Today I’m talking to Nate Grahek from StickyAlbums.com and Sticky.blog. He offers products for professional and prosumer photographers business owners.
Nate shares lots of interesting tactics he used over the years to dig into the professional photographers niche. He had an amazing growth from 0 to 5000 paying customers in just 2 years.
Nate is very talkative and open. We talk about viral marketing tactics where his clients are the ones to help spread the word. Also, we talk about growing a team but keeping it lean and mean and quitting his job to dive full time in his project.
Enjoy!
Episode Notes
[6:48] How Nate had the blip to create Sticky Albums while shooting high school senior portraits on the side.
- “My second product looked very good on paper, but after 2 months it fizzled out. I required my customers to do too much, to change too much.”
[15:30] Big Groupon style launch for the concept. Delivering the SaaS in 30 days.
- “I was doing 8 hours at the day job and 8 hours at night [for Sticky Albums]. It was pretty bad. But I wouldn’t do other way. I didn’t risk anything other than my time.”
- “I judge somebody’s expertise on how accurately they can estimate something will take.”
[26:53] Paying to access other people’s audiences to promote the product. Leaving the 9 to 5, family, and first hires.
- “So many entrepreneurs make this mistake. It’s not the idea, it’s not the product, it’s your domain expertise that really have saved you.”
- “It’s like, you have day job, business, social life, family. Pick 2.”
[34:21] How to know when to hire and when to build new products.
- “The old corporate model to interview 20 people to see if we can predict if you are a fit… it’s like an exercise in futility. Let’s just try it with a small project!”
- “The lesson I continued to learn was making sure I maintain trust with my customers.”
[45:48] Using Videos to communicate with everyone, even when replying to customers and hiring.
- “I can save so much time in a 5min screen recording than I could ever write in a 30 minute email with images and arrows and crap.”
Links
- Nate Grahek on Twitter
- Nate Grahek’s first product, StickyAlbums
- Nate Grahek blog, Sticky.Blog
- Sticky Products
- StickyApps
- StickyFolios
- StickyEmail
- Drip
- Bootstrapped Web Podcast with Jordan Gal
- Animoto on Amazon AWS
- Mixergy
- Lean Startup Book
- Groupon
- Rework Book
- Adobe AIR
- Clay Collins, founder of LeadPages
- Loom
- Soapbox Wistia
- Calendly
