November 2019 PlainScaling Workshop

Battles between making things you’re proud of and making money are stressing you out. You want to own a calmer business. You dream of having a steady income that lets you focus on being creative without giving up your independence.

PlainScaling is a one day workshop on starting, growing and sustaining businesses with predictable, recurring income. We’ll take you through a range of talks, discussions and hands on exercises designed to help you calmly run a self-service subscription business. We’ll focus on methods successful software as a service (SaaS), coworking, training, agency and consulting businesses have used to sell product and service subscriptions to other businesses (B2B).

This workshop is aimed at those who have a few years experience of running a business and a desire to understand how they can make work better. Aside from the practicalities of running subscription businesses this course will cover the things that can slow you down or trip you up along the way.

This is a highly interactive workshop. At the end of it you will have inside knowledge of a range of subscription businesses and your own set of actions to apply to your business. You’ll also have got to know a small group of fellow business owners who are facing similar challenges to your own.

What will you learn?

This workshop provides a hands-on master class in starting, growing and sustaining subscription businesses. In particular we will focus on marketing and sales methods that even the most introverted software developers can apply.

The course will cover:

• Why businesses buy inferior products and services to yours.
• How to charge more without alienating your customers.
• Where your potential customers are hiding.
• What is slowing down your sales pipeline.
• When is the best time to take an extended break from your business.

You’ll come away from the day with:

• A refined value proposition you can use in an email, blog post or website.
• A pricing hypothesis to test that could significantly increase revenue.
• A marketing channel to experiment with that could become your best source of leads.
• A method of reducing your sales cycle time that could on board new customers in half the time.
• A set of principles tailored to your business that should keep burnout at bay.

Things to reflect on before the workshop

Before your workshop we ask that you take some time to consider the following questions. The more time you take to consider your current situation, and the issues and challenges you face, the more you’ll gain from your training:

• Where does most of your business’s revenue currently come from?
• What have you learned about business since getting started?
• How well do you feel you know your customers?
• Do you think your business has a healthy culture?

Key Takeaways

At the end of the workshop, you will be confident in your understanding of what it means to sustainably run a subscription business, including a firm grasp of pricing and how it is important. You’ll have a clear understanding of how marketing and sales can sit alongside product development without compromising creativity. You’ll go back into your business feeling confident in your ability to build a long-lasting independent subscription business. You’ll feel accelerated on on your journey to helping more people around the world while providing yourself with a predictable recurring income.

What do you need to bring?

Please bring a laptop or tablet. A Google account and access to Google Docs is all you’ll need to use on the day.

Is this course for you?

I’ve heard subscription businesses need millions of investment to grow and I don’t have funding, should I attend?

Absolutely, this workshop avoids going into the methods used by highly funded / VC backed businesses. We focus on experience from self funded businesses that have invested profits they made themselves from selling their time and expertise.

I only have a handful of customers, can I benefit from this workshop?

It’s very common to find yourself stuck at a dozen or fewer customers in a new subscription business. We’ll make sure you leave equipped to get past that first barrier to your growth. First hand inspiration from other business owners is sometimes all you need to keep things going in the right direction.

I already have an established subscription business how will this help me?

All subscription businesses hit plateaus in growth and/or productivity at some point. If things aren’t feeling quite right it might be time to make some changes. Stepping out of your businesses for a day and looking at it from a fresh perspective is the best way to start doing that.

At this workshop you’ll hear about businesses that have taken different paths to your own. And you’ll be in a room with people eager to help each other to succeed. Some might be a few steps behind you. Others will have experiences to share that could accelerate your business overnight.

I’m currently focused on freelancing/contracting/consulting/running an agency can I still attend?

If you don’t yet have a subscription business of your own you might soon find yourself with a client that does. The more you understand about the challenges they face, the better you’ll be able to help them.

This course will give your more empathy with the owners of subscription businesses. And you’ll be better placed to decide if the time is right to start one of your own.

I don't have any programming skills or a team of developers, can I still attend?

We have deliberately kept the topic broader than just Software as a Service so that the workshop is accessible to people without programming expertise. It’s nice to have a mix of skill sets in the room. And there are now a wide range of tools that make it possible to make subscription businesses without writing custom code.

While it’s not required, you’ll get most out of the day if you have some past experience working with software developers. That tends to be a good indicator that you’re confident using a wide range of online tools to run your business. And you’ll be able to follow along if the discussion occasionally gets technical.

What software and tools will we be using?

Most of our work on the day will be done in Google Docs. But we might refer to a useful few tools that can be used to apply the methods we use. They include: AnswerThePublic, BuzzSumo, ConvertKit, TypeForm, Zapier, Podia, Stripe and Profitwell.

Who am I?

Jonathan (@jot) Markwell - Founder, Developer, Occasional Sailor

I'm best known as a co-founder of The Skiff coworking community in Brighton, the SussexFounders software business community and DevNest - the World's first Twitter developer meet up hosted in London, New York and San Francisco.

Over the last 15 years I've helped start and grow dozens of businesses. CoverageBook and AnswerThePublic, created with the team at SEO/PR agency Propellernet, are by far the most successful. I previously co-founded and sold HowSociable, a social media metrics SaaS, and Life. Time. Value., a conference for digital product businesses owners.

In a previous life I gained firsthand experience of the craziness and stresses of agency and startup life. I once built a six-person software development agency (Inuda) and went round the world raising funding for a consumer internet startup (Smidgn).

Previous participants in this workshop have said

The workshop was really useful, it enthused me to get going on a bunch of things to get my business growing again. This was exactly what I needed right now.

Thomas Parslow, Founder, Buzzshot

I was pleasantly surprised by how nice and respectful and welcoming everyone was. No-one talked over me. In fact, I felt so relaxed and confident I jumped in to answer questions because I’m used to not getting a chance to speak.

Rifa Thorpe-Tracy, Founder of Refigure

It’s given me a renewed enthusiasm, and confidence to start building my business towards becoming a product company. Which is priceless. Really happy I made the decision to sign up! Looking forward to sharing my progress!

Tom Christie, Founder of Encode & Django REST framework

Nice things people have said about my work

Just wanted to say thanks for everything you’ve done for Propellernet since we first kicked off our product development journey back in 2013. Shaping and guiding the team, building confidence, developing skills and bringing brilliant people onto the team. What you’ve achieved is nothing short of remarkable. re-Markwell-able.

Jack Hubbard, Cofounder & CEO Propellernet

We've been in the software as a service business for over 10 years and Jonathan introduced us to a wealth of valuable opportunities we hadn't previously spotted. It was refreshing to get perspective from someone who genuinely understands how things work at the intersection of business and technology

Rebecca Kimber, Cofounder, Create.net

Jonathan recommended a change to our website that took 10 minutes to implement and resulted in over 4,000 additional downloads of our Android application within a few days. Great breadth of knowledge and ideas.

James Robinson, Cofounder, OpenSignal

Appreciate the input thx.

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

On a previous workshop:

The workshop format worked really well. I liked the story sharing, as I find anything that makes me feel less alone as a freelancer very useful. It is important to learn from other people's mistakes and realise that we all make them. Going away with specific targets was very useful.

Isabel Crouch, IZC Marketing

The workshop gave me the confidence to increase my rates by over 30%. I haven't lost any new business from the increase so this is a rate I could have been charging all along!

Oliver Winks, Paper Plane Software

On LTV Conf:

I loved the day. It was packed with fantastic value (I took SOOO many notes!) and was inspiring to be around so many fellow online entrepreneurs (speakers and other attendees). It also had a friendly, fun and laid back atmosphere - way less corporate than other events I have been to (which is a good thing!). I have been recommending you to people for next year already, and I will certainly be back

Hannah Martin, Talented Ladies Club

The people chosen to speak inspired me that I can follow in their footsteps. I feel like I had a positive push in the direction of my goal.

Simon Rowland, Layback Engineering

The info from the experts was so valuable that you can make the ticket price back almost immediately by applying some of the things they suggested. They could also prevent someone from making a costly mistake thus saving them the ticket price that way too.

Joanne Munro, The VA Handbook

The conference was intimate, inclusive and highly relevant for the audience. The speakers shared solid advice and told good stories.

Anthony Eden, DNSimple