From Zero To $7K MRR: Tips And Lessons (feat. Olly Meakings)

Hello everybody, I'm KP, your host of the Build in Public podcast, and I am super, super, super thrilled to have Oliver, aka Ollie, from Senja joining us all the way from London. Welcome to the show, Ollie.

Thank you.

So for folks who may not know much about Senja, they're, you know, hearing about it the first time, how would you describe it and how long have you been working and building this product?

Yeah, so it's a platform to collect, manage, and share social proof. So founders, creators, freelancers can sign up free. They can create a form to collect video and text testimonials. They can go into Sendja and see all of their testimonials in one place, including transcriptions of the video testimonials, tag them, whatever else. And then you can share them and you can share them as these really cool looking widgets. Probably the sexiest widgets of anyone in this space, and you can also share them as images, videos, and walls of love. So nothing groundbreaking here, but we think we're executing it at a higher standard than most other people in the space. And yeah, we're pushing hard to grow the business, grow the revenue, and improve our customers' happiness and success.

I can co-sign on the last part for sure because Ali and I exchange DMs almost every two days, every three days. I'm a— at first I was a curious beta tester in a way. I played with the product a little bit and over the last few months, the rate at which Senja has sort of iterated the core product and added a lot of fun features has really convinced me, won me over, along with the fact that Ali is a prolific builder in public, which was probably one of my secret, one of my sort of unspoken reasons why I signed up and I was like, became a happy paying customer, and I'm loving it. You know, my team at BIPF, they love SendGrid. We have like 4 or 5 walls for, you know, cohorts and my content. And what you said earlier about the design and the coolness, the sexiness of the widgets, definitely agreed. Mm-hmm. They're the most colorful and the fun-looking, you know, social platform— social proof platforms that I've seen. So great work there.

Thank you. Yeah, we want to create something that isn't vanilla. We want testimonials and social proof that really stands out visually and therefore is more effective when you're using it. So you might put it on your landing page to help more visitors sign up. You might use it in your sales flow. So for example, if you have a lead with a doubt, you might send them a link to a Wall of Love. You might put it on your demo request page, get more demos. There's lots of different places you can use it, but it needs to look sexy. It needs to look amazing and it needs to stand out just like the customers we have. We have interesting, cool customers who want something that is dynamic and vibrant like they are in most cases.

So, Ollie, the biggest reason why I wanted to bring you on this show, and I featured you already in the newsletter as well, so thanks for agreeing to be part of that, is your affinity towards building in public, both the highs and the lows of, you know, the founder journey, which I— it's just always refreshing for me, always fascinating, and always heartwarming because I feel like you're one of the few voices in our building public, you know, movement who's not just talking about the highs and talking about, you know, all the rah-rah, like, motivational speeches, but also kind of addressing the more vulnerable you know, kind of hard-to-digest pills about the journey. You know, you're very, very vocal about that, very honest, which I very appreciate. You know, you keep it real, which is such a great thing.

Thank you.

I'm curious about, you know, your decision to not only share the highs but also share the lows. What drives that decision for you?

Sure. So first of all, I'm a very honest and vulnerable person outside of social marketing or, you know, platforms. So, uh, I'm definitely a person who would have a glass of wine and tell my friends exactly what's on my mind, exactly how I'm feeling, what my challenges are, what's going well. And so it's not necessarily a new persona, it is actually who I am. But of course there are people that play social in different ways. And I try not to. I do try and be authentic and share what's going on, both good and bad. And more particularly in the tweet I did recently where I got into the nitty-gritty of some of the struggles we're having, I was actually replying to an email from another co-founder, Grant from Teller. And we do check in with each other now and then. And I just thought, fuck it. I'll put it online. And it's radically transparent. It basically could be read as, you know, we're failing. But actually, I think part of me does have a deep confidence in what I'm doing and therefore wants to share that we are in what I would describe as a difficult spot. And who knows where we'll end up, but I still feel deep down I'm on the right path. And I feel like sharing that will be really fun later on when we look back. And can also be great for other people. And the response of people— And that's a new one.

Let me tell you, as people who haven't seen this, I've seen that. I've responded right away, I think in your DMs, and said, thank you for sharing this. It blew up on Twitter in a good way. And I think thousands of indie hackers felt seen, felt validated, felt like, man, thanks for saying the truth. And also, I'm sure you're surprised. I was surprised. the community response and trying to lift you up in a good way, you know, not in a negative view, but like, here's what we've done. Here's how we navigated that part. I thought that was brilliant.

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons I love Build in Public. It's not just the marketing channel. It is genuinely a community. I even got a $35 Amazon, sorry, Uber Eats voucher so I can buy lunch. Someone just randomly sent that to me.

That's so sweet.

As well as loads of other, yeah, loads of other stuff, including intros to VCs, people offering to work for free, words of encouragement, words of solidarity. It, look, it wasn't planned. It just happened. But what I have found is that honest negatives or difficult things do resonate with people. And people wanna feel seen. They wanna know that other people are facing those challenges too. And it was, yeah, great. And I hope other people share both the lows and highs, but it, the important thing is it wasn't performative. I didn't know if people would find it useful. I think they just did. And that was cool.

I, I think that's the tone with which it felt like you didn't feel like it was performative or didn't feel like it was trying to, uh, trying too hard. It felt real. And with the realness, the authenticness of it, authenticity of it, came with the— came a heavy dose of vulnerability, you know. And, uh, to— I'm summarizing some of the message of what you were saying there. You were talking about some of the difficulties of keep, you know, being able to pay bills, being able to— because you had to make a lot of trade-offs, you know, compared to your previous lifestyle to, to be able to build this SaaS product. The thing that I think blew my mind, and I'm sure a lot of the people who read that were surprised was probably because Senja on its sort of on the surface level is crushing it, right? I'm a happy paying customer. I know this because I see the product evolution and it's week over week, month over month, it's growing and becoming better. So on the surface level, something that makes $5.5K MRR, correct? Something on that range and has a huge amount of community love. Mm-hmm. sounds great, looks great.

Yeah.

So I think there was a— because we're probably inundated with Twitter content of founders who are just showing only the good side, I think that was surprising to see that, look, even at $5K or whatever MRR, there's so many trade-offs some of these founders are making, you know, and future is always uncertain. Like, part of being a startup means everything's uncertain, nothing is guaranteed, right? And you addressed all of that in that particular tweet. And I thought that's why maybe it surprised all of us in a good way.

I mean, one thing I would say is, first of all, I am really proud that we've got to $5.5 or $6K MRR. I am. But if you compare that, let's say this, getting your first dollar online, awesome. Earning more money, awesome. But there's this massive opportunity cost when you're working on your own project. You could be working for a big enterprise business and you'd probably hate it, but you could have the financial and emotional security.

Right.

I don't lean towards that, never have, and I love risk. I'm not risk-averse. So some of the things I discussed in my uh, message that I shared, people might look at that and panic, you know, credit card debt or, you know, not using my personal trainer, which did sound particularly privileged, but whatever. But to me, taking a risk is actually relatively enjoyable. So you may project onto it a little bit of fear, but I don't mind taking that risk personally. It's just that as that has grown, The further I am from that first dollar and I think, okay, well, $5,500 a month, we're one year in as a partnership. Wilson started a few months before.

Right.

You split that and I have financial commitments that are significantly higher, then the picture is a lot less rosy.

Right.

Now, the story that people say and share that I do believe in is you're going to get these compound effects, right? It's MRR. You add in new customers, your MRR grows, and as long as you're managing your churn, you know, you're gonna get this kind of uplift. But there's so many other risks in terms of my own commitments in my life, switching to other projects, falling out with my co-founder, just getting sick to death of the financial situation, saying, you know what? Yeah, this could go somewhere, but I can't live like this any longer, or a competitor massively changing their pricing, or the market shifting, right? Yeah.

So this is the messy middle.

Yeah. And it feels really messy. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, I think that's why it was brilliant that you shared that. And I think it connected with a lot of the people who were listening and watching and reading that, because it's the messy middle. Nobody talks about these parts. Everybody talks about making the first dollar online. We have a plethora of content about that, which is great. I'm sure you tweeted the first Stripe notification. I've done that. And then they talk about the finale, like the exits, the microacquire exits or Arvid Kahl exits or whatever. We all talk about these, but I think somewhere in the middle, you have to have— Boundaries. a boundless amount of patience each month to kind of persevere. And I think you, you know, through your example, and I know a lot of listeners and a lot of indie hackers listening to this will relate, this is why we need each other. This is why we need community, you know, because it's hard even for Ali, you know, even for me, for anybody. And the other thing, dude, like you were so, like when I first saw you execute Senja, I thought Senja was like so lucky to have you. which I still think, Sanjay, as a product is lucky to have you because you're one of the best marketers, you know, who knows the game. And you've done this for the Rosemary landing page thing. You've helped so many other founders with their marketing and copywriting and their, you know, growth efforts. So when I saw you struggle in it, but not struggle, but like, you know what I mean? Like when I saw you be honest about the struggles, I was like, Damn, that was real, you know? So it felt, it felt real. And I appreciated that honesty with you, from you.

Thanks. Yeah, it was real. It is real. Our days are long at the moment. We're not always getting on, me and Wilson, my co-founder, who is absolutely awesome. But I can be evil on Slack, as he told me. I'm very direct. We're under a lot of pressure, but it's all right. I think it's all right. I believe in the product. I believe in the customers. I believe we're helping people. And I'm sitting in a relatively, or actually significantly privileged situation in that I don't have kids.

Mm-hmm.

I don't have— I do have big financial commitments that preceded Senja. Like, my rent is crazy. I'm in central London and I didn't think I was gonna be going down this path, but I can ultimately go stay with my family. If I really needed to, I've got the network, I've got the years of marketing experience, I can earn a lot of money in different careers. So I don't want to sound too much like— the struggle is there, it's tough, and I'm inside it. But I do recognize there's people that are in this that really don't have a lot of what I've got, which is brave.

Right. The other thing I wanted to ask you, Was— so apart from this part, I'm sure there must have been some lessons that you learned about building and growing SaaS compared to you, compared to the Ollie who just had his first customer. You know, what were some of the non-obvious lessons going from, you know, the first $30 you made, the first dollar you made with Senja? I mean, since you arrived, of course, because Senja precedes you, I think, right? Yeah. Wilson built. Do you remember when You arrived and when the partnership began, what was the MRR at that point?

Zero.

Oh, okay.

So it was—

yeah, you guys started working together and then started making money. So from there to, let's say, the first customer to today, $5.5K MRR, what were some non-obvious lessons for you that you learned along the way? Okay.

Yeah, I've got a few. So I am a marketing consultant, or in a previous life I was, you know, I did roast my landing page. I also worked on an hourly rate with a bunch of different clients, and often I would focus a lot on tracking and analytics. And the more I work on SendGrid, the more I think, why did I tell people to do that? Because qualifying where someone came from on your product is so difficult because you can use tracking like PostHog or Google Analytics. You can ask them, you can check various different things, and everything comes up totally differently. And the scale we're at, I wish we hadn't spent so much time thinking about it. Instead, just spent that time talking to customers, trying to get connections to the people that connected them to us. So that was the first thing. It's like, maybe spend less time in the tools.

If I'm hearing you right, you're saying it makes sense at like Adobe and Apple level, like enterprise level where you can, you know, really map out the customer journey of how they've signed up. But when you're a startup, early stage startup especially, wasting time on optimization of the funnel or tracking of that is not that useful as opposed to talking to customers. Yeah.

We like to know where people are moving through the funnel.

Right.

But sometimes we get so stuck in how much analytics data we've got and we're just analyzing it, analyzing it. What does this mean? What does that mean that we're not executing?

Yeah.

So we'll spend an hour talking about different reports, setting up new reports. And I think You know what, I could have emailed that customer in the time we're kind of looking at that. So one thing I would say is, is kind of stay in the customer success space. And customer success is really interesting because people talk about it. But I think people think that success is getting them to use your tool, whereas it's getting them to use your tool in a way that helps them and connects into their flow and helps them achieve goals that may well live outside your tool. So you need to show people not just how to collect testimonials, but how to actually add them to your website and then measure to see if those testimonials are help increasing, help to increase conversion. You need to go beyond just how do I have success to implement your tool and more how do I have success in terms of my business goals of winning more clients, getting more signups, closing more deals. Hmm. So often I'll talk to founders and I'll ask, how do I use what your product create, say for example, it's an outbound tool. I might say to them like, so what do I do once I've pulled all the emails in? They're like, well, you send an email. I'm like, well, what type of email? They're like, I don't know, like write an email. We're like the lead tool or we're the sending tool. We're not the copywriting tool. It's like, okay, but if you can't help me utilize your product and get me to success, then I don't feel like I Can stick with this. I can't focus on this. I can't prioritize this. So we flip that and we try and do that a bit more with SendGrid, which is like, okay, what does success actually look like? And it's not just like they logged in 5 times. It's like they're growing their business.

It's almost like you have to give the wand to the wizard and then get them to use the wand. Otherwise it's just a stick on the floor. You're like, this is magical. Use it and use it in like the 4 or 5 ways so that you can benefit from it. You know?

You have to like give them the wand and you have to tell them the spells that get them to have a fancy new outfit or like make the person fall in love, right? Yeah, I agree. Because that's what they want, you know?

Yeah, and you, you would be surprised that I think, um, I was listening to, uh, on Lenny's podcast, there was, um, Scott Belsky, you know, founder of Behance, and was talking about how people are inherently lazy or busy, like are the 2 default states. I thought that was really brilliant, you know, just to describe like the 2 modes that I operate in. when I'm not the founder, when I'm the consumer, even with Senja. Yeah. When I signed up, you didn't have to convince me because I loved the product. Signed up, but then I was lazy. So you had to convince me to check in. I remember you sending me 2 or 3 things like, KP, you want the shout-out wall, or you want this wall, or you want the wall of love, or whatever? And I was like, I was just busy. So, combination of busy and lazy is what is, I think, almost a default assumption. You can almost guarantee that your customers are going to be So it's upon you to— not you, I'm saying upon the founder to kind

of

include the spells and say, have you tried the spells yet? You know, with the wand. So

a lot of things we looked at was like, when is this person engaging with our product first? And how much do we support them at that point versus later on? So at first we considered that after someone signs up, it makes a lot of sense to send a series of emails, one every 5 days, the typical nurture type thing. Or you can call it upselling. it like an activation flow. And then we started to think, well, look, if they're in our product right now and they prioritized it right now, maybe they really want like a lot more as soon as they get into the product to point them to what to do immediately. Because 3 days later, their priority list has changed.

Yes.

They're worried about their kids or it's, you know, dinner on Sunday or they've got 5 other products or tools they're trying. And so we started to think, okay, can we get a few more emails over to them earlier, then wait a little bit and then say, okay, well, you didn't play with this, what's going on? Can we use an enhanced onboarding flow to get more people to success? And can we just be there at the moment they want to be? So there's lots of testing that we do around that.

Right. It's again, very non-obvious to— I mean, I've been building a couple of SaaS products myself this year. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see. There's 2 that I tried. One failed horribly. I sucked it up, tweeted about it too in vulnerability fashion. It's called SponsorSoup. Learned a ton about it, didn't enjoy it, and realized that that's not my cup of tea. And then now I'm building Leaderboard, kind of like a gamifying— Yeah. You know, you've heard of it. So with that too, the same thing. People are so hyped on day one. They sign up and they want to achieve an outcome and they think the tool will help them there, but I'm baffled after 3 days there's no activation. I mean, there's no retention or they're not using it well. And I call them and I say, hey, did you hate the tool? And they're like, no, no, no, the tool was great. Can you please cancel us? I'm like, what? Why?

Yeah.

And they're like, yeah, because it didn't really fit into our flow. I didn't really see myself using it every day. So we have work to do in terms of handholding, you know. So that's something—

So you're getting— what you're getting there is these objections that people have. And what you can do is in your email sequences, address some of those objections. So one thing, I mean, it's not necessarily relevant to that tool, but if you have a tool that requires people moving from another platform, then you're going to offer some sort of concierge migration, right?

Yeah.

And that removes that doubt over, okay, but is this like 10 more hours worth of work?

Yeah.

Um, or even in a big company, that could be a month's worth of work with various stakeholders, which would suck. Um, so can you help manage that? So it's good that you're speaking to those people. The other thing is, how do you fit it into their flows?

Yeah.

So we're looking a lot at how you add automations to collect testimonials on autopilot. The truth is You don't really want to be running campaigns where, you know, a marketing team go, right, this next quarter we want to collect like 9 testimonials, turn them into case studies. You just want to have the form in an automation so that within a week of someone signing up or upgrading, they are sent a request for a testimonial. And we're also then from there looking at how to enrich the quality of the testimonial. That's another point. The main thing I'm saying is how can you fit What you've built into their existing day-to-day flows or their customers' flows. So can you introduce it into Slack? Can you automate it off the back of an existing process? It's a bit like habit stacking, you know, when this happens, that happens. So that's something you might wanna consider.

This is helping me think about kind of spending some time on using a testimonial form from Sendja to collect testimonials/feedback for the podcast. 'Cause what's happening right now, the flow is so ad hoc that I have on a weekly basis like 4 or 5 tweets that come randomly at random parts of the day, and they're amazing testimonials. But sometimes I get an email testimonial, sometimes I get like this, but there's no structured way where I'm collecting podcast feedback/testimonials. So I'm wondering if I could create some kind of automation

Or so I booked onto this with Calendly, I think, or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So whatever you book on, you could trigger an automation 3 days later. Thank you so much for guesting on my podcast.

Right.

Also, if I was running a podcast, or I use this example quite a lot with newsletters, you want to start thinking about, first of all, you have a podcast for guests. So the guest says, I really enjoyed coming on, it was awesome. You might also have a podcast, uh, sorry, testimonials from listeners.

Yeah.

So, I love listening to it.

Right.

Um, but you might also have a series of testimonials from advertisers so that if an advertiser approaches you, you can say— so people think of testimonials quite like binary and simple. Um, but actually another thing we do is we encourage people to add questions to their testimonial forms. that get better quality answers out.

And

what I mean by that is you have a common objection. So it might be, hey, like, I didn't— I don't think it's going to get me where I need it to get me. So you can find someone who will leave a testimonial who explicitly addresses

that.

They say, I wasn't sure it was going to get me where I wanted to go, but it did.

Wow.

And you can send them the link to that testimonial and go, look, this person felt the same. So-and-so at Netflix was also worried that setup would take so long or too long or that it was too expensive. But this is what they're saying now. So vanilla testimonials are nice. Testimonials that answer sales objections, testimonials that focus on outcomes, testimonials that focus on benefits are like a whole other level of effective.

Yeah. You know, I just got an idea for you. Unsolicited free idea, Ollie. Yeah. One of the unique things you bring to the table, you being you, is all of this sort of knowledge and specific insights and tactics that you have, I think maybe from the years of when you were helping people with landing pages and like sales objections. Even the language you're using right now is not very, very common and obvious to an average person. So what I would love is if there would be a version of where you are doing a concierge for some upgrade tier in Senja where you would help them with 1-hour training on how to get the most out of your testimonial setup with Senja, but also handle all your sales core. I mean, like design in a way where it helps your sales is one thing, probably a one-time fee or however you wanna design it. Yeah. But also it's insane marketing too if you want to do it once a month, free masterclass for 30 minutes on Luma or whatever, you know, because I think those things that come naturally to you might blow someone's mind out there.

Yeah, I would say actually that's another thing that like surprises me because I have this sense that what I'm saying is obvious and I think I've actually been around the block a bit, right? So, so I'm saying things and I'm like, well, isn't that common sense? But The truth is about most customers is that this is new to them.

Yeah.

They're probably joining at a point where they're hearing in the outskirts somewhere, you've got to be doing this, but they don't know how to turn that into actual action. And then once they are doing it, they don't know how to sort of do it better. And you're right, I would love to share that. I mean, at the moment when people register, they get all that for free. I'm literally Right.

I remember, I even suggest, like, I think we talked about something about testimonial prompts. Remember we had a little chat about that once? And you, I think, eventually launched that on Product Hunt too, no? You had like a massive library, which again, in your head, because you are seeing this from a meta level with how many, I don't know, hundreds of customers asking hundreds of questions in the prompts in their forms. But someone like me, I'm so busy and I just, I have this, at the end of my first cohort, I needed to send them a, what we call the NPS survey, right? To kind of, you know, get a sense of what they loved, what they didn't love. I want complete honesty. But what I was stuck with was how do I frame a question so that I suss out the good, like the honest answers, not just the bullshit fluffy things? Right? Like KP or CF or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't want that. I know that, you know, but I want like— I'm just saying. What I mean is, so I think you sent me a bunch of those things, and one question that I took from that list was, um, what made you almost didn't sign up for the fellowship but you eventually did, and how did you overcome that? The answers to them blew my mind. Most of them, I think 90% of the answers, I thought were gonna say price. Because my thing is premium. It's like $2K, $2.5K. 11 out of 12 or 13, the answers were time commitment. They all said, KP, we didn't know if we would have 6 weeks of time commitment ready to join the thing. If we paid somewhere, some program, $2K or $2.5K, we wanted to make sure that we were like present, taking advantage of it. And that really shifted my strategy. Yeah. Because now I'm like no longer worried about the price and things like that. Now I'm thinking about, oh, how can I make sure that I not only have a program that's, you know, this long, um, but people can feel like, you know, they're ready for it. But also maybe I should have more formats, you know, maybe I should not just do 6 weeks, maybe I should do 3-day boot camps or whatever. Yeah. This would never come to me if I didn't ask the question. So that obvious thing that you shared with me literally probably will add like a lot of revenue for me, you know what I mean?

So what we're doing now is— so it's funny because I've talked with Wilson about this a bit because we write blog posts and I'm like, I can't have to explain this because this is like a no-brainer. And then people are like, that was the most helpful guide ever. Yeah. And I feel a bit like I'm insulting people by saying that, but I'm not. It's just, it's not something they prioritized or focused on. So one of the things that people ask us is like, how do I ask for a testimonial. And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, what are the actual words that I use? And I'm like, oh, okay, well, you need to say something like testimonials help me grow my business because people are driven by this purpose.

Yes, yes.

Exactly. And then the other thing that is so effective is offering a cheap incentive. And when I say cheap, I mean, it doesn't need to be money. It doesn't need to be a discount code. It can just be a lead magnet. It can be, I mean, we sometimes suggest a thank you card, but just the language of get a free gift when you leave a testimonial. And Senja is built around that. So after you submitted your testimonial, you can then unlock your gift.

Ooh, I didn't know that feature, dude. I have to use that.

Yeah. I want to actually—

yeah,

we've got something really fun coming with that, but I'm not gonna say yet because I'll see it on all the other testimonial platforms before we launch it. So I don't want to say, um, but, um, we're looking at ways to make rewarding people have a bit more character and humor, um, and just fit with the tone of Senja, you know, which is— it's meant to feel kind of friendly, easy,

human.

Kind of fun, you know. Fun.

See, the other thing I wanted to share, Ali, is, you know, I try to bring this into my work, and I know you do this too because it's very apparent in the product. You don't take yourself too seriously. The work you do is serious, of course, right? Like, you're not like— I don't think you're the kind of person who drops the ball on certain things. But the little details that I see when I go to Senja, like the confetti effects or that or this, It's not just one. I'm just saying there's so many little things like that. I could tell that I was like, these guys are having fun. And that's what I hope that people feel when I do anything, you know, with my leaderboard or like, you know, with the fellowship, whatever. They always tell me that, KP, you were just having— weren't you having fun? Because usually I throw a pun, I throw a dad joke, I throw something because I'm just generally pausing time for that half an hour and thinking, how could I make somebody's evening today? Like, how could I just— Yeah. Think about the most ridiculous way to present this fact or present this, because most things are boring, man. The onboarding sequences are boring. Yeah. Right? Like, activation emails are boring as shit. Most things are boring in SaaS or in any business ventures. Very, very rarely do you realize there's some humanity involved. Like, there's some humanness involved. And I try to infuse as much of that. The reason that even came to my mind was, The design, the confetti, the little details, the fact that like these, you, you put in the questions, the prompts, the databases. There's a lot that you guys are covering. And awesome.

We really agonize over some of these details. So they start as fun ideas and then you have to craft them.

Right.

And it does kind of take the fun out for us, but actually you're right. I want to create a SaaS product that can also be used potentially by enterprise customers. It's not our key audience, buyer persona, whatever, but that has delight, that has simple and plain language that doesn't fill itself with confusing enterprisey administrative language about time zones and boring shit that no one cares about, right? Right. So we, what we do, we tend to start with things being quite vanilla. So if we're doing an email sequence, but very quickly we look at how it performs and we're like, what can we do differently here? How can we break some rules? How can we add some character? Yeah. And you can't commit to it too much. Like even between me and Wilson, if we overthink it, there was a really fun test we did for a landing page that had an Easter egg in it and no one found it, which was annoying. What used to happen is if you clicked the word incredible on the Senja landing page, it would load an animated GIF of like saying you're awesome, you're brilliant, something silly, a meme. And no one noticed it. But we want to inject those types of bits of character and fun. To be honest, we want to do it more. One of the ones on our backlog is we have our competitors checking out our product. That's fine, whatever.

All the time.

Yeah. They don't hide their email. They use their actual email addresses. So it's quite fun, like watching what they do.

Right.

But we wanted to add in an element saying something like, we're watching you so that if they're in the product—

Just freak them out a little bit, right? Like send them a separate email activation campaign or something.

Yeah, exactly. So like, it could be like, you could have so much fun with

this. You could just say, like, you could take it to the next level, say, Hey, looks like you checked in or logged in to Senja from, I don't know, like, you know, Leeds, UK. You okay? Somebody stole your phone? Like, you can just make up dumb shit because you know you're taking what they're doing and turning it around in humor, right? Um, that's another thing I actually want to touch on. Yeah.

So I was just going to say, like, Wilson, what's great about him is I can come up with really ridiculous ideas. He just like, yeah, whatever. He is very, very laid back. Yeah. And I mean, he's 19, which not many people know. I also didn't when we met. Um, he's super talented, but he is incredibly late— he's young. He's just like, well, let's give it a go, let's see what happens. Like, we can always walk back from it if we go too far. I want to have fun. I mean, if I wanted to have a boring life, I'm not going to be a, uh, SaaS founder bootstrapped, no funding. I'm gonna go work for, um, I won't name a company, but I've been there, I've done it. I don't want committee decisions.

Right, designed by committee and like, you know, sucking the soul out of everything. So, so 2 things I wanna touch on. One, the slow growth of SaaS products, something that like, you know, earlier that I asked a question about what was not obvious to you, what was not obvious to me Ollie, has been how insanely slow SaaS grows. And I wish somebody told me this at the beginning. I mean, it doesn't change. I guess I would've still done the things I did, but it's so slow than what people advertise. Unless you had, I guess, once in a generation product. Yeah. Maybe like Slack, which I guess took off. But most products are, you know, they grow very, very slow. And then when you factor in the churn, there's like 2 steps forward, one step back kind of thing. And I want to ask you about that. Like, what was your observation about the way SaaS products grow, you know, month over month? Like, was there anything you want to touch on?

So before I worked at SendGrid, I was a consultant to startups, and often they were funded, and they would, at the funded size, often be spending insane amounts of money on things like lead magnet campaigns, da da da da. And I would go in and I would really be effective at reducing the cost per lead, filling that funnel, those types of things. But when I got into like a bootstrapped dynamic and I started to realize, you know, the advice that I was giving others that was mostly effective, I wasn't always right, but I definitely cultivated good cultures for testing and experimentation. When I got into our Senja and my shoes back into my own business, I was just like, what is going on? This advice I'm charging all this money for is not working. And I mean, I was an incredibly well-paid freelancer. I was very lucky. I was earning £300-£400 an hour.

Right.

And I had a few issues when I was a freelancer or consultant. One is that I overcommit. So I treat other people's products like they're my own. I get so into the weeds, so into the details, sleepless nights. But I don't get the upside. I get the fixed day rate or the hourly, which is very good. So I'm not complaining about that. But I would often overdeliver. Clients would frequently tell me I worked too quickly. Present. As a negative, right? Because sometimes other people couldn't keep up. I'm also quite blunt, which created some issues too. I'm not 100% an asshole, but I definitely speak my mind. I like to get things off my chest and move on. I don't hold grudges.

Right.

Which is good. But yeah, so that was an issue, was that I went from directing marketing campaigns that often had £10K to £100K, and in my biggest clients, million-pound budgets, to getting onto what I would tell some of my smaller clients, which is like posting on IndieHackers and replying to unhappy customers. And that shit takes so long.

Yes.

You have to just keep doing it. We're not talking about 2 posts a day. We're talking about 100 community posts a day.

Nobody talks about this. That is why I wanted you to address it because I feel like they make it seem like it's some magic bullet. Like you just do 2 posts on IndieHackers and suddenly you have $10K MRR. I'm like, uh-uh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love it. I would love it. But there would be a lot more people doing $10K, $100K, right? When I first went on to IndieHackers to roast my landing page, right? That was the original product I worked on, productized service. I did hundreds of free roasts where people would say, what do you think of my landing page? And I would film a video or I would annotate an image. And so much of that led nowhere. Yeah. It was thankless and it was, it was lucky that I enjoyed it. You have to enjoy it. You have to like the people you're helping because if you don't and it's all fake and you're just doing it to get to that MRR, it really sucks even more than it sucks when you're working 20-hour days and you're still only getting a few customers.

Right.

So I enjoyed it, which made it bearable, but it was still not fun posting hundreds of comments.

Yeah.

Of substance.

Yeah. Right?

You have to give value. You have to say something interesting or useful.

Right.

Um, let me think. I mean, with the, with the roasts originally, it was all about over-delivering, which meant it would be a Saturday and I'd drop everything and do it. I've been able to calm down since then, But it was all about generating word of mouth. So I was making massive compromises. I wasn't taking holidays. I was jumping on everything. I was overdelivering. I was burning my emotional sort of energy out on these roasts to give that good energy to generate word of mouth. So people don't really talk about that bit. We have done thousands of marketing tasks since we launched Senja. Thousands.

Yes.

It's probably a problem because we have danced around a bit too much and we're still trying to find channels that work, but it's not what they tell you it is. You don't set up an email campaign outbound on a Friday and on a Wednesday. Yeah, like, oh my God, I wish, right? And there are exceptions. And we see those exceptions. We also see people saying it's an exception when it's not.

And the reason I even brought this up, Ollie, is sort of got you off because I was No, sort of, sort of, um, last one. I faced this as well. And when I had a full-time job and I was at On Deck and day one I was advising founders and I was surrounded by founders, it was actually, um, not as impact— not as painful as when I was on my own in December 2022 and shit was constantly breaking. Yeah. And I was like panicking and nothing seems to be moving fast, as fast as people advertise on Twitter. So I called Drew Riley, who was one of my very close friends. Drew's like at this point in his career making 7 figures. He's crushing it. I was like, Drew, I need some advice. What the hell is wrong with me? What the hell is wrong with some of the things I shared? What did you share? He said, okay, give me the list of things you shared. Then I shared like 3 things. He said, wait, are those for today? I said, no, no, no. I did 3 things in the last 3 weeks that didn't work. He laughed and said, KP, I have failed more times. in this week than you have in the last month. Okay. You've tried in the last month. So he said, despite all of this grand success that you look at from outside or whatever, we're constantly failing. We still don't know what will work. So we're trying, I don't know, 20 things a week, you know, in terms of tasks, not like mega things. So his answer was, we don't do this shit because it's easy. Don't become a founder because it's easy. We do this because this is the thing that gives you joy and meaning and purpose.

Yeah.

And don't let anybody convince you that this shit's easy, you know? And like, call me next time you think this is easy. Like, this is not easy. This is not—

If it was easy, every story on Twitter would be, I hit $10K MRR.

Right.

And for every story like that, there's tens of thousands that are looking for their first dollar. Yeah. And I wish it was easy. That would be awesome. You know, we're in on this like little secret.

That, that's why, Ali, I think it is a disservice if you are constantly selling some bullshit dream to somebody without showing, you know, what it takes, right? I feel like that's what we were riffing on before we started this podcast, where there's a wave of these creators/founders who are selling this almost like get to $10K MRR, get to $100K MRR in Like a weekend kind of situation, or like get to be a creator, get 200K followers like that. And I'm like, that, that is a disservice, you know, to millions out there who are probably gonna go take a leap, and then they're not gonna have a Drew Riley to call to who's gonna ground them. Because I would have been— if I didn't have that call, I would have been lost, and I would have been like depressed, probably thinking like maybe something's wrong. with me or whatever. That call grounded me and made me, gave me a sense of reality. And I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I didn't try as much. And it's okay to try a lot in the beginning because you are never going to have the perfect channel. So back to your point about channels, like that is completely the journey, is constantly trying these channels and not knowing which channel will give you the highest ROI yet.

Mm.

You know, so.

I think the art form on the channels is you want to test it robustly enough that you can put it to bed for a month or 6 weeks and say, I tried, it didn't show much success. And I think we've got to get the balance right of you can't do one tweet and then say building public doesn't work for me. But you also, if you've done 1,000 tweets and you've tried hundreds of different things, maybe your audience isn't on Twitter. So you've got to get this. That's the hard thing is like when to give up. What we try and do is to set some expectations at Senja about how an experiment will perform. So we kind of almost say, if we see this, these indicators at the end of this marketing experiment, we should continue it. Because it's very easy when you run the experiment to be like, oh, well, if it works, we'll keep going. But what does works actually look like?

Yeah, define it.

So we are, for example, we're doing some outbound now. where we're going to email people for the first time, feeling a bit anxious about that, putting ourselves out there in an email. You know, I don't like emails like that, but we're trying to do it in a graceful way. And we're saying if we get some meaningful conversations, a couple of meaningful conversations in a week, we'll continue. Not if we get 5,000 extra MRR next week, we'll continue.

Right.

Or not if we get an open rate, just something that feels like there's something here.

Yeah.

And then going back to your other point about the persistent stories on Twitter, which are getting harder to avoid around sort of MRR milestones but without profit, or about, um, this kind of hustle culture, like booking 20 meetings, or I made like $100,000 in this period of time. And yeah, it's just shite. There are very few exceptions.

Is that the British version of just shit?

It's a variation. I mean, shit, bollocks. It's nonsense.

I think it's all of it. It's all of it. Yeah.

Yeah. I call it hustle porn because people love to read it. You know, it gets them off. Like, they enjoy it. But if they took a long, hard look at what they're reading, or they did the smallest amount of research, I think pretty quickly they would be able to unpack it. But don't get me wrong, I fall for this stuff all the time. Like, I sometimes like panic Skype, or we use Around, panic Around Wilson, and I'm like, well, how is so-and-so doing this much MRR and we're doing this many hours? And are we, are we like missing the point here? And I think the thing that we need to be careful of is just simplifying things to a point where they just have no value at all.

Yeah.

Apart from for the person posting it because they get likes and follows.

Right.

As creators and makers and whatever you want to call us, we need to really amplify, like, people that are delivering in terms of the detail, delivering in terms of the risks, delivering in terms of Action points that actually work in stories that approach things differently.

I want to ask one last question. Um, this is actually important about various niches, uh, not just the social proof niche. You've entered a niche that's filled with a lot of competition. So I want to ask you 2 questions. When, when they see a niche filled with competition, uh, is it a good sign or bad sign? How should they process that? Number one. Number two, that's about the starting point. Number two is today, day to day, how do you navigate when there's a lot of competitors around you? Do you think about them? Do you not think about them? Do you just focus on customers? Like, what's your narrative?

Yeah, so just to be like totally honest, as we have been, SendGrid is a copycat of testimonial.to. So Wilson created it based on that. And we saw it validated. I mean, I wasn't around at this point, but it was validated through that growth in the MRR. But we believed that we could create something different, that the market could support multiple players, and that we would execute to a higher standard. And I think if I'm even being objective, I think we've done that. I do believe our product is superior, but I'm not trying to shit on anyone. I know I sound like an asshole, right? But— No,

no, I mean, there's a lot of iteration and development that you've done, you know. I mean, I haven't used testimonials.co since the first time I tried it out for fun, but I, as a happy paid customer for Senja, can attest that in the niche, yours is the most delightful, most fun, and most— the rate of development is, I think, faster. Again, this is not a knock on anybody else. I think they can all catch up. No, no, no. We would have a different reaction then. So.

Exactly. It's a, it's a marathon, not a sprint. I see Testimonial 2 and other players moving faster and I love it. It's great. It serves the customer in the end. But what I would say is like, we also just wanted to do our own thing. And we try and focus on our own thing. For me, I approached Wilson because I looked at what he was building. I looked at the design execution and a little bit around the product. It was really bare bones and I could feel a level of quality that I felt I could partner with this person. I could feel it through the product. Mm-hmm. As well as that, through roasting landing pages, I had already become an expert around what increases conversion. I've run thousands of A/B tests. And I knew how important social proof was to improving various parts of the conversion, the funnel. So it has to be something you want to work on.

Right.

You have to want to work on it because when you're in the messy middle or you're pre your first dollar, or even when you're making $100,000 a month, but you're about to get divorced because you're, you know, you're working insane hours and, you know, you're locked away in your office. which I wouldn't recommend. And I hope I don't— I'm not married, but I hope I don't get there. But you need to be able to derive pleasure from serving that audience. So that's one thing. So I would say other products— and by the way, Testimonial 2, there's like 100 other tools doing social proof. That one people are familiar with because Damon does a great job building in public too. I'm also blocked by him. But the main thing is There's also hundreds of other tools. Like, if you go into, like, e-commerce, for example, you will find thousands of Shopify apps doing this. Right. So you're gonna find something unless you're some sort of genius who has some original research and has a way of changing the world and just needs an operator to deliver that, then it's probably been done before. So we're in the execution game. We're not in the ideation or the origin game, right? Ideation is great for marketing, for engineering as marketing and things like that. We can come up with lots of ideas like the testimonial question directory, like the examples. We're doing a lot of that. But I would say just build stuff and kind of like work out if you can make some money from it. But you need to know that if you start making money and you start serving customers, you're going to enjoy it. Yeah. Because I love our customers. I love how we're helping them, what we're helping them achieve.

Yeah.

So that would be the first point in a very long form. What was the second part?

The second question was like a day-to-day today when you have a niche filled with so many competitors, do you, do you like keep up with them? Do you focus on—

Yeah, I, I love it when people are like, don't look at them, blah, blah, blah, like whatever. I'm literally crawling around their blogs at midnight being like, wow, that's smart. I'm going through their photos, I'm looking at their marketing messages, I'm looking at— I am the worst. I literally spend hours looking at that stuff. But I love competition. I'm driven by competition. Yeah. It's not to copy their product. I try to get into why are they building that? What does that serve in terms of a customer need? Why have they prioritized that? I'm not there to say, you've got this, we need this. And within our product offering, from the product side, we're much more centric on our customers. But from a marketing point of view, I cannot help but look at things. And of course, I see things copied from me and I think, ah, like, I hate it. Wilson doesn't care. I literally go to his hunk and I'm like, you'll never guess what. He's like, cool, cool, cool. I need to get back to the sprint. But I also don't like this line that people don't look at their competitors. I just, you know, Of course you do. It's, it's addictive. With Roast My Landing Page, I had like word for word, design for design copycats of my work. And there is a point when you just start to go, yeah, I can't look because it's— I like— it's too distracting. And we're kind of getting there now with Senja because we are so busy, because we're getting 5 requests a day in Canny for product enhancements and tweaks, you know, in our feedback community. I can't do it, but I'll tell you, I loved it. I love doing it. I, I, I'm, um, what's that called? Like, I'm a recovered addict, right? I, I don't look at the competitors anymore, but I, but now, you know, I like it. I like having a bit of fun.

Especially, I feel like, uh, given the fact that you've done a lot of roasting in the past and you enjoy kind of seeing the, the attention to details, I'm sure it's to you very enticing to kind of look at some of the details that maybe most people don't look.

It's the deconstruction that's fun for me. So it's not like, hey, they, this is different. It's like, why would you change this? What did their customers tell them? Why have they prioritized this? And it was also motivating for me. If I see someone's launched a programmatic directory of integrations, I'm like, yeah, that's on our backlog. We need to move quicker. We need, I'm revealing everything here because that's very specific.

I think, Christian, like you said, you have a— seems like you have a quote-unquote unhealthy mindset or obsession about looking at stuff. But also overall, I think the way you're looking at the space, looking at studying from other people and studying from just other landing pages, not just in the niche, I think is a healthy mindset. One of the things that I've you know, learned is some of the greatest founders and the greatest athletes and the greatest musicians, they constantly study the craft. They're always listening to their peers and, you know, not so much to kind of judge them, evaluate them, but to kind of see like, okay, what's resonating with the audience, right? What is the current trend in terms of what people are resonating with? I think—

And we're not just looking at social proof tools, we're looking at great products all the time. We're looking at their onboarding, we're looking at how they encourage and facilitate sharing, we're looking at activation. We're looking at, you know, if you see a great product, I'll sit there and I'll deconstruct it like various email tools with really interesting signup and activation flows. We're looking through them. Can we improve our activation flow? What can we learn from this? We also talk to customers. We also look at user recordings. We also look at analytics. We also use our gut and take risks, but it's got to be in the mix. And we also have wild ambitions. We are not— I love building public, right? I want to get to $10K, $20K MRR. I really do. But I also want to go to totally new audiences for our product that live nowhere on Twitter. I'm interested in how we can help all sorts of people collect social proof, not just testimonials. We're also looking at how we can help you collect your client logos, how we can help you collect case studies, how we can help you collect quantifications. We're ambitious. We are working hard to look at what everyone's doing and build something better. So it's not personal. I don't, I have a few sites I visit more than others, but broadly it's not like we're just doing it to— To like clone. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. We don't want to clone anyone. And we do sometimes look at, I mean, a lot of when we go in the product, which is the thing we really care about, I'm often saying, why did they do it like that? What, how can we make sure it's better in our product? How can we make that more intuitive? Why is there a dead end there? Why is that menu not clear? Why is it constructed in this way? Why did they use that word? I mean, I'm an attention to detail person and I obsess with these details too, but I use them to drive a better product and better marketing for us, not just to roll around in comparisons, you know?

Yeah. You know, I think the other thing too, in the long run, I feel like, you know, I'm not talking about the niche, but just talking about SaaS in general. I feel like you might be able to out-storytell everybody else too, Ali, you know, because you have this passion. Like, the thing that maybe will get you through the messy middle is your knack of being able to tell stories, even if they suck, even when the situation sucks, or even when the, you know, even when like parts of being a founder sucks. I feel like, um, the breath of fresh air of the fact that you are still a storyteller Okay. It's probably what is going to get you through because that's also a skill. I think people have to understand that, just like how attention to detail is a skill, which you can tell when some tools don't have it. You can easily tell that this founder or the team doesn't have the attention to detail. The same way, I feel like when some tools are just SaaS tools, they're just boring. They're doing the thing. Then there's the roller coaster ride of Ali Meekins, you know, who's taking us through a whole crazy, you know, Netflix documentary of the good, bad, and ugly of being a SaaS founder. So with that said, I would love to say all the best for the next few months and the next few years with Senja. Thank you so much for being here and appreciate you.

Cheers. Appreciate you too. Thank you so much.