What Did I Just Say? on an episode of Matt Report Season 4

I don’t like doing podcasts, I get nervous, and just clam up, public speaking is just a fear that I’ve been trying to break…and up until recently I had done one podcast ¹, which was an old cast of Apply Filters. It was a surprising  invite to be interviewed on the Matt Report, and because of my fear of humiliation I almost said “no”; however when a WP Legend asks to be on their podcast I had to say “hell yeah”.

I survived and the episode was recently published, so go check it out (and the many other great interviews).

Our conversation was wonderful, it really was. Even though I was still a little sick, which is why my voice is so rugged, and I found myself lost without an answer (remember I wasn’t feeling good), I think our conversation could end up being beneficial to a few of his listeners.

Here are some notes:

• Matt’s intro is awesome and I’m not offended at all. A “blue collar” WP product guy is right on: I worked hard to get to the point were I have a business that provides for my family, and I don’t have those world domination goals that the opportunists bring with them when building a product business using WP as act one.
• I did make $6k in that first calendar year of Sprout Apps. It was rough, and in the beginning of 2015 I was very close of giving up until I read this post from James Laws at Ninja Forms. There was another blog post and some conversations about the early day struggles of WP product businesses…anyway, I was able to learn from others that if I wanted to make Sprout Apps succeed I needed persistence.
• Matt talks about intimidation factor by hearing about the successful folks in WordPress a lot…then I reiterate what he says as if I wasn’t listening. Which is sorta ironic because I talk about mixed messages…haha, hey I was sick!
• I threw out arbitrary numbers of for my goals, I don’t have a goal for “$15k a month” because I don’t have a plan at the moment to get there…
• …at the moment I’m fine tuning my business process in order to continue to grow at 15-20% without having to put in 15-20% more work. In fact I want to decrease my workload and continue a stable business. If I end up having to work really hard later because I took my “foot off the gas” than so-be-it.
• I wrote about the “review gate” stuff here. I don’t want to rehash that debate, I only brought it up to show how something like this affected me personally rather than it affecting only my business.
• I wrote about the Freshbooks squatting on “Sprout Invoices” here. It’s a better read than a listen, since I was obviously was unprepared to talk about it clearly. 😕
• Here’s a email marketing blog post, which has more detail than what I talked about.
• I briefly forget what content marketing was until…yeah, thanks for listening this far into the show. Oh and I said, “I know…I think” while talking about something.
• My multi-pronged marketing approach: WP.org (free download marketing), e-mail marketing, (very little) affiliate marketing.
• I was asked about content marketing and I meandered into how I do email marketing, so I never really answered the original question. The point is that I don’t do content email marketing to I grow a subscriber list. I only do email marketing to convert.
• My method to convert (via email marketing) is starting to create a conversation, with a basic promotion or asking them how I can help.

Thanks Matt for the opportunity!