Michael Fitzgerald 0:00
The final deal, and the final decision is not made logically. It's made psychologically. It's the feeling in the tummy. I can trust Finola, and she has proven that in the sales process. So I believe that it will be in the delivery process of the product, the service, whatever it is, it's really simple.
Finola Howard 0:19
That's Michael Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of one page CRM. He is an inventor at heart and a champion for small business. He is one of the few people I've met who started his business with a very clear vision and has systematically gone after achieving it. I invited Michael on to talk about his growth story and to share his insight into CRM and why one page CRM is different to all the rest. If you want a different perspective on sales and how to manage that process, join us. It's a powerful conversation. I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart and your host of the your truth shared podcast. I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve. And this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared today, I wanted to do a kind of a double whammy for the podcast, and it was I wanted to tell a story, or have my guest tell his story of growth, because that's really important, because That's what the purpose of the purpose of the podcast is. And the other thing that I wanted to do was he's going to tell us the growth journey through the development of his product, which is a CRM product, and CRM is critical for growth, and we don't spend enough time paying attention to good CRM. So today, I'd like to welcome Michael Fitzgerald from one page CRM, which is based in Galway and is a great Irish success story. But the truth is, Michael is from Washford. Welcome Michael.
Michael Fitzgerald 2:10
Thanks very much. Finola, I don't tell many people up here, just accepted more in the west of Ireland, but it's okay. It's okay. So I,
Finola Howard 2:19
I've always, I've heard a lot about one page CRM over the years, and actually, a client of mine introduced me to one page CRM, it could be maybe 10 or 15 years ago, perhaps one of your earlier customers. But what I'd love you to do is
Finola Howard 2:34
tell the story, because you come from a web design background, a web development company, and the thing that I'm really interested in is You Share this story on your website, but how do you go from and what were the decisions involved in going from a service based business, a web design business, to choosing to go to a product based business? And it wasn't your first product, either. I'd love to hear that story. Yeah. Well, let's go back a little bit further, actually, because you said I came from a web design business. The web design business was something that I just had to do, I guess, to put bread on the table, because I'm naturally a product guy, rather, and it didn't make a difference if it was web or whatever, like that. My early jobs in in life, one not too far from me, with SRAM. And was I designed products, real, physical products. And so I've always been Ultra product guy. I just can't help it. It's in my DNA. So for SRAM, we designed the grip shift shifters, and I was specifically designed for manufacturer, designed for assembly, so that it would could be manufactured quite,
Michael Fitzgerald 3:47
you know, cost effectively. And then my next job after that was in slender tone, if you've ever heard of slender tone, yeah, yeah. So I was kind of like a product inventor for them. So I worked in the concept department, which was really, really cool. I mean, like we were the ones that people kind of stared at around around the office, because wonder, what the hell is he doing with that contraption in his hand? And we would make prototypes from anything. You just go down to Woody's and buy stuff and stick it together and build prototypes and strap like, you know, electronics and little bits onto it to make it work, or whatever. So really nice. And eventually, then that company, I guess, was in a little bit of financial difficulties, so we let I left it, and I started a product myself, with a with another, with another guy. It was a consumer type of product, and for language learning, and another one for speed reading. So there are really innovative, really nice products, but you need really deep pockets for consumers, because it's all about getting it in front of people's eyeballs, a lot of marketing costs and everything like that. So unfortunately, that company failed, but it gave me the taste of the software.
Michael Fitzgerald 5:00
World, and that I can build stuff in software. And then the whole advent of stuff was moving online. Products started to appear. Online product before this, it was all the trend. When I made that first leap, it was into downloadable software. So I made that, you know, transition then from downloadable software to web apps. And I guess when that company failed, you know, my my co founder, he went back into medical device research, kind of similar to slender stone stuff.
Michael Fitzgerald 5:31
And I stayed on and but I shifted to the web. And yes, I had to put money on the table. So I kind of accidentally ended up in web design. I suppose to to to fund me, but it wasn't long before I just have a niche for for building something and building a product, rather than being a service guy. Why? Why do you think what? What is because one page CRM is
Michael Fitzgerald 5:56
you've a very service oriented culture also like and so, yeah, I get the idea of that you're the fascination with product
Michael Fitzgerald 6:05
but, but I think you're bringing service with you too. Like, is there? What do you think is the difference, fundamental difference, between service, of how you behave or how you think about things, and product focus? I guess our service, at the moment, service is our product. It's not, it's not like a service. Somebody's not coming to me with their idea, their way of doing something. I guess I'm very vision driven,
Michael Fitzgerald 6:32
so, and I'll follow through to the end, like, you know, it's not like if an architect says, you know, design this house and you build it, and then the builders come on, Sasha, don't do it that way. I'm the guy that pushes No, this is the vision. This is what we've come up with. And we're going all the way. And so I'm, I'm that type of character, I guess. And one of the downsides of being that kind of inventor character is that you want to do it in the shed on your own. You want to crack the you want to crack the concept and build the kind of solve the main problem in the shed on your own. And I couldn't do that anymore, like I could kind of do it with other companies. I was left to my own guys to kind of, you know, make something, break something, and come up with the solution. But when you're trying to build it, and you have to make that transition again, from being an inventor, product type person, to being a business owner, which is totally different. And you have to hire people that are way smarter than yourself, that they can code, that they can design better than I could. They can do everything better than I could. And all I was doing was I still see myself now within the company, as a concept person, which is great place to be, because that's what I love. You know, they always say, do the stuff in your business that, you know, gives you energy, and the other stuff is just called stuff, and you should get somebody else to do it, because they get energy from doing that stuff in the different characters and the Yin Yang that's in company, leadership and and staff and everything like that. This is all, um, give people what they love doing, and this the stuff they don't give it to somebody else, because they'll get energy from that other thing. Completely agree with that. Completely what is, what's your vision then? Because you know how often it is that when I speak to entrepreneurs, I think this interesting, this inventor idea of visionary, because so often when I'm working with clients,
Michael Fitzgerald 8:30
throwing out this idea of purpose, mission, vision and actually seeing an end goal and going, you know, deliberately after that end goal is quite resisted. Yeah, I mean, like, we're 1213, years old now, and and our product mission hasn't changed. Not one bit from the day one, from that napkin sketch, our product vision has been the same. And we understood, I mean, like I was looking at myself, okay, if you if you can design something that solves your own problem, you're on to a winner, because you can use it in your own business. And then eventually it gets labels, and it comes outside your own business, and other businesses can use it. And that's the birth of that kind of in house thing to selling a product. But our product mission from the start was to try to be as easy to use email. Because I tested other CRMs and they were horrendous. Like, you can get lost in them. They're they were showing me the wrong stuff. Like, you know, I remember actually googling how to increase sales, because I said, Okay, I better focus on this service company, building stuff for other people, but I want to increase sales. So literally, I Googled, how do you increase sales? And I came across these people talking about it back then, and those early blogs and saying, if you increase sales actions, you'll increase sales I said, that sounds good. Well, what's the sales action? So then I had to Google that, what's sales action? And it turns out, it's not this mysterious thing at all. It's actually just a simple thing that sales people do every day, phoning somebody, sending an email, sending them away with WhatsApp these days and doing open.
Michael Fitzgerald 10:00
Estimate, adjusting dense estimate, answering some of their questions, maybe technical questions, reassuring kind of delivery dates. They're all just tiny things. And what actually happens is these CRMs were focusing on charts and graphs and lovely things. That's the result of sales. It doesn't help the sales people. What helps the sales people is ultra focus on sales actions. And if you just stay on top of the sales actions, be it the tiniest little thing, you send an email, if I'm did an estimate for you today, hey, I'm going to sell you that lovely competitor microphone that you have in front of you, and I send you the estimate like you're we stop you say, wait now, don't move on to anybody else. Don't think about anybody else you've got about, you know, just use the next 10 seconds to write down what is the next step and when. And you know that better now than you will ever know it, because you've just done the thing. I know that you have authority on buying that microphone. I know that you have the budget to do it. We've just been talking, so I should set a next action saying, Okay, today's Wednesday. You know, I'm going to give you a few days to look at the estimate and and then I'll give you a call on Monday. So I just set the next action to be on Monday. And with our system, if we just continuously, always go from next action to next action to next action, and it just the sales have a huge impact. We have a huge impact on companies that just buy into that system. It's a mindset, rather than just a piece of software. So that's interesting to me, because I think you've done something that I think you've just demystified sales there, because, you know, the way so many people go, like in so many small businesses, we heard that story of, I hate sales. I just feel so bad about it, or I feel and it becomes very emotional, and, you know, limiting beliefs and all that kind of stuff comes into the mix, whereas you're actually just saying it's just about the next action. And if someone, I remember somebody before, asked me to define sales, and this is my definition of it, sales is making promises and delivering on them, if not over delivering. And even if they're the tiniest promises, if I said to you, I'll give you a call next Tuesday, about, about, course, like you give a call next Tuesday, no matter what happens if you have to stop at an old pay phone that you're wondering how you're going to get a kind into give that call. And like, if I said to you, I'm going to send that estimate this evening, send it this afternoon. Just be ahead. Always be over delivering. Like, you know, under promise, over deliver. Give yourself that little bit of space. Don't be saying I'll be there this evening if you know you can't make it, because now you've broken your promise, and now the you start to erode the trust new at, you know, and all those things, and they don't even know the prospect doesn't even know they're losing trust in you, because sales, the final deal and the final decision, is not made logically. It's made psychologically. It's the feeling in the tummy I can trust Finola, I can trust she will deliver, you know, and she has proven that in the sales process. So I believe that it will be in the delivery process of the product, the service, whatever it is, it's really simple. Don't make any promises you can't keep, and the promises you do, you totally deliver on them, if not over, deliver. And now you have a customer. And you might even have a customer for life. Continue that the whole way through, and you have it. And these are the simplest little things like you might even think, well, I'll call you next. That's not a promise. It's just a phone call. No, it's a promise. It these are promises. And that sales, me, that's my definition of sales on it, and we focus 100% on that. I love your definition of that. And I would, I nearly, want to pause to let that to sink in with people, because I think it could shape how people proceed with sales, instead of putting them off all the time. That if it's just one simple promise at a time, a tiny promise every single in every single moment, yeah, and then what's the next promise? Yeah, and, and that's where sim, like I told you that our product mission, I actually didn't get to give you the second one. So our first one was to try to be as easy to use email. So our dashboard, instead of being charts and grass the results of sales, ours is actually what looks, instead of like, what look might look like an inbox of an email. It's actually what we call is an action stream. So it's just a stream of your next actions, sorted by the priority. So if you've called somebody today that's up at the top, and it's colored in it's in color, and that one next action is beside it in the dashboard. You don't even have to, you know, straight away, you just look at it and you scan or to make phone calls, send an email, have to do up an estimate. Okay, I'm on top of today. Don't look at anything else like and your busy business owner, wearing many hats, needs to get into the sales function extremely fast, do what needs to be done. And and gets out again, because they're hiring people, they're building product. They're, you know, sourcing some new stuff. They've loads to do. And you take our other character, which is the sale.
Michael Fitzgerald 15:00
Salesperson. And your salesperson are wonderful with dealing with people, you know, making that connection and everything like that, but what they hate is admin. So what we made is our second product mission, secondary to being easy to use, is to approach zero admin. And you can see that all of our app, every feature we add, are we reducing the admin to almost nothing. You know, I, if I was doing a demo for you for now with our product, I would show you, you know, I would look at your social profile. I get it in one click. We grab all that, and we set it up inside, complete with the next action ready to go, so it appears in the action stream with what you're going to be doing to them. If we if you had sent me an email, and I grab and I pull it, say from Gmail or Outlook, one click again, from Gmail, we will create the contact, but we fire off that email address to a third party service if it finds social data on you. So we might find your photograph, find your LinkedIn URL, we might find your you know, Facebook page and a background on you. And that's all done with one click. If you fill out a web form, we'll automatically enhance you on the way in as well. So before the sales guy talks this person, he's got a full customer profile on them. Yeah. And even the stuff we've done last year, we want once you find somebody in one page. CRM, so again, we're trying to reduce admin. Imagine a salesperson or somebody in your company kind of going, Oh, I wonder, has he got me? Has he been invited? Did he receive those marketing newsletters? So we've got all these little widget tabs inside one page, CRM. So if you find somebody in one page, you find them in the rest of your company. So you'll actually be able to hit a tab of MailChimp and see, okay, he's got marketing newsletters. They're there there. And I can see you click on a tab for zero or QuickBooks, and you can see that they've got invoices and maybe outstanding whatever like that. So you don't need to go off searching. We're reducing and reducing that admin all the time. And why we're called one page. I didn't even get to the core of that.
Michael Fitzgerald 17:01
You know, this has been what, how we have to sweat the detail all the time. When you open up a contact in one page, CRM, that's everything the deal or the opportunity is inside in the contact, the company information is blended into the contact. All these other sources of information comes into it, the emails that they have, because we sync with your email account and and we show you all the notes, calls, everything like that. It's all in just one scroll, but what almost looks like a LinkedIn profile, and so it's extremely used. You're not kind of going over to a tab for tasks. Now, I know I'm going in into a bit of product, but we're, we're talking about product mission, which has never changed from the start. So that is part of the vision as well. I guess it's like, you know, sticking to our, sticking to our, our values. I know Steve Jobs always said that marketing is about values. We stand for this. If somebody, we're promising people ease of use, they come in, it is easy to use. So they come for that ease of use. And then what we're doing is we're hoping our product wows them. They stay for the power of the application, and the power is when they understand the action stream, when they get to use our email system, which is one of the most efficient of all the CRM systems. And then again, the part we're selling about where we clip data from any source on the web that you want to in one click, you will get a contact set up, most of the time, with a photograph, social profiles, everything, everything is ready to go. We don't want you typing. We want you dealing with the customer. So yeah, that's, that's the vision for the product, and, I guess for the company. Then we have our visions as well, where we want to grow, but that's that's quite different to the product vision.
Finola Howard 18:45
How did you move then, from an inventor to growing the business with people that subscribe to the same vision as you like? Did you actively find people? Did you look at the roles that were needed to grow the business. Or did you look for people of a certain type? How did you decide the team? Because when you were deciding on the team, you had to decide what you were going to let
Michael Fitzgerald 19:11
go control of, yeah. And I guess our target market was kind of us, so we could see how it could be used. If you said, Who did we go after? If we pivoted or not, we're still, we're still for small business, and they're usually service businesses, like we're not, we're not for an E commerce system, even though there is some e commerce type companies using us, and we have some integrations with E commerce. And, you know, we're not as much for, you know, straight up product sales, or BTC, product sales, stuff like that. So we do have our niche, and our niche is in that whole service business, or anything from agencies, consultants, small consulting firms, you know, app and software development companies, stuff like that, who are building stuff for other people. Doing stuff for other people, where the relationship is, is the main way that they can sell now we do have some BTC. I mean, like, I would class real estate agents as BTC. They're normally single user accounts and and it's mostly in the USA that we have the real estate people. They're, they're single kind of users. And real estate in the USA is totally different to Ireland UK. I we wouldn't have many Ireland UK real estate. And they sell houses, I think, in Ireland and UK, we market houses. So the picture is put in the local newspaper. It's put up in the window of the auctioneers, and it's posted in daft in our case, and you wait for people to come in, and when, when somebody gets a property in the US to sell, they just go and sell it. They have databases. They're sliced and diced tags. So this person is interested in buying a condo in, you know, south area Florida as an investment. So they're tagged with all those kind of things. I get a house over there, and you just slice and dice and bang, you're hitting these people with emails or text messages, whatever, like that, saying, Hey, I've got a property that you're interested in. It's great investment. So we've a good few different types, but we are, you know, predominantly that service type of customer who's dealing with people. The relationship is everything, and it's that promises that I was talking about that we are, we're built for we've never the action stream in in the system has never changed since the start. That's actually, that was the sketch. So we honor that, because we know that that's how we can survive, like we're, you know, this joke Finola about, you know, in everybody's market, there's the 800 pound gorilla in the corner. We're at a party where everybody's gorillas. Everybody in the party is a gorilla like, you know, we're just this human standing inside the party of gorillas. And it's, how do we survive inside, in that and so we had to be differentiated. It couldn't be just, we're cheaper, we're, you know, we're a little bit faster, we're a little bit, you know, you know, a little bit easier is not even good enough, either. And so like our gorillas are, you know, HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, these are massive companies with massive budgets. And I see like even when I think about SEO at the moment and how some people find us, because a lot of our way people find us is, is word of mouth, is referrals, but SEO is another element. And for people to find us, and they're typing something into Google and the patches literate landmines like you know that they can't get to us because it's been intercepted by a blast of ads from everybody promising everything. And to me, I don't think they hold their promises, because most CRMs are bloated and difficult to use.
Finola Howard 22:46
That always made me really interested, because I've worked with so many clients who had so many different CRM systems, everything from dynamics to keep to HubSpot, as you say, but they're all seem to be focused on workflow, process, workflow processes that kind of overwhelm people and make them and very little about the customer themselves that you're trying to develop a relationship with.
Michael Fitzgerald 23:11
Yeah, I mean, like one of the things I do, I love this job in my own business, we have a fun we have funnel emails that go out to the users when they start a free trial. So we have a 21 day free trial. On day 12, they get a personal email from me. Now I admit in the email, it's it's an automated email, but I make a promise, if they reply, I will reply to them as CEO, because I'm a product guy, and I am asking them about their experience in their product, even for the small things, because we keep ironing out those small things, a bit like cans and about consistent improvement, and it just works wonders. I love answering that. I love speaking to the customers. I love getting that direct feedback. And it helps huge like for us to stay, stay with our vision, stay servicing that like, you know, if you said service, it is around that kind of service, our our sales, our support team, you know, we have the term white glove service. We, we, we try to wow them, and that's how they kind of talk about us. Then people will talk about if they're looked after well, and stuff like that. So it is, it does make a difference.
Finola Howard 24:23
In 2018 you did a crazy thing. You went into a camper van and went to the UK. What a great marketing thing to do. So tell share with people about mine's
Michael Fitzgerald 24:36
a great marketing what a great time. Yeah, this is, this is, this is, this is ticking loads of boxes for me. I've always been a camper van guy. Me too. I have a camper van. Very good. Yeah. To me, we just mean freedom, freedom. It's like, if everything goes wrong, I just jump into my campervan and go with obviously, we'll have to bring my family now at this stage. But when I was young, that's all I was thinking about. And. And so I love them and and it just turned out to be such a good campaign, such a good thing to do, like I'm still kind of known as, oh, you're the guy that did the camper van tour. And just from the start, it kind of clicked and worked. And what I spotted was, I spotted this camper van on autotrader in the UK, and it was quite an unusual looking campervan, like I think some people were kind of classifying it a bit space Agey. But what I found out that those only two ever come into the UK right hand drive. So they're produced in Germany, and they have a lot left hand drives, but there's only two ever come into the UK right hand drive, and jamero quay, the singer, had the other one. So I says this is even the start of a great story. So went and bought the camper van, drove it back here, and we did the rap on it. So it was about the time it was kind of like after Brexit. So I said, Okay, geez, Brexit is this unsure kind of time, and so let's either find out information about the UK and our UK customers. We had a lot of customers in the UK and and find out now this is affecting them, at least, I have a topic to come in the door to them, like, why am I calling to them? Even? And so we organized it. It gave great energy to the company. I mean, like, I think they had fun sending me to city. So they give me the coordinates, oh, there's a car park. You can park there. And if you just go down the street carrying my drone and carrying my stuff to go in to chat to them, because we used to do bit of drone footage outside the office with the team waving and stuff like this. And next in the lo and behold, there was a bloody car park with a barrier across only two meters high, so can't and going down these narrow roads. And they were like that. It was brilliant. It was brilliant. And customers loved me calling the whole thing. And you could actually walk in, I mean, like, I remember, you know, we're growing over time and everything like that. But I walked into an office in Nottingham, and so we had a customer there. And there were no a nice, sizeable customer about, I think there were 30 or 40 users, which is great, because we're kind of targeted at small business. But I went into a big room of like, you know, there are loads of people working in this room monitors. So what they had is they had a sales team on the road, and then they had twinned with a sales support person, and both of them were using so obviously, then you'd have, you could have whatever, 15 or 20 people on the road and another bunch of those in the room. When I walked into the room, I was coming from behind the room with the guy with the operations manager, I think, or the MD, or whatever. And so I could see all their screens, and most of the screens had one page CRM open. And I just never, I just never had seen that before. And I actually had to hide my face. I started crying a bit huge. Yeah, of course I would make sense, yeah? Cuz, like, you know, I suppose we're, yeah, I've went into companies, yeah, and you tell them, and they walk in, you sit down beside them. They open up one page here. But like, this is a whole room that I walked into that didn't even know, you know, I was going to walk in at just that time. But they were genuinely using it all the time. They're on the phone to the sales rep. He's about to call in. They were calling to hardware shops all around UK, but it
Finola Howard 28:09
was that the first it was like a moment where your vision got realized, because you could see it.
Michael Fitzgerald 28:18
I guess there was different ones along the journey, my earliest one, and we're really early system, but I had a woman email me, and again, still a bit emotional talking about this, and she said to me in the email, she said, you know, your software enabled me to go from my kitchen table to opening up an Office and employing people. Wow, you made you made me focus on sales so much, and get something over the line. Get stuff over the line that now I've expanded, and I'm gone from the kitchen table. And that was huge, huge one for me. So, no, I've got them over time. And we get a lot of, I get a lot a lot of messages back saying, Hey, this is, you know, I've been 20 years searching for a CRM, you know, and I even wanted to build one. And this is it like, this is what I would have built. All we want is the focus. Like, you know, take a take a pen for the gold, you know, and you load it in with muck on from the river. And the salesperson is inside here, and it's like, you know, the pan is not saving. They can't see the gold. Our system, there's the gold, there's what you focus on. Your next action system with one next action, that's the gold. These are your customers. These are the people who you're engaging with. Keep on them and keep on them until you get them over the line, or at least until they tell you go away. We're you know, it's not suitable. And that's brilliant, because now you can get on to the next one. The whole salesperson comment that they tell themselves when they start out. Every door slammed in the faces, it gets me closer to a yes. Every no is, it gets me closer to the yes if, if you're going to sell. To one in 20 people when they open the door are one and 50. They know that, you know, bring me to 29 maybe number 30 is the one that says yes, and that's, that's the way they go. And so people want to scrape away, them the muck from the dot, from the gold pan, and just give me that, give me the goal to focus on and let me go. That's what they love. Salespeople love this. Business owners love it because they know they have to keep a business running, and they usually have, you know, some key customers to work on, or maybe there's some staff. They're kind of lining up some customers for them to engage with. Because, you know, I know in small business, especially in Ireland, we we a lot of it is about relationship. You know, we nearly need to find out, are we, do we know somebody that they know, before we leave and buy from them? Like, you know, you're kind of saying, you know, we started this podcast. You said, I from Watford. It's quite important in Ireland. And I would say there's something in every country that's kind of important, like, it's some sort of a trust factor. It's some sort of a connection. It sounds like, Do you know what you're talking about? Are you technically competent? And we have these small little conversations over time and again. It's all back to that trust building and then and the promising and all that kind of stuff. And so that's, that's what makes it. Yeah,
Finola Howard 31:15
love it. And if I was to ask you what were key points of change in the business that tipped you into the next stage of growth? What would you say those were? And I'm asking you this so that other people can go, okay, that's what I'm looking for, you know, like me, okay,
Michael Fitzgerald 31:47
well, I guess we spoke a lot to our potential users at the start. I don't know whether you are a good you know, like, big into Twitter when it came out first, like I was, Twitter was the big chat room. You know, we spoke just before this podcast about, you know, you you're building a forum and, like, a board or whatever, like that a chat, chat board. And, you know, it's probably social media that has gotten rid of those and but social media like, like Twitter. I remember some a friend of mine was panicking when he started using Twitter first. He said, No, but when I come, when I get in there, there's, like, there's an awful lot to read. I have to go through a lot. And I says you don't have to read, read it all. It's a stream that's passing, go fishing when you want and stop fishing. But it really was a place where we could genuinely engage. Now, it's a torrent of marketing messages, you know, AI generated messages and stuff that's just specifically done to try and get you to follow them so they can, you know, increase their their their followers, stuff like that. It wasn't back then. It was a genuine bloody chat room. And so I don't know if you know the product, Hootsuite. So yeah, this is one of the things I did every day, like to try and get this thing off the ground, those early customers, and this is where I learned how to do the first pivot. Because what I did in HootSuite, you're allowed to, you could set up these columns so I had tabs along the bottom of HootSuite, and in each tab I had about four columns, and each column then had search terms in them, and even competitor search terms. So I would put in, you know, early stage, would probably search for Salesforce and other keywords. And what I do, rather than jump into the conversation like, you know, competing with somebody, maybe if they did chat from Salesforce to this person on Twitter, I would go back to the source tweet. How did this start? It probably started with the person sending something out, and it was picked up by somebody else. And then eventually some competitor starts engaging with them. And I go back to the source tweet, and I would start a new trade based on the source tweet, as if to say I didn't even see this other conversation going on. And I remember having keywords related to sales managers, and I would tweet them directly and say, you know, not a DM publicly tweet, hey, look great. See you're doing this in sales that, and sales whatever like that. We brought out this new tool. And, you know, I'd love if you come in and look, it's free. It's free. Well, we started off as a free beta product. So there's always going to be charged for, but at the start, we just wanted people come in here help us shape this product. You know, I did product vision, and I mean, like, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work, but that was the brilliant thing about just throwing something out there. We didn't, we were still doing, we're still doing. We still have a service business for developing web apps for other people and websites for other people. This was a side experiment in a services company, and at one point then, I mean, like, I think it's my favorite story about how we started, but when I made that decision to go from a service company to fully to all. In on the product, like we probably did it a bit early. But I just knew that I I love this thing, and I always had to force myself to go through this other service work and give a good service, because I'm, I'm, you know, I could be a bit of a perfectionist sometimes when I'm building stuff for even other people. So I didn't want this taking my attention. So I remember getting up, you know, very early in the morning and working on product. And then, you know, nine o'clock ticks in and I have to answer all these customer queries and stuff like that related to service business. So we were bringing in $300 a month. That's all from one base. Yeah, I'm very early, but we had all these messages telling us, you've got to build out this product. Like the M we built an MVP before people were talking about MVP, and they said, you have to build a product. It was probably about 10, 15% of what would be a CRM, but it was the core. It was just it. We were just a single page of these, these actions and associated contact. And when you click on it, it expanded. That was the bulk, that's all it did. But users could see, this is the focus. We had nothing to do with email, with nothing to do with, you know, team. It was a single user login. Actually, that was the first pivot. Was actually we built it for sales by business owner, because my first company that I was running at the time, we had only six or seven people. I was doing all the sales. I didn't everybody else. Was a design developer, you know, and maybe we had one project manager, I'm not sure. Or, you know, mostly just tech people, and all the sales being done by me. So I said, Yeah, let's build a system that's different to Salesforce, sales by business owner. But then I could see war being dragged. No, guys, this is a good system. This needs to be developed out. So that was a that was a big enough project to try and do, to make something that was born on its DNA as a single user, and everything is to do with that single user now to go to a team stuff. So I remember the changes in the infrastructure in the back end and the database was a lot of work, so, but it was a decision we made, and we said, Okay, we got to go after the market. That will, you know, if somebody wants to add 100 users, we've, you know, counts over 100 users. Now why stop them? It's per user. So our, we want our lifetime value of the product to go up. We want our average revenue per user to go up. We want our ACV to go up, our annual contract value to go up. So it's Howard how much you know, dollars, euros, you get from each customer just in a single year. So these are all metrics that we track and follow and try to increase that. So we went, even then, from being single user to multi user. We went from a single plan to, you know, multiple plans and stuff like that. So we can now start to differentiate repeat features. At the start, we didn't have enough features to differentiate. We were just tiny, but I made that decision. So we're bringing in $300 a month, and people were saying to me, you got to develop it. So my wife had just given birth to our second kid. She was also involved in the business. Gosh, is also a co founder in the business. She was also working in it, but she now left to go give birth to our second kid. We had a house and a mortgage. We had a car with all that stuff. So second kid there, and we're bringing in $300 a month. So tell me how you're going to survive on that stuff. So I and the same week my kid was born, my second boy was born, I went for the enterprise Ireland, competitive start Fund, which was a 50k 50k fund, competitive. So I was up against, I think, on the day that I pitched, I think it was the first batch ever of this competitive start fund. And I pitched against 30 other companies vying for this 50,000 but I went in and I showed him a picture of a ship's burning. I said, I'm burning the ships. I'm dropping over 100k worth of work for client services. I've actually and I left some of my I left some of my employees go work in those companies that were building big projects for and so they could continue with the work in there themselves. So I actually got me so nobody was, nobody knows I was a giant like I looked after my clients. But basically I said to, I remember saying in this, in this pitch to these other business people on behalf of enterprise Ireland, some enterprise Ireland staff, as if say, I'm going, you know, you can come with me if you want. It's not like, give me 50k and I'll start this company. No, no, we're started. We have a product. We have people saying they love it. They love the concept. We just need to finish out the other 80% 85% of the features that are needed in a CRM system and so, and I want it. And basically we haven't looked back. We haven't looked back since Bravo.
Finola Howard 39:58
But also I think Bravo. We've. And Bravo, even by saying I've only got 15% of the product, because that's huge risk, you know?
Michael Fitzgerald 40:06
Yeah, yeah, you
Finola Howard 40:08
weren't. You weren't saying I've got it 85% and we just get to get the last bit. Was the other way around,
Michael Fitzgerald 40:13
but it was the, it still is the bit that matters in sales. It's the bit that keeps the promises. It's the bit that focuses on the gold and the dust in the in the gold pan. That was the
Finola Howard 40:24
bit. But you knew it was the bit.
Michael Fitzgerald 40:27
It was. Yeah, I knew, and our customers knew as bit. So even the all the people that I was targeting every day in citing HootSuite for Twitter and invite them in giving them the link, hey, use this thing for free. You know, you can sign up in a few seconds, but the beauty of it, so if I go back another step, sorry about this. Now we're going back in time a little bit. When I first had the client service company, and I said I was a product person, I kind of started solving problems around me. I had to use an account an accounting app for the first time, and didn't like doing that at all. And I said, cheat. They have to be more simple than that. I actually built an accounting app before I built one page CRM. It was called swift accounts. But I was a complete perfectionist about I thought it had to be perfect, going to the consumers and and, and working, working very hard on it, and I presented it to about I got about seven accountants into a room in Galway presented it broke the rules of accounting. It wasn't double entry, but it worked. I said to him, okay, it's not double entry, but does it work? It was really easy to use. It was actually a graphical based accounting Who could imagine with pipes going places, so you could see money flowing. And then you'd have a circle over here that was called, like income. You could click on that and see all the sales, you know. So is this graphical based? And they just said, No, we couldn't recommend that. We, you know, it's not double entry. And, like I was kind of saying, Listen, tell me where it falls down, you know, you don't need double entry for we were aiming at kind of like tiny companies or even contractors. You know, the way you'd have a subcontractor who works with themselves in a company, this was our target market, and they don't need double entry at the end of the year. They can even just give this to their accountant, and the accountant will sign off on it, and there you go. It's done, and the accountant can suck it into their own, you know, sage or QuickBooks or zero, big systems, but why burden the the personal interest? So I they rubbished it, and I never launched it, and I was tick with myself. I was tickled myself after a while, and my my developer, would work so hard on it, and just got burnt out from trying to develop it. So he was gone for me now as well. He was a remote he was a remote worker, so and I was sticking myself. And I remember I got an I get an email from said God. And nearly every day, and I saw one day he had a statement. So the email that said God. And if people don't know what he sends out, he sends little short emails like on on something to do with maybe marketing, or he's famous for the Purple Cow book and stuff like that. So one of the settings was quite short, and I was almost just archiving it out of my out of my inbox, and it said building shipping as a feature. And I was like, Huh, what's building shipping as a feature? So? And then I understood it. It's like, imagine, you know, like, take this mouse here, and imagine, if you know, the main feature in this mouse, or one of the main features in this mouse is shipping it next June. You know, we're going to build it, shipping it next June. What else would you even take out? Like, you know, this is a fancy one. I think this mouse here can switch between multiple computers. This little switch, you can have three computers connected to the one mouse. You just flick it and it'll connect to the different computers. So you don't have to be kind of messing with Bluetooth term like that. So there's loads of fancy features that can be dropped. You know the laser part to be dropped back when you know you had a ball nose or something like that, you can drop all those features honor June as the shipping date. And I said, That's what I didn't do. I didn't bloody ship it. I was shining a car inside, in the carriage, polishing it all the time, afraid to drive it. Afraid like again, said Seth Godin says, exposing your art because you have the critic, you have the hurlers on the ditch, as we know, will comment and rubbish it and war for I was afraid to bring it out. And I got a sec. I read a second thing. Then it was by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. And he said his comment, I remember reading a small patch. He said, If you're not half embarrassed by your product, the day goes live, you've left it too late. And I goes, Yeah, that's it. He's nailed it. So those two statements, I said, If I ever do another product, another web product, I am honoring those two statements, I'm going to pick a day. It, and I'm going to ship it on that date, whether it has like what we said, the 15% or not, it probably shipped with less than 10% of what's in the CRM and I'm going to be okay. And I have to be okay to be embarrassed about it, whatever it looks
Finola Howard 45:15
like. I find it very providential and very goose bumpy now, because I have a an annual a planning product, an annual plan product that I'm about to launch, and I haven't said anything about it anywhere so, and it's just ready, and it's and bizarrely, right? It's because I'm a big one page person myself, it's the one page annual plan, which I find hilarious. Now that I'm speaking to you.
Michael Fitzgerald 45:47
Do you want to do it live on this podcast? Let's go. Let's pick a date. Come on. Okay.
Finola Howard 45:56
My date is the 30th of October.
Michael Fitzgerald 45:59
I'm writing it down. I'm writing it down. Okay, so on the 30th of October, I'm shipping. I'm emailing you. Yeah, you better come back with a URL where I can see it, or create an account or log in, or it's exposed. I'm holding you to it. And anybody listening to this podcast? Remember? She said it 30th of October, 2020,
Finola Howard 46:29
25 Yes, yeah. So
Michael Fitzgerald 46:31
you know, you've got a few weeks no more podcasts now for a little
Finola Howard 46:36
while, a bank, and you better
Michael Fitzgerald 46:37
publish, you better publish this podcast before the 30th. I want anybody that watches this to actually hold you accountable. So, yeah, pick the date and ship it. I actually remember the day so well. It was like, it was like, I was on, I don't know I was gone. I was gone numb with kind of like excitement and fear. You could say every emotion possible. But I walked into the office that day and I remember I had a girl working for me called Fiona. She was a kind of a for our clients. She was a database specialist, because we had a lot of E commerce systems and a lot of big databases out there that we had to do work on. So she was the one kind of managing the servers and would turn it on. So I said to Fiona, okay, let's turn it on. Let's, let's go live. And she said, No, it's not ready. It's like, there's, there's bugs, and there's, there's this and that. And I said, No, we agreed on a date, and it's happening today. Turn it on. And I remember her face went so red. She was tick with me. She was so angry with me, so she turned it on, and I went into Twitter straight away and said, boom, there guys, we're out we're out there. And brilliant. And I remember there was a guy who was into blogging in Dublin. That's his name, Kennedy. He wrote a he's living in South Africa now, but he wrote a blog post on us on the very first evening, and he had some screenshots of inside of the app after creating the account. And he said, look at this that I know is the title, but the main kind of sentence was, look at this interesting product coming out of Galway. And I met and like, he had a following in the blog, like, and he put it out in Twitter, and we pushed it out there, and we had people coming in. So if you for you remember me talking there about me polishing the car in the garage, not bringing it out. I was worried about colors and buttons and button positions and stuff like that. And now all of a sudden, we had people creating accounts in a system. There was a bit buggy. Yeah, so it's a bit buggy, and and now what the stuff was real, because we developed it since that day in our customers hands, we started getting emails, Hey, I can't log in. Hey, when this is not working. Hey, you know, can you fix that? And now we had real stuff to fix, not the bloody color of the button, you know, we Yes, we have polished it over time. We've made it look good like but we've developed that away in the customer's hands. We knew at some point, okay, like, you know, even the last year we did a whole app refresh, you know, we had some pages that were good looking, some pages not so good looking. So now we've got them all kind of in tune, and we're even still doing some work on that. There's always that kind of thing.
Finola Howard 49:16
But even those, even those ideas of customers talking about, I have this bug, I have this bug, but that's still relationship building, and still promises,
Michael Fitzgerald 49:27
yeah, yeah, yeah. And you fixing them straight away. And
Finola Howard 49:31
build is a better relationship because they you get the reputation for fixing them. Fergal Quinn talked about that in, you know, that little book that he released, I can't remember the name of it. It was a customer focused anyway, and it was this idea that you'll get more loyalty from a customer who has problems, where you have a problem that you solve, than someone who'd never had any
Michael Fitzgerald 49:53
problems. Yeah, totally, because it allows you to expose your your character. You know, if you have. It's like the kids, and they're playing football and hurling like you know, they learn more from the game. They lose. If you win something and the competition was weak, you don't know what about yourself. You don't know how you reacted when you went to goal down. Two goals down. Maybe if you go fight goals, you know you're down 211 to three pints. What? What character is exposed here? Now, do you fight to the very end? Because one day you'll improve your size, your strength, your speed, your skills and everything like that. But if you have the same character, when you tick all the other boxes, now you've got a winning team, you know? So this is it exposes you and allows you to show Hey, there's my character. I can I'll fix things. I'll get back to you. I'll get you set up, I'll get you going. And they're all those promises. Yeah, totally,
Finola Howard 50:48
I love it. What would you like to leave people with today?
Michael Fitzgerald 50:51
Michael, are we going already? It's a bit long. I'm sorry.
Finola Howard 50:59
No, I loved it. I loved it. What would you like if you want it, if someone, if someone wants to walk away with one big message, what would you say it is,
Michael Fitzgerald 51:09
I suppose I love small business. Like, you know, I love small business. I remember years ago, before we kids, my wife said we go to Paris. And, you know, I'd been in Paris before and stuff like that. But said, Where do you want to go? You know, where we go to Sean's release, a the Eiffel Tower, different things like that. And that guy is, no, is there? Is there some place where there's, like, markets and stuff like that? And I think it's, is it called Rose Street, or, I can't even name it now, but anyway, I was up early in the morning in Paris. And I was down there when these guys are opening the doors, sweep and pulling out the stalls. And I was chatting to them. I still do it in Galway market. I go in, I talk to them early. Is that love of you know, the shutters going up and like, if my message to anybody out there, if you are selling, if you are that small business, or if you're selling to these businesses, if there's a B to B stuff there, like, you know, just go and talk to them. It's like the camper van. Go and talk to them. It's to start the relationship. Maybe there's nothing that you can sell to them now, but build that relationship. Build it. Talk to them. See what they're doing. You know, you'll never get them at a better time when they're actually there's no customers there yet. You know, they're not that busy. I'm not talking about selling to people with stalls, but there's the equivalent in every business we sell to. So my, my thing, if you are selling to these people, you know, know them. No, no, understand that they're busy. Understand they're making decisions with their gut, not with their head. They understand that trust means nearly everything. They'll even buy a system that's not as good if they know that you're there for them and you'll back it up. I mean, like I think sage, sage accounting. I remember seeing it for an I saw it for so, my God, this is such a bad product and but they sold support as extra. And apparently their support team were so good that all the people who had problems in the software that they shouldn't be having, the software should just work, and they'd ring support, support us would sort them out, and they'd be singing, say just praises all over the world, like telling this is brilliant. They solved the problem. And even if the problem shouldn't be there first time because of that relationship and that trust and everything like that. So I would say, get out, meet, meet the customers, do what I'm doing. Say, it takes me some time, because we do get a lot of those emails coming into me with say, you know, features, feedback on the app, feedback on everything, and I answer them, and I know I'm trying to say the same thing about that relationship with the businesses. And my last thing I remember, I was at the very first Web Summit in Dublin, and you had Craig Newmark, or Craig Newman. Craig Newmark, he's the guy who founded Craigslist. He was up next to chat, so he was going to be going to the podium soon, and I was there in the in the audience. We were super early. You know, maybe I was working on the accounts app at the time, or whatever, like that. But I watched him, and he was working on his I thought was nearly almost rude. He was working on a little net book, a little laptop on his lap while he's waiting. Look up and chat. So end up in chat, give a great talk. And and he said, By the way, do you know what I was doing there while I was waiting to come up here, I'm on customer support. That's my number one job in this company. And I goes, Wow, that's, that's it. So that's, that's what I want to leave. If anybody is here from business, don't customer support is not a cost center. It's a massive opportunity. Get the right people in there, get them to read the book Delivering Happiness. I know you spoke there's probably the equivalent of what you talk about with Fergal Quinn, but Delivering Happiness is an unbelievable book for putting customer service ahead of everything else. And I would say that No. Your customer, engage with them and engage with them to learn for other customers, and not just solving that customers, but you know, go and solve that problem in your service or your product after you engage with them, and you can see that that's an issue and keep going. Yeah, that's my final
Finola Howard 55:16
message. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much.
Michael Fitzgerald 55:23
No problem, and a pleasure to meet you too. My greetings to to otford. My heart is still there. I know, I know you can. You can edit. All right, thank you so Okay, Michael, Bye, take care. Bye, bye, and
Finola Howard 55:43
that's it for this episode, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Make sure to connect with Michael on LinkedIn, and don't forget to click on the links in the show notes for the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you for listening to your truth shared. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do rate and review it in your favorite app at love the podcast.com/your. Truth shared. It really helps spread the word and helps me to continue to invest in this podcast. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
