[WAMA] Hiten Shah - Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics Co-Founder - Thursday 30th October 3pm PST/PDT

We're very excited to have Hiten Shah from Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics live with us here at Warrior Forum. This was one of our highest profile entrepreneurs & Internet marketers and it was a privilege being able to talk with Hiten 1 on 1.

Watch the Hiten Shah WAMA Replay Here

Transcript of the Hiten Shah WAMA Event:

[00:00:19]

Alaister: Hi everyone, this is Alaister from Warrior Forum and welcome to today’s Warrior Ask me Anything event, where we bring the world’s top internet marketers and online entrepreneurs for you guys to interact with and ask questions.

So today I’m really excited to bring to you guys Hiten Shah. He is a world class marketer and successful entrepreneur. He has started multiple companies with his co-founder Neil Patel and currently is the co-founder of Crazy Egg.com as well as KISSmetrics.com. Welcome Hiten.

[00:00:49]

Hiten: Nice, nice to be here.

[00:00:52]

Alaister: Excellent. Alright so I am really excited to have you on the call and we sort of sent an email out earlier this week just sort of announcing the call with you and we got a whole bunch of preregistered guests as well as questions. So thanks very much for everyone in the audience who preregistered and submitted their questions early, I will try to get through as many of those ones as we can. If you guys on the call have questions for Hiten or for myself, feel free to ask them within the forum or you can ask them within the ustream live chat.

So before we just sort of kick off with the questions Hiten I thought it would be good for you to maybe give everyone a bit of background as to kind of where you guys started, where you came from and what you guys are doing now.

[00:01:34]

Hiten: Sure. So for me it started when I was about five years old and my dad told me I shouldn’t work for anyone, he told me basically I should be an entrepreneur. I’m not really sure exactly why he said that, I think he either saw some decisiveness or assertiveness or something in me or he just, you know he…I wasn’t even born in America, actually I was born in Africa and moved here when I was five and I think my Dad just wanted a different life right for his kids. And I am the only child, so it happened to me. And so he said that. And since then I have always tried not to work for anyone and optimize my life around that.

I had one job in my life, it was an internship at a medical devices company that my dad had known since they started in the garage, and I was working for the I.T. director there and I was just doing it over the summer in high school. And I really feel bad for the poor sap but he’s only ever been my technical boss since then. And yeah, so what I did is I had a bunch of offline businesses from high school and college and then I…I have actually known my co-founder Neil Patel since he was eleven years old and I was fifteen. And right when I got out of college, he was getting into college but he had one customer paying him $3500 a month for SEO. And I was out of college, didn't really have a desire to work for anyone of course and we decided to start our consulting company while he was getting into college and while I was out of college.

And yeah ever since then we realized we didn't want to stick with consulting for the long term. And then we started to build different software. We had one big challenge. The challenge was that neither of us were engineers, so the first step was to find engineers and that is what we sort of did and started building stuff. And since then …

[00:03:29]

Alaister: Excellent.

[00:03:30]

Hiten: Yeah go ahead.

[00:03:31]

Alaister: Just before you continue, I am just going to break that down; there is a lot of sort of content there. So, you mentioned you sort of were advised by your father at the young age of sort of five, to kind of pursue entrepreneurship. That is really interesting I think. I mean a lot of sort of parents want to guide their kids in a safer sort of path and maybe a path they are more familiar with. So is your father an entrepreneur himself? Is that sort of where he saw that, or did he sort of see the entrepreneurial spirit in you even at that young age?

[00:04:01]

Hiten: I don’t know if he saw the spirit in me. He is actually a doctor, he is an anesthesiologist but he does a lot of entrepreneurial things such as he runs medical health camps all over the world, all like based on non profit donations and stuff like that. He is coordinating you know at any given time, hundreds of people and things like that and it is all free health camps, nobody pays for them that attends them and it doesn’t matter what kind of insurance you have or not. He has even done surgeries; I mean you are talking eye surgeries and stuff like that in other countries, for free.

And so growing up I saw him do that in southern California constantly. And I think that he is very entrepreneurial, has a very good knack for naturally leading other people and getting them to do things, and things like that, and I learned a lot from him around that. And I think in general his focus was, I am in this country, I came here so that you know, the future generations of mine could have a better life. And you know it is a typical immigrant mentality and story but like he wasn’t the one that built the businesses; he wanted me to do that.

[00:05:10]

Alaister: Yep. Oh excellent. That is a really interesting story. You mentioned that obviously you started all your companies with Neil Patel. You started the first company being a consultancy. Sort of it was SEO, I’m guessing, sort of marketing consultancy company, is that right?

[00:05:26]

Hiten: That is correct, yeah.

[00:05:28]

Alaister: Excellent and that would have been early on right? You met Neil when he was eleven or?

[00:05:35]

Hiten: Yeah that was in 2003. We started that in 2003 and we met each other when I was fifteen, he was eleven, when I started dating his sister who I am married to.

[00:05:45]

Alaister: Right. Right, excellent. How did you know, I mean what sort of…whose idea was it to start these companies and how did you know that you would be able to work well with someone? I mean I talk to a lot of people sort of whether they are in startups with another co-founder or they are looking for co-founders and things like that and people sort of liken that relationship I suppose to a marriage right, where they kind of go through the ups and downs and things like that. How did you so early on sort of know that this was someone that you could work with and that you could have I suppose complimentary skills with and build a business with?

[00:06:15]

Hiten: Yeah, um, obviously we had known each other for a while and we had some level of trust and I think that is a big part of it. But more importantly I think if I were to recommend to somebody right now, today, how to do that, I think it’s…you know a lot of people say, “Oh you need time” and I think that time is what we don’t really have, like you know time with the other person and stuff. But what I’d be doing is I’d be doing a lot of work to figure out whether you can work well together and complement each other in the right ways, and also you know can trust each other. And do tests, experiments, work, whatever it is to figure out whether you can trust the other person and trust meaning like, you feel confident they will execute on things they are supposed to and also when you guys get into arguments and stuff, there is that sort of, we can walk away from it and still be friends, right, or whatever, right.

So there is a lot of that sort of stuff that I think you need to work on, that has a lot to do with your personality, the other person’s personality, and things like that. And time is the easiest way to figure that out but you know it is also the slowest way and I tend to find things that are faster you know I look for things that are faster. So I think practice of sort of just working with someone, literally let us just work on something is kind of what I would do today if I was trying to find a co-founder.

[00:07:30]

Alaister: Yeah I think that is a good point. So if you are starting something maybe small, just to kind of see how that goes and the relationship and how that dynamic works. I think that is a good way to kind of test things out.

I mean I think I’m getting a bit carried away, I’m sort of asking all the questions myself. So I might jump in to some of these preregistered questions and go from there. So these initial ones, a lot of them are about Neil just because that was what I think you mentioned in the forum.

So I have got one here from Kyle A and they ask, “Why is it I have only heard of Neil Patel? Are you the one doing all the work behind the scenes?”

[00:08:05]

Hiten: Sure. So I think if I give you the answer Neil wants to give me, or Neil wants me to give you, I would say, Yeah I’m doing all the work. He probably wants you to believe he is doing no work. I’m kidding. But no, we both do work; we both do a lot of work. We are working all the time. We both get a ton of email, we love email and we both have parts of the business that we work on. I would say the reason you probably haven’t heard about me is I am mostly working on product and engineering and design and coordinating the teams and things like that and his passions are more around marketing and sales and things like that. And so you know he naturally has a tendency to be more out there and more people probably know him, but if you were into like product or SaaS businesses and things like that, you would probably know me over him. So we have our own sort of areas of responsibility and we do what I call divide and conquer on sort of everything we do.

[00:09:07]

Alaister: Sure. Yeah I think it sounds as if you both complement each other really well which I think is really important in a cofounding relationship.

So how did you, we have got another question from Jan R and she asks, “How did you and Neil come up with the idea?” I think, I watched some interviews you have done in the past and it was a very long process. It wasn’t sort of overnight that you came up with the idea. But if you can expand more, how did you come up with the idea for Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics?

[00:09:37]

Hiten: Yeah I mean those two were actually, I don’t want to say easy but kind of easy. At the time where both of those existed, Google Analytics was starting to get popular and so it was relatively easy in the work we were doing with marketers to figure out what the problems were that people had with that tool. And so Crazy Egg came out of the need of marketers not always wanting to look at data but also wanting to see a visual representation, and easier to understand, and easier to interpret sort of visualizations. And that is where crazy egg came out of.

And then KISSmetrics is more like we noticed that some of the most important parts of an analytics tool are when you can look at conversion rates and funnels and really understand what is going on. And at the time Google Analytics was not really that good at showing you the funnel or helping create it and there were just some little advantages around, that we leveraged around like you know just pass data to our system, we will build the funnel for you on the fly and you can create and explore.

And Google Analytics still doesn't have those kinds of paradigms. And we felt like those were the right things. Those were the things people really needed that made their lives better, and that was how we came up with those ideas. It was really easy actually at that time. I think today, the markets in general today for building software are a lot more crowded and you have to be a lot more disciplined about what you work on and why.

[00:10:54]

Alaister: I think early on it seems as if you guys really were able to identify a problem and then create a product that you sold people for that problem which I think fundamentally is the reason why you guys were able to get so much traction early on.

[00:11:09]

Hiten: Yep.

[00:11:10]
Alaister: So I have got another question here which is interesting because I know a lot of people in the audience are kind of in the process of building businesses and starting up and they are sort of running through a lot of the problems and challenges that you and Neil would have faced in the early days. So I have got a question here from Chris O and he asks, “How did you go about getting your first sort of hundred and first thousand customers for both of your SaaS analytics companies?”

[00:11:34]
Hiten: Yeah so before like the idea of a prelaunch landing page and collecting emails and all that kind of stuff existed we were doing that. So we had, you know, 23,000 emails for crazy egg before we launched it of people that were interested. We had over 10,000 for KISSmetrics, maybe even more, I don’t even remember. It might have been 20,000 in that case too. So we were just able to build those email lists before we launched. And I know now that is a common practice, it sounds absurd for me to say that is the way to do it because that is something a lot of people do. So that is one tactic.

And another one when you really want to get customers is I actually did customer support for the first one to two years of both of those products myself. Sometimes I got help but most of it was myself. So that got me a really good…being in tune with these customers in a way that you can’t do any other way I would say.

And then on top of that I would also always respond to anyone that mentioned any of those businesses online anywhere. At that time there was less noise and less people saying things so it was much easier, but like I would always be one of the top commenters, always tried to answer peoples' questions when they asked them in the comments, and was very sort of active and proactive on that. And you know I am actually in some of my upcoming things, I am planning on getting more active again like that because it was the biggest…it was honestly a lot of fun but also some of the biggest things you can do which is actually react to people’s feedback, comment on it and also build that list early so that you can get people involved in what you are doing earlier.

[00:13:10]

Alaister: Yeah I think an interesting take away from that is that you mentioned a lot of strategies that people are very familiar with now, and are perhaps crowded in the marketplace now as you said. So we are talking about building email lists, contributing to communities and things like that but I think the biggest take away from there was that you tried things that other people weren’t trying. So whatever that is at the time, it sort of seems to be really effective, when other people aren’t sort of doing it and you are being able to be creative and innovative in your strategy to sort of reach the target audience.

[00:13:42]

Hiten: Yeah and reach them before you build a product.

[00:13:43]

Alaister: Yep. Excellent, so that sort of falls on, I’m actually looking at some of the questions that are coming in live from you-stream and the forum and I have got a question that sort of carries on from achieving your first customers. And we have got Jan here who asks, “What are the main steps you would take in actually building an MVP and sort of understanding what an actual MVP or minimal viable product should be?”

[00:14:07]

Hiten: Yeah. If you talk to enough customers about, or potential customers about their workflow or how they are doing things today and focus on their problems, don’t mention your solution, don’t even mention your idea, just say, “I would love to learn about how you do your job” right. If you talk to enough customers, I am talking like a dozen to two dozen, you end up getting an idea of what is the core problem that they have across all those customers. Once you do that, the MVP becomes really easy because all the MVP needs to be is any way to solve that problem better than they are doing today. And that is the easiest way to start. Even if it is like, you are using hacky stuff in the background but you are just solving their problem for them like magic, that is really what I try to aim for. So I try to find the core problem that people have just by interviewing them and understanding, by enough of them, what are the problems they have, what is the core problem.

[00:15:01]

Alaister: Yeah I think that sort of ties in with what you were saying in terms of reaching out to people pre launch, trying to understand exactly what they are going through, what problems they are experiencing, before even kind of thinking about creating a solution to that so you really intimately understand where they are at and what you are trying to achieve I guess.

[00:15:20]

Hiten: Yep.

[00:15:21]

Alaister: So I’ve got another question here which is just coming through. JR18_1080 asks, just in relation to building email lists and creating a kind of preregistered group of people, “What sort of platforms do you use to manage your emails and build your lists?”

[00:15:46]

Hiten: Yeah. I don’t know, there are so many email providers out there. The truth to the answer is it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you are trying to accomplish. So you know as long as you can pop up a landing page, maybe use Unbounce, and you collect emails in Unbounce and it connects to Mailchamp and you send your emails in Mailchamp you know. Honestly early on, especially in start up, just use all the tools out there that give you free plans because you will be able to use them for a little amount of time or a long amount of time for free. And so that is my advice, find a free tool that does the job and use it because it is more about what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it than exactly how and what tool. There are so many tools to do that today.

[00:16:26]

Alaister: Yeah I think a lot of people sometimes get bogged down with kind of the semantics of, oh what tools are the most effective, or what should I be using before actually just taking action and going out there. It doesn’t matter what tool you are actually using as long as you are actually implementing the strategy and getting results I suppose.

[00:16:40]

Hiten: Absolutely.

[00:16:41]

Alaister: Yeah great. Alright just going back to some of the preregistered questions, I just want to get through as many of them as I can because I really thank you guys for preregistering and submitting your questions early. So running a SaaS sort of business, obviously you have got problems with customer acquisition as well as retention and things like that. I guess that is the two side of the coin that you are trying to solve. So we have got Cosman here who asks, “How do you actually go about dealing with customer retention and increasing the lifetime value of your customers for both of your companies?”

[00:17:14]

Hiten: Sure so at Crazy Egg the pricing is pretty low. You can go to the pricing page; you will see they are very low. We do bill annually so once we started billing annually the churn actually went down. We don’t really have a monthly option right now. We might change that in the future. So that is one easy tactic if you are all self service and people are buying online. When you have like sales and an inside sales team and even customer success, it is really just about being proactive about identifying customers who might churn, reaching out to them and helping them out to make sure they don’t churn. And those are the two primary tactics that I use that work.

Also a lot of times my theory and my thought process is if you have a SaaS business and you have a churn problem it is very likely there are product improvements and product tweaks that you can do to make people use the product more regularly so that they don’t want to churn. So usually, not even usually, people are churning because they are not getting value. That is the number one reason people churn. And all you have to do, and this is hard, is figure out how to make sure they are getting continuous value and understand the value your product is driving to them.

[00:18:20]

Alaister: How do you go about sort of splitting your time between customer acquisition and retention? I imagine you sort of have different teams and different strategies for both. Which one do you sort of concentrate more on or is it an even split?

[00:18:36]

Hiten: Yeah that is a good question. All companies I have seen are better at one than the other and so you want to go and put the resources at the one you are not good at and make sure you don’t mess up the other one. And what I mean by good at is I mean look I can look at any business’s funnel or even like their monthly recurring revenue and their churn rate if it is a SaaS business and instantly figure out where their opportunity is. So the right advice on that is find out which one is more important that is holding you back from growing and go focus on that first.

[00:19:08]

Alaister: Yeah excellent, no that is a really good point. So just kind of switching gears here, I know we sort of spoke about this briefly prior to the call, I know Neil Patel is very experimental in a lot of his marketing strategies and he will actually go out there and try to find sort of innovative ways to acquire customers. And I saw that Neil recently implemented an Instagram campaign. I know that Instagram is relatively new in terms of marketers sort of leveraging the user base and so marketers are trying to figure out the best ways to kind of acquire users and things like that from new platforms such as Instagram. So I know Neil and yourself have got quite a lot of success from Instagram, so I would love if you could maybe sort of expand on that, how that came about and what are some of the results that you guys are getting right now.

[00:19:55]

Hiten: Yeah. So Neil just loves finding new channels and leveraging them and I love talking about it, thinking about it and doing the same. I would say I am probably more of an active Tweeter than Neil is and Twitter is really a platform that I have really embraced and it has really been valuable to me. It has helped me hire people, meet new people, and all kinds of stuff. And so that is one I was on really early. I think I was under like user4000 or something like that, or 5000 so I was very early on Twitter. So we have just always, and we were really on Dig as well, had one of the most popular accounts for a while.

So we are always just trying to find ways that you can drive traffic and engage with the community and Neil recently just got inspired by a bunch of other folks who were having, who have millions of followers on Instagram and were sort of getting a lot of attention from entrepreneurs and other folks. And so he essentially bought an account and he blogged about this, so this is all public, but he bought an account, spent a decent amount of money to buy it that had over 100,000 followers. He switched it over to his name. He really was very thoughtful about the name and I will get into why in a second but he called it, Who is Neil Patel? And is the name on the account. The reason he did that is because his hypothesis was if he came up with a name like that, people out of curiosity would type in Neil Patel in Google and it would increase traffic to his website because you know he shows up in the top results for Neil Patel; all of his sites do. And so that was the reasoning behind some of that.

And then he spent a bunch of money to do contests and giveaways on Instagram and he also had sort of half naked ladies put up signs, “This is Neil.” He likes doing things like that. I’m not that guy but that is Neil definitely. He is also single, ladies. But anyways, he put up a sign that said, “Who is Neil Patel?” And he had these models of looking it up and did a lot of cross promotion and stuff and he wrote about all of this. And the whole idea was to experiment with the medium and see how to drive traffic from Instagram. And the reason is when you put a link in Instagram, like in the comments and all that, it doesn’t…it is not linkable, you can’t click it. And so you have to find other ways to drive traffic and get people from Instagram over to your websites.

One trick you can do and I will give you guys this trick, on every picture you can put the picture up and then you can tell people to click your bio link and change the bio link every time if you want people to go somewhere because of that picture. So there are some tactics but they aren’t very clear on how to drive traffic from Instagram to your website to get conversions or whatever. And so he has just been playing around with that and so far has had success. At the very least I think he has about doubled the amount of search volume that comes from his name to his sites.

[00:22:37]

Alaister: Have you guys seen any success in terms of conversions? I mean obviously you guys are tracking everything I mean running analytics companies. Have you guys seen sort of what sort of converts and what is not converting from those specific campaigns?

Hiten: Yes. So on Instagram it has been more of a branding exercise just to see if the branding can be improved because the thesis is more branding equals more business in general. And we have just had that experience historically and it has only been less than a month so it is too hard to tell exactly how the conversions are working out. All we are looking for right now is just, is it a sustainable and effective way to drive more traffic? And we always treat it like that. I think when you get too close to the conversion too early if you are doing experimental stuff like this, you might miss the mark on what it is really going to be able to do for your business and just write it off as not working. So we really do focus on, can it drive traffic to the site? Because our belief is if we can drive sustainable traffic to the site and it is targeted enough we will be able to figure out how to convert it over time.

[00:23:39]

Alaister: Right. It is interesting running analytic companies like you do, I mean Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics themselves, you guys obviously learned from a lot of other people’s experiences and things like that and you guys are kind of looking at the data all the time. I have got a question here and it sort of asks about your home page for KISSmetrics. I mean it looks like a page that sort of converts well. Talk about that, how much testing, or how did you come about creating that page. How well does it actually convert and what was involved in that process of creating the page that you currently have now?

[00:24:08]

Hiten: Yeah so we have had long form pages and all kinds of things on the homepage and then we started spending more time with the customers. And what we learned was all of them use Google Analytics before they use us and they probably continue to use Google Analytics even after they use us. And so we then started running a bunch of tests around, can we get them to sign up with Google Analytics or with their Google account more specifically. And so that was the first part of the test and that had about a 40% increase in sign ups.

Then we started running more tests. Can we make the page more familiar? So if you go look at the Google Analytics home page and you look at the KISSmetrics home page you almost feel you are right at home when you visit the KISSmetrics home page. And we know a lot of people visit the Google Analytics home page a lot because they don’t auto log you in. That is their own problem but you have to hit the home page and hit “access Google Analytics” and then you get in. And so we thought that was an opportunity to make it more familiar.

So if you notice we are using the same exact blue, we are using a graph that is like theirs. That kind of graph barely exists in our tool and we are also using the same orange and things like that. And we also have a message that talks about Google Analytics on the home page.

So we have just really doubled down on learning that everyone uses Google Analytics, they are familiar with it, and they want more. And the whole idea of KISSmetrics is to give you more than what Google Analytics can in the area that matters to you which is learning about your customers. And so that has been what we learned. In total we have had about over a 250% increase in our conversion rate since we started going down that path and I would say we have now run over two dozen tests on that.

[00:25:38]

Alaister: Is that two dozen tests in the past or that sort of two dozen tests you are currently running right now?

[00:25:43]

Hiten: That is two dozen tests in the past. We have got probably half a dozen tests running right now on different parts of our funnel at any given time.

[00:25:50]

Alaister: Right. What sort of things are you testing? Is that kind of is that sort of higher in the conversion funnel, or do you like to test things at a sort of later stage? What is your sort of testing philosophy and how do you go about doing that?

[00:26:04]

Hiten: In every key part of the funnel around a key action like sign up or upgrade or add the java script or even cancellation, we try to have a test running at all times no matter what, even if it is a dumb test like bold a word or something. And the reason is I think in my experience you need practice testing and you need to be testing all the time to get that practice even if it is things that might not move the needle if you don’t have better ideas. And then overall we are always trying to learn how to have better ideas. So we have a deliberate process of trying to figure out why people are getting stuck and then trying to create experiments around the problems that we discovered.

[00:26:39]

Alaister: Yeah excellent. Okay. We have a question here from Daniel from one of the preregistered questions and he asks, “What are some of the major conversion/optimization surprises or lessons that you have learned” I suppose running your companies as well as seeing what other people are doing with your tools and other tools out there?

[00:26:57]

Hiten: Yeah I would say that it is very likely that if you think something is going to win, it is probably not going to win. Like if you look at a variation of a task and you are like, “Oh we know we are going to nail it, it is going to work”, it is usually not the case. And that either means you are just wrong and you are just using your intuition or your data was wrong that informed you on how to do the test. So, these days we spend a lot more time trying to figure out what to test, what ideas we should test and not just start trying to brain storm ideas out of thin air. Instead we try to find again the problems people have and tests against those problems and solve those problems. So that is one surprise.

Another surprise which you can see on the KISSmetrics home page is we tested sign up with Google, sign up with Google Analytics, sign in with Google, sign in with Google Analytics, log in with Google, log in with Google Analytics, get started with Google Analytics and what we learned was that log in with Google works better than any other variation we could come up with. And we only have theories on why it works but essentially we believe that people already signed up for Google, so we are basically telling them, “You can log in with KISSmetrics using your Google account.” And that converts way higher than any other variation we have had.

[00:28:10]

Alaister: Yeah I’m fascinated with conversion rates and sort of optimization. I mean here at Freelancer and Warrior Forum we are always testing basically anything we can think of, and some of the surprises that come through are really interesting. I mean you often kind of have a hypothesis and you think, oh this variation is definitely going to win because of xyz but a lot of the time you are proven wrong and it is sort of back to the drawing board.

So it is really interesting that sort of real time feedback that you get from users actually testing your site and kind of going back and forth.

[00:28:39]

Hiten: Yep.

[00:28:40]

Alaister: You mentioned earlier how your pricing plans are pegged annually instead of monthly and you said that you may sort of change that. What sort of….did you find there was a drop off when you moved to annually? What was that decision making process in terms of deciding to have an annual plan as opposed to monthly plan and how do you see it working? Are you going to keep it the same in the future or do you think it will change?

[00:29:06]

Hiten: Yeah I mean a lot of things are just Math. So if you do the Math yes we had a drop in conversions when we went from monthly to yearly but we had an increase in cash flow and so it just depends what you are trying to optimize for. So in the future we might be optimizing for more sign ups and more [29:24 MR] increases faster over cash flow up front. So, if you want cash flow up front you can go yearly and basically people are paying you up front for twelve months of service. And if you want more sign ups, generally monthly pricing is what works out better. So it really just bottom line depends on what you are trying to improve, and what you are trying to increase.

[00:29:43]

Alaister: So I guess despite the drop in I guess sign ups and conversions, you obviously would have dropped in churn as you mentioned. Are you able to quantify that drop and sort of how that maybe compares to the churn for a monthly plan?

[00:29:56]

Hiten: We did the move a long time ago so I don’t actually have the data but at the end of the day if people are not staying twelve months with your product then charging them up front for twelve months sort of makes them stay twelve months right and buys you time for making the product better too and things like that. And also you can invest the cash back into the business. It is over a 10x difference in cash flow. So as long as it is not a 10x loss in sign ups, you are basically coming out from a cash flow standpoint higher.

[00:30:28]

Alaister: Sure. So I know a lot of your traffic comes from content marketing. You guys are really heavily involved in the content marketing space. You guys, I see you guys everywhere, yourself as well as Neil and you guys are experimenting with a lot of other channels specifically Instagram and things like that. Are there any other new channels you guys are exploring right now finding success or even not finding success or lessons that you can learn from trying out new channels?

[00:30:56]

Hiten: Sure. I think Twitter is highly underutilized and will probably be for a very long time. I also think Facebook is underutilized. There is like just newer platforms. I think the way I think about it is, if a social media service or platform is growing then it is very likely you should be looking at it now. So today I would be thinking about, okay how can you leverage Snapchat you know and create an account there and figure out how to engage? I am not as bullish on Vine just because they are not growing as fast. So just find things that are actually growing really fast that consumers use because we are all consumers even if we have jobs and you don’t have businesses and things like that, and then figure out whether it is a channel that can reach the demographic you want and then start engaging on it.

And I think the ones I have been looking at are the ones that are growing the fastest right now because those are the ones that other people might not be looking at or haven’t figured out a leverage. I mean I think it is ironic that Instagram is many years old, already been acquired and yet marketers are like, you know dilly dallying around trying to figure it out. It is like go figure it out. There is probably a ton of opportunity out there. It has got a lot of users and it is a very visual medium and I am sure there is a lot of cool stuff you could do on it.

[00:32:14]

Alaister: Yeah sure. I think there is heaps of opportunity around sort of internalization as well as all these platforms that sort of are kind of international. Have you guys reached out to sort of more international platforms? Perhaps platforms in China or things like that, that have huge amounts of users. Have you guys experimented with that at all?

[00:32:30]

Hiten: Yeah we haven’t experimented much with that because usually most of the platform we engage with are going to get us U.S. customers but also they are already international, so like Instagram is already pretty international and they already have a pretty large international user base, same with Twitter and same with Facebook although a lot of those are predominately saturated in the U.S. So, we haven’t really toyed with location specific places yet.

[00:32:55]

Alaister: Sure. Sure. So tell me a little bit about your content strategy and your blog and everything. I know you guys get a lot of visits to the KISSmetrics as well as Neil’s Quick Spout blog and it is quite an effective strategy for you guys. Tell me about how you built it and what are the conversions you are getting from all the content you guys are pumping out. A lot of our audience sort of pump out content all the time and they have kind of got their own blogs. I am sure they would love to hear about that.

[00:33:24]

Hiten: Yeah I think that there is no shortage of content but there is definitely always going to be a shortage of the highest quality content. So we always focus on highest quality content for the audience and figuring out what gets them the most value and then when they do come to the site we try to get them to engage in the comments and things like that. So I think those are the kind of things that I think about when I think about this question which is, how can you be helpful to your audience, and blog about things they want to learn about or things that would be really useful to them?

Some audiences and target demographics are better tuned for that, so we know marketers love information. I mean think about how many different services they use, how many different things they need to learn, and how many different expertise there are inside of marketing. And so with KISSmetrics we figure that out and that is why we have a blog and we try to have some of the best content on the internet for marketers. That is our goal. And so far it has been working out but that has been our goal and that is how we think about it.

In other markets, like let us say you are targeting lawyers or something like that, they are not actually very hungry for information the way marketers are, but there is a lot of legalities, statutes, things like that they are looking up so I might not start a blog for them but I might start like a repository or resources of publically available information searchable in one place. I might actually create a search engine for them if I were to market to lawyers if I knew that their problems were around finding the right court cases and things like that when they needed it and it was related to my service.

So, you know it is like you have to use the right tactic for your audience. And that is one of the problems that I have with everyone just suggesting, “Oh you should do content marketing, you should start a blog.” It is like, no wait, you need to do what is right for your audience, and you need to really figure out what that is going to be, not just blindly start a blog and just write blogging related type of content and your audience is just not there.

[00:35:11]

Alaister: Yeah I think that really comes back down to understanding your audience as you said and really trying to identify what you are trying to solve, and their problems and everything. What was your experience of building the blog up from the bottom? So I suppose I mean a lot of people sort of pump out content and they are really excited in the beginning, but they get very disheartened just because there is no one sort of coming and visiting their blog. What was your experience in the beginning? How did you actually get that initial traction?

[00:35:35]

Hiten: That is a great question. I’m not going to answer it that way, I’m actually going to answer it a different way. So right now my friend is a very prolific blogger, Om Malik from Gigaom. He challenged me to thirty days of blogging and I am on like day 24 today and literally you are blogging every day. And he even said I could take weekends off and he challenged me and a few other people and I told him, “I am not going to take weekends off because I know myself well enough to know if I took weekends off I wouldn’t start back up on Monday.”

And so you know what I have learned so far is that some of the same stuff as KISSmetrics but it’s like again this is probably biased by experience, if you want to start blogging, start blogging every day like literally write something every day and you will learn what works and what doesn’t work for your audience even if you are starting from scratch. So my biggest piece of advice on it is just start blogging every day. And I am doing it right now so I’m not just telling you, you should do it. I am doing it and I am seeing how it is working. Like I know it is going to get traffic. I know it is going to get comments, I know it is going to get attention and I’ve only written twenty things but I’ve done it every day and it has helped me learn about the patterns of the traffic and all that kind of stuff.

Now I do have an audience on Twitter, and on Facebook and I do Tweet it out and share it on Facebook and stuff like that so I do have a little bit of a head start. If you want that head start I would consider building up your Twitter audience and your Facebook audience, even if it is just friends on Facebook before you go down this path but that is probably the biggest secret which is the hard work of actually doing it. And it is hard to write, like writing is not easy and I actually personally have never written as much as I have so far. It is anywhere from 250 to 1000 words a day.

[00:37:16]

Alaister: Yeah I think it takes a lot of discipline to be able to pump out that level of content but in terms of high quality content it takes a lot of time and discipline to get that, but I suppose as you mentioned the kind of results are amazing.

[00:37:29]

Hiten: Yeah I mean I went from like barely a hundred visitors a day on my blog to averaging about 700 to 1000 a day just by blogging every day.

[00:37:38]

Alaister: How many visits are you guys getting on your KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg blog? It has sort of grown I imagine to millions now?

[00:37:46]

Hiten: Neither of them are quite in the millions but they are definitely in the mid hundreds of thousands to you know…they are basically 100,000 to about 750,000 on all of the blogs that we have including Neil’s Quick Spout.

[00:37:58]

Alaister: Right, okay. I have got a question here from the live stream. So I have got a NicholasDCM he asks, “What are the metrics that people are finding the most useful using KISSmetrics?”

[00:38:10]

Hiten: Sure. So we are very focused on person based data and also being able to help you understand not just how many conversions you had but actually who those people are and everything they did before and after they converted. And so the important metrics are the ones tied to people. So we are not going to tell you that you had you know, five purchases. We are going to tell you that you had three people purchase two things, I’m sorry one person purchased three, and the second person purchased two but there is only two people and tell you all about them, where they came from, exactly what they bought and all that kind of stuff. So we are actually tying to analytics data with data that usually lives in your database or your CRM. And we are doing that all in one package. The important metrics are the ones that you want to know who did it, not just what happened.

[00:38:52]

Alaister: What sort of actionable insights have you seen your customers sort of using from that sort of data? What sort of results are they getting from a sort of understanding of being able to have that data presented to them and sort of what are they actually doing with it and what results are they getting?

[00:39:06]

Hiten: Yeah so we introduced a report recently literally last week and it is called The Path Report, and what we allow you to do is you pick a conversion point. So let us say people who visit the site and sign up, we automatically help you figure out what are the common paths that people took and we even help you figure out who those people are. So, because it is a person based system, we are able to do analysis like that and help you find those common paths. If it wasn’t a person based system you really wouldn’t get any accurate stuff, it would all be estimates. And so that new report is probably one of the things I am most proud of in the product so far and it is the idea that you don’t have to go dig through funnels and figure out what people are doing, we can tell you exactly what people are doing without you even thinking about it.

[00:39:49]

Alaister: Yeah that is very powerful. I have got a question here from the preregistered audience and it is an interesting one. “If you were to go back in time and talk to your eighteen year old self, what is the sort of best piece of advice that you could give them now?”

[00:40:04]

Hiten: Yeah probably two or three things. 1. Just get started. Like whatever you are doing, whatever your desire is just get started. Don’t wait, don’t think about it too much, just start doing things and things in whatever direction because the more things you do the more you end up learning and the more practice you get. Just have some conviction about the general area you want to do or get into. So for example let us say you want to get into marketing. I know a lot of people on this forum are marketers obviously, and it is ten years ago, and just start doing something. Start a blog. Figure out whatever the medium is.
I mean for me it was like, I love Twitter, so like I would probably tell you, “Hey no matter who you are, you should get on Twitter and figure out how to grow your followers.” Just get some practice and do it fast. Don’t think about it too much and you will learn more that way than thinking about, oh what is the right thing I should do, or what platform should I engage with? Just do what comes naturally and do it fast and now.

The next thing I would say is like I always threaten that I am going to learn programming. I think if I were to go talk to my eighteen year old self, which is about 15 years now, I would say you are dumb if you don’t start learning programming. And at that time I had already learned programming a little bit when I was like in my teens and I stopped. And I think I would have probably went in and did it. I don’t mean go get an education like go to school and be a programmer, I mean like go learn how to modify CSS, html, and write Ruby on Rails. Like just stuff so you can have better proficiency and be fluent because most of us if we are building software, all of us we have to work with engineers. The more we can understand about how they deal with things, how they think about things and the struggles they go through, the better work we are all going to produce and you know a lot of times if you don’t understand that then you are sort of at a disadvantage. So I think it has taken me longer than it should have without having that background to be able to have those kinds of conversations.

[00:41:52]

Alaister: Yeah I mean with content information being so readily available now, you can learn how to code on You Tube and there is like Udemy and [41:59 Coursera] and all these sort of things, so it is amazing the sort of content out there and the kind of information you can get without actually getting a formal education. You don’t need to go to school to learn how to code and things like that.

[00:42:10]

Hiten: Exactly.

[00:42:11]

Alaister: So just sort of going back to just the churn, when you are actually looking at churn how do you figure out the reasons why people are churning? Are you looking at sort of qualitative data, quantitative data, both, or how are you sort of analyzing that data and how are you converting that data into actual reasons and sort of solutions I guess?

[00:42:31]

Hiten: Yeah the best thing to do is don’t let people cancel without them telling you why. So one way to do that is you actually put a box and don’t let them hit the cancel button unless they answer why they are leaving. Another way to do that is you make them email you to cancel and then you can get into a conversation with them. Another way to do that is after they cancel, send them a quick survey or an email and get them to reply to it or fill out the survey of why they cancelled. So I think what is really important is being able to catalogue why people are cancelling. That is the only way you are going to be able to know exactly why they are cancelling and then figure out what to do about it. So that is very qualitative.

And then quantitatively start learning things that actually cause people to stay. So what is the likelihood they are going to stay based on the things they have done. The other part of it is what is the last thing they did before they cancelled? Or what is it that people who don’t cancel are doing that people who cancel are not doing? So those are the kind of things that I would be looking at but taking a deep dive into that is really important even like potentially creating metrics and a dashboard around that is also important and just being able to double down on understanding that better.

[00:43:38]

Alaister: Have you got an example maybe of a time where you were able to kind of provide a solution to a specific churn problem by using those strategies that you mentioned?

[0043:49]

Hiten: Yeah absolutely. So like at KISSmetrics we used to get this idea that people were just not getting value from the product. So what we started doing is we started doing training. We do everything we can to make sure that people are trained on how to use the product, how to use the funnels, and they are integrated well. We also discovered that integration is one of the biggest hurdles for people it is like what do I track, how do I track it, how can I know I can trust it? So we spent a lot of time in our interface explaining these things and also built a lot of documentation around and getting people the documentation around what to track, how to track it and what value they are going to get.

So I think you know it is really just learning what those things are and then going and trying to make it better. And you know you might think that you need to make your product better or whatever but you could easily just learn those things and start improving it in really subtle ways that do not necessarily require engineering or as much effort just by manually doing it.

[00:44:42]

Alaister: Yeah great. I mentioned, we were talking about this earlier and I saw that you mentioned in your bio that you are sort of a big proponent of sort of personal growth hacks and personal growth. A lot of the warriors I know are into personal growth and improving their perspective on things and positive thinking. You mentioned that you read 3x speed and you listen to audios at 2x speed and things like that. Can you tell us a bit more about that process and sort of your hunger to learn; how you go about doing that?

[00:45:16]

Hiten: Sure. Yeah I don’t actually read at 3x speed I listen to audio books at 3x speed on audible and on You Tube there is actually an option to watch videos at 2x speed which is actually the same as audio at 3x just because of the way they do the calculation on the x or the speed. So those are the two things. And then outside of that it is just like I am hungry for information.

So the way I ask questions to people, I am trying to learn things. Or the way that I sort of try to find summaries of books. You know I have this product which a product called [45:50 Blinkest] and it is like an iphone ap. And it is like one of my favorite aps. I can literally get a summary of a book, a very detailed summary in fifteen minutes. And so I am always just trying to figure out how can I consume more information faster and get better at doing that because I believe that information eventually turns into knowledge as you start practicing it and the more information I have about something the better. And also that helps me also learn things faster whether it is you know in a conversation with somebody or even trying to read something or listen to something.

[00:46:19]

Alaister: Yeah excellent. I have got a question here from the live stream and Shane asks, “What is the hardest part of being a CEO and what are some things you didn't expect?” I mean with Crazy Egg I suppose, you guys self funded the project right? And with KISSmetric it is venture backed I believe, if that is correct?

[00:46:38]

Hiten: Yep.

[00:46:39]

Alaister: What are some of the challenges, what are some of the differences you are experiencing running the two companies in that way?

[00:46:47]

Hiten: Sure. Actually I think ultimately there are not very many differences between the two so I put it very simply. When you are venture backed you are able to spend money ahead of the revenue you are making. When you are self funded, you know, every single dollar that you make you would like to put it back into the business and you will but you don’t have any more dollars to put back into the business. It is just a different mindset on how you think about the businesses and how you think about resources allocation and mostly the resource being money.

The other thing I would say on the other part of the question is I think focus is one of the hardest things for a company to achieve and figure out and so where I would spend most of my time in the business is, are we working on the right things, do they really matter, are they what is going to move the needle right now or is there something else that we are not thinking about that is more important for us to work on and sort of focusing in on that?

And another piece of it I would say is also like the hardest part would be, besides focus, would be managing your own psychology because you know, one day could be bad, the other day could be horrible, and then the next day you don’t know what to expect and sometimes that happens within minutes or hours in a day right, like and it is all kinds of stuff right. Like someone is saying they are going to leave your company, a customer being really upset and writing a really strong blog post, we have been in lawsuits before in my companies or you know not being able to raise money if you are venture backed and having to figure out how to survive a few months longer or whatever so there is all kinds of issues. So I think that is the part people don’t talk about; they don’t talk about how bad it is to run a company and try to grow it.

[00:48:28]

Alaister: Yeah they are great points. Going on from that we have got a question here from Mike he asks, “Sort of running these companies what are the top three metrics that you measure in your business and you sort of look at every single day?”

[00:48:42]

Hiten: I think the most important metrics are related to what actually is causing you to make revenue and it is basically new revenue coming in, churned revenue and then you know people upgrading right and making you more money. And so looking at those kinds of revenue metrics on a way higher cadence of like even daily. So what is my daily MMR and how is that growing and can I go predict that out from the next five days, over the next month, those are the kind of metrics that I would recommend looking at in a SaaS business. All my businesses are SaaS businesses so that is why I look at those metrics.

[00:49:16]

Alaister: It seems like you are really fascinated in SaaS business. What sort of drew you to that side of things?

[00:49:23]

Hiten: Yeah it is really weird, we didn't really think about it like that when we started Crazy Egg and some of the other products, we just wanted to build – we used to call them web applications back then, you know we still kind of call them that – but that is what we called them. We didn't really call them SaaS businesses and I think you know obviously Salesforce existed at the time but there weren’t many SaaS businesses that didn't have sales team. So I am just really fascinated by the idea that you can build some software and people can pay you for it every month, almost forever, maybe forever and you can keep providing that value and you get a recurring multiple on your business because of that. And right now sometimes the multiple is as high as 20x on your revenue.

So when I think about valuations on companies and what kind of businesses to build I get really excited about SaaS because it is one of the easiest ways to have every…I mean if you do the Math, let us say you have a dollar come in that month in MMR right, let us say you have a dollar come in. That dollar is probably worth at least $12 because you know, most people stay like a year or whatever let us just say, if you have decent churn and it is not that high and then people are giving anywhere from a 5x to a 20x multiple on your annual revenue. So if you do the Math, that $1 that month times 12 so that is $12 x 5 which is $60 and aggressively it is another 4 on top of that which is 240x. So for every $1 you make you can get up to a 240x value to the business on that money. And so I don’t know why you would want to work on anything else, to be honest.

[00:50:55]

Alaister: Yeah that is interesting. Prior to the call we kind of mentioned how you sort of run your companies. So you mentioned that Crazy Egg basically doesn’t have an office and there is staff all across in different places and KISSmetrics, you are in the KISSmetrics office now, tell us about how you go about managing staff that is offshore. And I mean being at Freelancer we see that stuff all the time. Tell us about how you run it and some of the tips and some of the things that you, the pros and cons of running it in the way you decided to run it.

[00:51:25]

Hiten: Yeah I think distributor companies require a logical process and communication that obviously people feel comfortable with. And so you know we accidentally started running businesses like that and have just kept doing it. The advantages are you can hire people anywhere. I like to think you can treat them more like adults. I think you know if people have to come into an office it is kind of like school where you come in at a certain time and you leave at a certain time and there are these things in the middle that you do and as adults why would you want that experience? I mean that is what you got when you were a kid. You are an adult now, you should be able to control your time and manage it better and manage it any way you want.

So, the people in our companies even at KISSmetrics especially on the product engineering side of things, and marketing, if they want to go in the middle of the day and go attend a play that their child is in, they can do that. And that is what I mean by being an adult right you get to make these decisions. At the same time the drawback is if you are not disciplined enough to make these decisions you won’t be successful in a company that is distributed right because you won’t be getting output and eventually you won’t be working there. And so to me it is just treating people like humans, treating people like adults. So that is my rant on like why I think distributor teams are awesome for people and human beings.

At the same time the downside is if you are not in the same room and can’t walk over to somebody and talk to them, the amount of information that gets exchanged that is sort of casual, or low fidelity, like low overhead is a lot less. So you have to find other ways to do it. Whether you use a tool like Hipchat or Slack you know to make sure you are in constant communication or you use Wikis and Trello and things like that to make sure there is some rigor around updating information and things like that, I think you end up having to do things like that a lot more and a lot more deliberately and someone has to manage those processes a lot more than in a company that is you know deliberately all in the same place.

[00:53:18]

Alaister: Yeah I suppose when you are sort of looking for staff as well you look at different qualities. I mean at Freelancer we get a lot of testimonials coming in from people working on projects all across the globe and they sort of, one of the biggest things that I think screams out for them is that we are able to provide them with the freedom in terms of time as well as flexibility to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as they kind of get the work done at a certain quality. So I suppose when you are sort of interviewing staff and sort of finding and judging the suitability of someone in joining your team, you look at very different qualities as well.

[00:53:51]

Hiten: Yeah absolutely that is correct. It is a different type of person that can work successfully in a distributed company than an environment where you are in an office all the time. And also there are different needs people have. Some people love being around other people and need that to keep themselves motivated and that is fine, that is different you know, that is cool and these days we have options like that for people.

[00:54:12]

Alaister: Great. I’ve got a question here which is interesting from Tommy, he asks, “With a business like yours where you have got a whole bunch of different customer acquisition channels how do you go about conversion attribution? Do you attribute conversions to multiple different channels? Do you look at kind of last channel attribution? How do you deal with it and how do you allocate I suppose your marketing budget in that sense?”

[00:54:40]

Hiten: Yeah that is a great question. I would say that we use KISSmetrics to do it because it is a person based system and KISSmetrics helps you actually analyze that 100% accurately. So I could go on a rant, which I am not going on right now but I will say that I think attribution modeling is dead and stupid. And the reason we do it is because the systems that exist today can only give you an estimate about why someone came, who they were, where they came from, while if you have an accurate system in the first place then attribution modeling doesn’t even need to exist. There is no damn model, there is literally the value, the cost per each individual person and what the ROI for each individual person was and then you find the patterns in the mix.

And so I would say that we built internal systems to do that at my companies and it is still not awesome but we do hope to solve that problem at KISSmetrics and right now if you were to use KISSmetrics you could actually do that. It is a little bit more manual than it will be in the future but like honestly it is one of the reasons I am working on this problem because I think that it sucks that we have to guess. I think attribution should be 100% accurate.

[00:55:49]

Alaister: Yep, right. When you say 100% accurate, what are you talking about? Are you talking about understanding the exact flow that every sort of customer goes through before converting to your customer, is that what you are talking about?

[00:56:00]

Hiten: Exactly.

Alaister: Okay. Excellent.

[00:56:01]

Hiten: The channel they came from can be easily visited and ideally if you can plug the systems in which is a little bit more difficult, every ad pays off.

[00:56:11]

Alaister: Okay excellent. I have got a question here which kind of goes back to the stuff you are talking about in terms of listening to audio books and watching videos. What are the sort of books and audio books you are reading right now in terms of digital marketing, internet marketing and online business?

[00:56:27]

Hiten: Yeah I really love old school books so Scientific Advertizing, Ogively I believe, is amazing. Tested Advertizing Methods is another one I really love and it really helps me write copy and think about copy better. And then outside of that one of my favorite books right now that probably marketers don’t really know about or work on yet is we had a product manager at KISSmetrics, her name was Cindy, or is Cindy Alvarez and she worked at Yammer, then Microsoft now and she has written a book called Lean Customer Development and that will help anybody whether you are a marketer or not to talk to customers in the right way. It will teach you how to do that so that you are actually trying to figure out what problems they have instead of biasing them by telling them about solutions and things like that.

So, you know I really care about the customer. I think honestly I think your customers have all the damn answers to problems at least that you should be looking at, and any way I can find to learn more about customers I try to do as a marketer because then my copy will be better, the tests I run will be better and the channels I use will also be much more targeted at what my customers actually use.

[00:57:33]

Alaister: Yeah okay excellent. Yeah we will add those books into the forum thread below so if you guys just yeah check the forum thread a bit later on we will add those books so you guys can get access to that. So we are sort of running a bit out of time now, but just if anyone has any burning questions that are watching this live stream now make sure you submit it, whether it be in the forum or in the live stream chat. So I have got this question here which just came in. He said, “You guys obviously are running a whole bunch of tests all the time. How do you actually go about organizing your tests and prioritizing which ones to run and when to run them?

[00:58:08]

Hiten: Yeah we put them in our Wiki and like I said we do a lot of qualitative work to make sure that you know we are prioritizing our test based on the problems that customers actually have at the different sort of conversion points. So, you know the biggest thing I can say is like again it is back to the thing we talked about earlier which is like, you know, how do we organize them? It doesn’t really matter. It is just the fact that we have a system to organize them, we use a Wiki and we make sure that we also have specific parts of it, like you know here is the hypothesis we are testing for. Here is why we are doing that testing; we think it is important. Ideally we even try to have a hypothetical expected conversion rate improvement because of the test, and then we test it and make sure that we go back and learn from it. So, it is a very deliberate process and it doesn’t really matter what tools you use it is really more about having a very regimented deliberate process and that is where I see people going wrong is they don’t have a process.

[00:59:05]

Alaister: What are some of the biggest mistakes or maybe myths that you have seen with AB testing and people trying to test for conversions?

[00:59:13]

Hiten: Yeah I think people lean heavily on best practices and rules that are out there and usually the tests that win in my experience are the ones that don’t follow any rules or anything out there and it is more about things that you learn about your own audience. So most people just don’t know how to get better test ideas and better test ideas come from your actual customers and exactly the kind of things they are actually looking for and trying to do.

[00:59:50]

Alaister: Yep okay. So just before we wrap up I think we have got one last question here. So tell us just to wrap up sort of what are some of the best ways people are using KISSmetrics to really kind of get maximum impact in their business and really grow their businesses?

[00:59:54]

Hiten: Yeah the people that are most successful and I am probably a broken record on this are actually the ones that are using KISSmetrics to understand customers and looking at individual customer activity and trying to analyze it and understand them better. And I think that you really have no excuse these days to actually go deep into each individual customer journey and try to understand more about them. And overall over time we are going to have more and more tools like our path report to help you analyze that data better.

That is the direction we are heading in but at the end of the day it is like, you know, there is really honestly very few systems out there today that will let you tie the data to people and understand everything about them before they sign up and convert and after they sign up and convert. But you know honestly you have to have a business that and a desire to actually want to do that and want to go deeper into understanding customers, otherwise you know you can be fine and happy with Google Analytics. That is actually one of the reasons why we spent a lot of time teaching people how to use Google Analytics better because we want you to be an expert in Google Analytics before you even come use KISSmetrics.

[01:00:53]

Alaister: Excellent. Alright well thanks very much for your time and I know that I gained a lot personally and I am sure that the audience gained a lot from this session, so I really appreciate your time giving up your afternoon over there in the States, we are here in Sydney, for this course, so thanks very much Hiten.

[01:01:10]

Hiten: My pleasure.

[01:01:12]

Alaister: Alright excellent. So just before we wrap up, next week we have got another really exciting Warrior Ask Me Anything event where we have got Brian Massey coming in. He is known as the conversion scientist. So he is going to be talking a lot about increasing conversions and strategies and lessons that he has experienced around optimizing and improving conversion rates. So that is something not to be missed. For a lot of people who may have jumped on the call late and they may have missed some of the call or most of the call you can always find the recording within the war room section. So we upload all of the recordings to all of our Warrior Ask Me Anything’s to the war room and people can watch them and pause them and just kind of replay things back and forth as much as possible. So thanks very much again Hiten and I look forward to seeing you guys next week for the next Warrior Ask Me Anything event. Thank you.

[End Recording 01:02:30]

Thanks for the event. If it s possible then I will try to attend there.

I have used CrazyEgg in the past and loved it.

SaaS is something that intrigues me as well, this is just the type of WAMA I was looking for.

Registered

Thats kick-ass!

I'm having all my clients use crazy-egg!!!

Igor

Awesome. I am in. Sent a question regarding increasing day to day productivity. Love to hear more about it

Thanks for being here Hiten.

Just sent a question about the essential steps for a successful product launch. Would love to hear back from you.

Cheers

Thanks
I have send you my question, waiting for your reply
thanks

Im excited to see you live waiting for it

We're looking forward to this event. Hiten is a world class marketer and entrepreneur. If you have a question about SaaS (Software as a Service) business, you'll want to hear what Hiten has to say.

The event is on Thursday 30th October 3pm PST/PDT.

Check what time this is for you here.

Have a question for Hiten? You can post it here and we'll get through as many as we can tomorrow.

Make sure to register for the event if you are planning on attending. If you are a War Room member, this event will be accessible inside the War Room shortly after the event concludes.

Thanks everyone for attending today. We'll upload the recording into the War Room shortly.

Nice! I really enjoy the way you have taken extra steps to introduce yourself to everyone in this thread because people don't join businesses, they join people. You seem to be very dedicated in what you are doing and also ready to provide help by any means necessary which says a lot about the type of person you are. Neil seems to be a great guy as well. May you both continue to have abundance and opportunity at your door step!

Had a nice read. OP did an amazing job posting this.