29: Prioritize or Die

The SaaS Venture

FULL SHOW NOTES

[INTRO music]

0:00:10.5 Aaron Weiche: Episode 29, Prioritize or Die.

0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

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0:00:42.5 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:46.0 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:48.0 AW: Did you see what I did with that clickbait title of our episode today, Darren?

0:00:52.9 DS: I did actually. I wrote something different, but yours is way better, yeah, that's good. [chuckle]

0:00:56.8 AW: I think I was mostly trying to avoid, right? You had wrote prioritization and I was like, that just sounds like a word that I will somehow mangle when we go to hit record, and then yeah, I just went all-out sensationalism and clickbait and...

0:01:12.2 DS: And I actually think, not only is it clickbait-y, which is great, but it also was accurate. I think that it's really the theme of this episode.

0:01:20.9 AW: Yeah, and it's not... As we get into it, it's not an instant death, it's just probably a slow death if...

0:01:28.8 DS: Absolutely.

0:01:29.8 AW: You don't adhere to it. And yeah, I'm super excited to get into that. But it's been five weeks since we've last recorded, and we caught up a little bit before hitting record. Sometimes I think we should just hit record the second we get on and let people hear all of our small talk, and then maybe wrap that into the after show. We usually have really big... We just had some really big ideas. We'll see if we can put those into play someday. But...

0:01:57.2 DS: Yeah.

0:02:01.7 AW: What has been consuming your time this last handful of weeks?

0:02:07.0 DS: I've been busy with the summit. Just, I've been on lots of calls with the team, planning our software, and lots of summit stuff. So just trying to get all work...

0:02:19.3 AW: So you're talking about, for those that don't always listen to us, you put on a local search summit, virtual last year, it was your very first one.

0:02:29.2 DS: Yeah.

0:02:29.3 AW: Remind me again, how many speakers... I know the attendee number was super high. Like frame up how the very first one went.

0:02:36.8 DS: So our Whitespark Local Search Summit, the first one we did last year, a virtual summit, it's free to attend, pay if you want the recordings, and we had 6,000 registered... People registered for the event. We...

0:02:56.7 AW: That's so awesome.

0:02:56.8 DS: It was huge, yeah. So I was a little bit shocked with how well we did. We had 32 speakers, I think, a three-day event. And so it's a lot of work to put it together. So this year, I'm really excited about how things are shaping up. Our line-up is phenomenal. We've got incredible speakers like Aaron Weiche speaking. [laughter] So it's gonna be fantastic. I can't wait for it. We really put a lot of polish on it this year. I gotta give a shoutout to Jesse Lowe on our marketing team, she is our marketing team, and she...

0:03:29.8 AW: Go Jesse.

0:03:33.2 DS: She's done such an incredible job with the design, and we're building our website now and our sponsor deck, and just everything is just getting really nicely tweaked and polished, and it's gonna be an incredible event, and I think that we're shooting for 8,000 registrations this year, but it really feels like that level of conference quality that you might see at a Moss Con, I feel like we're hitting our stride with it this year and really kinda taken it to that next level. So been really busy with that, trying to get that stuff working out.

0:04:03.5 AW: That's just so incredible, like when you say those numbers. I remember that attendees were in the thousands, but again, first-time event, you pull it off during a pandemic.

0:04:15.1 DS: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:04:16.1 AW: Some of it probably helpful 'cause people were just so hungry for good information, good interaction. I remember, I super enjoyed... So many of the speakers are like friends and people that we see on the conference circuit that you get to see in person and have a beer with or grab dinner with, and it was just like... It was just great to hear David Mihm present. It was just great to hear people that you're used to that are smart and have something different in your day than Zoom calls with your internal team. [chuckle] So...

0:04:50.1 DS: Yeah.

0:04:51.3 AW: Those are some lofty goals, man. 8,000, that's awesome. I can't wait.

0:04:54.3 DS: I'm a little bit worried that instead of increasing our registration count, we might drop, and one of the concerns I have is just virtual conference burnout. It's like we kinda hit it and at a sweet spot last time around, whereas it's been a full year, and I don't know, my inbox is blowing up with virtual conference invites all the time, and so I just wonder if people are a little bit burnt out from it, but we'll see.

0:05:20.4 AW: Yeah, could be, but I would say in the local space, other than local you, nothing else comes close to the level of content that you put into that event. So I think no matter what, even if you stay the same, even if you're a little bit lower, like you've put something great in motion that I can't wait for it to be like an in-person, just imagine like... Imagine if you're able to pull off a 1000-person in-person conference event in local, that would be nuts.

0:05:54.7 DS: While we plan to do it, I actually have already looked into doing the conference at the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, and so one day we're gonna go to... It's like castle in the mountains, in the rocky mountains, it's so beautiful. I wanna do it there. I've looked into pricing. I would have done it if I felt confident that by 2022, we wouldn't have weird COVID variants locking us down again, but their cancellation policy is like, "You gotta sign that contract, and if you back out, you lose 75 grand." So it was like, "Okay, I can't commit." But 2023, I feel like we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it in the mountains, it's gonna be great.

0:06:35.1 AW: Oh my gosh, that sounds epic to say the least.

0:06:39.1 DS: Yeah. I want that to happen.

0:06:45.3 AW: On my side of things, you and I talked during this as friends, and then professionally on a couple of things, but I had a hard two, three weeks of being able to focus on work, which is really strange for me because I'm definitely a workaholic, work is a hobby, I just love being immersed, but the short of it is, my mom has Lewy body dementia, and it's gotten to the point where she can't live on her own, and so we had to transition her into assisted living, and the combination of visiting facilities and finding the right one for her and organizing everything that goes into a transfer like that and to some of the medical things and records and application and process, and then she was living in a town home that we owned, so cleaning that out, and then my wife and I decided to sell the town home as well, with my mom moving out of it, we just felt like the timing was right, and real estate market's great.

0:07:46.3 AW: So it was really hard. I'm normally like a lot of hours, 50, 60 hours easily of high-output work, I was probably more in the 30-hour range and having a hard time focusing 'cause of these bigger things, and it was really hard on me for a little bit because I'm just so not used to it. It was just jarring off of my normal schedule and what I usually put myself into and everything else.

So it's nice to be on the other side of that now and feel Mom has moved and settling in and that's a really... That's a g...