How to Bootstrap a Business without Any Software w/ Mike Carroll

UX Marketing

Blake: [00:00:00] Awesome. On the podcast today, I've got an old friend, Mike Carroll, who was on a previous podcast that I hosted, and we're running it back today. Mike, how are you doing?

[00:00:12] Mike: [00:00:12] I'm good, buddy. How are you?

[00:00:13] Blake: [00:00:13] I've been fantastic and I'm excited to have you on. Mike knows a ton about sales and marketing and blending them together and growth and all that good stuff.

[00:00:21] So we're going to talk about bootstrapping and growth in general when you're just starting out. But before we get into all the details, I want to give the audience a little bit of context as to who you are and what you're doing. So if you wouldn't mind just giving us a brief history of your career so far.

[00:00:36] Mike: [00:00:36] Yeah, sure. That's a, well, I'll, I'll try to give you the, like the TLDR version. it's been short. So I graduated from, from college and went to grad school and got a master's degree in journalism. I worked in politics and ran political campaigns from like, you know, aldermen all the way up to the, to the U S Senate for about six years.

[00:00:52] Then I freelanced for a while, jumped into an agency, did that for six years. And now I'm at nutshell, as the head of growth. And actually in the very near future, I'll be going back to the agency side. be the VP of growth at marketing supply co, which is a digital growth agency in Detroit.

[00:01:07] Blake: [00:01:07] That was, that was pretty brief.

[00:01:08] That was a much more brief than a, than we usually

[00:01:11] Mike: [00:01:11] get resected who does

[00:01:13] Blake: [00:01:13] the short episode. I figured

[00:01:14] Mike: [00:01:14] I'd keep it through it. If you want to dive into any part of that career,

[00:01:17] Blake: [00:01:17] yeah. Be a little crappy. Oh, you only got like 20 minutes here, so let's, yeah. yeah. So I'm curious, if I were to ask you what you think professional superpower is, what would you say?

[00:01:27] Mike: [00:01:27] Problem solving? Without a doubt. You know? And that sounds like a really weird, like, nebulous, thing to say like, Oh, I solve problems, but, but my superpower for sure is I think my ability to take any situation, any challenge that you're facing, break it apart into its, its requisite components. Figure out which of those components needs to be fixed first and then draw on a really kind of strange and diverse background and skillset to figure out what to attack, how to attack it, and then, you know, and solve that problem.

[00:01:56] Well, that's a business problem, a marketing problem, a sales problem, political problem. You've been, that's, that's definitely my superpower. That's thing it's served me well. Just the ability to kind of like take a 30,000 foot view of any type of problem and then dive into it and bust it up and figure it out.

[00:02:10] Blake: [00:02:10] Well, let's solve some problems today then.

[00:02:12] Mike: [00:02:12] All right,

[00:02:13] Blake: [00:02:13] let's do this. So one of the problems that we see often when you're a side hustler, you're just starting out on a project. I don't really know where to start in terms of the growth. You maybe you have an idea, you kind of have a game plan of what you want to accomplish, but then you feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do on social media to grow it and all the sales side of things and, and you might feel tempted to immerse yourself in buying all kinds of different tools.

[00:02:39] I'm curious what your thought process is that early on actually having tools or if you even need them.

[00:02:46] Mike: [00:02:46] personally, I don't think you need them. I think the only thing that you need to start any type of side hustle or project as a whiteboard. So, yeah, and what I mean by that is that whatever you're going to do up front, whatever your side hustle is, the most important thing is just to, and actually I read one of your posts this morning, they kind of resonated for this conversation, on LinkedIn.

[00:03:08] You were talking about, you know, working from home and coronavirus and all this razzmatazz. And it would be your suggestion by the way, it was work from home and schedule yourself like, you know, down to the, to the last minute, which, you know, I tend to agree with work from home as opposed to, you know, sort of exude this type of flexibility.

[00:03:23] But if you are responsible for your own time 100% of the time and you don't schedule yourself, you're going to do poor work, like you say, and you're going to fail. So I think the most important thing when you're trying to, there are two things when you're trying to, to spin something up. Any type of side hustle is one carve out the time.

[00:03:39]and then to, you know, take action during that time and stick to it, absolutely. On a, on a schedule, even that's only an hour a day. there's only the, it was only bought the doing right? Like you can't get anything started unless you start actually doing it. So before you start thinking about software or even strategies or anything like that, just start throwing stuff against the wall, start doing that thing that you're enjoying doing and it'll evolve or organically from there.

[00:04:00] I know everybody says that and it's like almost a terrible piece of advice, but there's no other way to do it. There's no, no magic bullet.

[00:04:07] Blake: [00:04:07] you get to a point where things are actually working. You've bootstrapped from zero. Now you may be right, one or two on your scale up to up to a hundred at what point, or I guess, let me rephrase that.

[00:04:18] Is there, what would be the first tool that actually would be worth investing in?

[00:04:24] Mike: [00:04:24] Oh, I mean, well, if it's, I guess it depends on what we're, can we, I hate to do this and be like, I take issue with the question, but can we

[00:04:30] Blake: [00:04:30] share, let's give an example. So let's say I'm, I'm running an eCommerce store where I sh I sell.

[00:04:35] Red shoes that I make with custom messaging on them, and that's what I do. Okay. And so I've gotten to a place where I can get some traffic organically. I haven't paid for ads or anything yet, but now it's to the point where I've got a couple sales and I can see that it's starting to slowly snowball.

[00:04:53] What's the first tool that I need to start looking at?

[00:04:56] Mike: [00:04:56] So in that situation, I think the first tool that you would start looking at it would be any type of social media, like scheduling tool. Right? I think one of the hardest things to do. And this could go for any type of digital business, right? Whether you're doing e-comm or you're trying to build your LinkedIn audience or whatever it might be.

[00:05:10] And actually this is what I've been looking at recently as I start to spin up my own website and kind of go out on my own a little bit and try to, you know, come up with something that I can sell outside of my work. Everybody needs a side hustle. it's just something that's gonna keep you posting consistently.

[00:05:23] And I think the best way to do that is. Okay. What I do now is I keep a, just a notepad. I use notion by the way people use it. Evernote. Okay. I just have one post open all the time. That's like LinkedIn posts period. and I just write down anytime I have a thought, I write down, you know, what needs to go in there.

[00:05:39] And then the next step for me is rather than like manually posting them all the time, is like the load them all up for the week and then set it and forget it because I've got other stuff to do. and then come back after the weekend check, see how those posts have been doing. So if I was running an econ business and my traffic was coming from social or organically, and in that regard, and the first tool I would look into is just something to regiment how I post and where I post without me having to think about it all the time across channels.

[00:06:04] If you're doing two or three, although I would tell you to focus on one, maybe two, max. so that would be the first tool I would recommend anybody use. There's some simple tool, like a trying to think of a good one, like a buffer app, or I'm not a huge fan of HootSweet or anything like that, but something like that put you on a schedule.

[00:06:19] Oh, for sure.

[00:06:19] Blake: [00:06:19] And by the way, a lot of those tools either have a free trial or have a free plan. So at this point, there may not even be reason for you to be spending any money outside of maybe if you want to start running ads, which I'm curious, I guess at that point, how far into it you think you should actually start running ads?

[00:06:36] Is that something you think you should just do right off the bat? Especially with an eCommerce store like we just mentioned.

[00:06:41] Mike: [00:06:41] I suppose it depends on like what kind of money you have available to yourself. Right? So if you have money to spend on something, then yes. I would say starting to F nothing, you know, whether it's e-comm or anything else, nothing keys you into your sales process or your or your funnel, for example, I guess is the best way to put that.

[00:06:57] Like your conversion metrics more then spending money on advertising. when it's found money and you're getting traffic organically, you don't tend to spend as much time like worrying about how it's converting because you're not paying for that traffic. But there's nothing that focuses your attention quite as acutely as when you're spending your own money on, on advertising.

[00:07:16] So that's one advantage to spending money on advertising, not just the traffic that you get or the conversions that you get, because it's going to force you to look across, you know, your whole funnel and make sure that everything is, you know, is, firing on all cylinders because you're, we're spending money.

[00:07:29]So to answer your first question, like when did you start spending money? If you have the money to spend, start spending it immediately. I mean, there's no way to escape, you know, particularly in an econ situation if you want to get things going quickly. paid advertising. Yeah. You know, I was talking to Susan and Patel, are you, do you know him?

[00:07:45] Blake: [00:07:45] Yeah, I interviewed him on the, on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. So

[00:07:48] Mike: [00:07:48] we talk every once in a while and he, you know, he came in and did a great talk on lead generation for boundless at nutshell, which was last Friday. And one of the things that we were talking about is exactly that, by the way. So I'm kind of taking that piece of advice for him, but you know, he basically, he was like, if you're trying to get from zero to a hundred customers, you know, a cold outreach is like the best way to do that.

[00:08:08]although it's e-comm, like you're not going to start calling people up and ask them if they want to buy your red shoes. So. so in that regard, if you're getting from zero 1000101000, those short term tactics where your paid acquisition are going to be absolutely critical in the background. You should building your organic engine for sure, but you're never going to get past that 1000 Mark without sort of spending on paid advertising.

[00:08:29] And when you're spending, by the way, it might be ROI negative at first, and then it might be breakeven, right? Which is okay. You just have to get yourself up to a certain threshold so that you start see the organic kind of comfort. W

[00:08:41] Blake: [00:08:41] S things like that. It's all about testing testing. Rare. When you're testing upfront, you're usually not going to find the right answer immediately.

[00:08:50] And if you do, it's extremely lucky and over time you can narrow in on the right answer because all of the wrong answers start eliminating themselves. So just over-give give yourself time. Folks, if you, if you're running ads, if you're building anything, give yourself time to actually consistently put in the work.

[00:09:07] like, like Mike said, just posts on social media consistently. If you're going to be able to run ads, do it consistently and test and keep all that data over time, going to work. If you just use all that data to your advantage, where it doesn't work is if you decide to quit halfway through or you don't learn from mistakes and you're, you're not humble enough to just accept that what you're doing isn't working

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