The Guide to Bootstrapped SaaS Growth – Peep Laja @ Wynter

Todd Chambers
Todd Chambers here, hello! Welcome to another episode of the Masters of SaaS podcast, brought to you by Upraw Media. We interview the very best in SaaS, extract as much value as possible, and share all the learnings ready for you to implement. The episodes are mostly focused on growth and marketing, as well as founder stories and a bunch of other strategic and tactical stufff for SaaS.

In this episode, I speak with Peep Laja, the world's most influential Conversion Rate Optimization expert. Peep has founded three companies - CXL, an online training platform, Speero, a customer experience agency, and, more recently, Wynter, a product marketing research platform. Peep is an incredibly switched on guy and he definitely did not fail to deliver in this episode, where we discuss how to validate ideas, how Peep approaches bootstrap growth with limited resources, the richest sources of qualitative feedback, what exactly is message market fit and how you can approach it, the advantages of speed in business, how to defend yourself against fierce competition by building a moat, hiring lessons and advice and how to prioritise your time, which is something we all struggle with, me included. Alright guys, this was a killer episode - please enjoy!

Hey, welcome to the show!

Peep Laja
Thank you, good to be here.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, pleasure is all mine. So yeah, maybe you can explain, who is Peep Laja? You can give us the surface level answer or you can go really deep and philosophical, your choice.

Peep Laja
Well, the real brief way to put it is, I'm a businessman! So, that would be the extremely short answer. So, yeah, I've grown three bootstrap businesses. And I have some failed ones in the past. I also been in various roles. I've worked as a software engineer, for nonprofits as a professional fundraiser, I've worked in advertising sales... But I've been in marketing since 2007. My business viewpoint is that I'm a marketer. First, you know, some some founders are product-first or sales-first. I'm a marketer. And so, I've been having to learn all the other stuff along the way.

Todd Chambers
I actually didn't know you were you were a developer. Has that, kind of, come in handy?

Peep Laja
Yeah, for sure. In the in the early years, when I first started as a marketing consultant, I also built websites. So, I built websites, optimised the CRO, SEO, you know... So it's been real handy in the early days in my career. Today, how it's really handy is in the front end or back end, I speak the same language with with my engineering team. I mean, obviously, I'm not on the same level as them. But conceptually, I can assess the difficulty of what it takes to build something and you know, the process that's involved.

I was into computers from, you know, a very early age. And so, I had this, when I was in sixth grade or so, my mom bought me this IBM XT Megahertz Computer, and it had no graphics card, so I couldn't play games. So, all I could show is like text. And so, I taught myself to programme at the age of like, I guess it was 11, 12, to programme computer games. So, I could play that game on a computer... Necessity, mother of all things.

And then I got to college and I studied IT. Once I graduated, I was a developer. Then after being a developer for a year, I realised that... I fucking hate this. Maybe not hate, but I was like, it's not for me. So I changed my career.

Todd Chambers
Maybe you can just give us, like, the super quick whistlestop tour, a couple of minutes, from, I guess most people know you from CXL as the, kind of, conversion guy. So, I guess the main business,like, it started from the blog, right? So maybe you can give us the last, kind of, summary of 10 years of businesses you ran, the last 10 years.

Peep Laja
So, like, 2009 to 2011, I had a SaaS company, Traindom, and it failed. And once it failed, I told myself, "okay, this next business, I'm gonna do it differently. I'm going to build an audience first, and then figure out what I'm going to sell". Because my last company failed, I was bootstrapped. And I had no audience, like, I was, like, shouting in the desert, nobody was listening.

And so, I started a blog. And that got relatively quick success, because I hooked myself onto this relatively new and up and coming thing called Conversion Optimization. Now, of course, Conversion Optimization has been around for a number of years, but as a category of service. It was the early days, the early days. And so, I played a big role then, in growing the category. And very quickly, within one year, people started to email me and they wanted to buy my services, or, "help me with Conversion Optimization!". And so, I built the agency around me. And when I got into Conversion Optimization, obviously, I was just, I was a guy who knew a little bit about it. I have been doing this for a number of years, but among other marketing things, like, I was also doing SEO and PPC and all these other things, but I set myself a goal; "okay, if I'm running a SEO agency, I also need to know a lot about it". Because otherwise, it's like I'm scamming people for money here.

And so, I set myself a goal to become the best in the world at it. And so, I took it seriously. So, one is like read everything you can get your hands on, talk to everybody in the industry. There are a lot of people in the industry that were far more experienced than I was and I managed to run with many of them as my mentors, and obviously then doing the work, doing the client work. And, so in 2016, they recognised me as the most influential Conversion Optimization person in the world. And so I was like, "okay, I achieved this goal as well", at the same time as like, I got tired of consulting, I had been a consultant, then, by then, for 10 years, and really explaining the same shit or the 7,000 times... If anybody asked me to explain what the p-value is again, I'm going to fucking kill them...

... I burned out, in a way. Like, I talked so much about Conversion Optimization - conferences, podcasts, webinars, writing content - really, I built the business on content marketing, and I just lost interest. I mean, lost interest is the wrong way to put it. But like, I just ran out of juice.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, lost a feel for it.

Peep Laja
And so, but there I was, I was still the CEO of this Conversion Optimization agency, that's a bad problem to have! And then I explored, what else could we do? "Can I add another revenue stream over here?'. And so, I decided to build an e-learning business. Because most people, our agency is pretty expensive. And most people, you know, no one is going to afford it. So we built an e-learning business, teaching people how to do first only Conversion Optimization.

Now, CXL is like, all things digital marketing, and today the e-learning business, so, started 2016, it's, like, five years old. It's bigger now than the agency in terms of revenue, making more money with less people, because agencies are people heavy. online learning scales and about 2019. So, two years ago, I stumbled upon this problem optimising revenue for the e-learning business, which was, we have a lot of copy heavy pages, you know, 60 courses, or webinar, landing pages, PPC landing pages, and in order to increase the conversion rate on those pages and impact significantly impact our revenue trajectory, we needed to improve the words, copy heavy.

Copy is what drives conversion, most of it. But what's wrong with the words? You can only make something better if you know what's wrong with it, like, what needs improvement. And I looked for a tool that will help me do this, and I found nothing. And so traditionally, you know, scratch your own itch. That's how people start companies. And since I've had a failed SaaS company in my past, I was like, "hey, I would love to have another go at it". And also, it's very rare to stumble upon a business problem that hasn't been solved. It's rare. And so, I gotta jump on. I didn't really need to build another company. But here we are!

Todd Chambers
Yeah, good stuff. Well, that's a really nice launching off point, thanks for the, kind of, the lay of the land.

So, that's kind of what I'm interested in, it's how you think about building a business. Now, I mean, you've built a couple of businesses, I'm sure you've got punched in the face, metaphorically speaking, along the way, you've had a lot of setbacks. So, when you had this initial, kind of, eureka moment, you think, "hang on, wait, this thing doesn't exist", you are scratching your own itch, you're trying to solve your own problem? How did you go about, kind of, validating whether this was a good idea instead of like, "okay, I'm going to chuck like 100 grand at this, I'm going to hire some people, I'm going to build the thing and then hope it works". Like, what was that next step to, kind of, validate?

Peep Laja
So, having worked years in experimentation, and what conversion experimentation really is, is user research plus experimentation. So, super familiar with all the user research methodologies, anywhere from lean startup to jobs to be done and everything in between. So, that was the first thing, like, as soon as I had the idea, and, so, there's an opening in the market. The question is, "does anybody want this? Does anybody care about this?".

I recruited maybe about 30 people that had copy heavy pages trying to get more conversion. So, people who were really responsible, owning copy portion of the website, and in-house people, not, like, freelance copywriter. And so, the problem discovery - "is this a problem, is this a perceived pain point?". And then, we had drawn up, like, prototypes, non-working, meaning, like, just essentially a set of screenshots of how you would, how this product would work, potentially, and we showed them them the prototype like, "hey, would this solve your problem? What do you think? What else do you want it to do? What are you wondering about?", 1,000 hesitations, things like that.

And it was interesting to say, we got, like, a really good, overwhelmingly positive approach, like, feedback. Not everybody wanted it, but majority said very good things, and also the type of things that they wanted the tool to do. I was like, "there's a clear pattern, also". Then, we had our first product roadmap, OK, in order to go to market base before it's market ready, it needs to do all these things. It took us a fair amount of time. I want to say it took us about 12 months, or, like, 11 months, from the interviews to the first private data. So, the interviews were in February and December of 2019. We made our first dollars and learned all the things, and then, May 2020 was like the actual public launch, like, "here we are, use a product".

Yeah, it took quite a bit of money to get there, but also I'm very comfortable with risk. That's that's one of my personality traits.

Todd Chambers
That was actually going to be one of my questions.

I would assume it's just your own cash that you've made from your other businesses, you're just putting yourself... So, how do you kind of, balance profitability and, kind of, being aggressive in growth? Was it like, "I'm going to chuck a 100 grand at this and then, like, this thing needs to be profitable within its own right"? Or are you like, "actually, no, I think this is a massive opportunity, put some more money, I want to be aggressive", like, how do you think about that?

Peep Laja
It's a delicate balance. So, yes, using using our own money, it's bootstrapped, the e-learning business, on top of the agency profit, the agency funded it. And it lost money for the first nine months. And now I have two companies producing money, profitable and growing, basically, they fund Wynter. And, to date, I think we've put in, we've invested about 600,000 or so of our own money.

Biggest source is, of course, development costs, it is like the biggest, biggest source of cost, we also have the thing where we're kind of a panel company with a software layer on top, so the power costs is an ongoing... The panel and recruiting people to the panel, that's all cost.

Of course, if you look at what's happening in the, like, the DC arena, if you're, you know, a famous entrepreneur, you raise 10 million on an idea, you've done something great, you know? The other day, the founder of Twitch, you know, like, he sold Twitch for a billion dollars. And then he started his atrium that failed spectacularly. But then, based on, you know, a PowerPoint deck, he got 10 million. So, that's, that's the starting point for a lot of companies, and then you start investing in growth, and so on, so forth, or, you know, like, I think, like, $4 million seed rounds are very common today. I mean, do they have this, or I guess the standard, maybe a year or two, maybe two years ago was more like, 2 million seeds was already pretty good. So, most of that money goes into engineering for SaaS companies.

So, considering those amounts, like, putting 600,000 is nothing crazy. It's actually very modest. And it mostly went to engineering, I'm not even paying myself for Wynter at all, we get a small team, haven't invested anything, really, in paid acquisition, or SEO. So, now, plotting the company's growth here is like, "okay, so, in order to grow this, how can we do this?". If we have no money to pay the acquisition, yet, being competitive in terms of SEO takes a while, because in the beginning, you don't have enough backlinks, you don't have domain ranking, you can't rank for it. So, I really haven't even tried, like, going all in with content marketing, because, like, we were really not competitive in terms of our ranking power. Now, we will get there, building backlinks and all that stuff. So, the question is like, "well, I need leads today. And I need awareness. How do I get leads and awareness?".

And so, one is, like, piggybacking off of existing assets, the Excel email list - the obvious place where to advertise and Wynter exists now. And second is my own personal social media following, my LinkedIn, my Twitter. Because I've been active on social for a number of years, I've cultivated the following. And so, by the time Wynter launched, before that, official announcement in, you know, newsletters, and so on, we had already gotten like 1,000, signups. This was all through my personal LinkedIn and Twitter. So, personal social media is not just a vanity metric, I mean, follower count days, but like, if it's actual real people, it can actually drive an impact adding to that. So, this is existing assets. It's like, "I need leads today, but I can't rank, so I can't capture emails, but I need emails...". I'm a big fan of content marketing and email marketing. And so, as, "okay, what can I do"... And I also do events. I'm doing an event, an online event, because it's the corona times, and I started this thing called Wynter Games - just actually ended the seventh one yesterday.

Todd Chambers
Content is amazing, by the way, love it.

Peep Laja
Thank you. And so, we've been doing this, so, seven months, we do it once a month. So, I guess it's been seven months, we've been doing this. Really, time flies. And on average, we've gotten, you know, like, I want to say, like, 900 attendees per event, some events 1,800, some events like 700. So, in that range, and of course, this is top of the funnel, it's not, like, the warm leads to buy. But building the awareness and awareness is half the battle. The fact that people know that you exist goes a really fucking long way!

And so, in that sense, and then, on the way of this, one year of doing this now, like, one year the product has been on the market, the more you figure out who is your actual target customer... My hypothesis for what it is when we launched was wrong. I knew target market has emerged. And, so, I'm also tweaking the Wynter Games topics accordingly, what's interesting to this audience, so I get more relevant interest based top of the funnel.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, super interesting. The feedback economy's really, really interesting. You come from an experimentation background, you understand research, you understand the importance of feedback. I think, for me, when I really got into SEO, and I just saw how powerful feedback can be, getting people to actually tell you if your thing is good or bad, is so, so valuable.

How have you kind of, I mean, you just said that, you know, you're iterating the Wynter Games, and you're learning as you go. But how do you, kind of, make sure that you bake in as much feedback as you possibly can into everything you're doing? Like, for example, I know you do all the demos, you do the onboarding calls, you're speaking to as many people as you can, but like, how do you really make sure you're getting as much feedback as you possibly can?

Peep Laja
Well, qualitative feedback is the richest source of feedback there is, where you can have a conversation and ask questions. So, also from the experience from CXL, where we use live chat from the get go, I knew how valuable live chat is. So, we launched with live chat. And my God, I gotta tell you, it's our number one sales channel. Number one, you know, of course, it's a support channel. And it's the number one source of feedback. If I can choose one user research method, the whole like, tour, live chat, man, it's so infrared.

Todd Chambers
Is that because people is basically saying, like, "hey, I'm on your site, I want to know this specific thing, and it's not there"? And that's why it's so useful? Or is it, like, just, "we just want to speak to somebody quickly"? Like, why is it? Why is it, so, yeah...?

Peep Laja
I mean, it's a low friction way to get your problem solved. Or if you're wondering about something, because like, yeah, scheduling a demo is a high pressure situation, you know, it's a commitment. So, most people, depending on the company size, you know, but if there's friction in there, like, and also they're long, and you know they're gonna sell you and, like, so not everybody wants...

But live chat also is anonymous. Just ask questions, and there's no pressure, they won't harass you. They won't follow up with you. It's just very low friction way to do it. And I am not for chatbot - chatbots still are idiots. For me, personally, they're a really frustrating experience. Whenever they have tried to put on a website, and I need to go through the support to sales and ask a question, it's a nightmare, it's just so bad! So, hence, I have made the call to - it's live. It's live. It's humans.

I of course, my team is small. So, every timezone across the world has real time chat, which you know, it's a problem. So, with CXL we saw that it's, like, not every timezone is covered... But we will get there, you know? Given enough time, you can solve a lot of problems, so I'm not worried about that. So, US timezone it's usually me, actually, on the live chat. And then I have people in Europe. So live chat is one.

And I guess an even better source is the sales calls. Because now these people are raising arm, I'm ready to entertain paying for this. I'm a believer of transparent pricing. You go to Wynter.com, the pricing is there. So, if you take a call with me, you know how much this costs. So, we're really not, again... I hate going into the demo, and they say, "oh, this is just $75,000"; "thank you very much. I just wasted my time here". You know? Like, so, if you think my stuff is expensive, I don't want to talk to you, you don't want to talk to me either. So everybody wins!

I have different pricing and so on, on the demo... And some days, I do, like, six a day. You know, since the early days of my career, the way I've been doing this is that I can do anything for a short while. And the short while can be here. For a number of years I can do anything. I have worked without pay two years in my life, because I wanted to change my career after software development. It wasn't sitting on me. "What what job can I get? I don't have a degree or a skill". So, I work two years for free to build up skills in another domain. So I can play the long game. Similar thing. I can do demos all day long.

Also, I want to be in these calls, because these are my customers. "Who are you? What do you want? How can I help you?". Things like that. And then the objections to questions, the reality... "Why does this matter to you?". And all the questions they ask. Then what happened was that in the beginning, massive growth in, literally, learning through sales then. And then they plateau, because the issues start repeating. And that's the moment where if I'm feeling, let's say, a little bit bored at sales meetings... Bored is maybe the wrong way. It's like, I'm a master of this demo, because I know what you can ask, you know, every answer, I'm smooth, I can I've explained you 1,000 times, I can make a compelling pitch, right? That's a sign. "Okay, now I'm ready to bring somebody on. I can teach it". Yeah, I know exactly how it's gonna go, I can make a process of how the pitch should go how the demo should go. So I've tweaked it a bunch. So, last week I finally redone sales, customer success, who is now also doing, and wasn't, so... I'm bringing back some time to work on more strategic issues.

Todd Chambers
Totally. Same thing, whenever I speak to a potential client, it's so interesting to get the objections. And once you've done it, like, 56 times, you just say over and over again. And, like, we're an agency, you know, obviously, you've run agencies, you do presentations, you have a big deck, and you know, the ones that are just like, you know, eyes are rolling, they're disengaged, the ones that do work... So, just having that interaction with potential clients is absolute gold.

Peep Laja
Exactly.

Todd Chambers
Maybe we should just explain, I don't think we really explained what Wynter is.

Peep Laja
Well, really, it helps you understand what in your messaging and copy on your website is working and what's not working, what's helping you get more customers and what's turning customers away. That's the summary of if.

You will learn this through feedback from the people you're actually selling to marketing to. So, as I said, we're a panel company with a software layer. So we have a database, and they're organised into job functions in the industry. So SaaS marketing directors, e-commerce, customer support people, etc. And so, if you're a B2B, which is our focus, you sell to people based on titles, everybody knows which title they're selling to, or at least for job function, we're selling to marketing, we're selling to sales, HR, and so we can put all you need selling to HR or what size companies, and, boom, here you go. And so, you will learn from the people, the target audience you have, what in your messaging makes people lean in, like, "ooh, tell me more" And what about it is like, they're like, "I don't give a shit about this, this is so boring". And so, that's specifically about how compelling your pitch is, but also on the broader spectrum.

So, really, this is about competitive strategy because everybody has a fuck ton of competition. Agencies have the most competition of all, because it's the easiest business to start, you and I, we can set up as another agency this afternoon. Just need to register a website and boom, we're an agency. That's it. You know, that's all it takes really.

And then SaaS, e-commerce, same thing. It's just crazy town, you know, 400 email marketing tools, 450 CRM tools, and so on and so forth. And so, what are you saying that tilts somebody's decision in your favour? And especially in B2B is, like, you cannot win the feature war, really, like, whatever feature you have that is interesting and attractive to the customers, everybody else will have it shortly too. And so, it's really... Most companies are not competing on innovation and product, or product based differentiation, you're really competing on brand messaging, and brand is differentiation. And the choice for the buyer, why choose you? That's messaging, and if you want to, like, compete and win in a saturated category, you need to be able to measure and have data on what is it that my audience - the very specific slice of the market that I sell to -what is it that they want? And how is what I'm saying to them already landing? And how does it compare with what else is out there?

Todd Chambers
Totally. And it's so much more useful. I mean, for example, like, we're an agency, there's no way we can do A/B testing to how the hell are we going to get, you know, some feedback on our messaging.

Peep Laja
Yeah, I mean, and also A/B testing doesn't tell you shit about your messaging.

Todd Chambers
It's good or bad. But you don't know why.

Peep Laja
Exactly right. It's a measurement technology or, like, methodology, really, you can measure it. B is better than A, and, you know, by how much, if you have the volume for it. So Wynter works - if you have the traffic for it - it works in conjunction with A/B testing, where it feeds the test hypothesis. Here's qualitative data, let's make the changes, address the friction and increase user motivation. Let's test whether these changes have an impact. And boom, now we can measure how much increased messaging is helping our bottom line.

Todd Chambers
Maybe you can explain the concept of... Everyone knows product-market fit, and maybe you can explain the concept of message-market fit.

Peep Laja
It's like a subcategory of the same thing, so product-market fit is really about, that's the product. So, I need a problem - give users something they want. So, it's about the functionality of the product, the onboarding, the user experience, the actual value of how good the product is, largely speaking. So, the message-market fit is the before the sign up - will they even consider signing up and exploring your product? So that's the message-market fit.

And so, your message needs to resonate with an intended audience where they're like, "oh, wow, yes, that's exactly what I want". Or "that speaks to my problem", or "that's what I want". So, it's really, there's like a, you know, the jobs theory, there's a job to be done, meaning, there's a progress I'm looking to make in a certain arena. Currently, I am dissatisfied with my options to make that progress. And so, if you find that hole, that's... You get message-market fit. I care about this issue, I want it and now I sign up and now people, you know... Good messaging won't save a shitty product. So, it's kind of, like, you're managing expectations as well, obviously.

Todd Chambers
One other thing that strikes me about you is you seem to work really fast. I mean, maybe that's just a mirage, something I see in my mind, like, you're on LinkedIn, you're on Twitter, you're always posting content. You've got a couple of businesses now, you're running Wynter, and you seem to be making good progress. But, in your mind, kind of, what is the advantage of speed? Is the advantage of speed in the fact that you get feedback quickly? Or is there some other, kind of, separate advantage as well?

Peep Laja
Yeah, well, all the businesses I have are small businesses, and a small business cannot afford to be slow, because other bigger companies can overrun you with money. And so... But the bigger companies are slow to take decisions. And the bigger they are, the harder and slower it is for them to have any new type of strategic initiative - especially if it needs to go to how many layers of managerial approval, think process, risk mitigation, legal compliance bullshit, you know, it's just takes a while. And then, of course there are, I guess, notable exceptions out there. But, mostly, big is slow. But they have more muscle and more money, better talent, they can afford far better people than you have. So, really, the only advantage you have is speed.

You can change fucking everything overnight. And I have - multiple times. And I'm a big fan of the Jeff Bezos matrix from the nineties where, like, "how fast should you decide?". Where it's, like, a two by two matrix. On one axis is irreversibility. How reversible is the decision, and then the other is impact. So, the only time to sign slowly, this decision is irreversible and high impact. So then, in all other cases, decide fast. So, really the way to move faster, really, is to decide faster. And so, of course, you need better data, cleaner, data faster. If you do decide purely based on opinions, it's limited.

I mean, I'm a big fan of actually deciding on insight and wisdom. This is, like, the older I get... When I was only thirty years old, I made fun of HiPPO, the highest paid person's opinion. "What do these people know?". Now that I'm getting up there with my seniority, oh my Oh, I get it now! Like, these guys who are, like, the CEOs of big companies, the motherfuckers earned it. They've made some good calls and bad calls. And they've seen it all. They've been in the industry so long that they see the patterns that the junior folk miss. They don't see how everything fits together. And that's like, insight.

Todd Chambers
So true. Yeah.

Peep Laja
And then, like, classic jobs to be done, like, Clayton Christensen style was, you know, author of that and all the disruption books he's written. And he talks about the insight, and it's actually this unquantifiable moment when, like, everything falls together in your head, and you can just see.

Todd Chambers
You saw the path with Wynter. And it's like, instead of sitting, kind of, overthinking stuff, your intuition just, kind of, guided you, like, "okay, I know this is right. I know everything fits together, just go fast. And we can do it"?

Peep Laja
Yeah. And also like things, smaller things. Like, we launched the brand as Copytesting, with a different target audience, different name, different focus... We were on consumer panels, focusing on e-commerce and freelance copywriters, and we were called Copytesting. And so, relatively quickly, I want to say, like, six months after launching, we changed the name. And that was like, the data never tells you what the right decision is. And the data is also debatable. There's always this fog of war, it's never clear. And so, really, you need to gamble. That's where wisdom and age comes in real handy.

You know, like, in consulting, they have the grey hairs. Now, you need the grey hairs, we've seen shit! I'm not there yet, but... I lost the hair, anyways, I'm not getting grey!

Todd Chambers
Next is grey!

Peep Laja
And so, basically, I see those decision... Speed is the advantage of, it's how you can outmanoeuvre the competition, especially the bigger guys. When I launched my agency, we were an all-purpose digital marketing agency. And so, one day, I said, I told my team, "we are gonna fucking change everything, and we're gonna just do CRO. We're gonna fire our developers". They were like, "what?". My business partners were like, "I can't - I don't believe in this new direction!". And, like, "I don't believe there's any potential there". If you bring in, if you close the first retainer for this course... The history is that we changed the company. And so, there's a lot of times we've changed a lot of things all at once.

Todd Chambers
Let's talk about, metaphorically speaking, kind of, building a moat. And like, obviously, a moat is a fence system, right? So, exactly, how do you think about building a moat in the context of Wynter, and, you know, starting a business?

Peep Laja
I'm a big fan of the book "7 Powers", which is all about the seven, kinds of, moats you can build. And I think some of them are only available for the really big guys, you know, like Facebook and LinkedIn. They have network effects, which is very hard to have as you're starting out, or economies of scale, that the Amazon has, or Netflix. It's very hard to have that as a startup. But then, there's also, like, brand and cornered resources, and things like that. So moats, in most simplistic terms, are like, anything that's hard. When something is hard to do. That's a moat. Because whatever is easy to do, everybody will do.

So, here's an example. So with CXL, e-learning business, right? And when we launched five years ago, it was still not that easy to create high production quality courses. But since then, the technology landscape has completely changed, and the camera landscape. And so, everybody has access to good lighting, good cameras, and cheap platforms to build your own course. And like, all this distribution products that are out there... So the tech really has been solved. And so, what has happened is that everybody and their mother has literally courses online, so. And then, what do you differentiate in terms of product based differentiation?

So, you could go for, like, what Reforge is doing. They have the Silicon Valley heavy hitters, which is a cornered resource, not everybody can get ex-VP growth of Uber to be the instructor. You know, that's a cornered resource. They're all drinking buddies with each other, and so they own that resource. So, you could really have e-learning as a product based differentiation if you have access to certain type of people. So, take MasterClass. What is the cornered research there? It's the Hollywood celebrities, all kinds of celebrities, and also the amount of money it requires to hire them for a course, you know, they say on average about 100,000, 150,000. That's hard to replicate, right? So, there's a moat right there.

Now, but, if it's, like, anybody fielding themselves, so, there, you don't have a moat. So, now with CXL, we are building a new type of an e-learning product, which we call "task-based learning", in private beta right now. And building the product is very hard for us. And whenever we have these internal debates about, like, conversations, like "oh my God, this is not working", we're trying this and that, and, like, all these problems here, and quality problems there. And it's like, I love it! Because the fact that it's hard means that other people, it's going to be hard for them as well. And now, the faster we figure it out, and finally get to, you know, all the things that we're solving, you have a big advantage.

So that's the thing. In Wynter's case, you asked what's my moat there, really, it's not software, because it's very easy to copy UI, anybody who wants to can, you know, like login, see what it's like, and then they'll show designers and developers - "build me this". That's not hard at all. Which is also why we're seeing so much sameness in size, because it just easy to do that.

So, what is a moat? the moats are brand, which is a really great moat that most everybody can build. And of course, if you have more money, it's easier to build it, because you can spread awareness that you exist, because brand and positioning and all those things live inside the mind of a user. So, the first mover advantage thing is also, "who is the first to position the mind of the user". So, in my case, what I'm doing is that I'm promoting this idea that you need to do messaging. And I sent the first product out there that really does this. There are, like, work around ways so you can hack it together with some other tools, but really, it's a pain in the ass, and we make it easy. So, now the more people find out about it, I'm positioning myself as "oh, I need messaging - that's Wynter!". You connect a tool to a job to be done. It's like, "oh, I need heatmaps for SMBs, what's a good deal? Hotjar, in my mind. Maybe then I think of, like, Mouseflow. And if it's, like, enterprise, I have another set of tools.

So, most buyers have, like, a very limited consideration set. "I'm a mid-market growing company, I need CRM, HubSpot", you know, and maybe there are some other ones out there, like, you look into three, maybe five tools. And same goes for agencies. I need the best in the world, content marketing agency - who am I going to look into? Overseas media, I need the best CRM agency, and so on, so forth. And so, to build the brand mode is positioning yourself as the best one, whatever the progresses that user is looking to make, as a first to market, that goes a long way. And there's a lot of staying power and momentum.

And the second is my panel. Because you can copy all my functionality, you can't copy the panel. And same goes for your audience. If you have a blog readership and blog audience and social media following reputation, those are the things that they can't really copy. My friend Jonathan, who runs client pools is, like, all about how many reviews he has, and reviews, you can get there, if you copy... But, like, we all know how hard it is to get a huge amount of customer reviews. It's just a pain in the ass. And so, if you say 1,000 reviews on G2 or Captera or whatever it is, that's an advantage. You know, that's a moat!

Todd Chambers
What about... My, kind of, final question, closing up - which is not really related to, you know, messaging or marketing - is more about, like, building businesses. How do you approach hiring? It's a little bit out of left field. It's really a tricky one. And I heard you recently talked about t-shaped marketers, and hiring generalists too.

When you were looking to hire for Wynter, did you kind of say, like, "okay, I think I'm going to need, like, copywriter, I'm going to need a developer, I'm going to need this... And then you hired them? Or did you kind of say, like, "I'm going to hire some generalists and we're just, like, going to make it happen"? Like, how did you approach that? Or how has your philosophy changed?

Peep Laja
It really, really depends on, you know, the constraints you have for hiring. That determines a lot; Who you can hire, who you can you afford to hire... It's easy to hire yourself out of business.

And also, my my point of view on hiring has evolved. So, when I was starting my first company, CXL and so on, I hired mostly very junior people, with the goal that... We can't afford to hire really senior people, so let's hire for talent, train for skill. Now, the problem with that approach is that - and you probably know this too - it takes a fucking long time to train for skill! If somebody is just starting out...

Todd Chambers
Even with CXL!

Peep Laja
Yeah! I mean, it takes a long ass time to train a proper CRO person. On average it took us two years before they were good. Two years is a long time. And so, yeah, if you can afford to buy somebody who is, like, already there, I recommend you go that route; you hire for skill and train for more skill, that's what I would say. So, the seniority of already knowing shit is very valuable.

And also then there's another perspective here, which is, most companies do exactly the same things, you know? So you need bookkeeping, need some candidate sourcing, HR, you need a, you know, some sort of development you need, you know, like all these things, you need sales and marketing, you need SEO and PPC, content, marketing, all these things that you need. And now, depending on who you are, what is the actually that makes you you. So, like, I recently spoke to a founder of an e-commerce company, and they're doing about 20 million a year in revenue. They're selling shoes, manufacturing and selling direct to consumer, they don't own any factories or our manufacturing. Manufacturing is outsourced. The whole supply chain management, which factories use and where... It's all outsourced third party logistics, outsourced warehousing, you know, with the third party logistics, outsourced PPC, outsourced SEO content, everything is outsourced. So, really, the only thing they do is brand management and strategy. Everything else is like, we're not a manufacturing business, right, we're managing the brand of the shoe. So I think that is the way to go.

So, the old status game, how old entrepreneurs brag; "no, I'm about 100 employees, look at me". You know, it's like, well, what's the average revenue per employee? Like, you know, whatever, like, what are we bragging about? Then I guess a lot of it comes from like, the fact that it's, it feels kind of like jerky to say how much money you make, you know, it's like, "oh, we're making 100 million". So it's, you don't want to say that. So you use a proxy, which is how many employees you have. But I think, like, the actual role model should be like Instagram. It was like, I think, about 10 people when they sold for a billion... Talk about leverage! And in order to optimise for companies speed in really fast and optimised for high productivity I would hire the most senior people. You can afford to manage the 20% core of what makes you you, you outsource everything else. So, instead of investing in talent management, you invest in vendor management, which is a skill that needs to also be developed.

And obviously, in order for all of this to work really well, you need all the standard operating procedures and processes and all these things that help to scale. You know, usually in the first year of the life of a company, you have very little of those things because you need a lot of brute force. But then after a certain point, you know, you need process and more senior people you hire, they've seen the processes, they know the processes needs to be set up, they can see shit when they come across it. Whereas Junior people do not, they don't know what good looks like...

And another advantage of working with vendors is that, let's say, it's content marketing, right. So, I might hire Linda as a full-time content marketer for my business. But then Linda has a hard time with her boyfriend, and then there's COVID, and, you know, the neighbour is sick, and the cat just died. Linda has problems, and then becomes demotivated, and doesn't like this other colleague... And so, basically, I need to deal with all these problems, take care of Linda and her emotional problems, and deal with the conflict. And then, maybe, my feedback was not good enough. And then she's angry at me, like, you know, most of company management is people management, the problems. That's what a manager should do.

And if you read books like "Radical Candor", which is all about managing people, you'll learn shit, like how, how many hours a week should a manager spend on managing people and feelings, versus to work, really, ideally, out of a 40 hour work week, 30 hours goes just on giving guidance, feedbacks and managing emotional problems in a small business. And I just don't have that time. I'm managing people, I'm not investing 30 hours in guidance, holding their hand and giving feedback. And so, if instead of Linda, I have an agency, I have an SLA, I have a service level agreement, buying eight blog posts a month that should be published and of this quality, I don't give a shit how it gets done. If their writer is sick, they're going to replace him with some other person they have. And I'm getting a product. And this is a real company, and I can rely on it. Whereas my employee can have a bad day. And then it's, like, the quality is not there. And it's my problem. I need to, like, ask for a lot of my own management. So, another way to move faster, like, you've seen your people managing vendors and their service level agreement. The ship needs to be shipped, and, you know, you have less problems and more speed. Obviously there's a vast quality difference between agencies - it's like people, hiring people. There are shitty agencies, and there are good agencies, you know, so that you can still go wrong. But then you need to have the processes in place to easily switch them out. So with agencies... Ideally it's a long-term partner for years and years, but if need be, it's fungible, we can just switch them out.

Todd Chambers
Interesting advice. Definitely, given COVID and everybody's going remote, and you get the geoarbitrage, right? If you've hire across...You know what, I'm sure it's much more expensive to hire someone in Houston than it is in Estonia, right? So, yeah, yeah, that makes total sense.

One big question I wanted to ask you was; how many push-ups can you do now?

Peep Laja
I think last time I tried my max was 22!

Todd Chambers
22... Yeah, I went to the gym for the first time in a long time a couple of weeks ago! I tried to do some tricep dips, I think I managed almost one and failed epically. I was like, I'm definitely not going to try pull up.

Peep Laja
It's all volume training. Keep at it every other day, you do as many sets as you can, as you have time for... I would love to get up to 30 pull-ups. But now in order to get from where I am now to 30, the amount of additional volume training I need to put in is just insane. So, basically, what I need to do is, I need to do 10 sets of 80% of my max every other day. And that takes a long fucking time! I'm questioning whether that's the level of effort I want to put in, how much do I care about 30%, 30 pull-ups? With 20 pull-ups, you can get to with best effort. I think, like, you do four sets every other day, you'll get to 20 no problem.

Todd Chambers
What do you do have any spare time? Do you have any interests outside of, sort of, work?

Peep Laja
Well, I'm married with kids. So, I have two kids. I have a wife. So, all of my free time really goes to my family.

Todd Chambers
And how do you balance that?

Peep Laja
Yeah, so I just have to be effective and efficient with my time at work, be good at prioritization, not fuck around, not doomscrolling on Twitter, you know? And I work eight hour work weeks, sorry, work days. So, 40 hour work weeks. So, and then, I pick up my kids from school and play with them and cook dinner. I'm a family guy!

Todd Chambers
Nice! So, you've, sounds like you've definitely mastered prioritizations... It's a massive one, isn't it? And you see it, definitely, with more junior people when they come into a role and they have all these different things thrown at them, and they really, really struggle to understand, "okay, where the hell should I be prioritising my time". And maybe that comes down to the t-shaped thing, where somebody, kind of, has a little bit of experience across everything. So, they can come, they have, like, a better line of sight. And they're able to prioritise.

Peep Laja
it's also about management. So if you if you read about, you know, the paper mafia, all these heavy-hitters who now run Silicon Valley, they used to be in paper together. And if you read about what the management process was like, it was all about every single person has one priority, and no meetings can be had with anybody unless it's about their one priority. So, it really helps to prioritise if you know what's your one priority. And the priorities, they can shift from week to week and week. And I think this, priority management, "I don't know how to spend my days...". Like, if you're unclear about priority, and of course, if you have poor priorities, as in plural, it's also a problem.

Another thing to do is to scale through delegation. So... I cannot scale myself. I mean, I could temporarily, I can put in more brute force hours. And sometimes I do, if there's a deadline, there's something, you know, I brute force it, occasional, overnight, it still happens in rare occasions. And so, really, if I have something that needs to get done, you ask, like, "who can do this for me", as opposed to "how can I get it, how can I do this?". It's like, "who can do this". And so outsourcing, again, as much delegating and outsourcing. That's the way you can scale yourself. I can still maybe have 30 projects that I want to ship and, of course, my financial constraint isn't is an issue, and that's how you prioritise. Time should not be constrained unless you have no money at all.

Todd Chambers
I promises is my final question. This is the one thing I always wondered about you, and this is about delegation.

How do you, kind of, like, for example, you. I get your email from Wynter, I get it from CXL. You know, I see you on LinkedIn, like... How do you kind of outsource yourself in that way? So like, do you have so like, this day, I'm gonna write one post and you just literally just like bang out a few bullet points and you give it to someone and they distribute it? Like, how do you scale like your thoughts like that?

Peep Laja
Well, I write all my own stuff and post all my own stuff. So usually, most days when I come to the office, the first thing I do is I post something on social. The timing is, I try to do the first thing but sometimes I have meetings, and so... But as early as possible. And I'm always thinking about shit, and taking notes. As soon as an idea comes to me, I DM myself in Slack. And so, that's my LinkedIn and Twitter stuff. I do write the Wynter newsletter, this is all actually me typing it in, and with CXL the "on my mind" section is my word. So, it's not... But sometimes I have, you know, people who help compile the different sections and gather the info, and put it together. There's room for me to improve there, in terms of process, but, like, when it comes to like social media and authenticity, and so on, like I don't believe in ghostwriters. Also, I make a lot of fun of Neil Patel, you know, so, like, then, I cannot be like him and I need to say my own shit.

Todd Chambers
Alright, let's not open that can of worms!

Thanks, Peep, I appreciate you doing this. Let's do the cliche thing at the end of a podcast; where can people find you?

Peep Laja
Twitter and LinkedIn, I'm on it, daily! And the newsletter as well.

Todd Chambers
I suggest people sign up to that, it's really, really good.

Cool! Thanks, Peep. Appreciate your time.

Peep Laja
Thank you very much.

Todd Chambers
Thanks for listening to the podcast, guys. for links to any other resources, head over to https://uprawmedia.com/blog. And, super important, please let us know how we're doing! Check the links in the description where you can leave some feedback or you can just email me todd@uprawmedia.com. 'Till next time, adios!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai