Brian Rhea Brian Rhea

Bright & Early Podcast

Converting More Customers with Better Onboarding with Alli Blum


Episode Transcript

The following transcript has not yet been edited. I am slowly editing them, identifying speakers, and cleaning up issues; but I haven't gotten to this one yet. For now, it's helpful for some Ctrl+F action to find a pull quote.

Brian: Hey everyone and welcome to bright and early the podcast for people building early-stage startups.

I’m your host Brian Rhea.

I talk to entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and marketing pros to learn what works, what doesn’t, and why; giving you at least one thing to apply to your business first thing tomorrow.

my guest today is Alli Blum Allie is an expert in copywriting and onboarding optimization for SAS products she helps her clients understand why some users bail on their trial and others upgrade so if you’re struggling with high turn or low activation rates Ellie has wisdom you’ll want to hear Allie welcome to the show hey Brian thanks for having me it’s such a pleasure I really appreciate you coming on and I’ve been enjoying digging into your work and and researching this episode so can’t wait to hear everything you’ve got to share cool so tell us just a bit about your your background and how you got into how you get into this whole world well a few years ago I was running a coloring for grown-ups business and it sounds pretty cool but I was pretty miserable and I decided not to run that business anymore and knew I wanted to start another one so I went through a user research project of interviewing about 50 people in a lot of different industries from hardware to sustainability which by the way is not actually a business category for velocity or approach I looked I studied Mandarin for Chinese for nine years so I thought maybe some samiches China and through that process I ended up learning about the micro Kampf community learning about software-as-a-service businesses and I started really enjoying the conversations I was having with those folks I would follow people who tweeted about micro Kampf and email them and say hey can you just tell me just tell me what SAS is like just tell me about your world and then I started reaching out to some folks out larger more established SAS companies as well and what I really found compelling was that SAS has relatively repeatable problems from one business to the next so every SAS business is struggling every sus business is unique but we’re all struggling with the same kinds of problems in a way that doesn’t exist or maybe doesn’t exist to an extent that I find that interesting in other industries so that made me say ok SAS has several repeatable problems they can be solved with my skill set which is marketing and writing how do i how do i tie these things together and i decided to focus first on onboarding as a challenge there are a lot of reasons for it but one was how complex how multi-departmental onboarding is what is onboarding no one can really agree well you I mean I guess there’s illusions of agreement but is onboarding what happens during a trial is onboarding what happens after the sale is onboarding a sales process is it about customer success what’s the difference between onboarding for someone who’s the first user the first account creator at a company and onboarding for the 1,000th what’s the difference between onboarding for someone who’s going to be using the product every day versus someone who’s introducing it with the hope that their team will get really excited what about the differences between product champions who sign up and people who need to get buy-in from their boss oh so many interesting questions so that’s where I decided to start in it I kind of cracked open this world of others within this this what I thought originally within this one tiny problem of onboarding if there’s all these other great great areas for exploration okay there’s so much about I mean just the talking there about onboarding customers you know number one or say one through ten or a hundred versus onboarding a thousand plus and whole details the nitty-gritty there I can’t wait to get into that with you but you do not get to mention that you ran a coloring for grown-ups business and they just keep on saying how how did that happen and what question so I my introduction into the world of online the sister technology businesses was at an e-commerce company and it did a lot of art and when I was younger well a few years ago before this craze really took off I had this idea so I I like drawing I like coloring would it wouldn’t it be fun to start a coloring for grown-ups business everyone loves coloring and this was also around the time when mindfulness and and well hmm I want to call it wellness but mindfulness was becoming more popular or more mainstream and I said oh this sounds fun and what a relaxing business to start we’re just going to come together and save and color and focus on our pencils so move across the page and we ran a bunch of coloring parties and it was really really stressful I do not recommend it starting relaxation just means if you want to be relaxed planning an event finding a venue coordinating food refreshments inviting people figuring out how to make that ticket price work and the cost of the physical product oh yeah yeah yeah yeah it was nuts it was not for me so it was not another kind of problem I enjoyed solving okay and so you’ve got to so you so you had this background in writing and in marketing you’re doing all these interviews you stumble upon the microcon world and so then that this is the point at which you begin to start building this this business and the work that you’re doing now which is helping SAS founders to have a better onboarding process through better copywriting and more thoughtful strategy yeah it was right now yeah a two-pronged approach there so there was a couple of conversations where I was having with SAS founders and this was very early on so this was before I even knew about jobs to be done this was before I had any kind of research framework of my own this was just one person asking other people questions sometimes getting good answers and sometimes not I started to notice that this idea of onboarding was challenging the founders very often did not have a writing background some did but more often they were I found myself speaking with technical founders or designers so I said okay this is a complementary skill set this sounds like there could be a space here their writing needs words need to be written I can write them and at the same time I was also learning a lot more about conversion copy writing from copy hackers and from Joanna Wiebe who is the foremost authority on writing I cannot cannot recommend her enough in going through some of her trainings and learning or how she works with SAS businesses and getting really great consultant education around specializing also learning from Brennan done at double your freelancing became really clear that onboarding was a place where I could specialize and it would be a place where there’d be a problem I could take from one business the next I would never have to organize or plan another event worry about getting the food for everyone to show and getting ready to show up and what it was so interesting to me is that conversion copywriting is really about using the exact words your customers use reflecting them back joining the conversation happening in their head and nudging them along to help them learn more and make a decision and this is really interesting to me because it’s unlike a lot of the writing I have done previously which is content writing which very often will start from this place of what is the problem how do we teach someone how to solve it and this is more about how to engage someone along to take an action to make a decision and that was very very interesting to me and very cool to see that you could use voice of customer data in this way I should also say we should probably define voice of customer data have you heard this term I think we yeah okay but but well I should have said no pretend pretend I’ve never heard pretend I’ve never heard of that before okay so if you had heard a voice of customer data no shame in that the voice of customer data is the the qualitative data the exact words your customers news whenever they are talking about their problem or your product or your competitive or their competitive alternatives to your product voice of customer data lives in your chat box anytime someone asks for help mmm-hmm it lives in competitive review sites G - crowd kaptara Amazon it lives in and forums where people are asking hey how can I solve this problem this is what’s going on I need to find a solution and it exists in the transcripts of the conversations that you have with other with your customers with people you’re talking to so there’s so many great sources of that data and once you haven’t you can really start to well you can do a lot with it but for the purposes of this conversation since there is so much you can do I think you can use it to plot what what’s going on from the moment before someone gets to your site when they sign up for your trial when they’re in the middle of the trial and then all the way through to whether they decide to upgrade or to cancel and then you can use those exact words to write your emails write your landing pages to build additional content that may be able to support your people as they’re getting started yeah what’s your what’s your advice for founders who are looking for this voice of customer data they want to write better they want to have better conversion copywriting all of this is resonating but the piece that they have missing is that that they they don’t even have a hundred customers or ten customers they’re stolen you know pre-launch trying to get there more like they’re getting ready to launch and the marketing page is getting pull together they want this data what’s your advice - to those founders so if you are those are two two important distinctions so if you’re pre marketing page if you don’t have an email list if you don’t have relationships with anyone there’s so much voice of customer data living out in the wild so you can go to for example I’ll walk you through a process of what a brief you mining I review mining bubala I stumbled over a review mining a few times what a review mining process might look like so let’s say for example you are starting a product and let’s take a really competitive category will say invoicing software there are a ton of invoicing software’s out there and they’re all a little bit different some just will give you an invoice so I’m having invoicing in time tracking some have invoicing and time tracking and also they took when you sign a contract he will automatically trigger trigger a workflow and your clients while you’re stirring your pencils and serving clients and it will automatically go through and let’s say your unique approach is that you are building an invoicing software that is custom to will say the landscaping industry you may want to look into really great places for where you can collect that data you may want to look at what people say in reviews of similar landscaping or similar invoicing software on review sites and you may also want to go to some landscaping forums and say what are people talking about that is their main problem with their invoicing software with managing clients with getting paid with maybe it’s maybe the you discover through this process that people people are really complaining about the threads that have the most voluminous complaints are completely different problems than the one you originally set out to solve organize them all put them into if you’re good if you’re just getting started you truly have zero budget put them into a Google spreadsheet copy and paste I highly highly highly recommend copying and pasting to the point of I’ll just say I require you copy and paste your data don’t take a screenshot because a screenshot you can’t copy and paste again you can’t manipulate the text you can’t organize it becomes an image file copy/paste put it into a Google sheet or an air table I say where you got the data from start to you can start to accumulate different tags you’ll start to notice different patterns about what there might be and how you can use it now once you have a marketing page this is a really great opportunity to set up some automated emails that come from you and the from name should be from a person and you think that in your welcome email you need to use this phrase and this is another Joanna Wiebe lesson what’s going on in your world that led you to sign up today now it’s extremely important that you use that exact phrasing don’t use why did you sign up because there’s there’s so much baggage we have when people ask us why we do things we often don’t know why we do things but when you ask a question that says hey what’s going on that brought you here you’re going to get responses that are structured like this I am a landscaper I run a small firm where with 300 customers we were remote lawns and I’m having I’m considering expanding to a new area I want to be able to have better processes and that’s why I signed up for your product people will very often answer this question I am a X person with some context around what that that type of person is and here’s what I’m working on right now and that helps give you a really great piece of data into the exact moment when someone is changing their habit when they need to change a habit when they’re motivated to make a decision on one of your earlier episodes I think it was okay it was either Claire or Val I think it was Andrea I think Andrea Hill was talking about why you can’t ask people two questions would you use this feature right because I don’t know and changing habits is very hard but when you ask people these questions right at the moment they have changed their habit you start to understand what that moment really looks like and then you can take that data and you can reflect it back into your onboarding messaging into your web copy into even into how you write your content because you know what that that moment is from people are coming to you every desk you’ve had has talked about jobs to be done their framework it’s a pretty in vogue right now and one of the one of the great things about jobs to be done is that it gives you this framework which I highly recommend you consider it gives you a way of saying okay here’s what I need to happen as a result of using this product okay well so that that start you’ve mentioned that there at the beginning of that you know review mining first of all and for as a as a strategy for collecting voice of customer data when you don’t have any customers yourself that’s very practical and useful so that’s that’s fantastic and you and you mentioned there in your answer and so this first automated email that you want to set up that’s going to be hey welcome like what’s going on in your world that caused you to sign up today . that’s the end of the that’s the end of the email great i mean in all practical purposes great clarifying question so there is a little bit of a little bit more that goes into it so jolly dimension you know what your subject line to say hey welcome to the future right yeah so whatever you’re welcome subject line is and there are a lot of different ones that are toyed with a few a year or so ago the you’re in no it was pretty popular that one I’ve seen that one quite a lot you can experiment a welcome you know I tend to see pretty high open rates on it and anyway because people are expecting it and they do the first there they’ve got that momentum when they sign up so there’s a few different approaches that you can take and it really depends on what kind of product you have where what kind of customers you have what you’re really what kind of relationship you’re trying to build who you are Val I think she also mentioned she has she shares five cool facts about her in her welcome email there’s another marketer okay I’m I’m pretty sure it’s Danny Hart and she loves goats and her welcome emails all about how much she loves goats so there’s you can really think outside the box and how you’re welcoming people but there are two things I would say are really important thing number one you’re welcome email should make it clear that you are improving the person not the person’s process so the person is is coming a person signs up for a product because they have a problem that they want solves but they want to be a better version of them themselves I want their job to be less difficult they want to be a better researcher they want to be a better market or whatever it is that they want to be that doesn’t mean using that exact language but once you’ve done a little bit of voices customer review mining you might be able to to go back to our landscaping example say hey you know there are work let’s say it’s a increasingly competitive environment maybe you say there are more landscaping firms more lawn mowing businesses today than there ever have been and increasingly people are planting their lawns with grass that doesn’t need to be mowed as often so how what does that look like for your business one opportunity that you have is to make your process more efficient so that even though you’re in operating in this increasingly competitive environments you’re you’re still going to be able to find opportunities to remain profitable I really want to help you do that okay but yeah but the point is to keep it keep it brief make it personal I think I mean both the the goat example and Val talking about you know her for her five things about them about ourselves is that everybody that email is automated everybody knows that that email is automated but you know the so I guess a follow-up question to that is like I wanted to ask you a little bit about voice like you’re your own brand voice your own person’s voice and putting that into your automated emails so that I mean is it a fair assumption that that’s going to increase reply rates engagement rates etc so you just talk a little bit about voice and and how you think about that voice is a sandbox that I don’t really play in too often okay and there’s a few reasons for that so how you build your voice guidelines how you Brent go your tone guidelines some companies have these at your earliest stage voice guidelines may not be the best way to spend your time yeah that’s not gonna be there’s not gonna be like a voice guideline document for a company that’s super early stage yeah yeah and there are so many other guidelines that I would say even within the world of marketing within the world of how you organize your research that are going to be far much more important I’m all for process I know there’s a tangent to this is that there’s a lot of debate over when you add process and which processes and how much documentation of the processes as someone who’s always coming in as the consultant the more documented process that there already is the easier it is to do stuff that’s at all stages of companies so anyway that’s a tangent but all that to say the more that you can reflect your customers voice using that voices customer data that’s the best that’s very often the best option that you can have when you’re getting started and that means use the exact words that they use to describe their problem and not summarizing them not attempting to come up with a way of reframing it so that it sounds shorter so that it’s marketing speak so that it sounds like it’s just generic enough that maybe you have two different kinds of landscaping companies maybe you have people who specialize in treating sick trees people who specialize in lawn fertilizer you don’t want to write for both of those and just for the sake of being you know we just want to have one one generic version there’s a lot of ways that you can Oh doesn’t that sounds like a cop-out by telling you that there’s a lot of ways that you could talk to these different groups without telling you what those groups are well that’s probably I wouldn’t like that so the good to different when you have these two different groups that’s actually a really good segue into one of the other topics we were chatting about before which is that in conversion of copywriting you always want to make sure you’re writing for one audience this is another great Joanna Wiebe copy hackers lesson which is called the rule of one the rule of one states that you are writing every piece of writing that you have for one customer one reader I should say one reader you are making them one offer you’re making them one promise and it all falls under the umbrella one big idea okay but but is it it’s it’s always it fair to say though that you mate you may have multiple segments or multiple audiences who matched different use cases for your for your SAS product but you want to have done some segmentation prior you want you want to be to be smart about segmenting along the way so that you have multiple bits of content that speak to one person one one use case one path forward is that fair that okay [Music] hey friends this is a great time to pause and let you know that bright and early is brought to you by transistor dot FM transistor offers you professional podcast hosting and analytics they host this very podcast that you’re listening to right now and my friends I got to tell you it could not be easier I can tell you from personal experience as you also probably know podcasting is becoming one of the best ways to develop a closer relationship with your audience and so if you’re thinking about starting a podcast trust me look no further just visit transistor dot FM and if you decide to sign up let him know that Brian sent you so that definitely ties into you know one of the closing questions I wanted to ask you which is if I have if I’ve got zero budget to invest and you know bring it bringing in a an onboarding expert like yourself somebody who’s specializes in customer research I don’t have any budget to invest in that just yet but I know I need to be spending some time there how would you recommend I spend my time what can I do to at least not be terrible at at this part of the process the first thing that I do with every client with every the first thing I recommend to everyone is to set up a few of these emails now like you said earlier they are automated emails everyone knows they’re automated emails we don’t want to automate to the human part of the relationship building however there is something to be said for sending an email very soon after people sign up because it does generate it’s right in that momentum it generates a lot of people are ready to respond because they’re thinking about you when they get that email yep so emails a couple of key inflection points email number one what’s going on in your world that led you to sign up today and that comes goes out to folks who sign up for a child if you have people who are who are also on a team related project you can also have another one that goes out to people who are invited and you can change the question a little bit today saying something like hey what’s you know how did you learn about this tool or what do you think that the you’re going to be able to accomplish with this tool that gets a little bit that’s like next level it’s like level two this is we’re talking level one here okay so then the next question is at the end of the trial you can send folks an email who don’t upgrade to say hey what was there something you were hoping to do that you were not able to accomplish and again this gets it really targeted around what was happening as opposed to by what’s happening asking people why did you decide not to do something is a very very difficult question as anyone who has ever asked a child why they didn’t clean or why they didn’t brush their teeth but no there’s there are a thousand reasons and none of them are going to be be immediately just addressable that’s it yeah that mean that’s a that’s a great question too I mean the the initial question what’s going on in your world that cost you to sign up that is why did you hire us they don’t convert through their trial process the question is you’re you’re asking why did you fire us that’s an excellent question as far as that first one you know what’s going on in your world should we as part of the automated process like a day later say hey dude did you miss this or like my question is basically if somebody doesn’t respond to that first question should we automate a nudge to try to get them to respond or you ask it once and you just let it go that’s a good question I’ve never thought about automating a knowledge for that one before whoa I don’t know my first that’s fair I mean yeah go ahead what’s your first instinct my first instinct is no but that doesn’t mean you shut down the relationship because you’re you have people coming in you are you’re you’ve gone to Vout site you’ve got hurt in your party strategy but it’s all set so you are creating these other opportunities where you’re having conversations with human-to-human conversations maybe through automated emails but there are other opportunities to get people to respond to you in different emails so maybe if you notice that you’re not getting really good data there maybe your third or fourth email is for example hey we’re doing we’re doing free custom setups a set if setup is hard or I’m doing I can I can build you a custom workflow I don’t know something you can do something for them you can give you that is involving some degree of manual effort and say hey would this be interesting to you and that creates an opportunity to have a conversation with them and ask them that question face-to-face which also I should say if people do respond and they do answer that question of what’s going on respond back because that is a huge relationship building opportunity totally yeah but something you said there made me think like that well so that would be that’d be an interesting way to follow up to the people who don’t respond to the what’s going on in your world email rather than tap tap tap hey please respond yeah automate to them you’re eligible for concierge onboarding this is blah blah blah in and offering offer them value in order to to get the conversation going exactly yeah so so then what if I am ready to commit some budget to this kind of work what what what sort of things could I expect to dig into what does an engagement with you specifically look like okay so two levels of budget so if you’re ready to invest a little bit of budget but not a lot of budget what I would recommend doing is as you set up these email sequences these automation automated emails also set up a qualitative research repository now quantitative data gets all the love there are so many products for so many people working at SAS companies to make all the data flow through meta base and go in and out and all the different warehousing but that seam level does not exist at most companies for qualitative data which is why setting a qualitative research repository up from the beginning means you will have your in a year or two you’ll have a year or two worth of qualitative data you’ll be able to pump out to whoever you hire you’ll be able to give people who are joining your team or who are your consultants access to all of the amazing insights that you have collected the to give you an example when I have set up this email of why did you what’s going on in your world that let you just sign up or even for a turned customers why did you cancel what’s what was going on that led you to cancel over six months you may be able to generate somewhere between 50 100 200 300 responses depending on how many signups you get then you have this great mmm-hmm dead asset that you can start to say what are the patterns now analyzing qualitative data manually hard and I thinking quantitative data when it is in a repository we’ve built in Wilson and automated charts less hard still still you have to think a little bit but less hard I recommend enjoy HQ is a company I have a great working relationship with but I get no money from telling you that they are one of my favorite SAS teams of all time and they you can set up your email so they will auto forward straight in you can sync up your chat transcripts so they’ll go in as well you can set up a Twitter integration so that anytime someone mentions your business or hashtag that’s related to your business that can also go in so anytime you’re ready to say alright we want to ask a new research question we can look at the data we already have we want to consider building a new feature what evidence do we have that this is something that people want and why would they watch it or hate you know we’re experiencing a problem at this inflection point when people sign up or people are our quantitative data has told us that half of our customers will turn after eight months your qualitative data might tell you why you can set up some cool filters to say what are those chat report requests that people give in the thirty days before they cancel what is what are they asking for help how can we quantify that yeah well let me ask you real quick I mean a qualitative data repo I’m are we talking about a Google Drive folder with categorized in there or how how how do you recommend setting that up so enjoy what does it actually look like a dream queue is like looking at yes what does their okay let’s see if I can pull it up for a memory you have your you have what you can search have a search feature you can see all of the data so a Google Drive very hard to localize this will pull up yeah very very alright don’t recommend it each I mean if you’re just getting started and you have less than 100 data points use use Google don’t use it yes or if you’re working for a specific project and you know exactly what you need and it’s not data that you’re going to be using again and again or maybe you will there are honestly I think there needs to be an entire show about voice of customer data and how you manage it but that’s for another day the repo looks like having every single item that you upload or a ticket that comes in is a document and you can search for them each support chat that comes in hey I need help setting up my getting my getting paid for the first time with my invoice okay that gets tagged by the product area you can tag it by whatever type of user they are and then it will you can look at them individually and then there’s also a section where you can run these cool graphs that says okay bring up all the people who signed up 30 days ago and I want them to be categorized by how we tagged them or the properties that we have assigned to them got it okay cool it takes a long time it’s not cheap yeah I misunderstood when you when you recommended enjoy HQ this is somebody who’s offering like their product does this I okay cool I I heard it as enjoy HQ as somebody who does this well you should follow them building it in public no this is what they do this is what they do it’s very good yeah all right I I’m gonna I’m gonna check them out okay listener so if you’ve got budget check out and joy HQ and see which you can what you can do to start integrating there and if you don’t then maybe think about ways that you can enact that hack that process for free for now okay let’s see yeah Lisa the final thing that I would love to ask you about you run your own business you work with founders startups of all size it is a stressful thing to do this and so are there any practices that you have found helpful to manage your own stress that that you’d like to share there are some things that I have found work well then they they work less well when something is that I don’t expect to work well do you work well but for me there’s two things that tend to be really helpful one is keeping to a regular schedule and going outside to take a 20-minute walk at least a few times a week even and that’s separate from any kind of additional exercise that may be happening at the walking process from going out walking next to tree doing some forest bathing really helps but I’ve also found that what can be really helpful for me personally is thinking that every industry is going to be stressful and it’s all right and whatever I am stressed about maybe it’s something that is unique but more likely it’s something that is common in businesses like mine among people like me you may have some qualities that are unique to us but for the vast majority of what we do it’s fairly similar to other industries and it can be harmful to think that you know to put that extra pressure on yourself depending on what the pressure is if your business is going under and you may have to shut down that’s a different that’s a different kind of existential stress but if it’s day-to-day stress yeah cool that was a doozy my guest today has been Ali Blum Ali thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me and share your thoughts and expertise with our listeners absolutely thank you so much for having your friends [Music] all right some local showed up sore closing thoughts from me I think that the process of doing review mining for conversion copywriting is a great just actionable takeaway from this episode if we if we were all of us to take 45 minutes at some point this week and apply that to whatever it is that we’re working on pretty convinced that we would we would learn something most most especially if you find yourself in the position right now where you’re still working on your your idea and you have a quiet launched it or you have launched it but but you don’t have many customers or you’ve got a sense that the people who have signed up aren’t going to be your long-term you know best fit optimal customer what a great way to kind of hack your way around that process then to find out where your people are hanging out look at your competitors what are people saying about them and kind of you know trick yourself into thinking that these are your customers those are your support requests this is your customer support forum how are you going to respond to that and and using their language in your yeah you know in your materials and I noticed Ali said and you know a number of times like copy and paste their exact words their exact language this is it’s fantastic advice I think that in it I think the reason it completely resonated with me is I have observed myself doing this so many times where you want to like summarize I think she even used that as an example don’t summarize what what they’re saying just copy and paste it trying to I’ll catch myself trying to summarize two or three you know bits of feedback into one sentence or I think what they probably meant there was this thing that I’ve already built her this thing I’ve already envisioned are you nodding your head up and down so I think that that’s just really fantastic advice to make it a rule I’m going to use their exact language and and why not why wouldn’t we do that and the answer is that for some reason we want to kind of we want to bundle and and and summarize so that we can you know maybe maybe that’s a shortcut or it appeals to more people so I think that there’s I think that there’s a lot a lot going on there something useful to apply to your project right now I liked a bit of the conversation about the rule of one and you know writing to one person and they have there is one call to action there’s one outcome and one path forward just you know from a writing standpoint do you ever do you ever find this where it’s super easy to just spin off email email email to a co-worker or to a group or and the writing comes and you know maybe maybe it’s even entertaining it’s fun whatever but then when you sit down to write a blog it’s like you know just you just get writer’s block or it ends up coming off real business yeah I’m uh I’m gonna rabbit trail just a little bit as I’m prone to do from time to time on this but I’m in a fantasy baseball league that I just have so much fun with and we’ve been doing this leaf like seven or eight years I think seven actually and so for a few of those I was the commissioner and like once a week you write you know a summary of the week and send it out to the other managers and it’s fun it’s kind of nerdy for yeah you know for to be doing that but you know you just always get like good feedback from from the other you know people in the league I can always look forward to these summaries haha and and it’s just always I think about that example all the time because when I sit down to try to write copy either from my consulting practice or for what the SAS product I’m trying to build every now and then I’m just not I just it just doesn’t flow and I think to myself why can’t I sit down and try to write this why can’t I tap into the same energy that lets the fantasy baseball updates just flow like water and are more entertaining by the way why can I tap into that and I think that folks who have mastered the idea of the rule of one to have someone in mind that you are writing specifically to I think that that’s I think that that’s what they’ve they’ve done is that they’ve they’ve just been able to master that through practice and can tap into that and it just makes writing more fun yeah producing whatever it is it makes it it makes it easier in it and it should flow better when you’re when you’re speaking to somebody there’s want to hear what your what’s been your experience as you try to write you know documentation or marketing materials in your in your work how do you how do you find a way to effortlessly tap into that that sense of flow as far as words go I really liked the suggestion and the advice of the email being what’s going on in your world when we were talking about you know the initial onboarding and welcome sequence what is going on in your world that caused you to sign up for this trial that is just so is it so straightforward I cannot wait to test this I cannot wait to apply this it it loops back to what we learned from vow and episode 7 if you’ve not listened to that one highly recommend it where she kind of flushes out like hey welcome to product name is the worst first email you can send it needs to be brief it needs to be personal and it needs to be about them it’s like you know welcoming someone into into the home you know as a guest what’s what’s happening what’s up how are you and so it taps into that and gets into you know jobs to be done language and approach which you know is the the you know one of its core tenants is there is something going on in this person’s world that caused them to be unsatisfied with the status quo like they aren’t they didn’t wake up and decide they want your thing they actually don’t even want your thing they want progress and improvement for themselves and so what you’re trying to tap into that find it so that you can amplify it and satisfy it etc etc and the just a straightforward black-and-white advice of that initial welcome email needs to it should ask what is going on in your world that caused you to sign up for this trial today imagine if you had ten answers to that question that’s just I think that’s really really solid and let’s see finally this concept of a qualitative research repository and I think about it yeah most especially can begin just as a Google Drive folder you’re just dumping things into categorized Docs documents and worksheets I’m you know we have have all had the experience oh man where did I I got it was it was that in any email or did I drop that into was I like through a slack support request from one of my beta users I’m not kind of thing so if there’s a way that you know through you through a process you can start to collect those things or if you are far enough along that you’re that you’ve begun spending and paying for paying for services then that enjoy HQ sounds like a service that’s worth worth exploring okay yeah great good stuff to apply immediately with review mining to improve your copywriting rule of one ask them what’s going on in your world and start a qualitative research repository great stuff I would love to hear what you all think about this episode the show in general I am beer a on Twitter shoot me a message over there beer a that is B as in bit ours in reserved ages in hydraulic E is an extraction and a as in Airway I would love to hear from you there and please if you’re enjoying this show could you just scroll down in your app right now leave a five star review on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts wherever you listen to your shows it’s it’s just really it’s just the best way for people to find the show which makes it easier for me to attract guests and the show gets better from there so if you’ve got a minute or two just to do that that would be fantastic and I’ll talk to you next time