Unlock Your Marketing Potential with 2Quiet2Market: The Ultimate Tool for Introverts

Matthias Bohlen:
Can I do something for introverts to take the fear of marketing away?

Mikael Hugg:
It looks like it's kind of like make.com

Artem Daniliants:
2quiet2market.

Matthias Bohlen:
The traffic goes up from almost 0 to 2000 and something. Then you write stories about your positioning, right? This exactly what you see here. This is a positioning diagram.

Mikael Hugg:
Even for me that is sometimes too much.

Matthias Bohlen:
If I went into Todoist now, you would see one main task with several subtasks.

Artem Daniliants:
This is like the most German way of doing marketing I've ever seen.

Mikael Hugg:
Another great episode coming up. And we are now talking about very interesting topic because we have Matthias with us from 2quiet2markets. And you also own the company name Borland Labs, Right. So I'm very happy to have you here. And and awesome to hear your story. And how did you build this dot product and all that.

Matthias Bohlen:
Thanks for the invitation, everyone. I'm glad to be here as well.

Artem Daniliants:
So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background. Where are you located? What do you do? You know, and so forth.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, My name is Matthias. I live in Germany. I founded a company in the US called Bond Labs. It's my my laboratory of ideas, so to say. My background is in software engineering. I worked as a software developer for ten years. It was already 100 years ago. It was, yeah, it was. I was with different companies and then I suddenly became a consultant for software engineering methods, and I've been enjoying that for quite a long time now. It's I think it was 2001 when I started that one

Mikael Hugg:
Nice.

Matthias Bohlen:
And so I went freelancing work with software teams who want to say, okay, we want to deliver good quality, but we also want to deliver on time. So all these challenges that they have. And so basically.

Mikael Hugg:
Did you code like, were you a developer first? So you started coding and all that and then through that? Okay.

Matthias Bohlen:
Exactly. And yeah, I keep coding, I run my own startups today like to try to market, for example, because it's really important to me that I stay in the code. It's, it's not good to be some kind of helicopter consultant flying above high above the code is not good. So yeah. And have much fun to, to stay in the code. So I created some several kind of startups. I encountered that challenge with marketing and that's the reason why I created two quite to market. I think we'll speak we'll speak about it in a minute.

Artem Daniliants:
Awesome. Awesome. So, you know, I'm starting with the name. I don't know if you want to jump in, but starting with the name, the thing that kind of attracted me, I saw the post on Reddit and that's how I became curious. But it was like 2quiet2market. I thought it was a it was a kind of, you know, it's an interesting name. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit? Also what I want to say when I saw the two cards and Margaret at first, you know, when when I just read it, I saw it. I didn't understand the point.

Mikael Hugg:
But then when I went to your website and I saw this for the introverts that are now until it makes sense and then there's like a funny, funny the way to play with the name. Uh, so yeah, it's a very brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It is brilliant for sure. Yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
I thought I should choose a name that reflects what who is made for, right? It reflects the audience. Introverts. Lots of us who build software projects, products, for example. We are introverts. Yeah. Used to focus on our stuff. We are really good at problem solving. What we're not so good at is talking to a lot of people. At the same time. I think we as introverts, we, we enjoy, um, one on one conversations or one on two like we have now. Um, but we are not used to talk to the masses, right? But that's the usual perception of marketing. People think, or at least solopreneurs, they think marketing is kind of the old style interruption marketing with ads and, and TV spots and billboards and kinds of stuff like that.

Mikael Hugg:
You know.

Matthias Bohlen:
They are a little afraid of that and they are also not very organized in that. So I thought, can I do something for introverts to take the fear of marketing away or to be more organized in marketing? Because if you don't do it, people don't know about what you're offering and then you won't get any sales, of course. So marketing is important also for software solopreneurs or for solopreneurs in general, software are not.

Mikael Hugg:
The way your software looks. It looks like it's kind of like make.com. Uh, or well, more like making com, not so much like Zapier, how the whole product works, you know, what is the, what is the thing you create these different kind of, uh, like wireframes and then you connect boards, right? Boards, Yeah. It's like a mirror mirror and make.com basically. So I say, yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
It looks like a lot like Miro. I'm used to to use Miro. I love that tool. So it was little inspiration from there. Colorful elements on a board kind of diagram. The problem that this solves is before you can start marketing, you have to think about positioning of your product. So what's your product? Who's the audience, the persona? Who's consuming it? What are the features of the product? What are the benefits of those features? Which jobs can you get done with it or can your users get get done with it? And what story finally are you going to tell about it? So I thought, why not represent each of these concepts with a with a colorful block kind of graphical element that you can connect with each other. For example, you can connect the product to its features, the features to its benefits and so on. And finally, you arrive at a story that you can tell to the persona you are addressing. So you get this kind of diagram and then you can write micro copy into the connectors, like, for example, from the story to the customer persona, you write a story into that connector or from one benefit into the story, you write a very small kind of copy. There's a thing called story Composer inside to create a market that collects all these little pieces of micro copy and collects them into one larger story that you can tell on different channels like social media or a landing page or whatever, where you put that copy that you get at the end and.

Mikael Hugg:
It's this the the blue sky, the ad protocol, what you think you're being part of somehow. Is that connected?

Matthias Bohlen:
No, that's a total that's not connected. I'm just I love to be there, but that's. That's a totally different thing, right?

Mikael Hugg:
Okay. Yeah. Just because I was browsing when I was doing research about about you and your your company and all that, I noticed you had blue sky there. And then I went there because I have never heard of blue sky before. So then I went there and I saw the ad protocol. And then now that you told these micro micro feeds and all that, then I was thinking that are you actually combining the product there or what's the deal? But okay, so it's separate.

Matthias Bohlen:
No I'm combining it with other things, like for example, with Todoist, the to do list manager, right? When in into to market, I have a thing called marketing experiment. You take a story, you tell it on the channel and you measure the impact. So that makes an experiment. And these experiments can be broken down automatically into task lists. So Todoist is a task list management system and into the market. I'm interfacing with it so that you can automatically get your tasks split up and so you won't forget about your marketing efforts.

Artem Daniliants:
Would you say that a good way to describe the product is that it's basically a way for you to do marketing in a more systematic approach that is more yes, feels more comfortable for software developers, for solo entrepreneurs and so forth. It creates some sort of structure, right? And some sort of process that is just like easier to comprehend and and feels less chaotic, maybe because marketing seems to be well, it's very different compared to software development. Software development is very much systematic and it's like it's problem solving. And in marketing, in many cases, it's like basically shooting in the dark. Like you don't really know what will happen. You don't know what kind of results you are expecting. There is, you know, it's like very few companies actually take the systematic approach.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah I what I would also yeah you're absolutely right I was just talking about this just like an hour before with with my intern intern and we were talking about now everything goes so fast and everything is developing so fast that even like, especially in the marketing, what was the case five, ah, eight years ago where you were able to do one thing systematically over time, like year or 2 or 3. Now everything seems to change within months and and sometimes it's even. Yeah, exactly. Even for, you know, I am as an ADHD person, I love change. So for me it's, it's pretty good. But even for me that is sometimes too much and I don't know where we're going. So, so maybe this, this tool helps to, to get these things more systematic.

Matthias Bohlen:
It's such a big problem for, for solopreneurs like, for example, writers or photographers or musicians who want to sell their their music and so on. So it's so problematic, for example, when they have been creating and building for some time and they get back to marketing, let's say it's Sunday and they say, okay, have good to do some marketing today. They say, Oh, what did I want to write about last time? What was the story I was going to tell? What was the transformation that a customer will experience when they use my product? Oh my God. So. So they they suddenly lose their structure. And because it's such a big change between marketing and what they. And the main thing they are doing like making taking big good photos on creating composing music. So that's a big change. And I wanted to create some structure where they have a strong guidance, like, this is my product, these are the features and this is the story I'm going to tell, and so on. So when they get back to marketing, they exactly continue where they left off last time.

Artem Daniliants:
I think it'll be awesome if we could see the product, if maybe you could do a short demo because now it's maybe hard to visualize in one's head how the product works.

Mikael Hugg:
And is it a task board or is it like a brainstorming board or is it a list of processes? You know, I think exactly. I think it'd be awesome if you could show it. And while you are sharing the screen, you know, your these subscription models, you say that you can plan and run marketing experiments. So can you connect your Google ads or meta or some other platforms theirs And it runs from there. So it's not just.

Matthias Bohlen:
Like live, but I'm working on that. It has just begun to work. I've made two connectors, one to Google Analytics, four and one for plausible analytics, more privacy focused,

Mikael Hugg:
right? Yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
And they the data is pulled in, so you get the page views and the active users on your site and you can compare that with your marketing efforts. For example, when when you make an experiment, you make a quick log entry into the journal of your project and you say, okay, today I did this or that. And for example, if traffic goes up, you can later correlate, Oh, this was the day when I did X and then traffic went up as a result of that.

Mikael Hugg:
Are you also because well, you are based in Germany so zing is a big thing there. So are you able to connect that there as well or. Are you planning to play there?

Matthias Bohlen:
No, not yet. At first I'm trying to make a kind of workflow for. For marketing. Right. You start with some kind of social listening, for example, like Reddit or like Twitter or whatever, and then you create a project. You. You position your stuff. I can show you this in a minute here, live on the board. Then you write stories about what? About your positioning, right? Not about the positioning, but about the product and its features and its benefits and so on. And then you run experiments. So I want to first get this cycle going and then make more connectors to the rest. Okay, so let's have a look. Right. Okay. So, yeah. These are my projects here in the 2quiet2market system. I've got six of them. Let's take 2quite2market itself for example for for marketing it. This project contains several boards that focus on certain aspects of marketing. For example, this board focused on positioning, this focus on messaging. This focus is on experimentation. Let's look at at the Positioning Board first. This is the simplest one. Just let me zoom here a little bit. So here we have two quite to market as a product and it has one feature called the positioning Diagram. It is exactly what you see here. This is a positioning diagram and what does it do? So it gets one job done. The blue color here you see on the right, it means job to be done. So, for example, one job that my customers need to need to get done is get their initial positioning right. Positioning is this art of, yeah, deliberately defining why you are so good or what's so good about your product, right? So yeah, they do their positioning. It's also a huge time saver that that is the quality of this diagram and it brings clarity. Clarity is the benefit of this feature in the positioning diagram. So what do we do with these three things? We go into a story, it says Dump your brain, then get your positioning sorted. That's the initial brainstorming exercise. And this goes into another story. That says build a launch pad for your marketing. And finally, who do we tell this story to? It's the introverted solopreneur. So that's basically how such a diagram works. How such a board works. I think I could show a brief exercise on an empty project. Let's create an empty project. So do you have a product which you would like to market?

Mikael Hugg:
We haven't launched yet, but it's called armful o m. F u l i o. And that that's a that's a meditation of what we've been now building. It's like based. It's pretty good stuff. So, so we can use that because now it's still in the making and, and we are now building its marketing funnels and the plan.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay. So I'm creating a board called Initial Position. Uh, just a demo for armful. Okay. Like this. And I would say, okay, your who's your persona? Who? Who am I making it for? What you just say in.

Mikael Hugg:
General, if you're talking about the the ideal customer profile. We've now decided our, you know, our our the way we see it, it's going to be 20, 30 years. Like let's actually 25 to 35 year olds, people working in offices have most likely bachelor or higher degree, basically living like very busy lifestyle, very exhausted from their work. And they are very also natives so that they can actually use use apps they usually like try to solve their problems using apps and, you know, Google and all that stuff. So so yeah, and also they they want to, you know, save a little bit of money, not in a way that it's cheaper per se, but it's a little bit cheaper, but more that it's just convenient. You don't have to overpay for for stuff and you can modify your. Experience. So that's basically the the is there.

Matthias Bohlen:
Take a note of that. You as best.

Artem Daniliants:
You could say that they are heavy. Social media users feel overwhelmed, you know. Okay. They're probably yeah, yeah, they're probably young in the sense that they probably used to already installing apps and just like using apps and maybe even they already have some sort of similar apps that they have used. So they're familiar with the concept, maybe not meditation, but maybe they have some like relaxing apps or something like that.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah. Okay.

Mikael Hugg:
How about told you this before or did you just heard about the project? If you've told me something like very quickly.

Artem Daniliants:
All right. Yeah, well, you know, I was just like, You got the puns really fast.

Mikael Hugg:
Well, from this. From these chaotic, chaotic explanation. Yeah. Explanation. What I just gave. And you just know about the whole, like, Oh, you know, I have to take down notes. Yeah, but, you know, we've been doing this for quite some time, and I already know you. So. Yeah, I keep. I keep telling you all my stuff immediately when I invent them. So, yeah, that doesn't come as a surprise. I've already told you about this one. Yeah, that's true.

Artem Daniliants:
Well. Very well.

Matthias Bohlen:
I've made a quick, quick drawing here like unfold with a meditation app that you see here. It's a feature. It's it serves for solving to to jobs here, for example, solve my personal problems and get get over my overwhelm. And then who does that? The 25 year old stressed out person us based. What would be some. Let's say, some benefits of the meditation app. What what would they get from it like?

Mikael Hugg:
Do you mean meditation in general or using it as an app, using the product or using the app?

Matthias Bohlen:
Using the product using

Mikael Hugg:
you know that you can get guided meditations the way you want, whenever you want, as long as you need. Basic is always the point is that you can choose your structure, you know, whether it's a male or female voice, you can choose if there's going to be binaural beats or it's going to be quiet and all that. So you can you can really customize your experience because you know, me as a male, I usually actually tend to listen, uh, male guided meditation because I do meditation quite a lot. But then my wife, she said that she's a little annoyed because most of the meditation apps, they usually have male voices and you can customize them.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, like, yeah, that's true.

Mikael Hugg:
And now that you know we are using AI to build this all this like device and, and the scripts and everything, now you, now the user can actually, uh, they can just modify their experience, customize the whole set so that it really feels you and, and now that you can use it everywhere, you know, because your work is coming from your phone, you know, you can work whenever you want, wherever you want, and that's also a problem. But then you can also get a relief from your phone using these kind of apps. So I would say that is the main benefit. And also right now, the meditation app scene is very crowded in a way that there's a lot of lot of lot of competition, right? Yeah, But they're also raising the prices all the time. So that's why because we are generating them, Uh, we're using AI, but also professionals to come buy them. Now we can give more quality and more everything with fraction of the price. So. So now people don't have to spend hundreds a year to, to meditate with their phone.

Matthias Bohlen:
So, so interesting.

Artem Daniliants:
If I was going to pitch the product the way that I would describe it, I would say, you know, imagine if you could have your favorite meditation instructor always with you that knows what you want, what do you like, what you don't like. But most importantly, it it it's always attuned to how you feel. So depending on the day, situation, stress, you will get exactly what you're looking for. Hyper personalized meditation experience that is a tune to what you are seeking in that specific moment, relaxation, getting relief of anxiety and so forth. And most importantly, the more you use it, the more the application will know your habits. So basically by investing time, you will personalize it even further so it will truly be yours.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay. Okay

Mikael Hugg:
Eventually.

Artem Daniliants:
Eventually.

Mikael Hugg:
Now, like I have to write these features down because, you know, the current version is well, you know, I mean, like there's, there's some of that.

Artem Daniliants:
But yeah, but remember, you remember MVP, MVP is never you know, is not never, you know, full of features but think you should have a vision where you're going though.

Mikael Hugg:
Very true. Yeah that is that is exactly true and that's how it's going to be the MVP part is well you know there's actually already some some parts of that so yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
That's exactly the right keyword here. The vision. So so this board here is trying to capture the vision of your of your positioning, right? What are the things you are providing? What are the benefits of those? How would this this persona here on the right, how would they react to that? What what do they what problems do they solve? And so on.

Mikael Hugg:
So they don't want to kill themselves missing? I would say that that would be the thing.

Matthias Bohlen:
So what's missing here is the story, because this is the interesting thing. For example, delete those two connections here again and let them run. Let these jobs run into a story. And then you tell the story to the persona. Now, that's the that's the initial positioning step. Now comes the messaging step. Now, for example, if I double click here on the product. You see a script editor goes. Opens over here.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, markdown.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, it's markdown language. I could say, okay, what's the definition of.

Artem Daniliants:
It's a markup.

Matthias Bohlen:
Give me one sentence. Right. Yeah. Imagine you, for example, you can write. This is a headline I write with.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. I'm like, okay, so that's the basic stuff. Yeah, got it. And two hashtags sub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a simpler version of. Yeah

Matthias Bohlen:
yeah

Artem Daniliants:
yeah

Mikael Hugg:
Recent.

Matthias Bohlen:
So give me a short definition of harmful. What is harmful?

Mikael Hugg:
Basically, it's just that innovative mindfulness and guided meditation app tailored to suit the needs of today's fast paced world.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay.

Artem Daniliants:
If I had. A crack at it, I would say absolutely. AI powered hyper personalised meditation app for meditating on the go or something like that.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, exactly.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, but again, it doesn't matter.

Matthias Bohlen:
Let's let's say let's say pretty factual and boring here. Let's, let's try very boring. Copy.

Mikael Hugg:
Boring. Boring is good.

Matthias Bohlen:
Meditation app. Or let's say innovative power nap.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay. So when I now double click on meditation app, you will see that unfold. The product with its micro copy is coming in from the left. And then I can say, okay, a meditation app. What is it? Guides your meditation. Sessions. And for example, you can include.

Mikael Hugg:
Your customizer guided guided meditation sessions.

Matthias Bohlen:
Or like that. Customize.

Mikael Hugg:
Your guided meditation sessions.

Matthias Bohlen:
Guided. Meditation sessions like that. Yeah. And here there's an interesting feature. When I write two opening curly braces, that's kind of a include merge tag like you find in email marketing systems, for example. And you could say product one. That's the thing coming in from from the left here, product one, and I can include the name or the text, let's say when I include the name, you see that on the right. Or if I include the text. You see the innovative AI powered meditation app is coming in. So this is the way to include and build larger and larger copy. So when you reach the right. Yeah. And the story is complete. This one here. You can tell it, for example, when I go here. There's nothing in there, right? It's still empty. I could say spice it up. This would invoke an AI like. Like ChatGPT something.

Mikael Hugg:
Okay. Yeah. Um, so it's not. It's not ready yet.

Matthias Bohlen:
Are you ready?

Mikael Hugg:
You have to become a client.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
I have to pay $49.

Matthias Bohlen:
To pay for your app. Yeah, yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, right.

Mikael Hugg:
That's tough.

Matthias Bohlen:
Or I could say copy as markdown copy as HTML. Or. Most interesting, this one used in a new experiment. Right. I could start some experiment. Like. Yeah, it says unnamed story because it copies from the from the diagram. I could say, okay, where would I find the inputs, the outputs and the tools to run that experiment? And these come from the bookmarks section. You say, You see, I have. Edit links to all my marketing channels, my marketing material where can find it? Places I visit or the places that my customers visit. And the tools I use for marketing. So I have all my links here. And then when I say create new experiment, I can say, okay, good, let's take some input from my blog. The output goes to Reddit. The tools that I use are Beacon, for example, kind of lead magnet generator system. And here I can say, okay, first read blog post X second write. Reddit post. Um, and third one is. Use beacon to to make a nice. For download.

Artem Daniliants:
You know, if can just jump in and hopefully you don't. You don't get offended. But this is like the most German way of doing marketing I've ever seen. Like ever, ever.

Mikael Hugg:
True.

Artem Daniliants:
And I say, I say it with love and admiration, you know, because this seems to be like so, you know, systematic. But please continue. Matthias I just wanted to make that remark that it's true.

Matthias Bohlen:
Exactly. Yeah. We Germans, we are good at planning and structuring are definitely good.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Please continue. Yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
When I, when I posted this on on AppSumo, these days I run a campaign on AppSumo now. Yeah. And I got one feedback. The person said this product seems rigid, so I guess that's what they mean by rigid.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. It's just another word for German.

Mikael Hugg:
Like.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay, so edit this experiment for now. I could say what are the tasks that I need to do to run that experiment? So here's where to get the input, where to put the story, the tools to use the recipe again and the story you tell. It says your story has no copy yet. So if I had added it in the diagram in the board, then you would see it here. And the final step is add as tasks to todoist. So if I click here, it says working with Todoist and it says Wonderful. Added an experiment with several subtasks to Todoist click to close me. Okay. If I went into Todoist now, you would see one main task with several subtasks that represent this experiment. So that makes sure that you never forget about what you wanted to do in your marketing because you can prioritize it against all the other tasks you have introduced to just has a pretty generous free plan. You can run five projects at the same time using tasks management there. So yeah, it's so good if it could fit here for an integration with market. So that's it basically. Next thing I'm adding is connecting to Google Analytics and to plausible. It all already runs in my machine, but it's not yet published. And then I can show you something. I think this is really new. I never showed it to anybody.

Artem Daniliants:
I'm excited. You saw it first here.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah. Exactly. This is the traffic on my side. This active users also visitors. And what also inserted are these project journal entries. So I marked some important dates like yeah Dagobert was so nice to tweet something about me or these are posted on indie hackers or I myself posted on Hacker News and I give the date here. There's a formatting problem in the date and you see suddenly here in the traffic curve post on Hacker News, the traffic goes up from almost 0 to 2000 and something, right? So 20 2200 users came when I posted to Hacker News. So this is how you can correlate what you do in marketing versus what you earn in traffic, for example.

Mikael Hugg:
This is a good one.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah

Mikael Hugg:
Because this listening software usually cost a lot.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah. It's. It's difficult. I didn't find any real, really good system who does this, this correlation and I want to work on that even more. What I also want to add is social listening. Like, for example, I want to add an AI that listens to Reddit and finds interesting questions that my audience is asking. For example, when an introvert says, I'm overwhelmed by marketing, how do I do that? The I could find that and then could react to that and I could immediately answer something from my existing copy.

Mikael Hugg:
That were very convenient. Yeah, absolutely. The closest right now is I think, meltwater. But meltwater is extremely expensive. So, you know, you have to pay like 700 a month, but that is the closest. Oh yeah, Yeah, that is quite much. But that's I think that's the closest. So, so you know in a way if you can get that working out then. Do you have a pretty solid product?

Artem Daniliants:
The way that we actually do this now inside my company is that. We have a Google spreadsheet. I wish I could show it to you, but it has customer data. But we have Google spreadsheet where we, you know, put all the tasks that were done, experiments and so forth. There is short description, date, category and comment section, and then we bring that data, we import it into Google Data Studio, also now known as Google Looker Studio. And we overlay those actions on the information we get from Google Search console, from Google Analytics and so forth. It works surprisingly well and it's a kind of homebrew solution, if you could say that. But yeah, and obviously it's a free solution, right? So, you know, that's, that's the good part about it. But yeah, that's, that's how we solved it. And before in Google Analytics3 were we used to use annotations if you know, annotations in Google Analytics3, you could actually you can actually create annotation for any day. So for example, you could say like, Hey, today we changed the marketing budget for Google AdWords and you could put it as annotation. And then on every single chart in Google Analytics, you would see the annotation. So you could kind of guess, you know, what was the reason for the potentially like traffic drop or spike or whatever. But the problem is, is annotations and like as a feature is not available anymore in Google Analytics4. So we had to, you know, create a kind of like a homemade solution for that. But it's wonderful that, you know, you have something that is very simple, very visual and maybe in future you could actually choose different metrics because sometimes active users is not the thing that you want to track. Maybe you want to track conversion rate or you want to track if it's an ecommerce store, maybe you want to track, you know, average conversion value, you know, that kind of stuff.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, but the volume or whatever.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Different, different metrics. But one thing that I kind of, you know, I heard you mention it two times already during our conversation. You mentioned plausible analytics, and I know that it's, it's a pretty popular product in Germany, right? Because it's a privacy focused version of the of the Google Analytics. Right? So can you tell a little bit about like, I'm just curious, you know, how, for example, in Germany, you know, digital marketers are approaching analytics. You know, it seems to be that the the focus on privacy seems to be ever growing.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, it's a it's a big problem for marketers because the EU and also California in the meantime, by the way, they are very much into privacy now they say if you for example, if you set a cookie that is called personally identifiable information PII, and they say as soon as you create PII, you have to ask your users for permission. For example, a cookie needs a permission even if you store the address. Okay, that's also PII, so you have to ask for permission, etcetera, etcetera. So you you can do almost nothing without permission now. And so what what the new analytics tools like like for or plausible what they are doing they they don't set cookies anymore. They do some other methods like fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is also PII. By the way, it's very tricky here. So they do kinds of things like, for example, plausible. They they aggregate immediately. You don't get any data about a particular visitor anymore. You can't track one person across your website anymore. So funnels can only be built on many people at a time, not on one person at a time. So what they are trying to avoid is creating PII and there are a number of tools like this in the meantime, like Fathom Analytics, like, I don't know, there are several of these and they are all working more or less the same way, tracking a bunch of users instead of one single user in Germany. Here, I think we are a little perfectionist about it, right? When the EU says something, we always want to be the perfection ist.

Artem Daniliants:
I think Finland tries, but when it comes to GDPR, I think a lot of companies just give up. They're like, like forget about it. Like, you know, it's too hard, too complex and so forth. Okay. That's, that's, that's pretty, pretty cool. I think from the perspective of your product, I think another question that I have is like, do you actually like, do the software building part yourself or are you outsourcing? Like, how did it come to be the product? So you had this idea, you're like, Cool. And by the way, thank you very much for demoing the product. I think it was really insightful. Um, so like once you got an idea like, like what happened next? Like, did you just think, you know, like a mad scientist just rushed to your computer and just started, you know, doing this on the keyboard or like, what happened next?

Matthias Bohlen:
It was my, let's say, fifth product. Yeah. The other four have failed. And so the first thing I did,

Artem Daniliants:
Okay

Matthias Bohlen:
I said, I want to do it differently this time. This thing has to be successful. So what do I have to do? First, I have to check whether there's real demand. So I went ahead and created a landing page, very simple on card SEO and with a sign up form an email signup form email list behind it in ConvertKit. And I tried to get signups there. Yeah, that was the first thing I did. And suddenly 120 people signed up and said, Wow, okay, that's the best thing I ever had because I have never I never had it before, this kind of demand. And then I shared more about it on Twitter and people said, Oh, this is something marketing for introverts. Yes, I'm an introvert. Yes, I know that problem and so on. So it also got good feedback on Twitter. And then I built an MVP with within a week or so. And recorded a video about it and put it out there. And suddenly people said, Yeah, wow, that that could work. That's interesting. And I talked about the typical problems, like having fear or having no structure or get falling out of the marketing habit. That's the biggest danger, by the way. Many people start with good intentions and lots of energy. But after the three weeks, they they put it aside. So that's also a challenge for my product, by the way. Need some kind of gamification algorithm inside to keep people engaged with marketing? That's the biggest problem right now. So yeah, the first step was I made this, put it out there and people said, okay, let's look, this looks good. And then I made a small first version. It could simply make these diagrams and that was it. So that was even no text editor in it. And no experiments and nothing. And then I added feature after feature. Like first I added these these text editors, then the experiments, then the larger storytelling stuff, and then the AI. And at the moment I'm working on the analytics stuff.

Artem Daniliants:
Awesome. So what is your and I know this might not be interesting for everybody, but it's interesting for me. So what is your tech stack?

Matthias Bohlen:
The tech stack. Yeah, it's it's running on AWS lambda functions.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh, awesome.

Matthias Bohlen:
Serverless functions. And the code is mostly. Yeah, all the code is written in TypeScript and also the server side runs on TypeScript. Also the front end with React on TypeScript. Um, and yeah, on the front end I'm using React with CSS like tailwind. Um, and yeah, that's basically the tech stack. So it scales well if suddenly there's a spike of users, um, the lambda functions will scale up. I don't need to do anything for that.

Artem Daniliants:
Does that and think like maybe, you know, especially in the beginning, you don't even cross the threshold for the, you know, free functions, right? Like free quota that you get in lambda.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah

Artem Daniliants:
I think it's very generous, especially in the beginning when you're just starting out. I think it's pretty, pretty awesome. Um, think you're kind of like user interface is very, very snappy and I think it's very interactive. I like it like the board especially. I think it was really interesting. How did you create the board? Is it like a canvas or is it something ready made in React? I'm just wondering because I think it's pretty snappy with the connectors and all that good stuff.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah. I don't want to talk too much about this, by the way, because it's kind of a trade secret for me. But yeah, I'm using.

Mikael Hugg:
Really healing.

Matthias Bohlen:
All kinds.

Artem Daniliants:
So. So. But. But is it something you build yourself or is it a mix of, you know, is it a mix of something that you found?

Matthias Bohlen:
It's a mixture.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm using a lot of libraries from the Net. Sometimes I buy,

Mikael Hugg:
Of course, and sometimes I write stuff myself for things that I can't get.

Artem Daniliants:
That's wonderful. So as a person who starts multiple businesses and just in general, just love the whole serial entrepreneurialism kind of life, and I'm working on multiple SaaS projects as of now. So what I did is I went to AppSumo and purchased purchased the code. And even already while we were talking, I even redeemed the code already. So I'm looking forward to using it in my projects to kind of bring some, you know, to make my projects a little bit more German, you know, as a compliment, you know, to make them to make marketing maybe less chaotic. But one feature that I noticed was maybe, I don't know, maybe it's missing, maybe I didn't see it. But if I'm not solo anymore, like in my case, you know, I have a team. So is it is it that the product is not good fit for me anymore? Or like, can I share, you know, boards? Can I invite people Like, how does that work?

Matthias Bohlen:
I can quickly show you that you can see it right on the screen. If you go on a project you see here on the right that you've got share. If I click on that, it says, okay, what does the the other person need to do? Should they be able to view your project or should they view and edit your project so you can switch this and then say, for example, share via email and the email editor will go up or you say Copy project link. And now in the clipboard there's a link. You can paste it into an email message or into a telegram message or whatever to invite your colleagues. Or Slack or whatever you're using. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, of course.

Matthias Bohlen:
And then the people would get an invitation and they will be added to your project as, as users.

Artem Daniliants:
And there is no additional cost for me as like, you know, as a user of your product, like there is no additional cost per user or anything like that.

Matthias Bohlen:
The there's a difference. The viewers are free, so you can invite as many viewers as you want, but then the editors have to be paid users. So, for example, if you have a small team of five people or so, you buy you buy five codes in AppSumo right now, and you you are all editors on the same project, for example. But be careful if you modify a diagram. It's currently so that it writes back the entire diagram contents at once. So if two people are doing that, they are overwriting each other's content, so be careful. Only one person should work on a diagram at the time.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. For now. Yeah. There is no collaborative editing as of yet.

Matthias Bohlen:
That's it. That's. Is it? Yeah. Okay. Exactly.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. Understood. Well, that's awesome. Time really flies by. Michael, do you have any questions before we start wrapping up?

Mikael Hugg:
I don't have a question, but I have a tip because obviously your product is is directed to to introverts who want to do marketing, but they just struggle. So I've been I've been one of our clients is called trade spotter and trade spotter is a company that helps you to find extroverts and introverts from email lists. Basically they are using I what if I if I remember right, they have their own own automated tool that goes through their social media feeds and all that and decides from there whether the prospect is introvert or extrovert. So what I'm just thinking is that in your case, using trade spotter would be a pretty good idea just because then you can. Better find your prospects in a way when you are getting bigger email lists or you know you want to contact somebody, then you know beforehand that not they are most likely introverts. And then you can. Just pretend you're a part of them. And most likely, they are happy to respond.

Matthias Bohlen:
Cool. Sounds good trait written with i t write with trait spotter d.

Mikael Hugg:
No, it's not traits, but. A trait.

Matthias Bohlen:
Like traits.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, Human traits. I'll send it to you guys in chat here. Trade spotter.

Artem Daniliants:
So you can see it. You can see it in the chat. I think it's easier. I also like when I googled.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
When I googled it for the first time, it wasn't really obvious like right away. Um, but yeah, it's trade spotter. Yeah. Trade StratCom

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a Finnish company, but they also operate in Germany actually. So one of the co-founders live in Frankfurt. I think he's been living there for that one. Ten, 15 years at least.

Matthias Bohlen:
Wow. Thanks for the tip. I will definitely have a look at that.

Mikael Hugg:
Sure. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
And so just so that we can start wrapping up a little bit. So. You know, just a few questions like at what stage are you now? So, you know, do you think you found your market fit and now you're trying to scale up? You know, that'll be interesting. Or like like, at what stage are you now, currently?

Matthias Bohlen:
It's it's interesting. I'm at a stage where I get initial traction, but I'm not really sure what what my market really is because the

Artem Daniliants:
Uh

Matthias Bohlen:
how should I say that the introverted solopreneur, it's a really good persona. It really resonates. But I don't know yet whether these people are able to spend money and how many of those people are out there. Who want to spend money on that. There are some who say, Yeah, take my money. No problem. If I get only one customer, it pays for itself. So these are the business people. They know what they're doing. But there are also many, especially on AppSumo these days, they who simply want to save money. Right. And they they are not really able to spend. So I created a free version and a paid version for this purpose so that they can do one project in the free version and then move to the paid one. The other thing is agencies are coming up and asking me, Hey, does this product work for us as an agency? And that's why I added this sharing feature. And this could also be an interesting market because agencies might not have this introversion problem, but they might have the organization problem, you see. So maybe I can move upmarket. I don't know.

Mikael Hugg:
That is that I think agency plan is excellent idea, especially in these sort of SaaS businesses. Agencies would be most likely your best resellers as well. So so you can either do the agency plan where the agencies space or then just make a deal that they can sell your product with a little discount and they can make a little bit money, but also also the client gets a little bit. So, so maybe, maybe open a partner stack program for you so then you can make these affiliates already have them.

Matthias Bohlen:
Okay, Excellent. And an affiliate program. You find it on the dashboard?

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw that. I saw that. I was surprised that. How quick you how quickly you, you know, created an affiliate program.

Matthias Bohlen:
Yeah, it was pretty easy. I was using lemon squeezy for that. It's my payment provider. And they also offer an easy way to create affiliate programs. So yeah, that's already smart.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, exactly. And I think the $25 a month, it's not it's not bad. It's really I think it's really good. So, so I'm not thinking that it's going to be at least a money problem. Even even for the solar printers

Artem Daniliants:
If I can add my $0.05. So I would do two things in my opinion, that would make the product very valuable. So if you think about it from the perspective of a solar entrepreneur, right, the person who probably doesn't know too much about marketing and so forth, I think the product needs to be somehow combined with some of the educational stuff. So imagine, for example, you click on a feature on the board or you click on a story, and then there is a small YouTube video that could pop up and there is you, Mathias, explaining like, Hey, in this field you should input this and this information about your business, blah, blah, blah. So I think that would be very useful for the person because it would kind of educate them as they go. Later on, they can just click don't show, don't show it to me again. But in the beginning, you know, I think people, solar entrepreneurs would feel a bit overwhelmed, maybe if they are not familiar with the terminology and so forth. So basically combining it with passively educating the person on how to do marketing I think would make a lot of sense. And then second feature that I think is rather easy to do, it seems like if you already like work with TypeScript, you know, Lambda, I think you're very pretty much very senior when it comes to software development. So one thing what I would do is I would start creating integrations with very popular platforms such as Google ads, you know, Google search console and so forth. And I would start to pull data from there automatically and show it in the dashboard so that, you know, that way the entrepreneur or the person responsible for marketing, you know, they could see like, Aha. So our like SEO, you know, went up and it coincides with the, you know, story that was written about us or something like that, I think because many times, especially if you're doing marketing alone, you get overwhelmed with information, right, from like different sources. So I think that would be pretty useful because it would allow you to kind of see the anomalies and then tie it to the experiments you made, maybe. So I think that would would be very, very beneficial. Google ads, for example, there is change history, so you can just pull through API, change history and like overlay it. So you could see, you could see everything that is happening in my opinion, like the easiest and probably like the lowest hanging fruit for you is just to combine it with education because think you're really good on camera. I think you're very concise, you're very straight to the point and I think you appeal to the audience you are trying to reach. You know, you are not running around and like, oh, you know, you got to do this. You know, let's hit it. Let's do this. You know, you know, this whole rah rah and, you know this marketing stuff. You're very calm, very, you know, relaxed. And I think that would appeal to your target audience. They want somebody like you would become like their sort of like virtual mentor for their journey to do marketing.

Matthias Bohlen:
Interesting point that to say that I've already experimented with the YouTube channel, you can find the the reluctant marketer that's the name of the channel and I've done some videos about how to do positioning or how to do messaging and so on. So I'm experimenting with that. Good point. I could integrate it into the product. You will also find demo videos on the dashboard. You can click on on these interactive demos.

Artem Daniliants:
I saw them. I think it was. I think it was click demos. Yeah. That's how you name demos. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matthias Bohlen:
And there you can see how to do various things. But really personal video would even be better. Yeah. Thanks for this. For the Tim for the tip. Thank you.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh no, no problem. I think it just I think you are good on camera and I think it definitely would help, especially in the beginning when, you know, people haven't seen products like this, in my opinion. So it kind of takes a little bit of time to kind of understand like what's going on and what I should do because like your product makes you adhere to a specific process. And I think like, that's why people say like, Oh, it's rigid or it's too constrained or something. It's it's not really it just has, you know, it's opinionated, let's say. You know, it's opinionated. It wants to do things in a different way. But, you know, there is nothing wrong with that as long as you understand how it works. Well, Matthias, it's been a pleasure. You know, Thank you. Thank you very much for spending this hour with us. Much appreciated. I hope your product will become successful. And you mentioned this is your fourth or was it fifth product?

Matthias Bohlen:
Fifth. 5 or 6 Don't know.

Artem Daniliants:
You know what they say. You know what they say. Fifth time's the charm, right? So hopefully this will be the one that you can really be proud of. And, you know, I already purchased the deal on AppSumo. So if you're watching this video, check out the deal at AppSumo. It's really, really good. And yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. Good luck with your project and it's been truly a pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much. And also, I just subbed your YouTube channel, so you got a cool new subscriber. Cool.

Matthias Bohlen:
Another subscribe.

Mikael Hugg:
Thank you very much.

Matthias Bohlen:
It was it was cool. Thank you, Mike. It was really. Yeah, it was a nice chat. I really enjoyed it to, to have a circle of little circle of people who who care for marketing. Nice. Thank you. Of course.

Artem Daniliants:
Thank you very much. All right, guys, we're out. Take care. Bye Bye. Bye