300 – Clay Collins The Leadpages Journey Continues… 55 Employees And Beyond

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Clay Collins reveals lessons learned during his journey that rising online entrepreneurs can learn from. Listen to the latest on LeadPages and how it continues to pave the way and shape the future of the online business landscape.

Topics discussed:

00:54 – Clay’s “accidental” growth journey
03:30 – What is LeadPages? (A short intro)
04:59 – The greatest asset of a business
04:59 – Boosting conversions through LeadBoxes
06:48 – How to get a 30-50% opt-in rate increase
07:48 – What are LeadLinks?
11:10 – The latest on the LeadPages marketplace
15:10 – How is James’ webinar template doing?
16:30 – Growing your business through webinars
18:10 – What you shouldn’t do when someone opts in
19:17 – James’ new podcast with Taki Moore
19:52 – What the ConversionCast podcast features
22:10 – How has LeadPages changed?
24:05 – Doing what you love
25:17 – Raising a venture capital fund
27:03 – Developments on integrations
29:38 – The theory that the LeadPages team follow
31:18 – The most surprising element of the journey
34:52 – A quick recap

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I have my most regular guest, Clay Collins, welcome.

Clay: James, it is an honor to be here. What is this, like number six or seven for going on here?  We should just start a podcast together. Like you need another podcast.

James: I’m not sure. We pretty much have, except that it’s surrogate into the SuperFastBusiness domain and it doesn’t pull too much resource from here, and I’m just so thankful that you’ve put aside the time to document this growth journey that your business is going through.

I know when we started, it’s probably more a discussion about LeadPlayer and LeadPages, just to help people understand what this tool is and how it’s helpful for the business, and we should always touch on that.

But it sort of transformed into this fabulous growth journey as we literally document where you are, as you’re climbing up the Mount Everest of business success, where you’ve been laying in further up the mountain.

It’s nice to tune in and see what sort of issues you’re facing, what challenges you have, what stories you’ve garnered, and what lessons there are for other entrepreneurs who are inspired by your journey, but also who would like to travel down those tracks.

So I’d love to touch on some of the key things that are happening in your world right now.

How is Clay’s business journey?
Clay: Yeah, absolutely. You know when we were both speaking at Yanik Silver’s event and people were asking me questions about the growth trajectory of LeadPages and what we had gone through at different stages, I just referred people to this series of interviews that we’ve done.

I think when we both started having these conversations; neither of us knew that it was going to turn into what it is today.

I think when we first started talking, there were three or four people on our team, now we’re at 55 or hiring 1-2 people every single week and we’ve had over 20,000 customers and so it’s kind of cool and accidental that we started when we did and it’s kind of nice to have this record and so I’ve really enjoyed this.

James: Yeah, I’m glad that I met you before LeadPages existed, it was really LeadPlayer. But I knew, as soon as I became aware of LeadPlayer and I understood what it was, I knew that this was going to be big and I gravitated to what’s it…

But what my real discovery was when I started directing with you and dealing with your support and your software was that it’s something way bigger than just that application. It’s about the mindset and the enthusiasm that you bring to the table.

And I often describe you to other people as, you’re like the next Steve Jobs in my mind, I can see you going all the way because you’ve got such passion and energy and clarity of focus. You’re uncompromising when it comes to making decisions. I really respect that about you and it’s actually a very uncommon trait.

Most people who I speak with are overloaded, overwhelmed, confused, frustrated. They always got this gap between what they think they can do and what they’re doing and it gets between them.

But what you’re doing, you’ll be the first man to actually reach the horizon and get there because I think you’re that committed to it. And let’s just have a look at some of the evidence of that. I want to hit this conversation off.

Firstly, if someone is listening to this and they don’t even know what LeadPages is, could you give me the one-paragraph description?

What is LeadPages?
Clay: Yeah, absolutely. So on its surface, and what most people see when they see LeadPages is a tool for creating conversion pages so any page in your business that drives business results, that is the kind of page that LeadPages is going to be able to create.

So opt-in pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages and also opt-in boxes and links, and we actually have a variety of mechanisms now that people can use to generate leads with LeadPages.

When you go a lot deeper into what we’re doing, there’s a lot more there but that’s typically what people see on the surface and I think that’s a good enough intro.

James: Great! And what we’ve been doing is using the various tools in your toolbox to build up our house database, which I believe is probably the greatest asset of the business. The ability to email 20 something thousand people and make an offer is the ability to bring in revenue and that’s the fundamental.

I think every single person who starts out with an online mission should be really considering how can they build a quality database that they can access at the drop of a hat.

Clay: Absolutely.

James: So some of the tools we’ve been using, we started off with the page itself. We’ve got dedicated page, we were able to split test and get great results, and it works with integrating into the autoresponder.

We’ve started using tools like LeadBoxes. And the LeadBox basically allows us to make any banner or link people can just click on and out pops an opt-in form right there in the page. And that boosted my conversions.

In fact, I recently submitted a split test result to your team where I got, I think it was a 50% increase by just changing the layout of my LeadBox, but as soon as we spoke last time and I implemented the test, I got a great result from switching most of my opt-ins to LeadBoxes instead of having to send them to the page. Love to get your comment on that.

How banner helps boost conversions
Clay:    That’s awesome. So you removed the opt-in box from the page and you replaced it with like a banner or something that people could click on that would then trigger a box where people opted in. So you took it from like a one-step process to a two-step opt-in process essentially.

James: Well, in some cases, I used to have the banner. What I found was having a banner, it’s kind of like I accidentally discovered LeadBoxes’ effect because I took out my in-line form and put a banner.

And when people click on the banner they went to the LeadPage that now the LeadBox brought the opt-in back to the front page of the side again, so whatever page they’re on. So I already realized that it was better to have a banner that people click on than an in-line form.

So that was something I was aware of maybe for 5 years. But after I switched to LeadBoxes, I think the fact that it brings the opt-in right there in front of someone on the same page, it’s got less friction than going to a whole new page.

So that was something I switched over, and been then working on split testing the LeadBoxes, which is really easy to do and getting substantially better results by working on the call to action and the button, and the headline, and removing things like privacy policy, etc.

Clay:    Yeah. What we found is that if you’re going to send people from… if you have a landing page and you’ve got a banner on that landing page that when clicked on sends people to another page where they opt-in, that rather than sending people to a separate page, if you make it so that when people just click on that banner, one of our LeadBoxes immediately appears where they can opt in, that often can get you a 30 to 50% lift in your opt-in rate.

And we’ve seen about a 30% increase in opt-in rate across the board when if you have a form on a page and you remove that form and replace it with like a Submit button, and that Submit button triggers a LeadBox, so… People are getting phenomenal results with our LeadBoxes product, and it sounds like that’s kind of echoed in the results you’re getting.

James: Yeah. Well, the combination of things I’ve been doing, in simple terms, I went from somewhere around a thousand opt-ins a month to 2,000 opt-ins a month. So things have been improving in that regard. Tell me about LeadLinks.

What are LeadLinks?
Clay:    Yeah, so, what’s really cool with more complicated CRMs and tools like Infusionsoft and Office Autopilot is these tools traditionally have allowed you to do something that Aweber and other products don’t allow you to do, and that is they allow you to create automation links that when clicked on, trigger a series of events or allow you to opt into sublists.

So just to illustrate this, you can mail your list and invite them to click on a link where they can go to a webinar registration page and click and opt in on that webinar registration page. Or you could email your list a link and say, “When you click on this link you will be registered for our webinar.”

So sort of that first route where you email your list and you send them a link to a webinar registration page, that typically is a one or two-step process. But you can actually create a zero-step process, where you email out a link that when clicked on automatically adds people to a webinar.

And so we call that the 100% conversion rate webinar registration page, right? Because a hundred percent of the people who would have ended up on the webinar registration page or actually opted in to the webinar, and you need to be really upfront to your list when you send out one of these emails.

You have to say, “When you click on this link you will be automatically registered for the webinar.” But we found dramatically higher opt-in rates as a result of doing something like this.

Now here’s where we’re different than maybe an Office Autopilot or an Infusionsoft. With Office Autopilot and Infusionsoft, you can only mail these links to your own list. So you might email your own list and invite them to a webinar and that will work with those two products.

But with LeadLinks, what you can do is you can construct a link that someone else, like an affiliate, can mail out to their own list. And when people click on that link, they’re added to your list. So I might be using, let’s say I’m using Infusionsoft. And I might have an affiliate partner that’s using Aweber.

I can provide my affiliate partner a link that they can mail out to their list along with an email that when clicked on, right, they’re mailing their list using Aweber, and when someone clicks on that link, they’re added to my list on Infusionsoft.

And that’s what’s new about what we’ve done with LeadLinks, is we’ve added the ability for you to have these automation link types of functions even when other people are mailing on your behalf. And it’s not just about webinar registration pages.

You can add people to a sublist where you’re handing out some kind of eBook, like you can say, “Hey, affiliate, please email this out,” whenever anyone clicks on this, they will be sent a free eBook on x, y and z and then they’ll be added to a follow-up sequence that teaches them a new series of tools that they can use to grow their insurance business.

Or something like this. And you need to be upfront in the text of the email about what’s going to happen so people know what they’re getting into, but it does reduce friction and it does increase conversion rates.

James: Wow. So it’s basically, like you take the automation and tagging ability and power of a good CRM system, and you’ve created like this Jetpack suit that you can strap on around and now use it in anyone else’s device and it still calls back and does what you need to be done on your end.

Clay:    Absolutely. That’s a good description of it.

James: That’s phenomenal. OK. So, let’s talk about the marketplace for a minute. What’s happening over in the marketplace?

The LeadPages marketplace
Clay:    So one of the things, like literally, I’m not that interested in only landing page. In fact when we started, I think a lot of people thought that we were only about landing pages when we were about so many more things than I think kind of the master plan is going to unravel or people will kind of see what it is over time.

But kind of the first inkling of where we’re heading in terms of the size of the opportunity that we want the size of the market we want to play in is the LeadPages marketplace. So we are, little by little, releasing parts of our marketplace.

And so the LeadPages marketplace when it’s fully formed and it’s not 100% here yet but pieces of it are, but the LeadPages marketplace is a marketplace where landing page authors can submit templates for sale and earn some money.

Let’s say I am a developer and I primarily work on dentist websites. I could submit a Contact Us form for dentists. And every time someone buys that from the LeadPages marketplace, I would get 90% or more of the sale. We were going to do 100% but we need to hold some back in case of refunds and charge backs and things like that.

But we’re essentially giving the people who sell their landing page templates in our marketplace. We’re essentially giving them 100% of the profit from the sale of that template we’re handing back to them.

Now, what’s cool about our marketplace is that unlike other marketplaces where you might look at templates or pages or WordPress themes that you want to buy, in other marketplaces, you would sort those templates by maybe popularity or rating or the number of sales they’ve made.

In our marketplace, you could do those things also, but in our marketplace, you’ll also be able to sort by average conversion rate for that template. So you can say, “Hey, I want to find a webinar registration page for my industry.”

Let’s say it’s software – “I want to find a webinar registration page for people who run software companies, and I want to sort these templates by average conversion rates.” And what we’re trying to do is gamify design around conversion.

So rather than designers competing on how good their templates look, we want them to compete around how well their pages can perform. And that’s really the goal of this. And then we’re segmenting it further by industry and by traffic source.

So, what we’re trying to replicate here is kind of what Amazon does. So in Amazon, if you publish a Kindle book, if it’s niche enough, you can be like in the top 10 for something. So like let’s say, you publish a biography.

It might not rank for anything in biographies, but it might rank number 1 in biographies, technology, Silicon Valley, software, accounting. You might have the number 1 biography of the CEO of an accounting software company in Silicon Valley and so you know that. And we’re trying to replicate that in LeadPages.

So you might not rank number 1 in the squeeze page category, but you might rank number 1 for squeeze pages for real estate targeting… you might rank number 1 in real estate for traffic from the United States that comes from Facebook.

So you might rank number 1 for squeeze page – real estate – United States – Facebook. And so we’re segmenting it to that level. So you can see which page works best for my industry for traffic coming from Facebook, or coming from Google, or wherever.

James: Beautiful! So, it’s kind of like podcasts as well, where you can rank for your niche category like business, marketing, etc.

Clay: Exactly!

James’ rank in LeadPages
James: Dare I ask, how’s my good old webinar conversion going? The webinar templates still performing?

Clay: It’s still performing incredibly well, there are occasional fluctuations. Right now, you have… D**n you James Schramko, you have it looks like the 4th highest converting page in all of LeadPages and the 2nd highest converting webinar registration page. So you are still, I think we’ve got over 60 templates now.

So to have the 2nd ranking webinar registration page and the 4th of all of LeadPages is pretty insane, actually. And when it comes down to it, the top 1 and 2 ranking pages in all of LeadPages right now are not getting a lot of use. So they’re for very niche cases. They’re not like broadly used pages.

James: So maybe it’s like a gravity weighting of conversion based on use. That’s like saying that elderly drivers are safer than young drivers because…

Clay: They don’t drive as much.

James: Exactly! All right, that’s cool. Thank you for that.

Clay: So if I were to gravity weight it, I’d say your page is number 2 and it’s beating Justin Brooke, who challenged you.

James: (Laughs) Go Justin! I want Justin to go well because you know it means that everyone’s a winner. When there’s good competition in the marketplace, we all get to use high converting templates.

Now, the upsell, thank you, I love this simple concept. It’s when someone registers for your, whatever you give away, then you can invite them to a webinar. That’s something I’ve been suggesting my SilverCircle students get into, is upselling a webinar on the back of a free giveaway.

Upselling a webinar
Clay: Absolutely. It’s fundamentally changed our business. So if you opt-in I think anywhere on the LeadPages website, the thank you page will be a page that thanks you; one – tells you that everything you opted-in for is on its way to your email inbox, and three – has a huge call to action to sign up for a webinar.

And I believe we’ve tripled our webinar registration rates as a result of doing this. And webinars are one of the ways that we grow our business here. So that’s had an enormous impact on us; the webinar thank you page. So it’s a thank you page whose ulterior motive is to get you to sign up for a webinar.

And those templates come from a lot of places inside of LeadPages. Often, I request that they get built and it comes from a variety of customers’ needs and request. But this is one that I specifically request around a specific hypothesis and it’s been huge for our business, it’s been huge.

And I think it’s a big mistake to not allow people to do something else after they’ve opted in. So many people end the conversation right after the opt-in, they’ll say like, “Oh, your stuff is in the mail,” or “Thanks so much for signing up for our list, enjoy browsing our website.” And that ends the conversation, that’s a dead end to the conversation.

And I firmly believe that if someone has browsed the Web, found you, read enough articles to think you’re credible and then opted in, don’t just say “All right, thank you.” Offer them an opportunity for further engagement.

And the best opportunity in my opinion for further engagement is a webinar. Usually you’re lucky to get people to watch a 5-minute video of you on YouTube, much less an hour during a webinar.

And if you can right off the bat establish that connection, invite people to a webinar and spend an hour of time or an hour and a half engaging with them, answering questions, etc., then you should absolutely do it. There is no better way short of a live event to build a bond with someone other than a webinar.

James: Perfect. It’s a great medium, a great way to get response. I know that even for my paid members, a monthly webinar that we do is held in very high regard, it’s like a super information pack.

In fact, I’m going to take some snippets from my monthly webinar and I’ll put them on to SuperFastBusiness and maybe some 6-10 minute chunks to show people what’s happening behind closed doors.

Clay: That’s awesome.

James: I’m really interested in conversion costs because I started a podcast with Taki Moore called SalesMarketingProfit. And in that one, each week, we have a case study. We’d pick one of Taki’s students, or one of my students, and we talk about the before and after.

When that person came to our coaching, what we did, and what results they get. And it’s taken off like wildfire, and I suspect that it’s to do with dealing with real proven case studies instead of theory, and that’s the premise of ConversionCast. Tell us about that and how it’s going.

What is ConversionCast?
Clay: Yes, so, ConversionCast is a podcast that LeadPages does. In every single episode of ConversionCast, we feature a conversion case study. We’ve interviewed you on there and a whole bunch of other companies. Some of the popular ones include ones from HubSpot, Digital Telepathy, Aweber, Udomi, Moz, yourself, Pat Flynn, Mindvalley Hispano, Wistia.

So we’ve really had some heavy hitters on here, in terms of the case studies and the people who have brought stuff in there. And we not only talk about the case study, but we provide downloads of the before and after pictures.

So if we talk about a split test, we refer to the before and after, and what exactly was changed on the page, or what exactly was changed about the funnel. And I think there’s a whole lot of one style of business podcast that a lot of people are doing.

And I think that something that’s more factual, that’s more built around case studies and real examples rather than theory, I think there’s a huge need for that. And I think the growth and the popularity of your podcast really speaks to that.

And I think ours as well, the day we debuted; we were number 6 in all of iTunes, in all the podcasts, which is crazy. We were like right below NPR or something like National Public Radio. And it was amazing, and yeah, a huge part of that is the size of our list, but also, reception to what’s going on.

So ConversionCast is a much shorter format, it’s usually like 10-15 minutes but hyper focused on data and results, in a way that I think is fun and other people can benefit from. And props to you for doing a case study-based stuff as well, I think it’s the way of the future.

James: Well, I think most of my courses have always had a lot of screenshots and actual results. I more or less go and do the thing, prove it, test it, and then share it with others, like OwnTheRacecourse, for example.

Clay: Awesome.

James: We’re doing it right now actually, recording content that people would be interested in. Now, how has the business changed as it’s getting bigger and you’re hiring all these people? What’s the Clay part turning into?

How has Clay’s business changed?
Clay: It’s a really good question. When we first started, I didn’t know how far I could go, and I still don’t know. I want to go as far as I can in terms of being the CEO of this company when we first started.

There was about 3 or 4 of us, right now, we’re at 55 people and we’re hiring one to two people every single week. And I don’t see that slowing down, and I’ve managed to keep my job, they haven’t fired me yet. But I’m really enjoying this phase of the company.

So at the very beginning, it was all about kind of marketing and funnel creation and me building relationships one-on-one. Now, Tim does ConversionCast and Tim also does our webinars.

Kevin, who used to do biz stuff for Groupon, now handles our affiliate program and partnerships; Jeff, and we just hired a second videographer do our videos; we just hired our second copywriter, we had Kat, Kat is our current copywriter; and that’s just the marking team, right?

And then we’ve got two graphic designers, and anyway, our team is just growing and I’m finding that I spend almost 100% of my time either thinking or talking about the product, or just meeting with people, doing interviews, hiring, cultivating our team, indirectly working on culture issues, making sure everyone’s happy.

But my number 1 job right now is just to clear the field so that our team can run a straight line towards the goals. So I spend almost all my time eliminating barriers for other people that do what they’re best at.

Is this what Clay really wants?
James: And would you say that you are following your bliss? Is this what you absolutely love?

Clay: Yeah, there’s nothing in the world I would rather be doing other than this. I think there’s this whole lifestyle thing around business. And lifestyle is so many things to so many different people, and to me, the ultimate lifestyle is being able to afford the most talented, brilliant people in the world, and go after the biggest challenges we can possibly think of.

And I get jealous every time I see Elon Musk launching a rocket in space. I’m like, “I want to launch a rocket into space.” OK, like that was his first company, Paypal, it just handled payments, and now he’s launching rockets into space.

So, whether it’s doing what we’re doing with regards to big data and conversion rate optimization or launching things into space, I always want to be at the very edge of the types of problems that my team and I are capable of solving, and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve never slept so little or worked so hard in my life, but it is the most rewarding experience in the world.

Raising a venture capital
James: Fantastic. Well, that’s lovely to hear. How much of the capital funding have you been digging into?

Clay: Right, so, I think we did an interview. Yeah, we definitely had a conversation right after we raised $5 million in venture capital from the Founder Group and Arthur Ventures. So Arthur Ventures was an investor in InfusionSoft and Founder Group has been investors in Zynga and Zen Grid and Moz and a lot of really large companies. Fitbit, they’re an investor in Fitbit.

So we raised $5 million in venture capital for a minority stake in the company without giving away control of the company. And we haven’t touched a penny of that. It’s not because it would be irresponsible for us to raise that money and not touch it, and purposely not touch it. But we’ve raised it and we haven’t touched a cent.

And the reason why we haven’t touched any of it is because the reason we raised that money in the first place was so that we can make larger bets. Like we could bet on content, or we could bet on network effects, or we could bet on different theories on what can happen.

We wanted to raise that money so that we could place bigger bets with the knowledge that if we didn’t win a particular bet, we could still exist as a company. But at least we tried. And that allows for innovation.

Luckily, every single bet we’ve made so far has paid off, like we haven’t lost a bet yet. But someday we will, and that’s going to be fine. It’s not the end of the world if we tap into that money, but so far, we’re profitable. Every single month, our bank account is growing quite a bit, despite our best efforts to spend it all.

James: Yeah well, that’s good. You mean, you’ve got a little bit of buffering in case some of your decisions don’t work out, but it’s a great position to be in. Now, you’ve been doing some stuff with integrations. I think that was one of the strengths you had with LeadPlayer, was being able to work with YouTube.

So obviously, you must have learned some great skills with your team from doing that sort of stuff. What sort of latest developments have you had in terms of having things talk to each other?

Here’s the latest
Clay: Yeah, so I think that what almost everyone sees is the front end stuff. But we care a lot about the back end as well. And everything that goes into making our system, like an enterprise level system that’s rock solid and stable and stuff, and so one of the things that we’ve released recently is around some of our integrations.

In fact, we might be at the level where it’s with all of them, but there’s a fail over and backup mechanism in place.

So for example, if you use one of our webinar registration pages to host a GoToWebinar event, if the GoToWebinar API goes down, which it does a lot more frequently than folks might think, but if the GoToWebinar API goes down, we will actually cache all those email addresses and send them through when Gotowebinar goes back up.

Same with Aweber. When the Aweber, they were DDoS-attacked. And so when Aweber went down, when it went back up, we sent all those email addresses back through.

So to my knowledge, there was no data loss. And yeah, it’s not as good as getting that immediate email back after you sign up for something, but at least, nobody was spending like maybe $5, $10, $20,000 a day on ads in capturing leads using Aweber. At least they didn’t lose those leads.

James: Beautiful. So you’re covered. So basically, using your service gives you a bit of insurance instead of if you were just using the direct webinar provider.

Shaping the future
Clay: Absolutely. It’s still experimental and we’re not promising this to people but yes, it’s something that you get and we’re working on this all the time to make it better and better and better. And it’s our goal right now. I believe, I’m not going to say exactly how many integrations we have right now.

But our goal is, by the end of the year, to have 100-plus integrations, including integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot, and a number of other systems and this backup mechanism will be in place for all of them.

James: Right. Well I guess you kind of just answered my “What’s coming in the future?” question. Now, I know every single week I get a new thing come through in the email that’s like wow, these guys are so innovative. Where does this innovation come from?

Endless innovations
Clay: I think it really has to do with a theory that we have about what should be happening in this space. And it’s a theory that I probably don’t want to talk about too much, ‘cause I don’t know, but we definitely have our work cut out for us. We’ve got at least a 5-year roadmap in front of us.

And we think that there’s a certain way about what people should do to B2B software, and I think that a lot of the things that we’re doing right now is just setting us up for the kind of things that we’re going to be able to do later.

It’s almost like a necessary evil on the path towards the really big thing that we’re after. And it’s coming little by little. But you know what does it say, like, Rome wasn’t built in a weekend… in a day yeah. I mean we have this thesis and we’re just kind of following it.

James: Very cool. All right now, final question, and don’t worry, I won’t do the “What was the one question you were hoping I wouldn’t really ask.”

Clay: OK.

James: That’s my special job interview question. Well you know, “Is there something on your resume that you feel should’ve been put there that you’re wondering at if you should have?”

Clay: That’s so sticky, because they never know if you know something about them.

James: That’s right. What’s been the most surprising or shocking element to this entire journey so far that would reveal something to our listener that they could really get some sort of insight into and learn from your first-hand experience, as you are just forging ahead here, probably a little further ahead down the path than many of our audience?

The most surprising or shocking element throughout the journey
Clay: You know I think the main thing that has served as well that in retrospect I didn’t realize that we were doing it but I think it may be the largest contributor to our success. It’s kind of hard to make that statement but we actually built our business from the ground up based on what would get the greatest number of people to opt-in for something.

Our own dog food
So, before I started LeadPages, I was a marketing blogger and I would write these large thought pieces about different topics and I realized that they would get some attraction but people weren’t super excited or at least it didn’t inspire a lot of sharing.

What I decided to do was rather than to write this thought pieces in every single episode of my video podcast, rather than explaining some concept or some theory, we would just give away a landing page template.

And so we would give away the template and we would explain to people how it worked and why it worked and any data we had around it and any examples of it being used in other businesses and people opted in like gangbusters for this.

They ended up with questions like how do I integrate with Aweber, how do I make this work with WordPress, how do I… whatever. And LeadPages was created to solve these questions but the thing I started with from day one was what would get the most number of people to opt-in for anything.

Like how can I just create that crack cocaine that will get the most amount of people in my market to opt-in? And the premise for that is we give away landing pages and we still give away landing pages.

There’s all these theories about how to create a business, what’s the size of the market, are you addressing the need and all these complicated ideas about how to identify what you should do to start your business when you’re first starting.

What worked for us was let’s just build a business around what’s going to get the most number of people to enter their email address and opt-in for something because if they’re going to enter their email address and opt-in for something, then there’s a good chance that down the line, they’re going to want to pay for something.

And if they are willing to pay for something, at least we’ve got this huge backlog of people who are opting in who we can build a relationship with, who’ll eventually want to buy.

So LeadPages has been eating its own dog food from day one but yeah that’s kind of the theory behind how we started.

James: And I think making a great product is also a good strategy.

Clay: Yeah. I think that really we get up every single day and we obsess about thousands of details. And we try not to let any of them slip. And I really think it’s about getting up every single day and slugging through thousands of little details that are fact customer experience and user experience and brand experience, and I mean that’s what the reality is now.

When we first started, there was like this concept and this idea, but everything else is been just around trying to be exceptional on every single area that we can think to be an exceptional in.

A recap
James: Perfect! Well, I don’t have any more questions for you today, Clay. I think you’ve been super generous.

Just a recap, we’ve really had a look at what LeadPages is and how it came about, what continues to be the driving force, how that’s changed your role within the business, what’s coming down the pipeline, and how you’ve had some little offshoots in using practically the podcast to bring in and to reinforce your audience.

We’ve talked about some innovations like LeadBoxes, LeadLinks, upsells, how you can get the highest-converting templates straight to your website using the marketplace, and we’ve talked about how your software takes to everything else.

So I think we’re done for today and I hope you’ll come back and give us an update in a little bit down the track as to what happened between now and your next batch of epicness.

Clay: I would absolutely enjoy that James. I’ve learned a lot from you throughout this process. Thanks for the nuggets of wisdom and like subtle encouragements you’ve given me to go in one direction or another.

So I’ve appreciated that guidance and I’m so glad that I met you before all of these started because it’s really added to the journey along the way and I’ve appreciated your help.

James: All right. I look forward to buying you a nice special high-powered, high alcoholic content beer the next time I see you Clay. Thanks so much for hanging out!

Clay: Awesome, thanks James!

James: See you buddy!

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