Episode 125 includes:
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How to make your website more engaging
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The MSP owner who was so frustrated with this tool, he created his own for other MSPs
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A cure for the distractions that get in the way of business growth
Featured guests
Thank you to Tony Capewell and Neil Renwick from MSP Dark Web for joining Paul to talk about how their dark web scanner can benefit your MSP.
Tony brings decades of experience and a unique expertise in Cyber Security and IT productivity to the team at MSP Dark Web. When he eventually steps away from his computer screens, Tony enjoys a vibrant family life. He also loves his power tools and often immerses himself in some extreme home DIY projects, with awesome results. That annual skiing holiday is always on the horizon as another special time of year, but only when ageing knees allow. Connect with Tony on LinkedIn:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonycapewell
Neil has been in the IT Security industry since 2016. Although a newer member to the MSP community he has spent much of his time understanding the pain points that MSP owners express, and how MSP Dark Web can overcome those areas of discomfort around dark web security. Outside the office Neil enjoys a busy family life, with as much football as possible, but only on TV nowadays. After 25 years in Honduras, Central America his culinary and cultural heritage is a real Anglo-Latin American experience, most enjoyed at the loud Spanish family zoom meetings. One Monday a month he is recovering from Sunday afternoon Dad’s match that he still enjoys.
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/
- http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/
- Paul mentioned some productivity and time tracking solutions:
- focusme.com
- timeular.com
- You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook:
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/
- Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC
- To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from Thursday 7th April 2022:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng
- Thank you to Aaron Nihat from Cornwall IT for recommending the book Helpdesk Habits by Mark Copeman:
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Helpdesk-Habits-helpdesk-superhero-indispensable/dp/1729416896
- https://uk.linkedin.com/in/aaronnihat
- In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Simon Marcil from Propel Your MSP, to talk about how he was able to build his MSP from zero to over 100 staff in 18 years:
- https://ca.linkedin.com/in/smarcil
- Subscribe to Paul’s YouTube channel:
- https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing
- Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider:
- Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@
paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello, it’s lovely to have you here on the podcast. It’s episode 125, and this is what we got coming up for you this week.
Tony Capewell:
Once we found the right developer, we then felt that this was something that we could build. It was as much about there not being many competitors in the market space for people that do dark web scanning.
Paul Green:
That’s Tony and Neil from mspdarkweb.com. They’re going to be here later in the show, talking about how they built their own dark web scanning tool from scratch. There’s nothing I love more than a story of a frustrated MSP creating their own solution, and then actually releasing it into the world for other MSPs to use. They’ll be here later on in the show. We’re also going to be talking about gamifying your website. What is gamifying? It’s the process of making engaging with your website more fun. Because the goal is more engagement. The more you can get people to engage with you, the more chances you’ve got of turning them into a lead and ultimately a client. We’ll look at how you do that later on in the show,
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
There are a number of persistent themes within this podcast. Obviously we’re here to talk about MSP marketing, but hand in and with that is how you grow your business, and it’s certainly an area that I have so much passion for. I’ve worked with so many business owners over the years and I’ve seen so many people literally change their lives. It is an honour and a pleasure to work with someone and to watch them do all the hard things that it takes to turn their business around and genuinely change their lifestyle. It’s a pleasure to do that. One of the things that I notice over the years is that people often will get stuck trying to change things, and this getting stuck stage can last months, I’ve seen it last years and years. And the reason they get stuck, I think there’s a number of different reasons, but one of the biggest challenges to them is finding enough time to work on the business and not just in the business.
Paul Green:
So working in the business is when you are doing stuff, the things that the business does. So for you, that’s technical work, it’s closing tickets, talking to clients, putting screw drivers into sockets, and I don’t know what you do, but you know what I mean. It’s the things, it’s the technical workers, probably the things that you started when you first started the business. That was why you started the business, so you could do the technical things your own way. And then over a number of years, you kind of realised that actually your real role as the bus and his owner is not to press buttons and plug cables into things, into sockets, but actually to build the business. And that’s the challenge is to spend less time working in the business and spend more time working on the business. So working on the business is basically doing things that grow the business, it’s doing activities that get you more new clients.
Paul Green:
It’s doing activities that get your clients to stay with you for longer. It’s activities that persuade your clients to choose, to spend more money with you. Those are the things that grow the business. So some of the business owners that I work with, they do get stuck just finding enough time to do that. I’m on record somewhere many places actually, and you’ll probably find it in this podcast if you go that far enough saying, “You just need 90 minutes a day to grow your business.” And certainly if I look back at the business that I built up between 2005 and 2016, which I successfully sold, most of the working on there was done in 90 minute chunks. I used to get up at five in the morning, which is insane as I look back at it now. I used to get up at five in the morning, I’d do 90 minutes of intense work on the business and then I’d go and spend the rest of the day working in the business.
Paul Green:
And that was pretty much how it was until the last couple of years of that business. Now, when I set up this business in 2016, it was very important for me, right from the get-go that I spend more time working on the business than in the business. So everything we’ve done has been designed around that. You know what I’m doing here? I’m recording a podcast, this is working on the business, because our podcast is one of our most important marketing channels. It’s also fun. Isn’t that good? It’s good those two things have been combined. But me, standing here, doing this podcast recording is me working on my business. I’m working on my marketing, which is going to help me to attract new clients to my business. How much time do you spend working on your business? If you don’t know for sure, track it. Use one of the many, many time tracking apps you can use.
Paul Green:
And I’m a big fan of timeular.com, which is the one that comes with a physical dice, here it is. Just turning my physical dice around and it’s making the app go crazy as I turn it from side to side. But right now, I’ve got that tracking that I’m creating content. Creating content is a green task for me, I can do an unlimited amount of it, as much as I want. It’s a very good use of my time because creating content is working on my business. So how much time do you spend on it? If it’s less than 90 minutes a day, you’ve got a problem, you really do. 90 minutes a day is the minimum. Really, you want to be getting to a stage where you are spending 25 to 50% of your time working on the business. And yes, that means hiring good people who can replace you doing the work you did in the business.
Paul Green:
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to completely come away from doing work in the business, but the goal is to get to a position where you have the choice, you have the choice to spend time working in the business or not. You might enjoy doing a server rebuild or resetting a user password … No one enjoys resetting user passwords, but you might enjoy doing certain projects and you might choose to go back and do that now and again. And why not? That’s a good thing to do, but it’s about having the choice. And I’d rather you spend more of your time working on the business. Because the more time you spend working on the business, well the faster you get where you want to go, which is a business that contributes financially and in time terms, to the lifestyle that you want to lead.
Paul Green:
Half of the battle is making sure that you are not interrupted while you’re working on the business. So the interruptions come from staff, they come and clients, they come from your family. Damn those children wanting your time to enjoy time with you, but they are a distraction sometimes and you need to find ways to work on the business without your children, your family, your staff, and your clients. Stealing time from you. Part of that is about discipline. The reason I used to get up at five in the morning was that was where my daughter was very young and the whole family was in bed at five in the morning, and I knew I could work without any interruptions. Didn’t check my emails, didn’t even switch my phone on. No one is around at five in the morning who needs your attention. And so you can get some incredible work done then.
Paul Green:
I also used to go out to an office unit. So I used to leave my home, sometimes, not always. But I’d leave my home and I’d go out to a separate office unit, and the reason I did that was so that my environment was an uninterrupted environment. So it’s five in the morning, no one can contact me. No one’s trying to contact me. They certainly don’t expect me to be available, and I’m hidden away in an area when oh one can find me. As you could imagine, that was an incredibly powerful and intense way of working on my business. Now these days, my daughter is a bit older, she’s 11 now she goes up to her room and goes and does TikTok and SnapChat and all those horrible things that I don’t really want her doing. But she’s quite self contained with leaving me alone to work on my business so long as I pay her attention every now and again and make sure she’s got internet and of course, food every 17 minutes or so, but now, it’s digital distractions.
Paul Green:
In fact, as I’m recording this now, my phone is pinging, ping, ping, ping, WhatsApp, I’ve got a weather warning, I’ve got the bank saying that some just come out and some other money’s coming in. I’ve got breaking news from the BBC. I’ve got my Nest Protect smoke detector telling me it’s going to do a test in a bit, which is actually quite helpful, because I can make sure I’m not recording the podcast. You get the idea. So digital distractions are the biggest burden for me now. Maybe they are for you as well. If you’ve already sorted out the having the space and time and the environment to work on your business, maybe now you need to work on the digital distractions. Now I’ve found an app, I haven’t quite decided to use it yet, but I’m really tempted, I keep coming back to it. It’s called focusme.com.
Paul Green:
And it’s a productivity app. Well, I’ll just read off the website. It says the productivity app that forces you to focus. No cheats or workarounds. More than just a website blocker, FocusMe is a fully customisable tool that walls off online temptation to instantly increase personal efficiency and take countless hours of your life back. So you can block, limit or ration the websites and apps that kind of suck your time. I know what I find … I don’t use Facebook a lot. I use it for an MSP Marketing Edge members only Facebook group, and then a big MSP marketing group, which is for any MSP. And apart from those, I don’t really use Facebook a great deal, but I do know that when I should be working on something important and I’m procrastinating, I’ll find myself reaching for my phone to go on Facebook.
Paul Green:
I don’t know why. I don’t know, I guess it’s almost a way of you knowing you’re trying to do something important, and because your brain’s fighting against that, it’s trying to find something else to do. So maybe if I was to block Facebook, that would be a good thing to do. It says here it builds better habits for long term will power. There’s a force mode when you need to go nuclear and it works on Windows, Mac, and apparently it’s 100% free on Android. Oh my goodness, it doesn’t work on iPhone. I’ve got an iPhone. I’m going to have to find a different app. I’m sure there are competitors to focusme.com, but can you see the power of these? Of actually using technology to stop you having the digital distractions?
Paul Green:
In fact, sometimes, and certainly when I’m not doing the podcast, but when I’m doing other things, I do switch on do not disturb on my iPhone, because that means no notifications pop up at all to disturb me. It’s just me getting on with it. But yet in an emergency, the people in my favourites list can get through to me on the phone. So I have the reassurance that if the school rings for whatever reason, they’ll get through and it’ll break my do not disturb. So I don’t have worry about stuff like that. Maybe that’s just the way I should do it.
Paul Green:
Anyway, this is about you, not me. What digital distractions are getting in your way? Is it your ticketing system? Is it Slack? Is it Teams? Is it your own teams messaging you on Teams and asking questions that really they know the answers to, but they don’t have the confidence to take their own answer? What is it that’s getting in your way? What are your digital distractions? What’s stopping you from spending 25 to 50% of your time working on the business? Identify what that is, and you know what? Do something about it. Your future self will be very happy that you took this action today to spend more time working on the business with fewer distractions from that important work,
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
Back in episode 69 of the podcast, which went out just over a year ago, we talked about the concept of gamification. Gamifying something is about making it fun. And in fact, we’ve just been recently revamping the onboarding for our MSP Marketing Edge service, and we’ve built in a level of gamification. For example, when you watch our four onboarding videos, there are only four of them and there’s only 15 minutes in total to watch them, we send our new members a free t-shirt. In fact, they get to choose the design and the colour and the size of that t-shirt. Because watching those onboarding videos is obviously an important part of our retention strategy. We want someone not just to join, but to actually get started, start to use the service and build it into their weekly, monthly marketing.
Paul Green:
And the onboarding videos are designed to do that, so we wanted to gamify the process of watching those videos and give a reward for doing so. That’s a very clever way to do it. You might choose to gamify your onboarding in some way. Now your onboarding is obviously much more in real life, but you can still make it a game. Anyway, that’s all back in episode 69, you can go and listen to that. What I want to talk about today is an extension of that, it’s about gamifying your website. Because one of the main goals with your website is to increase engagement. The more that people engage with you and your MSP through the website, the more likely they are to go on to become a client. Engagement is the goal, in fact, it’s the goal, not just on your website, it’s the goal on your social channels as well. Engagement is really good.
Paul Green:
It’s all about engagement these days. And gamifying your website to make it fun is a great way to catch people’s attention, because you think about how they’re looking for a new MSP, they’re typing in, “IT support your town.” They’re clicking on a website. They’re seeing a picture of network cables. They’re seeing the same old text and they’re clicking back again. And then they’re clicking on the next one. Yep, they’re seeing another same old stock image of network cables and they’re clicking back again and then they click on yours and yours, it has a picture of you welcoming them and it has a quiz. Oh my goodness. There’s a quiz. It’s just a very simple quiz. In fact, I’ve got an example to show you. Now, this isn’t from our world, this is from outside of our world. It’s from the world of people selling courses, education on how to buy property here in the UK.
Paul Green:
If you go to this website address, type it in carefully, it’s propertyhub.net, propertyhub.net. And I don’t know the two guys behind this, I don’t buy anything from them, but I’ve used their website as an example of gamification a number of times. And assuming they haven’t changed this, at the moment when you go into propertyhub.net, there’s a photo of the two guys behind it. And it’s so is at the top, “Welcome home property investors. How can we help?” And there’s a quiz. It says, “I want to build up my pension.” And there’s a little tick box. And then there’s another option that says, “I want to quit my job.” With a tick box and a third one that says, “I want an extra income stream.” So I’m going to go through this quiz right now. I’ll do real answers for me.
Paul Green:
So imagine I was looking for an extra income stream. No I’m going to put, I want to build up my pension. So I’m going to tick that, and it’s instantly replaced the quiz options with a new option. It says, “When do you want to have achieved this by?” Question two of three. And then it says, “In 10 plus years, five to 10 years, two to five years and within two years.” Well I’m only 47. Not going to be retiring for a while, so I’m going to put 10 plus years. I’ll tick that. And the final question three of three comes up. It says, “How hands on do you want to be?” And my options are not very, I don’t have much spare time. Somewhat, I have a bit of time and find property interesting. And very, I have the time and I love property. Well, I’m in the middle with that one.
Paul Green:
I have somewhat, I have a time, bit of time and I find property interesting, which I do. So I’ve ticked on that, and it’s now gone through to … Ah ha, according to this, I am a long term Lou. It’s actually labelled me. It says, “A generous pension, security for your family and something to pass on, property is the perfect investment for achieving these important long term goals. Good news, you already have the most important asset when it comes to property, time.” And then it just sort of gives you some information and it’s teaching me and telling me about stuff. And then down here, they have some recommendations. So they’ve got a course, they’ve got a podcast episode and then it says to access all of these resources, I just need to become a member which is free and I need to join the Property Hub community.
Paul Green:
Isn’t that clever? So essentially I’m joining their email list and probably joining their forum as well. This is gamification. Now I wouldn’t exactly the same approach on an MSP’s website, although you could, and I have a couple of my members who have done just this. And obviously they’re not promoting their podcast or their community, they’re trying to get people to actually inquire, but it’s a very clever way of increasing engagement. So a mission for you over the weeks and months ahead as you’re going onto other people’s websites, when you find something that immediately engages with you, ask yourself why. Ask yourself, how has this engaged you and what’s the benefit for you? How can you steal their good ideas? Because let’s be honest, the best ideas come from stealing them from other people and then doing your own version of them. Swipe and adapt, I like to think of it.
Paul Green:
What are the ideas that really inspired you and how could you apply them to your website? And don’t worry too much about the technicalities of it. Anything, certainly something as simple as a quiz like we were just looking at here, there’s a developer somewhere out there that can develop that for your website or indeed, there may even be a plugin for it. How can you gamify your website to make it so much fun for the potential future clients that are visiting it?
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
I mentioned earlier on that I have a couple of Facebook groups. So one of them is just for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge service, but I do have a big group as well, it’s called MSP Marketing. It is open to any MSP anywhere in the world and you can just join it if you go into Facebook. Well, if you’re your desktop or your laptop, go to facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing.
Paul Green:
Whereas if you are on your phone, you just go into the search bar and type in MSP Marketing and look for groups. Now, we’ve got some really, really cool posts in here. We’ve got a post … actually, it’s a post from Tony Capewell, we’ve got an interview with Tony. You’re about to hear in the next couple of minutes and he’s talking about dark web scanning. Then we’ve got post from me and I’m talking about ripping apart an MSP’s marketing in a session I’m doing and putting it back together. That was something I was doing with Zomentum. What else have we got here? We’ve got a top productivity recommendation for something called Text Expander, which is pretty cool. Someone asking a question here, “For an MSP with no PSA, is QuickBooks Online sufficient for multiple technicians’ time entry and invoicing customers?”
Paul Green:
What else have we got here? We’ve got someone’s getting their van sign written and a whole bunch of other MSPs have posted pictures of their vehicles with their sign writing, which is really cool. It’s such a good collaborative community. How many people have we got now? We’ve got more than 1500 members, and all of them are MSPs. There’s no vendors in here, it’s a vendor free zone. Sorry, vendors, I do love you, but the community is just for MSPs. So if you’re on your laptop, go to facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing, or just search for MSP Marketing in your Facebook app and tap on groups. You are welcome to join and I’ll have a little chat with you in the MSP Marketing Facebook group,
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Tony Capewell:
Hi, I’m Tony Capewell, owner and developer of MSP Dark Web.
Neil Renwick:
And I’m Neil Renwick, also from MSP Dark Web on the front end, dealing with MSPs across the world.
Paul Green:
And thank you both for joining me. It’s been a pleasure following what you’ve been doing with MSP Dark Web over the last … oh, I don’t know. You’ll tell me how long it’s been, but it feels like it’s been many, many months. Tony, Neil, of course, we worked together with the MSP Marketing Edge program and you first told me about this idea, I think it was getting on for over a year ago. And watching you turn it from an idea into something that is not just now sellable, but actually a growing number of MSPs are picking up, has been an absolute pleasure. So I don’t want to jump too far ahead. Let’s just first of all, establish who you are and what you do, because actually your day job or your previous day job was you guys own an MSP.
Tony Capewell:
I’ve been working in the MSP space for over 20 years now, and an MSP in Milton Keynes. Running that business and building the business of more around cybersecurity over the last sort of three, four years, we’ve found that Dark Web scanning was a very limited product availability. Through lots of frustrations we’ve designed, developed and built dart web scanner from the ground up over the last 12 years.
Paul Green:
12 months, rather. Anyone could do it over 12 years, but 12 months is quite impressive.
Tony Capewell:
It seems like 12 years.
Paul Green:
Yeah, I bet it does feel like 12 years. Yes, in fact, I’ve watched you visibly age over the time that you’ve been doing this. Now, Neil, I don’t want you to name names, so I don’t want to know which products you were using before, but what were the deficiencies that you found? The things that the established solutions out there weren’t quite giving you?
Neil Renwick:
Well, first of all, the quality of the data was the initial problem. You’d do a prospecting report using a Dark Web scanner, and then your client would say, “Well, that was from 2016. What’s the point of giving me data from three years ago, four years ago?” Obviously the face time, the ability to be able to speak to somebody at these providers about an issue or problem, or even offer suggestions as to how they could tweak the platform, we were never able to do that. And the other big problem is that we were tied in both to a long contract and quite a heavy minimal monthly spend. So they were the pain points that we sat down and started to look at from an MSP’s point of view, and that is how we started to try and design the new product and platform.
Paul Green:
So Tony, I’ve known you for quite a few years now, it’s getting on probably about six or seven, isn’t it? And you’ve always struck me as the entrepreneurial type. But I think a good entrepreneur knows when not to pursue an opportunity as much as they know when to pursue an opportunity. So you clearly had these pain points, you clearly had not quite the right service out there. When did the realisation come into your mind that you were going to have to build your own solution,
Tony Capewell:
Not naming any names, but our experience with the last platform that we used for dark web scanning ended in a legal battle. So it was a very raw subject and I felt that dark web scanning was definitely something that should be part of any MSP’s cybersecurity stack to try and alleviate any of those security risks that a customer can come across. So it was a long period of time that was spent researching, trying to find developers that could build the product for us. And once we found the right developer, we then felt that this was something that we could build. And equally, it was as much about there not being many competitors in the market space. It’s a very limited space for people that do dark web scanning.
Paul Green:
Yes, I bet it is. I bet it is. And we’ll talk about the actual product itself and what makes it different, what its USP, its unique selling proposition is, we’ll talk about that in a little while. But when you first sat down to create it, was it easy for you because of your experience of being MSPs and having … and Neil, this question’s for you, so that your experience of being MSPs and having looked at other people’s services, did that make it easier for you to plan, “This is what we want it to do, and this is why we want it to work that way.”?
Neil Renwick:
That has actually been the key point, that we’ve been able to have a good kind of an openhearted chat with the MSPs and they’re feeling the same pain points that we were feeling. When we decided to sit down and put these points on paper and make sure that our platform, our product and our services would deal with those pain points, we were doing it from an MSP’s point of view. And yeah, face to face, we’ve already seen that with the MSPs that we’ve been speaking to.
Paul Green:
Tony let’s delve into what it does. So we all know what dark web scanning is. What makes MSP Dark Web different?
Tony Capewell:
The key element to dark web scanning is obviously the data and how relevant that data is. So if you are returning data, that is four, five, six years old to the customer, that is kind of irrelevant because the chances are they would’ve changed their password on that account within the last five, six years. So sourcing data that is as relevant as it can be, we do have a lot of historic data, but we’ve got a functionality within the system that allows the MSP to fill that out before they start doing live monitoring.
Paul Green:
So they don’t have to just deal with the old data, they could deal with the up to date data. Let me interrupt you there and be the devil’s advocate, which is surely all of the services, so you and all of your competitors, you’re all getting the same data from the same data sources?
Tony Capewell:
I would disagree. So our data source has never embarked on a partnership in this form before. So they pride themselves on providing the world’s largest breach data database, we are getting much better results in comparison to some of the competitors that we’ve during the demo, been asked to compare against. The way that we collect the data is not just through automated bots, which a lot of the other competitors do, we have humanised people that are going out and physically trying to get that breach data and purchase that data so that we can then have it in our breach data, which is what results in the published date being more recent to when the breach occurred rather than a longer period of time.
Paul Green:
And Neil, from the MSPs that are already taking this service and that you’re speaking to, is this something of commercial value to them? Because I know that’s the other wider question about dark web monitoring, again, just being devil’s advocate, which is it really a sustainable thing long term? Is it something that an MSP can buy and actually make margin from?
Neil Renwick:
Yeah, the two elements of including it within the package have been expressed clearly as to what we were already doing as an MSP. So we were selling a single domain coverage for anything upwards of a hundred pounds per domain. The MSPs have also come back to us and said, “Yes, I’m going to be using it both ways, including it within the stack and selling it as a standalone security product.” Which is what we were doing previously as an MSP. And it has been a mixture of both. So if you’re paying an equivalent of eight pounds per domain, and you’re able to sell at 1800 pounds per domain per month, the maths talks for itself as such, there’s is a good profit margin to be made there.
Paul Green:
In your own MSP. I assume you are selling the MSP dark web service, and what kind of margin are you making reselling your own service? Because theoretically, you guys should be absolutely the best at it because you’ve built it to be sold.
Tony Capewell:
We have dark web scanning included in our top managed service package, and we include that at a much more reduced rate. And then equally, customers can buy it as a separate add on to some of the smaller packages that we sell, or as a one off. And we sell, as Neil said, anything from 100 to 150 pounds per domain per month. So the margins are quite high.
Paul Green:
Neil and Tony, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Now we are actually going to continue you this interview and we’re going to continue it on YouTube. So we have an extended version, in fact, I’ve just been writing down some things that I want to talk to you about. I want to go back over the development process and ask you the highs and the lows of what it’s like developing an entire app from scratch, especially when you know it’s other MSPs who are going to be buying it.
Paul Green:
I want to talk to you as well about the possibility of distractions and how likely it is, or what the risks were that you were distracted from your MSP business, while you were developing this second business. And also what would you do differently? In fact, if you could start the whole process again, what would you do differently? And you’ve been talking to hundreds of MSPs now over the last few months, so what lessons you’ve learned from those? So all of that’s going to be on our extended interview and there’ll be a link to our YouTube, which we’ll mention towards the end of the podcast, and you can find it in the show notes page. Just for now, Tony, if you just want to finish this interview for this podcast, just tell us briefly, give us a 10, second cell on MSP Dark Web and tell us where we can find out more information.
Tony Capewell:
Okay. So you can head over to our website, which is mspdarkweb.com, and book yourself in for a demo where we will give you a quick squiz through the platform, show you what it can do, hopefully get you guys on board and start you selling dark web scanning.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Aaron:
Hi everyone, I’m Aaron Nihat from Cormorant IT. So my book recommendation is, Helpdesk Habits by Mark Copeman. Many of us MSPs, we love the technical sides, but many of us don’t always concentrate on the customer service, the customer experience side of things. So Helpdesk Habits is a great book for anyone who wants to improve their MSP’s customer experience.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Simon Marcil:
Hi, I’m Simon Marcil. I’m the founder of Propel Your MSP, and on next week’s show, I will tell you how I was able to build our MSP from zero to over 100 staff in 18 years.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about reusing marketing content across multiple channels. If you’ve gone to the effort and difficulty of creating a piece of content, why just use it on your website when you could use it on LinkedIn in something like a podcast? You could turn it into a webinar. You could turn it into a video on YouTube, maybe even some kind of infographic as well. There’s so many different things you can do. And most professional marketers reuse content all the time, across lots of different channels.
Paul Green:
We’ll look at how to do that next week. We’re also going to look at engagement. How can you engage your entire team, even your remote team, all at the same time in one go? I’ve got a clever idea for you next week. Now don’t forget the extended interview with Tony and Neil from today, we’ve put that onto YouTube. And on Thursday, we’ll be launching Another Byte, it’s the show presented by my friend, Sophie Law, featuring myself, where we talk about the show, the show about the show. Both of those are on YouTube, youtube.com/mspmarketing. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and also subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. Join me next Tuesday, and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.