[Podcast] How we Added 100k in MRR in Just 1 Month (With Stacy Dally)

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Ryan

People talk about the mystique of hockey stick growth. Travels around like some urban legend, only growing as time goes on. But is it actually real? So anybody seen it? Well it is. And we just saw it. Now, what if I told you that Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot might have inspired it all?

Today we come to this conversation a little differently than we do most. We're going to talk about ourselves and some recent successes. We like to be selfish, self-assured. Once song. Right. But some recent successes that I think are inspiring for many that find themselves in the doldrums of technology and finding growth. We ourselves unlocked 100 K in MMR just a past month ago, and we want to break down how the heck we got here, what it took to get here.

And of course, through Stacy's lens in revenue operations. Michael, from the vantage point of SEO and from a marketer who is adjacent to the conversation, a lot of exciting stuff to share with you today. But first, we want to talk a little bit about the musical inspiration that kind of bubbles up into much of what today's talking points are about.

So without further introduction, let me introduce you to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, an album that speaks for itself. Many might put this on their top ten list. Top five favorite record of all time. Michael, can you draw a parallel between today's conversation of gross and then preeminent record like this?

Michael

Yeah. So this is the only Wilco record that I own.

Ryan

Oh, okay.

Michael

Because I actually can't stand Wilco. But this record is is excellent. And it was a huge departure from where they were, and I think where they were, it was very clicky. It was very like, you either into Wilco or you were not. Yeah. And this record, it seemed to again reach out to, to a different audience, and it really expanded who they were as a band.

You listen to the the first track. What is it, drummer?

Ryan

Heavy metal drummer.

Michael

No, it's the first track on the album. Oh, it.

Ryan

Is. Let's get in there. Let's take a peek ourselves. I'm trying to break,

Michael

I'm trying to break your heart. Right. So it starts off and you're like, okay, I'm in a Wilco record. And then it quickly starts to break down. Yeah. You almost hear this kind of Syd Barrett kind of Pink Floyd influence coming in? From the from the 70s. Like the way that they, they are now leaning more into the studio production.

Is something that they hadn't really done before this, and they took a bold risk like I believe their original label didn't even want to put out the not and but they believed in it. They believed in the direction. They knew where they wanted to go. They trusted their fan base to follow them. And I think that's really what we're talking about today, is they knew what was going to be beneficial for them.

They knew how to better serve their audience, but it was a risk, and it was a bit of a departure of where they had been, but it opened up a ton of opportunity for them.

Ryan

You know, I love that you said at the center of Risk. Tell us about your parallels here.

Stacy

Yeah. So I actually listened to I think it was Sweet, Sweet Tooth Sweet something was their previous album because I wanted to hear the the differences. Right. And the sweet something, was a lot, not harder, but a little bit more upbeat, a little bit more fuller sounding. And this and this seemed more like almost happy go lucky, like every, every day.

So that approachability and that, like, more appealing to more people. I can definitely see how that was successful. But in a weird way that doesn't. When you say like risk, I'm like, sounds like any you would have, you would hear it at the store or like anywhere, like it's like, how is that risky? So but if you heard what they were playing before, you're like, oh, gotcha.

Yeah, I can see it now. Yeah.

Ryan

Absolutely. It's it's it's definitely introspective. It has some uncertainty. And our topic today was much about how we overcame uncertainty. Some self-reflection allowed us to accomplish something relatively seismic for a SAS product that's now over ten years old. Hockey stick moments don't often come about that often. So, I like to, you know, get to that. But first I want to talk about some songs on the record because, yeah, it's such a damn good record, Michael.

I know it's the only one you own, but where some kind of the hallmark moments on this record for you.

Michael

Yeah. So it goes from I'm trying to break your heart, which, which is kind of this a bit more experimental side of Wilco.

Wilco

Let's forget about the totality. Let me let SunTrust.

Ryan

Just, cross out strangers. This is not a joke.

Michael

And then we get 2 or 3 tracks of what I feel like a little bit more at home to.

Ryan

Wilco on the nose.

Michael

And then you kind of hit Jesus, etc..

Ryan

Jesus, don't cry.

You can rely.

Stacy

On me on it.

Michael

You come to me and. And all of a sudden you start to feel something, a little bit bigger than I think they had been able to, to reach in the past. Yet it's still pretty stripped down. It's very mellow. But it has this beauty to it that I hadn't seen previously or really recognized in their work.

And it's kind of this moment in the record where it's a bit of a departure from a little bit more of the lightheartedness and into something that feels very emotional.

Ryan

Yeah. No question. Stacy, you spent some time with the record, a few feels.

Stacy

I did, yeah, the heavy metal drummer, I think it was you reference that earlier. I'm like, yeah, out of all of them. That was one that I picked out too. I.

Wilco

I miss the innocence of my. You love playing kiss colors beautiful and Stone, but.

Stacy

It's got a little bit more, a little faster and a little, I don't know. It's just more like making.

Ryan

Sense inside of it, as opposed to all this folksy instrumentation in electronic sense, which I think was probably quite a deviation from former Wilco stuff.

Stacy

Yeah, exactly. And so I just like connected with it a lot more, but it was a little bit deaf. So I did some kind of like, well, this was very different than all the other stuff. So I guess I like this one more than, yeah.

Ryan

I found myself so Jeff Tweedy. His vocal tonality and timbre is something that's truly unique to Wilco, and I think is really the underpinning of most of their success. I thought a lot of the, the music and the soundboards really kind of created such a great stage for his voice and for me. I think that's why this record has become so classic and so longingly adored, because his performance, track after track, boy oh boy.

I mean, what a unique, performance. And I thought it was just so compelling. Jesus, etc. I mean, obviously it's the most popular song as far as commercial success, but another great showcase of Jeff's voice. I thought Heavy Metal Drummer also captured a lot of that as well. And we'll give the listeners a little taste of what these songs are, but some really cool stuff, really cohesive.

I thought, oh my goodness. Records that have stood the test of time tend to have this thread that just travels throughout with, you know, minor deviations. I thought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was an exemplary piece of music of, of, recording that that showcase. That's absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, that's a little bit about the record, but again, there's this exciting story about how Lee page has found itself to some to success and want to celebrate, but also point in the direction of how a new customer profile might inform strategies of today and tomorrow.

So, Michael, take us a little through of what it took to get to this conversation of a lot of them are in a singular amount.

Michael

So so when when lead pages was founded, right. The way that I knew it, I was in San Diego. It's comes this startup out of Minneapolis. And really it felt like a tool for marketers and a tool for marketing teams to avoid using their engineering resources. Right. This is directly tied into ads. It was directly tied into the marketing stack.

Somewhere along the way, we really started focusing on the solopreneur customer. How do we get them online? How do we, solve the problems that they have, which is much different than the problems of a marketing team, because they really wanted us to be everything. They wanted us to be their CRM, their ESP, their right and their their domain.

And we were solving those problems. But we were certainly always kind of at a tension point where half of our customers are companies and the other half are entrepreneurs. And it felt like we had reached this kind of tipping point where we need to decide which way are we going to go. And in looking at a lot of the the internal customer data, it was really clear that marketing teams needed us.

They stuck with us longer. They they used they had higher volume of usage for the product and that if we didn't choose them, the product was going to continue to become, it move into many different directions that a small team like ours wasn't really able to service. And so we were kind of letting everyone down in trying to make everyone happy.

And that's really where I think the, the beginning of this project became was we have a choice to make who is our customer and how are we going to to serve them moving forward. Yeah. And that's when Stacy came in and we started looking at the data, the customer data. And there was actually some pretty surprising kind of elements underneath the surface of it.

If you want to speak to them.

Ryan

Like give us the mechanics because people are probably on the fringe or on the edge of their chair going, oh, tell us how you did it, though, would you please?

Stacy

I just have this wand. I don't know if you've seen wicked, but it's very similar to Glenda's. No. So I think one of the first things that was we started talking about this, misalignment that we were experiencing and trying to be everything to everyone, basically, when we were kind of talking about that with a team, and trying to think of different solutions or something like that, you could just kind of see apprehension on, on people's faces naturally.

Right? We're talking about a big potential shift. We're not going to do. We're going to change. Just change in general can invoke that reaction. And so, what I kind of noticed is, is that in order for us to really move forward and really put our everything behind it, we had to get the team on board first. And so, hey, come on board.

It's going to be great, I swear. Just trust me, all those that, like, none of that's really going to work, right? It only works to so much. And, we needed everyone to really 100% believe in us. And so coming up with kind of a risk test, and just going out and saying, you know, here's what we're going to do.

Let's just do it with a small chunk of, of people and let's see what happens. And then let's let the data, the numbers speak for themselves. And so we did that. And we saw the results were phenomenal. We were way better than what we thought. We took our riskiest customers. We, made some price adjustments, some other product adjustments with them and blew it out of the water.

And then once we kind of presented those to the teams, it was almost like you could see the shoulders just like, relax, like we're breathing. And now you could actually start talking about the mechanics of how we're going to do it to the rest of the customer base, thinking like, wow, this is actually a very exciting opportunity. Apprehensions gone, and now let's get down to business.

Ryan

Yeah. So you mean you got into kind of some advanced customer segmentation that allowed us to tailor fit some messages to those that were going to have a change in their and their their relationship with lead pages. So could you take me through a little bit of what segmentation allowed? Because I think we got to treat cohorts of customers independent of their use case, which I thought was really important to, you know, reducing churn propensity, which allowed us to achieve some great, you know, revenue results.

Stacy

Yes. So we had a majority. So we had about half of our customers fell into this kind of misalignment that we whereas we're labeling it. And so of the of the half, a majority of them were on discounted plans. And so just treating them as one to your point was like whoof.

Ryan

Yeah.

Stacy

To bold variable, you know, the discounts were varied, quite varied. And so looking even further at them and looking into, you know, usage and looking at the number of pages and all this of these other smaller metrics allowed us to come up with a, a risk test or a risk kind of score for each of them. And then based on their score, treat them accordingly.

So there's that advanced segmentation again, based on what they're showing, what they're they're telling us what they want in what they're doing. And then so can we price and can we adjust accordingly. So then that way we're not treating everyone the same expecting just one big result. A lot of work. I will say a lot of details, a lot of things that, you know, you got to go through with the team and comb through all those details, but it definitely is has worked as you can kind of see from the result today.

Ryan

Yeah. And Michael, I think the one thing it's important to to, to spotlight also is the alignment with the product usage. We had some power users that were excelling on our platform. Yeah, extracting more value than maybe they're being charged for. So could you take us a little bit through what we were just doing to right size, that relationship with our customers?

Michael

Yeah. Well, we want it to be able to serve them better. That's really the goal, right. And because we had these these really steep discounts, and over the years, even the discounts didn't align with a customer type. Yeah. And we had really been exclusively speaking to kind of this entrepreneur or solopreneur customer when acquiring companies and marketing teams or marketing agencies along the way who also found value.

And everyone was kind of mixed into this, this pot. So part of it was kind of pulling, pulling apart who needed what from us and how can we better align what they needed to their subscription. Yeah, right. Yeah. We we can only give so much support, to customers that are paying even below our market rate. Yeah. So if customers need a lot from us, we want it to be able to serve them and then also have the resources to build product for what they need next.

Correct? Right. We've been talking a lot about change. We've been talking a lot about about AI. We've been talking about what's going to happen in the future. We need to be ready to serve them and give them what they need from our product, or else they will start looking elsewhere. But we can we can service them, but we need it to kind of rightsize some of that relationship in order for us to have the resources to better, give them what they need.

Ryan

I think that's so important because you start throwing on these large numbers hurricane EMR oh, wait, it sounds like a greedy grab or whatever. What is much to do with the reinvestment into our customers, into the products that serve them into their future? So without tipping your hand and showing the roadmap of the future, can you tell us how where maybe taking these resources and better applying to what the customer gets at the end of the day?

Michael

Yeah, I mean, we we are hiring now for the first time in a while. Yeah, it's.

Ryan

Exciting.

Michael

We are we are looking, to expand our product and engineering teams. And really one of the main focus is, is how do we expand past being a landing page builder exclusively. Hello. Always be. It's our core. It's what we do. But really what people hire us for to collect leads. And that modality is changing into the future.

So we're looking at different ways that what is going to what our customer is going to need in six months, what are they going to need in a year, and how is our space changing and how do we we make sure that our customer has the tools that they need when we get to 2026, when we get to 2027, that's going to look a lot different than it does today.

And even today looks a lot different than it did ten years ago.

Ryan

Sure does.

Michael

And so we need to to be able to give more insights. We need to give different modalities. We need to be able to use data. Our customer we need to be able to we need to be able to better translate our customers data, give them insights, from what is actually happening on their, their pages in their campaigns.

So that's a lot of what we're working on is, is how do we better service a client that doesn't just need a landing page, they need a lead generation solution.

Ryan

I think that has to be exciting for anybody that is a current customer of lead pages to here's that we are firmly investing into their future as much as our own. But I mean, I think that that's something that gets lost in a lot of these pricing updates or migrations or whatever it might be, is that it doesn't show up as such, but we really are committed to that.

And like you said, we're hiring. We're getting the people that will secure their future within our technology. So I think everybody should be thrilled about that and say, I wanted to hear from you just a little bit. You have product around you all the time. We're talking about it actively. What do you think from this perspective I guess, yeah.

Stacy

So I Michael I think teed me up for my favorite analogy of the toolbox. I love this one, and I don't know if anyone else loves it as much as me. So talking about basically we're trying to give our customers tools, to collect leads. Right. Before we were trying to focus on one tool, like building a really awesome hammer.

It's got all the bells and whistles. It's great. It's, you know, it's got everything you need. It's still a hammer, though. At the end of the day. Now, taking this new philosophy of we're trying to give them here's your toolbox, here's a hammer, screwdriver, I mean whatever any tools that you want to collect leads through in here. And then pick your size of toolbox.

That's a huge philosophy switch, I think, for us. And so, as we're talking about kind of this new customer, those customers do need a toolbox, right? They're not just hammering nails where maybe the solopreneur was more on that side of, you know, I need of just a couple to I'm good. Like, I don't need much, but we're building for multiple tools now and so making sure that we align and we know, like, hey, here's, here's what have you tried this?

What about this? Like, oh, you're building a house. You should get this one. Oh, you want to build a birdhouse here? Over over here. So just being able to serve all of them in that way, and letting them choose what tool they need and not telling them it's this. You need the hammer for sure. Don't worry. We know it's a hammer.

Ryan

Yeah. What's allowed us to firmly plant our flag next to the marketing community, right, is showing that we know what we need, and we're invested in building that in the future and hopefully providing unique utility that you can't find elsewhere. So much so that the relationship we have is only strengthened by this, you know, this investment that we're talking about.

Michael

Yeah. And if we tie it back in, I mean, this is exactly what Wilco did.

Ryan

Yeah.

Michael

When taking a bit of a departure great call it was they had to bring their customer base along with them. They didn't bring everyone. They left some behind, inevitably. Right. Some people only wanted the true pure Americana. And it's similar to what what we've done here. And I think a lot of businesses, when you start out or you reach this, this period of unknown, you start to serve everyone and you get to a point where it works, right?

Because you can get a little bit over here and a little bit over here. But if you never find that thread that actually connects everyone together, you end up being really stretched thin. And I think it's a really tough position for anyone running a business to be in is to have to constantly juggle, the different needs of the customer and the companies that have scaled.

They found that thread and they've leaned into it, and they've been able to build a product that satisfies, for that specific need. Yeah. And I felt like we were in that point in time where we were spread really, really thin, trying to kind of service everyone, duct tape everything together. But it was it was really stretching us past our capacity.

And so in choosing what are we going to be in the future and what customers do, we serve the best that gives us focus. It allows us to give them the best product back. And if some people aren't along for the ride because they needed a different tool that we no longer provide, we're okay with that. That's, you know, we are who we are, and I think we need to own that for who we can make successful.

Ryan

I love that.

Stacy

Yeah, owning who we are and saying, yep, not anymore. We're it's okay. I think that is a huge just being able to say that. And even when we said it to our team, like when people yeah, what if we get people to, you know, they're going to cancel all this stuff? Well, actually, we aren't seeing many people cancel.

Our churn rate is almost identical to what it was a couple months ago. Even though we've just half our customers. We've just changed. Yeah. And so we're the the product does align in that sense. But then also we were okay. Those two are like yep some people are going to leave. And and that's okay. Like we don't need to be liked by everyone.

I almost feel like it's a popularity contest a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Like we're back in middle school.

Michael

We don't want anyone to say no to us. But the fact is, we are only so big and we can only do so much, even with AI. So it felt like a choice that that needed to happen. It was hard to bring the team around. I don't think we can emphasize that enough was, there was a lot of trepidation.

I understand why, and it took us months to to to prove to ourselves, and to the team that we were going to be okay, like, we can do this. And what we were seeing in kind of our customer analytics was true, because even we had all this evidence was, here's the customer base, this is what they look like.

But people still believe it because it hadn't been who we were actually talking to on the outside.

Stacy

Well, and I think they also didn't believe because we tried doing this a few years prior. I where the word is on the great, you know, word on the street is and so and that didn't go so well. And so there's that PTSD from those of you around then like, oh my gosh, we been there, done that.

Like, nope, didn't work. Are you sure you want to do this? And I think kind of walking through the customer segmentation and showing how we aren't just going to treat everyone as the same person and that we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this and that and all that kind of stuff did help with that confidence, because without that confidence, it just manifests itself in ways, if it comes out in the writing or if it comes out in, how we deliver it to, to customers, that apprehension can be felt whether we can put our finger on where it is or not.

Ryan

Yeah. We talked earlier today about kind of empathy and care, and we approached this very much. So with that. I mean, we care a lot about our customers. Any business does. We fight like hell to get these customers. And once we've kind of created this relationship, we do want to hold on to it while honoring. We are who we are.

We want to serve those who need us to the best of our abilities. So, a lot of themes are kind of finding their way to this conversation, which I like very much as a marketer. As we button up this conversation, I mean, big things like this come with some lessons learned, sometimes harsh, sometimes like what a pleasant surprise that was.

So I want to start with you. A key lesson you learned and maybe a takeaway for the listener slash viewer.

Stacy

Key lesson, for me, it's that, I'm going back to see selling the team. Yeah. That I think is the biggest and hardest lesson that I didn't anticipate. I didn't know how big of a hurdle that was going to be. I didn't know how much of a consequence it was going to be. And so once that was done, once I felt like we got the team on board, then everything just like fell into place.

Lots of work, of course, but like that was the biggest hurdle. Not the oh my gosh, our customer. Gosh, all that. It was getting the team. So I think that is to me is one thing. If we were to do it again, I'd focus more on and place more importance.

Ryan

You see me smiling ear to ear. Remember a few years ago when we didn't work at Lee page, we worked at a different business. I talked about internal selling.

Stacy

I knew you were going to say that. I you know, I have it written down right here. Internal selling.

Ryan

A couple years ago. Stacy, I would talk to her, but, like, girl, we have to find a way to sell to those internally to get to the external conversation. She said, I mean, rolled her eyes a thousand ways to suddenly know here we are.

Stacy

Now was because you said I didn't do it. Come on, you're rewriting history.

Ryan

The fact is, we have stories from the past to find it today. But yes, it's fun. You're right. The commitment to the team and to the message that gets them to confident what we're doing. It's so critically important no matter how you coin it. So love that. Take away Michael from your desk.

Michael

Yeah I think well, one of the things that we talked about today was, was curiosity. And I think every company has these kind of stories that we repeat and we tell ourselves kind of mythologies internally. I think sometimes you have to take a step back and question, do we really know, are we sure? Is this the.

Ryan

Truth?

Michael

And when we do that, sometimes we can. Things change over time. So the stories that were relevant four years ago and maybe create growth, they may not be as relevant today. Maybe there's a new story emerging. Maybe it's an old story coming back. But if we we never stop to question, are we sure we know that? What what makes us so sure?

Can we get confidence in that assumption? Then we miss opportunity like this, where we may not have discovered this customer type that was in lead pages, but one that we were not externally talking to or trying to reach out to, or even trying to build for. And once we did that, we were able to open up a huge opportunity for us.

Ryan

So it's fantastic. And I think this will resonate with a lot of people that have faced similar challenges, and then the few that have found success and will appreciate how we got here. But maybe for those that have some trepidations, this conversation maybe calms those nerves and might let them have the tough internal discussion that gets into this, this output that has been a successful endeavor for us.

Yeah. Just so.

Michael

Yeah.

Ryan

I want to thank you both for sharing, a bit of an intimate story. You know, I don't want to bring it out to the four walls, but we're trying to be relatable and authentic. So much so that the listener sees we're not here just to sell you stuff. We're here to inform, educate and have this kind of ride along experience.

Like, no better example than today's conversation. Yeah, absolutely.

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