When should you charge your first customers?

In this episode, Sean's Shmoocon trip got spicy 🌶️ 🥵 and Andrew is riding the high of a great prospect call for MetaMonster. Sean gives feedback on the experience of using MetaMonster, and Andrew debates when (and how) to start charging early customers.

Links:
For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.38
Sean
How's your poop?

Andrew
Oh, fuck you. yeah

Sean
I'm sorry, we can cut this out.

Andrew
No, no, no, it's all good. Everybody poops, man. I didn't actually poop this time, but I do poop.

Sean
yeah oh I hope so.

Andrew
Poops are great.

Andrew
Poops are great. Well, I that was not expecting that. Okay.

Sean
Sorry, sorry, how's robotics?

Andrew
Robotics is great. Yeah, we're I think two weeks into the season. And this is going to mean nothing to anybody who hasn't been involved with first robotics, but we're making a big switch from tank drive to swerve drive this year and from time based to command based robot programming.

Andrew
So.

Sean
Whoa.

Andrew
Yeah, pretty cool. Pretty cool. Tank-based is kind of what it sounds like. you know If you imagine how a tank moves, it's like two tracks moving at the same time. um And so it's simple, but it's also like not very precise. Whereas swerve drive, you have four wheels that can all move independently, and so they can and they can rotate. So you can move forward, backwards, left, right.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
diagonal you know you become a queen instead of a ah ah rook and it's uh does that metaphor make sense it's nerdy as fuck but it makes sense

Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does, it does. It was just not, it was just not the metaphor. Like, it just took me a second. and I was like, I didn't, my brain did not go to chess. I was like, what is it?

Andrew
And then, yeah, but the the flip side is it's just way more complicated. So Swerve Drive, you have because you have you go from like four motors that are basically doing the same thing you have to control and to eight motors that can all operate independently. And there's a lot of like tuning and.

Andrew
PID controllers, which are this like math thing that you use to like set a location on within like robotics. So you have to tune like your PID controllers and set your like encoder offsets and just get everything be very precise about everything. And then it's also like strongly encouraged that you use command based code which is like a little things are a little more like obfuscated away from you versus like in timer based you're like there's a timer running throughout a match and you're just constantly getting

Andrew
hitting the same function over and over again. And then in command-based, it's a little more abstracted. And so it can be like just a tiny bit trickier to debug things. So we've just like we have taken a big step up in complexity of our electronics and programming. And guess who's the electronics and programming mentor on the team?

Sean
Austin.

Andrew
yeah

Sean
You, you.

Andrew
I wish. Dude, I wish Austin was on the team.

Sean
That'd be crazy.

Andrew
That would be a blast.

Sean
That'd be the coolest robot there. That'd be cheating for the kids.

Andrew
Yeah. But yeah, it's been super fun. And I you know finished up workday and then went and spent two and a half hours at the robotics center yesterday and spent that whole time trying to tune our surf drive. And it is still not doing what I want it to do. So I'll be going back tomorrow night.

Sean
How many kids do you have to work with? Like just on your team?

Andrew
Yeah, so our team, the first year I did it, we had three kids. The like most competitive teams often have 40 or 50 kids. so And they often have tens of thousands, if not six figures of funding.

Sean
Whoa.

Andrew
And we had our first year like two grand. So that gives you an idea of like scale. This year, we're up to, I think, 15 kids.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
We've got a handful of eighth graders who were having them build a separate robot so that they can get a as much hands-on experience as possible.

Andrew
then we have a couple of seniors and like a junior who were who are super involved. And so I've got one senior who is interested really interested in programming and electronics.

Andrew
And so usually he and I are working together with a random eighth grader.

Sean
Nice.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Nice.

Andrew
Yeah, it's fun.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
It's cool. Also, our team's all like Hispanic, and like half of them don't speak English. Well, not half. yeah This year, we've only got a couple who aren't very comfortable speaking English.

Andrew
But like everyone on the team speaks Spanish, a couple of them like prefer to speak Spanish over English. And so yeah.

Sean
Sweet.

Andrew
I get to try to practice my Spanish, and they get to make fun of me for how bad my Spanish is.

Sean
Sweet.

Sean
cool nice nice i was thinking about going back to my high school and like saying hi helping out and then and then i and then i decide not to but yeah okay fine that's fair that's fair there's there's a maybe there's a little bit of of high school pride

Andrew
Yeah. But they're they're really cool kids. It's it's really fun.

Andrew
I don't know if I'd want to go back to my high school. I like that this is a different high school. Something about that creates some nice separation for me.

Sean
like city school maybe i would go to somewhere so i cried at a party uh at shimukan this week bald my eyes out yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Andrew
Oh, yeah. See, I have no pride in my high school. I'm like, thank God I'm fucking out of that place. What's going on with you?

Andrew
Holy shit. What? This just got more real than I was expecting.

Sean
no no no it's not it's not it's not it's not stay light stay light just stress me on this i was at a penthouse in dc it was really cool uh i was at i was in dc for schmoo con i was at a pen i was at a penthouse and the guy the host had no

Andrew
OK.

Andrew
OK. OK.

Andrew
Jesus. Yeah. Is this the puppy? Did you cry at how cute Josh's puppy is?

Sean
no no basically the guy who owns the penthouse also had the whole hot one stack of hot sauces and you know as a

Andrew
Oh, damn.

Sean
it was bad. It was real bad. It was like, actually, like, I think I saw God at the last tab.

Andrew
Speaking of poops, our how are your poops the next day?

Sean
Okay. They're fine. They usually doesn't affect me in that way. strong, gastrointestinal, gastrointestinal. I don't have like hot girl tummy issues, you know?

Andrew
Must be nice.

Andrew
Oh man, I have i have weak white boy tummy issues. like It is bad.

Sean
uh i do i do now and now that once if i eat too late feel like i feel like yeah i but i'm guessing it's acid reflux but i have no idea what it is anyway yeah uh the bomb doesn't taste that bad but very spicy the last dab because i think i think the one that they sell at hot ones isn't the actual the bomb i don't know sean evans you can come out come for me for after me for this but like

Andrew
What? What?

Sean
I think the ah the the bomb is not hot sauce, the bomb is like like heat something that you add to hot sauce. so I don't remember, it's like a different classification of the thing, which is why it's so painful and all that sort of stuff. I'm pretty sure that the one they sell at Hot Ones is like a hot sauce version of the bomb.

Sean
Regardless, very spicy, tasted not bad, was pretty good. and didn't try the others, except for the last dab, where I finally got coast into it, because I got better from the the bomb. I saw that he had ice cream, and I was like, okay, I can do this. It was bad.

Andrew
Did the last ad taste okay?

Sean
Yeah, it tasted fine. It was just way more painful, like way more, like...

Andrew
Wow. Yeah. That's the opposite of the experience that people seem to have on the show. So, uh, yeah, that's wild.

Sean
yeah I woke up the next time where my tongue hurt is like it was in pain I think I saw yesterday there was still a little bump of my tongue from it but yeah yeah yeah I'll send you someone has a photo someone has a video of me eating it and dying too I'll send it to you later but yeah magician mccon that was cool that's the last one very sad about that

Andrew
That is absolutely wild.

Andrew
Love it.

Andrew
Yeah, ah ah Greg was telling me that that it was the last shmoo, so I never made it out there, which is a bummer, even though you literally invited me to come to this one.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew
but

Sean
It's okay. It's fine. It's okay. We'll go somewhere else.

Andrew
Hey man, I'm on that, I'm on that startup founder budget right now. I gotta get to Ramen profitability before I start taking random trips to DC for on a whim.

Sean
Well, speaking of Robin profitability, how is MetaMonster?

Andrew
Dude, I just got off of the best fucking call.

Sean
How you doing?

Andrew
I'm like a little bit floating right now.

Sean
Okay. Okay. Is this with, is this with the the guy you showed me, the marketing agency?

Andrew
This is.

Sean
I don't know if you want to say his name, but.

Andrew
No, no, no, no, no. i'm I'm talking to them tomorrow. I'm stoked for that call too.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
But no, i think I think I could say this person's name.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
This was, you're shaking your head. You're saying don't say this Okay.

Sean
Oh, no, I'm just waiting for the pod scan results to come in.

09:23.100
Andrew
no, this is a mutual friend of ours. I was chatting with Margaret Pacheco, who's the head of, think the OAG SEO is her, is her agency.

Sean
Oh, yes.

Sean
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Andrew
she works with her friends over at NOMIC and she is awesome.

Sean
Kill it.

Andrew
She's just a delightful person.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
really enjoyed talking to her and it's like, So we've been getting some feedback from friends and it's been awesome.

Andrew
You've had some amazing feedback and you were by far the closest to our ICP. And so your feedback has been the most helpful.

Sean
Hell yeah.

Andrew
Like you were actually using MetaMonster for what we intended intend to use it for.

Sean
Nope.

Andrew
it A lot of the other people we've been onboarding, are you know ah we intentionally know they're not our ib ICP. We just ideal customer profile or persona for anyone listening who's not familiar with that acronym. So we know they're not our ICP. We wanted to get a few folks to just like kick the tires, make sure it's not horribly broken before we start bringing on people who could be actual customers someday.

Andrew
And so, you know, they've been great for that. And it's been cool to see meta monster through their eyes and for a couple of them I've even like, you know, sort of stepped into a little bit of an SEO consultant role. And so that's been really cool because it's been a good chance to like try to step into our user's shoes.

Andrew
like for our friend Mike Privet, return on security, I actually like put together like a little SEO audit strategy doc for him, partially using MetaMonster and then partially using a bunch of other tools, which was awesome experience.

Sean
Sweet.

Andrew
But there's something so satisfying when you're talking to someone who is in your ICP and it just reaffirms that like, yes, these are the people we want to serve. you Because it's just like everything clicks, everything feels easy. And it's just like you see the vision, you see the path to like,

Andrew
If we just build the best fucking tool possible for these people. I will one enjoy working with them and to like, you know, I think this is like a great market for us. And so Margaret was just like right in our sweet spot of like.

Andrew
You know, she's technical. She does technical audits. She uses a bunch of different tools, both AI tools and traditional tools. And, um, um, yeah, she's always looking for, uh, for ways to improve her, her process and everything. She's not like all the way on the, I really just do content strategy into the spectrum where folks aren't going to get as much value from MetaMonster. And she's not on the like hardcore technical writing code. I don't need MetaMonster. I can do this myself into the spectrum. She's like.

Andrew
right in our sweet spot. yeah She works with clients who are you know have a decent number of pages, enough that this can take some some workload off of off of her plate. And just like had such great feedback, was giving me so many ideas for for things to do. And like felt like our vision for the next few things we want to add was aligned with what she wanted for the most part. and other than like some new stuff that she got me thinking about. And so it was just, man, when like when you find your ICP, like you got to keep talking to them because you got to keep reminding yourself like this is who we want to serve.

Sean
yeah i mean i'm all for it just keep serving you know you and austin yeah i mean i mean i feel like the icp like like yeah i mean yeah like at this point like daily active user of it so it's pretty crazy like uh yeah it's it's not even like it's it's not like a

Andrew
Yeah, I think you are. Yeah.

Andrew
That's awesome. That's so cool.

Sean
Like, hey, I should log in wow for Andrew to go give him feedback. It's like I need my thing solved. So I'm going to log every single, actually every other client I speak to on the phone or not on the on on a call.

Sean
Like sometimes when I see them, I just, I'll just start running them through MetaMonster, not them, but on the call just because ah SEO comes up all the time.

Sean
They have a bunch of pages. They'll bring up an SEO thing or like, Yeah, ah ah there also isn't a day I don't go without having a feature request for michael letster at this point.

Sean
yeah yeah Yeah, so I'm all for it.

Andrew
And we've been implementing them. We've been implementing your feature requests. Yeah.

Sean
I'm all for Austin and Andrew to to build the tool that works for us. No, it's it's been it's been super cool.

Andrew
it's so exciting like

Sean
ah

Andrew
chart juice, like you were using chart juice a little bit, cause you're my friend, but I feel like that one was much more, you were using it because you were my friend.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And like, I don't, like I was using chart juice a little bit.

Sean
Mmhmm. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew
it It was cool, but like, this just feels so different. Like I think once we get a few people on in this ICP, I think we're going to have some more people who are going to feel like you pretty quickly is my hope.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
And then it's just, my job is just make it better for them as fast as humanly possible. Because there's so much stuff I want to add. I'm so excited.

Sean
Yeah I think I think the thing with charge use is I did think about charges the other day because I was working on the blog post like the 13 paths creative people and then I wanted to make a chart and then I went to charge and then I didn't go to charges was thinking about I was like okay this doesn't like fit what I need to do I think as the one who goes into like uses Figma doesn't really it's not Programmatically, yeah.

Sean
think... Can I give you another future request on the call? That just came into my mind.

Andrew
of for meta monster.

Sean
for four minimum answer yeah Yeah, yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, hit me with it.

Sean
Okay, great. theory This is just a customer support call now.

Andrew
What you got?

Sean
You need to add schema to the product.

Andrew
Love it.

Andrew
Interesting.

Sean
If you add schema yeah structured scheme because it's close enough to meta descriptions if you add or call it fucking schema monster will pay for a different license because because like when someone asked me how to get their page to rank that is always my answer.

Andrew
Structured schema generation.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
It's just like schema is like the Pareto principle of ranking.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
and most sites don't have it. like I don't even think Beehive has like schema for their pages, which is mind-blowing to me. They you know we need to get that shit together.

Andrew
Yeah.

Andrew
This is fascinating. So Margaret on our call was just saying, don't bother with structured schema.

Sean
yeah

Sean
Oh, really?

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
her So there were kind of two things she was saying.

Sean
okay

Andrew
She was like, one, I think that puts you too directly into competition with rank math. And I don't know if you want to do that. And then two, and like a bunch of other plugins that are like schema focused.

Andrew
And then two, she was like, schema is so important, I do it myself. But that said, it's totally on the list.

Sean
picture.

Andrew
So here's here's the list of like new generation types, issue types that I want to be able to support. as And I don't know the order yet.

Andrew
like I got to get some more feedback, but like I don't know the order yet. So right now, we just do page titles, meta descriptions. And we basically just do missing or too long, too short.

Andrew
so like big things I want to add image, alt text, headers. So like H ones, H twos,

Andrew
Structured schema, OG tags.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
and, uh, I feel like I'm missing missing one. I mean, those are kind of the core things I think, And I don't know the order that i that we're going to tackle those. But like I think we'll eventually have all of them. And Austin and I have talked about, do we do those inside of MetaMonster, or do we spin them out into their own products? I think I want to keep them in MetaMonster, because I think it just makes MetaMonster even more valuable. And oh, internal links. That's the other big one, internal links.

Andrew
I think I want to keep them all in one because it's like it's less, you one, I don't want to manage two fucking code bases and like two fucking marketing pipelines and all that. I just want to keep everything as simple as possible. And then two, yeah I want to make the tool just stupid valuable.

Andrew
And like, there is a risk that you add too much and then it feels cluttered. And, you know, so there's, there's going to be UX challenges if we go that route. But that's my preference. And I don't know. Oh, and then the last thing is just like.

Andrew
adding more like quality metrics. So if we add a Search Console integration, we could be like, hey, your click-through rate is too low. If we know what all your primary keywords are, then we can be like, hey, you're this is missing a primary keyword. This header, or this image alt text, or this page title is missing your primary keyword. And so there's a lot of like, yeah, those quality metrics are kind of kind of the other thing.

Sean
And then in four years you can do that thing that ConvertKid did, and you drop the meta. So you're just Monster.com. but That would be sweet if you could do that.

Andrew
Except Monster dot.com is a massive company. They're the job board company.

Sean
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, but, but, you know, you never know, right? You see the t-shirt company that apparently bought and run?

Andrew
Oh yeah, that's wild.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew
That's hilarious.

Sean
could be you, you know? I mean, Liquid Death, like get with enough energy drinks out there. Who knows? Who knows?

Andrew
Oh, by the way, that reminds me, we have officially set up a business.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
We are a real business entity now.

Sean
Sick.

Andrew
Monster Endeavors LLC is incorporated in the state of Delaware.

Sean
Congrats.

Sean
I love it. I love it. You mean Monsters Inc.

Andrew
Thank you, Stripe Atlas.

Sean
You mean Monsters Inc.

Andrew
i Dude, we thought about it, but I was just like, I i don't want to accidentally get entangled in a Disney lawsuit.

Sean
you

Sean
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. You don't want the mouse coming for you.

Andrew
i don't want them now so

Andrew
ah can't handle the mo

Sean
But we're going to call it Monsters Inc.

Sean
Oh, OK, OK. Sorry, I got really distracted with Monsters Inc. I think I agree with you.

Sean
I do think you should keep it in one thing also because it's really confusing and because the purpose, like the purpose and usage is the same.

Andrew
I don't want the mouse. I can't handle the mouse.

Sean
That being said, though.

Andrew
And it all starts with a crawl. It all starts with like understanding the content and the website and all that.

Sean
That being said though, I think the only thing that I'm iffy on is your internal link idea. um Because it's kind of is different between like, you know, literally HTML head and body.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
But I do think if you build a tool that helps you build out more internal links, that would be crazy useful. Because nobody realizes if their internal links are dead on a blog post until it's too late.

Sean
And, nobody, like, not nobody, but people do not properly internal link their blog post content because it's such a pain in the ass to do.

Sean
So, I don't know, I mean, it could still probably be in the tool. I just, like, I think if you were, yeah, I think if anyone even was were to start a microsass right now that's similar to this, internal links would be such a good use case.

Andrew
yeah

Andrew
And there's a couple, right?

Andrew
LinkWhisperer and LinkScout are both out there. And MetaMonster started with us thinking about doing internal links. And we trade away from that for the the starting point, because honestly, we heard a couple of SEOs say getting the metadata right comes first before internal linking.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
And like while internal linking maybe has a bigger long-term impact, it's like its if you don't have page titles, you've got to fix that.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And then the other thing was just we heard more skepticism about our ability to do it well.

Sean
Yeah, yeah.

Sean
Yeah, that makes sense.

Andrew
And there is nuance to getting internal links right where you kind of want a flow like from like your

Sean
That makes sense.

Andrew
home page to your pillar pages and then to supporting pages and vice versa.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And if you and so like figuring out that flow automatically is could be tricky.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
And there's like rewriting content.

Sean
i mean i think it's it's like i think it's a different yeah I mean, I think it's a different product and almost entirely.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
I think it'd be cool to eventually for to be a part of Venom Monster. but yeah i mean i think I would almost even rather just have a sitemap and start saying, hey, I want these pages to go here and then for it to then give me like for me to decide that and then for it to give me the like link suggestions or something but even then like you're dealing like if you're plugged into Webflow versus Ghost versus WordPress like you know with Ghost I love the fact that I can do bookmark cards as my links instead of like native links and

Sean
There's like more ux reader UX to it, or reader experience to it, than meta descriptions. I love that you're adding everything else. you know I think when you started the project, I was i told you that I would love to have a real ah SEO dashboard for a website where I can manage all the all the descriptions, and all the tags, and all the images in one place where that makes perfect sense to me.

Sean
and I mean, Screaming Frog definitely does not do that, even or even even comes close to do it, which is cool. But yeah. Thank you for adding the bulk export function, by the way.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
That's super useful. Yeah.

Andrew
Have you tried bulk generation yet?

Sean
No, I haven't.

Andrew
Oh, I'm so excited for you to try it.

Sean
I haven't.

Andrew
I can't wait can't wait to hear what you think.

Sean
Okay, I'll let you know. I'll let you know.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah, i haven't I haven't logged in today. I haven't logged in since I gave Austin my thoughts about like how you guys use primary keywords and everything.

Andrew
Yeah, we haven't made that switch, but I think we're going to Austin just like had a lot on his plate yesterday.

Sean
All good. Yeah. Chop, chop, guys. You're a free user. I want the world. Yeah, I mean, it's

Sean
to kind of talk.

24:00.100
Andrew
here's

Sean
Oh, go ahead.

Andrew
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. No, no, no, no. Finish your thought.

Sean
one of the use cases One of the use cases that's been really helpful isn't actually just optimizing after

Andrew
And then I've got a question for you.

Sean
Because they have you know their seo they're not SEO optimized. um I might as well have new meta descriptions for it. I have another, yeah, another client we're doing, a Webflow to Webflow one, same thing, like they had a shitty Webflow build, we're rebuilding it. As we're rebuilding it, we might as well have new meta descriptions, and it's not like I'm gonna have anyone on my team sit there and write them at the moment, and for sure not going to. And the first pass is pretty clean.

Sean
It is cleaner when I get to ah ah assign the keyword if the first path doesn't work, which is why I was giving you your but like the thoughts on that.

Andrew
Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Sean
but yeah, it's been really cool for like website like as like a first starting point for a website migration. So yeah.

Andrew
Sick. Just like crawl and see all the, yeah get a good snapshot of all the content and like what what's the current state.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, and and the ability to like optimize and then export everything that I'm not optimizing, right? Because that way I can get the entire site map and then plug it in somewhere else rather than like only get the optimized back and then don't have anywhere to go for the other yeah URLs.

Sean
So yeah, sorry, you were going to say something.

Andrew
Cool.

Andrew
So at one point I was really stressed about like, get people to prepay, get paying customers as fast as possible. And I've realized that like the bigger risk in my mind is that we don't build something good. And so like, I want to, I'm now of the mindset where like, I'm warning everybody that it's going to cost something. I'm trying to give them an idea of what it will cost them at some point in the future.

Andrew
But it's free during alpha. And so my question for you is like, when do you think I flip the switch and I've got ideas, but.

Sean
but Just say you don't want to come travel with me. Alright, because you don't want to hit wrong profitability.

Andrew
yeah

Sean
yeah

Andrew
No, but it's like i I was so worried about optimizing for like revenue and it's like it's just too early for that, I think.

Andrew
And like that's not to say I'm one of those people who's like, I'm building a free tool or I'm going to make it free forever. No, I'm telling people it's going to cost money. I'm giving them an idea of what it will cost.

Andrew
I'm gauging their reaction on that. but it is free for right now because I just want to make sure it's useful. And, and so like my goal, like I'm thinking in my head that like, once we have five people who are using it weekly or something like that, like somewhere in that ballpark, that to me says we have built something useful.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
It's time to flip on payments.

Sean
Okay. Let me challenge that because that's interesting because your metric for your, your qualifier for when to charge to is interesting because it's different than your qualifier to like launch when I asked you last week.

Andrew
Okay.

Sean
But if you said you wanted to at least get, something and you wanted a bulk generation,

Andrew
Yeah, what did what did I say last week?

Andrew
Bulk generation?

Andrew
Yeah, so that was launched the alpha. And in my mind, the alpha is free. So like it's free while it's in alpha state.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And so I was thinking of like what's the bare minimum amount of value that I need to be able to create to to feel good about putting it in front of our ICP people who could be potential customers and then the next the next gate is what do I want to see what kind of feedback do I want to get or what behavior do I want to see from those people to go this is good enough for me to charge you. you

Sean
Yes, my point, the point that i'm I'm not saying to launch and charge for the alpha, I'm saying that the the decision for when the beta is out to me is when you should charge but that should be but based on features than it is on like daily active users for the platform.

Sean
I think point being is like, I i feel like there are a number, I mean, I guess my point is like, I think one is a leading indicator and one is a lagging indicator. So maybe you are, maybe I take back what I said and maybe you are right that like five daily active users or weekly active users is like a lagging indicator for saying that you have enough features for the product to be like useful either daily, weekly, or, you know, every other day.

Sean
So yeah.

Andrew
Yeah. I mean, if it was if it was feature-based, I think that until we have you know sync to your CMS, I think that that I probably don't want to charge until we have the ability to sync to at least one CMS.

Andrew
But I don't know.

Sean
like Agreed.

Andrew
I think it's possible that people will feel like it's valuable enough before we have that that they would be willing to pay knowing that that is coming.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
And so like, that's where I'm like, I think, you know, it was easy for me to feature gate for like the alpha cause it's like, okay, what's the bare minimum I need to do to be able to like, feel like I'm meeting the promises I made.

Sean
I see.

Andrew
And if people get in here, they're not going to be like, what the fuck, this doesn't do anything. But then like the switch from like alpha to beta feels to me more about like usefulness of the product than it does features and like features will be a part of that.

Andrew
But, you know, any lines I draw right now are based on assumptions versus like if I, if I have feedback from people that they're like, five people have said, I am getting value from this.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
I'm using it for real projects.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Then then I'm like, OK, that feels to me like enough to be like, all right, it's it's time to pay. And if they don't pay, then I'm like, then I can be like, OK, cool, why not? what do you need to be able to pay? And if it's like, I need to be able to sync to WordPress, it's like, all right, cool.

Sean
Yeah, no, fair, fair, fair. Just to index on something, this might be more micro. I don't think that syncing to a CMS is actually a, a like,

Sean
I don't know, like wallet taking, taking out wallet blocking feature, to be honest, because I think that there are plenty of us SEOs who also have BAs, for example, and changing meta description is not that hard of a thing.

Andrew
Mm hmm.

Andrew
Mm hmm.

Sean
It's just annoying to do. There's also other ways to do it. It's not, yeah, it's not the end of the world. I mean,

Sean
I'm trying to think about What in the product I would want to see before I pay for it.

Sean
But it's not like there's a lot, you know, like. There's like, there's I feel like there's like bells and whistles and things. But if you're like, I'm going to cost you 50 bucks a month starting now, that is not out of the picture or, know, I think if you.

Sean
Yeah, I think like something under that, like a like a 14 to 30 a month is like a no brainer already, given the fact that like we just literally get value out of it right now, right?

Sean
I feel like there's just like normal sass things for it to have for me to feel like, okay, I would pay 50 bucks a month. But yeah, I mean.

Andrew
Like what are what are those things?

Sean
teams, workspaces, like stuff like standard SaaS polish. I think having a ability to push out to and think an ability to push out to a CMS is useful and nice.

Sean
It would be save our team time.

Andrew
By the way, we do technically support

Sean
Oh, really?

Andrew
um i It's just not in the UI. So if you want to add someone else to your team, I can create an account for them and then manually connect them to your organization in the database, and then they will see all of your sites.

Sean
Cool. Nice.

Andrew
And there's no like separation in of like these are Sean sites and these are YARX sites or anything. But we do, like, Austin was smart and was like, I want to build this with organizations from the ground up because it'll be easier than adding it later.

Sean
Nice.

Andrew
So we do actually already have organizations. They're just hidden.

Sean
Nice. Those are very, those are very like sales solutions engineer thing for you to say, by the way, at the amount of times I've used that line, like, Oh yeah, it's in the product. It's just not in the front end yet.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
believe you, I believe you for the record. Have I lied about it in the past? Maybe, I don't know.

Andrew
I promise I'm not lying. It's there. Awesome and I are on the same org.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah, no that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, I think, I think the I think the main so like like to go back right like I think like like features that I would want it to have, or things I would wanted to have.

Sean
maybe scheduled scanning for example like something that's continuous right because otherwise I gotta run into all the time versus like meta monster please just watch this site and I don't know ping me once a week or ping me every time there's a new page who knows I don't know that stuff is useful

Andrew
Hmm.

Andrew
Mmhmm.

Sean
then I think the rest of it is like, just like, and you know, I know you guys are working on getting it, making it better, but making the optimizations better, right?

Sean
There's the, there was like the one single, ah ah you guys might have fixed it already, the whole cookie bug.

Andrew
Mm-hmm.

Sean
Yeah.

33:48.100
Andrew
Yeah. that was a And that was a scraper issue. I'll have to check with Austin to see if we've got that fixed. But yeah. Basically, the the scraper there was like a cookie banner, and the scraper was pulling the cookie banner content instead of the page content.

Andrew
So yeah, we do need to get there's still some edge cases like that that are going to pop up and that I'd like to have have ironed out before we start charging.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Nice.

Sean
Nice. Yeah, I mean, otherwise, like, the the like, I feel like there's some indie hackers that charge like $14.99 for their plan or something, $29.99.

34:12.100
Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
I think either of those pricing plans are basically no brainers.

Andrew
Yeah, yeah, on on the pricing front. It's a little complicated, but I think we're going to charge basically based off of the number of pages you want to publish.

Sean
Mm.

Andrew
So like if you publish meta description for like if you export a meta description or you export a page title that is edited, optimized in any way, that that page counts towards your page limit for that month.

Andrew
And so it's like it's a little hard to explain, but it feels to me like the thing that like simplifies you know, it like captures usage without limiting your usage in the product. And so I think our base plan.

Andrew
So we've been talking about our base plan being $50 a month for 500 pages per month. And But I also have been thinking about having like sort of a solopreneur plan that is like $20 or $30 a month and is like maybe 200 pages, but you only get one site.

Andrew
Whereas the others all the other plans you get like up to, I'm currently thinking operating off of, you get up to 50 sites.

Sean
My only problem with that, there's probably more, but the page limit feels too too small on both 50 bucks and 20 bucks. Because so we also run a Shopify store, it basically means we can't put our Shopify, like our Shopify store does not have that many products, but the way Shopify is structured,

Sean
shittily, means that we cannot. Like, it just blows past our plan immediately at 500, and if I was a solo print...

Andrew
one One minor point of clarification, you can crawl an unlimited number of pages.

Sean
Oh, true. That's fair. That's a good point.

Andrew
It's it's optimis optimized pages. So you could add your Shopify site and you just have to optimize it in batches, which is not ideal.

Sean
That's fair.

Sean
I mean that's a, I mean if I'm optimizing batches I would just pay for the next level up.

Andrew
but

Sean
That's a good point. I do forget about that. It's hard to like fully pull that out of my head and thinking about it as like, basically like watch pages, it does make sense.

Sean
I feel like we have a, we have a client and a tax service management space that does something like that after billing and it works really well for them because It tells the they get to upsell all the time because or every single contract because like hey you have this many more app sets you're now covering a very small percentage of it you can. Yeah. It does make sense.

Andrew
Yeah, it is.

Andrew
Yeah, I mean, I feel like when I've talked to people in our ICP, they're like, yeah, 500 pages a month makes sense. Even people who have multiple clients, which has been interesting because they're like, yeah, we're only we're only actually optimizing even if we have you know, three sites doing this many pages or something, you know, three new sites per month or something.

Andrew
Yeah, I don't know. That's yeah.

Sean
Yeah, I mean, I... Go ahead, sorry.

Andrew
If I if I get more feedback, more pushback, then I'll consider expanding it. But I want to I would rather start low and then have the option to increase later, then like start too high and then be like, oh, shit, we're giving away like

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
too much value, you know, it's hard. I also don't want to over optimize right now. Like I want, I don't want people to, I want people to be like, yeah, this is a no brainer. This is great value. So I don't know.

Andrew
I don't want to charge too little, but I also don't want to try to squeeze the most out of people right now. So it's tricky.

Sean
I mean, I think you're right. In my brain, when you said it, I did not hear you when you, like I did, but then I didn't hear you when you talked about optimized pages.

Sean
So my brain went to, you know, every site that I've scanned with 100 to 200 plus pages, and I've scanned one, two, three, I scanned 10 different pages at this point.

Andrew
Great, I want you to.

Sean
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew
Yeah, but and that's gonna be ah something something we'll have to figure out.

Andrew
like Even if we try to be explicit about it, do people still see that page limit and think that's the limit of like total pages they can have in the product? Or can we communicate it in a way ah mean we communicate effectively? Crawl as many pages as you want or up to some reasonable limit. like we We'll have to have some sort of limit in place. because but crawl some reasonable number of pages that's huge.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And then we charge you based off of optimized pages. But like the other thing we're trying to do is like, and maybe this is trying too hard, but we were trying to do like not just optimized pages, but like,

Andrew
exported optimizations. And maybe that's like too complicated for people to grasp. Maybe we should just do optimized pages. Because the idea was was like, do as much as you want within the app, and we don't charge you until you start pulling data out.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
But maybe that's too complicated.

Sean
Jam on it this week. I'll think about it.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
Talk about it in the next episode.

Andrew
Yeah. Give it some thought. and then

Sean
I just want to point out this reminds me of something lovable on bolt lovable does message limits bolt does credits and I see a lot of people like credits more even like like it's like two million credits on bolt versus like a hundred of a message limit feel like it's a really odd space to be in between for meta monster because like I don't know I feel like because it's

Andrew
Mm hmm.

Sean
Instinctually, like I feel like it's either number of pages crawled versus number of optimizations run, not optimized pages. That being said, optimization just makes the most sense off the top.

Sean
It just feels, I don't know why. There's like a bug in my brain that makes it feel very weird.

Andrew
Yeah, no, I hear you.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
I don't think we've solved it yet, for sure. We got to run, but think on it.

Sean
Yep. I'll see you in a second.

Andrew
Good chatting with you. We'll talk more next week.

Sean
All right. Bye. Thanks. Bye.