Lean Startup Tactics for WordPress Product Owners

[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Everybody today, the title of this show doesn't have the word AI in it Actually. Um, which is amazing. We kind of talk about AI pretty much every episode. Um, but one of the things that people talk about a lot with AI is that like, now you could get so much more done than you ever did before with a lot fewer people than you did before.

[00:00:25] And that's definitely a threat when it comes to people's livelihood. Um, but it's also an opportunity in a lot of different ways. Uh, there's a lot of nuance to the way that you build out your team and the way that you're, uh, optimized to do stuff. Um, but most of all, we want to talk today about how you can do all those things as a lean team.

[00:00:46] So, oh, I don't even have my, um, hold on. I have a video for you. Here it comes. Ready, set. Go.

[00:01:08] And that's the wrong video. People are gonna leave 'cause I told them to like subscribe and go away. Oh my gosh. We are rough today, Ian.

[00:01:16] Ian Misner: They can, they can subscribe now too. That's fine. It's okay.

[00:01:21] Matt Cromwell: Hey folks, this is WP Product Talk. Um, we're a little off the rails, but it's kind of come together. My name's Matt Cromwell.

[00:01:28] I'm founder of Roots and Fruit.

[00:01:31] Ian Misner: Yeah. And I'm Ian Misner. I'm with Kestrel. We got a whole bunch of eCommerce extensions

[00:01:36] Matt Cromwell: and today, um, well, well, before we get started, let me stay on script. I'm so, so messed up. Anyway, today, before we get started, uh, if you benefit at all from WP Product Talk, we would love your help and your support.

[00:01:52] The easiest way you can help us is by hitting subscribe. You can hit subscribe in a lot of places nowadays. You can hit subscribe on YouTube. That's super helpful for us right now. You can, uh, hit subscribe or follow on Spotify or Apple Podcasts anywhere, uh, where you might find us. We'd love your support and help.

[00:02:09] It takes only a second, but it makes a big difference.

[00:02:13] Ian Misner: Yeah. And, uh, we also wanna say a huge thanks to Freemius, our exclusive growth partner. They help software makers grow, monetize, and succeed. Um, so Freemius, it's a merchant of record platform that handles everything for you. They, you know, help with checkout payments, subscriptions, licensing updates, uh, and I think tax stuff too.

[00:02:32] Um, so, you know, it just lets you focus on doing the product part.

[00:02:38] Matt Cromwell: All right, so today finally, without further ado, we are gonna be talking about running a lean product business. And for this, we have invited none other than Ben Sibley, uh, from Independent Analytics to join us. Ben, how are you doing?

[00:02:53] Ben Sibley: Hey, I am good.

[00:02:54] Thanks so much for having me on today.

[00:02:56] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Can you tell the world a little bit about who you are and, uh, what you do?

[00:03:01] Ben Sibley: Yeah, so I'm a co-founder of the Independent Analytics plugin. It is an alternative to Google Analytics and makes it easy and privacy friendly to track what people are doing on your WordPress website.

[00:03:14] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. I love it. Um, and you also brought this, uh, subject today of, uh, talking about, um, a lean startup or a lean business. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit about like what's your motivation and why is this, uh, subject important to you?

[00:03:32] Ben Sibley: Yeah, so as I settled into entrepreneurship, I always felt. A little bit out of place.

[00:03:38] As someone who is not fully like a business person, I've always been sort of a creative person as well, and I really enjoy building things and creating things. Could be creating a product. It could be writing an article, making a video. That's really where I'm drawn. And so. Building the business is really satisfying.

[00:03:57] It's really enjoyable. But I've never had this aspiration of like creating a large team, even though going to business school that was sort of like, I. Almost like a measurement of success. Like, oh, you could start a company with five employees and a hundred employees and a company with 10,000 employees.

[00:04:15] That's really successful. But I, I had to reconcile with that with my creative side and my lack of interest in managing people. And so I would say that when, you know, when it's time to cross that bridge, we'll get there. But I've actually really enjoyed scaling our company in a way that it can just be.

[00:04:35] Andrew and myself, just the two of us running this company. And we haven't needed to, genuinely haven't needed to hire help since we got started, uh, about four years ago.

[00:04:44] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome. That's

[00:04:45] Ian Misner: good. Yeah, and, uh, I mean, I love the topic. I definitely would love to, to hear more thoughts on it. I do it. Before we jump in too fun, I want to, again, thank you for coming on, but uh, for anyone watching live right now, you know, if you have questions on this topic, thoughts, ideas, whatever, we encourage you to leave comments, questions, wherever you're watching, and we'll highlight comments to discuss here on the show.

[00:05:05] Matt Cromwell: Love it. So I think a couple things you said there were really interesting to me, Ben. Um, the first one I think is more of like, how do we define success, uh, when it comes to building a business. Um, I really like the way that you framed that in terms of like. They're, you know, they're in the WordPress space.

[00:05:25] People will sometimes talk about that. They've built like a lifestyle business. It's like paying for itself and paying for their bills, and they're happy that way. Others are trying to grow super fast, super quick. Um, but, but what do you mean by like, when you say, you know, you don't want to, um, define success by being a big team, what do you mean by success then for you, um, and your partner?

[00:05:49] Ben Sibley: Yeah, sure. So I think it definitely leans a lot more towards, um, you know, like what you could say, um, like a lifestyle business, which again, that's something I kind of learned was sort of a dirty term. Mm-hmm. It was almost like you've got people building serious companies and you've got, well, if you wanna start a lifestyle business, almost as if it's like not a real business.

[00:06:06] Mm-hmm. And so I feel like. Maybe walk the line between those things. I definitely don't want to make a ton of sacrifices. Um, you know, I don't wanna like give up time with my family and my friends, at least not to some extreme degree. Right. And I want to be doing things that I enjoy, which again, they're not, everything I do is super fun.

[00:06:27] There's a lot of stuff that's just difficult and tedious, but there's sort of these guardrails in place where I don't. My aspirations aren't to hire tons of people and basically grow at all costs and not really care about like my personal life. So I think it's about striking a balance there. And there's definitely room to pursue growth while also keeping things in check.

[00:06:52] And I think that's what a lot of this is about. It's about scaling your outputs and being careful about how you choose to spend your time so that. You can scale while also maintaining that, uh, very lean structure.

[00:07:08] Ian Misner: I mean, there's so much to dig into there actually. It's the choosing you, you kind of, there's like five different paths I could go based on what you just said, but mm-hmm.

[00:07:16] It's specifically like, you know, the, how, how do you decide where, how do you like, decide what is the next big thing? Like what is the thing that is gonna allow you to scale your outputs? Like do you and your, do, do you and your partner discuss it? Like how do you, do you rank it? Is it by vibes? What, what's,

[00:07:35] Ben Sibley: yeah, that, you know, that's like, that's the, the secret sauce, isn't it?

[00:07:38] Um, so the, the way we have our work defined, he does all development the whole time, and I think the way we both see it, product development is the most important part of the business. I used to lean even more that way. I used to think it was like 80 20 product development versus marketing. Now I think it's being more like 60 40, but he is developing like full-time all the time.

[00:08:01] That's important. And then for me, I pretty much do everything else. And so I'm trying to, whenever I have time, I'm gonna work on marketing and growth. Otherwise I'm focused on customer support, um, testing, more housekeeping kind of stuff. But, um. That. That's pretty much how we divide the labor and then trying to choose what feature to build next is.

[00:08:23] That's a whole discussion in itself. But the short version is it's an amalgamation of what do we have a lot of feedback on? What is getting the most up votes on our feedback board? How often are people emailing us? And then how ready do we feel to actually make this feature? Yeah.

[00:08:47] I think maybe

[00:08:47] Matt Cromwell: I love it. It's interesting. Uh, I, I've always been a little bit, um, we had three partners, um, and, uh, I liked the three partners split, um, because um, it just felt a little bit more balanced and it felt like it avoided the whole like. 50 50. Uh, in terms of like coming to an impasse because you just disagree on how something's gonna go, um, how do you deal with that, Ben?

[00:09:14] Like is it more like you have your domain and if you two disagree, you kind of win when it's your domain, but if it's his domain, um, then he wins. Like how does that work out?

[00:09:25] Ben Sibley: Yeah, there's a little bit of that I think when it comes to like, what, what should we ship next? What should we build Those, those are the biggest decisions.

[00:09:34] And we're pretty amicable about that because ultimately it's like the, the, you know, the, the best idea wins the most logical path forward. There's always a ton of room for compromise. But I think that we've also both been entrepreneurs for long enough that, you know, I will, you know, plead my case very strongly.

[00:09:53] I'll beg this is what we should do. I have all these reasons why, but if you want to dismantle that and tell me I'm wrong, I am like immediately ready to be like, oh, you're right. Like, because I've had strong convictions and been so wrong so many times that like, even while I will believe something strongly, but I'm at the same time, I'm totally prepared to be proven wrong.

[00:10:13] And so. We, yeah, we do go back and forth on what to build next sometimes, but ultimately, a lot of those decisions are like just the order of implementation. Like, okay, we'll do this first and then that The only time I think he pushes back is on occasion if there's something that people are asking for and I'm like, oh, we should do this, and I think it's gonna be a small thing.

[00:10:31] And he's like, that's gonna suck really bad. I don't wanna make that. Mm-hmm. It explains why I'm here.

[00:10:38] Ian Misner: It's one of your big benefits being like, I think all of us are small teams, right? Like the, the reality is like by the time you've shipped the version that one of you may not have loved the other co, like the big company's still debating if they're gonna do anything at all.

[00:10:51] Right. You know, you, you have sort of the luxury of just putting out a lot and getting it wrong and fixing and iterating, whereas, uh, you know, huge organizations have to like negotiate every layer, right?

[00:11:04] Ben Sibley: Yeah. And there's some degree of like. You know, if, if, if you, yourself. Are like three different departments, then you don't have to spend time having these meetings and you know, I can do a mockup and I can have an idea of how it's gonna actually functionally work.

[00:11:20] Then Andrew will really deeply understand how it's gonna work. But I can also understand what the CSS is gonna look like at the same time. And what I'm gonna put, like, I know what maybe needs to be on the sales page so I can kind of think about all these things at the same time, which is, um, would be a lot of time in meetings.

[00:11:38] If this was broken up into, you know, a bunch of different staff.

[00:11:41] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I'll be a little bit devil's advocate. I can kind of sense. Um, one big Achilles heel that probably won't show up until like five years from now. Um, but because it's the two of you, all of the institutional knowledge is just in both of your brains.

[00:11:59] Um. And, uh, probably not a ton of internal documentation happening. Um, and I, I just, I've seen that happen a few different times with different teams. Like it was me actually like me and, and my partner Devin. Like we, we just battled everything out all the time and, and never wrote stuff down. And we were the source for everything.

[00:12:19] And until we started to hire folks, and then they're like, well, what about this? What about this? We became the go-to for all of that information. And that's just like, it's just painful. Um, but do, do I, you know, this is a left ball or left curve ball question. Um, like do you do a lot of internal documentation or is it just spitball everything?

[00:12:41] Ben Sibley: I would say, so we don't have a lot of shared documentation outside of GitHub. Um, we have a tremendous amount of notes and like over a thousand issues in there, and we do our best to document things. Um, I would say otherwise a lot of, you know, my documentation, I put a lot of things in notion for myself.

[00:13:00] Yeah. But, um, no, you're, you're totally right about it. If someone else tried to just run it right now, it'll be really difficult. So. Like, I fully expect that when we're ready to sell, which will be at some point, right? Um, we are going to go through a phase of like prepping for sale, where it's like, okay, we gotta clean some of this stuff up.

[00:13:21] Mm-hmm. And we need to create those docs. And I, you know, would not be surprised if someone wanted to do an. Like acqui hire us, and they expected us to be on board for three to six months. That wouldn't be, you know, a surprise to me at all. And that's something that, you know, we're Yeah. That we have in mind.

[00:13:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. So that, but that's your intent then, that's, that's your goal is that you're, you're gonna grow the product with just the two of you as far as you possibly can. So it's like, it's actually an anti goal. Like you're, you're wanting to make sure that you don't hire, is that right?

[00:13:53] Ben Sibley: Sort of like, well, no.

[00:13:55] Yes it is. That is the goal, but it's not. I'm not going to be so stubborn that if that's what the business needs, I don't do it.

[00:14:04] Matt Cromwell: You,

[00:14:04] Ben Sibley: but the goal is not have to,

[00:14:07] Matt Cromwell: you Don's wanna hire support.

[00:14:09] Ben Sibley: Um, not until we, I feel like we really need to.

[00:14:11] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:12] Ben Sibley: No, 'cause that's a big, so that's like a major expense for a WordPress product, right?

[00:14:17] That's, you don't have to pay for hosting costs 'cause it's, it's a zip file. They host it, but. Those, you know, the customer support, that's what can scale. And that is how you can, instead of building a business, you can build a debt machine. 'cause every customer eventually costs more in support than the, than what you're selling it for.

[00:14:34] So that is like a, a major leverage point. And so I spend a lot of time, um, trying to scale the way we handle support through AI and knowledge based content, FAQs and all those different resources.

[00:14:49] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. For sure you're talking to two support folks and, um, we know what it means to be a cog. So

[00:14:56] Ian Misner: I was ta I was chatting with Katie the other day and, um, complaining about a support issue I was working on, and she was like, why are you doing that?

[00:15:04] Like, I, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanna talk to these co like I do it whether I need to. It's, it's fun, you know, whatever. Yeah. So,

[00:15:12] Ben Sibley: yeah, it's like, it sucks, but it's also fun at the same time. It really keeps you in touch with your market. 'cause you're like in the trenches every day. Understanding.

[00:15:22] Yeah. Not even just like features they're requesting and bugs they're having, but also just the language they're using and how they feel about these things.

[00:15:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Ian Misner: Yeah. And, and I don't know about you guys, but like we have for a number of our, like bigger products, we have this like, um. The small list of customers, it's very informal, but they've become like avatars for the product.

[00:15:39] They're the people that they ask for something. It's like, yeah, I mean, I don't get it, but like I get that this is our customer, we're gonna go do it. So you know, those people, we do probably spend more time on than we need to, and like, you know, whether it could be handed off to support, who cares? The time spent with that user is more valuable to us than it is to them, and they don't even necessarily know it, you know?

[00:16:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:16:01] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:16:02] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Interesting. Um, Ben, what's your take on? So you're talking about costs. So you wanna reduce costs and support is costs. Like, and if you get a thousand tickets a week, like you gotta get somebody on support, um, you're not there yet. Um, maybe you'll get there and maybe you need support at some point or another, but until then you have other costs.

[00:16:23] You're paying yourselves, right? Like are you lean when it comes to paying yourselves? I, I mean, I'm not asking you to give us a pay stub here or anything, but like how far does your lean methodology go? Like across the whole, all the costs and all the expenses, like,

[00:16:39] Ben Sibley: uh, no, we like to pay ourselves.

[00:16:41] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:16:43] Ben Sibley: Yeah. No, we, we took a while before, actually the first year we didn't pay ourselves at all. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then after a year of this. We, I remember we both wrote ourselves a check for like $3,000. It was just like an amount that we could pay ourselves. It was something, and then we weren't. Able to pay ourselves enough to support ourselves for it.

[00:17:04] It took about two years, um, until we were at that point. And so yeah, now we, we set aside, we set aside enough to build sort of a marketing war chest in terms of reinvestment. It, it sounds really simple, right? Like, oh, we have more profits. We'll reinvest, and then you reinvest. And it's like, well, that just lost money, and that lost money and that lost money.

[00:17:23] So it's kind of. Sometimes difficult to find ways to spend on marketing that give you a good return. And so we've become a little bit cautious with that, but we always set aside money every single month to, um, jump at any different opportunities that that come up with marketing in particular.

[00:17:41] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine.

[00:17:44] Ian, I'd love to hear a little bit from you, like what's your take on this whole idea? Um, I know that your team is, is not as lean as Ben's, but um, but you're a pretty small team for the amount of work that you're doing. What, how many folks do you have? And, um, I mean,

[00:17:58] Ian Misner: it's depending on how you count, right?

[00:18:00] We only got like somewhere around six, seven people. We got a bunch of, uh, contractors that help out with things as well though, right? So, um, that being said, we got like 40 something products. Some of them have a lot of users, there's a lot of work flowing around and you know, my thoughts on like staying lean is there's this sort of like math you can do of like the time you spend on something and how much cheaper it would be to bring someone in to do that.

[00:18:22] That like, there is this sort of like natural conclusion you could take that where, well if I hired for all these things then I have all this time to go do all the growth and the marketing that I, you know, probably should be doing. But like I, I have a very similar experience to what you're describing, man, of like.

[00:18:37] You know, I don't know if that actually does bring quite as much magic. As what it potentially could, um, for an org like ours at least. But I do find like we have a lot of like measures for like the way we make decisions that are really about keeping the operations lean on intentionally. And I brought this up on prior episodes even of like our primary support metric is conversations per thousand active licenses and like every support interaction.

[00:19:04] Is about figuring out how to identify, like what's the root cause, how do we make sure that the next person doesn't need us for this? Uh, and it really ties back to like, um, you know, you go write the doc so they don't need to ask for help or you go fix the product. So they never needed it, but like. Every single day we're doing some of those things across our product suite, and we don't really even break it down as like, on a per product basis, except for a couple of the biggest ones.

[00:19:30] It's really just, is it going to drive down these, like cost levers? Is it going to help make this the most palatable solution for a, a new audience that we don't have yet? And if it doesn't do one of those things, we usually just don't do it, frankly.

[00:19:44] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:19:46] Ian Misner: that does mean though, that like my spot in that ends up being often.

[00:19:50] Tying all the things that we're missing together so that, you know, we are keeping that like, I don't know, like the, well, sometimes you do it just because it's better, you know, none of the spreadsheets say that this actually matters, but, you know, we still gotta squeeze in some of those, like, like where does AI go?

[00:20:10] You know what I mean? Where does AI go in this thing? You still, you just need someone to just figure it out, I guess. Yeah. So, yeah.

[00:20:17] Ben Sibley: Yeah, and I feel like, yeah, a big part of this, like what's enjoyable about the support is that. When you're, you're also, you're not just answering that one person most of the time, you can turn that into something that's improving the business.

[00:20:32] Yeah. So actually I, I like it when someone finds a bug because it's like, great, we're gonna improve the product, we're gonna fix that.

[00:20:36] Ian Misner: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:37] Ben Sibley: And finding ways to, you know, something I'll even do, it's, it's tough to answer people's questions well, and try to be empathetic and all those types of things.

[00:20:45] That's one mindset. But then to also have this mindset of like, oh, let me solve the root. Problem. That's like a different type of work. So something I actually do is in the moment I might just be like helping the person and then I'll revisit closed tickets with that mindset. And I'm, I'm thinking, how can I never get this email again?

[00:21:06] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:06] Ben Sibley: Like, I, I don't want to get that same subject again. And most of the time. There's something you can do. Um, that's why, yeah. The only support questions that I, I really hate are the ones where like, there's just something really weird and unique to this website, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna learn anything useful from this, and it's never gonna come up again.

[00:21:25] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, they're like, we have your analytics for all of our traffic, but we have another analytics just for email traffic. And you're like, why? Why

[00:21:36] Ben Sibley: we, I had someone the other day they, the campaign tracking works by finding, you know, the parameters, the question mark in the ampersands. That's how you find parameters in URL.

[00:21:45] And their site was just it. Any question marks, it would just turn them into hashtags. So then the tracking would work. And I'm like, well, just don't do that. Why are you doing that?

[00:21:55] Ian Misner: I mean, it's one of the ways to stay lean is be unapologetic about it. You know, here's, this is how you're gonna fix it, and if you don't fix it this way, it's not for you.

[00:22:04] I mean, we've ended up with a few refunds now and again for being pretty blunt on those sorts of things. And I don't know it, it really isn't worth it eventually, you know? Yeah.

[00:22:14] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:22:14] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:22:16] Matt Cromwell: I'll say from, from my perspective, thinking back to, uh, early days of, of Give wp, um, we, we, our take in general, we had a, we had a third partner who was running our finance, and I really liked his approach to, to budgeting and finance overall.

[00:22:32] Um, and, um, he helped us to kind of basically create buckets of expenses essentially. Um. Now the, I think the fear with like buckets of expenses, um, is that like it gets close to the end of the year and you're like, haven't spent the whole bucket and then it's like all of a sudden you're buying a copy machine.

[00:22:53] Um, like that kind of thing is, is the problem. But what it did too is it ensured that, like, even as we were hiring, as long as our expenses stayed in, in those percentage ranges, so like for example, we knew that all of our marketing ex expenses, whether it was ad spend or any other sponsorships or or going to Word camps, all of that, that was gonna be 15% of revenue.

[00:23:18] Um, we just said. That's, that's set aside for, for marketing purposes across the board. And if we spent a lot on ad spend, that meant probably one less word camp or something like that. Um, and similar with our support team. Support team was also capped at 15%. Um, we were like, we know that we're gonna spend, uh, on these costs of goods sold, um, but let's cap it at 15% of, of revenue.

[00:23:47] Um, and um, I felt like overall it was a good approach. I don't know if it made us particularly lean, but it definitely ensured that we had the profit margin that we wanted. Um, regardless of how big the team got at the end of the day,

[00:24:00] Ian Misner: it's pretty similar to this type of constraint. I think that we're hearing from you, Ben, is that, you know.

[00:24:05] So you keep the two of you, what can you get done? You know, if you have a cap on how much revenue can be applied to an area, what can you get done? It's just constraints one way or another, right?

[00:24:15] Ben Sibley: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And for us, we're choosing, um, time constraints, you know, maybe even more so than cost constraints.

[00:24:22] Um. And I think that we, we move fast enough, you know, people, our, our users are satisfied with how quickly we, we release new features. Um, I think if we had more competitors that were moving really quickly, if they were venture funded and stuff like that, then maybe we'd be like, okay, we now we have to. Or maybe ourselves get funding if we need to, to hire more developers to scale and to, you know, develop features as quickly as their competition.

[00:24:49] But that's not what our situation is. So we're content with how fast we're moving and yeah, it's basically like an ideology that we're seeing through in sort of, um, uh, this works for us, so we're gonna do it this way, kind of approach.

[00:25:04] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting.

[00:25:08] Ian Misner: Yeah. This, this actually more a broad. Th there is something I'm hearing though, that I sort of very strongly agree with of this.

[00:25:16] Like, you know, the, you know, the problem of, you know, making the product good, making support, good using it within the constraints. But then I think you and I have both shared that like, you know, what do we do about growth? How do you find that next? Bajillion users or whatever. Mm-hmm. And the fact that like there's this problem statement of like, I don't know if this is an issue of expertise or time spent in an area, but there is this problem statement of like, how do you do better at the growth part?

[00:25:40] How do you find the places to invest that money? And like, whether you need the time, like is it worth exploring going beyond that constraint to bring in like expertise or something like. You know, actually there's a genuine question, like, please help. You know what I mean?

[00:25:57] Ben Sibley: Yeah. It, that is, it's really, really hard, um, finding any sort of marketing or like promotion tactic that's gonna work.

[00:26:06] In fact, the only thing. We, we have on occasion, um, hired YouTubers to do videos about independent analytics, just as like a single example that tends to work best. If they do like a dedicated video about our product, um, that works pretty well. But for the most part, what we spend on is, you know, uh, we have, um.

[00:26:25] Uh, a marketing coach, Adam Weeks that we hire, and that's like most months the only marketing spend is someone advising us and telling us, okay, go do this and go do that. And then it's, um, you know, trying to use our time effectively to get these things done. So yeah, having good guidance is, is probably the most important thing because.

[00:26:46] When you try to reinvest in marketing it, a lot of it ends up being throwing money at stuff. That kind of sort of works. And if something does work, then you're like, can I, how much more can I spend on this? Because it actually works.

[00:27:00] Matt Cromwell: Well, you spend in two ways. You spend money or you spend time and I mean, those are the restraints that you're dealing with all the time.

[00:27:08] And if you find like, okay, well. We can spend let's, like, we can go and, and, and spend a whole bunch of YouTube influencer money. Um, and that will bring a certain ROI, um, or we can write a whole bunch of emails and a whole bunch of blog posts and that's gonna have a different ROI. Um, and we don't spend a lot of money there, but we spend a whole ton of time.

[00:27:32] Um, but in order to spend that time, then something else as a founder or a co-founder, I'm not doing that something else. Um, and that's where it starts to get tight, I think. Where, where all of a sudden you're like, okay, well here's a growth lever that I need to pull. So I have to choose, am I gonna say no to all these other obligations?

[00:27:53] So that I can spend all this time doing this growth lever, um, or are we gonna hire, like, can, do you have any, do you have a good example of, I'm sure you've, you're probably thinking about those tensions like every day. Um, but like, do you have any good examples of that?

[00:28:08] Ben Sibley: Yeah. Um, and well, like social media marketing is something I'm still.

[00:28:15] Wrapping my head around, uh, specifically doing like video marketing and stuff like that. We could hire someone to start pumping those out. But I do feel like we need to sort of find what works for us first before we invest in that. And my approach of dealing with this conundrum is basically to. If, if you're selling, if you have a job, right, you're, you're selling your time basically.

[00:28:38] And if you are selling a service, it's the same thing. Once you sell a product, you can scale your time. But even within that product business, there are still times when you can spend time for like a. A one-off return. So social media marketing can be like that where if you're posting on Facebook every day, once you're done posting, okay, you got those visitors to your site, but you're left with nothing else.

[00:29:01] And so something I try to do even, and it's tough to do with like a lot of marketing activities, but I try to build either the product or build the website so I'm still scaling my output. So while you know, I'm not knocking social media marketing, I'm trying to get more involved in that. I would rather make an improvement to our checkout page or to our homepage.

[00:29:23] Like I'd rather make a video for our homepage necessarily than publishing a bunch of videos on social media because those are gonna come and go. Whereas the improvement to our website, that's like an asset we're building, and so it's getting better and better. So that, yeah, basically trying to focus on building what we have is a way that I'm able to improve our marketing in a way that is lasting and doesn't just.

[00:29:46] Come and go.

[00:29:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I've had a couple different conversations with folks who, who also have similar aspirations to you that like, I want to, I, I wanna stay lean for as long as I possibly can and not hire out. And I, and. I have my own experiences where I, we didn't stay lean in terms of team members or total expenses.

[00:30:09] Um, but we did have a, a, a good size profit margin, um, that we enjoyed. And I felt like that that was a good balance for us. Um, and I, but because of, because I have my own experiences, I have a really hard time imagining a situation where I'm like. No, I don't wanna hire for that. Like I, because I, I just, I just constantly, like, I know I can accomplish so much more if we just get somebody who's gonna care about social media when they wake up every morning because I don't like, but I need somebody who does, you know, that like, to me, and maybe that's, maybe that's my fault, like that I.

[00:30:46] I too quickly will want to, um, hire, um, rather than, uh, get scrappy. I'm not sure. I'm, I'm, I'm processing out loud a little bit. Ian, do you relate to what I'm saying?

[00:30:58] Ian Misner: I mean, I'm, maybe, if anything could learn a little bit from that approach, you know, I, I am more than happy to just wing it and, you know. The, the thing that I, actually, this may be a problem, but it's like, I think I like the version that I can do in a couple hours a week is probably 80% as good as what an expert can do with like a proper investment in the effort and the time.

[00:31:20] And like, whether that's overconfidence just wrong, it doesn't really matter. It is pretty good and it does work and number go up and like the second you start adding all the infrastructure of like people and like somebody to own the thing. It's like. That becomes the work and that, you know, we've done that before.

[00:31:36] Right. And it has like as we've scaled there gets to a point where you literally just need somebody because the work is no longer, like 80% stops being good enough, but also it isn't a few hours. It's way more hours.

[00:31:49] Mm-hmm.

[00:31:49] Ian Misner: Like both of those things start to break and supports like the obvious example of that, I think.

[00:31:54] But you know, like growth marketing, um, social media is a really great one where somebody who's like, like native to that really great at that can do, they're not doing a hundred percent, they're doing like 300%. You know, like that. Being great at that is a skill and like having somebody to handle that would be wonderful.

[00:32:12] Theoretically though, like once you have them, that's, it's kind of a trap door. I'm really bad at firing people, man. So it's kinda, you know what I mean? Like it's the, once they're there, they're there now. And you know, that's sorta of, it's, you're unlikely to undo it. And even if you did. You know, it's, it, the step backwards feels bad outside of the people problem.

[00:32:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Ian Misner: Right?

[00:32:36] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, in many ways you have to hire for things that, you know, are, are part of the meat and potatoes of the business, you know? Right. And we all. I, I, I don't know for sure, but I feel like none of us here are micromanagers and so none of us want to hire folks that need to be a whole lot of handholding.

[00:32:56] They need to know what they're doing all the time and be productive and all that kind of thing. Uh, it definitely has its risks. Um, uh,

[00:33:03] Ian Misner: yeah, there's, being part of a small team gives you the opportunity of like everyone is. Amazing. Everyone's great and like, you know, you hand a problem to somebody and they come back not just with an answer, but then they went and fixed the three things next to it because they were there anyways.

[00:33:17] Matt Cromwell: Yeah,

[00:33:17] exactly.

[00:33:17] Ian Misner: And like that is something that the bigger a team gets. I think, I'm sure it's possible to scale a team to thousands of people, hundreds of people, and maintain some degree of that. But like, I don't know if anyone has, you know, no, so definitely not. It's kind,

[00:33:29] Matt Cromwell: it's hard to find those kinds of PE people because the truth is, what that requires is basically skin in the game.

[00:33:38] They ha they have to like right, actually care about the business, uh, in order to do something that's. More than just their job, you know? Um, and it's hard to find folks who are, who, who want to just benefit the business, uh, in their role, uh, rather than just like, you know, punch the card. Um,

[00:33:55] Ian Misner: yeah, we, we've done a lot of actually bringing people from support into product engineering, those types of roles, uh, kero and prior to Kestrel, partially because a lot of the times those folks, they.

[00:34:06] Care so much like the empathy for the customer is so deeply rooted into just like the person that, like they will do what Right. By a customer regardless of what role you give them. Um, which, and I could go on a whole

[00:34:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:34:20] Ian Misner: Rant about that. But it's, it's one of the ways that you can get some amount of that,

[00:34:24] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:34:24] Ian Misner: From, from folks, but for

[00:34:25] Matt Cromwell: sure.

[00:34:26] Ian Misner: Again, it's just, there's, there's a limit to it, I would say. Yeah.

[00:34:30] Matt Cromwell: Ben, I wanna lean in, uh, circle back a little bit to your, um, example you gave about like, yeah, I could go out there, write a whole bunch of blog posts, but I know that long term it'll benefit me more to optimize my checkout.

[00:34:42] Um, that's a choice you make for sure, but at some point you're gonna need to do those social media things too. Um, right. Um, what, how do you, how do you maintain the leanness but still scale your marketing opportunities? Uh, like you, you know what I mean? Like how do you actually. Make those choices and get the most out of your time, um, when you don't have the people to lean on.

[00:35:10] Ben Sibley: Yeah, so a big part of it is optimizing parts of the product and the website, so. If we want to convert more free users into paying customers, something I might do is maybe we, um, add a, a different button or design element into the interface itself that takes people to the pro landing page. Maybe optimize that pro landing page a little bit more, maybe collect some more reviews, get some video testimonials.

[00:35:37] That's something that we wanna do, making changes to the website. Into the product itself is like the way that we can scale marketing then when it comes to like content creation, like we have just straight up not really been doing very much of that. I used to be a big SEO guy and that is like done, that's not really a thing anymore.

[00:35:57] Um, you know, we get traffic from Google because people search for independent analytics, but um, you know, you look at what else ranks and it's like, yeah, there's, there's no shot at showing up at the top instead of Reddit and wordpress.org and stuff like that. So. Um, I'm basically viewing that as that this level of promotion where we're really going out there and reaching higher up into the funnel, and especially reaching people who maybe aren't looking for a solution right now.

[00:36:26] I, I kind of view that as almost like a next phase of the business and we're sort of getting there now. And so for me, before I start paying a bunch of other people to make content, I am. Experimenting finding what works because I've, my idea originally was I was gonna start doing some longer YouTube videos and I looked at other WordPress plugin businesses, a lot of them that I admire.

[00:36:47] And no one's really killing it. Like I would see very well produced videos that are like 10 minutes long, which at that quality could take 20, 30 hours to make. Yeah. And they'd get like 200 views. And I said, okay, I'm definitely not gonna do that. Or spend two grand to get 200 views on YouTube video. So I've been experimenting with, you know, what works for us.

[00:37:10] And so I think once I. Get that locked in when it comes to content creation, that kind of thing. I will not be doing everything myself. I will be. You know, using automation and outsourcing in some capacity. I don't know if that means hiring someone to do it full time, but, um, outs outsourcing in some capacity for that.

[00:37:31] Yeah,

[00:37:32] Matt Cromwell: yeah,

[00:37:32] Ian Misner: yeah, yeah. I do wanna add something there. 'cause like, I mean, we haven't hired for any of that at Kero and like, I mean, it is mostly me. Some of the other team helps out with it and all that. Uh, to question on the, the SEO though, it's like, I think I agree that it doesn't work in the way that we think about it.

[00:37:47] Like. From back in the day, you know, like just you write a lot of articles, get a lot of traffic, but like, if you choose like some pages, um, I'm gonna use WooCommerce checkout as an example 'cause we are all over that. Um, but the WooCommerce checkout search, you know, you got the video section, you got the ad section, you got the actual organic section.

[00:38:07] But then to your point, like there is.org and Reddit and woocommerce.com are gonna be there. But like you can do the work of showing up in those. As well, right? Like one step down the funnel. And so, you know, make sure that you are, somebody searches the term they find you from the.org space, or they're on woocommerce.com.

[00:38:26] You know, there's ways to get, and it's a, it's a lot of high effort work to get in there, but like you can like still own a search term. It's just not like SEO, it's go do 67. Different things.

[00:38:39] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:38:40] Ian Misner: So

[00:38:41] Ben Sibley: yeah, and actually to your point, one of the, one of the like biggest growth spurts we ever had was when our.

[00:38:49] wordpress.org page, our plugin page suddenly started ranking very highly for, uh, like WordPress analytics plugin or analytics for WordPress, something like that. It became like the first or second result, and, and that had a, a huge impact. And that's because we had carefully optimized that page. And I, I'd forgotten about it, right?

[00:39:09] Because I, it was like months, years before it suddenly did that. And then it was like a. Yeah, I'm happy. Surprise.

[00:39:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:39:16] Ian Misner: Yeah. And I, I, we, I'm like half convincing myself I need someone to do what I just described though, because it's like, there, like again, we've done it for five or six, like search pages.

[00:39:27] It's like the page, you pick a page instead of a bunch of keywords and you just try to be all over the page and it's like a way to find you. Um, it is a lot of work though, so.

[00:39:36] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:37] Ben Sibley: Yeah. I feel kind of like burned out with SEO after, so. I, I have, um, I WordPress theme shop, which I, I, I don't, um, manage as actively anymore, anymore.

[00:39:47] Um, but that used to get, I, I really leaned into the list posts for a while and I wasn't super proud of it 'cause it was kind of like, I don't know, it's not what you grow up wanting to do with your life, but that's what I was doing to grow for a while. And you know, Google would release these updates and they'd be like, oh, well it's gonna affect the search results, but it's not gonna impact any individual site that much.

[00:40:09] And they'd be like, well, I just lost half my traffic. So I don't think that's true. And it has happened over and over and over again. And now I look at the results and it was bad before they put in ai and they put in the AI suggestions. So it's like, okay, we can't, you have to pay to play for. Commercial intent keywords.

[00:40:26] Now all the informational intent keywords are ai. It's gotten so tough that, um, it, I think I feel really, uh, turned off of the whole thing, but looking at it in terms of like showing up on Reddit in other pages, that, that does make sense.

[00:40:42] Matt Cromwell: It's a little bit ironic since your product is an analytics tool, but

[00:40:47] Ben Sibley: I can tell you how much search engine traffic you're getting at and how much AI traffic you get.

[00:40:51] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. What's the alternative then? What, what, what do you, what is, where would, where do you spend your time in marketing then, if it's not SEO?

[00:41:00] Ben Sibley: Um, a lot. Well. Lemme see. I mean, to be honest, I don't spend that much time specifically, like on marketing, outside of making updates to the product and making updates to the website.

[00:41:13] I really am not doing a lot of like, going out to get customers.

[00:41:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:41:16] Ben Sibley: Um, a lot of that is, you know, the, the, the wordpress.org working for us and then that itself ranking well. And then just capitalizing on that.

[00:41:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:41:28] Ben Sibley: Getting everyone have a good experience, um, converting free users to paying customers as much as possible.

[00:41:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:41:35] Ben Sibley: And, and then of course, you know, the brand building stuff coming on, podcasts and things like that help a lot. And I think that probably helps with AI citations and stuff like that. Um, it's more like brand building stuff really. Um, occasionally paying YouTubers to do videos and things like that. So it's a, for us, it's a.

[00:41:54] Pretty soft touch. It's not, not a whole lot of going out to get customers.

[00:41:58] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. What I hear folks watching the episode right now saying already is, uh, uh, once you got up in the search, um, uh, on the plugin directory, then things got a lot easier. Um, but getting there is the hard part. Um, getting that your plugin, that that.org starts to actually work for you, not against you.

[00:42:21] That's the hard part.

[00:42:22] Ian Misner: But then to tie that back to what you said about the list posts, does that not scare you to some degree, right? Like I, I dot org's pretty stable. If you're up there, you're up there. It's one of the things people complain about. But what if it changed one day, right? Mm-hmm. And that's.

[00:42:37] Maybe that's, uh, too much for this topic, but yeah, throw it out there anyways, right?

[00:42:41] Ben Sibley: No, no. Um, no, I think it's good. Uh, when we launched the product, um, putting it onto wordpress.org, the plugin repository was super helpful because right away we're getting like 10 downloads a day. That might sound like nothing, but if you have your own website, getting 10 people to actually download it a day might mean getting a thousand people to your website every single day.

[00:43:02] So the repository helps a lot, um, right off the bat. And then it's about, um, building the product from there, making sure it's a really good experience optimizing that page, but. A lot of it comes from people installing and then keeping it installed. So we really started from almost from scratch, um, on the repository.

[00:43:24] The other thing, and I actually forgot about this, the other thing that did give us a good boost at the beginning was since I had compete themes already, um. I was, I, I put, I used the, I forgot what it's called, the TGM Plugin Activation Plugin, where it recommends other ones. Yeah. I put that into all my themes to recommend our plugin.

[00:43:41] Mm. So that also gave us a little jumpstart. Mm-hmm. It wasn't like massive, but that gave us a little bit of a jumpstart. A lot of our early users were compete themes, users, but otherwise, you know. Choosing a good niche, having a good product, making it really professional and well designed through the whole experience from when they first see the plugin page to when they use it to the email tutorials you send them.

[00:44:05] Having that all work really well builds a lot of trust and makes, gets people to continue using it. Um, so. It, we, we did rank, I forgot about, like I was talking about the, the wordpress.org page ranking in Google, but as far as ranking within wordpress.org itself, that happens pretty quickly unless you choose, if you're choosing like, uh, like a backup plugin or something where there's tons of solutions, that might be really tough.

[00:44:29] Yeah. For analytics, there's not that many dedicated analytics plugins, so we got onto the first page pretty quickly down to, you know, the bottom of it, and then slowly rose over time. The number of active installs does matter a lot, but it's not the be all end all. In fact, something that actually matters a lot is the percentage of closed support tickets.

[00:44:52] So a lot of times, you know, I'll go in there and I'll see five unanswered tickets. It's all people that I answer their question, but they didn't mark as resolved and it's been like a month. So I, I jump in there and Mark has resolved and we're currently, you know, the. Fourth result for analytics, and then the next day we're back up to number two.

[00:45:09] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:45:09] Ben Sibley: And I really don't think it changes things that much when you go from number four to number two or to number one. Yeah. I think just being top four, top six is, it's not like Google. I think that's pretty much, you're getting a lot of it, so. Yeah,

[00:45:24] Matt Cromwell: actually a live tweet with somebody, uh, like about a year ago, they were like, I'm I, you know, I'm a, I'm great at, in the plugin directory all the time.

[00:45:34] All of a sudden it's way down low, um, what's going on? And everybody was like, oh, you should tweak this headline that you should tweak this headline. I was like, no, you should close out your support tickets. And he did it right there during the thread. And then he is like, okay, I'm back up in a second. I was like, that's right.

[00:45:50] Yeah.

[00:45:51] Ben Sibley: Yeah. I think the algorithm has trouble deciding which one to do, and that's like a tiebreaker.

[00:45:55] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:45:56] Ian Misner: The, the, it's not all open, but you can actually go look at the old track tickets for when they've changed it and it, yeah, they should like, it is pretty straightforward how to get ranked up on there.

[00:46:06] Yeah, I mean, people overcomplicate it for themselves. I would say. I did a search analytics on.org Right now you're next to Google, so I think you're doing okay.

[00:46:14] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:15] Ian Misner: Okay.

[00:46:15] Ben Sibley: Alright.

[00:46:16] Ian Misner: Yeah, maybe people should copy whatever you've done as far as the right way to handle it. It's great.

[00:46:21] Ben Sibley: And we, there is another plugin with like 2 million installs.

[00:46:23] We have a hundred thousand and we rank above it. Sometimes, some days we do, some days we don't. So it's not like you can't rank above those in the repository just 'cause they have 10 times. Um, your installs, but also you mentioned, you're asking me about relying on the repository. Yeah. And I would say. I feel much more comfortable relying on the repository than any other like major tech marketplace because it's so stable.

[00:46:51] Um, I don't trust Facebook, YouTube, any, Google, any of these other companies at all.

[00:46:56] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:46:56] Ben Sibley: But. So to your point, I think brand building is really like the most important thing right now because like lots of our search traffic is people, at least to our website, is people, it's branded searches. And so building the brand, being out there.

[00:47:12] That's the most important thing. We're at the point where now if someone goes on Reddit and they say, ah, I need analytics, but I don't want there to be any cookies, like people recommend us. And that's not us going out there saying, Hey, try us. It's, we're just out there at this point getting those recommendations.

[00:47:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah,

[00:47:28] Ian Misner: I was actually gonna mention something similar to that when you were talking earlier about how great the product is, making sure they keep it and keep using it, that value. Um, when you, you don't need social media quite as much if other people are, you know, um. We get compared to the other big solution automatically.

[00:47:44] And it's like, I agree with what people say on Reddit, but they say it for us, so it's great. Yeah.

[00:47:48] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:49] Ian Misner: Sorry, I cut you off, Matt. Go, go

[00:47:50] Matt Cromwell: for it. No, no, no. That's good. I, I was, uh, I was saying this has been great and I think it's, uh, about time for best advice. What do you guys think? Yeah. Um, yeah,

[00:48:03] Ian Misner: let's do it.

[00:48:04] Matt Cromwell: Ian. Um, what is your best advice to folks who are trying to stay lean?

[00:48:09] Ian Misner: I mean, it really is just a matter of, um, choosing to stay lean. I mean, I know it sounds very dumb, but it's ultimately, it's, I, I, I think that very much what Ben has been saying, you can support a lot of users with very few people. If you just care enough, you try really hard, you're willing to sort of bounce around and do all the various things.

[00:48:29] Um, I will say though, that for us as a company, having sort of these measures in place that help people make decisions on their own around, you know, like. Should I spend time on fixing this weird bug? Well, does it impact a lot of users or you know, is it one person? And sort of building that into your sort of standard procedures for operating is really helpful.

[00:48:49] You know, give people the tools to know that they are supposed to help make it easier to support more users with fewer people in their day-to-day work. Yeah. Um.

[00:48:58] Matt Cromwell: Uh, I'll just say my, my best advice for folks honestly is, um, I like the bucketing your expenses approach that we did. Um, it's not necessarily, uh, the objective to be lean necessarily, but it is a way to make sure you're controlling your cost.

[00:49:16] Um, and, uh, and, and scaling your, your company in a way that you feel good about at the end of the day. Um, and if you decide that those buckets are gonna be smaller, uh, in order for your team to be leaner, um, you could do that too. Um, you just, you know, make different choices in terms of how, how big each expense should be.

[00:49:37] Um, but I think the other buckets that you have to think about besides just how you. How you bucket your, your budget itself is how you bucket your time. Um, I do think that in order to, to to stay pretty lean and but still get all the work done, time blocking is probably the most important skill that you can develop.

[00:49:56] Uh, honestly. Uh, because the temptation, when you are the end all, be all of like all the things like Ben is and like I was in my business too, is it gets so frenetic. It's like there's 25 things I could do right now. Let me just do a little bit of all of 'em instead of, and then you basically do none of them over the course of an hour.

[00:50:20] Ian Misner: This might be a little too honest, but it's really easy to procrastinate by doing the work you like. You know, it's, it's really easy to just go do the thing that you think is easy, pleasant, and use that as a way to not do the one or two things that are really gonna move the needle today. It's

[00:50:35] Matt Cromwell: a good one.

[00:50:35] Maybe we should add a segment to the show called Confession Time.

[00:50:39] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:50:40] Matt Cromwell: Very Catholic on everybody. Come on.

[00:50:43] Ian Misner: Hey man. I do it a lot. Uh, but yeah, it is. Yeah. And support. I like helping people. It is what it is. Yeah.

[00:50:50] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:50:50] Ian Misner: Sorry

[00:50:51] Matt Cromwell: Ben, I saved the best for last. What's your best advice to folks who want to stay lean?

[00:50:55] Ben Sibley: Sure. So I would say take stock of everything you're doing to run your company and try to find any work that is kind of one off and see if you can make it scale in some way. So if you're answering an email. Is there a new knowledge base article you could add so that the next person answers it on their own?

[00:51:14] Or if you're, you know, publishing a video on social media, can you also publish that somewhere on your website so that people can keep watching it and enjoying it over time?

[00:51:23] Matt Cromwell: Love it. Great advice. It's

[00:51:25] Ben Sibley: amazing. Yeah.

[00:51:27] Matt Cromwell: Well, folks, uh, that is a wrap. Ben. Thank you so much for joining us. Uh, where can people find you online?

[00:51:34] Ben Sibley: Uh, yeah, we can find, um, you can go to independent wp.com to check out our product. We're also on, um, X at analytics for WP, and we're on Facebook, blue sky, YouTube, everywhere. You wanna look us up?

[00:51:47] Matt Cromwell: Awesome.

[00:51:49] Ian Misner: Yeah. And, uh, if you guys are enjoying these shows, do us a favor. Subscribe. Hit the button on YouTube.

[00:51:54] Stop right now. Do it. It's free, it's easy, and it's, uh, it's the best way you can help other people discover the show. Thank you.

[00:52:01] Matt Cromwell: And next

[00:52:03] Ian Misner: week special thanks to Freemius again, actually. Absolutely. I'm supposed to say that. Yeah, there we're,

[00:52:07] Matt Cromwell: I was. Say that with, man. This today's been great on the workflow. We've been so good, so dialed in.

[00:52:13] It's

[00:52:14] Ian Misner: on top of it all. It's perfect.

[00:52:17] Matt Cromwell: Next week we're gonna have, uh, Ben Pines with us. I'm excited about this one. Ben's a great guy who's been in this space for a long time. He wants to talk about founder led marketing. I'll say, I'm gonna put a post out. Today, tomorrow. Um, we have a great season, Ben. Uh, Sibley.

[00:52:34] Uh, two Bens back to back. Bens. Sorry about that. Um, it kicked off our new season and we have eight episodes coming up that are jam packed. It's a bit marketing heavy, I have to say, uh, which honestly, most of our audience is always asking. I need some more marketing tips. So you're gonna love this season and, uh, we will see you all again next week.

[00:52:55] Thanks so much. Have a good one.