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Hey everyone, today we’re talking to Noah Parsons, COO of Bplans and LivePlan. Noah and his team focus on teaching small and medium-sized businesses how to grow and make things right with business planning tools that make creating forecasts, budgets and goals more relevant than 40-50 page long ‘business plan’ documents.
A Career that Evolved from Software to SaaS
Noah’s been working in internet marketing and entrepreneurship in some form or another since the mid 1990s, starting his career at Yahoo back in the day when it was the “darling of the valley,” as he says.
Eventually, he ended up at Palo Alto software where he worked on products that helped companies pitch their businesses, write plans, create forecasts, and track their processes as they went along so they could keep refining and improving their plans.
But rather than getting bogged down by traditional, stuffy business plan documents that no one actually reads, they offer tools that help people create living and breathing plans that are incredibly useful and change with time.
Traditional vs. Modern Business Plans
Traditional 50-page-long business plans are so outdated that a lot of people in Silicon Valley go as far as saying that business plans as a whole are simply irrelevant and out dated.
But as Noah says, people still do planning… they just don’t do it in a document-based format. Financial forecasts, sales goals, budgets, strategy, and milestones are all still incredibly relevant and valuable, and very much tie into the “lean startup” movement.
“Companies really need some form of planning to succeed,” says Noah.
So that’s exactly what they try to facilitate with their product. They help companies keep track of their strategies and goals in a really simple way, and they connect their software to their customers’ accounting systems so they can track their progress against their financial standing.
Rather than walking their prospects through creating endlessly long Word documents, they help them set easily accessible & easy-to-track goals and budgets that can be revised on the fly. And with their software, they’re not prone to the headaches caused by Excel or the room for error if they made their own from scratch.
The plans are on the cloud and collaborative, and embraces what modern planning really is to make it easy for all entrepreneurs… whether they’re in Silicon Valley or Main Street America.
Driving Numbers via Content Production & Marketing
LivePlan recently crossed the 300,000 user mark, and their content site Bplans gets around 1.5 million users per month with 30% growth year-over-year.
The main driver for both sites, says Noah, is content marketing.
They invest heavily in Bplans by creating content on a regular basis, both with in-house and freelance writers.
By laying a foundation of creating valuable, useful content from the get-go and not focusing on SEO tricks, they use content to drive their funnel from Bplans to their product LivePlan.
On top of creating quality content, having a really robust editorial calendar setup to capture ideas, publish them, and promote them helps them be consistent in getting the word out rather than just trying to wing it without any kind of detailed planning.
The Content Investment
Noah says they publish anywhere from 25-30 new articles per month, along with revising 10-15 older articles to increase their relevancy.
To get this production done, they pay about 2.5 in-house writers to work on their content, along with some external writers… some who charge fees and some who don’t.
How to NOT Fail at Content Promotion
Noah says that a key part of their content promotion and getting 1.5 million visits per month is their email newsletter, so they work really hard on collecting email addresses by creating downloads, white papers, templates, and key takeaways for free for their readers.
They promote their key articles via a week curated newsletter, but also do daily updates for people who want more frequency.
To schedule promotion, they use a WordPress plugin called CoSchedule to plan and implement promotion across multiple channels within WordPress, and they can plan promotion for a piece of content not just on the day it’s published, but also over time so they can learn what types of content, photos and headlines that perform best and tweak those that need some help.
The key thing in having strong content promotion, says Noah, is tracking your data really carefully and paying attention to the results a piece of content yields.
While they do look at vanity numbers like shares and favorites, the real metrics they track are related to engagement, like the bounce rate and time on site of people who click through to read a particular article. The traction you’re getting from your content is what’s most important, says Noah.
And along with tracking data from your promotions, you’ve actually got to do the promotions.  After writing a piece of content, Noah says their in-house social media and email manager probably spends an additional 2-3 hours promoting each piece spread out over time.
Getting Their First 1,000 Customers by Not Marketing to Their Potential Customers
LivePlans actually got their first chunk of customers by not pitching their target audience directly.
They did use blogging and expertise giveaway as a content marketing strategy, but to get their first customers, they also networked with the influencers of their target market.
For example, they reached out to small business development centers and accountants… who were trusted sources they knew their prospects would come to and ask for advice at some point or another. Using this pre-existing trust-based relationship rather than building one totally from scratch proved pretty effective, and Noah recommends it for anyone who’s launching a new product without a pre-existing audience.
The Biggest Struggle of Growth
Noah says the biggest struggle for him when his company started growing was to transition from being very hands-on with everything in the early stages to being a people manager.
It took a lot of self-control and discipline for him to step back, and it’s one of the biggest challenges he’s ever faced.
Software to SaaS & Being on the Brink of Failure
In the late 2000s, Noah said the writing was already on the wall for the future of desktop software.
The world was seeing the decline of the big-box retail store, which was where they traditionally had a lot of revenue coming from the sale of their software.
They could see the switch to the cloud coming and knew they needed to make the switch, but at the same time, they didn’t want to simply port their product online because they saw a simultaneous change happening in what business planning for entrepreneurs should be like, so they wanted to create a shift in that product so they could become a leader in the space and establish themselves as the modern product that people needed.
After testing and validating their assumptions, they made the switch, which was initially terrifying.
Moving from a software install to a SaaS model meant that rather than a person paying full price for the install, they only paid for a fraction of it up front, and they had to hope and cross their fingers that their product was good enough to keep people using it and paying for it to get the total income they needed.
When you’re first moving into SaaS, he says, you don’t know what your churn rates will be or what to expect when it comes to lifetime value. You’re just jumping off a cliff and hoping the parachute opens.
Eating Their Own Dog Food
LivePlan is a company, that, as Noah puts it, “eats their own dog food.”
They’re active users of their own product, connecting their accounting system to it, and using it for all of their planning, tasking, and budgeting.
Because of this, they’re hyper-focused on making the product super easy to use. After all, well-designed products shouldn’t need a lot of documentation and tutorials just to get started with using them.
That said though, they do have a lot of help documents and tips for helping entrepreneurs who are very passionate about the problem their solving, but might not have an MBA or any kind of management or financial background.
They help them use LivePlan to spot potential trouble months in advance so they can act on it to avoid it now rather than scrambling to recover later.
Advice to His 25-Year-Old Self
“I’d tell myself to listen more than I talk.”
He says it’s probably advice he’d give himself today too, but young people have a higher tendency to have a big ego about what they know, when the reality is that those around them who have been in business longer know a lot more.
His Big Productivity Hack
Noah suggests unplugging your laptop from your big, fancy office monitor – if you use one.
When you unplug your monitor, you’re just on the 13″ or 15″ of screen that your laptop has, and you can maximize whatever window you’re working on to focus on one particular thing.
Having a bigger screen often creates more room for distractions and a cluttered desktop. Having the screen real estate to just do one thing makes a big difference, says Noah.
Two Must-Read Books
Noah suggests reading The Lean Startup or The Art of the Start.
Either one offers a great view into entrepreneurship and starting the business, and both are applicable no matter what kind of business you’re trying to launch.
He says he wishes more business (not just tech startups) would think more about the minimum viable product model, and the Lean Startup does a good job of drilling through that process, which is a methodology he uses every single day.
Resources from this episode:
- LivePlan
- Bplans
- Trello
- CoSchedule for WordPress
- The Lean Startup
- The Art of the Start
- @NoahParsons on Twitter
- Noah Parsons on Quora
- Bplans author profile
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DISCLAIMER: Your results may vary depending on the stage of your business. Like any program, there are no guarantees that you will have the same result. It's all about the work you put in!
The post GE 93: How Bplans Created A Content Production Process That Helped It Eclipse 300,000 Users appeared first on Business & Personal Growth Tips.