003: People are the Key to Developing Successful Products with Daniel J. Lewis

The SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Podcast

Daniel J. Lewis discusses his SaaS product My Podcast Reviews stressing the importance of talking to people before developing your product.

Introduction

Daniel J. Lewis is an entrepreneur, an award-winning podcaster, and the founder of My Podcast Reviews. My Podcast Reviews is a subscription-based SaaS product for aggregating podcast reviews from 150+ national iTunes stores into a single deliverable report. Daniel stresses the importance of talking to your customers during development to find out what their pain points are. Daniel also shares how he monitors Twitter for niche-specific keywords and combinations to do marketing.

Key Segments

• [01:50] Who is Daniel J. Lewis?

• [03:00] How long has Daniel been a podcaster?

• [03:15] Daniel talks about his flagship podcast The Audacity to Podcast.

• [03:30] Daniel discusses the Noodle.mx Network, his podcast network.

• [04:40] Daniel is passionate about enabling people to share their message.

• [05:05] What is My Podcast Reviews?

• [08:10] You can monitor your competitor's podcast, and why you should.

• [09:35] Daniel wishes he had done more research among other podcasters before launching My Podcast Reviews.

• [10:50] A little marketing trick of monitoring Twitter for keywords and combinations.

• [12:40] Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference)?

• [14:45] Using Apple's iTunes API.

• [16:05] My Podcast Reviews uses Ruby on Rails for a back end with a WordPress front end.

• [16:45] Learning from a dataset of 40,000 podcast reviews.

• [18:15] Daniel found great developers on Elance (now Upwork) who challenged his concept.

• [18:50] In what ways did Daniel's developers challenge him for the better?

• [20:45] Was there any downside in dealing with developers in India?

• [22:10] Daniel discusses project management.

• [24:05] How is the product documented?

• [24:55] Daniel talks about hosting on Vultr.

• [28:15] Daniel does a deep dive on the Ux (user experience) for My Podcast Reviews.

• [31:35] SaaS owners should have an email list and segment the list (send email based on what plan the customer is on).

• [34:00] What does he do for analytics?

• [35:10] As an artist, Daniel looks at the human side.

• [36:40] The best resources are people. Ask your users what they want. What are their pain points? Connect with people.

• [37:50] Be helpful and connect with the community before you promote yourself.

• [38:50] Thinking of podcasting? Go to TheAudacityToPodcast.com and checkout MyPodcastReviews.com.

Resources Mentioned

• SaaS Business Podcast

• My Podcast Reviews

• The Audacity to Podcast

• Noodle.mx Network

• Daniel's blog

• Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

• Asana project management

• Elance freelancers

• Vultr - high performance SSD cloud servers

• MailChimp

• AWeber

• Infusionsoft

• Google Analytics