Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

< All Articles



Transcript

John Jantsch: Who doesn’t love Copyblogger? Really been around since the dawn of the online era. Brian Clark and I have been friends for a really long time and they have certainly set the standard on how to build a business, how to build a brand, how to take care of a community. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I catch up with Brian and we just talk about a whole host of things. Why don’t you sit in and listen with us? You don’t want to miss it.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brian Clark. He is the CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger, host of unemployable and curator of further. Brian thanks for joining me. This is about your third time on at least.

Brian Clark: John, it’s always good to be here. Always good to talk to you.

John Jantsch: Yeah so you’ve got a lot going on in your world always. We always enjoy, I think, we forget there’s an audience listening even sometimes and enjoy just chatting about this online world that we’ve both been in for a long time. Tell me what’s new at Copyblogger and Rainmaker.

Brian Clark: There’s two big developments that have happened in the last six months or so. One was the launch of Studio Press Sites. For those that are familiar with Studio Press, it was pretty much the industry standard for word press things for many, many years powered by the [Janis 00:01:44] framework, which is our design framework that makes word press more powerful and easier to use. That was a company founded by Brian Gardener who is a principle here in Rainmaker Digital. We came together in 2010. That was part of our overall initiative to build what became known as the Rainmaker platform. As a bootstrap company without investors we always have to use cash flow as our development and maintenance funds.

Studio Press was a work horse for many years as we did development of Rainmaker, which was released in 2014 and then a couple years of rapidly trying to iterate that more ambitious marketing automation website email total solution type thing. When we finally came up for air, which was last fall, we started thinking about an idea that we had had for several years which was the idea of a hybrid between an all in one solution like a Square Space or a Wix, but without limiting all the functionality that you can do with word press. It’s a hard thing to do because what makes word press so powerful is just being able to use any plug-in, any theme, mix and match, put it together your own way.

Of course, as an open source project when you start mixing all these elements together from different sources, you have possible compatibility issues, you have security issues, you’ve got ease of use, who can you trust, who do you go for support, all that kind of stuff. That’s what we tried to solve with Studio Press Sites which is a little up market of say a Blue Host or an entry level thousand on a box type very inexpensive solution. Still, nowhere near the higher pricing that you would see. That rolled out at the very beginning of February. We’ve been thrilled with the reception level while we’re taking in all the feedback and improving and trying to do the same thing there with rapidly making that more in line with what we’re hearing from our customers, which has been pretty good.

There’s that side of things. That was our chance to revitalize Studio Press. The brand was always so important to us, but just again, by the nature of being a small bootstrap company even though we made it to eight figures in the last couple years, you know how it is when you’re running a small business you choose your priorities and you focus. At least that’s what we do and that’s the only way we’ve been able to make things work. That was a revisiting of Studio Press, which we’re really excited about.

On the Rainmaker side we evolved the platform. It’s kind of like Hub Spot if you will. That’s the easiest way for people to understand what it is. It was designed to be more accessible and more affordable because we started with word press and then we tricked it out heavily just as we do for our own sites. We got to thousands of customers and millions in recurring revenue. We started seeing the writing on the wall, I’d say at least a year ago where, again, you’ve got to listen to your customers. If there’s frustration, if there is something standing in the way of your customer’s success, even if it’s their own staffing, it’s their own skill levels, anything, ultimately it becomes your fault. Right? If you don’t solve the customer’s problem and provide a mechanism for success. We saw people, they were just running into roadblocks whether it be content development, design, any myriad of subset of that SEO, which of course you’re having a nice focus on custom development. All of that kind of stuff we realized we needed to do that, even though from the beginning that wasn’t really what we aspired to do. We weren’t trying to have a client type business. It was always at the customer level.

The thing we found with that model, to make it affordable and easy to use, you spend an incredible amount of time on onboarding, documentation, just trying to figure out every possible way to keep a paying customer on track and successful. I think we did a pretty good job at that, but when you spend all your time on that type of stuff, not all of it but a substantial part, that’s just taking away from development of new features. Again, even beyond that it was still take my credit card. Why can’t you just make me the content? Why can’t you do design for me? Why can’t you just set this up for me? It was amazing how much of that we got.

John Jantsch: You and I talked about this a couple times I think probably about a year ago. I think that’s always gonna be a challenge in there are 700 million variables and how you plan for every one that every person wants. Right? Everybody wants their thing. In the end, like you said, everybody really just wants somebody to do it for them. Rainmaker, I think, at the outset was incredibly ambitious. What’s the right term? You’ve enhanced it? Is that the right term?

Brian Clark: I think what we’ve done is listened to the market. It’s going to be a little bit upstream, not enterprise level, but certainly more than 150 bucks a month just for the platform. We’re gonna create just more bundled solutions as well as a la carte services. We had started that, and again you’re right, you and I had a conversation because of course you have this network of talented consultants and our friend Michael Port same thing. There’s some congruency here. Of course, that’s what Hub Spots model was and other similar platforms, they rely almost 100% on agency reseller arrangements. Right? They’re the point of contact for the sale, but they’re also doing the substance of work for them as well. We had to consider are we gonna be a me too, again, we didn’t take 100 million bucks like Hub Spot and we’re not trying to go public, so for us it made sense to why don’t we make power house hybrid agency where you have technology solutions, website, email, marketing automation, but also the creative services that back that up. Everything from strategy design, SEO, and whatnot.

Really when you think about it, I have two Rainmaker sites. I wouldn’t go back to word press if you paid me. Just the interface alone of word press scares me sometimes because I’m spoiled now with what we did with Rainmaker. I’ve never had an issue. Here’s the difference, my Rainmaker sites were set up for me by someone on the team, my designs were done by [Raphal 00:09:15]. You know? It was seamless. I don’t ever have a problem. I just go in there and I post my content and I do what I need to do. I send my emails. It’s wonderful. I can imagine if I had to start from scratch, even with all the onboarding work we did, even with all the extensive documentation and videos and everything, for me, I’d be like just do this for me. My time is more important than my money. Right? Now imagine you’ve got someone in a similar position to me, but they haven’t been doing content marketing for 20 years. They need a whole lot more help than even I need. That’s just the reality of where we’re at.

John Jantsch: Well and I think the other thing that a lot of people really neglect to is I find increasingly we used to live in a world where you could go get somebody to design your website and then you could get a content producer to help you produce content and then you could get an SEO person to SEO it all. I think we increasingly live in a world, a business and marketing world, where all that stuff has to be done together. Developing your website is strategy now and developing your content is strategy and developing your SEO is strategy.

Brian Clark: Right. We’ve been preaching that for awhile. You have. I know [Lee Odin 00:10:33] wrote a whole book about it. It is true. It is one thing. I think people are coming around to understanding that. That’s one aspect of it. Then also look at where we’re going with consumers and prospects are expecting personalized experiences as long as you don’t creep them out with your automation and whatnot. That’s just adds another layer of complexity. Within the strategy, it’s not just content and SEO and design, it’s entire choose your own adventure sequences of if then,…

Click here to read more