Brian Bell (00:00.558) Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today we are thrilled to have Jonathan Maxim on the mic. He is the founder of Viral App Launch, where he spent nearly a decade helping founders go from zero to meaningful scale through user acquisition, monetization, and investor readiness. Thanks for coming on, Jonathan.
Jonathan (00:16.203) My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Brian.
Brian Bell (00:18.606) Well, I'd love to start with your background. What's your origin story?
Jonathan (00:23.855) Well, I think the most the the part that really sticks with me from my background is I I tried, you know, tech was booming when I was coming out of college and I was like, I gotta get out of corporate, I gotta get into tech. So I made this app, an app that gives you rewards for working out. So you run two miles, you get a free tank top, you you know, do thirty miles in thirty days, you're entered to win a thousand dollars in prizes. And I consumed all the podcasts, read all the books around it from Silicon Valley, only to find out that that was a little bit of a farce. And ran that company for four years. I got it to about fifty thousand users. I even had Kevin Hart, you know, give me an LOI to invest two million bucks. So you know, thought I was doing all right. Well, that deal fell apart in legal and and then at that point I have forty-six thousand users who were not paying customers on my app and the company couldn't support itself and then it essentially imploded. And if I there if I had just done one thing different in that journey, if I had just put monetization into my app from the beginning, this company would have been paying for itself, right? Like let's just say that 10% of my users turned out to be paying customers, they're paying 10 bucks a month. That's 4,600 paying customers times 10 bucks is 46,000 bucks a month. Obviously I could have sustained the business if I was doing that. So there was a few key mistakes that I made in my journey that I just pray the next founder doesn't make because when you go and follow exactly what Silicon Valley is saying, they will mislead you. In the c in my case, they were saying, hey, go focus on getting free users. Make this thing viral. Make this thing blow up. Make it the next Facebook. But practically what the business needed was revenue. And so I was I I call it the lottery mindset. I had adopted the mindset that I'm gonna my app's gonna go viral. I'm gonna meet a big shot investor, which I actually did. Both of those happened. But the funny part is that obviously didn't pan out, right? So I'm I'm here to to correct that story for the next founder who, you know, goes and builds business hoping that it just kind of falls into place. It doesn't. It's intentional actions.
Brian Bell (02:30.529) Did you try to convert to paid as a Hail Mary at the end?
Jonathan (02:35.148) I should have. It was dude, it was too little too late. I was just so burned out at that point. I had been working on the company for four years. I had spent all hundred and like thirty thousand that I had saved up from working corporate, burned through all of it, put myself like 30K in debt. And and I was cooked. I just didn't have any more juice in me. And and that that's an important lesson too, right? Like I I ran ran myself into the ground. And and a lot of founders, I think, make that mistake, especially for following the narrative that I was.
Brian Bell (03:02.465) Yeah. So you you went from building your own apps to helping hundreds others launch theirs. what was that first moment where you realized that distribution is the whole game?
Jonathan (03:14.84) Well totally by a strike of luck, TikTok emailed us in twenty nineteen and wanted to expand to the US. So I actually had a chance to work on TikTok's launch and we started in US and then did Brazil and UK and ultimately ended up doing Italy and Thailand, all these other places. Obviously, distribution is the whole play, right? In that campaign we recruited a hundred of influencers and had them posting about TikTok in order to get a bounty or a reward. And then my team got paid based on how many verified users we sent. So it's a performance engagement. They would pay us nothing if we sent them no users. But that really showed me not only the power of distribution of like having affiliate partners and you know having channels that you have real data on and you know how profitable they are, but also, you know, that's what made TikTok what it is. They they took over the marketplace, right? When when we worked with them, those hundred influencers that we recruited for them. We found out later they had already worked with all 100 of them, right? So our our performance was super weak actually at the time. And so we had to like again restructure the strategy. But ultimately, you know, as they say, the guy with the most marketing dollars wins, right? So then if you if you deduce that backwards, it's like, okay, well, how do I create an unlim unlimited source of of money for ads? Well, one option is you can make the app profitable. And it becomes an engine, you can keep reinvesting everything. So I'm really passionate about making founders get profitable, monetize ASAP because once that engine's running, you know, same thing with our business, right? We put one dollar in, we get five bucks out consistently. So it's like when you have a an engine like that, you can just hit the gas. And and that's something I think a lot of people never get to that stage. They never have a a true growth engine where they can just turn it up like a dial. But ultimately that's the cheat code they're all looking for.
Brian Bell (05:06.701) So early on, what did you fund fundamentally misunderstand about growth that most founders still get wrong today?
Jonathan (05:13.87) Well, I was a little bit scared to spend money. I mean, even s years into the business, it's it's still scary to invest into growth marketing. and understandably, right, like ninety-nine percent of agencies, you know, ninety-nine percent of people have had a bad experience with an agency. Most advertising dollars are wasted. And that's scary. I can completely acknowledge that. But the thing that it reveals when you just sack up and invest. Is where the leaks are in the system. So for example, you know, this I see this all the time with first-time founders. We launch their app, they get 100 downloads, and out of those 100 downloads, 20 people create an account. And most of them are not measuring their registration rate. So they don't even know that they're losing 80% of their users on the splash screen. And so, you know, if we can get that registration rate up to 40, 50, 60%, I mean you're talking about tripling the profitability of their endeavor. So People just don't look at those metrics. In fact, I don't think I've met with a single founder, you know, coming onto our accelerator who had had that data laid out in the first place. So there's clearly a knowledge gap here. The way I do it is I just make a weekly tracker, a spreadsheet every week, like impressions, clicks, downloads, free trial starts, registrations, purchases. And I look at it every week and I identify the bottleneck, and then that's what I work on next. And so Th there's these simple frameworks and methodologies that people just aren't using because nobody teaches it, right? Like Silicon Valley doesn't want to share all their secrets. We're really the only one divulging it all. But I'm proud to do that because I'm I'm helping the next founder like me who who didn't have that, you know, tool in his shed.
Brian Bell (06:58.967) So you've seen hundreds of these launches at this point. What's the earliest signal that you can tell that, you know, something's gonna take off or or maybe fail?
Jonathan (07:08.204) Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people come and say, like, hey, do you think this can work? Do you think this can be profitable? The the answer that they don't want to hear is yes, every company can be profitable, which also implies that whatever they're doing to now hasn't been working. But the big the biggest indicator that I look for is when we do an initial split testing launch, we'll launch 10 ads that all look the same, feel the same. The only thing that's different is like messages. So we'll put 10 different hooks on all of them and look at which ones ha has the highest click through rate, conversion rate, things like that. we launched one recently called Claim Scope, which is basically automates the process for filing like a you know, a hail damage claim about your house or whatever. They were paying 250 bucks or 125 bucks to acquire a customer. Those customers are giving up 250 bucks a month. So off the bat, they were making like two to four X their money back. That's a great indicator, of course. A lot of people never get to the point where they actually launch a marketing campaign and see that data, but I always look at the split testing data. That's how I will determine. the viability of the product. But what I'll tell you is a little scary. Like, yes, every product can be successful, but when you enter a space like fitness, marketplace apps, all these products are super crowded spaces. So you gotta have a really, really sharp competitive edge to compete in that space. So if I was going back into being a founder, and I thought about this a lot, like what do I build next now that I have this system for launching these apps and making them profitable? And the thing that I would build is something that automates a process that I already do every day. So whether that's refilling my refrigerator with the right groceries or whether that's planning my dates with my wife or something like just a real pain point that I have. And then I would look at that and I would, I would act actively step away from it and say, how how big of a pain point is this? How much of an inconvenience is it? Right. Could I just set aside 30 minutes on my calendar each week to plan a date with my wife? Probably easier than downloading an app and doing all that. But like maybe not. Right. So I I always just try to look at it from like a really practical standpoint because that's what it is in the beginning. Right. Early users are not coming for the dream. They're coming for the functionality. Like they want this product to work and solve the problem. So I look at it really cut and dry in the early stages. Is the pain point sharp enough that somebody's gonna take action on it? And is the solution good enough that they're gonna actually pay for it? Right. Like that's kind of what it all boils down to.
Brian Bell (09:28.779) Yeah, and I've been I've been on the other side of that where I started in demand gen when I started in tech and ran lots of different demand gen teams. So, you know, we're birds of a feather there. And then I moved on and built a lot of like the at tech market sales tech. So pretty familiar with all the tools methods. one thing I realized is that, you know, sometimes you're marketing a turd. You know, how do you know when you're marketing a turd? and you need to need to actually polish that turd up versus you need to polish your marketing up.
Jonathan (09:55.425) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in our program, some of our programs guarantee ten thousand users. So it's like, man, that's a risk. If we gotta polish a turd here, you know. but I'm super straight up with the founders. I'll be like, look, you gotta fix this, that, and the other before we'll take this on. but the the obvious indicator every time I was just on the phone with a with a founder and they have an app for college planning and it, you know, basically helps them map out their whole college career and all this kind of stuff. They literally have twelve features, okay. So I ask them like, what's the pain point that you wanna what's the main pain point you want to solve for here? And it's a bunch of small pain points, right? So that that's always the biggest indicator that the company is, it's not because the product sucks, but the company is likely to fail if they've got 10 features because the founder is in the mindset that more equals better. And with apps, a lot of times less actually equals more because it depends on the value of addressing that pain point, not how many pain points you can address. So when you're talking about putting somebody onto a product that has ten features, twelve features, how are you gonna t teach them to use all those features for starters? But second, like They're not coming to have 10 problems solved. They're coming to have one problem solved. I'm trying to quit smoking. I'm trying to quit porn. I'm trying to learn to skate. I'm trying to learn whatever. You see what I'm saying? So it's like whenever they've got multiple product features and benefits, usually that's that's a that's an insecurity move that us founders do to hedge the initial risk, right? To to hedge the product that isn't strong enough on its own two feet. Right. Like Airbnb works because it's like, hey, I need to book a place. You got a place to rent. Right. But Airbnb is not renting cars. They're not renting private jets. Right. Like you come to get houses on Airbnb. And that's that's what I'll see a lot of first-time founders do who end up shooting themselves in the foot. You know, thankfully AI can make the apps for super cheap now. But I'm talking, you're talking about like some of my clients have spent like 500 million on just building product, only to find out it doesn't work. Same same type same type of situations. Always the product has too many features. And then the hard part is.
Jonathan (12:02.56) Okay, I have to be the bearer of bad news. You gotta slice 80% of these features. And then they're not gonna like me for that. But that's for the best of their company. And so that that's that's really what determines whether the founder will win or not. Can they be agile enough to say, okay, you're right, or not I'm right, but the market's right. And I need to make this a product that people actually adopt. And forget about my opinion, forget about my experience. It could all be, you know, leading the witness, let's say. But if we put it into market and Your conversion rate's one percent and the industry is ten percent. I mean, the data speaks for itself, right? And that's that's what happens with these new apps because simply users cannot figure out how to use the app. That's that's the main issue, is just a user education issue.
Brian Bell (12:45.803) How d how does a founder know when to cut a feature?
Jonathan (12:50.04) What we do is we we'll run a split test. So let's just say we're talking about this college planning app. We got a course planner to figure out what courses to take. You got a maybe like a career planner, you got a resume builder, you got a research tool, et cetera. Let's just say you got 10 features, right? Which in this case they do. I would put all of those into text based ads. All the ads would look the same. The only thing that would be different is the hook message. And then I would look and see which of those features gets the highest click through rate. That's typically what people are most attracted to. The the the the biggest pain point they have. That's one way I like to do it. Another way I like to do it is just look at the app. You know, you got a thousand users on there. You can just look and see which features are getting used. And then, you know, if you want to cap them and and you know charge for them, you would just do the ones that are getting the most engagement. That, you know, speaks for itself.
Brian Bell (13:35.425) Yeah. Smart. So founders love talking about virality. in your experience, how much of app growth is actually engineered versus just good luck and timing?
Jonathan (13:50.115) Virality plays a very small piece of the story. we named our company that because we know that's what people want, but we we we sell them what they want but give them what they need. Because for example, my first app, I got it to go viral and got 14,000 downloads in a day. Sounds awesome, right? But only 33% of them registered. So we're talking about about 5,000 active users. And then of those, I mean, you tell me how many of them were paying users? None of them.
Brian Bell (14:18.721) Zero you said, right?
Jonathan (14:20.396) Yeah. So what what good is fourteen thousand downloads with zero revenue? You can't fund that initiative multiple times. So that's the fallacy is that people think like more reach equals more success. And it simply doesn't, right? Like my Instagram profile, you know, I'll make a viral video, you know, copy a viral format or something that's trending. I have one video that's got nineteen million views, but it only leads to about a thousand clicks a month on my Instagram page. So if you have an app, figure thirty percent of those convert. That's three hundred downloads off of nineteen million views. Whereas in ads, you would maybe get like Hundreds of thousands of downloads out of that many views. You see what I'm saying? So pe people assign it to the wrong place of value. The the virality is important for brand building and reach, but it's not what drives the company, you know, revenue and product and all that. Another issue with virality is you can't control who sees it. You might have a bunch of, you know, guys over 50 in India who nothing wrong with them. They just might not be your target audience, right? And and sometimes, like even in our case, when we have a video go viral, our ad performance goes down because we're retargeting people who aren't who we already reached. And so it actually impacts us negatively to go viral. So we actually had to isolate and remove the profile that had virality on it. So it's it's it's a lot of stuff that like is is misleading to founders. And that's why I'm just, you know, trying to to share that clarity with them. It's like virality is is valuable, but the real virality that is valuable. Is when users invite their friends, not when you go viral on social media. So for example, you know, let's say Brian, you have a product a product for doing project management. You get a month free, your friend gets a month free, everybody wins. That's a good virality program. Not making a video go viral on Instagram. That's not gonna add anything to it.
Brian Bell (16:14.669) So think about a a launch that you did that worked really well. What what were the two or three moves that actually mattered versus everything else that did not?
Jonathan (16:24.12) Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've done, I think it's 373 is the number. I'm creating a counter that my my cloud agent can put on our dashboard, but I'm pretty sure it's 373 apps today. And the ones that always win, it's not product related. It's not picked the right market. It's not came up with a novel product. Novel product helps, but it doesn't it doesn't win the story. What what wins the bigger story is the founder.
Brian Bell (16:32.731) nice.
Jonathan (16:53.314) Founder's mindset is ultimately what determines the success of the company. For example, that company I told you about earlier, Claimscope, we put 250 bucks in. We got $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue from that $250 investment. I called this student up and I said, Rayline, you need to put every dollar you have into this campaign. I got no money for ad dollars. I'm like, you just made a thousand bucks off to two hundred. I was like, what are you talking about? And then she's like, okay, I'll think about it. Maybe I'll try to find some credit. I'm like,
Brian Bell (17:15.325) You're making a thousand bucks a month. Yeah.
Jonathan (17:23.256) When that revenue comes in from stripe, you put it right back into those ads for me, okay? And then I was like, I'll invest the money. Let me be your angel. Like if if this thing's printing four X, I want it. I want to own this business. That's four X on month one. All the retention, let's just say our customers stay three months. Now you're talking about twelve X in her money. So but because she was in this small employee mindset that's like, I don't have the money.
Brian Bell (17:34.498) Yeah.
Jonathan (17:51.449) She I haven't heard from her since, to be honest. Which is extremely heartbreaking because I'm like, damn, you were sitting on a a a golden goose here. Yeah.
Brian Bell (18:00.205) Working. Yeah. Anytime you could forex your money in a month, I mean, that's pretty incredible. 250 acquisition, a thousand bucks a month revenue. That's just like press on the gas all day long. I you know, I think about kind of return on ad spend or payback periods of more mature companies that have tens of millions of revenue that that's what I was used to managing. You know, companies that, you know, five, ten, twenty five, fifty million revenue. You know, we're happy if it paid back in like six months, nine months, you know.
Jonathan (18:10.531) Florida.
Jonathan (18:26.018) Yeah, imagine month one, it's just like, my God. So that's that's like a founder who got lucky because they they were in a really profitable niche. Claims, you know, damage claims, automating the process for these adjusters. But not everyone's that lucky, right? Like people like me and you, I don't know your story that much, but in my case, dude, it's been headwinds. I've just been fighting the good fight for like four years straight on this business, you know, after we rebranded. So a lot of them like they don't you don't get a magic. a a golden goose like she did. But really what makes a winning founder is somebody who looks at the obstacles and looks at the challenges as each is an opportunity in itself. Because the whole reason you're in business is to solve a problem, aka to fix a challenge, right? When you can solve that problem, you'll get paid for it. That's how the market works, right? So people think that when they launch and the campaign performs poorly or not getting a good registration rate. Or more most often what I see is the conversion rate of the product sucks. It's like, well, how could it be good? You don't have any training in UX. You've never been a product manager. You know, like how could it be good? But they will get discouraged by a little little yellow signal like that. And to me, I'm like, cool, now I have some meat to sink my teeth into. And so that's the that's the mindset I'm trying to impose upon these founders or at least show the light to them that if you can stay in that growth mindset, that's what makes you win. It's not about striking gold with the product, right? Even in the case of the girl who did strike gold with the product, she didn't even have the foresight to take advantage of it. So, you know, it's always a mindset thing. And that mindset is identify the top constraint in the business right now. If you don't know what it is, you need to start measuring your data. When you identify that constraint, you know this, Brian. You look at that funnel made data and you see: hey, our opt-in rate is too high or too low. We need to maximize that. Or our click-through rate's too low. Let's launch some new creatives. But they don't they don't have that mental training, I don't think. And and that really comes from being an entrepreneur. So, you know, again, just hope that hope that somebody hearing this can think like, okay, I should just give this, I should just burn the ships and press on.
Brian Bell (20:39.297) Hold up. so and to you know, it's been a long time since I've run Demand Gen, but what's a widely accepted growth tactic now in twenty twenty six as we record this that you think is complete BS?
Jonathan (20:53.642) And you're good at this stuff. You know the the I can tell. I love the intellect. The the era of AI slop is to a point now where AI answers are inaccurate because it's eating slop, it's eating its own barf, if you will. Sorry to give you this nasty graphic image. That's not normally me, but
Brian Bell (20:55.605) It's not my first podcast.
Brian Bell (21:12.205) Hm. Yeah, it's kinda like eating its own tail kind of thing. Yeah.
Jonathan (21:17.708) Yes. So when a founder goes in and says, Hey, I need a twelve month launch plan for my app, it'll develop you one, right? It might do your ASO content, it might write your ads, you can hook your MCP up app store optimization. It's SEO for apps.
Brian Bell (21:27.125) ASO what's that? Okay. Okay, got it.
Jonathan (21:33.549) You can connect your cloud agent to Meta and have it optimize your ads. Great. But the but the issue with all of that, and and the reason it doesn't work for people, the reason they still end up on my doorstep is because if you tell your cloud agent, hey, I'm making an app for 18 to 34 males who are in college who are struggling with finding a day job, you're gonna get a good marketing plan. But if you just say, hey, I want a launch plan for this careers app, it's gonna give you the average of every Careers app launch out there, including all apps, and it's just gonna give you the very middle, the the the most ordinary, not extraordinary, but ordinary average results, right? So people just don't know what to ask their AI, and so they lean on it too heavily, thinking it's gonna develop them good content. But I mean, even as a first time founder, you're not gonna know, hey, I want African Americans who are twenty five to thirty four who live in Kentucky and, you know, West Virginia or whatever. You don't know that until you've gone out and done split testing. And so there there's really no way that they could know how to do it effectively. Now, maybe the AI gets to a point where it's just so damn good you just push a button, it starts printing customers, but we're not there yet. And ultimately, even when it gets there, I mean, you know this as much as I do, the driver of the car determines the performance, right? It's not the car that they're in. You know, you could be in a pagani, but if you don't drive a stick, you're not going anywhere. Right. So it's it's about the questions that you ask your AI and I have resources for this. If anybody is interested, just shoot me a DM on Instagram at it's J Maxim, IT S J Maxim. I will give you those resources for free. Just know what you're doing and make sure that you're not producing more AI slop because first of all, customers hate AI slop these days. And second, it doesn't work. That's why they hate it, because it's not relevant for So that's the number one thing to avoid in this day and age, in my opinion.
Brian Bell (23:21.943) Yeah, love that. so you've worked on some pretty big campaigns and big brands. what do big companies understand about distribution that really founders are underestimating or getting wrong?
Jonathan (23:35.043) Well, what founders miss about distribution is their their sites are on the wrong thing. So one thing is they don't even know the distribution is important. A lot of founders will spend their whole budget building the product and then put it out into a beta. Let's just say they get 100 users. That's typically like 90 to 100 users c will come in from post into socials and stuff like that. And then they look at the data and they say these users are not engaging. My app must suck. So then they start go bolting on features. Now, the development company loves that because they're making 10, 20K a month off of you. So they end up burning all of their budget before they can even get to distribution. But distribution is the whole story. That's what makes you the money. The product is just a mechanism that services that distribution. So they gotta stop thinking about putting every dollar into product thinking that that's gonna solve the problem. This whole fallacy that build it and they will come, it's a it's a complete misnomer because today, like people are trying to avoid new. businesses avoid new apps, avoid new products. Why? Because they're so assaulted every day by marketing. So it's not gonna be like that. I'm sorry to break it to you. It's just it's not like you know the 1900s where you invent a car and everyone sees you driving around town while they're walking. Okay, yeah, people will come and buy your product in that case, but that's not how it works this these days. You put a if you're a business to business company, you put a post on Instagram Nobody's engaging with it. It's gonna get like a hundred and fifteen people reached and it's not gonna go anywhere if you talk about your product features. People do not care. And like just think about it for yourself. You're like, I don't care. Like, you know, even if the app completely could be a help to me, if it's hard pitching me from the beginning or
Brian Bell (25:14.071) Yeah. I get I get this is a business podcast and we have an Instagram channel. Almost no like engagement on Insta. Like LinkedIn, tons of engagement, tens of thousands of views, you know, sometimes hundreds of comments, like well, maybe not a hundred comments, but you know, fifty comments, right? But Insta, like nope, nope, nobody goes to Instagram to go like, you what? I want to learn some business stuff.
Jonathan (25:24.398) Yeah.
Jonathan (25:30.83) Awesome.
Jonathan (25:35.682) I wanna go spend some money on a on an app.
Brian Bell (25:38.635) really need claims software. I need a claims software app. And nobody goes to Instagram thinking that, right? They're like, I need that cute thing for my dog, right?
Jonathan (25:43.169) Exactly.
Jonathan (25:48.695) Yeah, but you know what? The th the thing about distribution is in your case, I love that example you shared because you're posting on LinkedIn, you're getting a decent amount of reach, and that is your playground. Now you have now you have a piece of a meat on the bone, something to sink your teeth into. Prior to that, like you got really nothing. Nobody cares. And and that's the harsh reality that a lot of founders face when they launch. So I encourage everybody to have a founder-led brand to start creating content. Like the stuff that goes viral for me. You know, one of them's like a humorous meme. It's like a b-roll of me eating pizza and it's like a joke about how, you know, I didn't do the 6 a.m. work wake out workouts, I didn't do the carb cutting, you know, and and that one got like 12 million views. Precisely. And it's like exactly what the opposite of somebody like a fitness guy like myself would post, you know. So, but that allows me to have the prowess to go and now talk about my app when I'm reaching 12 million people of.
Brian Bell (26:31.265) Like I woke up late and ate pizza for breakfast. Success. Right. Yeah.
Jonathan (26:46.434) Whereas if you if you're doing what you're talking about, taking your Instagram page and posting your company stuff, you're gonna get reach like twelve people literally. So yeah, I just I hope that founders take their focus off a product and put it onto growth as as as a a conglomerate of of opportunities from demand generation.
Brian Bell (27:02.337) Yeah, you gotta have distribution, right? And it it's kind of the old product advice too. You work backwards from the customer pain point, I think is what you're saying. And rather than kind of going, Hey, I have this great product and trying to sell it, you're going, a lot of people have this huge pain point and I'm solving it. And now I just have to like funnel people in to let them know, like, hey, that huge pain point that I know you have, I can solve it right here. Come in and like solve it here. Rather than like, hey, I built this really cool thing and like you should buy it, right?
Jonathan (27:32.704) I mean, you know, yeah, people don't like to be pitched. That's why. They wanna be understood. So if you ask what their pain point is, they'll feel that you care. Whereas if you tell how great your product is, they'll feel like they're being pitched. And so that's that's where a lot of founders get it wrong, especially with content. You you put content talking about yourself, talking about your product, it's not gonna get reach.
Brian Bell (27:32.727) But it's a different framing.
Brian Bell (27:53.4) Yeah, I love that. How does your advice differ or do you work with and have experience with, you know, we do a lot of B2B software and so a lot of listeners probably are, you know, enterprise software or, you know, small to mid market kind of software. You know, we're talking the hundred dollar, thousand dollar a month kind of software. how does your thinking around GTM, distribution, virality, all that differ for that those kind of apps versus like the consumer career planning, college planning app?
Jonathan (28:21.208) Well, the the apps that you're talking about are generally going to be more successful. It's harder to launch a B2C business just because it's so ruthlessly competitive. And there are so many people who are even more neurotic than I am that are better at it than both of us who will go and do it. Whereas the B2B segment, like thing with consumers is I want Spotify because I want entertainment. But hey, if I am having a hard month, I might have to suspend that, right? Whereas if I have a business and I have a calling software that my sales team of three people uses. I can't just shut that down when I got a tummy ache, you know? God habit, right? So from a fundamental level, the business models are always going to be more stable, better lifetime value, better retention. So that's it's more businesses with high retention are generally more attractive businesses to be in because they're not in this hamster wheel. So when I think about launching those, it's it's a more human touch, right? So if they're they're either gonna do a e commerce funnel like buy online, or they're gonna do like a book a call sales funnel.
Brian Bell (28:50.071) You gotta have it. Yeah.
Jonathan (29:20.13) With software as a service, SaaS products, you know, when you're talking about tickets anywhere from a hundred to two thousand bucks a month, I I will definitely focus on getting leads and taking them through a demo process and selling off the backs of that demo. And we have a few techniques that we use, for example, like you know, instead of presenting it as twenty bucks a month, present it as twelve bucks a month paid 144 annually. Or twenty bucks a month paid monthly. So that way founders can capture
Brian Bell (29:53.238) You try to upsell them to the annual versus the monthly. Hey, it's 20 bucks a month or it's 12 bucks a month if you pay annually. Yeah. And it's an opt-out. Like I've noticed a lot of people have done this on their landing pages recently. The you know, it's like, it's only 12 bucks a month. that's if I pay annually. Like and you have to opt into the twenty dollar a month monthly. I've noticed that's been a a very common pattern I'm seeing now.
Jonathan (29:59.511) Yep. Especially if it's a business software and they if they think they're gonna need it.
Jonathan (30:13.172) It works. You'll see about seventy, eighty percent of people skew toward that. You know, you may make the annual button green and then the monthly button gray, create a little bit of psychological focus on it. So those are some of the techniques I like to do, but
Brian Bell (30:25.069) It's been it's probably been it's been a long time since I made landing pages. What else has has the industry figured out in the last ten years on landing pages? I used to do optimizely, I used to like do all kinds of multivariate testing. And what is what is some stuff that's emerged in the last last five or ten years that is is that the annual one is something that we didn't we didn't really do back in the early twenty tens.
Jonathan (30:33.166) Yeah.
Jonathan (30:44.482) Yeah, we also do founding member specials. So that would be like, hey, pay 500 bucks and get it for life. And you know, that's a 90% savings. you know, you offer the first 50 people, hey, 250 bucks for life. The next hundred people you offer it to them for 500 bucks for life. And then the next group you would do like, hey, the next 200 people can get it for a thousand bucks for life. And that exactly and that's what creates the nested for you to reinvest in growth.
Brian Bell (30:49.893) yeah.
Brian Bell (31:00.16) okay.
Brian Bell (31:05.717) Really pulls forward your cash flow. Yeah.
Jonathan (31:12.146) And you got an audience of beta customers. And you can even host like a weekly call or like a monthly, you know, feedback call where they can influence the product roadmap based on their needs. So you're actually getting beta feedback from real customers who have paid you, people you actually care about. So the founding member strategy works super well and it allows it to be genuinely scarce and urgent. So we we like to roll those out, skewing the pricing, but you know, toward annuals, you know, through PIFs, things like that. And then of course, you know, when it comes to the actual funnels themselves, optimizing the free trials, right? Like a lot of people will offer a 30-day and you know have to wait 30 days to get their money back to figure out if it's converting. And usually users will fall off during that gap. So we will push them toward like seven day and then make sure that the back-end selling system, as we call it, like the first seven days of their engagement, bunch of SMSs, bunch of emails, bunch of push notifications. Fully immersive product experience, it takes them from one step to the next so that as soon as they hit accept trial, they're engaged and they're feeling the magic within three clicks. That's our goal is to like make the hair hair on their arm stand up within just three tasks after they commit. And we actually go for the magic before the free trial. That's another thing I'm really passionate about is making sure the onboarding is solid. Hook, problem, solution, social proof, call to action. If they accept the free trial at the end of that, then we go for a referral and ask them to invite a friend and get a month free. So you combine all those together, you're educating them on the product, the pain point is getting solved, and you're getting the upsell, you know, catching them in that moment where, you know, they're feeling the magic can really make it convert well. So we've essentially turned apps into funnels at this point.
Brian Bell (32:52.525) Yeah, that's amazing. What's the best kind of tool? What's the state of the art best tool stack? Take us through the whole like for a B2B software company, not B2C. We don't really do B2C. And may and maybe you could say, hey, B2C, it's it we actually use this one, not for B2B, we use that one. Kind of take me through like everything. What's the state and you can name a couple tools, two or three, so you're not showing favorites, but take me through the whole like architecture here nowadays. Like back in the day, I'll tell you it's like it's optimized like for landing pages and we use Marketo for the lifecycle stuff.
Jonathan (33:16.75) Yeah.
Brian Bell (33:22.725) And I I'm forgetting, you know, ad words for the search ad to obviously. And yet like but take me through the whole like I'm a founder, I'm listening, I got some revenue, right? I've I've kind of I've I've gone zero to a hundred thousand of revenue and I'm I'm now building out the marketing stack. Like what's what's a state of the art marketing stack look like now?
Jonathan (33:41.465) So definitely revenue cat if it's a monetized product, you want to be able to cross cut your LTVs and things like that and get, you know, user dri it's for tracking revenue. It's just that, you know, optimizing your pricing screen, things like that. Everwall is really good for swapping for split testing different payment screens. So you can charge, you know, you can display a twenty bucks or a thirty bucks and see which one converts. we use high level. We use high level in a lot of circumstances, even for B2B SaaS operations because
Brian Bell (33:48.481) Revenue cat, what is that? Okay.
Brian Bell (34:11.607) What's high level? I haven't heard of that either. So yeah, this is great for me. Yeah. I've been out of the game so long. Yeah.
Jonathan (34:11.712) High level is built. my god, you've been out the game, dude. So think of HubSpot and and Salesforce, but not completely clunky and from the 80s. You know, it's like a yeah, go high level. We host our landing pages in there, our funnels, our products, our payment links, invoicing, contracts, contact database, email marketing, SMS marketing, chatting, right? Like having an ongoing chat with all your prospects.
Brian Bell (34:23.125) Eye level, okay.
Brian Bell (34:27.392) Okay.
Jonathan (34:41.632) As well as a sales pipeline. So it's really good for B2B. it's it it it's not pretty. Think of it, it's like the Google of CRMs, right? It's not pretty, it's just functional. And it's got really robust functionality. We also have like a circle style community in there. We have our mastermind in there. So there's a lot of functionality all on high level. And you know, everyday people could be in there for ninety-seven bucks getting all the features, everything. There's no
Brian Bell (35:00.301) It's all on high level.
Jonathan (35:08.824) There's almost no gatekeeping in the software. It's kind of a a golden era in that platform right now.
Brian Bell (35:12.141) Kind of like all you can eat for a hundred bucks a month per user kind of thing. That's that's pretty good.
Jonathan (35:16.352) Yeah. Yeah. And they have affiliate programs. So if you're an agency, you can create sub accounts and make money off of your clients. And meanwhile, you can take a snapshot. If you know, if let's just say you have a similar operation to mine, I can snapshot my account and give it to you and it'll all be set up. So I can build a snapshot for, you know, SAS you know, ERPs, right? Or SAS fintechs, et cetera, and have a different set of
Brian Bell (35:24.001) Reseller. Yeah.
Jonathan (35:44.738) Landing pages, all this stuff pre built. So that's a super handy software. I love it. Way faster than Hub Spot, way faster than you know, when I'm talking about like landing pages and stuff.
Brian Bell (35:52.62) Yeah, HubSpot's gotten really clunky. I I logged in because I I use Decile, which is a CRM I'm an I'm an investor in, and it's really good for cut kind of this, you know, account to account kind of high touch DC level kind of CRM stuff. and I looked at HubSpot and I I was like, What's that?
Jonathan (35:59.06) nice.
Jonathan (36:07.576) Yeah, good for account based marketing. Good for ABM. Account
Brian Bell (36:12.725) Yeah, basically. Right. And I looked at HubSpot and it was gonna be like eighteen hundred dollars a month just to replicate all the stuff. I was like, that's a non starter. I'm not gonna pay two grand a month for a for a CRM.
Jonathan (36:21.198) Jesus.
Jonathan (36:25.262) Yeah, I mean there's there's repos on GitHub copying high level where you can get it for free now too. I'm not gonna use something that, you know, could have a backdoor in it, but I'd rather pay my ninety seven. Yeah.
Brian Bell (36:32.009) I'd rather use somebody that yeah, I'd I'll pay the ninety seven bucks. That's basic. What else? What else is in this in the state of the art stack these days?
Jonathan (36:41.804) Yeah, so when we're talking about SaaS companies, I use closely HQ. I do my email and out email and LinkedIn outreach from there. It gets really good open rates, really good response rates. Yeah, closely HQ. It's it's a cheaper one. You know, there's there's more robust softwares, but you can, you know, pair it with clay and Apollo or
Brian Bell (36:49.207) Clovely. Okay.
Brian Bell (36:56.225) We just we just invested in Goji Berry. I don't know if you've run across Goji Berry. growing super fast, YC company. we use we use them personally and they're just are really good for LinkedIn outreach. So check them out.
Jonathan (37:00.468) No, it sounds sounds cool. wow.
Jonathan (37:08.236) Ojiberry, I'm gonna put that in my search for now.
Brian Bell (37:11.371) Yeah, they just work really, really well for just LinkedIn stuff. I'm I'm pretty happy with it's all agentics, all AI driven. I just say, Hey, I wanna talk to founders and this just goes and find like finds people, you know.
Jonathan (37:15.857) sweet.
Jonathan (37:20.211) wow.
Jonathan (37:23.842) Founders who have raised over a mill, who, you know, have SaaS products. Yeah, that's that that's actually something very positive for for me personally because it's very hard to identify founders. There's not like a industry breakout in LinkedIn and stuff for audience building. so we've never really been big on outbound because of that. You know, we scraped the app stores, scraped Kickstarter, things like that, but it didn't quite work how we wanted. there's not enough volume. But yeah, so as far as like
Brian Bell (37:25.749) Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. Just makes it really easy.
Jonathan (37:52.535) SaaS Founders Go though, you need an outreach software, right? Like teeing up demos. You need to have a demo funnel. So like a ideally a a pre-built, you know, product features and benefits video, probably one that addresses pain points as well. you need a CRM to track all those deals. Obviously, you need a pricing sheet so that you can start piffing and selling three months, six months with like twenty seats. Then you start getting in the multi thousand dollar transactions instead of these, you know, ten, twenty hundred dollar, you know. e com transactions. we use we do a lot of our tracking and in spreadsheets and we've put into an air data air table database. So we do all of our analytics and we pull our ad data into the air table air table database too so we can know what's going on in any given client campaign.
Brian Bell (38:39.181) I like air table because it's like this, it's it's like a hybrid between a database and a spreadsheet. And you can you can treat it like a database, and go in there and like really run some really complex SQL on top of it and stuff. And you can also just go look at it, you know, just like a spreadsheet, like a Google Google spreadsheet.
Jonathan (38:57.774) Yeah, and you can make a portal for your clients, like, hey, put your information in here and then it creates a client in the database, you know? It's it's really, really handy. really. Yeah, and they're getting they're getting tanked in the market today, but I'm like, man, I hope this company does all right 'cause their software's awesome.
Brian Bell (39:04.031) All all of Team Ignite runs on airtable. Just all of it. The the whole the whole operation. Yeah. With AI and agents and stuff, but yeah.
Brian Bell (39:15.169) Well, you see what they did, right? I w I wrote about this in my last week ignite on my blog. I wrote I write this like Sunday newsletter about what's happening in tech and they they peeled off what they did something interesting. They sold off this like, you know, cash generating database company, their table, and they kept the agentic company for themselves and now they're pursuing that, the founders. Yeah, pretty interesting. Yeah.
Jonathan (39:35.68) Wow. That was a bold move. Man, they had such a good foot foothold with the database, but
Brian Bell (39:41.89) Yeah they're still I mean this is like a SaaS business still growing thirty percent year over year, like and it sold for like two point something X sales. I was really surprised. That was like a killer deal for the firm that acquired them. yeah, 'cause it's like it's a system of record, right? And a system of action too. And but they're good they're they're going after the AI. Boom.
Jonathan (39:51.276) Yeah, it was like a Miserable valuation.
Jonathan (40:03.67) It's crazy. But and and SAS got really tanked. I mean Salesforce like plummeted from the AI boom, but like then companies like Amazon are rehiring all these people they fired during the AI layoffs. So it's like it's not there yet. And this is why I don't lean on it overly heavily. I I lean on the database. That's what all our AI works off is the database. Yeah, reports, research.
Brian Bell (40:22.317) It's good it's good for repetitive stuff. Like the way we use AI is and I just did a little I did a cheeky tweet tweet today. If you if you go look at my my my ex or my my LinkedIn. It's something like step one, stop what you're doing. Step two, ask AI to do it. Step three, build code and repetitive, you know, a repo around it. Like I kind of go through this like fifteen steps of just, you know, automating everything. So now like everything we do.
Jonathan (40:32.494) Yeah, I'll take it out.
Jonathan (40:39.738) Yeah.
Jonathan (40:46.934) I I need it I need it in that simple language, dude. It's like I have a blocker, I'll like look at something and be like, How could I automate this? And I just like you can just ask.
Brian Bell (40:54.317) So what I what I what I did in the last year that really worked for me is I switched to Cloud Code and Chat GPT Codec for all of my stuff. And so what I do now is I say, hey, this is a repetitive thing that's happening. I'm getting deal flow all over the place. Like, how do I handle all this deal flow? I used to send them to a form on Airtable. And then there would be AI that runs on top of the form to to figure out like, is this good? Should I look at it? That was it, it was okay. And like some founders are like, fuck your form, right?
Jonathan (41:20.366) Mm-hmm.
Brian Bell (41:22.463) And so what I did now is I'll I have this email ingestion pipeline that will there's an API I can crawl the docs and links. So just send PDFs. Don't even bother with docsend. I'll just crawl it anyway. There's an API I can pull, I can pull all the text out of your docs and links, crawl it all with AI and determine is this like a really good startup? Should I look at it? And the AI has been trained on thousands and thousands of deals. So I've built this whole pipeline now. anyway, I'm getting out into a lot of my stuff. And this podcast is about you.
Jonathan (41:47.702) Well.
Brian Bell (41:51.521) What are you excited about for the future? Like where is all this stuff going in the next few years?
Jonathan (41:52.076) Yeah, but that's that's viable.
Jonathan (41:57.807) Well, I think, you know, on the on the breaking of the, you know, SaaS industry tanking to AI, I got a little nervous, I'm not gonna lie. But then I saw my industry literally like five X. There was like a a million apps on the App Store, and now there's five million. And and that's just the people who made it off lovable into the app store. Yeah. So I I I'm actually quite excited for the future. And I think that the way that this is this is a big bounty, a big unlock for the everyday founder.
Brian Bell (42:15.691) More of everything. Yeah.
Jonathan (42:28.198) And and that's why I'm trying to help them the most because they're the least equipped to succeed, but they're now the most enabled in the sense that they can build an app in 30 seconds. So th this is gonna be huge for entrepreneurship in America and in the world, which is really exciting for me because I feel like, you know, entrepreneurs are the backbone of of society and have have been taken advantage of and, you know, like taken for granted with all these, you know, different programs and taking taxes out of the system that are produced by us producers. And so I'm I'm really excited for this next era. It's a little bit scary to me as well. But I will say that founders who are building apps, even if you don't make it on your first swing, maybe your second swing, maybe maybe your third swing, but don't give up. That wasn't the number one mistake that I made was like I would face headwinds in a business and then I would change directions or change businesses. And then I would go back, the shot clock would start over. If I had just stuck with one thing for like ten, fifteen years, it would have accumulated much more 'cause business gets easier and more profitable the longer you run it. But it's very, very difficult in the beginning. You know, that wheel, that flywheel's not turning. So I inc
Brian Bell (43:30.219) Yeah. Going to zero ones is super hard. Going to one to ten is a little easier and then going ten to hundreds even easier. In some ways. Yeah.
Jonathan (43:35.833) Yeah. Yeah, and and and it's it's easier in the sense that you you're it's not do or die all the time. You can make mistakes and you can fix them, but when when you're early, you know, it's very do or die. So you have to get through that first two years of build. And again, I see founders quitting it like three months. I'm like, this is this was never gonna be successful committing three months. So I think if if if people can realize the the gravity of the opportunity that they're dealing with. and get their piece of the action, everyone can be millionaires. And and honestly, you can be millionaires with with zero employees. Like it's not hard to create a a million dollar a year business with SaaS. If if you want to, I guess is the one caveat. You know, if you're committed.
Brian Bell (44:22.189) Yeah. I mean, it's it's easier than ever to create a a bootstrap, you know, multi-seven figure SaaS app or or or consumer app. I mean, it's just following some of the stuff that Jonathan's talking about. starting with the big pain point, the hair and fire problem that you want to solve and then working back to the tech. It's never been easier, right? And you can make a really good lifestyle for yourself. It may not be VC backable, but it's a great it can be a really great lifestyle business.
Jonathan (44:48.334) Doesn't it doesn't need to be though? That's the whole thing is V VC investment into startups. You know, we raise capital for startups. The activity is down like 90% on the everyday startup level, but it's up like 90% at the infrastructure, the AI infrastructure level. So basically all the VC capital got sucked up into data centers and infrastructure and got sucked out of the actual consumer-facing companies. So it's not a good time to raise capital and it doesn't need to be because you don't really Need capital, right? You basically need ten, fifteen thousand bucks in marketing dollars to get this thing profitable and then from there
Brian Bell (45:23.895) Yeah. A hundred dollar, you know, Cloud Max subscription and some marketing dollars and you're you're off to the races. I really enjoyed the conversation. I I could talk to you for another hour about demand gen. but maybe you could tell folks that are listening, maybe there's some founders, people with app ideas where to find you online.
Jonathan (45:32.172) Yeah. So it's a super exciting time.
Jonathan (45:44.268) Yeah, I mean I post a lot. I post 150 videos a week. So at Viral App Launch is my company page. My personal page is it's J Maxim. And I have a free one hour masterclass that goes through like the whole zero to a million users, the roadmap of scaling an app. Somebody made one like that. I was I was in their funnel and I really liked it. And so I ended up making one, a training that covers the whole process. And that will help them isolate like
Brian Bell (45:48.067) geez.
Jonathan (46:09.794) What do I do at this time of the business? 'Cause you can't do everything. You need to be focused. So that roadmap video is really helpful for that. So if you guys are interested in that, just DM me on Instagram and and put Ignite and that way I'll know to give it to you for free. so I highly encourage founders to do that. if they wanna check out the accelerator, they can go to bioapp launch dot com or, you know, find us on YouTube. We got a lot of long form on YouTube, you know, covering all kinds of stuff from pricing strategy to go to market, et cetera. So Lot of free resources out there.
Brian Bell (46:40.661) Awesome. Well thanks so much, Jonathan. Really enjoyed
Jonathan (46:43.885) My pleasure, Brian. Thanks so much for having me on. And it's always great to talk to somebody who can get nerdy with me.
Brian Bell (46:48.831) Likewise.
