Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, increase the value of their business. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I love being part of the community, and I love bringing the best of the community to you here on the podcast. Today we have with us Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. I’m so pumped to have him here. Email marketing is often hailed as the highest ROI channel for marketing, especially in SaaS and digital businesses.

But what happens when your emails don’t even make it to the inbox? So in this episode, we’re going to talk with Hank. He’s Director of Operations, but the email deliverability evangelist, more importantly, at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, deliverability impacts your bottom line. So we’re going to learn why deliverability is no longer a set it and forget it process and how to fix common mistakes that could be silently killing your campaigns and communications. Hank, thanks so much for being here today, man. I really appreciate it.

Hank Hoffmeier (00:59)

Yeah, thanks for the invite. It’s exciting to be here and talk about email marketing and how it’s a crucial role for any type of company.

Jesse Paliotto (01:06)

Absolutely. I know we were joking for a second before we hit record that it can sometimes feel like the dark art off in the corner of like, how does that all happen? So today we’re gonna reveal the dark arts or whatever. I don’t know. Something like that. ⁓ Can you just to get us kind of into it, can you talk a little bit, why is email still such a high R— ROI channel? If I can spit that out, especially for SaaS companies or digital companies.

Hank Hoffmeier (01:31)

Interestingly enough, I like to do videos almost every day on various social media platforms, short form, and I did one this morning and it was a, did you know, and it was, did you know that email marketing, the first marketing email was sent in 1978 and made $13 million. And I was encouraging people, it’s Monday, but you might not make $13 million, but send an email. Yes, it is the marketing channel of choice by people that know what they’re looking at when it comes to numbers. Just the most affordable, provides the highest ROI,

and most importantly, and this is coming out more and more, I’ve heard it over the last few years, but more importantly, I’ve heard it in the last few months at conferences is it’s an owned audience. You own your audience. Of course you have to upload it to a platform to send emails, but you can take— it’s portable. If you’re on social media and you do something wrong or don’t do something wrong, but you get reported, you can have your account suspended, banned, or killed. You just lost that audience. It’s called rented land. A lot of people do marketing on rented land. On Facebook,

you know, if you’re running ads and then doing posts and boosting your posts and you get your account suspended, you just lost that audience. With email marketing, Like I said, you own that audience. You could stay in touch with them. You can make it feel like a personalized one-on-one conversation through the use of personalization and merge data. And it just, to me, it’s a no brainer to either just get started or go back and revisit what you’re doing. If you feel like that has fell off of a cliff or something.

more more I have these conversations and get people excited about bringing email back into their platforms and their marketing efforts again.

Jesse Paliotto (03:06)

Yeah, I’m curious like, has there been any changes over the last few years? Has anything kind of modified or is it still the same game as it was from 10 years ago? And is there anything that like founders or marketers should be thinking about like, hey, this is how.

Hank Hoffmeier (03:23)

there’s been changes and then there’s a lot of fundamentals that people don’t even know about. mentioned like dark arts and people don’t know. And oftentimes I go to conferences and I talk about the basics and getting things set up and doing it right so that you are successful right away. And it amazes me how many people in the audience are new to email marketing or have been doing it for a while, but just don’t know some of the things that I end up talking about. And when I started at,

Eye Contact, which is a sister company to Kickbox, both owned by Ziff Davis. You know, I went into account management. said, I know how email works, right? You get a list of subscribers, you create an email, you send it you make money. It’s not that easy. You mentioned it. First, your email needs to get to the inbox. It needs to be viewed. And first and foremost, you need to have a valid email address to send to. And that’s where Kickbox comes in is we validate email addresses.

Now lot of times people say, OK, I’ll upload a list where I’ll connect it to my HubSpot and validate my email addresses or HubSpot said, hey, my list is old, may have a lot of email addresses that are no longer valid, and they’re going to recommend that I go to kickbox to clean my list. And that happens. And sure, by all means, do that. But the missing link, as I call it, is verifying it when it first comes in. Let’s say you have a sign up form.

A lot of your audience probably have has a website. Maybe you have a sign up form or you’re looking to add one. You should be doing that on the fly. If I fill out my the form on your website and I put hank at g nail dot com and I spell it with an N by mistake. I finger it right. The form, if set up correctly with an API, can say, did you mean Gmail and automatically allow them to correct it? Or if I type in Hank FG.

At gmail.com and I didn’t mean to put the FG and it’s an invalid email address. It’ll say this is an invalid email. Just please try again. Custom like Citibank Major League Baseball and Reddit use us in that manner. Not saying only big companies can do that. We also have some partners that work with us to work with WordPress forms with gravity forms, small companies, and they’re able to do that. You can use the API. Anybody can use the API, but first and foremost.

Validate your email addresses, then decide if you want to use what’s called risky email addresses like disposable email addresses. Those are on the rise. That’s one thing that’s changing. Then there’s role email addresses like admin at and marketing at now. Why is that dangerous? If somebody signed up for marketing at whatever company.com, maybe I signed up for your email using that email address. And then three months later I leave the organization and then you, Jesse, you’re checking the emails because you got that new.

responsibility and you say I didn’t sign up for this email. I don’t remember it. You market a spam or you know unsubscribe from it. It’s up to you and the type of business you’re in whether or not that’s important and it also depends on other things as far as your engagement rates. But those are things to look for. Disposables, the role addresses and then there’s the free like do you want to accept Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft or do you not? Do you only want B2B domains? You might see that you may fill out a form and will say please provide a business email because you tried using a Gmail.

That’s another thing that providers like kickbox and other ones that do validation offer is the ability to filter those out on the fly if you want to, or in a report. Next is email authentication. And a lot of people forget this and years ago, maybe it wasn’t as important and you didn’t really have to do that. What is email authentication? It is basically showing these email providers or the recipient servers that you are safe, secure and trustable.

Jesse Paliotto (07:05)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:06)

And I’m to go into detail here because the first one is SPF and it’s not something you put on your skin to protect you from sun damage, right? It’s called sender policy framework. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (07:10)

Yeah, bring it.

I wanted to ask you about this because I feel like these terms

get thrown around and I’m not sure people always know truly what they are. So yeah, do this. This is great.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:21)

Let’s go through this and try to make it understandable. SPF is sender policy framework. This means let’s say I’m sending emails from hankhoffmeyer.com, but I’m using MailChimp. The recipient server is going to say, this email is being sent by Hank, but MailChimp’s actually sending it. Does MailChimp have permission to send us emails? What it’s asking for. Now MailChimp and other providers, they’re automatically going to do this SPF set up for you. And I contact our sister company who I worked for for 13 years.

Jesse Paliotto (07:43)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:51)

They do this automatically. Now you may have another provider or you have your own server. Just make sure you have SPF set up and that would be in say your hosting provider like GoDaddy. I always mention X it’s well known. You go into GoDaddy and you go into your DNS. If you’re technical, you know what I’m talking about. If not use chat GPT, right? Or ask your email provider. How do I set this up?

And then you’re to go in and put a text record in and it’s going to be the SPF record. It’s going to identify, say MailChimp as a sender for me is what it’s doing to dumb it down. Then there’s DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Simply said, this means that the email has not been altered or changed during transmission. It hasn’t been hacked. It hasn’t been injected with malware. There’s end-to-end encryption. This is something that your provider, email provider, or you need to set up. Most times your provider will send you this information or it’ll be in your control panel.

Go to GoDaddy, whatever hosting provider you have, enter these DNS records and validate it and you can check it and make sure it’s valid. And then the last one is called DMARC, Domain Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. That’s a mouthful. Really, even though it’s the longest acronym, it basically says, do you have SPF and DMARC set up? mean, DKIM set up. And if you don’t, what do we do with this email? What I always recommend is setting it up and then there is pass, fail, and ignore, right? Kind of.

And I would recommend just doing ⁓ doing no, none ⁓ fail and quarantine is what it would be right. None, rejecting quarantine is the correct terms set up as none. What this does is allow you to see if anybody is actually spoofing your emails. Maybe some company from a foreign country is sending emails on your behalf, trying to steal information from people. You can actually see this.

Jesse Paliotto (09:20)

Yes, ⁓

Hank Hoffmeier (09:35)

And a fun thing is you’ll actually see, Oh, it looks like the dev team is actually sending out a newsletter. We didn’t even know about it. And, know, cause you could see that they’re doing that and what email address they’re using and what domain they’re using, but then you can send it to quarantine or reject. And this is going to be something that’s required. The reason why I mentioned these three is these are required right now from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail. If you don’t have this pretty much your emails are going to going to go to spam.

Now you might have a listener that’ll say, well, Hank, some of my recipients are still getting the email and they’re replying to it. I know they’re getting my email. What do you mean? Sure. If somebody is highly engaged and they’re opening, clicking your emails, they’ll continue to get the email. Now somebody going and going to your website and filling out a form and you’re using authentication for a kickbox. Then what happens is they don’t get that welcome email. They don’t get subsequent emails because it’s going to spam.

Another item you can add, and this is not required, optional, it’s called BIMI, brand indicators for message identification. Now, if you look and say Gmail is the perfect way to describe this, you may see either a logo or like a K for kickbox in a circle, like a red circle. The reason why it would be a logo is because BIMI is set up. Again, you have to have SPFD, Kim, and DMARC. You do have to have a verified domain.

There’s a couple options and it does cost some money anywhere from $800 to $1,500. You may need to have a what’s called a VMC certificate and then to go through this process of verifying you own the domain, right? Which is critical for this. And really what that does is it provides a way for users to trust you in the inbox that your domain showing up. OK, this is Best Buy. This is their subject line. I probably can trust them. I’ll open it. Whereas if it’s just Hank Hoffmeier and Assistant H, can you trust that? Maybe, maybe not.

But those are the authentication methods and things that you need to worry about when it comes to sending emails. Right. And I mentioned Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail. like to call them “Yahooglesoft,” but we can also say MAGY, which would be Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo, because Apple and I can mean my phones right here. And let’s say I put it face down. I’m not even looking at it, Jesse, and you send me an email and I’m using the built in email

Jesse Paliotto (11:41)

Mm. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (11:54)

app from Apple, right? And I can use that with Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera. It’s going to count as an open whether or not even looked at my email or not. I mean, never look at your email, but it’s going to count as an open. lot of people like to look at opens as a metric of success. In other words, at 20, 30, 40 % open rate where that’s kind of a almost a dead metric. It’s still OK to look at it. Realistically, you want to look at clicks and make sure that people are clicking your email

Jesse Paliotto (12:19)

Well, let me let me let me go back a paragraph. I just want to make sure that I grabbed that, because that was a lot of sort of dense definitions. But I this is my simplistic way that I heard you. So a ⁓ the SPF is a text file. In your. Domain settings the. Or. It’s the host and then.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:39)

or host that mostly most times is the host. But it could be

on the domain. It just depends on how your website set up nine times out of 10. It’s the host.

Jesse Paliotto (12:48)

And the DKIM is an encryption that’s running in order to make sure that contents are not altered during send, right? Okay, DMARC is essentially a policy that runs sort of if-thens, that if it sees these signals, do this with the email, either let it go through, possibly quarantine it, possibly put it into the spam folder. And then BIMI, in my weird brain, it’s the blue check mark on Twitter.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:54)

It’s making sure there’s encryption, yes.

Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (13:15)

You’re paying in order to get a brand trust signal that shows up right next to your message in the inbox. Is that Jesse’s dummy dumbing it down? is that where? The clip notes version. OK, so this is ⁓ before the Apple thing on the 30 % is a really interesting thing. Let me ask you really quick on a sidetrack before we come back to that. What do you see companies messing up? That’s that’s too negative. What’s the biggest opportunity you see that companies have when it comes to?

Hank Hoffmeier (13:16)

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I like it. What do we call those Cliff Notes? Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:45)

getting what you just said with all those settings.

Hank Hoffmeier (13:49)

When it comes to getting the settings right is they’re not actually implementing it. They don’t have it. They don’t know that they need to implement it and then making sure it’s correct.

Jesse Paliotto (14:01)

Yeah. So just straight up awareness, just knowing that there’s these pieces that need to be put into place. Is the obstacle. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:08)

Yep. And there’s a tool. Let me, this is important about my dot email.

If you go there and you recently set up or you want to check your authentication, that’s a good tool about my.email. It will tell you if you have SPF, DMARC and DKIM and even BIMI set up and set up correctly.

Jesse Paliotto (14:27)

that’s a great tip. ⁓ if you’re, you know, shout out to anybody that’s new to the marketing team on the operations team, trying to get a quick read on things, you could go to there and get an immediate readout on your own or potentially even competitors or somebody.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:41)

Yeah, somebody could start in a marketing team and they’re head of marketing and they were told, yeah, we set up authentication years ago or last month. You may want to verify that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:50)

Yeah, does it change over time? Is there anything that would alter ⁓ those settings or once they’re set up they’re permanent?

Hank Hoffmeier (14:57)

Maybe you change the, ⁓ the domain you’re sending from or something like that, usually they’re kind of permanent or maybe you moved from MailChimp to Constant Contact and you never updated your records, right? ⁓ that could be a huge red flag and cause it to fail. And then a lot of people tend to use Microsoft email still.

A lot of times sometimes it’s hard to set up something with what’s called IP lookups because every domain has one or more IPs and I believe that the SPF record holds only about 10. So in other words, if you use it in Microsoft, I think it automatically uses like six to eight, I think. And then if you’re adding five more, it’s going to put you over that limit and it will fail. And there’s workarounds for that. We won’t get into that because it’s like highly technical.

Jesse Paliotto (15:42)

Yeah, interesting. And I know from my experience in SaaS companies, the entire company is often not using the same email platform. So you may have marketing team using MailChimp. You may be having the product team using Railgun or something to shoot out ⁓ system messages. You could be having sales team using other outreach techniques for outbound. So I would say that’s the thing that also strikes me with that is

It’s not just validating one system. It should be across the company, I would guess.

Hank Hoffmeier (16:14)

Yeah, and if you’re using many platforms, make sure you’re synchronizing your unsubscribes because you don’t want to get in trouble there.

Jesse Paliotto (16:20)

Yeah, that’s ⁓ interesting. Yeah. Okay, let’s go back then. Thanks for letting me kind of like circle around for a second there. ⁓ Can you get us back into, so Apple with ⁓ open rates, you’re, and this is going, I’ve seen this in a number of articles, people will talk about this, that your open rate as a metric is no longer as meaningful as it was because your phone is auto opening anything it gets. ⁓ So what do we do with open rate?

Do people still quote benchmarks and say, oh, know, if you’re in this type of business, you should be having a 40 % open rate? Or do you even think about that, or do just throw the whole thing out?

Hank Hoffmeier (16:56)

You can eyeball it and it’s a good way. You know, if your list isn’t holistically changing a lot as a, you know, an informal metric, you know, if you’re steadily in the twenties or going up, then you’re doing well. But if all of a sudden there’s a big drop or a big spike, you might want to look into why that happened. Um, you know, if you added a bunch of, uh, people that may be using Apple, then you obviously know there be some jumps, but most people don’t usually steady grow over time because you should be.

using permission based email marketing. In other words, never buying a list and adding your million email addresses that you purchased because there’s a lot of issues there because not only does Yahoo Google soft require that you have this authentication, they’re also looking at your spam complaint levels. If they’re over 0.3 % or 3 % per thousand of each of these domains, not overall, you will be dinged again. And also

cause what’s called IP or domain reputation damage. The same thing with your bounces, right? And that’s why kickbox is important and validating emails. If you send too many emails to too many emails that are invalid and they bounce again, that hurts your ⁓ reputation as well. And what I’m talking about here is every time you send an email, let’s say I’m using hankhofmeyer.com and I send to a hundred Gmail subscribers. I like to use Gmail cause they’re the most strict with their algorithms, et cetera.

And then over time, 50 % or 50 of them are either bouncing, mark me a spam or worse unsubscribing and even ignoring my emails. That is a bad signal and people don’t realize that. That’s why list hygiene is important. If that starts happening and my credit score is 50, again, I’m going to run into trouble and Gmail, Yahoo, whatever server is going to say, Hank’s not a really reputable sender. Let’s send more and more of your emails.

his emails to the spam folder and that’s what happens. And you mentioned like, what is the biggest thing that marketers either have an opportunity for with authentication, but the biggest overall opportunity is value, right? Making sure that you’re sending emails that your subscribers want that they opted into that’s. Educative, informative or helpful in some way, not what you as a marketer saying, I have the best email in the world and I love it. Everybody else should love it too.

Jesse Paliotto (18:56)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:16)

Make sure you’re sending relevant emails and testing, know, split testing. A lot of these platforms have ways of taking a portion of your list and testing it to see if it’s going to do well because yeah, authentication is important. Verification is important and your IP and your domain reputation is important. I don’t mention IP a lot because usually smaller senders are going to be on what’s called a shared IP like MailChimp constant contact. They have a bunch of IPs that all their customers share.

Jesse Paliotto (19:38)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:43)

But if you’re a huge center and you’re sending millions of emails a day, it might be worth looking into what’s called a dedicated IP, having your own IP address, then you’re holistically responsible for the reputation of that IP address. And how I meant like to mention this is years and years and years ago when spammers would sign up for a service, they would send out spam and it would be the IP reputation that made it an issue, right? Okay. They’re on this IP address. They’re sending spam. Any emails coming from this IP leads block.

Jesse Paliotto (19:51)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (20:12)

Then they would just say, okay, well I’m leaving this ESP and I’m gonna go over here to this one now and burn their IPs. Then they burn those IPs and they go somewhere else. What happened is there’s been a change. Number one, these providers start blocking people. And then two is the powers that be said, well, let’s start looking at the domain. Okay, if they use this provider and they’re sending crappy emails, that domain reputation is gonna follow you over to this other provider. And that’s what’s happened over time.

Jesse Paliotto (20:40)

Oh, interesting. Thank you. That was a helpful summary because I know I’ve looked at that in the past and tried to track like, why did this reputation, you know, why did it persist? Can you talk a little bit about list hygiene? Because I feel like this kind of gets us into like, if I’ve got 10,000 member list or 100,000 or million, it doesn’t really matter. And I want to make sure that what you’re describing isn’t happening, that people aren’t ignoring, spamming, just throwing in junk.

then know my I’ve heard that you know well you want to clean your list and take away people that are actively not engaged but I’m getting false signals now from my phone or from their phone rather that are auto opening that how do I approach ⁓ hygiene on my list in light of all of that.

Hank Hoffmeier (21:25)

And the advice can be generic and it could also depend on what industry you’re in and how many times you’re sending an email. If you send an email once a quarter versus once a month versus once a week, your timeframes can be different. let’s say average, you want to look at six months. If somebody hasn’t opened and clicked an email in six months, it might be good to put them into a sequence and asking people if they still want to receive your emails.

Now I’ve seen this done well on people that are in our space because we all know marketers know what’s happening. And there’s a newsletter I belong to that every now and then they’ll say, Hey, we all know that Microsoft Yahoo and all these other providers want to see engagement. Please click this link if you want to still receive our emails. I actually got one from a well-known brand doing something similar saying, we noticed that you may not have engaged with our emails in a while.

If you still want to receive our emails, please click this link to let us know to keep sending you emails. Now that was great. Wonderful. The thing I think the mistake they made is I clicked on the link and I went to their homepage. That’s it. Like just dropped on their homepage. You should have a, think in my opinion, have a specific landing page. That’s simple. That just says, thank you for clicking on the link in the email or thank you for letting us know you still want to receive emails from us. Now, if you want to put an offer on that page or put something else, picture of a clown, whatever you want.

Jesse Paliotto (22:31)

Yeah, missed opportunity.

Hank Hoffmeier (22:48)

Just make it so that, like I said, it’s valuable, right? Don’t just drop somebody to homepage and maybe they’re gonna buy something or you were just lazy to set something up. Maybe you do something where you sell something that people don’t buy too often. Like you sell, I used to work with a client that sold reading glasses and also regular glasses. I don’t know if you wear glasses at all or not, but I do. How often would I buy glasses? Maybe the most once a year. Why should I be sending somebody an email once a week, which is what this client was doing?

Jesse Paliotto (23:13)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (23:17)

We moved to once a month, but then we also started limiting how much promotion was in there. Started providing information like blog posts about organic health for your eyes, how to clean your glasses, repair them, gave them more value to stay in touch with them. So basically my, guess I want to give some advice. Like if you don’t send the emails too often because you say we only send once a quarter because that’s the industry we’re in.

find ways to keep in touch with them and send them an email a little bit more often so that you do have that data and those metrics. And then you use that sequence of emails, send them one email asking if they still want to receive it, waiting a week, two weeks. If they didn’t open that first email, send them a second one. It’s kind of like, are we breaking up question mark, the first one, right? Then they don’t open that. The next one’s like, here’s the divorce papers, right? And then you have some information in there. And then the last one, if they didn’t open the previous two is,

Sign sealed and delivered. We will remove you from now. Hey, maybe email is not your thing. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on LinkedIn. You know, whatever you want to do. Try to promote that as well, because maybe they’re getting them or they got that last one and they opened it, but they still don’t want to engage with your emails. Maybe social media is their thing. Then follow through and then you can use automation to automatically remove them or manually remove them. The beauty is folks, you can add them back at any time. That’s the thing is they can come back at any time. Some companies just

Jesse Paliotto (24:37)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (24:41)

Some marketers want to hold onto those email and say, they’re going to open up at some time and we need to be in their inbox even if they don’t open. Because now we also have the AI summaries where Apple is automatically summarizing these emails for you as well. You have to fight that battle too.

Jesse Paliotto (24:56)

Can you talk about that for a second? What does that look like for people that may not have experienced that?

Hank Hoffmeier (25:01)

Right. And there’s no telltale way as to exactly how it’s going to look for each individual person. I can look at my phone right now and any emails that I’ve gotten while we’ve been talking, it would summarize it for me. And it can even summarize that one specific email if I open it at the top. Play around with your copy. Your copy is more important than ever, making sure it’s concise and valuable. This way the summary is going to reflect what you have in your content.

If you’re using a lot of fluff words and you’re not really getting to the point, keep in mind that that could be pulled into the AI summary. And, you know, there’s a lot of jokes going around because some of it’s kind of funny or, know, there’s always there’s been like two I’ve heard where somebody had a death in a family and the summary was just hilarious. And it’s still a work in progress and they’re not going to be perfect, but that is something that we’re all going to have to learn together because it’s kind of newer.

Gmail starting to summarize emails now. If I gave you my work email address and you’re sending me emails, it’s going to summary at the top. Make sure that you’re optimizing for that. It’s almost like SEO and almost.

Jesse Paliotto (26:08)

Yeah, the AI summary with the death of the family, which is very, I mean, it was probably tragic for the person experiencing that. It reminds me of the story from years ago of, I think it was Target’s auto coupons, where I think it was the woman was pregnant and that coupon or something showed up, said, looks like you’re pregnant. Do you need these products? And the husband or somebody didn’t know and that’s how they found out. And it was just like the system is trying to be so smart.

you’ve got to, it can follow you up, you’ve to be smarter than the system.

Hank Hoffmeier (26:42)

Exactly.

Jesse Paliotto (26:44)

The ⁓ with sending. I’m curious because I’ve read recently around long form being making a bit of a comeback and a lot of different channels. Have you seen that with email? know kickbox probably has access to a lot of data. I’m not sure how much of that you can share, but do you have any insights on like in terms of getting engagement so that you do have a list that stays good and people are excited to or at least accepting of receiving your emails?

Is long form back for email marketing or is that largely other content forms?

Hank Hoffmeier (27:18)

It depends. It depends on what industry you’re in, your audience. I do a monthly newsletter and it’s tools I found that made me productive. If I’m going to be speaking somewhere or takeaways from conferences I’ve been to another blog posts I’ve read, that’s a little bit more long form. And I find that people tend to like that. But if it’s something where you’re selling a product and service and it’s you only sell one or two products and service and not like Macy’s where you can put a bunch of products.

Jesse Paliotto (27:48)

Yeah. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (27:48)

It’s not worth having long form. It’s not worth

putting a full product review in an email, maybe put the first two sentences and getting the click to get them to read more. I still think that FOMO wins out, especially with email because we have to get that click through to show engagement, right? Whereas we’re not looking at opens much anymore. ⁓ You could say, Hey, we recently wrote a blog post with the top three ways to whatever.

Right. you can say number one, number two, and then say to read number three, head over to our blog and get them to go over to the blog. Right. You’re giving them the summary, not AI summary, your summary, and then click here to get the third one, which helps with that engagement. I think that people are willing to do that. But to specifically answer the question, it really depends. And also make sure you’re testing and finding out if that’s what and I’m always a fan of polling your audience. Do a survey once a year and ask people.

Jesse Paliotto (28:32)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (28:39)

Hey, do you generally like longer form content or shorter form content and let them decide. And people tend to say, Oh, well, we know what our subscribers want. No, you don’t. And a lot of times you might get mixed. Then what you can do is say, okay, 50 % of our audience or 49 % of our audience wants long form and 51 want short form. Then you split that audience into two and you put them on two different lists and you react accordingly.

Jesse Paliotto (29:03)

Yeah, testing is always the answer. Like asking and testing. Yes, 100 percent. ⁓ I wanted to ask for a second about regulation or changes or anything you may see coming up in the market around this. I GDPR has been with us for a long time. For those who may not be aware of it, that’s the Europe started ⁓ legal process or not legal process, legal requirement.

For people to opt in and not get spammed to their CCPA, which is the California one which has been more recent I’m curious if you see any other kind of changes standards or whatever else coming down the pike for the world of email

Hank Hoffmeier (29:40)

I think it’s all going to move towards like what GDPR is. And I would just ⁓ plan for that. And the best advice I’ve ever heard from somebody on a legal team was always follow the most strict there is, even if it’s not in your country. In other words, follow GDPR because then you’re covered for CCPA. You’re covered for, you know, Castle Now and, ⁓ and all the other ones that are out there and every state can come up with theirs because the thing is

I can market to someone in the European Union without knowing it. And then I’m on the hook for that same thing with California is if you’re emailing somebody that resides in California and you didn’t follow the CCPA, you can get in trouble. And the punishment’s pretty serious. I would say just make sure you’re doing the right things and make sure that you’re getting those options. I mentioned in beginning, don’t ever buy a list. And more importantly to not more importantly, but also important if you go to say a conference.

and you sponsored the conference and they say, we’ll give you a list for $2,000 of everybody who’s attended. Now, how many of those are going to actually come to your table if you have a table? Not all of them, right? But then you do have the ability to email all of them. But did they specifically opt in to get your emails? Probably not, unless the conference is doing it right. Then you run into the they don’t know who you are. They don’t remember your brand.

They may mark that message as spam, ignore it, or, you know, and all those things and it may bounce. It may have provided a bad email address. That’s why it’s always good to make sure that you have the best possible quality list you can. And with those folks that you meet at conferences too, most times what I recommend is emailing them one off or reaching out through LinkedIn and asking if you can add them to your email newsletter. Not every marketer wants to hear that if they’ve been going to shows and collecting lists of hundreds and hundreds of people.

Jesse Paliotto (31:22)

Mm.

Hank Hoffmeier (31:28)

⁓ I did a talk in Birmingham, UK, and I got the list of people who opted in. I sent them a personalized email video and I personalized each one, 120 people that I got the opt in from. And I just said who I was, gave them the key takeaways and a copy of the deck and a recording of the session afterwards. And I asked them, I have a newsletter. Would you want to sign up for that? I asked them to stay in touch. It was a one and done. And I asked them to stay in touch.

I’m not saying everybody wants to do that, but that is a good tech.

Jesse Paliotto (32:00)

So those were folks that they, because you were a speaker, the event had probably had something that said, you know, if you tick this box, maybe we pre tick this box, you’re giving permission for our sponsors to email market you. But you said, I want more permission than that. And so I’m to do this video tag.

Hank Hoffmeier (32:16)

Yes.

Cause I mean, if I just said, thank you for coming to the IREX conference, the name of the conference, wanted to follow up and tell you more about what kickbox does. They might not remember all that. They may have came to my session, sat in the back and been on their phone the whole time. And they probably might not have remembered me, but majority of them may have. they, and I got a lot of replies, you know, saying it was great and all this, and he appreciated the followup, but there will be those handful that.

Don’t remember who you are. Don’t care who you are. And they’re going to market a spam, unsubscribe, ⁓ ignore it, which hurts your domain reputation, which is what we mentioned. That’s what you’re looking out for most first and foremost, staying legal price. You don’t get fined and then making sure that you are keeping your domain health in check so that your emails get to the inbox.

Jesse Paliotto (33:03)

I love that in the sense that or in multiple sense one is just that it’s true permission marketing because once somebody says actively yes no I want to hear from you I’m going to be more likely now to open your emails because I kind of made this mental decision that I want to hear from you. Also I feel like SaaS companies digital product companies are so many venues where you get that you know when you somebody registers for ⁓ filling out a review they fill out a trial they fill out they attend a trade show they do something where they’re kind of.

kind of giving third party sponsors permission to market to them, but they don’t really want it. And so there’s so many scenarios that, you know, a company may find itself where they technically have GDPR opt in, but do they really have the actual buy in to not get burned in the relationship? And so I really respect, you know, kind of going out and doing the hard work to confirm the relationship.

Hank Hoffmeier (33:54)

Yeah, I like to always say, know, if you’re using a purchase list or using these conference lists, of course you’re to get the flash in a pan moment, right? You may get some sales, you may get some opens, but you’re hurting yourself for the future. Your domain and your IP reputation and your brand reputation is going to start to sink in. Your email marketing efforts will slope downwards and you might even start wondering why, unless you’re listening to this episode, you know why, but if you didn’t, you’ll

Jesse Paliotto (34:01)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (34:20)

It will start saying, why are open rates so low? Why is nobody clicking our emails? It’s because they’re not getting them.

Jesse Paliotto (34:25)

Yeah. OK, this is a big question. So you can answer to the extent you want. If you could wave a magic wand ⁓ and fix kind of one thing with how most SaaS software, digital companies, do their email, what would that one thing be?

Hank Hoffmeier (34:41)

It’s going to be looking at the program and making sure you’re providing value while sending authenticated emails. That’s simply what it is. And it’s not one simple thing, but yes, just making sure you’re looking at your program and you’re set up correctly as far as setting yourself up for success. First thing is authentication. know, I’m not, mean, sure. Verification is important, but authentication is the king. And then your content and the value you offer is going to be the queen. And after that,

Hopefully everything just goes smoothly after.

Jesse Paliotto (35:14)

Yeah, I love that. ⁓ I think you can we talk for a second. I think you’ve got an offer for the growth stage audience today. We were just chatting for a second before we hopped onto the call. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

Hank Hoffmeier (35:27)

Right. People that come to kickbox and they sign up, they get a hundred free test credits. What I’d like to offer is using growthstage as a coupon code. When you go to purchase credits, maybe after you use the a hundred, if you want to up to you, I want to offer 1000 free credits. In other words, especially if you’re a small company, it would take you a while to get through a thousand free credits. You can test out our integrations, our API upload list. There’s a way to do one. We call it single verification. You can go in and just do one at a time.

Test it out, but yeah, use the code growthstage and get 1000 free credits. I have that set through the end of the year, which is the end of December of 2025.

Jesse Paliotto (36:05)

Awesome. Thank you, man. So much for doing that for the audience. And just to kind of poke at a little bit, because I haven’t used Kickbox yet, although now I’m going to have a thousand free credits to do. The credit is the API validation of the email. So somebody is filling out my free trial form and it double checks. This is a legit email and all of that. that’s actually especially for some for a company that may be either smaller or on the B2B side where there tends to be less volume of lead generation. Yeah, that’s a that could be a substantial runway to get somebody

testing this whole methodology, right?

Hank Hoffmeier (36:36)

Yeah. And we don’t charge for unknown results. There are some servers that may be temporary issues, servers down, or they just flat out refuse to talk to us. It’s called unknown. We don’t charge for those. We also do email deliverability consulting. And if you feel like you have a domain reputation issue or you you think your authentication is not set up correctly and you feel like majority of your, or you know, a majority of your emails are going to spam. We can provide a success plan and strategy to get you back on track.

Jesse Paliotto (37:06)

Man, that is so valuable and I’m not just buttering you up because you’re on the podcast. I’ve just been in numerous scenarios where ⁓ like email deliverability for the marketing operations or sales team can be, you never think about it till it’s wrong. And then all of a sudden it’s a fire and you’re trying to figure out how do I put this out? And so that’s a great shout out for folks that may run into that in the future.

Hank Hoffmeier (37:32)

Yeah, think of it like the credit score, right? You tank your credit score. It takes a long time to come back, right? It takes a while to get down to a low level and it takes a long time to climb back up that mountain. Same thing with email deliverability. Once you know there’s a problem, it’s hard to get back on track again.

Jesse Paliotto (37:37)

Mm-hmm.

That’s so good. Where can people catch up with you, Hank, if they want to ⁓ try and catch you somewhere online after this?

Hank Hoffmeier (37:56)

I always like to say if you search Hank Hoffmeier on Google, I have really good SEO. I show up probably for like the first two pages of results with everything that has to do with me, all my social media channels. The only thing I ask if you’re going to connect on LinkedIn, just make sure you personalize the invite. I have this rule where I don’t accept blind invites, but I’m a marketer, so I will reply and ask you if we’ve met before because I have a bad memory or I’ll offer to have a call with you.

And what’s funny is I keep track of that and I think the metrics still around. I only get a 40% response to that. In other words, it’s just a lot of salespeople trying to pitch me. I even get responses to my reply saying, thank you for accepting my invite. Here’s my sales pitch when I didn’t even accept it. But if you reach out and you say, I met you on the show, I still may actually want to have a call with you because I really covet having a valuable network where I can help you. You can help me and we can have a wonderful LinkedIn relationship together. Otherwise follow me on TikTok, Instagram, all the social channels. I’m always putting stuff out. It’s not all related to email. I do a lot of tips around digital marketing. I’m still trying to get my podcast going again. Hank’s Marketing and Business Tips. There’s probably about almost 300 episodes that are there historically. I hope to definitely get that back up and running and Jesse I’ll have you on too as well.

Jesse Paliotto (39:15)

Oh, I would love that, man. Well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thanks everybody else for joining us, for being with us here on Growth Stage. Again, Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. Really glad to have him here. I’m Jesse Paliotto. I’m your host. I get to be a part of the digital product community by doing this today, and I’m so pumped about that. And I hope you all have a good week, and we will catch you next time on the Growth Stage.

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build good products, increase the value of their companies. I’m your host Jesse Paliotto I get to be a part of this community as part of my role at FastSpring and I love bringing the best of the community to you guys today. So today with us I’m excited to have with us Amber Hinds. Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital, a company specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, lead organizer for the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and…

Board? What was it Amber?

Amber Hinds (00:36)

President for WP Accessibility Day nonprofit.

Jesse Paliotto (00:40)

I knew I was gonna mess up the phrasing. Thank you for helping me. Through work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet. So important, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she’s been leading teams, building websites, web applications for nonprofits, K through 12, higher education, government, businesses of all sizes. And she’s a passionate advocate for accessibility. Amber, I’m so glad you’re here today. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Amber Hinds (01:06)

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jesse Paliotto (01:09)

Just to give folks some context, can you briefly describe what Equalize Digital does as an agency?

Amber Hinds (01:18)

Yeah, so we specialize in website accessibility. We do a lot with WordPress, but we also do work outside of the WordPress world. So we have a software product called Accessibility Checker, which audits WordPress websites for accessibility problems, puts reports in the editor, and helps with some of the larger governance, does full bulk scanning, and…

Then we also have a services side where we do audits and we do some audits and remediation. And our audits are full WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which I’m gonna call WCAG testing by certified professionals. And we also do user testing with people who are blind and native screen reader users.

Jesse Paliotto (02:09)

I wanted to ask about that in a few minutes about people versus machine testing. maybe first, like to ask the very obvious question or maybe the question I’m sure you have answered 1,000 times, can you talk about what accessibility is? I’m sure people that are listening have maybe a personal answer in their mind or some particular thing that, yeah, it’s color coding on websites or something. Can you talk a little bit more like what do you think of when you think of what accessibility is?

Amber Hinds (02:38)

So from a bottom line perspective, accessibility is about ensuring that all people of all abilities who use all different kinds of devices can access your website and do whatever it is you want people to do. So like buying your products, adding them to a cart, going to a checkout page, entering all their credit card information, and then completing the purchase.

That’s probably what most of your listeners want people to do on their website. So accessibility is about ensuring that people can do that on your website. There are a wide variety of different people who use websites. Based on stats from the World Health Organization and the CDC, it’s about 25 % of the population in the world has one or another type of disability.

And so some of the people that we commonly think of are blind people who use assistive technology called screen readers, which read out all of the code on the website to them. And it needs to be formatted properly in the backend, behind the scenes, so that it can be read out properly and they can then use the website with their screen reader. But also captions for people who are deaf, if you have videos on your website.

There’s things with color contrast or making sure that it’s appropriately mobile responsive so that if somebody who has low vision zooms in or somebody who’s just out using their mobile phone or sitting on their couch using their mobile phone can also use the website. And accessibility is something that a lot of us sometimes think, people are born with disabilities. And yes, that is a group. But it is one of these groups that almost all of us are going to join at some point in time.

some sooner than others unfortunately, but you know as we get older our vision maybe isn’t as good or we might experience an accident or an injury that results in a disability. A lot of veterans for example might have mobility challenges or limb losses where maybe they can’t use a mouse and they can only use a keyboard and they can see just fine, but if the website doesn’t work well with a keyboard then it doesn’t work well for them.

So there’s a lot of different people and it’s really just about making sure that they can buy your stuff on your website.

Jesse Paliotto (05:03)

It’s the vision thing is immediate when I thought of when you said, most of us will join kind of this group at some point because yeah, using reading glasses, you suddenly realize like, yeah, like I’m zooming on stuff and you get into sites where it doesn’t work properly and becomes very frustrating actually. and you get, you get, if you have not been a part of that group and had to deal with that before you quickly become aware of the gap that people experience.

Amber Hinds (05:21)

Mm-hmm.

Captions on videos too is very

big. You know, it’s interesting because even 10 or 15 years ago, you didn’t see captions reliably on YouTube videos or social media videos. And nowadays it’s very commonplace. And there’s actually a lot of stats that say most people consume more videos muted with captions than they do actually listening to the sound on the video on the Internet.

Jesse Paliotto (05:33)

you

Yeah.

Yeah, I would love a stat that showed, because I hear the other side too, like especially for music and stuff, people listen but don’t watch or as you’re suggesting, watch but don’t listen. I wonder how many people are truly watching videos in a full kind of experience mode. I’m sure you could piece together some stats out there. That, you know, with accessibility, I was going to ask a very obvious question, but you’ve kind of already kind of given some of the answer. was going to say, why is accessibility important? I think the obvious point that comes to me

Amber Hinds (06:14)

Yeah, I don’t know.

Jesse Paliotto (06:28)

is that it’s just the right thing to do. It’s about equality, it’s about treating people with dignity, making sure that it’s equal access. But you’ve of already, I think, answered a secondary or maybe a of a sub point, which is it’s also good for business. Is that a fair point?

Amber Hinds (06:46)

It definitely is. The interesting thing about accessibility improvements is that there’s a lot that you do to the underlying HTML code that is also very good for search engine optimization. If you think about it, Google Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, whichever your preferred search engine is, is probably one of the most common

blind or non-seeing users of a website. They come in, they crawl the code, they interpret that code to understand what the website is about, and then they try to match it with search results. So we’ve actually seen sometimes where we’ve done some website remediations where there’s no design changes and there’s no content changes. It’s just the underlying architecture. And we’ve seen six months later a 15 % increase in traffic to that website from Google search.

Jesse Paliotto (07:39)

wow.

Amber Hinds (07:41)

Yeah, so it can really help on bringing more people to the website. It also can reduce bounce rates because if a website doesn’t work well and someone finds it and they just can’t navigate around it, they can’t find the product or they try to add something to the cart and check out, but maybe, you know, something confuses them about the process, then they will abandon.

So it can help with reducing abandonment rates on websites or just getting more people to add products to the cart. You know, get them out of your blog posts and over to where they actually buy, that kind of thing. It’s also good from a legal perspective for businesses. There are laws around the world that require websites to be accessible, particularly for e-commerce websites.

Here in the United States where I live, that’s the Americans with Disabilities Act. In most places, websites alone have to be accessible. There’s a couple of jurisdictions where they say only if you also have a brick and mortar e-commerce store, but it’s not consistently that way across the entire United States. So even a business that only has an e-commerce and no brick and mortar is required to do that.

Jesse Paliotto (08:47)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (08:56)

The big one that a lot of people are talking about is the European Accessibility Act, which is beginning enforcement in June of this year, June 2025. And that’s requiring that all e-commerce businesses that have more than 2 million euro in revenue or 10 employees or more. So either one of those, you hit the box. It applies to you and that requires accessibility.

Different countries in Europe handle the enforcement of that different ways. It could mean that the business will get fined. In Ireland, there’s jail time involved if it goes far enough. Yeah, in addition to fines. There’s also instances where businesses, there have been airlines that were getting subsidies and they lost their government subsidy, which almost is worse than the fine because so much more extra money.

Jesse Paliotto (09:38)

Really?

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (09:56)

So there’s a lot on the business side for doing it beyond the obvious benefits of serving all of your customers. There’s also maybe a stick involved too.

Jesse Paliotto (10:10)

Yeah, and with the regulations, I my experience with regulations is that essentially you have to perform at the most stringent level and then it takes care of everything else. It’s very hard, especially in a digital world where potentially anybody’s interacting with your site or with potentially your SaaS product. Like you basically get held to the highest standard in order to be able to meet everybody else underneath it, which sounds like it may be the European one.

Amber Hinds (10:34)

and that’s the thing. Well, actually, you know, one of the ones that is most strict is in Manitoba, Canada. Their requirement is any business with one employee or more. There’s no revenue threshold. There’s not. And they all they all require that you meet what I mentioned previously.

is the web content accessibility guidelines level double A. So there’s three different levels for that. Single A, double A, triple A, and double A is kind of in the middle. And that’s all laws reference that. The current version is 2.2. So you hear people say web content accessibility guidelines 2.2. Double A. And all the laws reference that. But the thing that’s so interesting about digital businesses

is that if you advertise in a market or you ship products to a market, then you have, or you have employees there, then you have what’s considered nexus. And this is like people come to FastSpring to help you with the tax, because once you sell enough stuff there, guess what? Now you have to pay tax. Well, once you sell enough stuff or advertise enough times in a certain market, you now need to meet their accessibility laws.

Jesse Paliotto (11:26)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Amber Hinds (11:45)

So where I mentioned there might be some states in the United States where if you don’t have a brick and mortar store, it doesn’t matter. But if you sell to a place like California where they don’t care if you have a brick and mortar store, you now need to comply with California accessibility requirements. And it’s the same thing if you go global, right? Then you’re looking, if you ship to Manitoba, Canada and you have one employee, you have to be accessible.

Jesse Paliotto (11:56)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

As soon as you said the word nexus, it triggered because that is such a key concept for what FastSpring does with tax handling for folks is that idea that you’ve kind of become liable is probably the wrong way to phrase that, but you’ve become legally responsible in that environment. I I’m curious. it’s I think anybody with a human heart would admit that it is the right thing to do to serve your people.

I think anybody with a business mind would say, okay, it actually makes sense. Why do people not do this though? Do you run into reasons why companies or even individuals who running their own businesses don’t kind of put the work in? Is it just ignorance or is there kind of myths or anything or what’s the obstacles there?

Amber Hinds (12:55)

some degree the interesting thing about the web and web developers maybe in general is that there’s there’s no certification there’s no one path many web developers and even marketing agencies are started by people who are self-taught and I don’t know that the the W3C which is the international group of volunteers that

created the web content accessibility guidelines, which have been around for more than 20 years. So this isn’t a new concept, but I don’t know that they’ve done a great job of marketing it maybe historically. And so I think there are a lot of self-taught developers that just don’t know. And even store owners, people who are starting an e-commerce business, there’s so much that you have to learn. And if you…

hire a web developer or web agency that’s never heard of accessibility or doesn’t say to you, hey, this is important, just like privacy policies. If no one tells you that, you might not realize, hey, I have to have a privacy policy on my website. So to some degree, I think there is or has been historically some just like ignorance or not knowing.

that accessibility is a thing or not having explained to them. Because I’ve heard people be like, well, I understand why you have to have a curb cut so a wheelchair can get up on a curb or why you need an elevator instead of stairs. But I don’t even know what this means on the internet. A lot of us haven’t seen a blind person use a screen reader. And so it’s hard to envision, well, what would the challenges be for them? Because we just don’t have that personal experience in the same way that we might have seen a person in a wheelchair and we can visualize that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:23)

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (14:41)

So I think there is some of that. In the more recent years, I want to say like four or five, right around COVID time is when I really started to see more of the news media picking up on this. We also saw a big acceleration on accessibility lawsuits against e-commerce businesses in the United States. And so the news picked up on it this year in

Jesse Paliotto (14:55)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (15:06)

February the FTC in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission fined one of the overlay providers a million dollars for lying about how they saw about solving accessibility because they don’t actually they’re like an AI solution and they got fined a million dollars for misrepresenting their ability to fix problems without a human, which we could probably go into in a minute. so I think

Jesse Paliotto (15:27)

Wow.

Amber Hinds (15:32)

There just hadn’t been a lot, but there’s a lot more news about it now and education. And so it does sometimes at this point, I think, come a little bit down to cost. There are ways to do accessibility cheaply or less expensive, but it is always going to be more expensive than if it was started from the beginning. If you have a website that’s already built out and no one thought about accessibility, well, now you have to put…

Jesse Paliotto (15:43)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (16:01)

some developer time into fixing that, which if you were just starting out and building it that way, might not be the case. So I do think sometimes there are some cost objections and some people have a harder time, like I was saying, of just visualizing it and understanding and being able to connect that with their customer base.

Jesse Paliotto (16:22)

Yeah, one other thought that just you provoked when you were describing that, have you ever seen this meme? It goes around on Twitter all the time of the World War II bomber with the bullet holes in the wings. But there’s certain areas that don’t have wings. And it’s supposed to be this kind of like logic insight of, do you put the, do you try and add extra armor where there’s the bullet holes in the wings of the bomber that came back to the base? You’re like, no, actually it’s counterintuitive. The ones that made it back flew fine. The ones that

didn’t make it back or the ones that got hit in those other places that you’re not seeing. And I’m giving that a bad description. Hopefully I can add a link in the show notes and give people the picture because the picture is worth a thousand words there. But the idea being that companies are very usually receptive to complaints and if they get customer feedback, they’ll respond to it. But I would imagine in the case of accessibility, you’re not getting the complaints from the people that are not being served. so sort of an out of sight, out of mind mentality, I would imagine could be happening there as well.

Amber Hinds (16:55)

Mm-hmm.

I think definitely, like I mentioned, they might just bounce right away, particularly if the navigation menu doesn’t work. How are they even going to find your contact page? Or I’ve seen them where the contact form doesn’t work. Or maybe they have a complaint about all of your products, explainer videos don’t have captions, and the only way that you have for them to contact you is to call you on the phone.

Jesse Paliotto (17:27)

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yep.

Amber Hinds (17:48)

How is a deaf person going to call you on the phone to complain about your videos not having captions because you didn’t provide an email address or a form for them to submit, right? So there are definitely situations like that where someone with disabilities might want to complain, but they literally cannot. The other thing I’ll say is to some degree that puts a little bit of a burden on people with disabilities.

Jesse Paliotto (17:55)

It’s just illogical. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (18:11)

And when they encounter so many websites, the unfortunate reality is that over 95 % of websites have at least some accessibility barriers and some have many accessibility barriers. And they’re dealing with that every day. At some point, it’s just easier for them to be like, I’m gonna leave this one and go to the other one that I know works, instead of trying to complain, because otherwise they’d be complaining all day long.

Jesse Paliotto (18:34)

So we’ve referenced a couple of times. I need to ask the question about human testing versus machine testing. And it may be a good way to frame this is if somebody is wondering themselves like, okay, Amber, I get it. Like this is important and I don’t know that I was aware and I would like to see how I’m doing and maybe make some improvements and see if it’s effective. Can you talk about like using machine methodology versus using actual people? I can you give us a picture of that?

Amber Hinds (19:04)

Yeah, there are some really reliable testing tools that are a phenomenal place to start. So like I mentioned, our accessibility checker WordPress plugin, includes, which has a free version that you can download if you have a WordPress website and install on it totally for free. That is a great tool. There’s also a browser extension that’s pretty popular called Wave. People can go to wave.webaim.org. It comes out of a university in Utah.

You can install that browser extension or just use it right on their website and scan like the home page of your website and then you’ll get some information.

the automated tools are a really phenomenal place to start. They’ll tell you some things that are very major blockers, like an empty button. Like your add to cart button doesn’t have add to cart text on it. It just had a little picture or something. That would literally stop someone from being able to do those are a good place to start, but they are not the end solution because there are some things that just require

context and AI is just not there yet and can’t identify the issues. You can also sometimes with automated testing tools get false positives. So I’ve seen instances where it flags color contrast only because it has a hard time telling where the background color is because the background color is maybe like four divs above where the font color is being set and it just can’t find it and tell. So it’ll think the background is white.

and the text is white and it will say you fail contrast but you’re like no there’s a black background on this right so you always need a human to sort of assess those and then there’s some manual tests that anyone can do you do not have to be a web developer or an expert and what this is is you take your mouse and you turn it off and you put it in a drawer and you go to the home page of your website and you tab use your tab key on your keyboard

Jesse Paliotto (20:38)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (21:03)

and you wanna make sure that you can reach every button and every link and every form field just using the tab key. And if there is a link, you’d press return to go follow it. If it’s a button, you should be able to press the space bar or the return key to trigger the button, do whatever it does. You should see a little outline around each item as you tab to it. If you ever hit tab and you’re like, I have no idea where I am, that’s a problem, right? So,

Jesse Paliotto (21:29)

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (21:32)

There’s just some manual stuff that requires a human to be able to do. And then I would say you definitely want to bring in someone who is an experienced accessibility professional because they’re really gonna understand web content accessibility guidelines, especially if you are in one of those businesses that is legally required to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. You want someone who can understand those because…

It is a long list of what’s called success criteria, where you pass or fail for different things. And some of them, if you’re new to it, can feel very overwhelming reading it. It’s not just like this little simple checklist. So I would highly recommend bringing in a trained professional. then the next thing would be potentially doing some user testing with actual users, which gives you a sort of different take. It gives you some accessibility.

Jesse Paliotto (22:14)

Right.

Amber Hinds (22:28)

but it also gives you general usability. Sometimes you learn that the name of your product doesn’t make sense to anyone except for you. And they’ll, oh yes. Or like the way you expect someone to come and search is, or the terms that they might search for to find something.

Jesse Paliotto (22:36)

It sounds like it happened with a client or something.

Amber Hinds (22:51)

is very different. And so that’s the thing that’s really neat about user testing is you get accessibility feedback, but you also get general usability feedback and you can watch people navigate and you’ll be sitting there being like, but it’s right there. It’s right there. And they’ll just let go circles around the thing you expect them to do. And then you might look at it and think, wait a minute, I’ve seen enough people do this now that I realize it should just be designed the way the people go. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (23:02)

Yeah.

Yeah, there’s

a term for that. I’m blanking out on it, but it’s it’s like unguided paths or something. And it’s the idea. one of the famous examples is a photo down on a university campus in winter and there’s the sidewalks and then there’s the actual paths that are walked in the snow. And so you can see visually, this is obviously the, the, unguided path that people want to take to get from point A to point B across campus. And these sidewalks do not match what people want to do.

Amber Hinds (23:28)

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (23:44)

very, very you actually type of a thing. How would if somebody wanted to do user testing and is there services or groups or how do you go to a place where you’re to have somebody who have groups of people that have maybe different types of impairment that could test for visual versus audio or how do you go about doing that? Or do they work with equalized digital? Is that one of the ways to do that?

Amber Hinds (24:06)

Yeah, so we do do user testing and we have different people with different types of abilities. And I would say, typically most people start with somebody who is blind or visually impaired, but we also have people with cognitive disabilities or mobility challenges or limb differences, those sorts of things that can do testing for us. And.

So you could come to us, you could go to someone else, you could also email your email list and say, hey, we’re looking to do a couple of user test user testing sessions with our customers who use assistive technology. If you are them and you would be interested, offer to pay people for their time. You know, like it’ll be fifty dollars for an hour of your time on Zoom. Right. Because obviously we want.

to get good feedback and you want people to be compensated for the effort that they’re going to put in. But you could email out to your email list and you might find customers that are already in your network that use assistive technology and would be happy to give you feedback. But when we do it, we spend a lot of time talking about what are the goals, what are the paths that we wanna test or that we think people might do. And then basically we write prompts.

You don’t want to say go here, click this, then click that, then do that, right? Instead you want to give them ideas like go learn about how we make our custom t-shirts. Okay, now you’ve decided you want to buy one, what would you do? Right, like that. So then you can find out, okay, do they find the shop page? Do they go to search? Like what do they do to go figure out how to buy a t-shirt after they’ve learned about it? Okay, now you’re on the t-shirt page.

Jesse Paliotto (25:33)

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Can you do it?

Amber Hinds (25:51)

What sizes do we have available?

Right? Like thinking about those kinds of questions that you would guide them through and then you observe what they do, figure out where they get hung up.

And a lot of times when I run them, I actually have the code inspector up and I’m looking at the website also and I’ll be looking at the code and I might direct them back and ask them to replay something with the screen reader. And a lot of times our testers aren’t they’re not accessibility professionals. They’re not web.

developers, they’re just average people. So they won’t know what’s going on with the HTML, but because I’m an accessibility professional, right, then I can look at that and then I will come back later and we’ll give a report and then we’ll say, hey, this is why they missed this thing and here’s how the code needs to change, which is sort of the benefit of doing that. If you run your own and you’re not super technical, you might not understand why they got hung up.

You might have to then send a video to like a developer or somebody who understands about screen readers and say, why did the screen reader say this thing? So, but yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (26:53)

Yeah, yeah, just that level of fluency

with the technology to be able to be like, I see exactly what’s going on. Yeah.

Amber Hinds (26:59)

But that’s basically how you run one, and you might have people in your network, or you could hire a professional like us.

Jesse Paliotto (27:07)

I love the idea of hiring a professional like you. I also love the idea of the email. I think that’s such a brilliant idea in the sense that you get what you need, which is testers, but also you create awareness for people that this is something to be doing. All of a sudden your entire email list that you email is now like, oh, accessibility. Yeah, maybe I should think about that. And then I would imagine as a brand, I mean, it just furthers your brand’s presence as somebody who’s trying to serve the entire kind of spectrum of people. So it feels like a triple win to go down that route.

I love that.

Amber Hinds (27:38)

It really

can be beneficial to a lot of organizations have corporate values and putting out that you are working on accessibility is a way to show that you might be living your corporate values. If it’s like we serve everyone in our community, whatever that might be, a lot of times you can connect accessibility efforts with your corporate values, which also might be helpful if you’re trying to sell this to internal stakeholders. But it is a way to show that you’re practicing what you preach.

Jesse Paliotto (27:44)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I love that. One question I’d had is for a lot of what we’re talking about is websites. so definitely any company who’s, every company is going to have a website. So this at least applies to that marketing, potentially to more of their services that take place through a website. Does a lot of this apply or how much does this apply also to software, to people that are designing a SaaS application?

Is a lot of this kind of the same thing or how do you think about that? Have you worked with clients that are doing both?

Amber Hinds (28:38)

Yeah, we actually, a large part of our auditing business is with software products. So people who build components that get added into websites, not necessarily the website owners themselves. The laws are a little dicey on whether or not they apply to the maker of a software product that is used on a website versus the website owner, if that makes sense. However,

Jesse Paliotto (29:06)

interesting.

Amber Hinds (29:08)

However, what you really want to think about if you are the maker of a software product is that it could impact your procurement process if your software is not accessible because an e-commerce store that is in Europe or a government agency in the United States, they are only going to want to buy things that allow them to comply with the law and

So if your software product is not accessible, it’s going to reduce your market because you might not be able to sell to them. The other thing that we’re seeing a lot more requests, especially with regards to the European Accessibility Act, is we’re seeing a lot of software developers come to us for something that is called a voluntary product accessibility template or a VPAT, which is a standardized international format report.

that goes through the accessibility of a software product in relation to web content accessibility guidelines and some of the European accessibility requirements and the Section 508 accessibility requirements in the United States. And it maps it all out and says on line by line, either this product supports, partially supports, or does not support.

accessibility on this line with notes. And this is something where increasingly we’re seeing a lot of software developers realize they need these because their customers are asking for them. So we’ve had multiple people who have come to us and they said, our customers are saying, hey, we really want to buy your WordPress plugin, but we can’t unless you give us a VPAT. And they’re like, I don’t have a VPAT.

Jesse Paliotto (30:45)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Amber Hinds (31:00)

So they have to go get one. And really what that entails is you first have to have a complete audit. And you could write a VPAT from the audit, but most people say pause. I want to fix my problems first because it doesn’t look great to put out a VPAT that’s like bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Right. So so you have an audit, you have some amount of time where you then remediate the software products and improve things. And then you have a retest.

Jesse Paliotto (31:12)

Yeah. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Amber Hinds (31:29)

where an accessibility professional confirms that it is accessible or the problems that were identified are fixed, and then the VPAT is generated. And the document that’s actually created from that is called an accessibility conformance report. Most people call them a VPAT, but that’s what it is, an accessibility conformance report.

Jesse Paliotto (31:48)

For those of you who live in California like me, this is just like getting your car smogged. You take it in, they smog it, you quickly go fix whatever you can to bring it back to get it to pass a second time. Yes. That is, that rings a lot.

Amber Hinds (31:57)

You

Jesse Paliotto (32:02)

I’m curious, is there anyone who’s, and I hesitate to ask a little bit, but I’ll ask it anyway, is there anybody who’s doing it right? Like if somebody was right now listening and they’re like, this all sounds great, I get it, I wanna do it, if you could point out and be like, you know somebody or a place or a set of an industry or anybody who’s like really kind of nailing this or just a good example you could model on, is there anybody you could point to like that?

Amber Hinds (32:29)

boy, you put me right on the spot.

Jesse Paliotto (32:30)

Hahaha!

government agencies I would suspect just by dent of needing to be regulation compliant.

Amber Hinds (32:34)

Well, I’ll say…

Yeah, it’s interesting. think in historically in the US, we were seeing a lot more effort being put into getting more of the older federal websites updated. There’s a whole Web Modernization Act and accessibility has been part of it. We actually were the auditing team on the new NASA website, and I know they were putting a lot of effort into accessibility on.

that front. Some of the state and local government are not as good, but I expect to see that ramping up because there was a mandate from the Justice Department last year under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that gave them all a deadline. Sort of like the European Accessibility Act deadline. I will say there’s a few…

Plugin companies in the WordPress space that have really started to prioritize accessibility stellar. WP is one of those. They own like an event calendar plugin and an LMS plugin. And they’ve been doing auditing of all of their stuff and remediating everything largely because they’re hoping to meet the deadlines before the European Accessibility Act. And because like I was saying, they have customers that are saying, hey, we really want to buy your stuff.

So I think there are some. You know, it’s funny. I can think of incidental like pages I’ve seen. that I like HubSpot is interesting because there’s some stuff that’s not as great about their website. But if you ever want to see a really great pricing table, the HubSpot pricing table is really accessible. So they’ve done a phenomenal job of

When there’s a check mark, there’s screen reader text that says, this is included. It’s not just like blank or an image that doesn’t explain what the check mark means to someone who can’t see the check mark. There’s a whole bunch of hidden code there. So if you’re developer savvy and you love that, I always would say, go check out their pricing table. It’s really interesting. So I can think of like little things like that. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Jesse Paliotto (34:39)

Right.

Actually, I think that’s super helpful. It’s also interesting insight into, you know, to your point earlier when we were talking about, you know, there’s a value to your business for this. And of course, one of the most valuable pages for any business is the pricing page. so like if you’re, and you can think of it two ways. One is the commerce side. One is just the amount of visits, the amount of people trying to engage with that content. So like, you know, could imagine being in a seat where you’re saying, I want to roll this out. What am I going to prioritize first?

Amber Hinds (35:12)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (35:27)

Pricing page, I should probably go check out HubSpot as an example. Also, I love NASA because my inner nerd comes awake and I’m like, just go hang out on the NASA site. You can see it done well. Plus they do, they have so much multimedia that I feel like that would be a really interesting site to look at that through that lens of so much video, so much photo, so much different types of stuff.

Amber Hinds (35:47)

Yeah, and there’s a lot of interesting articles that were written a couple years ago about their approach to alt text, which is really interesting. So people who are not familiar, alt text or alternative text is an attribute that’s added to an image tag that describes the image visually for someone who is blind. And a lot of us kind of just err on the short side. But the thing is, is when you’re NASA, every picture is stars in a nighttime sky.

That’s not very helpful, right? Like, how do you distinguish all these different ones? So they put a lot of effort into thinking, how do we describe, like, what part of the galaxy is being shown or what’s being featured or how does it look with the different colors? Or I don’t know, it’s very interesting. you can find if you just Google like NASA alternative text, you can find some interesting articles that talk about how they did that. There’s some.

Jesse Paliotto (36:16)

Right.

Yeah.

Amber Hinds (36:42)

some art galleries as well that have put some really interesting effort into how they describe their art in alternative text. Because, you know, sometimes we think blind people don’t buy art or blind people don’t buy cars or whatever. But the thing is, is just because the purchaser can’t see it, it doesn’t mean that they might not want to give a gift to someone. Right. Or they might.

Jesse Paliotto (36:49)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (37:07)

be the person who cares the most about gas mileage. They’re not gonna drive the car, but they live in the household and they really wanna know the facts about the car before they go with their partner to buy it. So a lot of that does matter even though you think, this isn’t the user of this product. It very frequently can be.

Jesse Paliotto (37:24)

Yeah, and that’s an interesting, just to connect, adopt back to, know, for companies that are selling SaaS or software into, especially at an enterprise level, so a larger business level, you are always dealing with groups of people. is very rare that you’re selling a large software sale to a single person and no one else reviews it. There isn’t a CFO or a controller or somebody in the background that’s reviewing things on it. And so yeah, that’s a really interesting point like,

Amber Hinds (37:47)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (37:54)

that may not be the primary person that you’re even talking to, but there’s another person back there that could need this type of access.

Amber Hinds (38:01)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (38:02)

I am like, I’m going to go look up the NASA alt tags, because I can imagine that being so difficult. Like, what are going to put? It’s just 20 names of stars. That doesn’t help. I mean, maybe it does. don’t know.

Amber Hinds (38:11)

Another picture of the moon.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (38:19)

I’m I’m have some really interesting Google search patterns after this. For folks that wanna get started, can you just recommend first steps? If somebody, we’re gonna walk away from this, I wanna do something today. You gave some great tips on tools that could be, but maybe if you had to tell somebody one thing, you wanted to get started today, do this. Any advice?

Amber Hinds (38:42)

Yeah, so I would say first have a discussion internally and determine what your internal capabilities are. So if you don’t have a solid dev team that can fix problems like I mentioned before going through tabbing through your website. Well, if you’re missing all those outlines, but you don’t have someone who knows how to add all those outlines, that’s probably your first step. So figure out how comfortable are you in-house doing some basic testing or

trying out one of those tools and do you think that you might be able to fix some of those problems? You can do a lot of that without bringing in an accessibility professional. And then you’ll get to a point where you want to start identifying an accessibility professional to help you really finesse things and figure out about the more difficult problems and how to fix it. But that’s where I’d recommend getting started, figuring out if you have a developer and if not, start there.

And then if you do try out some of those tools and keyboard testing that I mentioned and start trying to fix some of those problems. And also I think you should assess your processes a little bit around how you publish new blog content or add new products to your website because you will start to see even just using automated tools you can start to catch some patterns like, our marketing team always forgets to write alternative text or

the headings are always out of order. For some reason, someone on our team really likes to use that H5, right? Like it’s the smallest heading and they always use that when it really should be a different one. And so you might need to start thinking about what are our processes around the QA for the content that we’re creating or that we’re adding to the website? What can we do to try and catch problems sooner so that they get identified and fixed before we hit publish?

Jesse Paliotto (40:18)

Right. Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Do you find that if you’re following SEO guidelines rigorously that you’re also meeting accessibility guidelines or is there extra stuff? Cause good alt tags and all that stuff are part of good SEO. And I’m wondering if, you know, if people do that checklist thoroughly, are they really doing everything good enough on content in particular? I know that’s a very deep dive into SEO. maybe maybe a too, too nerdy of a deep dive there.

Amber Hinds (41:08)

No, so there is a lot that helps. A major problem for both SEO and accessibility is missing an H1 heading. Like a literal title of the page, very important for both of them. So there is a lot of sort of basics, like SEO really cares about heading order, the alt text, those sorts of things.

Jesse Paliotto (41:18)

Yeah, right.

Yes.

Yes, this is where you’re saying that

I’m like, a lot of what you’re saying is like, that’s good SEO if you’ll do it right.

Amber Hinds (41:32)

It’s good SEO. Yeah.

But but that said there there’s definitely a lot of accessibility that goes beyond what any SEO crawler like if you’re using PageSpeed. PageSpeed Insights has some accessibility and it has a little accessibility score. But what I’ll tell you is that you can get a 100 on PageSpeed Insights accessibility score and have a very inaccessible unusable website. So because.

Jesse Paliotto (41:42)

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so yeah, good SEO is not

good enough.

Amber Hinds (42:01)

Yeah, so it is a good place to start, but it is not going to guarantee that you’re legally compliant or that your website is usable for people with disabilities.

Jesse Paliotto (42:11)

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to share today that you would want? I was going to wrap up, but I just want to give a quick spot if there’s anything that we didn’t get a chance to talk through where you’re like, don’t forget this or anything. And if not, no worries.

Amber Hinds (42:25)

Yeah, I mean the one thing I would say is we put out a lot of educational content both on our blog if you just go to equalizedigital.com, but also I run the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, which is a free Zoom webinar. We do have live captions so we have a human who comes in captions if that’s something someone needs. It is the first Thursday of the month at 10 a.m. Central Time in the U.S. and the

third Monday at 7 p.m. Central Time. And there’s a whole variety of topics. Some are developers, some are designers, some are content focused. And so there’s a lot of learning resources available. So even if you don’t have the budget yet, or are a professional, you could learn a lot just by coming to those free webinars.

Jesse Paliotto (43:14)

I love that. And so if people want to find you, equalizedigital.com. Is that right? And then if they want to find you in particular, any socials or anything you want to drop really quick.

Amber Hinds (43:18)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so on X I am at heyamberhinds and then I’m also on Bluesky, just amberhinds, which is H-I-N-D-S. Those are probably the two most common social media platforms that I’m on. I am on LinkedIn, but it might take me a while to respond to you. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (43:29)

Ha

I love the honesty.

Thank you so much for sharing today. Amber, really great to have you here. Really appreciate you taking the time, explaining so much, and more important than I think just doing the long and ongoing work of really raising awareness and helping so many people kind of get better access to so much information. Thank you.

Amber Hinds (44:08)

Thank you for having me.

Jesse Paliotto (44:09)

Absolutely. Thanks everybody for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I get to support digital product community by doing this and that’s an awesome thing. I love being able to do what we did today, which is hang out with Amber and talk about this sort of thing. Thanks for being with us. Have a great week and we will catch you next time. Cheers everybody.

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In this episode, we’re going to be interviewing Justin Sacks of Nexus around the FastSpring and Nexus web shop integration.

Justin will share his thoughts on the core challenges the partnership was established to address, how the integration works, and exactly how publishers can use FastSpring and Nexus together to quickly launch a successful D2C strategy. And so joining us today, I’d like to welcome Mr. Justin Sacks. Justin, welcome.

Justin Sacks (00:56)

Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

David Vogelpohl (00:58)

Excellent. Well, you’ve been on the show before and I’m trying to recollect it was like, can you actually make 50% of your revenue through D2C? Wasn’t that our prior topic? I’m trying to remember now.

Justin Sacks (01:10)

It’s right. And it’s funny because it feels like every month it’s becoming more and more accepted just how much a percentage of your revenue can flow through your web shop. So yeah.

David Vogelpohl (01:20)

Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you for establishing that it was possible. That was a burning question. I needed answered, especially when I heard you originally make the claim. But today we’re going to talk about the integration that Nexus and FastSpring built together. So FastSpring, the company that I work for, and Nexus, you’re COO there, is that right? Or CEO, sorry.

Justin Sacks (01:40)

That’s right, CEO here at Nexus.

David Vogelpohl (01:42)

Excellent. Excellent. Well, the first question I usually ask guests is, what is the game you bought with your own money, but you already answered that during your prior interview. So I’m just curious, what is the first game that you ever beat, completed and beat basically?

Justin Sacks (02:02)

I’m sure it was something on the SNES, but the first one that like comes to mind because of like the sense of accomplishment for beating it was Banjo-Kazooie on the N64. I’m sure that it was, you know, Mario or Zelda or something from even before that in the early nineties, but Banjo-Kazooie, I remember like a hundred percent completing it and it was an epic adventure to go through it all.

David Vogelpohl (02:28)

Excellent. Well, that’s a great one. All right. Well, let’s get into the topic at hand, the FastSpring and Nexus integration. So for people to understand, I think it’s helpful for them to get a sense of what challenges the partnership has kind of set out to address. What does that mean to you? In your view, what were the core challenges that you were trying to address here with the partnership and integration?

Justin Sacks (02:55)

Yeah. So I think it, goes back to people that are trying to start doing DTC for their game. What are the things that they need to solve? one of them is they need a way to take in payments and handle taxes, which is really what FastSpring is all about. Two, they need a place to, for the players to actually go and make that purchase. So website that they go to somehow they need to attach that purchase to the player’s account and then entitle that item or whatever

SKU they’ve bought back to that player inside of the game. And for that second piece around like the website and the item entitlement, the developer could do that themselves. They could build that website. They could build that, the interactive rails between web and game themselves. But most game developers, while they have a bunch of engineers at the company, they don’t have software engineers. They don’t have developers that are used to building for the web. And so the idea of what Nexus can bring is

a really, really simple solution that we can help build that for the publisher. So not only do they not have to do their own payment processing and merchant record, but they also don’t have to build and manage their own website or in-game item entitlement. And so that’s what the Nexus and FastSpring partnership is to me is all of the pieces that you need to launch D2C, you can have it in one place.

David Vogelpohl (04:16)

And that’s a really interesting perspective. like how you can, mean, obviously from FastSpring’s perspective, like payments and taxes and then outsourcing and compliance pieces, what we live, eat and breathe. But it’s interesting to also hear you connect the dots through to the value from the Nexus side of the equation around getting that web shop built and maintained, basically offloading all of that to the Nexus platform.

And it’s kind interesting how you talk about how game companies have a lot of developers, but they’re not software or web developers, if you will. And so a lot of those skill sets aren’t internal. Now, Nexus itself, though, it has a core value beyond just the web shop piece. What is Nexus’s core value?

Justin Sacks (05:00)

So the core, the reason for our existence is to build and manage creator programs, which is basically a way to align the incentives of a game publisher with the incentives of an influencer, usually around revenue sharing. So we build and manage creator programs. And a lot of the time that actually is done in game. So,

creators come to Nexus, they get a code, they tell their audience, hey, use my name when you’re buying something inside of the game. And then when a player does it, Nexus handles the attribution, and then we handle the payouts and stuff for the creators. But a lot of games increasingly are wanting those programs to exist either for a new web shop that they want to build or for existing D2C motions that they already have.

because one of the biggest challenges around D2C for games are the steering rules in place within the platforms. Basically that the games themselves can’t tell players in the game, go over to the web shop and buy instead because it’s a better deal.

But those rules don’t apply to content creators. So a YouTuber or a streamer, they can certainly say, hey guys, you get a better deal over on the web shop. And by the way, use my code when you’re doing so. And so our core thing that we’re trying to solve is creator programs, but they interact really directly and positively with D2C for publishers as well.

David Vogelpohl (06:20)

So Nexus is a platform and the creators and publishers that use it, the tracking from the creator to publisher referral or relationship, that is in a sense, a little platform agnostic, I guess, or works on many platforms, not just D2C. Is that true?

Justin Sacks (06:36)

That’s exactly right. Yeah, we build one partnership with the game and then whether they’re in multi-game platforms, meaning they’re on Steam and Apple and the Google Play Store and they’re on, you know, Xbox, we’re agnostic to all of those, as well as of course, if they’re on the web. Frankly, on the web, it’s an even easier integration.

David Vogelpohl (06:57)

And so for the creator marketing side of the equation, you kind of pointed out because of the anti-steering rules, creators have like, they’re in a sense, almost like this unique opportunity where it’s like their own platform to communicate. And so they don’t have those restrictions. So there’s like this natural connection to the D2C universe in that way. And then for the Nexus platform itself,

You have this ecommerce functionality built into the platform, correct? The ability to have shopping experiences and coupons and catalogs and effectively a web shop and ecommerce platform from the UI and UX perspective, effectively kind of in a box. Is that correct?

Justin Sacks (07:44)

Yeah, it’s, funny before, you know, web shops for mobile apps or games even like became a realistic possibility. were building web shops for creators, for, for a bunch of years. And so we built, you know, all of the tech that has to do with how does a player visit a website, see different SKUs, go through that shopping experience, then get the game or the item of the thing that they’re looking for. and just so happens that that’s the piece that

game developers need in order to now have that D2C motion. And so yeah, it’s been a big part of our DNA for the past half a decade or so.

David Vogelpohl (08:22)

Yeah. And so on the FastSpring front, then, so FastSpring for those unfamiliar payment and subscription and compliance, basically platform and the FastSpring platform can be integrated with kind of any open in that way e-commerce experience. And so we often think of the world as like, what do you want to build? And then how do you put FastSpring into that experience?

But the value of the in a box approach is it seems like a large piece of it is around speed to market really and ability to maintain. Is that how you see that value in leveraging and kind of in a box or out of a box type experience? Is it about speed and consistency? What do you think that core value is?

Justin Sacks (09:12)

I think that’s exactly right. And I think it’s, it’s also about the, like the team extension, you know, when you’re building out your team to handle whatever the pieces for your business, if that’s making a game, it doesn’t really make sense to also build out a core competency of web development. If that has nothing to do with the game itself. And so when you can have partners that can handle that for you, it can be valuable. And, know, as I think of like, what are the core pieces to have successful DTC? It’s the two that we talked about.

payments and merchant record, and then having the actual website that the players can interact with in order to get their product. But then to close the loop, you need to get your players to visit it. And that’s like, that’s where the core part of Nexus comes in with the content creators, but it’s also, there’s a bunch of different methods that the publisher can use to make sure the players can visit the website.

But of course, before you even start thinking about that, you need to make sure you have a website. And for a lot of developers, it’s, it’s not as simple as it is for us. We’ve built, you know, we built a platform and tools to make it, you know, within hours or days, we can stand up a new web shop. But for most game publishers, they’d have to hire the team. They’d have to choose the technology stack. They have to build it out and do QA and fix bugs and like, then maintain it forever. so often it makes sense when possible, partner with someone who can make it real easy for you.

David Vogelpohl (10:29)

So if I’m a large publisher and I’m going to go all out on my web portal and I’m going to have extensive player experiences, all integrated through everything custom end to end.

That’s not an out-of-box type experience, right? It’s completely custom. But maybe that’s a benefit for orgs that have the resources to invest in that. Do you look at it as like a size thing, or do you think, like, is there a sweet spot on the size front? Or is it also beneficial for people maybe further up the size scale, basically?

Justin Sacks (10:46)

Yeah.

I think it depends. It depends on the specific organization. I’d recommend for all of them, regardless of the size of the company, start out with an out of the box one, because you can always, like at the end of the day, it should be living within your game’s ecosystem. So on your own hosted website, you know, it’s easy to point domains there.

And you can always move into your own full developed stack if that’s a place that you want to go, but at least like start with someone else because you can see what is the potential for your business. And then also what is the experience of working with partners?

And to answer your question really directly, I think it depends on the customization level of those features because some of the platforms out there like us or like other folks, they might still be able to solve the unique needs of your game, even if it seems like it’s a lot of customized sort of like white glove experiences for your own web shop.

But if it’s things that are unique to your game that wouldn’t be true to any other game, then it’ll probably make sense once you also have the resources to build and manage it yourself. But for a long time, I think you can rely on partners to kind of figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

David Vogelpohl (12:20)

You know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about how speed is so important and kind of like, just get it out there. lot of the people, and publishers we talked to at FastSpring, you know, what a lot of, one of the popular stories we hear is, you know, we launched a web shop a year or two ago and we didn’t really do anything with it. And it’s already like 15 to 20 % of our revenue. So we’re like, I wonder what would happen if we tried.

do you find that that experience is common? Like, is that where you’re coming from with like, just get it out there.

Justin Sacks (12:50)

I mean, yes, I think it’s like, if you have a functional web shop and you make any attempts at all to let players know that it exists, you should see something around double digit percentage of all of your revenue come through your web shop. Which if you think about how the margin structure works, it immediately pays for itself with essentially no effort put into it. I’ve seen that to be true. Now it is.

What percentage of your revenue will flow through your DTC is a little bit dependent on things like the type of game that you have, the type of community you have, the type of monetization that your game has. But in general, I have seen that to be true, which is why I recommend people just try it and do it quick. Like throw something out there and see what happens. And you can always grow it over time and build that closer relationship with your players. But you got to get started somewhere.

David Vogelpohl (13:42)

Excellent. All right, well now I want to get a little nerdy and a little technical. We won’t go too deep though, because I think you and I mainly play technical people on TV, but we’re kind of on TV now, so maybe that works. But I want to talk about how the integration with FastSpring and Nexus works.

Let’s say that I’m a game and I sell in-game, I sell in-app purchases for like inventory items or maybe a battle pass. Where do I load that up if I’m using FastSpring and Nexus together?

Justin Sacks (14:17)

Yeah. So what the partnership looks like is Nexus will communicate with the publisher and then we’re going to do a seamless and easy API integration. And it basically is so that the publisher can tell us what the SKUs are and then what the information is about the SKUs. So there’s something like a store name, which is what it’ll appear to the player, a SKU ID, which is like the, you know, behind

the doors, like information about the SKU And then we’re going to need information about pricing and then some currency stuff and all sorts of pieces. But basically the publisher does one quick, easy API integration with Nexus. And through that, they provide the information that Nexus needs to know. What are the SKUs that should be sellable for what price to what players? and then we send back information post purchase. So the player comes to us and then there’s a couple of different ways that they can tell us who they are.

So either they can authenticate through their platform ID, so like their Apple ID or Steam ID or whatever it might be. Or most often, they’re going to use some unique player ID, which they can get in-game, which will be provided by the game’s back end. So it’ll be some string of letters and numbers. And then the player goes and makes a purchase.

And then we send information through that same really simple API back to the game. And it says, hi, game. This player ID should receive this SKU item. And then the game gives it into their account just like they would if that purchase was made in-game or in any other fashion. And that’s kind of the whole experience.

On the back end, the way that Nexus and FastSpring work is, as the player goes to make the purchase, they’re going to go through the FastSpring payment experience, and they’ll be able to use payment methods across the world, whatever makes sense for them. And all of that stuff is handled on our end, and the publisher doesn’t have to deal with any of those pieces.

David Vogelpohl (16:14)

So it’s the integration with the payment side and compliance features and capabilities that FastSpring offers. When you pull in the inventory or doing that via the FastSpring API, is that synchronized? Like if their inventory changes over time, can they push and pull from that into the Nexus system? is it kind of basically just like a one-time or manual sync?

Justin Sacks (16:38)

No, it’s dynamic. So it can be updated when there’s new items in the game or new prices or discounts or all sorts of stuff.

David Vogelpohl (16:48)

So the source of truth then it sounds like is the publishers data. It’s the publisher source of truth when it comes to the SKUs and items in their game. Does that sound correct? And then they’re basically synchronizing that with Nexus. And they are the source of truth is what it sounds like.

Justin Sacks (17:06)

That’s exactly right. Yeah, the publisher is always fully in control of what SKUs are available to which players at what price and all sorts of stuff.

David Vogelpohl (17:14)

Excellent, because it’s an open API, well, I guess it’s not too open, but what I mean is because it’s an API that they can leverage, then if their source of truth were to change to a new system or platform, in theory, they could still integrate it with Nexus. In other words, you’re not doing it only to work with one specific type of inventory system.

Justin Sacks (17:37)

That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (17:40)

In that inventory, I didn’t hear you say that it gets pushed to FastSpring effectively. As I understand it, we’re effectively invoking it on checkout. So you have the SKU, you’ve tracked what the user is purchasing. When it’s time to check out, you basically invoke FastSpring to charge that amount, localize the payments and do all the tax compliance pieces. And then FastSpring tells you if the transaction has gone through and then you can then tell the game via API that the player should have access to that entitle.

Did I catch that right?

Justin Sacks (18:10)

I think

that’s exactly right. Like if we imagine it as three points on a line, you know, the publisher says, here’s the SKUs that are available. Nexus features those SKUs. Player goes to make a purchase. We tell FastSpring, hey, someone wants to make this purchase. You let us know when it’s finished. You say, hey, this was completed. We then go back to the game and say, hey, this player with this ID is owed these items. So make that entitlement happen.

David Vogelpohl (18:37)

And that integration and all the systems and platforms behind that effectively is fully managed. So nobody’s having to like go update software or worry about like pen testing and all these other pieces basically, because it’s effectively all outsourced.

Justin Sacks (18:54)

Basically, yeah. We always do testing for any new launch that we do to make sure that the experiences matches as close to what the player would experience in game on their web shop and to the design and the specs of what the publisher is looking for. But effectively, yes, yeah, we’re not recreating new experiences for each new launch.

David Vogelpohl (19:13)

This is kind of interesting because the benefit of a platform is you inherit features, right? Everybody on that platform has access to it, and so it’s efficient. And of course, you don’t inherit the maintenance costs that goes along with that. But there is customization, right? As you launch these shops, help us understand the level of customization that you’re

doing for publishers as you get these out of the door? And then how long does that usually take? I guess not like exact working hours, but maybe like turnaround time in terms of days. And maybe I get that it’s a wide range, but help people understand like how quickly you can help get them going.

Justin Sacks (19:51)

Well, I can speak to Nexus. I think there’s other platforms out there that are less customizable.

but also more open, like, for example, like not anyone can come and build a web shop with Nexus. have to like say yes, and we will build this for and with you and make that partnership. And so we have some discernment of the size of the game or the type of the game or whatever it might be. but that’s because we’re highly customizable. A lot of that is for on the design front end, you user experience side of things. So

We at least tried very closely to match what the player experience would look like and feel like and seem like in game to seem like on the web.

But at the end of the day, it’s up to the publisher of what that literally will look like. And, you know, the, the, the aesthetics and the branding and the color scheme and all sorts of stuff. It’s, up to the publisher, but we can build that basically to their specifications beyond that on the feature set. There’s a lot that we can do. probably the most bells and whistles that Nexus has is on the creator program side of things. And so for example, we just launched with a partner last week, or it was two weeks ago.

that wanted to do, a multi-tiered system where different creators got different revenue shares for different SKUs, but also they got some custom SKUs that their audience could see after putting in a creator code. And there’s a lot of fun stuff that you can do there where you can like create personalized offers to groups of players.

You can do discounts, you could do promotions, additional content, exclusive content. There’s a of different pieces and ways to do it. Next, we have our recommendations and best practices, but the way that we always think about working with a publisher is we are their partner. And so it is up to them. they’re always fully in ownership of what will the web shop look like? What will it feel like to players? Who is it? Who is it available to? What are the SKUs that are available? What are the prices for those? What are the promotions and the activations and all sorts of stuff?

And so there’s a lot of options and recommendations that we make, but it’s really important to us that the publisher knows they always have a hundred percent control and ownership over what that looks and feels like.

David Vogelpohl (22:00)

What would the typical rollout time period look like? I mean, an ideal, perfect scenario. guess the worst case could be very high, but are you talking the matter of weeks, days, months?

Justin Sacks (22:11)

Yeah, so I use our last few as examples. And I think the longest from, Hey, we’re ready. And we like have some idea of what we want this to look like to launch was three weeks and the shortest was one and a half. and so it should be, should be weeks, not months. I would imagine.

The lengthiest would be like six weeks and that’s probably only if there’s really significant design cycle, you know, back and forth and some heavy QA and testing and stuff. But the actual like process of developing and building it with a publisher should be just a couple of weeks.

David Vogelpohl (22:48)

What other types of systems should folks be thinking about with this type of rollout? Like we’ve already talked about entitlements in game, we’ve talked about pushing and pulling my inventory back and forth. What other kind of systems should folks be thinking about with a rollout like this?

Justin Sacks (23:06)

Well, we recommend a creator program, but we’re very biased. You know, if your game is the sort of game that is live service and has some pool of organic creators, probably makes sense to incentivize those creators to drive sales specifically of, you know, new content in the game. There’s a lot of other cool pieces that are game dependent things like forums and blogs and leaderboards and competitions. Those are like systems that can be helpful when you think about DTC and

Now, D2C isn’t just about getting better margin than what you can get in the app store, but it’s also about building that direct relationship with the player and then offering them unique personalization. So if you have a really highly engaged player who’s spending a lot of money, maybe you can offer them something really special to keep them engaged and keep them excited and interested. And this is a good place and way to do that.

David Vogelpohl (23:56)

Yeah, it’s a great point. Such a good relationship builder, feel, not only with VIPs, but just with players writ large. This whole idea that, you know, are you a real business if you don’t have a direct relationship with your customers? In gaming, that’s quite common, right, to have this kind of third party interstitial type relationship. And so it’s really interesting to think about that opportunity to deliver a better player experience.

Thinking through the systems you mentioned, that made a lot of sense to me. Maybe we can switch gears on the rollout side. You’ve underlined a couple of times with the FastSpring Nexus partnership that you get payments and compliance, you get the web shop, but you also get the creator program in a box, which is interesting to think about in the rollout perspective, how you might roll something like this out. What should publishers be considering when

they roll out D2C to their players.

Justin Sacks (24:57)

I think they…

The first part to consider is the experience for the player. want like necessarily it requires more friction because you’re having the player change their normal experience of staying inside the app store and making a purchase. So how do you limit that friction as much as possible? That’s where I think of things like making the, the web shop, you know, mimic the experience and the aesthetics and the brand of your end game as much as you can. But then also I would think about just standard

better offers to the player. It’s really…

It’s sort of industry standard at this point that you’re offering at least about 10 % additional value on the web shop than you do in game. Usually that comes with additional content. So for example, if you sell a thousand gems, which is a soft currency for $10 of a hard currency, instead offer 1,100 gems for the same $10. I think those are like the core pieces to be thinking about as you establish your DTC. And then also think about that, those touch points.

that you were talking about, David, around how do you communicate with your player? How do you let them know about upcoming content or cool deals that they shouldn’t miss or exciting stuff going on in the meta experience around the game? I think those are really important pieces,

David Vogelpohl (26:20)

We’ve seen a big push from a lot of publishers who’ve rolled out with us around creating and activating their player accounts. Do you view that as a major pillar? guess it probably depends on the publisher, but how do you view the use of player accounts logging into a web portal with that player account, like that whole universe around the account side?

Justin Sacks (26:44)

I think it’s generally good. I do think there’s one unique piece of not doing the player accounts, which is it actually makes gifting easier. just by like, if, someone doesn’t have to authenticate their account in order to make a purchase or experience the website, but instead they’re using a unique ID, you could get your friend’s ID and then just gift them really easily. So it’s sort of like naturally enables gifting and gifting is a powerful part of

e-commerce, also this sort of like D to C motion. but generally attaching player accounts to the, to the website and to the web shop makes a ton of sense. It’s ways to like build more of those personalized offers and unique experiences. And it’s totally a thing that is worth doing. when you have the resources to be able to provide something special and unique to that player.

Whether that’s a daily login bonus or it’s a personalized offer or whatever it might be.

David Vogelpohl (27:42)

One of the interesting things that stands out to me about all this is that with live service games and mobile gaming in general, you tend to have things like VIPs emerge, obviously people that disproportionately buy from you. In the mobile app world, that actually rarely happens, right? It’s mainly driven by subscriptions and all players are effectively the same, or users are worth the same amount of money to you in a very real way.

In gaming though, we have the VIPs at Emerge. Do you feel like rolling out and focusing primarily on VIPs is a valid strategy in the beginning? Or do you like when publishers go broader with their player base? Like, can’t you get like 70 % of your revenue with like 5 % of your players?

Justin Sacks (28:33)

It’s a really good question. I don’t know if I would recommend starting only focused on VIPs, but I would, I would certainly not recommend ignoring your VIPs. I think they should be part of the strategy and should be part of the intention and the idea of building that direct relationship with your VIPs, with your most engaged players. That’s like.

Yes, it’s one of the biggest values that you get by, having a web shop, by having DTC. and it’s exactly right, especially if you’re a game that has, you know, a minority of your players driving a majority of your revenue. then your web shop is going to be even more valuable to you, not only because you get better margins on those few people and it’s easier to get a small group of people to make a shift to a web shop versus a large group of people, but also you’re starting to build that direct relationship.

And then as mentioned, you can communicate things that are really valuable to that person to keep them engaged and retaining one more month of a VIP might be worth retaining years of dozens of other smaller players.

David Vogelpohl (29:40)

That’s great insights. You’ve talked, of course, about the role of creators in promoting your D2C offering, and that makes a lot of sense. You’ve talked about the anti-steering provisions, and I know that you are able to promote your website within your game. Obviously, you can’t promote your web shop within your game, and so many publishers will kind of skate the line between what can we promote versus what might be going too far.

But I’m just curious, like either in that arena or just generally writ large, what are some unique strategies publishers should consider when promoting their web shops?

Justin Sacks (30:20)

Yeah, well, I do think I think influencers and creators are a good way to do that. So just partnering with the creators you have in your community and they don’t necessarily have to be YouTubers or streamers. can be ambassadors or community leaders. This might be people that run Facebook groups or discord servers or things like that.

I also think separately leaning into social is really powerful. Most publishers have built some social presence about around their games or the IP and, you know, letting the folks that follow you on, on, your social media and know that the web shop and the website exists is great, especially when ideally you can combine them and your website has some value to players beyond just the web shop. So it might be.

blog or news or more information or, you know, two of like the core pieces that I see all the time for competitive games are leaderboards. If your leaderboards exist somewhere near your web shop, then there’s like a pretty straightforward funnel of your competitive players go and checking out the leaderboards and then go into the shop in order to top up their currency. and then I forgot what the last one was.

David Vogelpohl (31:28)

Must have been a great idea though, but just in general, it sounds like, like I hear people talk about this and it’s so funny because so many gaming publisher sites, it’s like really cool looking imagery from the game, a list of the games and a few call-outs on where you can download or install or buy it. And that’s pretty much it.

And what we’ve seen, what I’ve seen anyways is more and more publishers really turning their website into a destination. so is that I talk to folks that’s often how what I’m seeing is like, if I have my leaderboards there, if I can log into my account and do stuff, if I can make it a destination where my players are engaged and interacting with it, then that’s just going to strengthen the connection with that player, with my brand and my business. And then of course your web shop is there and you get to take advantage of that.

Justin Sacks (31:53)

Mm-hmm.

David Vogelpohl (32:15)

But it’s this idea of owning your customers instead of renting them and using your website as a destination in order to do that. That’s my own point of view. I don’t know how you think of some of those variables, but what are your thoughts?

Justin Sacks (32:30)

I think that’s right. think it is really building it into a habit where it doesn’t feel like additional friction to go to the website, but it feels like just a part of the player experience. And so that reminds me of the last piece that I was going to mention. That’s one of the two core things that folks do. One is that that leaderboard piece, if the game has any competitive elements. And the second is some sort of like daily reward. So just saying, Hey, you visited this website, you get something. which requires that the player has logged in and they’re

experiencing this and that there is value on the website for them to go and see every day. Ideally more value than just like getting an additional, you know, hundred gems or whatever, but that’s great too. It is valuable to make it, like a normal experience for the player to visit your website and see content about the game in addition to actually playing the game itself.

and in addition to just using the webshop itself. I totally think there’s a lot of value in making it a destination more than just a place to transact.

David Vogelpohl (33:29)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So how can publishers use FastSpring and Nexus if they want a custom webshop or create one in the future? Like, what if I didn’t want my webshop to be the out-of-the-box option? I was actually going to go build my own. Could I still use Nexus for my creator program and FastSpring for my payments on a custom webshop somewhere?

Justin Sacks (33:54)

Yeah, you certainly could. could, you know, if you’re…

totally building the website, which is what is the thing that the player is going to interact with? And then you’re building the rails to like tell your, your games back into entitle that item to the player after purchase. You can build that piece. can integrate with FastSpring to handle payment processing, your merchant record. then next, next is can certainly easily still provide that creative programming experience for the web shop. You could also just try it and start with nexus building it. and then, you know, before you invest all the time and resources

into making it yourself, but yeah, we’re Nexus is certainly platform agnostic. So you can have a creator program in your own first party web shop in one that obviously that we build in one someone else builds or in game, you know, we’re happy to work with you.

David Vogelpohl (34:41)

Yeah, I think like in my experience, that’s where I think people get a little like awkward around like out of the box experiences because they feel trapped, but it doesn’t feel like that’s actually the case here. You can take the value of Nexus forward with you regardless of your DTC future.

Certainly FastSpring is a similar type of fluid platform in terms of the web shop side. And then if you had a custom web shop either today or in the future, you could still use all three together if you found value basically in all three. And I think that openness is really powerful when you think about it through the lens of a partnership. least it is for me, someone who likes flexibility and options.

Justin Sacks (35:21)

That’s totally right. Yeah. If you want to build the pieces yourself, both of us, FastSpring and Nexus can be a module that lives in your ecosystem, or we can build that part for you. It’s up to you.

David Vogelpohl (35:33)

Okay, so just to recap one time since obviously the core topic we’re covering today is the integration, but effectively Nexus will help you set up your web shop customized for your game’s design and the type of inventory basically you’ll be selling associated with your game. You’ll help connect through to entitlement systems via API so publishers can allow their entitlements in the game.

The inventory itself, of course, is synced with the publisher being the source of truth. And then on the payments and compliance side, when it’s time to check out, FastSpring swoops in, does our checkout magic, offers local payment methods and compliance worldwide. And the publisher gets to stay focusing on their game and promoting their D2C channel and not implementing and managing all of this technology and integrations on their own. Is that about right?

Justin Sacks (36:26)

That is exactly right.

David Vogelpohl (36:28)

Excellent. Well, this is awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat this out here on the podcast. Obviously, we’re, at FastSpring, really excited about this integration and really wanted to get the opportunity to kind of talk about it here and be able to share it with others. But is there anything else you want to make sure we mentioned about D2C or the integration before we kind of wrap up here?

Justin Sacks (36:52)

I think the only thing to mention is if you have a game that has any amount of players and revenue and you haven’t already explored D2C, you’ve got to get on it. And again, my recommendation is start with some partner that can make it super easy just to get something up there. But it is certainly positive value for basically every game publisher out there.

David Vogelpohl (37:15)

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jessen.

Justin Sacks (37:20)

Thank you, I appreciate it. I’m glad to be here.

David Vogelpohl (37:22)

Excellent pleasure as always. And if you would like to learn more about what Justin is up to, you can check out nexus.gg. If you’d like to learn more about the FastSpring and Nexus integration, you can go to fastspring.gg and click “Demo” and we’ll get you connected with all the right folks who can help you take a double click down and learn a little more. Thank you all for joining the Growth Stage podcast. Again, I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital marketing community through my role here at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage, a podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m your host Jesse Paliotto. I support the digital product community as part of my role with FastSpring and I love being able to hang out with just phenomenal people here on the Growth Stage podcast. And today the phenomenal person I get to hang out with is Hannes Andersson, CEO at oeksound. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how they build a globally recognized brand in this audio plug-in space that they operate in, take a little bit of a dive into their journey and their expansion and challenges, opportunities that they encountered along the way. So, Hannes, thank you so much for doing this, man. Really, really excited to hang out for a few minutes with you here today.

Hannes Andersson (00:49)

Thank you for having me.

Jesse Paliotto (00:52)

Hannes, maybe a good place to start. Could you give folks a little bit of context? Can you briefly describe what oeksound does, especially for people who may not have any exposure to the audio industry?

Hannes Andersson (01:04)

Yeah, sure. So oeksound is a software company and it’s a software company active within the music and audio space. When it comes to tools that we use when mixing, recording, producing music or then editing audio in post-production for a film or maybe even something like a podcast, a podcast like this. So we have a few

Jesse Paliotto (01:30)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (01:33)

plugins is what we’re calling them. We call them plugins because they work within these larger software packages that exist, production programs like Pro Tools, Steinberg Cubase, Ableton Live, Logic, and even GarageBand that we can find on any Mac computer. So these plugins are these smaller tools that you use inside of software

Jesse Paliotto (01:57)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (02:03)

packages that you can use them to manipulate or enhance or just better your audio.

Jesse Paliotto (02:12)

And you guys have three plugins or maybe you can just give a quick sketch of what oeksound offers. I think you’ve got a few and maybe a new one. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (02:22)

Yeah, so right now we have three studio plugins. So what we mean by studio is that they’re used in more of a studio setting, maybe be this bedroom producer or a lone pod podcaster or maybe a big commercial studio where they make music. So we have three plugins called Soothe or Soothe 2 is the current version of that. And we have Spiff and then we have Bloom.

And then on the live side, we also have a live version of Soothe 2, which is kind of Soothe 2 quickly became our kind of most popular plugin and that was the product that really took off for us. so one and a half year ago, we released it for live use. That meaning that it’s also now being run on shows on, for example, huge…

for huge artists like Harry Styles or Red Hot Chili Peppers and those kind of artists. So it’s also being used in that kind of setting.

Jesse Paliotto (03:24)

wow.

that’s amazing.

Yeah. In terms of how you sell them, are they standalone or is there a subscription side to it? And I ask because for folks that listen to the Grow Stage podcast, a lot of what we end up talking about is sort SaaS businesses where they’re kind of building subscription model. But I think you might have a few options there. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (03:50)

Exactly. Yeah. So oeksound is actually pretty much a very, very traditional e-commerce business. And so we sell perpetual licenses and that are perpetual. I mean, those are every individual product is bought individually. Currently we don’t have a bundle of any sort. And that’s how we’ve been doing it for…

a while now and that’s how the plugin industry has been working for most of the time. Subscriptions are mostly, you find subscriptions mostly when it comes to larger companies that might have 30 to 200 products out there and so there’s a large selection and for somebody that doesn’t know where to start they might just like jump on a subscription and then start using the tools that they need.

But otherwise, have our products, our studio products, our perpetual licenses range between $149 and $199. But a new thing that we did last year during summer was actually launch our rent to own pricing, rent to own way of purchasing our products. And that’s a very, very popular way.

Jesse Paliotto (05:00)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (05:13)

or it’s been for us very, very popular. And I don’t see a lot of other companies doing it. There’s some availability on a website called Splice where you can rent your own products. And essentially what that means is that it’s kind of a payment plan, but you never commit to pay the full sum. And so you can just rent the plugin, but one month at a time making a payment. And after

Jesse Paliotto (05:35)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (05:42)

I think in our case after 18 months, then you get your perpetual license and then you own it for the rest for perpetually after that. And I think that really helped us grow from from kind of more globally to countries where, for example, two hundred dollars is a lot and you might not actually need the plugin.

every month, you might not just need it for an album that you’re doing this month or next month and so then you rent it for two months and then the next time you rent it for two months and then after let’s say multiple years you get a perpetual license when you’ve gone through that 18 times.

Jesse Paliotto (06:28)

That’s amazing. Like what a very thoughtful sort of win-win scenario for people using it, like you said, where they get to use it when they need it. But as a company, you get the full kind of value that you need out of the purchase eventually. Like it’s timed out. I know, you know, there’s companies that

provide sort of this payment plan option. know, Klarna does this, Affirm does this, and buy now, pay later is the phrase that is often used in the industry for that. But that comes with, you know, finance charges and you’re committing to the full purchase up front. So it’s very interesting. So like when you guys are doing this, is it the same price? Like if it’s a $200 plug-in?

and I do the payment plan, does it become a $250 purchase at end of the day or you’re just, you’re kind of covering that financing cost yourselves.

Hannes Andersson (07:20)

We’re covering that finance cost ourselves to the most part. The end sum gets for the customer, the end sum might be somewhere like $5 more, $5, $7 more. So it’s pretty close to the original sum. so we just made sure that at least at the rental price, you don’t get it cheaper than for the full price.

Jesse Paliotto (07:32)

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (07:46)

But then again,

we wanted it to be as close as possible to the full price. And that has a lot to do with how kind of our ethos work with our plugins. We are very confident in how good our plugins are and that they’re useful and that users find them useful. And also if they don’t find them useful, then I don’t see any need for…

our users to buy them and just like having that as the ground rule, make something useful and sell it. And if it’s not useful, then we’re going to know about it. so for example, yeah, go ahead.

Jesse Paliotto (08:18)

Mm-hmm.

It’s funny how like

that can sound almost like obvious when you say it out loud, but unfortunately there are things I’m sure all of us have bought that you’re like, why did I buy this? This sucks. Like this was not worthwhile. It didn’t actually do what I thought it was going to do. So it feels, I know what you’re saying sounds like this should be obvious, but it actually is like to hold yourself to the standard that we’re going to sell something that’s so good that somebody is glad that they paid us for it. Like that’s a pretty, pretty cool standard to be living up to.

Hannes Andersson (08:58)

Yeah, it’s pretty interesting because you see a lot of kind of race to the bottom pricing wise in the industry going on right now. And that kind of, I feel a bit unsure about what that communicates about the company behind the pricing. When for example, you see something like a bundle costing something like $899 and then it’s like

Jesse Paliotto (09:04)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (09:27)

crossed over and now you get it for $40 or something. When I see that and I’m am I supposed to am I like supposed to be happy when I see that I’m not like yes that is a good deal but why would anyone buy that for $899 to begin with then either either your your products were never that valuable or they were actually never that useful they were never actually that worth it.

Jesse Paliotto (09:31)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (09:57)

or then you’ve kind of like, I don’t know, there’s might be some other. Yeah, yeah. And so kind of having all of that. And I think also something we started off with our plugins and with our products is that they all have 20 day trials and these 20 day trials are just, they’re not restricted in any other way that they’re gonna stop working at after 20.

Jesse Paliotto (10:02)

Or they were, and why are you marking it down to $40?

Hannes Andersson (10:27)

days. So you get all the features that the plugin has and you can use that plugin. So for example, if you’re a professional mixing engineer, you can actually use the trial to make money during the trial so that you can then invest and get the plugin if you like it. And so having that honest, extremely transparent and honest discussion with the users of here is the plugin, you can use it for three weeks.

Jesse Paliotto (10:40)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (10:55)

decide if you like it or not if you find it useful You can tell us you can let us know if you don’t understand it if you do understand it because we are all at different levels When it comes to users where you can be a super pro user and still don’t understand how it works So you can be a bedroom producer just starting off and getting exact getting immediately what it does. There’s so many different users available, but one thing that I like always to kind of

repeat is that our customers are not stupid. They’re never stupid in any way. We don’t have to ever tell anyone why they should kind of buy our plugin, but we could tell them why they should try it. I mean, and then every single user is going to make a purchase decision on their own. We’re never going to have to tell anyone. And we’re never actually in our marketing. We’ve never asked anyone to buy our product.

Jesse Paliotto (11:46)

Really? We should try it, right?

Hannes Andersson (11:48)

Yeah, I don’t think we,

I don’t actually think we’ve ever used the word by now or something like that as a call to something, something like that. I think we’ve, of course, when we have a sale, we direct people like we have two sales a year. And so usually Black Friday and then a spring sale around spring. That’s usually how we do it.

Jesse Paliotto (11:54)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (12:14)

We never know like how we’re gonna change it up or if we’re gonna do something different, but that’s been kind of the way we’ve done it so far. We let people know, people that are on our mailing list two weeks before that we’re gonna have a sale. So if anybody’s been waiting around, that’s usually the only reason why they’re on our mailing list is to know if we have any new product or run there’s a sale. So, and then we tell everybody beforehand and then they…

take care of telling everyone else like word of mouth is everything in this industry. It’s like 95 % of the marketing is done word of mouth. And after that, they just kind of that’s like the only time where we say, okay, here’s the link where you can buy the plugin for this price now. And so you can kind of like that’s because it’s a sale. Of course, it’s now it’s about now it’s about buying it, but that’s something we do.

Jesse Paliotto (13:05)

Yeah, yeah.

Hannes Andersson (13:08)

twice a year and then we’re back to our normal programming.

Jesse Paliotto (13:12)

That’s, love that in terms of like leading with value, like we’re gonna just give you value. And for folks listening who may not have kind of ever worked in sort of the creative side of software, my exposure is that limiting the ability to export final products was always like the trick to get you to, try the creatives, whether it’s photo or drawing or music. And then when you finally create something and you wanna export it, now we’re gonna use that as the hook to force you to pay us money. Like, you actually want that track exported.

And so to actually give them full use is a big deal, but it does lead with value. it, it strikes me that, it, it creates, it builds it into a workflow, which is very important. I would expect for this user base is that they’re creating things. And so the ability to create tool chains of software that work. And if it works, then you’re built in going forward. And now I want to buy it because I have a proven workflow that created a great thing. Is that, is that a fair analysis or.

Hannes Andersson (14:09)

Yeah,

exactly. So a really good example is we talk about something like vocal chains or master chains when we talk about these tracks, these audio tracks that we have in our software. So vocal track is obviously a track where you have your recorded vocal and then you put these plugins on in order to make that plugin, that vocal sound professional and make it sound ready, ready for the radio or ready for the streaming service where you’re going to put it.

And so there we have our plugins, but also plugins from probably 20 other different companies. so they’re constantly changing out these tools that they have there to get to a better result than earlier. Every single engineer is constantly tweaking and constantly changing out things there. And so when they trial our product, our plugin,

Jesse Paliotto (14:48)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (15:05)

put it there, maybe at the end of the chain or maybe at the start of the chain. And then they understand or they kind of like, yeah, get to the point where it’s like, this is actually better than before. And then after a while, let’s say after three weeks, they open up a project where they have used it. And then that’s when they’re going to notice that, okay, whoa, my trial has expired here. And then that purchase decision is going to feel so natural. It’s going to…

Jesse Paliotto (15:18)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (15:35)

feel like a no-brainer for them at that point because, I’ve already used it on like two, three tracks and I know I’m going to use it again. This is an obvious purchase decision. And that purchase decision, especially if it’s done at full price, for example, which is not common in the plugin industry that you like ever buy something at full price, but our plugins do sell a lot at full price. What I find or what I believe

is that you get a user that is so proud of their purchase. They feel like they have made an investment because it’s already in their workflow, so to say. It’s already part of their toolbox and they’re really happy about the decision that, okay, I’m actually know that I’m going to need it. And then when you have that kind of a user, that kind of a customer,

Jesse Paliotto (16:11)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (16:34)

they’re going to tell everyone. So again, word of mouth, again, we have the perfect customer. And again, if you compare that to somebody that sees an email that says flash sale today only, and then there’s usually a timer that says like 72 hours. I don’t know how that’s today only. then maybe, maybe. then

Jesse Paliotto (16:36)

Yeah.

I don’t know, multiple time zones? No, I don’t know.

Hannes Andersson (17:04)

they buy it during that flash sale, they’ve never seen that plugin before, they use it once in their project, don’t understand it, don’t understand the value. It might be a super product, it might be great, but they just don’t put it on the right place or don’t use it right. And then they feel bad about the plugin. And so next time they’re in a room with other engineers or they’re hanging out with other music creators,

Jesse Paliotto (17:14)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (17:32)

somebody goes, hey, have you tried that plugin? And they’re gonna go, yeah, I tried it. I actually bought it. I know it, we use it. Yeah. And compare that to, oh, so do you use Soothe? It’s like, yeah, I use Soothe. I actually bought it like a few months ago. It’s on every track. Love it. Recommend it to everyone. Like that’s the difference. You have two completely different customers, but…

Jesse Paliotto (17:40)

Yeah, you’re get negative word of mouth because the experience was so bad with it.

Hannes Andersson (18:00)

I think the other plugin probably also deserves a chance. It’s just that that funnel has become so like, kind of like FOMO based that you just try and grab, yeah, it feels more like a money grab. And then if you like it or not, that’s up to you as the user. You’re not giving them a chance to even like question you.

Jesse Paliotto (18:04)

Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of sort of the age old wisdom that people value what they pay for and they don’t value stuff that’s free. Like, which is, you know, I remember hearing that as a kid, like I could give you this, but you’re you’re just going to throw it away. If you’ve got to save up your money and buy it, you know, what’s bike or something like, then you’re going to you’re going to be super proud of it and you’re going to you’re going to show it off. There’s almost like a a personal investment, which the other thing that was striking me while you were kind of describing that is the picture in my mind a little bit is of like

somebody who builds things with their hands, like they’re building furniture or something, and they have all these tools. And a big part of those tools and what they choose to buy is their ability to successfully use it. And so kind of, it’s not just, bought this thing as a status symbol. Like, no, I bought it because I actually have to learn how to use this thing to make cool stuff at the end of the day. And so you’re kind of building the learning pattern too at the same time, which kind of stands out to me.

Hannes Andersson (19:18)

Yeah, exactly. And we’re trying to make that as easy as possible. So both Soothe2 and Spiff, they have both integrated tutorials. So what that means is kind of like, this is something you might see in SaaS websites, right? So you have like the pop-up screens that you show, and then you might have a test project going on and stuff like that. That’s not something you

see within a plugin within a DAW. That’s something very unique, but we have that going on. And so you can open up a small tutorial that is going to go through the parameters for you. And then you also have some test audio material running through the plugin that you’ve installed together with the plugin. So kind of like you have some demo material in a way. I mean, yeah. So that way you kind of, you don’t need to,

Jesse Paliotto (20:09)

Yeah, to kind of get you started. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (20:15)

read the manual, you don’t need to go to YouTube and watch some videos and get stuck in a rabbit hole on YouTube. You can just stay within your DAW, within your project, go through that tutorial and when you’re done, you’re back where you started and you’re still in your own project and you’re still using our plugins on your music. And so that’s something very unique in the plugin space, even though that’s something we pretty much took from, again, yeah, something more like the SaaS side.

Jesse Paliotto (20:40)

Yeah,

yeah. The just to quickly ask you said something a couple paragraphs ago that was interesting. How many you said there might be 20 pieces of plugins or software on a given track that you’re working on. Is that the right number? I’m curious. Like if I’m a music producer and I realize this is a hard question because there’s everyone from bedroom producers to professional, you know, working on, you know, Taylor Swift level kind of producers. But how many?

How many plugins or pieces of software are on a given song or album?

Hannes Andersson (21:15)

Yeah, I think if we start from the track level, I think Pro Tools, like the default number of inputs or kind of like plugin inputs you can have there is like five plus five, so 10. So usually if that audio track is well recorded material and you’re not in a genre where you have very

Jesse Paliotto (21:33)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (21:45)

over-processed material, then you’re going to be fine with an EQ, an equalizer. That might be the only thing you have there. Another thing is usually you go for something like EQ compression and maybe saturation or distortion, and then you have like three. But I’d say kind of like when you go for, when you have those more, let’s say,

Jesse Paliotto (21:51)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (22:10)

music tracks, the instruments and those tracks you might have somewhere between like one and five plugins. And then when you have your most important tracks, like a lead vocal, for example, like the main vocal that everybody is listening to, then we’re probably up. If it’s a, and if we say the genre is pop or EDM, then you’re definitely going to have like seven, eight plugins on that.

Jesse Paliotto (22:15)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (22:37)

And also that track being sent to some buses that also had the reverbs and the delays and everything like that. So there you have five, maybe some parallel tracks as well. So there you have five plugins.

Jesse Paliotto (22:49)

So I’m giving song,

this is all multiplied, right? So there was the five on the one and the five on the other and the seven on the vocal.

Hannes Andersson (22:52)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so in a, so in a, in a production project where the producer has produced a track, you’re definitely going to find, let’s say, I don’t know, 80 plugins and on a track, on a pop track. then that all already gets like committed. And so you kind of like print the tracks as they are. And that goes to mixing and the mixing engineer adds 40 plugins more. And so this is the way, this is just the way we manipulate, manipulate audio.

If we are not editing it, so like just cutting and pasting and copying and doing stuff like that, doing our fade ins and fade outs, the other way we process our audio is with plugins. And so that’s kind of the main way that we go about. And so yeah, we can have anywhere from like 20 plugins to 200, depending on the project. And don’t get me started on cinematic projects like for film, for cinema, because those projects might have…

Jesse Paliotto (23:48)

yeah.

Hannes Andersson (23:51)

If it’s for a whole feature film, you might have 2,000 tracks.

Jesse Paliotto (23:56)

mind-boggling. So let me use this as sort of a I’m gonna use that as a turn into a little bit different sort of question. So obviously a lot of competition in this industry right like there’s a lot of plugins out there it’s not like you know there’s you know five main ones that’s what everybody use I mean maybe there are five popular ones but there’s a lot out there. And I believe you guys are based in Helsinki and so how do you do how did the company and how did it think about going global?

Hannes Andersson (23:57)

Yeah.

Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (24:25)

Because if I’m creating software, I’m in Helsinki and I want to suddenly take this to the world, there’s a lot of other plugins that people can pick from. How did you get started and how did you do that? I know that’s a very broad question, so please feel free to take that wherever you want to take that.

Hannes Andersson (24:38)

Mm.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can start really shortly talk about the history. So the company was founded by Olli Keskinen. So he’s a dear friend of mine. were both studying at the Sibelius Academy. We were studying music technology. So we were both becoming recording engineers, mixing engineers in that sense, or was at least dabbling in that. And yeah, got to do that a lot.

Jesse Paliotto (24:46)

Yeah.

right on.

Hannes Andersson (25:10)

Oli made the first version of Soothe pretty much on his own. Like that’s a solo project. And not only did he made the plugin, but he also made the website. He made the web store. that was like a WordPress, WooCommerce based store back then. And he also made the copy protection for the plugin back then. And that’s both now both the store of course is FastSpring now and then the

Jesse Paliotto (25:27)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (25:40)

Copy protection is also done by another company that we then, or we implement their technology into our plugins. But yeah, that was all made by one person in November, 2016. And then we’re not in the plugin industry or in the, guess, in the software e-commerce side, you’re not thinking about going global. Anything is by different, by like start by default, it is global. And so he…

Jesse Paliotto (26:05)

Yeah. Yep.

Hannes Andersson (26:10)

started the web store and he loaded up the plugin and then he just wrote something on one of the more popular forums in the audio space and said that, hey, I made a plugin. I hope you like it. Here you can buy it and here you can download and try it. And then it took off from there pretty fast for a single plugin done by a single person. And so pretty quickly he understood that he should be focusing on

Jesse Paliotto (26:27)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (26:39)

squashing the bugs and making sure that the code is good. And so I jumped on the business side, on the marketing side, or mainly focusing on marketing, getting more people to know about it. And Tommi Gröhn as well jumped on as another DSP engineer is what we call it. So digital signal processing. that’s, those are kind of like where all the code starts. It’s the algorithms that do the processing for the audio. And so we became kind of like the core

Jesse Paliotto (26:50)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (27:07)

team and now we are now the partners of oeksound but that’s where I mean my how it started for me was actually just cold emailing reaching out to Grammy winning engineers and a lot of them answer I mean they’re not I mean engineers are not that kind of they’re not that secluded and they’re not there a lot a of them like when people reach out to them and

Jesse Paliotto (27:23)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (27:34)

especially like when somebody has a plugin that they haven’t tried before because we’re all geeking out about plugins. so, in a way, that just kind of shows that we were all musicians, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and just kind of had, we were all users of this plugin as well. So reaching out and just getting to geek out with other people about the plugins that we have was the best kind of marketing, again, word of mouth, getting the word out there.

Jesse Paliotto (27:37)

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (28:02)

was the way I went about it. And then at some point we released Spiff our second plugin in 2018, grew the company to up to about six, seven people. And then Soothe 2 we released in 2020 before COVID really hit. So that kind of like, there was a lot of things happening there. Obviously COVID was good for software, COVID was good for music in general. When it comes to the business side,

Jesse Paliotto (28:22)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (28:32)

horrible event, all in all, but just…

Jesse Paliotto (28:34)

Yeah, but yeah, so many people had to invest in tools and so many people were making music at home because they couldn’t go play the gigs.

Hannes Andersson (28:38)

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They were making music at home. They couldn’t go to a commercial studio and so they were recording in their bedrooms and something that Soothe, for example, was pretty much made for was to make cheaper microphones sound more expensive, cheap rooms sound more professional and all of that. it kind of got released and came out into the world at the perfect time.

Jesse Paliotto (28:56)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (29:07)

in that sense. so Soothe two was for us, the plugin or the product that really, really took off and put us on the map. And after that, it’s been crazy. Everything changed after January, 2020. And that’s when we also understood that we need a better partner on the, on the e-commerce side and not maybe like trying to do all the e-commerce our side ourselves with the, with taxes and, and everything. And so that’s when

we started to look for other partners there and found FastSpring.

Jesse Paliotto (29:44)

Was there any particular headaches that you ran into or was it just you could see that it would help in the future or was there specific pain points where selling like the popularity that surged? Did it create kind of growing pains or?

Hannes Andersson (29:58)

Yeah, definitely created growing pains. think bookkeeping was, for example, just keeping books clean on like the different countries and having that going on correctly. It’s just having pretty much… We couldn’t focus as much on the marketing side when there’s a lot of like technical things that you need to take into account and bureaucracy and…

Jesse Paliotto (30:24)

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (30:27)

legal matters and stuff like that. so it was just like we’re a small company of and especially back and back then we were a small company where most of the founders of the partner was pretty young and like I haven’t worked at another company in my life. This is my kind of first company. And so in a way it’s not like we could have we had like a

Jesse Paliotto (30:47)

Mm-hmm. All right, on.

Hannes Andersson (30:55)

consultants or a CEO that have started like four different companies before and say like, yeah, this is just how you do it. I mean, and we never were a startup either. And so we’ve never thought like a startup. We’ve never had the kind of like the way of thinking. And so we were always just like this artisan, plugging company making these tools. And so I think…

Jesse Paliotto (31:15)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (31:24)

What I remember now, it’s all a bit fuzzy just because of how fast everything happened. I think it’s just we needed to be able to handle scale and needed to be able for customer support as well to be able to handle orders correctly and fast and something that also would work with our licensing system because

Jesse Paliotto (31:30)

Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (31:53)

because oeksound and our licenses are handled by a third party in a way, and then fast spring. So there’s always this kind of like Trinity of actors when somebody buys a plugin or license to use our plugins. They buy it from us, they get a license, an activation code that they activate with pace with ILOCK is called. And then…

Jesse Paliotto (31:54)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Hannes Andersson (32:19)

that’s what they receive when they’ve made the transaction over fast spring to us. And so, yeah, there’s always that going on. it’s a bit of a complicated system, but again, it’s perpetual licenses. So it’s one transaction for most and then rent to own, of course, then makes it again, a bit more complicated.

Jesse Paliotto (32:24)

Yeah.

Yeah, but I can imagine there’s, start making decisions like am I putting my developer time into solving that triangle of software integration or my building the next, you know, soothe or improving the next feature or whatever. And so, it sounds like a bit of it is sort of just optimizing what do we spend our time on versus what do we outsource to, you know, a partner who can potentially or hopefully solve it for us.

Hannes Andersson (33:05)

Exactly. Yeah. And to not have to worry about some percentages being off when it comes to VAT or something like that and not having to keep track of it that often at least. I’d say as well, most of our, the sales we do is kind of B2C. mean, there’s a customer, but that customer is often as like,

Jesse Paliotto (33:20)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (33:35)

solo owned business. And so it feels like B2C for most parts, but it might be that it’s B2B. And that’s why always like, it’s like a lot of customers that’s always going to write off the VAT. There might have a code for VAT in Europe or then some other company ID for tax purposes. And then

Jesse Paliotto (33:37)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (33:58)

there are also B2B customers. So large companies like game companies or movie companies that are actual businesses that want to buy in larger volumes, for example. And so that’s something we’ve noticed with FastSpring that it doesn’t matter. There’s going to be a possibility. have the tools through FastSpring to offer what the customer wants and also to keep that.

Jesse Paliotto (34:12)

All right.

Hannes Andersson (34:25)

funnel as clean as possible. That’s always been super, super important for us is that we’re not using an account. We don’t have accounts. We don’t have oeksound accounts for our users, which is pretty unique as well. Usually for a lot of software companies, you need to log into your account in order to make a purchase and something like that. We thought since you’ve already trialing our product and you don’t have an account for trialing our product as well. And so.

Jesse Paliotto (34:36)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, right.

Hannes Andersson (34:54)

when you make the purchase decision, we’re trying to be by all means not be in the way for you to make a purchase. So kind of like when you’re going through the purchase funnel, get out of the way. You as a company need to get out of the way and you need to just make it as easy as possible for a customer, for a business, for to make a purchase, to make a volume purchase, to make a…

Jesse Paliotto (35:02)

Right.

Right.

Hannes Andersson (35:21)

purchase with VAT code to be able to add your address or whatever you need there. And it should just be so seamless and like simple so that that happens without doubt. It feels like because we’ve been super transparent up until that point. So we’re not going to ask you to to kind of like, you want to buy our plugin? Well, first log in and so you can see

Jesse Paliotto (35:24)

Yeah.

Right.

Hannes Andersson (35:50)

what kind of coupons you have in your account. No, no account, no coupons. The price you see is the same price for everyone. You don’t need to worry that somebody else gets a better deal. And you just go through it and then you have it and then you get on with your life and you get to mix more music.

Jesse Paliotto (36:00)

Yeah, right.

I love it. I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped because you go to buy or to do a trial and you’re in it and like, oh, quickly set up your account. I’m like, I don’t got time for this. And I’m, I’m in my head. wondering, like, if I set up the account, are you going to remember what I was purchasing? Is the cart going to stay permanent through my exchange or might have to start back over on the homepage? Like forget it. And I just move on. Like that’s so smart. Like reduce as much friction and just allow the purchase.

Hannes Andersson (36:23)

Yeah.

Yeah. And if you, and

also all of that, like if you sign off, sign up to our newsletter, you get a 10 % coupon and it’s like, so there’s coupons involved as well. Well, is there a 20 % coupon somewhere? And then I go to Google and then I try to Google out like, okay, where can I get a 20 % coupon? And, and stuff like that. It’s just like, it makes it such a gray area and it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like you’re treating the customer correctly because it’s

Jesse Paliotto (36:39)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (37:00)

Yeah, just… Yeah, I think it’s good.

Jesse Paliotto (37:02)

It’s interesting.

I don’t hear people talk about that a lot, and it may just be me missing it, but like it’s very popular with retail sites, right? Like clothing stores or something where, you know, send it for email and you get the pop-up, you know, get 10 % today signing up. And what you’re introducing is cognitive load to somebody who’s in a purchase funnel.

And it’s not like typically in the digital world, we tend to think in terms of there’s more clicks and that’s friction or creating the log in is friction. Cause you have to think of a pattern, but just the question I asked myself of wait, am I getting the best deal? That’s friction. And so, yeah, you’re reducing sort of that whole kind of internal slowdown.

Hannes Andersson (37:31)

Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, and that’s actually funny that you mentioned that because you can actually trace that back to the way we develop our plugins. So plugins pop up when you make your music, they pop up in a separate window in front of your track, and then you adjust your parameters and then you close the window. Now, for many sites and for many, let’s say,

Jesse Paliotto (37:52)

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (38:08)

let’s say content on social media, they kind of count how long the user has spent with that content and that’s positive. I mean, the more time they’re on a site, the better or something like that.

Jesse Paliotto (38:22)

Yeah, that’s quote

unquote engagement and that’s what everybody wants in order. Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (38:26)

Yeah, but that’s completely the opposite for a good plugin, right? When you know how a plugin works and you’re mixing music, you want to get to an end result fast. shorter while you have open our plugin and it stays on, it’s not in a bypass state after you close it. So it stays on. So if you open a plugin, you spend, let’s average seven seconds, like looking at it.

Jesse Paliotto (38:47)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (38:56)

And then you close it. That’s good. Like that’s amazing. If you spend a little time on it. And I think the same way you think about, okay, now I’ve used the plugin and now I want to purchase it again, the shorter time it takes for that person to make that person to make that purchase for better. Right. Because they’re wanting to get back to mixing music, right? They don’t want to spend time in their browser. They don’t want to start questioning. Like if they’re getting the best.

best deal possible they want to get back to making music

Jesse Paliotto (39:27)

Yeah, especially

if they’re going to have 200 plugins they’re using on this track. Like I don’t want to do this 200 times.

Hannes Andersson (39:31)

Yeah.

No, this is just a plugin exactly. This is not like, we’re not changing the world here with what we’re doing. We make kind of like really flashy toys in a sense, but they’re super good tools.

Jesse Paliotto (39:47)

The that that reverse metric on engagement is funny. It takes me back to the analogy of like somebody building something with like physical tools like the tool that I like the most is the one that if you tell me, Jesse, here’s this tool for building stuff with wood. And every time you use it, it takes an hour to set it up and it takes an hour to clean it. You guess what? I’m never going to use that tool. The one that like does it fast and I can just keep building. I’m going to use that every time. It’s interesting sort of reverse metric from a lot of marketing funnels where yeah, engagement is the.

the currency.

Hannes Andersson (40:17)

Yeah,

of course that’s different if the tool is the thing you’re doing. I mean, if I’m sitting down and I decide that today I’m gonna explore plugins, then of course I will spend time with plugins because I’m not working on a track, I don’t have a client waiting for me to send over a finished version. I’m not getting paid by the hour when I do that. And so in that sense, it makes sense. I mean, if you buy a golf club,

Jesse Paliotto (40:24)

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Hannes Andersson (40:47)

the more time you spend using that golf club, the better, of course. But because that is the hobby, that is the thing you’re doing. And that’s the same thing with an instrument then as well. I mean, if I buy an instrument, the more time I spend using that instrument, the better probably it was for me. It was a good purchase. But for a tool that’s there to kind of like get to the end result, it should not be in the way. It should just do its job and get out of the way.

Jesse Paliotto (40:50)

Yeah, true. Yeah, really good point.

Yeah.

You

Yeah, it really you have to understand the user journey or the user story. And maybe can you talk for a second? Before we started, we kind of talked for a second around the idea that you guys are your own audience. Can you just go back to that like about how you guys use your own stuff?

Hannes Andersson (41:32)

Yeah.

Yeah, and so I think actually I think I actually bought Soothe before I started working for all with Olli, which is really funny because I needed it. I needed it like it was a good tool and I needed it for my own music or for the music I was making for artists. And so that really shows kind of where where the core is at the company. I think everyone

dabbles in music in some form at oeksound, be it in recording or mixing when it to engineering or then producing music, playing music or then DJing or yeah, being, having something to do with music. And so a lot of us use our tools at least at a weekly basis, use our own plugins and we also use all the competitor, let’s say competitors plugins, even though we don’t.

Jesse Paliotto (42:18)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (42:34)

like to think of them as competitors, or they’re just other plugin companies whose tools we like. And then, so that’s always present when developing a product. Everything we do starts in product development. All marketing starts in product development. All kind of ethos starts in, it’s not a separate thing in any way. When we start thinking about a plugin, a new plugin, or an upgrade to a plugin,

Jesse Paliotto (42:56)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (43:03)

everybody’s involved. Everybody’s involved in what is it, what it’s going to be, what is it going to do, who is it for, and because it should be for us, like mainly. The plugins we do, we do for ourselves. We do take a lot of feedback. We do test it with users, have user testing and have alpha tests and beta tests and everything like that. But if we don’t like the plugin when we’re done, we’re not releasing it.

Jesse Paliotto (43:30)

Yeah.

Hannes Andersson (43:30)

I

mean, even though everybody else would say that it’s amazing, we still need to understand it ourselves because it’s really difficult to market something that you don’t understand.

Jesse Paliotto (43:41)

Yeah, that’s such a superpower to be the audience. I can imagine there’s maybe complications there, but you know, especially like in the B2B SaaS world, I think that can often be a problem where people aren’t using the product in their day-to-day lives. Especially if that’s not there, you know, if you’re selling whatever, you know, in my world, it would be sort of marketing tech. But if you’re, if you’re somebody who’s not marketing and it’s a B2B software, it’s very hard to figure out like.

Hannes Andersson (43:52)

Hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (44:06)

what are people actually doing, but there’s such an intuitive knowledge, I would guess, and kind of the oeksound team, where you guys like, no, this is how a producer uses it, because I just did that yesterday, and this was the problem I had.

Hannes Andersson (44:15)

Yeah,

exactly. Yeah. It’s so, and that’s, I love having those conversations with users where I can, I can just go up and ask like, Hey, so what do you do? Are you an artist or a producer or you’re an engineer? And then we talk about it. They tell them where they come, where they’re coming from, what kind of music they make, how they like to work and what their workflow workflow is. And then I can just immediately be like, that’s great. I do that. I do that as well.

That’s something new for me. Do you mind telling me more about that? this is where I see our plugins come in. Like when you do that, you might want to try this there or this there. And then just kind of like putting our plugins into the context of what they’re already working with instead of being like, this is going to fix all your problems in your life. And without having even listened to them to begin with about what their problems are.

Jesse Paliotto (44:56)

Yeah.

Yeah, talk about over promising. That’s going to be very hard to follow up with actual delivery. Well, Hannes, this has been so good. Thank you so much for joining today. I’ve I’ve so enjoyed this conversation. It’s very interesting. And I feel like there’s just kind of so many insights along the way around how you guys have structured, how you price things, how you sell things, how you develop things, how you’ve expanded.

Hannes Andersson (45:16)

No, yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (45:38)

Before we wrap up, there any, if people wanted to connect with oeksound, what’s the best way to maybe connect with you or with the company? Just go to the website or what’s the best thing for people to do?

Hannes Andersson (45:49)

So our website is oeksound.com. That’s O-E-K-sound, all in one word, dot com. There you can find our, our plugins. If you’re making music, you can download the trials there and use them for those 20 days. And, I’m not going to tell you to buy it because I don’t do that. And and also on socials it’s oeksound — O-E-K-sound — on, on all socials. That’s, Facebook X, TikTok,

Instagram, Twitter, everything out there. And so that’s where you can follow us as well. We’re a very small company. So if you send an email to contact [at] oeksound wanting to speak with me, we’ll know about it. Or if you send a DM, if you send a DM to any one of our social channels, I will know about it. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, just Hannes Andersson there, I will know about it. And so that’s the best way to connect with me.

Jesse Paliotto (46:33)

Nice. I love that. And we’ll add those in the show notes, of course. Thank you so much, man. I’ve appreciated this today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. Love being able to hang out with you and with the best in the business here on the podcast. Really pumped to have been able to get Hannes on here and talk through kind of their journey. Have a great week, everybody, and catch you on the next one. Cheers.

Hannes Andersson (46:55)

Thank you.