admin

The Transcript

Can Customer Insights Really Drive Innovation for Your Online Business?

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Sean Jackson: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, everyone. I’m your host Sean Jackson.

Jessica Frick: And I’m Jessica Frick.

Sean Jackson: We are the new hosts of The Digital Entrepreneur. Welcome, welcome, everyone. The format of the show is going to be a little different. If you’ve been listening in the past, you’re going to see some changes. Part of those changes is going to be right at the top of the show because Jessica and I are going to bring up a topic, and we’re going to take opposing sides. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Why You Should, or Should Not, Abandon Social Media

Sean Jackson: Jessica, you ready for a little bit one-on-one, mano-a-mano debate?

Jessica Frick: We are coming out of the gate with a fire this time.

Sean Jackson: That’s absolutely true. Okay. So, Jessica, what is the topic for the week?

Jessica Frick: Okay, this one is going to get kind of heated. Should you nuke your social media accounts?

Sean Jackson: Absolutely.

Jessica Frick: You’re out of your head, Sean.

Sean Jackson: Absolutely. You should nuke those suckers right now. Okay, all right. Let me clarify.

Jessica Frick: You’re insane, but yes, please.

Sean Jackson: Let me clarify really quickly what I mean by the nuking.

Jessica Frick: Okay.

Sean Jackson: There’s no question that social media when it first started out was a phenomenal tool. From Myspace to Friendster, to LinkedIn, to what’s that other one? Oh, Facebook. It was a great way to have conversations, but as content marketing has been on the rise, right now social media is a wonderful syndication platform for all of that juicy content that you create up.

Other than that, why waste your time on it? Why waste your time trying to engage with anybody on that? Just use it as a publishing tool and call it a day. If someone likes it, Retweets it, thumbs it, hearts it, whatever they do on these things — let them do that. But for the real entrepreneur, the time is better spent not getting into little cat fights on Twitter, the time spent on working your online business. What say you, Jess?

Jessica Frick: I say you’re wrong. How are you going to grow your audience if all you’re doing is speaking into an echo chamber? Are you going to take out a billboard?

Sean Jackson: Yes, yes, pretty much. Think about it. Look at it. Look at Pinterest.

Jessica Frick: Put an ad in the newspaper?

Sean Jackson: Yes, exactly. You put the ad in the newspaper, which is called Craigslist nowadays. No, think about it. Look at Pinterest is a phenomenal tool. Now, I’m sure and I know, for instance, that many people follow others on there, but what are they following? They’re following the content that these people put on the thing.

Yes, if you want to have a one-on-one conversation with Aunt Millie, sure you could do that over the phone, on Facebook, via email, but at the end of the day, the conversational aspect of social media is really not there — so why even worry your head about it? Just put the social share icon, once you publish that piece of content, get it into those social media channels, and call it a day.

Jessica Frick: I can tell from your position on this, Sean, that you don’t run an eShop selling mason jars because Pinterest is basically made for that.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, but are you really having a conversation? Come on, let’s think, really.

Jessica Frick: I’m not saying you should have a conversation. I’m saying there’s definitely value in maintaining it. Now, I’m not saying that, as you astutely noted, you need to get into the scratching and gnashing on Twitter. You certainly shouldn’t go on there and just be a link farm that just constantly broadcasts. But if you’re not engaging with people, if you’re not creating that relationship that’s not just one way, giving people a reason to know, like, and trust you, what exactly are you doing to build your business?

Sean Jackson: You’re spending time on your website, which is where you probably should be spending your time anyway. Now, think about it. It kills me. I ran into this very nice young lady who is a new blogger out there. She’s got a fashion blog. She was very excited because she’s got some followers online, and she’s putting things on her blog. It’s really kind of cool because she’s mixing music and fashion together, so she’s literally playing a guitar with things that she’s wearing. It was cool, it was catchy. But you know what she didn’t consider?

Jessica Frick: What?

Sean Jackson: Email. Like maybe people on your site, instead of just clicking on an affiliate link, maybe they should be signing up for an email list that you have. Why is that?

Because if she’s spending all of her time engaging on social media, then she’s not spending time on the site and doing things like build an email list, which will probably bring more revenue to her than sitting there liking, thumbing, and whatever the other things they do on those things to build that ‘one-on-one special relationship.’ What say you?

Jessica Frick: I say, you just need a hug, Sean, because you are just a little sourpuss today.

Sean Jackson: No, no. Here’s another thing, if we’re really going to get on this. Why spend time on things that are not mobile-first consumption? To that aspect I would say, then why not spending all your time creating videos and putting it on YouTube?

Jessica Frick: Well, why not? Wouldn’t that be considered social media?

Sean Jackson: Yeah, it’s publishing, though. It’s content syndication to a social media site. Really, if you’re getting a comment or two in your YouTube, hopefully it’s not something really spammy or stupid. Really, do you want to spend all your time doing that? Just saying, “Hey, here’s the video. Here’s the call to action” — which most people forget to put in, right? Let’s be honest.

Jessica Frick: Yeah, I’ll agree with that.

Sean Jackson: Instead, they’re like, “Oh, I want to put it out there to see if anyone’s viewed it or liked it,” or, “Maybe they did leave a comment.”

Jessica Frick: Well, yeah, there’s a real risk for social media to become another vanity metric. But I think that it does hold value when used in proper proportion to the rest of your marketing mix. Obviously, if you are spending time on social media at the cost of working on a great website or sending important emails that really make a difference, then you might need to look at how much you’re doing it. But everything in moderation.

Just cutting it off, I think it also depends on what kind of business you’re running. If you’re talking to a digital entrepreneur, some businesses will need social more than others.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, well, I would put it further down the list, spend more time on your website, and think a little bit more about how to increase conversions thereof than worrying about whether Aunt Millie is liking your latest post on Instagram. All right.

Jessica Frick: We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one, but I will say I’m going to sell a lot more mason jars than you are.

Sean Jackson: There you go. Folks, what do you think? Am I completely crazy, is Jessica brilliant, or does she completely not get it? We want to hear from you, so as part of this show, we set up a special email address at Digits@Rainmaker.FM. You can send us an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM and let us know what you think. Go ahead, what is your viewpoint? Is social media really worth it, or should you just go ahead and nuke your accounts? Send us an email, and let us know. We’ll be right back after this break.

Hey, everyone, this is Sean Jackson, the host of The Digital Entrepreneur. I want to ask you a simple question. What is your business framework for selling digital goods online? Now, if the question perplexes you, don’t worry. You are not alone. Most people don’t realize that the most successful digital entrepreneurs have a framework or general process for creating and selling their digital goods in the online space. And one of the best free resources is Digital Commerce Academy.

Digital Commerce Academy combines online learning with case studies and webinars created by people who make a living selling digital goods online. The best part is that this material is free when you register. Are you interested in joining? Well, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you’re listening to this show on your phone and are in the continental United States, I want you to send a text message to 313131 with the keyword ‘digits.’ When you send that text message, we will send you a link to the registration form right to your phone. Are you outside the United States? Don’t worry. Just send us an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM. Either way, we’ll send you a link to the registration form so that you can sign up for free for Digital Commerce Academy.

As a special bonus, we will also subscribe you to our newsletter when you text or email us so that you can stay informed with the latest insights from the show. And don’t worry, we respect your privacy. We will not share your email or phone number, and you can easily unsubscribe at any time. If you want to start building or improving your framework for selling digital goods online, then please send a text to 313131 with the keyword ‘digits,’ or send us an email at Digits@Rainmaker.FM. You won’t be disappointed.

How You Can Apply the Theory of Jobs To Be Done to Your Online Efforts

Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break, everyone. For this segment, we’re going to do it a little different than other shows where we generally have interviews. For this particular segment, we are going to discuss a book that Jessica and I have both read called Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen.

Now, that name may sound familiar to you because Clayton wrote a seminal piece of work back in the ’90s called The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Competing Against Luck is centered on the following premise, that people hire a product or service to do a specific job for them. In other words, that people are not thinking of the features and benefits that you provide with your product or service, but that they are really using your product or service to specifically fill a job that they have in their life — that will either help them save time, get something done faster, etcetera.

To discuss this book, Jess, I’d like to get your thoughts on it. Certainly, I personally felt that it was a really unique way at looking at online products and services. What did you think of it?

Jessica Frick: Well, I think it’s important, not just for the creation of products and services, but working out and fine-tuning how you talk to potential customers about your product and service. I love the fact that he leads off talking about how most companies are doing data wrong. And I agree — it’s so alluring to want to see data points, connect them, and figure that is correctly correlated to a customer cause, but that’s not always the case. Usually customer behavior is more disruptive.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, exactly. That brings up a great point. It was funny — we are awash in a ton of data right now, so everybody looks for, “Well, this person looks like this. They read that. They live here. They earn this. They do this for a living.” By having all those data points, we feel like, “Oh, we know our customer,” when the reality is, we probably don’t.

One of the stories in the book that I thought was hilariously funny was milkshakes. Let me talk to you about milkshakes for a second. There was a fast food chain that sells milkshakes, along with other things that they had, and they did notice that in the morning they had a lot of milkshake sales. They’re like, “Well, that’s kind of an interesting part,” so they went through your typical demographic data.

Who were the people buying milkshakes? What do they look like? Where do they drive? What etcetera? — all the demographic things that you would come up with. But they never answered the question — why were people buying milkshakes in the morning? It turns out that milkshakes, and specifically buying in the morning, had a very specific job. Do you know what that job was, Jess?

Jessica Frick: What was the job, Sean?

Sean Jackson: The job was, because in a long commute, people wanted something that would fulfill them, that was convenient and easy, and did not require a lot of thought process to fill them up and was easy for them to consume while they drove.

Now, coffee is a great, but the problem with coffee, of course, is it’s very, very hot. And it’s not very easy to drink as hot as it is, and it also does not fill you up enough so that on a long commute, by the time you get to the office, that mid-morning craving that you have for food, knowing that lunch is a couple hours away, coffee wouldn’t solve that job.

People were literally hiring a milkshake as a form of on-the-road food to make sure that, when they got to their job, they were filled enough to get them through to their lunch break. Isn’t that crazy?

Jessica Frick: It’s crazy — but imagine how many people wouldn’t get to that if they weren’t asking the right questions. That’s why I think this is so applicable to digital entrepreneurs. Remembering that what people are actually doing — and you and me, too, we do it all day, every day with every dollar we spend — when you spend your money, you’re hiring a product or service for a job. If they do a great job, then you keep hiring them. If they don’t, then you fire them and look for an alternative solution.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. You look at Uber. Uber being another great example. If you really boil Uber down, it really did two things. It basically allows you to call for a car, and it shows you where the car was in relationship to you. But why was the job that you wanted? The job that you wanted is you needed immediate transportation, and you wanted to know that it was on its way, right? You can get a cab anywhere, right? New York is complete with them.

Yet Uber comes on the scene, and now cabs become just kind of a passé thing. They both essentially as a feature did the same thing, which is transport you from point A to point B. But there was a very fundamental difference about the job that you hire Uber to do versus the job that you hire a cab to do.

I think when you look at your online products and services, certainly there’s a bigger reason why people are buying it. That bigger reason is probably because they’re looking at a job they need fulfilled, and if your product or service can fulfill that, then it’s hired. But moment that it fails at that job, then they’re going to fire it right away.

I think there’s a lot of things that he put into that book about how you can really kind of spot some of these things. Jess, what are some of the ways that you can spot opportunities where you can create a product and service that fulfills a job?

Jessica Frick: I love the one that he was talking about Quicken. When Intuit realized that there were a bunch of small businesses using Quicken, which was originally intended just for individuals. So they’re bending and shaping it to meet their needs, so Intuit was able to create a business solution. I think we all know how that story ends.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, and think about it. They were doing workarounds to it, so that’s another opportunity.

Jessica Frick: Exactly. Make it easier for them to do the job they want.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. That’s another very, very great example of how you can see how are people getting from point A to point B, and what are the bends that they’re having to make to their processes that are causing them some problems. Literally, think about it. Your product or service becomes the person that gives them the resume and says, “I can take care of that job for you.”

It’s not surprising to me about this concept, and I’ll tell you why. Back in the 19th century, back in the 1800s, technology was not anywhere close to what it is today, obviously. People would literally hire someone to do the most minute details of daily life for them. Today, we have all sorts of technology that makes us more productive.

We don’t need to hire very many people to do a lot of things that just 100 years ago would take a whole staff to do. To me, that concept of how we look at the past and all the people we would hire to do little things for us, now, because of technology, has changed.

When you think of your online product as a solution to a job, that if somebody has this job that needs to be done, then my product or service is the way that it’s going to get done — and it’s going to be done better than if you tried to do that job on your own. I think that concept really changes the way that online entrepreneurs should look at their products and services.

Jessica Frick: I think that by understanding that you’re going to be able to speak better to prospective clients. Let’s be real — not everybody’s going to be the right fit for you. But for those who are, make them understand why you’re the best. By clearly articulating the job to be done, and done well, I think your sales are going to increase exponentially. Satisfaction, too.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, that’s a great point. Let’s use it in case of something that relates to us, hosting. When you look at hosting, do you really care about the bits and bytes that are on that server? Of course you don’t.

Jessica Frick: Nobody cares about ones and zeros, nobody.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. What they care about is, “Is my site going to stay up? Is there going to be somebody who’s knowledgeable to take care of the issues that I have? Is it something that I can quickly get done without having to bring in a technical team to make it happen?” That’s what you hire hosting for, for goodness sake. You want it because you have a specific path, and you don’t want your hosting provider constantly going down because the job you’re hiring it for is to keep your presence up.

And quite frankly, do you really care about their backup storage being on this type of server versus that? No — you just want to know that, if it goes down, it’s restored, and it better not go down because what you’re hiring it for is to stay up all the time. That’s how that thinking can apply, certainly in the online space. Jess, what are some other examples in the online space you could share?

Jessica Frick: Well, I’m thinking about that as both a job that you want to avoid because you don’t want to have to deal with your site going down, doing your own manual backups and restarts, and all that stuff. You would talk to somebody both from that perspective and also from a job that needs to be done well, just to begin with.

But there’s also that difference thing, like we were talking about with Quicken, people using a product different than they were expecting. I’m thinking about DayQuil and NyQuil. So you’re sitting on the product team of NyQuil, and your sales have gone through the roof this year. And you’re like, “Oh my god, everybody’s got a cold.” Well, you dig a little deeper, start asking the right questions, and you find out that people are actually using NyQuil to go to sleep, even when they’re not sick.

Sean Jackson: Right. And they created up?

Jessica Frick: ZzzQuil.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. But I think in the online space, too, it goes to that, a fundamental idea of asking why. “Why do you need what I have? What is it that is driving below the surface?” I think of membership sites, certainly — why do people sign up for a membership site? I actually think there are different jobs people want done with a membership site. I think understanding that really helps in how you craft and manage a membership site.

Some people may go to a membership site because they really do need quality information — a content repository of some sort. Some people may go to a membership site because they’re alone, and they want someone to talk to in real time, or near real time as the case may be. They may go to a membership site because they are really afraid, and they just want somebody that they can trust to kind of guide them along a path.

There’s so many reasons why someone would just sign up for a membership site and be willing to pay a lot for it. If you ask the question, “What job is that person hiring my membership site to do? What job are people downloading my plugin to do? What is the job that they need fulfilled?” Because the moment that you fail at that job, they’re going to fire you, but they’re hiring you because they need something done.

Understanding what they need done is not going to be about the standard generic demographic information where people come in and say, “We know our customers because we know where they live, what color their hair is, what color their eyes are, what they read, and blah, blah, blah.” It’s because they’re hiring it to do something else.

Jess, I’m going to leave the last word for you. What are your final thoughts on Clayton Christensen’s book of Competing Against Luck?

Jessica Frick: Never stop listening.

Sean Jackson: I think you’re right. Never stop listening. Always be asking why. I think if you take a chance to read through that book, you’ll find your own insight. We’ll be back after this break.

You know, this show’s success is based on how well we are at helping you succeed. Are we giving you insights that help your online business? Are we providing you with the types of resources you need to grow and prosper? Or are we just wasting your time? Regardless of your response, we would like to hear from you. Just send an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM.

No, we’re not going to spam you or sign you up for something you don’t want. Digits@Rainmaker.FM is our public email address, so you can provide the feedback we need to help you. If you are enjoying the show, want to stay up-to-date with every episode, and live in the continental United States, then send us a text message to 313131 with the keyword ‘digits.’ If you’re outside the continental United States, you can still send us an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM. We want to hear from you because you are the most important part of the show.

One more thing, when you contact us we will send you information on Digital Commerce Academy, a free resource that will help you create and sell digital goods online. Don’t worry — you have the option of signing up for Digital Commerce Academy. This is not some automated ploy to spam you. We truly want to hear from you, so whether you are on your phone or at your desk, feel free to reach out and let us know how we are doing and, more importantly, how we can help you succeed.

The Tools and Information Website Sites That May Help You Improve Your Online Efforts

Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break, everyone. In this segment, Jess and I share some tools and information sources that we particularly find useful for digital entrepreneurs. Let’s start off with tools, Jess. We’re just going to cover two of them real quickly. What is a tool that you think is absolutely essential for digital entrepreneurs?

Jessica Frick: Well, I know this week and pretty much every day, my most essential tool is Slack. If you’re not already using Slack, this is not an ad, by the way, go to Slack.com and check it out. We could not function as a team without it. The cool thing is, even if you are disparate teams or just want to join a community discussion, keep your finger on the pulse of a community, and everything going on in it, jump on the Slack channel and you can join individual channels within that community, stay informed, and really develop relationships and that ongoing one-on-one communication.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, it’s funny because, for a while, we have experimented with HipChat. We used HipChat for a while, certainly Skype. Really, Slack has been really transformational for us as a company and just across the board. I’ve actually been very impressed with Slack. You know my feelings about social media, Jess, so anything that’s not distracting. I do think when it comes to that kind of one-on-one, or really just the pulse of what’s going on, I tend to like Slack. I have a different tool to talk about that I think is really, really cool.

Jessica Frick: What’s yours, Sean?

Sean Jackson: Clearbit API. Now let me explain

Jessica Frick: Oh boy.

Sean Jackson: I know, now I’m getting all technical on you, folks.

Jessica Frick: It’s going to get nerdy up in here.

Sean Jackson: It’s going to get very nerdy, but let me explain what Clearbit is. So Clearbit API, we have experimented with lots of tools in the company that help us understand who our customers are based on their email address. We have tried a variety of services, and we finally have put some side-by-side comparisons. I’m going to tell you now, Clearbit API has been, bar none, one of the best tools out there for really understanding who that person is behind an email address.

The nice part about it, it’s free. It also integrates with Google Sheets. Let me tell you what you can do with it.

Jessica Frick: Sexy.

Sean Jackson: Let’s say you have a newsletter subscriber list. You can take those email addresses from your newsletter, put them into a Google Sheet — only 1,000, sorry, that’s the limit, nothing I can do about it — put in your Clearbit API key, and it will go through every one of those email address.

When it finds information in their database, it will tell you their LinkedIn profile, their Facebook profile, their Twitter followers, their website, their company name, their title. Any and everything you want to know. How big is their company? Where do they live? What country are they in? Literally, the amount of data from one email address is mind boggling, absolutely mind boggling.

Jessica Frick: And creepy.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, it is.

Jessica Frick: I saw myself on it. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.”

Sean Jackson: I know, I remember that. That was weird, too. It was like, “That’s Jess, oh my gosh.” But it will tell you all sorts of information — some of which, Jess, you might want to take off the web, I’m just saying.

Jessica Frick: Yeah.

Sean Jackson: The nice thing is, again, if you’re not a programmer, you can use Google Sheets, which obviously is free, you can use the Clearbit API, and you can bring in a segment. If you’ve got an email list that you have, if you’ve got a series of email addresses from purchases made on your site, go really look at Clearbit API.

Also, I know they have a function that integrates with Google Analytics, so now, they can start pulling some of that data into analytics. By all means, I will tell you, folks, again, we don’t have affiliate commissions on the show. I don’t care if you buy it or not. I’m just telling you from our experience, both with Slack and Clearbit, they are very much a part of the tools that we use to run the online business that is Rainmaker Digital.

Sean Jackson: Speaking of, Jess, what about sources of information? Because that’s another part. We have our tools, and we have our information. I want to tell you my favorite, and then I want to hear what is your favorite. My favorite source of information right now is BusinessInsider.com. Silicon Valley Insider is kind of how it started out with. Business Insider, and I want to tell you why. I’ve had Feedly account with RSS feeds from a whole variety of sources for quite some time now, but I have to go set that thing up, right?

One of the things I liked about Business Insider is it really gave me all of the kind of the business news, the online news, the things that were happening that would maybe demand my attention. I almost want to think of it as a very sophisticated way of curated business and online information, really. That way if you see something, you can drill into it a little bit more.

The other thing that I like about Business Insider is they’re really on the forefront of online publishing. Henry Blodget, who runs Business Insider, gave a phenomenal speech about how they’ve been using video and how, as a publisher, they’ve morphed their video content to really appeal to people who are consuming it on social media sites, etcetera.

As both a company and as a source of information, specifically in the business space and in the tech space, I find Business Insider to be one of the first places I go to every day. Jess, what about you?

Jessica Frick: Well, when you first said it, I’m one of those weird people that actually reads news about other industries because I like those disparate connections. Then I was like, “Well, our industry would probably be Adweek.” That’s my junk food industry news. You know what’s so bad? As much as I like just gawking at Adweek, because it really does feel like junk food. Sorry, Adweek, I love you guys. I really do. But it’s Marketing Land. I’m on their list. I get their emails every single day, and that’s a real source that I check every day. I’ve been on their daily list forever, too.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I think you always have to step outside of the little box that you happen to inhabit. I think certainly finding other sources of information and other tools that may enhance it. This is going to be a regular feature of the show, folks. Jess and I will absolutely, time permitting, go through tools and information sources that may be of interest and help you.

Jess, we’re coming to the end of the show, but I did want to leave our audience with a topic to think about that you and I will be debating next week. The topic to think about is this — is email a time saver, or is email a time suck? We would like to know what you think.

Jess, which side do you want to argue on that one?

Jessica Frick: Email is a time saver.

Sean Jackson: Oh, you know what I’m going to say.

Jessica Frick: I know you’re going to say it’s a suck, but you’re wrong.

Sean Jackson: Well, folks, we hope you tune in next week to hear where Jess and I come down on this. If you’d like to participate in the conversation, if you have a thought about email as a time saver or a time suck, go ahead, take a moment, and send an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM. We’d love to hear from you, and definitely, if we like it, we may read it on the show next week.

Jessica Frick: Especially if you say Sean’s wrong.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, my wife tells me that all the time. So, folks, that will be this episode of Digital Entrepreneur with your new host Sean Jackson and …

Jessica Frick: Jessica Frick.

Sean Jackson: And we will catch you on the next episode. You have a great week.

The Transcript

Laura Roeder on Building a Business that Supports the Lifestyle You Love

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth ongoing instructional academy plus a live education and networking summit, where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce, that’s Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show where digital entrepreneurs share their stories and the lessons they’ve learned so that we can all be better in our online pursuits. I am your host Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. This is episode number 38. This episode of The Digital Entrepreneur is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. I will tell you more about this complete solution for digital marketing and sales later, but you can check it out and take a free spin for yourself at Rainmaker.FM/Platform, that’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

On this week’s episode, I am joined by someone who was raised in an entrepreneurial family. She got her start at a young age and she got it actually when she started selling painted rocks. Although, her family members were her only customers at the time, and she is a self-learner when it comes to the web and online communications. After moving to Chicago to start her professional career, she quit her job at 22 years old.

Since then, she’s relocated several times, currently in Austin, Texas. She’s gone from a one-woman design business to a scalable social media consulting business. Now, obviously running a SaaS platform called Meet Edgar. She aspires to help people’s small businesses succeed beyond their wildest dreams by making social media marketing plain and simple to understand and implement, and giving them the tools to do it. She is Laura Roeder and she is a digital entrepreneur. Laura, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. It’s great to have you here.

Laura Roeder: Thank you Jerod, I’m very excited to be here.

Jerod Morris: It was nice to finally meet you in person at Digital Commerce Summit a couple of months back. That was nice.

Laura Roeder: Yes, yes. We had been emailing for many years and now I can picture you when I talk to you.

Jerod Morris: Yes, and you did a great job, by the way. Your presentation was fantastic. It was great having you there. It was a fun event.

Laura Roeder: Thank you, yeah it was.

How Being a Mom has Influenced Her Ability to Reap the Benefits of Digital Entrepreneurship

Jerod Morris: Let’s dive in here, and I’m going to start out with you the way I start out with everybody on this show, which is asking you this question about digital entrepreneurship and the value that you derive most from it. Because, I think, for most digital entrepreneurs the number one benefit that we get from it is freedom. The freedom to choose our projects, to chart our course to change our lives and our family’s lives for the better. What’s the biggest benefit that you have derived from being a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: Definitely the freedom and more specifically now that I am a mom, I feel like I’m really reaping the benefits of building this career for the past ten years. My son is almost two and I was able to take three months off maternity leave when he was born. I actually just worked part time for the first year of his life. Now I’m back to full time but I have a very flexible schedule and I go home for lunch for two hours every day. I pick him up from preschool in the afternoon and I can take time off whenever I want. Seeing some of my friends who have young children and both parents are working full time and it’s like, finding the time to go to Target is all they have time for on the weekend. I’m just very thankful that I’ve made these choices and built this life because it allows me to have a lot of freedom and I just think a lot less stress in my life.

Jerod Morris: I was looking at your website in preparation for this and one of the lines that really stuck out is where you say that you’re big on building a business that supports the lifestyle that you love. It sounds like you’ve really been able to do that.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I mean that’s been very deliberate for me. I mean, even the switch from training to software was very deliberate in creating a business that I could really take a lot of time away from, and could continue to grow without me.

Jerod Morris: I guess to start here would be good to frame this by just giving people the overview of what you do, because you’re running Edgar now. Explain what Edgar does for folks who may not know it.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, Edgar is a tool to repurpose your content on social media. You create a library of all of your old blog posts and whatever else you send out on social, like funny images, inspirational quotes and whatever. Edgar pulls your content for you and also repurposes it over and over again, so that instead of having to manually schedule every update, Edgar looks at your library, makes sure that all of the content that you wrote a year ago that’s still valuable, it’s still getting shown on social, it’s still getting that audience.

Jerod Morris: Before you got into software, you alluded to this, you were doing scalable consulting for social media.

Laura Roeder: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shifting Gears into Digital Entrepreneurship

Jerod Morris: Let’s go back to even before that. Take us back to before you became a digital entrepreneur. What were you doing and what was missing that led you to want to make a change?

Laura Roeder: Well, I became a digital entrepreneur really young. I’ve only had one real job. My first job out of college was a designer at an ad agency. I was there for about a year and half and the freedom was definitely part of it. I remember having a friend visit me. I was living in Chicago at the time. She visited me and I worked til 6:30 or whatever, and we’d have time to have dinner and then that was it. That was all I got to see her while she was visiting. I remember when I visited her, she had a more flexible schedule and she could take the whole day to spend time with me. I thought, Ah, that’s what I want to be able to do.

And I was kind of bored of my work and I wanted more control over what my work was and how I spent my day. So I quit that job when I was 22 to start working for myself as a freelance designer. I’ve worked for myself ever since, for the past ten years.

Jerod Morris: You were a freelance designer and then you basically took some of what you’d been doing as a freelance designer, some of what you had learned and then parlayed that into teaching other people? How did you then get into social media and doing that part of it?

Laura Roeder: As a designer I was making websites for my clients, and just because I was young and naive, I thought that when you made a website you were also telling your clients what content to put on it and the strategy for traffic and SEO. I just thought I’m making the website. They need to know how to get traffic and how to drive business, and how to turn their leads into customers. I would just help them with all that stuff, that was what was free and they’d pay me for designing and building the site.

Around 2007 – 2008 social media started to become a thing. My clients would just ask me, What is it? Should I be using it? How do I do it? Eventually, enough people told me you know, you could get paid just for talking to people about social media, just for teaching them, at the time it was Twitter, teaching them how to use Twitter. I thought, That sounds like a sweet gig, talking to people about Twitter. Sign me up. That’s how I became a social media consultant, which very quickly turned into productized training.

How All the Small Choices She s Made Over the Years Have Added Up to Something Incredible

Jerod Morris: Tell me about the moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur thus far that you’re the most proud of.

Laura Roeder: Oh man, at this point there’s a larger team. At Meet Edgar we have 24 employees. We’re all remote so we don’t have any kind of office. We meet up twice a year. For me, what’s very fulfilling is providing great jobs. For whatever reason, that’s even more inspiring to me than the work we do for our customers is getting to provide a workplace that people can really do their best work and they love showing up to every day. My greatest moment as a digital entrepreneur has happened, honestly, every time we’ve met in person because every time it’s more people.

The last one was actually in Denver and we filled a conference room, I mean a small conference room, but we filled a conference room nonetheless. We had to bring in extra chairs and it was just so moving and so amazing to me looking around the room and thinking, I’m supporting these people s families from this company that I built on the Internet. So often it just feels like this imaginary thing, like we never see any of the money, it’s all people paying us on credit cards, going through straight to our bank account. It’s really nice to have this physical representation, seeing my team in a room, saying, Wow, this is a real thing that I built.

Jerod Morris: You know, that’s so interesting, because when we get together at Rainmaker Digital, since I’ve been with the company we’ve had four or five of those meetups. It is always so powerful to get everybody in the same room. I have, of course, done it from the perspective of one of the people working for Rainmaker Digital. I can’t imagine how that must feel in your shoes or in Brian Clark’s shoes when you’re sitting there and looking at it. What you started is what led to all of this. That has to be just such a powerful moment and such a powerful realization.

Laura Roeder: It really is. It’s just amazing seeing that an idea and just that little bit of work everyday, because when you’re in it, it’s just like you’re plodding along every day a little bit more. All these small choices that you make over the years really do add up to something incredible.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and it reminds you of your why. Why you’re doing it in the first place.

Laura Roeder: Yes.

Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s take a quick break and when we come back I’m going to ask Laura about her most humbling moment as a digital entrepreneur. Stay with us.

As you probably know, stitching together a website that truly gives you everything you need to demonstrate your authority, connect with your audience, and earn recurring profit isn’t easy. You have to find good hosting plus security and support you can trust, which is a headache. You need a patchwork of plugins that can prove to be a nightmare at the worst possible time. You need the ability to create content types ranging from blog posts to podcasts to online courses and what about integrated landing pages, email marketing and marketing automation to deliver a truly adaptive content experience. These aren’t nice-to-have features anymore for the smart profitable digital entrepreneur, they are necessities. But you have two choices: you can piecemeal it all together, pay more in total and then cross your fingers and hope everything plays nicely together, or you can use the Rainmaker Platform.

Rainmaker is a fully hosted, all-in-one marketing and sales machine that gives you everything out of the box in one dashboard. You can run a successful podcast, host authority building membership areas, and sell in-depth module based revenue generating online courses. You can even use RainMail to host all of your email lists and send broadcast emails and autoresponder sequences right there in your Rainmaker dashboard. Plus, the full email integration with your website platform gives you insight about your audience and content flexibility that you simply cannot get with separate solutions stitched together. Oh, and rather than having to choose from one of a hundred different places for support when you have a question with Rainmaker it’s just one support team ready and excited to help you out.

All of these reasons and more are why Rainmaker.FM runs on Rainmaker and why all of my personal websites do too. But, don’t just take my word for it, check out the Rainmaker Platform for yourself. Go to Rainmaker.FM/Platform and start your free 14 day trial today, that’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Now back to my interview with Laura Roeder.

Finding Humility in the Various Life Experiences of Your Customers

Jerod Morris: All right Laura, you just told us about your most proud moment as a digital entrepreneur. Tell us now about the most humbling moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur, and most importantly what you learned from it.

Laura Roeder: Something that’s always really inspired me when I was doing training, is the people who really didn’t consider themselves very computer savvy and knew that this is what they needed to do in order to grow their business, in order to keep up. Because I think so many people limit themselves and think, Oh, I’m too old, or, I’m not very good with computers, I can’t really learn that.

I remember I had … when I was doing training programs and sometimes you could buy the premium package and get phone calls with me. I remember having a call with this company that was very old school, brick and mortar, and the owner had sent me some emails that were just so sweet that were like, We just so appreciate what you do and we’ve learned so much from you. We got on a call and when I started talking to the guy he started laughing, hearing my voice, and he was, “We call you the girl that talks to us from the computer. Now here you are really talking to us.” He just thought it was so funny, like it was just this novelty for him that he’d heard my voice on the computer and now I was a real person.

It was very humbling, someone who had just such a big learning curve about online marketing and social media. Seeing that he was, I’m going to spend my time. I’m going to spend my money. I’m going to do the premium package so that I can get more one-on-one help and I’m going to learn this. I’m going to have a great business because of it. I really admire that kind of determination and that really is something that I found very inspiring in the training business. Because, it can just be easy to create this content and just forget about who’s consuming it and the impact that it’s having.

For some people this was a game changer, right? Because for a lot of people it’s like, Okay, I already know what content marketing is. I’m improving my skills 5%. But, some people, this was like, Wow, I just took my business from a brick and mortar to literally a global business because of what I learned in this class. That is very humbling.

Striving to Maintain Stability in a Volatile World

Jerod Morris: Yeah, no absolutely. Let’s fast forward to now. What is the one word that you would use to sum up the status of your business as it stands today? One word.

Laura Roeder: The word that’s been guiding me lately is stable. Something that has been a challenge for us in the past two years … Meet Edgar is only two and a half years old but we’ve grown really fast. We’re at a four million annual reoccurring revenue, starting from zero two and half years ago.

Jerod Morris: Wow.

Laura Roeder: We’ve had some pretty fast growth. Hiring to keep up with that growth has been really challenging. Our goal for the end of the year has been to really build out our teams for 2017. Instead of hiring every month, we’re like, Who do we want for the whole year and we’re going to hire them by the end of this year or early next year? We’re not 100% there yet, but my dream is to, instead of feeling like there’s this frantic growth, obviously keep growing the customer base, keep growing the revenue, but the team to feel really stable and this really tight knit community of people who have gotten really comfortable working together, and have really gotten their rhythms down. You know how it is when you work with someone for a few years and you can read their mind and you know what they’re going to do. I love to have that kind of rhythm within our own company, so stable is what we’re looking for right now.

Why Constantly Innovating Helps Her Deal With the Challenge of Bringing in New Customers

Jerod Morris: Okay, very good. What is your biggest recurring pain point as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: I would actually say that it just continues to be customer acquisition, because you have to keep innovating. I’m definitely a big believer in the bread and butter and just doing basics of online marketing. That’s absolutely how we get the majority of our customers. But, as we continue to grow, we have to keep expanding our thinking both about how to up our game and improve our content marketing and social media marketing game, and totally new channels that we might want to explore. Customer acquisition, it s fun, but it is an ongoing pain point because it’s a problem that’s never solved.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s true for everybody. You mentioned earlier how much satisfaction you got from that moment when everybody was together and you had that realization about how this all happened because of what you started. I know that gives you a lot of satisfaction on a macro level, but on micro level, what element of your work gives you the most satisfaction on a daily basis?

Laura Roeder: My job is now is mostly coaching the leaders of our teams. What gives me the most satisfaction is seeing people make hard decisions. When something s not going right and a tough call needs to be made, maybe a project needs to be scrapped that we’ve already put a lot of effort into. Maybe we need to start over with a new direction. Maybe a team member isn’t working out or a freelancer isn’t working out and needs to be let go. Watching the leaders on my team make those tough calls and put into action those tough calls, I love it.

Using Your Own Tools to Make Life Easier

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s open up your toolbox here a little bit, if you don’t mind. What is the one technology tool that contributes the most to your success as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: Okay, well I have to cheat and say Meet Edgar.

Jerod Morris: You can do that.

Laura Roeder: You know it’s funny, so obviously we use Edgar. The person who does our social media at our company, basically his attention went elsewhere. There was more important stuff that he had to do, so he took a lot of attention off social. We’re trying to figure out, Who do we need to hire? Do we need a freelancer or do we need a full time? We just stopped messing with it for a while and we realized Edgar handles our social, because now we have our customer support team going in and responding to people and monitoring the daily activity.

As far as keeping up with the content, Edgar really does that for us and Edgar really sends everything out. You really can just check in once a quarter and refresh things. That was a pretty cool moment to see, Oh, this thing that we would have previously had to hire maybe a full time role for, Edgar is just doing for us. That’s pretty cool.

Jerod Morris: Yeah and by eating your own dog food you found that out. That’s nice, and that’s what you designed it for so hey, that’s good. What is the non-technology tool that contributes the most?

Laura Roeder: Keeping focused on goals. At the start of every week I write my one or two big picture goals for the company. I’m always asking myself, Okay, is my time really helping to move the needle on that goal? That’s my biggest non-tech tool.

The One Word She d Use to Describe Where She Wants to Take Her Business in the Future and Why You Should Strive For it Too

Jerod Morris: Very nice. Earlier I asked you for the one word that you’d use to sum up the status of your business as it stands today, and you said stable. When we talk again in a year, what would you want that one word to be?

Laura Roeder: What immediately comes to mind is joyful.

Jerod Morris: Oh, that’s s new one, I like that.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I guess it’s unusual, but I would love to have that feeling for our team and for our customers. That using Edgar actually gives them joy, whether it’s seeing the results, seeing the time that’s freed up. Same with the people at the company. Obviously, there’s going to be some challenging problems that they’re solving, but if you’re doing work that you really love, it’s really fun to do that. To me, that word means we’ve gotten past some of our growing pains on the team level and on the product level. Everything just feels smooth and it’s like, This is fun. It’s fun to show up and do this work every day.

Jerod Morris: I like that, joyful. Okay, that’s a good one. I’ve got some rapid-fire questions to end here. Are you ready for the challenge?

Laura Roeder: I’m ready.

Rapid-Fire Question Time

Jerod Morris: All right, if you could have every person who will ever work with you or for you read one book, what would it be?

Laura Roeder: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. We use a ton of the systems. It’s our business Bible.

Jerod Morris: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish?

Laura Roeder: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jerod Morris: I haven’t read that one yet.

Laura Roeder: It used to be called Rockefeller Habits.

Jerod Morris: Okay, very nice. If you could have a 30 minute Skype call to discuss your business with anyone tomorrow, who would it be?

Laura Roeder: Wait, I thought I had my answer, sorry. You re gonna have to edit so it sounds faster.

Jerod Morris: Oh no, oh no, we’ll leave it in here. It’s okay, this makes for good audio.

Laura Roeder: Wait, who do I want to choose?

Jerod Morris: Who are you deciding between?

Laura Roeder: I don’t know their names. I would choose someone at Uber, but I don’t know who, because it’s probably not Travis who is the big name person that you see. They’re a fascinating company to me for how much action they take so quickly. It just seems like someone has an idea and then the next day it’s implemented in 40 countries. You see differences when you Uber in different cities. They have it localized and improved for that location. It’s just incredible to me. I don’t know who I want to talk to at Uber, but I just want to know how they do that.

Jerod Morris: Somebody, yeah. What’s the first question that you would ask?

Laura Roeder: I would ask, How do you execute so quickly? How do you take things at such a huge scale and execute so many ideas without breaking everything?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’d be great to know the answer to that question. What is the one email newsletter that you can’t do without?

Laura Roeder: Hiten Shah’s SaaS Weekly is a pretty good one.

Jerod Morris: Love that one, I subscribe to that one and I believe we’ve had that mentioned on here a couple of times. It’s a really good one. What non-book piece of art had the biggest influence on you as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: I have no valid answer to this one.

Jerod Morris: Nothing?

Laura Roeder: I don t think … I haven’t been influenced by art that is not books.

Jerod Morris: No song, no movie, no anything? How about a moment?

Laura Roeder: What moment had the biggest influence?

Jerod Morris: Maybe a scene or a location, like a trip that you took or a place that you were.

Laura Roeder: Okay, I’m going to think of an answer.

Jerod Morris: Anything.

Laura Roeder: Anything! Like, Give me something!

Jerod Morris: Something that’s not a book.

Laura Roeder: Okay, I guess, to choose a place that had an influence on me. I mentioned visiting a friend and she had a lot of free time. When I first started working for myself I was living in Chicago. Much love to Chicago, but I did not grow up in a cold place and I could not handle the winter. My best friend from college had moved to LA. I just remember that first time I visited her and the weather was just beautiful and it was such a fun city. I thought, Why do I live in Chicago? I want to move to LA. And I did. I did move to LA, and I was able to do that with the work that I had set up. I know so many people that would just sort of remain a lifelong dream because they’d be like, How am I going to get a job? I don’t know anyone there and I d have to start over. That visit really influenced me to choose what I wanted in life.

Gaining Productivity by Cutting Out the Phone Temptation

Jerod Morris: Very nice, and that all goes back to being able to design the life that you want to lead, and building a business around that, which is so important. What productivity hack has had the biggest impact on your ability to get more meaningful work done?

Laura Roeder: Getting off my phone. I do no tech after 9:00 pm. I do not keep my phone in my room, so I’m not seeing it before I go to bed, or when I wake up in the morning. I take social apps off my phone. I take email off my phone. I found that it makes a huge difference to be able to really start my workday when I sit down and start my workday; as opposed to I half look through my emails that morning. I try to respond to one, but then it got too complicated and abandoned it. You get this feeling that you’ve done work, but you haven’t actually done anything. Not checking Slack, not checking email, til I m actually sitting down at my desk ready to work is huge for me.

Jerod Morris: Interesting, so no email either. Even if you leave the office and go pick up your kid or whatever, you don’t want to be able to check your email when you’re in the line? You want it totally off there.

Laura Roeder: Exactly, because the thing is, I can’t do anything about it. If someone needs me, which they never do, they could text me. The problem with reading email when I’m waiting for my kid at pick up, anything that’s worth responding to, I’m not able to … Maybe I need to reference a document, maybe I want to write something more in-depth. I’m not able to do that, so to me, it often gives you this false feeling like you’ve handled something, but you haven’t actually been able to close the loop. Now you’re just thinking about it on the drive home. You can’t do anything about it. I find it much better to just have focused work time where I can actually close those loops.

Jerod Morris: I really like that idea. I can’t promise that I won’t just go start deleting stuff off my phone right after we get done with this, because that’s pretty inspiring, actually.

Laura Roeder: Give it a try.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I may try that, I may try that. What is the single best way for someone inspired by today’s discussion to get in touch with you?

Laura Roeder: I still love Twitter.

Jerod Morris: Only when you’re at your desk?

Laura Roeder: I don’t have Twitter on my phone, actually.

Jerod Morris: No, that’s what I mean. Only when you’re at your desk.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I’m LKR on Twitter, so that’s a great way to get in touch with me.

Jerod Morris: LKR, fantastic. Well, Laura this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Laura Roeder: Thank you.

Jerod Morris: That will do it for this week’s episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. My thanks as always to our great production team led by Kelton Reid and Toby Lyles as well as Caroline Early and Will DeWitt for helping me put this episode together. My thanks of course to Laura Roeder for taking the time to speak with us, and my thanks to you for being here and listening to The Digital Entrepreneur. I always greatly appreciate your attention and the time that you invest in the show. Always feel free to send me any comments or thoughts. Tweet me @jerodmorris, J-E-R-O-D M-O-R-R-I-S.

A quick programming note, this will be our last episode of The Digital Entrepreneur for 2016. We’ll be taking a little break but we will be back at the beginning of the new year with new episodes, so watch out for that. In the meantime, enjoy the end of 2016. Enjoy the holiday season however it is that you celebrate it, and I look forward to talking with you in the new year. Take care.