SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He wanted freedom and $5k/mo. Here's how he did it.
27 Dec 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you guys heard me speak with Brandon Epstein. He's got a six-pack and he charges $1,000 per month for Instagram consulting to mega-rich clients. Okay, Top Tribe, I'm here in the Appalachian Mountains, excited this morning to be talking with Alex Harris. He is an award-winning web designer, public speaker, and founder of alexdesigns.com.
Alex is the host of the top-ranked podcast, marketingoptimization.tv, and his latest book, Small Business, Big Money Online, became an Amazon number one bestseller. Now, you need to know this about Alex. Since 2000, guys, he... He has created over 100 e-commerce stores, thousands of different landing pages, and over 7,000 different A-B tests.
With 15 years of experience, Alex is passionate about conversion rate optimization. Alex focuses on helping websites increase their online sales and generate more leads. Alex, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready, Nathan. All right. I love it. I love it. Let me ask the first big question. People tell me all the time, Nathan, you've got a top podcast. Your business is crushing.
You should write a book. I go, no, there's no way I could write a book. Why did you decide to sit down and write small business, big money online?
Honestly, if I didn't write this book, my head would have probably exploded because I really needed to get this information into other people's hands. I just had been doing what I do for so long that I really just needed to tell more people about it.
Got it, got it. How do you use it now? Is it basically a business card or was your goal the whole time to get it to be number one bestseller?
Yeah, it's basically a business card. People go into Amazon. Amazon is a big search engine. They go into Amazon, they search for e-commerce, they search for small business. I'm right there.
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Chapter 2: How did Alex Harris achieve success in web design?
They call me the next week, we do business.
Awesome. So walk me through some of the metrics. I mean, I can't tell from looking at your website, alexdesigns.com, where you're making most revenue, if it's book sales, if it's marketing optimization TV. I want to focus on this episode and really dig into your number one kind of revenue source, how you're driving the most success for you, which product is that, that you're selling?
I sell consulting. Okay, boom, consulting. So a lot of people, Alex, will go, oh, they're probably going, oh, Alex must not be that smart. He sells consulting. He's trading his time for money. You've made that model work. Walk us through how you made it work.
Yeah. Well, I've been doing it for so long. My background is in web design and art, and I've always been a website designer. But really, web design has become commoditized. You can go to 99designs or Elance and buy a $200 website. We don't do that anymore. Now we focus on helping businesses make more money. So everything's really focused on results. All of my work comes from referral.
I do great work. I help them increase their conversion rates, and everybody recommends them to me.
Got it. I'm on your website again. You've interviewed some of the top folks in the industry, John Lee Dumas, Clay Collins of Leadpages, Amy Porterfield, all these great folks. I see one of the recent web design and conversion optimization examples you have online is for ProEnergy. Why don't you walk us through what you did for ProEnergy? What does that cost? How do you make money there?
Yeah, it usually starts around like $5,000 a month, some type of retainer, and we figure out how people are visiting your website, and then we try to tweak your website based on your existing traffic. Most businesses, they focus on the wrong thing. They want to generate more traffic. They want to spend more money on advertising.
But really, you should flip your mindset and focus on converting your existing traffic first. If you're not making leads or sales off of your existing traffic already, There's no reason to spend more money. So we try to lower their CPA, their cost per acquisition, and we try to increase their conversion rate so they have a bigger return on investment.
I love that. So walk me through for ProEnergy. You said you charge $5,000 per month. Is there a minimum amount of months people have to work with you, or could they work with you one time for $5,000, you do the work, and then you're done?
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Chapter 3: What inspired Alex to write his book, Small Business, Big Money Online?
And then we start to run A-B testing to validate our hypothesis to figure out, you know, really to validate and do that A-B testing. So as we start to get these wins, now we know how to spread where the opportunity is. Once we know what's working on the whey protein powder page, now we can take what we know and scale it to all of their other products.
And that's really how you grow your bottom line.
So Alex, help me understand if this is more like, I wanna understand a lot of these folks that sell membership sites or some people sell masterminds for 5K, 10K a month, it's hard to figure out, are they more like a one-time sale, they're trading time for money,
Or is it more like a SaaS business, a software-as-a-service business, where you can predict monthly recurring revenue, you can look at churn, you can predict lifetime value? In your case, you've got a lot of customer case studies on your website.
Do most customers, after that month one discovery platform, you discover so many opportunities, how many months do they typically pay you the $5,000 per month? Six, six months usually. That's an average.
Yeah, about six months. And we sell our web design, our A-B testing all a la carte. So let's say you come to us, you want to redesign your website. We don't recommend you do that right away. We want to iterate our way there. So what we'll do is we'll do the conversion audit and then we sell them a landing page or a conversion funnel, improving their checkout process. And we iterate everything.
In each different section of the website, and plus the costs of doing design, HTML, CSS, implementing the tests, all of those different tasks are all a cart, depending on the services that they- On top of the five grand per month retainer.
Correct. Got it. So your average lifetime value at a minimum is the five grand times six months or 30K per month. And then just like you would buy fries or upgrade to the super size meal at a McDonald's checkout, you're upselling them other things, probably a little bit less than five grand per month, and you increase the lifetime value of each customer. Exactly. Boom, baby. I love it.
Now, a lot of folks that listen in and folks that are very active in the top tribe, they're students that are looking to start a new business. A lot of them make money on the side, especially coders doing website work. Some of them are stuck in corporate. They're looking to get out.
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Chapter 4: How does Alex generate revenue through consulting?
So I feel your pain.
Where were you stuck?
What industry? I worked for a diet and fitness company, a very popular .com. I started right before the .com boom and we went all the way through the recession.
Wow. Wow. What was that .com by the way? It was called ediets.com. Ediets.com. Okay. So recession, then you quit that. And then that's when you launched alexdesigns.com.
Yeah, well, I was building my freelance business on the side anyway, because after we went public, they fired the CEO and the board really made the company deteriorate. And I thought I was getting fired every single day. So I was really investing in myself every single day.
And so help us. So how many people are on your team now? Or do you just keep people who you can call up and consult on an as-need basis?
Yeah, I'm basically a creative director. So I'm the only employee in my company, and I have about five to ten subcontractors at a time. So we have a copywriter, two or three designers, depending on the type of project, whether it's a branding project or a direct marketing project. We have an analyst, and I'm missing somebody else. you know, another convergence specialist pretty much.
Okay. Very cool. So five to 10, you can call up when you want. That allows you to control your monthly expenses based off the very, sometimes I know we've interviewed agencies before. Sometimes the revenues at agencies can fluctuate depending on where clients are in their customer life cycle. So you have full control over expenses since you're the only employee. Very, very cool.
Now walk me through, give me a sense of scale. How many customers in any given month are you working with?
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Chapter 5: What metrics does Alex use to measure success for his clients?
Number one, Alex, outside of your own, what is your favorite business book?
It's probably built to sell because it's basically focusing on the one thing you do really well and then selling it over and over and over again.
There you go, guys. And again, we'll link to all Alex, his metrics, his website, his podcast, everything. He mentioned the books at NathanLacca.com forward slash the top six three. That's the show notes. NathanLacca.com forward slash the top six three. Alex, number two, which CEO are you following or studying right now?
Hmm. Always a good one. It's probably Gary Vee. Gary Vee has probably been one of the biggest inspirations in my career. I met him a long time ago and he still continues to inspire me. And he's really made me come out of my shell and find my own voice, become a public speaker and things like that. So I know that I don't have the same DNA as Gary Vee, but he inspires me every single day.
Love that. Number three, what is your favorite online tool like Evernote?
Like Evernote, a productivity tool.
It doesn't have to be any favorite online tool.
Okay, then I'll give you a conversion tool. We use Hotjar, H-O-T-J-A-R. It's really an amazing tool. It brings in, it'll be able to track your funnels, do surveys, do heat maps. It's really a game changer if you want to optimize your website.
Very cool. Now, Alex, tell me a little bit about your family. Married, single, kids? Married. Do you have any kids? Nope. Okay, so I want to know if you're building this empire in a balanced way or not. Yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
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Chapter 6: How does Alex optimize conversion rates for his clients?
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