217 – Smarter Followup For Higher Conversions With Jake Hower

Podcast: Download (Duration: 16:33 — 15.2MB)

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Get the scoop on a cool new software that fuses your apps for intelligent automation and increased conversions.

Jake Hower

In the podcast:

01:32 – How James uses FuzedApp
02:59 – FuzedApp’s main use
04:00 – The story behind the app
07:03 – Fusing with GoToWebinar
08:51 – How much is it?
09:28 – What do users say?
10:24 – The challenges involved
11:49 – What’s next?
12:46 – The perfect customer
14:00 – Other things currently in development

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Quotables:

I’d start solving a problem that I have hoping that other people might have the same problem. [Click To Tweet].
It’s good to see the solutions out there because most of us have some of the powerful tools. [Click To Tweet].

Transcription:

James Schramko here. Welcome to SuperFastBusiness.com. In the ongoing interview series that I have with other business experts, I love to talk about new and interesting topics.  And one app that has caught my attention recently is by a friend of mine who I have actually interviewed before on SuperFastBusiness but for a different reason. I’d love to welcome to the call Jake Hower.

Jake:        James! Fantastic to be here.

James:    Great to have you, and I’ve got to say in the last week, I found myself talking about your new app to my own coaching customers because of what it does. And the app is called Fuzed app, is that right?

Jake:        It is. Yeah, yeah Fuzed app. And it’s certainly solving an issue for a lot of people which is great!

James:    Now tell me how we spell this because I know that people will probably want to go look it up.

Jake:        Yeah, right. So the product is Fuzed. The website is Fuzedapp: F-U-Z-E-D-A-P-P dot com.

James:    OK now, the listeners are probably wondering what the hell is this app, what does it do? I’m going to talk about what I’ve been using it for and what I intend to use it for and I may have some questions for you about this, you ready?

Jake:        Yeah, absolutely!

Convenience and Workflow Efficiency from Fuzed
James:    So the first thing that it does that I’ve been using it for is, it allows me to create the Dropbox on my computer and then when I finish a video, I can put my video on the Dropbox and it will automatically load that video up to Wistia.

So that when I hit export on ScreenFlow, I’m pushing that video to Dropbox and then later on, about 10 minutes, I can go into Wistia and the video will be there ready for me. So that’s one of the things it does. It joins Dropbox and Wistia.

Jake:        Yeah it does and this is something which was added after the other connections we created. It was more out of convenience and looking through, I guess even considering your own workflow, James, with how you use Auphonic.

The idea for me was to be able to essentially have the finished Auphonic file, drop into a folder and almost suck that up to Wistia as well which would potentially remove… remove a step or two for you or your staff. I know with Auphonic, what I did generally do is I pop out two files: I pop out the video file which goes to Dropbox and my audio file goes straight up to my audio host Amazon S3 so that cuts out any manually handling and uploading which saves a lot of time, just nice convenience.

James:    Exactly. So in my case, my team’s usually topping and tailing my podcast with a different audio track to my video but I’m sure these things will be coming in the various software applications out there. I wanted to talk about the main thing that people are using it for and the thing that I’ve been suggesting students use it for and the one that I’ll be setting up.

And this is where you can hook it up to other services like OfficeAutopilot  or whatever email CRM system you use and your video player like Wistia, just what I use and recommend.

This is where you can have someone come along to your page, watch a video, and depending on how much of that video they watch as long as you’ve got their email address at some point, it can recognize them and it can send them a specific message which is determined by how much of the video they’ve watched.

Jake:        Yeah, absolutely and that’s something Wistia and others sitting outside of Wistia and it’s almost just like arm’s length. And to me, when I started developing, it was like, “Oh I can seal this information! I’d love to be able to automate that, take action on it. So the whole… because it produces such awesome stats, it’s like, now we’re able to harness of the stats I produce and put it to work for us.

Why Fuzed was created
James:    So what was the background to why you started this app in the first place?  Was it just for your own use?

Jake:        Yeah it was! So, a mutual friend, Dan Norris, my developer was actually Dan Norris’ developer and he offered him up. He couldn’t afford him anymore. And I snapped him up and at that stage, I had no intentions of getting into the software business. So I just said, “Yup. Sounds great!” He’s a good value, I got him full time and he’s an awesome developer.  And I got hands on him on a Friday.

I had the weekend to think about what I wanted him to do. And of course with Wistia sitting there, so close and I’m an Infusionsoft user, so putting the two and two together, let’s see what we can do if we can say connect these, that works really easily and so we thought we’d just build it out from there.

And within about four weeks, we had a number of users using it for both Wistia and GoToWebinar and attendee data as well. And we’re about 12 weeks down the track now. Just on the 50 customers which is fantastic and it’s solving a real problem for all of them.

James:   Dan Norris must be spewing. I know he had a pretty tough first year with his first app. You’ve come out of the gates with the same developer and something cool. Now, I mean this is typical of what I would do is I’d start solving a problem that I have hoping that other people might have the same problem. Did you find anything else in the marketplace doing this sort of stuff?

Jake:        There is for Infusionsoft. There’s a company called PlusThis which does something similar. I’ve probably extended the functionality a little bit further and the integration with Wistia is a lot more deep… it’s a deeper in integration there and you’d say Zapier which is probably a mainstream app which does some of it but certainly not all of it, certainly not with Wistia either.

James:    Right and then you’ve got other things like If This Then That, and if we’re a Mac user, then there’s also the automation thing on our computer that can do lots of cool stuff. It’s good to see the solutions out there because most of us have some of the powerful tools. We have GoToWebinar, Wistia and an autoresponder.

We’ve got the things that can make a pretty decent business. The way that I want to use it is have a cascading flow of customer sequence. I send them to an opt-in. They opt-in for something that they get of value.

Then they watch a video, it could be a seven-part course and if they watch enough of the video, I want to send them to the second video. If they don’t watch enough of it, I want to send them back to the first video with a prompt. Now we have the stage where it can do stuff like send them back to the part in the video that they stopped watching?

Jake:        We probably… well, it depends on how you’re embedding the video.  Wistia allows you to remember where in the video you stopped watching, part of their Video Lab features so you could. I’m sure you could potentially utilize that feature of the Wistia and embed… yeah, you send them back to that page then Wistia, in theory, will remember where they left, where they finished and kick them up from there.

GoToWebinar Application
James:    Nice! OK, so, tell me about the GoToWebinar application because I’m really interested. I know a lot of people… It’s still the industry standard, GoToWebinar. What could someone use Fuzed app for with GoToWebinar?

Jake:        There’s a couple of things. First is obviously registrations. So, if you want to pass user registrations across to OfficeAutopilot in particular but all the same Infusionsoft can do it for that. It wasn’t initially built for that part in mind, because I use something like LeadPages. I think LeadPages is a much better lead capture tool and that integrates into GoToWebinar as well.

But what we can do is we harness the power of the data that GoToWebinar provides us for attendees and non-attendees. So we can… we can tag and pop into sequence registrants based on whether or not they attended or did not attend, or whether or not they attended for a certain percentage of the webinar.

James:    That’s awesome. So if someone didn’t show up and from memory, you usually get half the people who registered show up to a webinar in the first place. So we can send them specific video to people who didn’t show up at all?

Jake:        Absolutely! Yeah, definitely.

James:    And then if someone did show up but didn’t watch the whole webinar, we could send them a different message again.

Jake:        Yeah, exactly right. So I guess the use case is really for a typical sales webinar is for those that attended but potentially left before you were able to make an offer to them. You’re able to, I guess, either customize your email based on whether or not they saw that particular offer.

James:    Nice! OK so you can follow them up differently. And if they didn’t come at all and I guess you could follow them up with the replay and then you could potentially, if it’s a Wistia video for the replay, you could then follow people up who didn’t even watch most of the replay.

Jake:        Exactly right. Exactly right.

James:    This is mind-blowing stuff. So people are probably wondering how much this application currently costs.

Jake:        You can… it’ll kick off from $19. Watch the space though, you might get access via SuperFastBusiness to a version where you’re allowed to test it for free with one connection for the lifetime as well.

James:    Oh OK. Like the Wistia free model. You could have limited use and then when you’ve become engaged with it and you really like it, you can scale up.

Jake:        Yup. Exactly right.

James:    Cool. So at time of recording there’s a little application fee but it may change.  What sort of feedback have you got from the users? Have you had any people put it to real commercial use and get results with it?

Jake:        Yeah, I guess my first paying customer again was another mutual friend. Taki Moore. He uses it for his webinar and he loves it. So he’s made a few suggestions and improvements for us to use but certainly he’s now essentially an evergreen webinar sequence which he can essentially just plugin the webinar he’s after and his sequence is already built out.

He’s putting it to real use. He’s saving himself or his employees a couple of hours a month in having to manually extract that data from GoToWebinar and manually uploading it to OfficeAutopilot.

James:    Yeah, Taki is the master of automation. He was going to speak at my event but he was overseas at the time. I’m hoping, he’s actually told me he will speak at the next one if it doesn’t clash with dates. So, he’s a great user to have on board.

Tell me, what sort of challenges do you think people might have with deciding whether they might use the software or not, and how would you respond to those?

The Challenge of This App
Jake:        The biggest challenge is like the platform to make these connections are super simple; anybody could use it. In fact you’d be able to set one up in less than five minutes.

So, the challenge is actually not using my software, it’s actually plugging it to your own sequences. What I need or what my challenge is is to ensure that there is a whole heap of use cases and they’re clear and easy for someone to go ahead and implement and it’s something that’s in the near future we’ll be offering service packages to actually install these campaigns for customers.

James:       Yeah, that makes sense having it done for you. I know that our team are busy helping customers create stuff where they have the tools but they don’t have the time to use it. It’s one of the things I was reflecting on recently with the launch of some website software, OptimizePress 2 by James Dyson.

I was looking at how far our markets move in the last few years where in that time a lot more people are now taking custom sites and having custom jobs and they’re so time-poor but just want the result quickly. So someone could actually have you help them put it together, much like OfficeAutopilot that will help you build campaigns if you don’t have time to do it yourself.

Jake:        Yeah, exactly right.

James:    What do you think is the next evolution for you? Have you got any big grand visions or is it a matter of sitting down on a weekend thinking how you can keep the developer busy next week?

Jake:        Now we’ve got a big number of things we’re looking at. A big one for me, right now, we’ve got one of the really cool features and that video… we can actually apply a connection based on a project; Wistia project. So that any video inside of that project is automatically included in the transfer across to OfficeAutoPilot or whatever.

So that’s fantastic for something like lead scoring but it’s also fantastic for being able to track people all across your website without having to create a new connection each time. So the next evolution is probably a simple plugin which will pull in logged in user data and send that across to Wistia of the membership site or something like that so that anyone logged into your site will always be tagged based on what they’re watching.

James:     OK so, tell me in short, what is the perfect customer for Fuzed app right now? What sort of tools would they already have or what sort of things are they doing that they could be doing more effectively with this app?