worth the 20 bucks, whatever it is that we're paying.

What we found is for the power users, and I think you guys definitely fall into that category. It offers absolute tremendous value for the price. There's no doubt about that. The problem is when you have a subset of customers that are not power users and they're not using it as frequently, that's kind of when they're like, yeah, this is worth 10, 15 bucks a month. But if you were to go to like 30, they'd say, Ah, you know what? I just don't use this enough for it to warrant 30 bucks. And so it's just always tricky to find that line where, you know, you're still providing enough value where people aren't going to cancel.

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think there's ever a perfect answer to this anyway. It's just interesting to hear a perspective.

Because it's a very subjective topic.

A hundred percent. Totally. Now, I want to go back super quick, and I know this is like not talking about pricing or any software stuff, but we have a note here that says content market. Well, do you know what? What is that to you? Like, so how to. I mean, we haven't got to be.

Good at content marketing.

Yeah, yeah. How to.

This lady's fired.

We're reading our notes from the person who did the research for us.

Well, no, I was thinking about the content marketing because I was like, wait, I wanted to hit that really quick because it's in caps. But that's okay. She's fired. She's not fired. I'm just kidding. I'm just like, I don't want to miss this because content marketing is our thing. We love this stuff. Yeah, no, it's what I was going to say, though, is about the software. I remember now that you have all those stock photos tied up inside of Snappa so you could choose, and that's pretty clever. I'm assuming that's your stock Snap photo library brought into Snappa, is that correct? More or less.

So in the beginning, that's correct. So we had integrated the photo library into the design tool. And that was actually like, when we did those calls, that was one of the biggest value adds because with Photoshop, like, I mean, I haven't used it in a while, so it could be different, but they definitely don't have like a free stock photo library baked into the product. And so to say, like just that step of not having to go to, you know, stock photo sites, download them and upload them.

Right.

It just saves a ton of time. But we actually ended up selling stock Snap about a year ago.

And so now we're using a different photo library. But, you know, that's basically the gist of it is we're pulling in these free stock photos and it just adds like tremendous value to the product.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And I think that's something that can't be talked about enough, really. I probably should go back to my blog post and add it in more and talk about it more. Is that the whole stock photo library that's in there? It's such a time saver. It's such a money saver. I mean, if you use Snappa as often as we do, I mean, we, we used to use a site called Deposit photo to buy our stock photos. And it was like a buck a photo or something, at least a buck. And we were spending like a hundred dollars a month on stock photos alone for all the blog posts and podcasts and all the stuff that we were putting out there. And so just like by comparison, the stock photo library alone that's available in Snappa seems to make the value of what Snappa is just that much higher.

Yeah, totally an ease of use thing. Yeah, I totally forgot about that. I was like, wait, hold on. I kind of put it together as I was looking at it. I was like, this is brilliant.

So we have a note here that you used in the very first, first week you did a promotion that got you between 2 and $3,000 in recurring revenue. Is that, does that sound accurate?

Yeah. So right now the product is 15 bucks a month or 120 a year on the annual plan, which works out to 10 bucks a month. So what we did was we offered like a 30, 33% off the product for lifetime. So at that time, you can get, for the first two weeks, you can get a subscription for either $10 a month or 90 bucks for the full year. By the end of that week, we were basically at 2k in MRR, which was nice to launch too.

That's a good way to start with some recurring revenue already. That's really cool. Well.

There'S a lot here. What's in the future, I guess for you, I'm just curious, after maybe not Snap specific, are you going to stick in the software game or do you have some other ideas for new Ventures for yourself?

Yeah, really good question. The first.

Two, three years of Snap, I was just fully focused on the product and the marketing. The first two years was just me, my co founder Mark and our developer Michael. Then we brought in Nick who's handling a lot of our marketing now. And we're actually just about to bring on a customer success person. And then we also work with some graphic designers on contract.

Now I'm thinking a lot more not just about SNAP of the product, but about the company.

What we want this company to be long term. We're pretty big on culture and making it a fun place to work. We do company retreats. We try to go out for lunch.

A couple weeks ago we did like.

In Ottawa, they do this thing called the Brew Donkey tours where you go to a bunch of local craft breweries and basically get drunk and then, you know, do an escape room after.

And I actually just finished reading the new book from the base camp founders and really interesting to see kind of how they run their company and they actually kind of treat their company as a product. So yeah, so I'm just thinking a lot more about higher level stuff and kind of, you know, the direction for the company as a whole. You know, we're starting hiring more people. So just transition from not just being like in the product, like day in and day out and thinking more as like a, you know, an actual, I hate to use the word CEO because we're a small company, but more as a CEO, essentially.

That's cool. I mean, that's an amazing time. I feel like that's kind of a similar thing of where we're at. Matt and I, we don't have an office where all the team works together or anything, but we're finally getting to a point where we have what, nine or so of us on our team. And yeah, it's not us in the middle of all this stuff. We are not the bottleneck for most of anything really anymore. And there's systems and yeah, we don't like to call ourselves the CEO or any actually call our ops manager the CEO. And we're like, we don't want that role.

You tell us what to do.

Exactly. But it's such a freeing. It's hard as shit to let go of some of this stuff that you're so used to.

But yeah, I remember like the, when we, when we hired Nick and like I no longer had to do customer support. It was like a magical day for me. I remember the first time that I was able to take a vacation and not have to answer support requests. Like, it was just glorious.

Oh yeah, that was the very first hire I ever made, like 10 years ago when I was starting in business was a customer support person because I hated that role. Not that, like, I didn't like the customers or anything. It was just when you're in support all the time, nine out of 10 of the tickets that come through aren't people going, hey, I love your product. I'm really happy with you right now. Nine out of ten of the messages, like, you're only seeing the bad, right? Like, that's all that really passes through support. And that starts with mess with your head. And you start thinking, man, everybody hates this product because that's all you see all day long. And so that was the first, first thing I got my, myself out of because that just screwed with my head.

Yeah, it's funny you say that because when it comes to support, it's not necessarily the time it took to answer the tickets. It was the emotional, like damage.

And.

The mental energy that it consumes. And so that was super big. And it's funny because now our marketing guy, I feel like he's kind of at that point where he's still doing the support but also trying to do marketing stuff. And so now it's going to be great to have a dedicated customer support person so that, that he can start just 100% focused on marketing and not have to worry about answering tickets.

It's an emotional thing, 100%, because I know I'm more of the customer facing side of the two of us over here. Matt's more of the systems and all that. I remember going on a vacation last year, went for a week to resort in Mexico. And anytime I would hop on my computer, it was either Matt or our quote unquote CEO Shannon, would basically slap my hand and be like, go back to vacation. Go drink more beer. Get away from your computer. I'm like, I'm not used to this. I'm supposed to be around to answer some kind of question, right? Like, oh, cool, I'm not needed. This is great.

How do you find your team members? Does everybody work locally in your office or do you work with remote team members?

So we actually just got an office, like this month, actually. So we've been completely remote since then. But even now, the office, we don't make anyone come in the office. It's, you know, just kind of real. There's actually some people who work from coffee shops and.

We just thought it would be nice to have an office just For a change of scenery and for, you know, the days that we kind of do need to strategize and it's just easier to do it in person.

So in terms of how we found people, Michael was, we got so lucky with him. We just posted a local job ad and he applied and he's just such a rock star and just such an awesome guy. So we got lucky there. With Nick, our marketing guy, I basically signed up for a LinkedIn recruiter, or recruiter lite I think it's called. And what it allows you to do is filter and find people based on their profiles and stuff like that. So I knew that to hire a marketing person, we didn't have the money at the time to hire a top level marketing person. So my strategy was let me get some smart young kids straight out of school who maybe not have all the experience but has the mental capacity and I can kind of train him and groom him.

And just look at it more of a long term thing. So I essentially just scoured LinkedIn for people that were just about to graduate and I filtered for things like SEO, social media and that kind of stuff. And I came across Nick's profile and noticed that he had launched a couple side projects. And then. So that was really impressive to me and I feel like people are launching side projects while they're in university. It just shows that they have initiative and that hustle. I basically just reached out to him and said, hey, I'm looking to hire a marketing person. I'll teach you everything I know. I think it'll be a great opportunity for you.

That's how we hired Nick.

For the customer support person. It was again a job ad and this time made the company look a bit more sexy. So we got some pretty good applications and yeah, that's, that's kind of how we found our guys.

I love it. Awesome.

Yeah, there's actually a service we use that maybe might be cool for you. I think it's based in Canada actually.

I was just going to bring this up if you didn't called GenM G.

E N M CO and I actually.

Know the, the founder.

Oh, you do?

Mo.

You know Mo Abas?

Yeah, he's been on the show.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, so we actually, the last, what two hires we brought on we actually found through GenM.

That's awesome.

Yeah, and similar, similar idea. We just filter. A lot of the folks are either just about to graduate or right out of college is what we found to succeed the best. And yeah, any kind of side projects that are A lot more got that burn and desire to do something in that space.

Well, it's beautiful because you can, you can bring them in for like their three month, not intern, what do they call them? Apprenticeship. A three month apprenticeship where they learn everything in the three months and if you feel like they're not going to quite be a good fit, then you just kind of part ways and it's kind of the relationships over. If you feel like they're going to be really good and they did a really good job in those three months, then you bring them on board and you properly vetted them. So Stephen, the guy who actually listens to these episodes and writes our show notes and puts all the links in there, what's up, Steven? He came from GenM and then we ended up hiring him and now he basically runs our podcast for us.

He's taken on a massive role now on another podcast. So, yeah, I think it's super strategic when you can start and you're in a cool phase. So when you're bringing this team around you now you're going to start spotting these things that you probably, you're like, man, I could have done that. Or this is something I've been wanting to do, but I just didn't have time to do it. Oh, now I got the people for it or the resources to then hire someone new or an apprentice, whatever it might be.

Yeah, it's definitely nice to get to that phase where you actually have the manpower to execute on some of the ideas that you have.

Totally sweet. Well, we'll wrap it up here. Thanks for taking all this time with us, but usually we wrap it up with what are a couple of books or just a book that you find yourself referring to often or recommending others that have just been. Just brought in so much growth for yourself.

I mean, in terms of pure tactical stuff, especially for someone new to marketing and kind of startups. I really like the book Traction by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg, just because it kind of gives a really good overview of all the marketing channels that are available and the importance of thinking about traction before you launch your product as opposed to after, and kind of provides like just a framework for how to go about testing different channels. And I really like the idea of finding something that works and doubling down on it and just keep repeating that as opposed to just trying like a million different things all the time. And in terms of just general books.

The Steve Jobs biography still to this day is probably the best book I've read. It's just super Interesting and really inspirational. It's not necessarily something that you're going to read it and become a better entrepreneur, but I just really enjoyed it.

Love it.

It's funny, I actually have that book Traction in my hands right now. I just pulled it off my bookshelf and I actually ordered this book by accident. I thought I was ordering Traction by Gino Wickman, and I accidentally ordered the Gabrielle Weinberg and Justin Mares version of Traction, which is a completely different book.

But I have this book and I haven't read it yet.

So this is the first time that we've had a recommendation for it and we've heard the other one. That's where I thought you're going to go the other route for the other Traction book. But I'm like, oh, all right.

I have read the other Traction book, too, and I thought it was really good, definitely for, like, especially for organizations that have more employees and just looking to run things a bit more efficient. And, yeah, it's a good book, but this one is definitely for just starting out. I think it's a solid book for sure.

Yeah. Love it. Cool.

All right, well, final question. Where do you want people to go after this? Obviously, you've got your Snappa website. It's snappa IO, correct.

We have the.com now. Okay. So you can go to snapa.com.

Yeah.

Sweet. So snappa.com, is there anywhere else you'd want to send people? Like social media? Any other landing pages anywhere else? Any other call to action for audience?

Yeah, that's the best place. I'm on Twitter, but not super active. My handle is cgimmer. And, yeah, that's probably the best places.

Sweet. Sweet. All right, Chris, well, thanks a lot for your time and keep rocking what you're doing at Snappa. And we're just going to keep using it over here and loving it.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It was. It was fun.

Sweet. All right. See it.

Thanks.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about them themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.