What I learned when launching our first real SAAS program. ---Transcript--- This is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in your car Podcast. I hope you guys are having an awesome day today. I’m actually not driving to the office today. I’m driving to a hotel to pick up our programmer. He is a stud. Some of you guys may know him. He is in town for the next couple of weeks working on some cool projects, so I am going to grab him from the hotel. I have kind of a little longer drive today, so I thought I would do a podcast and talk to you about what we are doing right now, because it’s exciting. Just to get the wheels in your head turning if you are doing any software as a service products, SAAS (software as a service). This is kind of an interesting time in the internet world. When I first got online, the thing to create were these little .exe files, desktop-based. I remember Armen Morne things like E-cover Generator, Header Generator, Sales Letter Generator, all these different products. When I first got online, I saw all the things that Armen was doing, and I was like, “I want to do software too.” I did Zip Brander and Form Fortunes and all these other little software programs. Back then, the cool thing to do was create these little downloadable software programs to download and run on a computer. That’s what we did. People would pay for it one time and we would end at that point. I remember the very first software as a service we ever had was called Digital Repo Man. It was this really cool product where basically if you had an ebook or some product that you were selling, you would use Digital Repo Man to lock it down. Then you could give it to your customers and when your customers wanted a refund you could turn their license key off so they couldn’t give it to other people. It was a cool thing. For whatever reason, it didn’t sell that well. I think it’s one of those things where it’s a prevention versus a cure. People don’t really want to buy a prevention. They want to buy a cure. They wanted to buy something for after someone steals their book so they can go out there and beat up the customer that did it, but they’re not willing to pay money to lock it down ahead of time. Anyway, it didn’t do that well, but it was the first time I had sold software as a service, where people log into a members area, they pay you monthly. It was kind of cool. My favorite thing was that if I made an update to the software, it automatically made the update for everyone. Whereas with Zip Brander when I made an update I had to contact all my customers, give them something to download a new version. 90 percent of our support questions were because people hadn’t downloaded the newest version. It was kind of a nightmare. Software as a service became really big for a while, and we started doing some things in it, but I never really paid a lot of attention to it. Then a little while later WordPress came out and we started building three or four different WordPress plugins and themes and stuff like that, because the WordPress is so big. I’ve got a friend who is probably listening to this podcast, Stu McClaren and he runs a site called WishlistMember where they sell membership plugins for WordPress. They’re doing awesome. They’re making an insane amount of money with it. I was talking to him back when we were in Kenya and he told me one of the biggest issues with it is that their support is kind of a nightmare. Everyone has different servers and different hosting and different version of WordPress, all these different things that can happen with WordPress. Then if you make an update, everyone with your software has to go download the update. In January this year, we kind of mapped out this idea for a really cool plugin, and that’s what we were going to do. Then we found someone who had something kind of similar and they went and looked at it. The service we had created is a really cool thing that will go and backup your entire website. It’s this