Planning a marketing site redesign

This week, we talk about redesigning Less Annoying CRM’s marketing site. Tyler's company just finished a major redesign of the app, and now the marketing site doesn’t do it justice. Rick gives advice on how to approach the project.
In this episode, Tyler gets Rick’s advice on how to think about redesigning the Less Annoying CRM marketing website. Here are some of the takeaways:

  • There are different types of website redesigns, including:
    • AB testing (iterating pages on the site based on performance).
    • Style update (updating the CSS, or look and feel based on a new brand style guide).
    • Restructuring the site (changing the site navigation and pages to better accomplish objectives).
    • Rebranding the site (changing the brand name and/or positioning of the site).
  • You want to do the minimum necessary when you're redesigning a website. 
    • Figure out the smallest thing that you know you need and just go do it.
    • If you can get away with basic iterative AB testing, that's awesome. It means you're in a really good place. 
    • If you need a whole rebrand, figure out how to do it as quickly as possible because when you're going through wholesale changes, it's messing with reporting.
  • When doing a redesign consider the following questions:
    • Is my brand name or positioning changing?
      • If your brand name is changing, you may need to consider transitioning a new domain. (Note: This comes with significant search engine optimization challenges.)  
      • If your positioning is changing, you may need to review copy on all of your pages. (Note: This might impact SEO if the copy changes are significant.)
    • What are the main functions of the site and are they changing?
      • Is it for users to login?
      • Is it to generate leads?
      • Is it to convert free trials?
      • If the functions are changing, you may need to restructure the site (Note: This can impact SEO in a big way if you are onsite links or removing pages).  
    • How complex is the site?
      • How many unique pages and designs are there on the site?
      • Can you get away with designing a few templates and applying them across multiple pages?
      • Or, is every page unique?
      • More complex sites taking longer to redesign.
    • Does look and feel (style) need to change?
      • Do colors need to change?
      • Do fonts need to change?
      • Do page layouts need to change?
      • Do UI components need to change?
  • It’s OK to prioritize a redesign based on a standards without data proof.
    • At the end of the day, if brand is important to you, it's important to you. 
    • If you're failing on your brand promise or standard, that's going to keep you up at night and that's not healthy. 
    • Just go fix it and don’t waste time trying to justify your brand standards.

What else would you add to this list?


Context

Tyler: So what we're going to talk about is ... I'm actually interested, I'm not entirely sure where this is going to go, but Less Annoying CRM, my company, just did this big redesign that I keep talking about, but that was just the app. So when a customer logs in, the experience they have in the logged in part of it has been redesigned. The other stuff, what I'll call the marketing site here, still looks like it did four or five years ago. And so there's this big mismatch between the, first, impression a customer gets when going to our marketing site versus the actual polished and good design that they get once they log in. So we're basically trying to think about some kind of a redesign of the marketing site. This could be really, really small. It could literally just be like go in and make some CSS tweaks, but leave everything else the same. It could be completely, from the ground up, rethink what this website should even be, think about SEO, switch to a content management system like WordPress or something. It could be as big as we want it to be. So that's basically what we're talking about here. I have a little more context, but maybe what I should say is just what I'm hoping is we can talk through, A, how big of a project should this be and then, B, we're not going to plan the whole thing out in this next 40 minutes or whatever, but where should I start? What should some actions be that I can take to really get moving on this project?

Rick: Yeah. So I'm interested in what problems you need to solve by doing this. It sounds like you're mostly concerned about more of a brand consistency or user experience consistency more so than anything else. I'm not hearing, "Hey, we need to get more leads," or, "Man, people are complaining about the website." It seems like it's more of a personal, "Hey, this website is no longer up to my standard," type thing.

Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's definitely part of that. And, yeah. I'll say, I'm really skeptical about a lot of marketing. I think 20% of marketing is super valuable and critical to a company and I think a lot of it is just a bunch of overpaid people in suits being like, "Oh, your font doesn't communicate the trust that you're ..." Nobody cares about the font. Shut up. So, yeah. I don't want it to be what a marketing agency would turn this project into. The way I look at it is, it's kind of like if you're single and you're dating and you go to a bar to meet somebody, you know that the things that matter are personality and trust and all this, but all you can see is their physical appearance when you walk into the bar. And so people naturally tend to overemphasize that when it comes to first impressions. The same thing is true with a company. Just the other day, actually, for my wedding, I had to get insurance for the wedding and our wedding planner sent us two websites. I went to both of them. One of them had not been redesigned in a decade and one of them looked nice and I was just like, "I have no information here. I can't tell which insurance is better, so I'm just going to go with the one that looks like a more professional company." So that's really what I'm going for is, once someone uses our product, they like it, we treat them well, everything goes well, the personality stuff in the dating analogy is good, but we need to put on a little makeup and actually try at the bar if we're going to get these customers in the first place.

Rick: So it sounds like your main concern is what's the first impression people have of Less Annoying CRM when they come to your website.

Tyler: Absolutely.

Why is this a priority right now?

Rick: Okay. So flying up a little higher, just for context, why are we talking about this right now over some other priority? Why do you feel like now is the right time to worry about the first impression?

Tyler: That's a fair question. It's possible that it's not. I would say that, probably two years ago was the right time, but the reality was that the app would've let down that first impression either way. So I think it's just, now that the app looks good, I don't think ... Redesigning the app was a nine-month project. I think redesigning the website could be as little as a one-week project. And so I just feel like it's kind of low-hanging fruit because we've done the hard part already.

Rick: Interesting.

Tyler: But, yeah. If it didn't happen for the next six months, I don't think there would be any real consequences.

Rick: Have you talked to any new users who've gone through the existing marketing site experience with the new interface?

Tyler: I haven't talked about the marketing. I would say, I almost never talk about the experience on the marketing site with anyone.

Rick: Yeah. I guess, is there any sort of user conversation or feedback happening, whether it's a conversational piece, feedback bubbling up, or usage base that suggests, hey, they were surprised at how good the software was once they got through the process. I'm trying to highlight what the problem is between the transitioning from one UI or kind of look and feel to another look and feel.

Tyler: I'm not sure this is exactly an answer to your question but, for example, we survey all our users with a kind of similar to an NPS type of thing. Or when they cancel, we ask them why. It's not the most common thing but, before the redesign, a lot of people were just like, "I don't feel like I'm using good software just because of the design." No one says that specifically about the marketing site because, once you sign up, it doesn't matter anymore, but I have to imagine the same thing applies there.

Rick: That makes total sense to me. And, yeah. You're a self-serve product. So the product starts working the minute they hit the homepage.

Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rick: At the end of the day. Right?

Tyler: Exactly.

Rick: Because you're not going to be talking to them until they've put in their free trial information.

Tyler: Right. And I'm not our target customer, but I'll say, I would probably ... There are 50 different CRMs out there to consider. If I saw my homepage, I would immediately be like, "I assume the app is also going to be poorly designed, given that the marketing site is poorly designed."


How would you measure success?

Rick: Cool. Well, so I guess I'm pretty clear on why you want to do this right now. How would you measure success? Do you have a conversion flow or funnel that you'd want to try to maintain, at least, as you roll this out? Or do you want to see those numbers go up?

Tyler: That's a good question. Obviously, we have conversion numbers. I could go into Google Analytics and look that up. I periodically look at that stuff and the reality is that it basically never changes. Even when we do AB tests and stuff, our website's tested well enough at this point that a radical change might change something, but I think the steady state is pretty good. I think entrepreneurs read these articles about, "You change the color of the button and conversions shot up 40%," like there's this magic solution to make conversions go way up. The reality is we have 10 years of work on the product that has so much more of an ... Well, we just totally redesigned the product and we're only a few days into being able to measure it, but our conversion rate hasn't changed at all from that. So given that, I don't think we're going to radically change things by redesigning this.


What do you mean by redesign?

Rick: And let's be clear about what you mean by redesign. Do you mean, basically, rethink the whole navigation and makeup the site, like the skeleton of the site?

Tyler: Yeah.

Rick: Or are you talking about, basically, have each page maintain its current role in the scheme of things and make it feel better to access the same page?

Tyler: Now, I think this is the first thing I want your advice on is ... The thing I'm tempted to do is literally just say, the content has been serving us just fine for the last ... I think this site's probably four or five years old, at this point. We tweak it, occasionally, but it's fine. I'm tempted to just say, "Let's make the styles match the styles on the app. It would be really, really fast. And then move on with our lives." Or, should I say, "Because we're going to be doing this anyway, should we do more of a top-down approach and say ..." Well, I'm sure the navigation is not perfect. Right? I'm sure that, every single page, the copy could be better, the layout could be better, but is it really worth taking the time to make this into a bigger project?

Rick: I guess it depends on your near-term plans. So I could tell you where I sit without knowing much, just talking to you. It seems like you need to do the minimum necessary to solve your personal problem of brand inconsistency because it may be completely irrational. You don't really know. So I feel like this is more of a ... You have a concern that's not very well measured and so, at the end of the day, you won't really know what the impact is unless things go to hell or things go really well afterwards.

Tyler: Well, so do you think I should measure ... I'll definitely do a simple AB test. We do AB tests periodically. I've got the framework set up for that. So I'll definitely compare the new homepage with the old one to make sure it doesn't tank stuff, but do you think I should be doing more than that?

Rick: AB testing, I spend a lot of time on AB testing at PeopleKeep. AB testing works at high volume if you're changing one thing on the page. Okay?

Tyler: Well, I don't know if I agree with that. It at least tells you did this tank signups. It doesn't tell you what tanked the signups.


Breaking down different approaches

Rick: Yeah. So I would say that, if you're not changing ... So let's just break this down into two different approaches. One is, don't change anything about the objective of the site, don't change anything about the objective of its parts, which are pages. And just go through each page and develop a new style to apply to each of those pages that's consistent across them. There are a couple ways to approach that. One way is one page at a time and then, slowly, you have everything. Or you take a holistic approach and say, "Let me look at all of our pages. What are the different types of templates that we need and design elements that we need to redesign these?" And then apply those to pages as you go. I, personally, don't think that those changes are going to have ... because you're going to be thoughtful about them and probably even more thoughtful than you were the first time you went through this. There's going to be a minimal variance in those, especially if you don't mess with any of the text or objectives of the page and linking. You're just changing the way it looks and feels. It feels, to me, like that's something that you should just go do as a first one because it solves the problem that you're actually concerned about right now. And then, maybe down the road, you can start thinking about, what are my objectives for my website and how can I measure that? Two, what are the objectives for each of these pages and how can I improve the objectives of each page? It feels, to me, like you don't need to bite that off right now. You just need to solve your itch and your ... Honestly, I would compare this to, the way you're describing the problem, it's kind of like you have this just standard that is not being met. And for no better reason other than to enforce the standard, you're going to go do this. And unless in this conversation you can come out and tell me, "Hey, no, no. There are other reasons why I should do this," then just go hold your standard, get through that as quickly as possible, and then prioritize what's ever most important after that. If you're having to go search for reasons to go do this, I think that that's a waste of time and only lead to project creep that slows you down solving your standard problem.

Tyler: All right. This aligns very much with what I ... I think you know how I feel about a lot of marketing nonsense. This is what I wanted to hear, but just for mine and anyone listening's edification, can you talk ... because you've gone through website redesigns and I've talked to you while you did it, and I think the outcome at PeopleKeep you did was really good. What are the things someone should be thinking about? You're probably right. I don't have a reason to, but why might I?

Rick: Yeah. So I would break website redesigns into a couple of different buckets. One is your situation which is, hey, we've enhanced our brand style guide and we need to apply that new brand style guide to our existing pages without changing any functionality. And that's just a question of how you want to approach it and we can talk about that later. So that's one classification. I'd say that's the simplest because it's really just a CSS issue. It's not a copy writing, positioning challenge.

Tyler: Right. It's like all the blues are a little darker now and, yeah, the font is different and there's shadows on the buttons or that type of thing.

Rick: Yep. The next level up of that would be what I call a site restructure, which takes into account ... Well, I guess before that, there's just basic AB testing. So I've got to go backwards. So the most minor way of website redesigning is what I would call AB testing. And if you read a lot about AB testing, there's two types. There's iterative AB testing and there's massive AB testing. I don't know what the right word is, but you basically just wholesale change it and see what happens. The iterative AB testing requires large numbers, proper tests being run, and it takes a ton of time to see progress. But if you've got the wrong objective on the page from the beginning, no AB testing is going to fix that.

Tyler: Yeah. And we should, just in case anyone doesn't know what AB testing is, we should probably define this. You run two different versions of the site and you measure whatever metric you pick; how many people convert or click this link or whatever. And you see more people did it with this version than that version, so it's better. And then you normally conclude the AB test and then you do another one and you just keep testing. That's the iterative approach. I've heard of the analogy being, it's like you're looking for a maximum, like you're climbing a mountain. If you do iterative AB testing, you're going to find the highest point on your current mountain. If you do the other kind, you're looking for a different mountain. You have no idea how high it can get, but the reason you would do it is because it goes higher than the other one you were on. And so you want to iterate from the biggest mountain you can, basically.

Rick: Yep. Exactly.

Tyler: Okay.

Rick: Yeah. And I would say that I don't hear you questioning the objectives of your pages. So I don't put you in that category. So anyway, there's AB iterative testing. You might want to do that after you do these wholesale, larger changes to the design of the site. Above the wholesale, just redesigning the page, there's basically, "Hey, I'm going to restructure this thing and set new website objectives," or, "Hey, maybe my existing structure is not meeting the objectives of my website," which may be converting leads. "I need to restructure this to do a better job of converting qualified leads and moving them through the sales process." In that case, you're actually rethinking the structure of the site and rethinking what pages you need to accomplish that objective. And oftentimes, you need pages that don't already exist or you have pages that need to be repurposed entirely from a positioning and messaging standpoint. The next level up is what I would call a rebrand. And I think brand is primarily positioning, which is, hey, "what's your name, value proposition, and differentiation from the competition?" The colors are all downstream from that but, if you have a name change, then you're talking about a whole more complicated thing which is switching from LessAnnoyingCRM.com to thebetterCRM.com. And that brings in all kinds of technical issues with SEO that don't exist for the problem that you're solving. So when you're thinking about this, I would just ... I've been through all of these. You want to do the minimum necessary when you're redesigning a website. If you can get away with basic iterative AB testing, that's awesome. It means you're in a really good place. If you can't, don't go all the way to the rebrand if you don't have to. But if you do need to rebrand, man, figure out how to do it as quickly as possible because when you're going through high-cycle changes, it's messing with all of your reporting and you have very little control over ... you have really poor measurement over what's working and what's not. So one thing for you to think about in your particular stance, which I would put in the redesign category, I would say you either need to do this really slowly, right? And do it one page at a time, see what the reaction is, and just start queuing it up. Or you do it as quickly as possible on a wholesale basis and get it over with.

How big is the site?

Tyler: Yeah. We don't have a huge footprint for our site. I think everything you just said makes sense. Let me give the argument that I think we're already on the same page on, I just want to stress test this to make sure, for why I don't think one of those bigger things is what we need. First of all, we've got very simple brand positioning that has not changed at all. Not changing is important, but also I don't think it's that hard to get the content right. It's like, we're simple. And because other products need to say, "Well, we have this feature nobody else has," and then they have to explain the feature, we're not explaining any features. We're just like, we do the same ... You already know what CRM does.

Rick: You do not have a branding problem. You do not have a positioning problem. So knock off the whole conversation around whether I need to do a rebranding and then knock off the whole thing of whether or not you need to rethink your messaging around how to talk about Less Annoying CRM.

Tyler: Right. So then there's, okay, we figure out what our positioning is and all that. Are we communicating that correctly to people? I think one reason we have a slightly easier time with this, we have a link on our homepage that just says, "Try a live demo," and you just go immediately into the app and start using it. And I haven't looked at the stat recently, but way more people use that than sign up for a free trial. So basically, I think a lot of the work is being done by the app itself. We don't need to explain pages, and pages, and pages of information about the app on the marketing site because it's like, just go look at it.

Rick: Yeah. You have a product-led growth type thing where most of your marketing, and your qualification in your sales are being done once someone signs up for a free trial.

Tyler: Yeah. Because you've talked about changing the structure, the navigation and stuff. We basically have a homepage, pricing, testimonials, a signup page. I think there's about us, about the company.

Rick: How many pages do you have on the site? On the marketing site.

Tyler: There's probably 50, but almost all of those are not ... Well, I'm not counting blog posts and stuff like that.

Rick: Counting blog posts.

Tyler: Counting blog posts?

Rick: Yeah. I would say the whole marketing site.

Tyler: Well, we have hundreds of blog posts. We have hundreds of help articles, which are public. So probably a thousand, maybe, total.

Rick: Okay. And what percentage of them are unique? If you redesign one blog post, you probably can apply that redesign to a hundred blog posts. How many different unique designs are there?

Tyler: Yeah. So that's probably ... I'd say, there's about 10 that get any meaningful amount of traffic, like homepage, sign up, about us, stuff like that. And then there's probably another 30, 40 that they could be blog posts. I hard coded them. There's something unique about them, but they're all kind of in the same vein. You know?

Rick: And do they all have the same headers and footers or do you have unique headers and footers for some sections of the website?

Tyler: They all have the same navigation. They all use common shared components for the headers and footers, but with properties you can tweak, like should there be a background image or not, that type of thing.

Rick: Cool. So it sounds like you maybe have 10 pages that get all the traffic and then you have, it seems like, maybe 20 different types of pages total.

Tyler: Yeah, something like that.

Rick: Cool. I mean, that's pretty simple. Why do you feel like you want to do more? I know of want to come back to, why do you feel like you need to do more than just redesign? Or do you?

Tyler: I don't. I'm hoping that the outcome of this is that I don't need to, but I also know I have a bias towards burying my head in the sand when it comes to any kind of non-product thing. I don't want to spend time on marketing. I don't want to spend time on any of this. So I just want to make sure I'm not glossing over it because I don't want to do is versus it actually not being important.


What are the main functions of the site?

Rick: Well, let me ask you some questions. What are the top three functions of the site, in order?

Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, the number one, which I think none of this matters at all, is our current users being able to log in to the app.

Rick: Okay.

Tyler: Number two, I would guess ... I don't know exactly how specific you want me to be here, but I think most of the people who use Less Annoying CRM, who are signing up, were referred by somebody or heard about us somewhere. I think they're already largely ... They're not evaluating us with a million other CRMs, like an enterprise sales process. They're like, "Someone told me to check out Less Annoying CRM. I'm going to check it out and decide yes or no." And then I think the third one is someone's actually shopping around for CRMs and stumbles upon us in a directory or something like that. And they've got 10 CRMs and they're trying to get feature comparisons and how does this compare to these other CRMs?

Rick: So maybe one is making it easy to log in to the app. One is converting people into free trials.

Tyler: Yeah. I mean, those are really the only two, I think.

Rick: Yeah. And then, I'll break it down into three different things. One is users logging in. Two is people who've already visited the site converting into free trial. People who are already aware of Less Annoying CRM converting into free trial. And then people who aren't aware of Less Annoying CRM making it easy to find Less Annoying CRM and learn about it quickly.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah, because that third type of person is more interested in information on the marketing site, whereas that second type, I think, is like, "Let me just get my hands dirty and see if I like it or not."

Rick: And what percentage of your signups come from two versus three?

Tyler: It's hard to measure. The things we can measure where this person came through an ad or an online directory is a pretty small percentage, maybe 25, a quarter to a third of the customers. The vast majority are unattributable. We think most of those are word of mouth, but it's kind of hard to prove that.

Rick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). As a marketing type guy, I see so much fruit. Having gone through what I went through at PeopleKeep, I'd break this down into different projects. I would definitely just redesign the pages first and get the new look and feel out there. And then I would start doing optimization of the pages. I mean, the way I would go about that is I would make sure that there's a clear objective for each page. For each page, this page exists to accomplish A measure and we'll measure success by B. Right?

Tyler: So how do you do that, though? What is there to measure other than, does this person ultimately sign up for a free trial?

Rick: Well, I don't know how your ... If you show me a page on your website, for example, and I don't know, can you tell me for the page, "Hey, this page exists to accomplish this task?"

Tyler: Yeah.

Rick: And how do you know if that task was accomplished?

Tyler: Right. So let's take the pricing page, for example, which I think, on almost every site, assuming you list your prices, I know when I go to a SaaS marketing site, the very first thing I click is pricing.

Rick: I do the same thing.

Tyler: Yeah. So someone goes there, whether it's us or someone else, what is the point of the page? It's to show the person what the price is. If you want to put a marketing spin on it, it's to demonstrate that we have very, very simple and low pricing. It's to contrast us against our competitors.

Rick: What do you want the user to do after they see the pricing page? What would be a success?

Tyler: Well, one way or another, I want everyone to sign up for a free trial. Are they ready for that yet? There's not a clear next step. It's like, if you need more information, go get the rest or sign up for a free trial, probably.

Rick: Yeah. So what's the pricing page to free trial button click conversion on the pricing page? Make that go up.

Tyler: That's fine, but every page is going to have that same goal. There's no page where I'm going to be measuring something other than, are people going to the free trial after this? I don't think.

Rick: I don't know enough about it to get in, but what ...

Tyler: What are other goals that a site even could have, that a specific page even could have?

Rick: Well, in your case, it sounds like it's pretty simple to your point, but in a more complicated process where you're not sending someone to free trial, it might be, "Hey, first, I want them to understand why we exist and what problem that we're solving. So I want them to get the brand story and the positioning. Once they get that, I want them to understand why we're different than the competition. Once they do that, I want them to understand how it works. And once they understand how it works, I want them to request a demo."

Tyler: So you're saying, you're measuring how many people click from the pricing page to whatever the next thing in that flow is?

Rick: Yes. Yes. And that's a really simplified perfect-world version. In reality, you probably have a goal and a secondary goal for each page. Goal one is free trial. Secondary goal is, hey, if they're not buying, get them to read more about us on this other page. Maximizing the user's conversion into one of those two goals is probably the success of the page. But I guess, that's where I would be focusing on if ... Do you have a full-time marketing person?

Tyler: No.


How much time do you spend on marketing site optimization?

Rick: Okay. How many hours, outside of you, go towards marketing in a week?

Tyler: 10 to 15, maybe.

Rick: And what are those activities that they're going to do?

Tyler: It's mostly ... I mean, we do this intentionally. We kind of say, as a company, our core competency when it comes to marketing is working with our current customers to delight them in the hopes of referrals and stuff. So a lot of that is the newsletter. That's kind of our largest audience. The majority of the newsletter is actually not customers, but they signed up for the free trial, then didn't pay. So that's a lot of it. We do webinars sometimes.

Rick: What about marketing site optimization?

Tyler: No. I'm the only one who even can do that.

Rick: Okay.

Tyler: We're not on a CMS or anything like that. So ...

Rick: So you are the owner. You've built every page on the marketing website. You've written every word. So at the end of the day, everything's in your head about how the site works. You'd feel pretty uncomfortable saying to a new employee, "Hey, go rethink the website structure."

Tyler: I'd feel uncomfortable saying that to a new employee. And I'm talking to someone who might potentially help out with design, kind of like a freelance type of situation, and I'm very interested in his design expertise. I am hesitant. We have kind of this different type of voice in our marketing from most SaaS companies. So I'd be hesitant to hand it off to someone who doesn't already have that voice nailed.

Rick: Yep.

Tyler: Our long-term employees have that. They know it.

Rick: Yeah, cool. So I guess, the only reason I ask those questions is, Tyler, you don't have time to do more than just get this to meet your standard and continue not focusing on marketing, not focusing on marketing website optimization. That is not a priority for you. At some point, it will be. Hey, you're going to want to either get more people to the website or get more people who are coming to the website to convert into free trials. That doesn't seem like it's a focus for you right now.

Tyler: Yeah. Although, I'm not sure what would change in the future to make it a focus. Maybe it should be a focus.


Do you have plans to hire a marketing person in 2020?

Rick: Maybe it should be, but I don't get the impression that you have the time to put towards that right now, nor do I think maybe ... And maybe you are the right person to do it, maybe you aren't, but do you have plans to hire a marketing person in 2020?

Tyler: No.

Rick: Yeah.

Tyler: We have a CRM coach who's currently spending their 20% time doing marketing, but planning on ramping that up a little bit. This stuff is probably not what they're planning on doing.

Rick: Yeah. So it seems like there's lead generation, right? Get more leads.

Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rick: You're not going to give up the positioning stuff. Marketing is one part, brand positioning, and all the messaging, all that kind of stuff. Tyler owns that. He's really good at it. Right? That's not going to change. Where you're not working is the demand generation side of things where it's like, hey, how do we get more leads? There's not one person in the company that's always focused on how to get more leads. There's not one person in the company focused on, how do we turn more leads into free trials? Right?

Tyler: Yeah.

Rick: And it sounds like that's not the focus right now and I don't feel comfortable, based on our conversation, saying that it should be.

Tyler: I mean, if we can do product-led growth forever, that's my preference, to just say, "Well, we'll always neglect this until the end of time." So maybe you're saying, if that fails, then we need to figure out ... we can't live in that ideal world.

Rick: Well, weren't we talking a couple weeks ago where you said, "At the end of the day, I want to figure out how much I can stretch the business into a multiplier." Right? In order for product led growth to work without you having to focus on these things that we're talking about, you have to be able to have one plus one equal three in terms of customers or something greater than two. Right?

Tyler: Yeah.

Rick: And that's why you're working on the referral program. That's why you're working on other things. I don't understand ... This feels very much not like something that's helping you figure out the multiplication formula. It's definitely back to, "Ah, every time I go to the website, it makes me feel bad. I don't feel like we're meeting our brand standard." It's honestly one of those things where it's all of the things that you profess to hate about marketing, around the shit you can't measure, this is one of those for you where it's like, man, this is a brand statement that can't be measured by you.

Tyler: My problem isn't stuff that can't be measured.

Rick: Okay. What is it?

Tyler: That doesn't bother ... I actually love following intuition and using personal taste.

Rick: Okay. What is it?

Tyler: My problem is doing stuff that matters to you and not to anyone else, which you may be saying is what I'm doing here, but an example of this is, I think, typography. There's a do basic typography to make it look okay, that matters. But if you talk to a typography expert, their head is so far up their own ass that there's no way this impacts the customer at all.

Rick: If you're a typography expert, I'm sorry for what Tyler just said.

Tyler: Yeah. I'm sorry that you wasted your life on that.

Rick: No, but I totally get what you're saying. This is definitely something that is difficult to measure. Intuition says it's time for a redesign. Get it over as quickly as possible and then focus more on how to get a multiplier, which is not optimizing the freaking site. It's getting more people to the site for low cost through referrals and other types of things and it lead to some sort of flywheel. So to me, it seems like a no brainer. Don't even worry about optimizing the site in any way.

Tyler: Okay. That's what I wanted to hear.

Rick: Yeah. Do you feel good about that?

Tyler: Cool. Yeah, I definitely do. Like I said, this is what I was hoping for, but I always, in the back of my mind, kind of think, "Am I being irresponsible by indulging and working on the stuff I want to?" And it sounds like you're kind of saying there probably are wins to be had here, but I shouldn't be forcing it, basically.

Rick: Yeah. I'd say there's a couple of things that you're going to want to do in the future that you can argue all day is a good thing to do right now, but it isn't because it's not going to help with your most important question of the business, which is, how big can this grow? How can I create the multiplying effect? And what's the maximum opportunity of this product that we currently offer? Right? And so optimization isn't part of that. I do think, though, that when you have intuitive standards that are the essence of who you are, that is what branding is. And so I'm interested in how quickly you can get this done because it feels like a really important thing. What we're talking about, condensed to just the website redesign, seems like a really important thing to do. How do you get it done as quickly as possible, I guess, would be the question?

Tyler: Yeah. I mean, the reality is, if I just lock myself in a room for a weekend, I think I could do this in a weekend. The only sort of blocking thing is I do want to get some designs from this freelancer because I know I can do some of this pretty well myself, but there are certain things, typography being one as much as I like to make fun of it, but I am pretty bad at it, but where just getting the extra little bit of polish from someone else's designs, I can then go apply it all over the site, but I do need a little bit of that. So I think I'm going to wait for that work to get done but, as soon as it's done, nothing's blocking me, I think.

Rick: That sounds really good. Yeah. And I would just say, I think you're doing a really good job of ... I am really bad about scope creep and I know that you're going to have a lot of future problems. A couple of those future problems are when this CRM coach is spending 20% of their time on marketing moves up and says, "Tyler, we could increase signups by 20% in the next six months if I spent six months optimizing the site," you're going to run into a problem. He can't edit the site. So you're going to need to convert to a CMS or supply him with your time. And you'll figure out how to solve that problem when it comes, but it's not a problem right now.

Tyler: Yeah. Okay. I like that. Because the reality is, in the past, I used to make all these decisions like that. I think I've been way too much of, "I'm not going to do anything because I don't have time to do it right." And then what ends up happening is that thing you think you're going to do six months from now, it's five years later and you still haven't done it and it's like, "Well, shit. I probably should've put that weekend five years ago. We could've gotten ..."

Rick: Do you really feel that way sometimes?

Tyler: Oh, all the time.

Rick: Really?

Tyler: Yeah. And I think this year, one of my big things that I feel like has gotten better this year is we're not doing that. So for example, in our app, we have ... The main page you see when you log in is called Your Workspace. It's kind of like a dashboard. We've never touched it since we initially launched it because we always knew it was wrong. And we're like, what it should be is this awesome task list and your email inbox. That's what it should be and we don't want to touch it until we have email integration, but that was literally six years ago that we did that and we still don't have email integration. We should've just made the workspace decent back then.

Rick: Yeah. I would say that that's an example of not doing something because you were planning to do something else. In this case, that's not happening. You have a problem. You're just going to go do it. The CMS, you're not saying, "I'm going to wait on the CMS problem that exists today because I want to do this first." You're not saying that at all. You're saying, "Hey, I don't have anyone who would use a CMS, nor is it a priority of the business to optimize the site. So I'm not going to worry about the CMS problem." It seems like a different type of thing.

Tyler: Well, I think it's the same in that it's saying, "I know what it's going to be," and in a sense, everything you do now that's not what it's going to be is a waste. I'm going to spend a week implementing this design not in a CMS, no design framework, and then if we were to switch to Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap or WordPress, all of a sudden, that work is wasted.

Rick: Is it, though?

Tyler: No. My point is, it's not, but that's always stopped me in the past.

Rick: Oh.

Tyler: So that's the similarity I see here.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Tyler: Is I'm always like, "I'm not going to put any work into this because I know I'm going to redo it later."

Rick: So don't let it stop you this time.

Tyler: Yeah. I know. I'm not going to.

Rick: Okay, good.

Tyler: Because I'm on board. I'm just saying, it's the same type of thing that I've gotten...

Rick: Oh, I totally ... I thought you were saying that this direction was the same thing as the past, but it sounds like you're prioritizing, "Hey, let's go get this done as quickly as possible versus wait for it to be a better time to do this."

Tyler: Right. And we started doing that with the product. We started doing that with a lot of things in the company and it's a really great, freeing way to make decisions to say, "I'm not going to be hamstrung by my future vision. I'm going to do what we need right now."

Rick: And it's so hard to do it. It's so easy to say, "Oh, but it would be so much better if I could to A, B, and C at the same time. So I'm just not going to do [A]. I'm just going to wait until I can do B, C, and D at the same time." And then it just never happens.

Tyler: Yep.

Rick: I totally get it.

Tyler: Basically, you just gave me permission to do that here. I feel good about that. So …


Takeaways

Rick: What are your takeaways?

Tyler: The biggest thing ... I realized at the beginning, I kind of was saying maybe we should talk about how to do this. Now, given that we decided it's such a small project, I don't need any help with that. I'm just going to go write the code. It's going to be a piece of cake. So I think the big takeaway, for me, is there's just an overwhelming amount of advice and knowledge out there, including stuff you have. If I were making this a big project, you could've given really good advice, but the key is to figure out the smallest thing that you know you need and just go do it. And then maybe a month from now ... This isn't going to happen but, in theory, a month from now, I could come back and say, "All right. The redesign is done. Let's talk about how do I change the navigation up." And then we could talk about that.

Rick: Yeah. And then I'm going to be like, "Is this a standard Tyler thing or is this something related to helping you figure out that multiplier effect on your word-of-mouth growth?" And if it's not, I'm going to be like, "Dude, this isn't a priority."

Tyler: Okay. So one takeaway is do the small thing. Another one is I think you don't have to justify stuff if it's just basic, "I'm a human being with pride and I'm embarrassed by this," but you need to limit that to some extent. You need to say, "This needs to meet my standards, but I don't need to turn this into a bigger project than it needs to be."

Rick: Totally. I think the way I would say it is, we talk a lot about brand and I think sometimes we get frustrated with each other about how we talk about brand but, at the end of the day, I think we're both on the same page with brand is ultimately the sum of the decisions that you make on what to say, how to act, what you look and feel like, and how you make people feel. And at the end of the day, if brand is important to you, which I think it should be, it's important to you, it's important to me, and you're failing on your brand promise or whatever it is, however you want to describe it, that's going to keep you up at night and that's not healthy. Just go fix it.

Tyler: Yeah. Okay. That's a good way to think about.

Rick: Always, always. Never sacrifice that. Otherwise, that gets into not being who you want to be and that's ... ugh. So I don't feel like you need to ... Magic words are, "We're not living up to our brand standard anymore. This is urgent. We need to go fix this." I think that's okay.

Tyler: Cool. I like that. Cool. Well, thanks for talking through all this with me. That was helpful and I was so worried I was going to come in here and you were going to talk me into a big project. So I'm really glad that didn't happen. So, awesome.

Rick: Yeah. I wish I had this mindset when I was going through some of those redesigns because I definitely waited too long to pull certain triggers and tried to solve all the problems at once versus just knocking out one problem at a time and ... Good for you.

Tyler: Cool. Thanks.

Rick: Everyone, thank you for listening. You can join the conversation on this topic and review past topics by visiting startuptolast.com. If you have questions, contact us via the website or on Twitter. We'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Again, that's startuptolast.com. Also, if you're willing, please leave us a five-star review on the podcast of your choice. It does help us get out there and find additional audience members and we'd love to engage, if you're willing. So see you next week.
Planning a marketing site redesign
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