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Category: Entrepreneurship and SaaS
Tags: Competitive MarketsEntrepreneurshipGrowth StrategiesProduct Market FitSaaS Startups
Entities: Art of Product PodcastBaremetricsCalendering AppsCalendlyDerek ReimerDripHey.comInfusionsoftJosh MandersJosh PigfordLevelMicroConfMicrosoftMightyCalRob WallingSavvyCalStaticKitStripe
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[Music] and we are live welcome back today's episode of microsoft on air i'm your host rob walling as you know every wednesday we live
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stream for about 30 minutes and we talk about topics related to building and growing ambitious sas startups that don't require us to work 80 hour weeks creates crazy amounts of venture capital frankly burn ourselves or our relationships out and we want to be
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ambitious but you know we don't want to burn the candle at both ends and wind up kind of living an unhappy life we have a long-term mindset so we think in terms of years not months and we seek freedom purpose and relationships thank you so much for joining me on the live stream again today as a reminder
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if you miss any of these live streams they are available asynchronously on that's like the worst marketing word ever they're available on a podcast feed called microconf on air you can search that in any podcatcher or you can just type in microconfordcast.com
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and every thursday morning you will hear this show appearing there today we got a good topic its title is finding product market fit in a competitive space and my guest today is mr derek reimer you've probably
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heard of him he's the co-founder of drip he is uh someone just pointed out nice tie rob so i dressed up for the show today i don't normally wear a tie completely coincidental actually that i i grabbed this shirt it happened to match something else i was wearing so um derek and i started drip together
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back in the day um i met him when he was i think he was like 22 23 years old in fresno and he was a savvy programmer and had taught himself design as well and we started collaborating on a few things and um he was the for right the first lines of code on drip
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way back in 2012. so co-founder of drip he is the founder of savvycal which is a calendaring calendaring and scheduling app that we'll be talking about today as he's entering this you know this competitive space and he is the co-host of the art of product
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podcast uh if you're not checking that out you can hear him and ben ornstein co-founder tuple talk through their struggles victories and failures every week on the art of product so if you're interested in finding out more savvycal.com
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s-a-v-v-y-cal and that is as i said it's scheduling um derek is entering a pretty crowded space and looking to innovate in there and compete with a lot of you know incumbents and that's what we're going to be talking about today if you have questions for
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derek or myself please microcompconnect.com or if you're probably already at microcom connect go to the microconf on air channel and um type in a question that's the beauty of doing this format live and not just having derek and i record a podcast which we've done many times is that you're able to interact and ask
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questions live so with that i'd love to uh welcome my friend eric grimer to the show man how's it going good thanks for having me and um you should have given me the memo about wearing the drip shirts man i could have brought we could have we could have matched i hadn't even think of that we got to do
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that there's very few guests that i share a shirt with i bet we have like four different because you have i still have the level shirt that you gave me level rest in peace and we have multiple drip shirts and yeah in common so cool man thanks for coming on the show today yeah thanks for having me yeah so we're
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gonna talk about um savvycal which you know it competes with uh calendly and schedule well what's the other one called what's the big one the big two calendar apps uh yeah you can book me yeah acuity is what i was thinking of yeah yeah
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but it's a big space there's there's many players and there's many big players i mean calendly is a massive massive org so i think to kick us off it's you know why you had a choice to enter any space you know after we exited drip you could kind of do whatever you wanted and you entered a
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you know editor space as competitive as calendaring so why enter such a crowded market yeah so i've had i mean kind of a decently long journey that will probably touch on well it feels like a long time since leaving drip of trying a bunch of different things but you know ultimately kind of landed on this this current
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playbook of the competitive space because i mean it really comes down to the fact that like there's a lot of um like a lot of competition in a space tends to correlate with a really large active market and um you know that's something that i think a lot of
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bootstrappers kind of uh don't necessarily like fear um entering into you know a lot of us kind of tend to look for you know kind of niche opportunities that maybe is not on anybody's radar and there's not a lot of competition but i think um that often leads to you
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know um crickets like launching something and no one really caring about it so to me like like the competitive space is just an indicator that that there's there's a lot of opportunity here and um you know there's a broad range of different users of these kinds of tools
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and so one thing i recognized when i was kind of vetting different spaces to go into is that um you know a lot of the tools are extremely broadly positioned and so they're kind of general purpose and a lot of times that's a sign that like they're maybe not serving the needs
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of every particular sub-niche within the market um super well and and there's a lot of incumbents who have been around for a number of years and as we learned from our drip experience with with the likes of infusionsoft and and players like that they tend to calcify over time a bit
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and um you know anyone who's run an app for a number of years knows that you start to get kind of bound by legacy and and that does inhibit your ability to move quickly to you know listen to like a a particular niche of customers that you
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have and their pain points because now you're trying to you know build a product that satisfies the needs of everybody in your market so i think that you know presents a lot of opportunity for kind of a scrappy newcomer to to hone in on a particular set of set of pain points people have
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yeah you touched on a couple things there i mean i think i want to start with you know if we go back to my book start small stay small written in 2010 it talks a lot about entering these really small niches and staying away from big competitive spaces because if you're an individual bootstrapper especially if you're early i mean this
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is pre stair stepping i haven't talked about it yet but that would fit well into that book but you know are there niches where you can build a two five ten thousand dollar a month business that are really small and not very competitive yes absolutely there are your goals are different than that you have been there done that you've had
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with code tree you had a low six figure exit with drip obviously a much much larger exit than that you know that that we took part in and you want to build a seven or eight figure business a multi-million or deca million you know arr business and so i i do want i feel
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like people give advice of like you should always enter these massive competitive spaces like no no no especially if you're early in your journey if i was an indie hacker to launch my first product i would either stair step in and do little you know little products or i would find just a tiny tiny little sas niche that i can build up to 5 or 10k a month i mean that's what that's what i did
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you know and in in a sense you did that with codetree as well right it it was doing single-digit thousands a month and it was a great little add-on to um to github you know to github issues or to github i guess and that that's a that's a perfectly viable way especially if you're early at
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a different stage you know it becomes where you are ready to seven eight nine figure business well yeah are there any spaces today that that you can build a seven eight nine figure business that don't have competition in sas i don't believe there are there were in 2005 and there were some in 2010 and
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just each year i think those have been whittled away you know so yeah if you do want to build that large business it's something you're going to have to do i think yeah and especially like i mean a lot of people feel the temptation to like try to create their own category or something you know like like something completely novel and and maybe
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you know if you were pitching to a venture capitalist who wanted to put a bunch of you know high-risk capital after this idea that may completely flame out you know that's one route to go but it's not particularly feasible for for bootstrappers who are trying to get to default alive quickly and and build sustainable businesses right
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yeah and yeah that's right and i think there's there's kind of two ways to build a large let's say seven eight nine figure sas business today right you can go into a competitive space and you can just uh out innovate them like drip did to infusionsoft or you can
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niche down like you're doing which is like maybe maybe you out innovate calendly but maybe you just build the best you know calendar app for executives or founders or sales people or you know some niche that's not currently being served really well um or i think you can catch a
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a new area like a new technology or a new you know i think of josh with bare metrics right he was just early because the stripe ecosystem was early and he was the first analytics piece and that actually leads us to uh
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let's see i had another question although you know there's so many questions coming in from listeners i think i'm going to bail on my next question and just ask this it's a little bit of a non-sequitur but it's from josh manders and he said why did you switch from mightycal to savvycow i really liked the name mightycal
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yeah that was um that was a fun week dealing with that uh that issue so basically like too i did like the name mightycal um it was quite mighty um so ultimately it it bears
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somewhat uncomfortable similarity to another sas product and so i kind of consulted with um an ip lawyer or a trademark lawyer um to see like to suss out the risk of forging ahead with this name versus
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picking something that's a little bit cleaner in respect to trademark and ultimately he uh spent a couple hundred dollars on that he gave me kind of a a nice rundown of like eight different bullet points around you know defensibility of trademarks and basically said in my professional
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opinion probably best to change it now and if there's ever a good time to change it it's now before you're launched so thus new name such a bomber man trademark all that stuff good you did it early there is an interesting question from
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cam sloan that just came in that actually ties into what i was going to say right before josh manders which is i was talking about ways that you can build a large business right and you can go into an existing space and compete or you can try to catch a wave and be early to a space
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and that was something that you were that you tried with static kit which was the app prior to this and you're entering the static website um space in essence and building a tool there and so that is another way that you know people can
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keep in mind there's a lot of risk there that a the space never takes off or b your tool you know doesn't wind up being needed in the space i mean there's all types of stuff there but cam's question is how would you distinguish between entering the forms market ie static kit and the calendar booking
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space what drove you away from the former yeah so the the form space um like my ambitions with static kit were always a little bit larger than just kind of form back-end as a service there's in that particular like very
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small narrow range of functionality there are a ton of different a ton of competitors too in that area but the difference between kind of calendaring and forums is that um they're it's sort of a race to the bottom with the with the forms piece so you know um
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so it was kind of hard to get the economics right on on pricing and and delivering sufficient value to kind of build a compelling business around that and so with staticate my goal is always to to hopefully expand a little bit beyond
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just the forms vision and become more of like a kind of back end as a service complement for um newer static site technologies kind of being um pushed ahead by netlify and versailles and some of these really innovative hosting companies
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and one of the big questions in my mind from the from the get-go was is this space mature enough is the jam stack really mature enough where there's enough companies spending money on complementary tooling for sites built in this space or is it still pretty nascent
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a lot of like you know engineers kind of playing with this new technology and eventually you know gaining adoption in um in kind of commercial settings and so i think i found it is it is still decently young there's still a major gap between you know
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kind of the turn key what you can like you can build with like an older style cms versus um kind of jam stack approach and so you know with this one i kind of found it was just it was it was a bit early i think to try to build a bootstrap business yeah that's a tough part too is if
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you're early to a space are you too early you know what if you what if you're two or three years early even if jam stack or static sites takes off which you know it seems to have traction what if it's wordpress in 2004 versus 2008 you know because there was an inflection point where it was like man if you were on the wordpress train
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like woo themes like hit it right at that right time but if they had built wood themes in 2004 2005 it would have taken them six seven years to hit that traction and you were i mean you and i had a lot of conversations about this we live in the same town and obviously you know chat about stuff and you were like i just i don't want to be doing that you know i don't want to be
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still at 10kmr in five or six years like that does not sound interesting you know yeah so let me you have anything oh and i was just gonna say like yeah in addition to that like um you know one of the things we talk about is like why you know why not just
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try to be early and it's like if you think about kind of market opportunity plotted on a timeline like there exists a very narrow band of time where you can actually be early and and catch that proverbial wave right and be
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kind of the one to swoop in and and gain dominance in the market and then there's the rest of the timeline that's like either the time before the market demand is high enough to build a business on and then the time where other competitors are already there right i mean especially in a healthy economy where
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where businesses naturally emerge to meet demand you know it's like it's just finding that time is almost like saying i'm going to go to i'm going to go to hollywood and first become famous and then i will succeed you know it's like right it's it's a lot of rare there's little little too much luck in
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the be early for my taste personally yeah i mean obviously people do it you know again i bring up josh from bare metrics uh 80 with wu themes he was early to the paid you know paid themes and i had a bunch of examples in the talk i gave once i can't remember the others but there were people who i mean i even
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think of like opt-in monster and sumo you know the sumo sumo me i guess it was called at the time and drip right we were early to that space and got some traction um and yeah there's a little it's not as repeatable as i like to make these things right so another question that came in
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from pablo is an interesting one what products did you think of and abandon in your process of trying level static kit and savvycal and for folks who don't know level was you're working on a couple years ago and it was essentially a slack
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competitor a less interruptive slack competitor static kit we've covered and of course savvycal's which you're working on now but what products did you think of abandon well that's a that's kind of a tough one to answer because i have i like you rob i have an idea notebook that it has just pages upon pages of
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you know lots of random ideas from over the years and um most of them probably not very good right so i didn't really make a deliberate run at too many other ideas aside from these i would say one of the things i was vetting i think i think it was maybe
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a little bit before level and then after level i kind of returned back to it was some like tooling for um indie hackers or people in kind of the the earlier side of the microcom space like what could could there exist a suite of tools that you know helps people get their
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business off the ground quicker with like basic email marketing basic landing pages and that kind of stuff and um that was one i remember thinking about and ultimately didn't didn't move forward with and and i think you were there was at one point you were gonna do something integrating with stripe because you
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wanted to be where the money was right and i don't remember specifics about it but we definitely yeah it was actually it was gonna be something something around um you kind of like what the stripe customer portal serves now like kind of a right the ability to send
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send someone over to a page where they can update their credit card change their plan have like a an automatically like optimized for you checkout flow for signing up for a sas app and all that kind of stuff and um you know thankfully didn't enter that space because straight appears to be making some moves that direction that was one of the big
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reasons we talked about that we're like man this is a great idea man you're going to get trucked by the platform risk on this one is going to move fast and they're going to build a good product and they're probably going to you know unfor accidentally crushed you there so i i have a question now about level
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and compared to savvycal like level was also in a competitive space you know you were entering a place where slack owns it and then there are these slack competitors already and you are entering it with and kind of trying to niche down almost or take a different angle
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and saying look we are going to provide the value of slack but less interruptive for for makers and people who want to do deep work but you worked on it for a year year and a half and didn't get traction and shut it down so what's the difference there between you know level and
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savvy cal i guess yeah so i kind of made a small bulleted list of this and i have like a deep dive blog post on derekramer.com too if people want to check that out um but kind of the the big the big points are like one very extremely high switching costs which is something that i just
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sort of underestimated um how deeply ingrained slack was to people's workflows ranging from small companies all the way up to of course the larger you are the more the more kind of it has its tentacles into your processes um
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and and with that requiring universal buy-in from companies so you know there were usually in all the the kind of early customers that i spoke to there were always a couple champions obviously who who believed that the slack model for communication was not healthy
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but there also usually existed a handful of people in the org who saw no no issue with it and were kind of a blocker to to changing up the the stack and so um you know that's that's another frustrating piece that i ran into [Music]
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i think it's it's difficult to pilot because it kind of requires required you to make a wholesale switch over you know splitting communication between two tools was kind of a nightmare and a lot of people were really resistant to doing that and um another thing i heard was just
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like a lot of people wanted to continue using slack if for no other reason then it's already installed on my computer and i'm in a bunch of slack workspaces already so they kind of have this weird network effect um thing that that gave inertia to switching to something else and so you know all those things combined made
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it an extremely difficult uphill battle in contrast you know savvy cal you can you can use it effectively in single player mode you know or you can use it as a team if you're like a customer success team or something or a sales team that needs to to do group scheduling
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switching costs are decently low even if you have you know 10 scheduling links it's not that difficult to switch over and that's that's also on the flip side a a risk like if if it's easy to switch to savvy cal then potentially it's easy to switch away from it so that'll be
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something that i'm gonna be paying attention to is like how can i make my product stickier than the products that people were leaving to come over to mine um and then it also has kind of this this nice little baked in virality piece too and every time someone shares a
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savvy cow link you know more people are becoming aware of the product so so different in many in many different aspects yeah for sure there is a question about growth channels have you found a growth channel that's working can you share
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what you did to find it and i mean i think you know it's something we should have done at the top is have you tell people what stage are you at like can you tell us how many customers you have or just something so they so they do know at what phase you know seeking product market fit with ex customers is probably a good
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way to put it i think yeah yeah so it's still pretty pretty early days i just actually launched officially um last week so i have kind of i'm still sharing numbers at this point at some point i'll probably dial that back but i have about 35
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customers right now and around 450 mrr so it's i feel good about where it's at obviously it's it's you know have lots lots of progress to make um off of that but but it's really days
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and i still see this as you know kind of in the in like the lean startup sense it's like still my my learning machine it's the it's my proving ground for figuring out what are those channels going to be and you know i felt like launching was was a a big step towards
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towards accelerating learning um right so i will be you know i i'm a big fan of the traction book from gabriel weinberg and justin maris and the bullseye framework in there so you know that's kind of my go-to for for sussing out what my traction channels are going to look like and what kind of experiments i'm going to run to figure
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that out um so not quite don't quite have all that figured out just yet for savvy cal but that's probably where all that yeah no growth channels yet but you're basically in the process of you know finding market finding product market fit i think finding a
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you already have users who are going to use it and you know like the tiny seed team switched over and it's like yeah this does everything we need that calendly did and there's no reason why we would switch you know so i'm guessing that you're going to have you know a decent amount of people sticking around but you're trying to get to that point where
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it's not oh i am i'm on par or i have feature parody with calmly you know you want to get to that point where it's like oh i need like if you are this type of user you need to get on savvy cal right you need to be on superhuman and not using the gmail web interface
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right and you need to be using you know whatever email service provider if you know if you really are in that space so you're not i feel you're not there yet but do you have a process or is there something that you're doing specifically that that might be helpful to those who are also trying to trying to get there
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yeah so i mean something i did um early on that gave me my first nice bump of information was when i put up my landing page and i was collecting you know email addresses for people interested in the product um i did a an autoresponder email right
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after they signed up that basically said hey if you're interested in being kind of an early adopter of this tool um fill out this brief survey and in it i kind of asked you know what are you using today i wanted to get an idea of like at what point would it make sense to onboard these or invite these people to come
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onto the product um based on how far i my progress um and then also kind of figured out like are you in the market for a tool and and a chunk of people said like nope just curious which is super helpful and then the people who said yes they usually then wrote a paragraph or two about what they're looking for and
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and why the tools in the market today are not are not satisfying their needs and some of it aligned with with hypotheses i had come up with and other things i had not i not heard of before so that was a that was a really helpful like early indicator of like these people you know
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went through a couple layers of friction filling out a survey and to to express to me um you know the problems they had and i think it was somewhere close to half of the people who joined the list um went through that that phase of filling out the survey as well so that
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was a that was a pretty good indicator to me that there's there's something here and people are are particularly motivated not just to see kind of a new product but have like share their thoughts on what they'd like to see in a new in a new tool yep yeah and that actually ties into the the
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next question it's from jeremy chase he says when entering a crowded market how do you look for a niche that has opportunity and i think one way i'll throw out while you're what you're thinking is you know with with if i were going to go into competitive space i would look for
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a competitive space with a hated market leader so if everyone about salesforce i would ask myself can i build either a niche this isn't even a niche this is just a way to attack it the niche is i'm not them you know when we infusionsoft people just did not like them they were so overpriced and the
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software was and so we built it easier to use less expensive version of that um but that's not the only way to do it it's just an easy you know it's easy to get refugees at that point you're i don't i don't feel like you're entering that space i don't hear people saying i hate calendly it's not widely despised the
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way maybe quickbooks is or was you know and and i think paypal at one point was you know there's certain companies that are kind of easy pickings um but you're not in that space but you're looking at it from from a different angle so yeah you want to give your take on this yeah i think i mean there a lot of tools and cow only
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being kind of the the dominant player i think um you know is it's a simple tool it does it does its job decently well but um and it's i will say it's not hated it's it's pretty it's a pretty well liked tool but when you start digging a couple layers deeper
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um you know you start scouring through forums you start initiating conversations um you know on on twitter and such and you start to unearth some some like feature requests people have been asking for that have kind of fallen on deaf ears um
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and i think that's just you know the for better or worse they have a pretty um tight reign on scope of their product and so i think you know it's it's like if you start listening to some of the more power user use cases um
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you will start to find find some some areas to explore and now grant you have to be careful that you don't go you know um too far i mean this was something we had to resist with drip early on you know we had we had power users like brennan dunn and probably a lot of people know brennan don
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and you know brennan's ideal tool probably is you know would only be usable by brendan because it'd be too complicated but so you have to be careful with that but i think that's what i'm starting to see is just like um kind of a a list of wants and needs
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from people who want to take the tool a little bit further beyond kind of the simple the simple dominant player that's what i was going to say this third kind of framework that i think about because i gave one you give one that the way i think about it is if i'm going to enter any space a competitive space or otherwise
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i'm going to say and i want to niche down i'm going to look at industries or roles within a company so industries are things like well i'm going to build accounting software that caters to hairstyle salons you know i'm not saying do that but that's one example or accounting
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software for um you know people that have very unique accounting needs maybe it's for sas companies because they maybe they defer revenue and have annual this and that and it's more complicated than just using xero so you can go industry verticals or you can go roles at a company because you'll often hear well currently works for me but i'm like
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a sales person and i would really use these five things to make sales better or calendly works but i'm i'm head of hr and i need this to be confidential and and once they submit this i need it to go and like trigger this pdf to get sent in this workflow or whatever you know i mean you can imagine a role at any company across
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industry verticals because an hr manager at target best buy and general mills probably has similar needs even though they're in different industries so that's just a third kind of way to to think about it and from there i would you know use your approach which is a lot of conversations i'd probably be
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hitting people up on linkedin i'd probably be on forums i'd be watching twitter you know i'd have i'd have google alerts i'd have be in the facebook groups for the the tool or tools that i'm thinking about competing against and i'd be looking at what are they not building what are people complaining about you know any type of info and
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what are the commonalities and is it a role or is it you know an industry vertical so yep cool that's where we are well sir we are at time it's been a great conversation um thanks for fun yeah thanks for coming on the show your first time on microconf on air yeah good to be here
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folks want to keep up with you you are at derrick rimer on twitter and derekreimer.com is that right you blog a little bit there and then of course for people who listen to podcasts the art of product podcast comes out every friday morning
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thursday all right thursday is it yeah i was thinking it was tomorrow and today's wednesday all right you're right thursday morning cool well anyways man thanks for joining me appreciate it yeah thanks for having me awesome well if you have not checked out microconf remote.com
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you can see the remote event the virtual event we did a couple weeks ago and uh purchased access to that for i think it's 25 for four four and a half hours of live streaming thank you so much to derek grimer for coming on the show today i thought that was a really fun conversation thanks thank you for listening and asking those
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awesome questions and also thanks to hey.com and stripe who are headline partners for the year really appreciate their partnership with microcom that's it see you again next week same time same place
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