Stacking the Bricks Podcast EP28 - Double your Conversion Rate with Brennan Dunn
33 min

In this episode…

I've been wanting to do an episode with Brennan Dunn for a LONG time. He's one of our most successful students, having built an empire of resources and products for freelancers at doubleyourfreelancing.com. But freelancing rates aren't the only thing Brennan has figured out how to double...now he's mastered the art of personalizing on-page content to boost conversion rates, often 2x or more!

Brennan has come a long way since he joined 30x500 with the idea to build and AirBnB for homecooked meals...and in this episode you're going to learn how he built his empire by stacking the bricks.

Links & show notes

  • Brennan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brennandunn
  • Brennan's Double your Freelancing: https://doubleyourfreelancing.com
  • Brennan's Drip Automation & Personalization Course: https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/drip-course/
  • Rightmessage: https://rightmessage.io/stackingthebricks
  • Churnbuster: https://churnbuster.io

Additional Episodes, Essays, and more

  • Stacking the Bricks: http://stackingthebricks.com
  • Amy Hoy: https://twitter.com/amyhoy
  • Alex HIllman: https://twitter.com/alexhillman

Transcript

Brennan Dunn: So those were the excuses I told myself, but really, I was probably scared shitless. It’s one thing to say, “Here’s the software.” It works or it doesn’t, it’s another thing to say. “Here’s the mental framework”. Oh my God. These people are going to hate me and think I’m stupid and a fraud. Right? I mean, software works, or it doesn’t work. Information is a bit different, I think.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: What’s going on brick stackers! As always, I’m your host, Alex Hillman and I’m back today with a brand-new episode of Stacking the Bricks.

If this is your first time joining us, this is a show about the small steps, the tiny wins, and the lessons learned along the way from real people that have started businesses selling product online; creative people, just like you and me.

Today, I’m super excited that I get to share an episode with you that I’ve been wanting to do for a very, very long time. As a teacher, one of the most gratifying things that Amy and I get to experience is when students become masters of their own. When I think of masters, I can’t help but think of Brennan Dunn.

You might know Brennan from his site, DoubleYourFreelancing.com and his super popular course, Double Your Freelancing Rate, various other courses he’s created over the years and his new product, RightMessage.io.

See, the thing you need to know about Brennan is not just that he is a production machine.

That’s how he cranks out all that amazing content and is constantly building and delivering incredible value to his audience and his customers. The thing you need to know about Brennan is that he started out just like most of you.

We’re going to start out today’s story with Brennan giving a little bit of background on his experience in building a successful consulting agency, but eventually realizing it wasn’t the path he wanted to go, when he could be the one creating products and selling them to people, instead of creating products for other people to sell and leaving them to reap all the benefits of his creative work.

But this is so much more than an origin story. This is a deep dive into the strategies that Brennan has learned and deployed over the last five to seven years of building smaller products that lead to bigger products. Of building a relationship with his audience that ends up with a bigger audience, and even how to use lessons learned along the way to create the foundation for his latest SaaS that isn’t even available to the public yet, but he can’t keep up with the demand.

Brendan is a former student. He’s a colleague, most importantly a friend and someone I admire and respect and always learn new things from, anytime I get a chance to hear what he’s working on.

So, without further ado, I would love to kick things off with Brennan Dunn. I hope you listen carefully. I hope you take notes and I hope you get a ton out of this episode. That’s more than enough for an intro. I’m going to let Brennan take it away.

Brennan Dunn: So while we can start back into when I was running an agency circa 2008. That was my first kind of real proper adventure into running a business, a few clients paying a lot of money and all the stress of big payroll and all that good stuff. Then Amy was opening up 30x500, I think…what year was this? 2011 I think, something like that. Before that I done, I’d kind of always wanted to, I mean, it’s hard when you’re consulting and you’re building products for other people. You’re like, I’ve got everything I need inhouse, do it myself, I’m doing it for others. Why can’t I do it for myself?

So, I had all these itchings to go out and build like an Airbnb for food, which was dead on arrival. I’m being very naive, even though all I had to do is look at my own clients and see how many of them were abject failures, because they didn’t put any stock into the thing they were paying us to build.

Anyway, I took 35x500 and Amy had me ditch the Airbnb idea and that led me to Planscope and Planscope was my baby that emerged from the class. That was my product, which I knew is what I wanted to focus on. It addressed visible pains and it worked. I mean, it got customers. I had no exposure, no anything online. So, following the whole idea of ebombs and all that good stuff built up, I think I have like a launch list of about 300 people.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: What do you think was difficult about how you launched Planscope, knowing what you know now?

Brennan Dunn: So the mistake I made I think was because it was dependent on client projects. What that meant was somebody would need to have a new project. So, if you found the Planscope website and you’re midway through a client project or something like that, you might think to yourself, “Oh, this looks cool. I’ll come back when I am done with this project and have a new client.” Often times when they think that, they wouldn’t come back.

So, it was really hard to both get the timing right, I mean, in order to get value from it you had to make it a part of your daily habit of working with clients. You had to get your clients to buy into it. You had to get your team to buy into it. At first, I only onboarded the account owner, which is dumb because if the client doesn’t figure it out, they’re going to go back to email and the account owner is going to cancel. So, there were just a lot of mistakes I made in not really thinking through how people would actually use the product and how they would make it a part of the way they worked.

I put way too much stock into just the typical SaaS marketing side of - have a sales page up, free trial, they click it, they start the free trial. You do some attempted onboarding and then hopefully they’ll convert. So I did that and then that led me to writing content, hoping that that would generate leads for Planscope and I was building up kind of an audience of people who were interested in freelancing, but didn’t give a crap about the software. I think right around then is when Amy convinced me to write a book that was then called Double Your Freelancing Rate, which I very much resisted.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: What was the resistance?

Brennan Dunn: I did not want to write eBooks, I’m a software engineer.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Can you unpack that a little bit? What is it that you think in the mindset of an engineer, I want to be software engineering, not writing books. Is it as simple as that, or is there more to it?

Brennan Dunn: I mean, it would be wrong to call me - I shouldn’t have said software engineer. I was a self-taught coder. So that, and I also had majored in classics, so I read real books and I did not think that an eBook about pricing for freelancers was comparable in any way to real books.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: That is super interesting! So, where you personally considered the value of a source? My eBook is never going to be a classic, so why bother?

Brennan Dunn: Well, no, so those were the excuses I told myself, but really, I was probably scared shitless. It’s one thing to say, here’s the software, “it works, or it doesn’t.” It’s another thing to say, “Here’s the mental framework.” Oh my God, these people are gonna hate me and think I’m stupid in a fraud. I mean, software works, or it doesn’t work. Information is a bit different, I think.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: That’s very interesting. So, Amy issues you this challenge, you resisted like crazy, but what made you bite the bullet and actually give it a shot?

Brennan Dunn: Well, I mean, there was a financial reason for the challenge and she was like, “Hey, they’re doing this conference called FUND conference.

You should go, Thomas and I are going, it’ll be fun.” And I was like, “I don’t have the money.” And she’s like, “well get the money.” And I’m like, “how?” She’s like, “presell a book”. I’m like, “no.” And then long story short, she was right. And I did that. I think l made $2,000 of presales, which back then I was selling it at like $29 and my list was microscopic. So, it actually did pretty well, I think, in retrospect.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Okay. So that’s a great jumping off point. It started as a challenge. Where did it go from why people actually would buy this book to more of the empire that you’re known of these days?

Brennan Dunn: What happened was, so I took people’s money as a presale and I really felt bad about it. So, I thought I need to email them weekly, otherwise they’re all going to be claiming I’m a thief for something. I started writing weekly about what I was working on with the book. And then I think it was like a month and a half, two months later, is when I shipped it. I thought at first, I was like, okay, I’m done. I’ve delivered the product. I don’t need to send the weekly emails, but I just decided to keep sending them because they had kind of gotten in the habit of it. Then I got an email from somebody who had bought the book who was on that list because the only way to get on that list was to buy, got an email from someone saying, “Hey, I’ve got a friend, who’s a freelancer she wants on, where’s your sign up form?”

I’m like, “I don’t have one - she could buy the book!”

I got smart and I put a sign-up thing on the footer of these articles I was writing and started putting these emails on my site. Also sort of building up some Google, choose from that over time. I would get people who’d go through the course on pricing or as a book on pricing.

And they’d asked me, “Hey, I saw you built an agency. Do you have any advice?” And that’s when I started just responding to what people were saying, really sale safaring on my own list. So, I would do a lot of P.S.’s to my weekly emails saying, “I’m thinking of potentially doing a course where I talk about what it took to grow my agency. Is that something you might be interested in? If so, respond.”

I’d get a few dozen responses. And then from there I’d just jump on to a lot of email threads, “So, tell me about why you want to grow an agency and what would it mean?” Finally, it gets to the point where I realized, okay, a bunch of people want this. How about I do like a Google Hangout, two-day thing. I’ll charge a thousand dollars for it. And I just went back to that list, the people I’ve been talking with, found all the conversations in Gmail and said,” Hey, would you pay this?” That’s how product number two came to be born and rinse and repeat for everything really since then has been pretty much that model. Just responding to more importantly, I think reading between the lines of what they’re telling me and trying to figure out exactly what I could build again or build next to help them.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: The way you just described it too is interesting because it’s different from an outright, “would you buy this, or do you need this? Or what problem do you have?” You have a very specific approach to digging. Sounds like there’s a question answer, question, answer, question, answer thread with an individual potentially to sort of divine something out, like what what’s going on there?

Brennan Dunn: I mean, this is probably the one thing, the best thing my liberal arts education did for me was reading a lot of Plato and the Socratic dialogues and learning about this method of question and answer, where you’re really trying to peel back the layers and get to the root of some surface level assumption or thought or something like that. So, in college, I mean, most people went on to be lawyers or something like that, and instead I’m using it now to mine an email us.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: So combining that with observing people in the wild safari style, and then sort of taking it in house, you’ve got people who you’ve already earned their trust, you know something about them, and then applying this additional layer to bring stuff to the surface that you can then observe.

Brennan Dunn: Right. You know, it’s interesting, what I’ve come to realize, for instance, with Double Your Freelancing Rate is it’s not about people wanting to make more it’s about people wanting to avoid the stress of cashflow hiccups. That’s, that’s really the root of it and the perceived idea is that if I can charge more, I’ll have more in the bank, which will mean I won’t be in a rut when my clients are late on paying me or something like that. It’s not usually that they want to have Ferrari’s or anything like that. The more I’ve come to get to know my customer base and to understand the root of what it is they really want solved, I mean, that’s all been directly now fed into the product and the marketing leading up to the product.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Where things really took off for you, and I think where at least I started seeing you become a more household name is when you really started applying both detail, so you’re taking what we refer to as crispiness in 30x500, these detailed observations about what people’s problems are, the specificity of where they’re coming from, they’re not just a freelancer, they’re an agency or a small agency versus a big agency, or the reasons that they want to grow their agency. Things like that, started tailoring it to your marketing and things like that.

It sounds like creating Double Your Freelancing Rate as that first product for whatever money it made you, it sounds like that led you down a path to start to really study what you’re doing now and calling personalization. Do you remember what your earliest work in trying to personalize looked like?

Brennan Dunn: I remember with Planscope, I would make it so when you signed up, if you told me you’re a designer your sample project would be tasks that a designer might do.

Whereas if you told me you’re a developer, it would be tasks that a developer would do. If you told me you were a team, these tasks might be assigned to randomly generated fake people. I was trying to really get better at onboarding. What I realized doing that is the web browser doesn’t care that it’s a SaaS. It just says, “Hey, this is a webpage. Cool.” Knowing that I was like, well, why can’t I make my blog, which I have a opt in thing? Why can’t I make its so that if they’re not on my list, show the opt-in. If they are on my list, point the SaaS, get them to sign up, you know, simple as that.

That’s where things started, that was the root of it all. I realized if somebody’s Googling around for information about pricing and finds an article on my Planscope blog, they’re not interested in project management software at that point. Trying to point people back to the SaaS homepage isn’t going to help. And it didn’t help because I did that for a while. So, by getting them on just a five-lesson drip course type thing - I was using Infusionsoft, but you would opt into that. Then the goal was to basically set the stage for introducing Planscope as a thing that will help you manage your projects better. All I did is, because I was sending my list back to the blog every time I had a new article, I realized, well, if somebody is on my list, there’s no point in showing that form, so why don’t I just have a banner ad that points to the marketing site

That’s all it was at first, and it started from that. But then as I started to grow beyond just Double Your Freelancing Rate and have other products, and then I split off the two from Planscope, and then Planscope, I got rid of it last year, but then, I really started to tend to this Double Your Freelancing portfolio of products.

I realized, well, why not make it want to go further and say, if they bought this, but haven’t bought that, promote this. Now I’m at the point where I’m looking at if they came from a web design blog, that links to my site and they’re reading articles and proposals. They’re going to see on the homepage stuff about how I can help designers close more proposals. So I’ve really taken it in a way to the extreme, but it makes sense why that would work because if you’re coming from a website blog, you’re probably a web designer. So then if I speak to you as a web designer, you’re going to think, “Oh, this is a site meant just for me.” That’s all I’ve been doing.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: How did that change performance, conversion rates and things like that?

Brennan Dunn: Well, that’s a fun question! I track a lot of things and Google traffic to an article with an anonymous person. So, if Google sends me someone who’s never been to my site, when I used to have the generic site-wide call to action, I would get about a 2% opt-in rate globally for that person reading an article. Then I realized that I was looking at people who do content upgrades, which are specific lead magnets for an article. People like Brian Harrison, and people were saying that they’re getting 10, 20% opt in rates for those and it made sense why, if you’re reading an article on ‘10 things to do when starting a business’ and the content upgrade is ‘get the 10 step checklist from this article as a PDF’, that’s going to have a very high uptake rate because it’s very relevant to the article they just read. So, I thought, well, what if I again make it so if they’re a designer and they came from a design site and they’re reading articles on proposals, they probably care about that. Let’s just change by normal code action and just rephrase it a bit. So, designers, learn how to close more proposals and that’s it.

I’m calling these dynamic code actions that made organic Google traffic go from about 2% to 5%. So, about 2.5X increase and which is huge. I mean, that’s mass, like insane.

So that’s been one big win that I’ve had. The other has been where I take that same approach and I put it on a sales page. Now on the Double Your Freelancing Rate sales page, if I find out you’re a designer and you’re an agency and you went through my email course and you click the trigger link saying you want to price and value, I have three different options. Price and value - I have no idea how to price, I just need guidance, or I am not getting any of my proposals accepted. You click the one that best reflects why you joined the free email course. So, by the time you get sent to the sales page I take into account - are you a freelancer agency? What kind of work do you do? And which one of those three are you?

Then the content gets dynamically modified based off that. So, if you’re a design agency struggling with proposals, you’re reading the page, testimonials are other design agencies. The headline is about design. The way I present the offer is about how it can help you close more proposals. Every instance, the word freelancer is now design agency.

I used to get emails from copywriters. It would say, “Hey, Brennan, checking out your course, heard good things but looks like all the testimonials are from like designers and developers, can this actually help me?” I would sit back and think, well, yeah, it’s a B to B sales product, it’s not specific to anything, but I realized for everyone who wrote that email, there’s probably a thousand people who think that and closed the tab. So, you know, that’s all I was trying to do is counter that, so that has given to me on the Double Your Freelancing Rate sales page, a lift of about 70%. So still, pretty nice!

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Significant! Alright my friends, don’t go anywhere. This episode is not over - Brennan will be back in just a moment talking about his new software-as-a-service, RightMessage; how he came up with the idea, how he’s launching it. This is some of the most epic brick stacking I’ve ever seen! I’m very excited for you to hear about it.

Before you do, I have a favor to ask. It’s a small thing, it won’t take you more than a minute or two, but it’ll really, really help this show and help more people find this show, and that’s giving this show a rating and a review on iTunes. I’m going to make it as easy as possible for you. You can go to StackingtheBricks.com/itunes. It’ll take you straight to our show, click on your review button and leave us some stars and your opinion of this show. What have you learned? What are your favorite parts? What do you want to hear more of? Any words of encouragement you want to share with us? Share them there. And then while you’re in the sharing mood, share the show with a friend, colleague, somebody who has never heard the show before, let them know about it and maybe suggest your favorite episode. We’d love to get some new listeners listening to Stacking the Bricks and your help means a ton to us.

Thank you so much for listening, Amy and I really appreciate your support. And with that, let’s get back into the episode.

So, talk to me a little bit about RightMessage.

Brennan Dunn: It started with actually a training product. I came out with an automation course that had lessons on personalization in it and that did well. It did about 400 sales or I’d say about that. It was nice because it didn’t take me long to develop. The nice thing about a course is it’s a lot easier to build a course, than a SaaS typically. So, when people would buy that, they go through the lessons, they’d be intrigued by the personalization stuff and then they’d say, “I want that too.” I just basically ripped out the code from Double Your Freelancing called intra-ProTools. It was a JavaScript library that I would just bundle in the course. I said, okay, hopefully it works. Unsurprisingly a lot of the feedback was “I don’t know what to do with this.” I remember somebody who was like, “I uploaded the zip file you gave me to WordPress, the plugin thing, and it’s not working.” It’s just one of those slapping your head type things, right!

That made me realize, and I even knew for myself, I didn’t like needing to redeploy all my code or write a lot of weird JavaScripts to change text. So, I thought, I’ve used tools like Optimize before, that’s really nice, what if we could make it so would people like these customers of mine, be interested in a SaaS version of this, that basically compiled down the code that would then do what your ProTools does for you. So, I did that and then I started really building in the open. My Twitter thing for the last year has been nothing but this crap again and again and again, I’ve been sharing mixed panel reports, weird code snippets, lifts and stuff, which has gotten me in the radar of a few conferences. I’ve given a few talks in this stuff, and I’ve kind of built up a little following of people who are interested in what I’m calling pretty advanced optimizations you can do on your site that most people don’t do. When I announced RightMessage. I mean, I haven’t even been properly marketed, my list of now 41,000 on DYF I’ve never mentioned RightMessage to that list yet.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: That was one of my questions because it seems like a divergence from…

Brennan Dunn: It’s a different audience and it was interesting because even with the drip course, I was thinking this is kind of divergent, this isn’t business training for freelancers.

This is really a new skill that a SaaS company could use and maybe a freelancer could, but for the most part, it’s not specific to freelancing. I had to actually spend this whole, when I launched my list, the drip course, I really focused on this is a new skill that will take you relatively little time to master and learn compared to learning how to design or something like that and you can upsell your clients on doing this.

That’s what I’m waiting for now, I’m waiting to get the training in place on how to sell your clients on personalization before I launched to my list.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: So you’re basically packaging this up. You’re almost carving out a new industry of services that you can then have freelancers offer as a premium service to their clients?

Brennan Dunn: Exactly. So instead of just giving them a new website, why not make that website hyper-specific to the people visiting it?

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: You’re an evil genius! It is very good that you use your powers for good to help people do well in their business. That was my biggest question was not how do you build up this new list, because to me, and maybe less so to the listeners, I’m going to try and break down what I heard you say is, through the process of building the Double Your Freelancing empire and then folding in some methodologies that you learned over the years – and I can imagine that your ability to think about personalization tracks back to your success as an agency owner.

Brennan Dunn: Well, it’s high pitched sales. I’ve been doing high pitched sales forever. When I’m talking to you, if I’m talking to you and you’re a Silicon Valley startup person, I’m going to speak to you much differently than the next sales meeting I have with a local small business owner. I mean, that’s all, I needed to find a different way of presenting my “product”, the consulting service to you. That’s all it is.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: So that mindset, when you track that over to, “Okay, now I’m selling a product that I’ve created once to lots of different kinds of people. How do I essentially do that?” Then you figure it out how to do that and the fact that you figured out how to do that, attracted to a degree, a new audience of your own peers, people who are trying to sell products and services to other people more effectively using online tools. So, it’s not as much of a divergent audience as it might seem, but I had not seen the loop back that you’re describing where you can essentially carve out a new service and teach people how to sell this to their own clients.

Brennan Dunn: I’m waiting on, I’m actually doing two things. I’m working on a course right now on how to segment and personalize. I realized the tool - everyone gets the value of it and it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever sold. The hard part is everyone asks, they’re like, “well, I’ve got this great tool now, what do I do with it?” That’s the hard part is really building up how to segment because if you don’t segment, you can’t personalize. You need that before the other. We’re really focusing on the education side and the next step is going to be, how can you as a consultant – for the most part, this can be an upsell for your clients. If you’re doing design work or development work or anything, I’m going to try to get - DYF should be an army of resellers instead of maybe direct clients.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Evil genius. I know we’re running short on time, so I have two sort of remaining questions and, and they are really good about connecting the timeline of the past to the present, because you’ve clearly learned a lot. I think you’ve applied more of the things that you learned in 30x500, and it’s definitely a situation where the student has become the master, surpassed us and you’ve taught Amy and I so many things. So, I’m thankful for that.

If you could go back in time to around the time that you were working on Planscope and give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?

Brennan Dunn: I actually credit to Andrew Culver. When I signed up for Churn Buster, it was brilliant. There was no way to sign up, jumped on Skype. He said, “Okay, share your screen. I just sent you an email, go in your inbox, find it. There’s your tracking code and everything you need to get Churn Buster set up, go and do it, I’m going to watch you do it.” Not only did that make sure I did it, but on top of that, he was able to see how I used this product of his. He got to see me actually using his software and screwing stuff up and not knowing where things are, and that was a mistake I made with Planscope, not going that. So, with this, there’s no way to sign up currently without getting on the phone with me to RightMessage and midway through, if you’re ready to go, I’ve got a little link generator where I plug in your account, your plan, all that stuff. It generates a link just for you. I paste it to you. You sign up. We switch, now you share your screen on Zoom. You could sit up and go, before we get off this demo call, let’s set up your first campaign. I don’t even know how to design onboarding until I have enough of that data.

This has given me data in terms of how to market the thing, I realized having done 30ish of these calls now I’ve learned new use cases that only came to me through showing people and talking to them about their businesses and what they could use it for. So, it’s been by far the best, it’s draining as hell, it’s not something I’ll do long-term, but more so than any amount of AB testing or this or that, or whatever I could do on my site surveying or whatever, this has been huge.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: You’re basically doing post-sales safari.

Brennan Dunn: Yeah, pretty much. They’ve already bought into the concept. Now it’s a matter of, let’s see how they apply the dream that they have to the reality of the product and see if there’s any disconnects and how can I resolve that?

We talk a lot about ebombs and everything, I have this notepad of basically the next year of content to create as a result of this stuff. I now know exactly what I need to do, two things I’m dogfooding first off because all of these demos are live. There’s nothing more personal than a live thing. So, I’m associating the structured data that I have about the kind of business they run and all this stuff that I keep in my CRM with the results of that call and I’m really able to better correlate now. I still haven’t normalized it as much as I need to, but I’m able to see, if they have this, this and this, this is the messaging that’s going to be working really well for them in these demos. So then when they get to the marketing site, future people just like them, I can apply that. It’s all super mellow because I tell people point blank on the call. I’m like, “here’s how I’m going to personalize this demo for you, by the way.” I rattle off the list of attributes I know about them through the survey that goes in before you’re able to demo.

So, it’s basically just like a part of the demo experience, really selling somebody on, like, “you’re going to see just how effective this is compared to me showing you just a generic video,”

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: That’s amazing! Last question, back to the product that kicked off the whole empire of success, version one, Double Your Freelancing Rate, Brennan, the one that resisted Amy over and over and over. What advice would you give that Brennan?

Brennan Dunn: I’d call it a course instead of a book! No, but I think the biggest thing, the mistake I made was I delivered the product and that was it. So the biggest change that I made with DYF far V2, which was a course format is when you joined, I marketed it as a two month accountability course, which is a fancy wat of saying an eight week long automation sequence that sends two emails a week. All it did is walk through section by section the whole thing, almost like a recap of that with a link to a worksheet related to that section. So, what people loved about this is they couldn’t avoid the purchase. I realized, and I don’t know if you guys have seen the same thing, but a lot of people think they’re doing something good by buying something. It’s like, “Oh, I bought this course. I’m obviously doing something good for my business”, but until they actually apply the thing it’s useless. It’s a waste of money.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: “I bought these sneakers. Now I can run faster. I can jump higher!”

Brennan Dunn:. Exactly! Well, we all do it. I mean I would, the new course was saying, like, I’ve got all my books on my bookshelf, business books that I bought, that I was sold on the cover, I was sold on the idea, but I haven’t read, but because I bought it anonymously at Barnes & Noble, the author is not following up with me, but I’m going to do that. I’m going to follow up with you. Now that you’ve bought this automatically over time and make sure that you actually are able to apply it. Strangely enough, that’s probably been in terms of increased overall customer success and increased purchase rates of other products of mine, that stupid eight-week automation has been it, that thing alone.

I would have done something like that. I think more people who sell information should do that. You can have almost like a post automation sequence. If you have a pre-automation, you’ve got your email course leading up to the course or the product, that’s all good and well, but you should have something post too.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Now Amy and I are always, and other friends of ours, as well as like, “how does Brennan do all the things that he does?” Part of it is obviously that you’re a machine, and you’re very good at what you do, but I also love how strategically you find ways to help

robots do the things that are obviously repeated over and over and over so that you can spend more time doing the human soft-touch things or replicating things in a way that feels more human and soft-touch.

Brennan Dunn: I mean I think so. I think for instance, I use automation to let people segment into what is it they need this email course to do for them? I also automate the capturing of data after the email course to see what they got out of it. I mean, that’s not only a great way to get testimonials, but it’s a great way to see, did I deliver on the expectation? That allows me to really make sure over time I’ve been able to refine continuously the core automation of courses that I have in place based off of this, you know, they bought something, with an email address and their time commitment. They bought into the dream of this email course. Now that they’ve gone through it, what did they get out of it? Are the two in line? If not, that means I need to fix the middle of it. That’s helped me for paid stuff, free stuff. I mean, everything in between. And I think that’s what’s made the company do well, it’s just that kind of looking at data and using data to actually act on it rather than just having it sit there.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Killer. Well, if people want to go check out a RightMessage for themselves, if they’re interested in how all of this works, they are obviously going to be in a queue to get a demo from you. Where should we be sending people to?

Brennan Dunn: Rightmessage.io/StackingtheBricks

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Beautiful, awesome. Brennan, thank you so much for fitting us in between all of your dozens of demos every day. Like I said, I’m always super excited and Amy and I are proud to have been even a small part of the journey.

Brennan Dunn: Hugely, both of you. Awesome. Thank you, Alex.

Alex Hillman Alex Hillman: Alright my friends, that is it for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed. I hope you learned a lot and if you did, we’ll be back again in two weeks with a brand-new episode, a brand-new guest, a brand-new conversation. And if you don’t want to miss that, make sure you’re subscribed to this show in your favorite podcast listening app. You can find us just about anywhere by searching for Stacking the Bricks.

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