49:5 Privacy policies got you down?

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Lee:

Welcome to Trailblazer FM. I am your host, Mr. Lee Matthew Jackson. Today we are joined by the one and the only second time returning podcast guest. It's Mr.Hans from Termageddon. Hans. How are you today?

Hans:

I am good, Lee. It's always good to see you.

Lee:

Thank you, mate. Today we are experimenting with a completely new way of recording a podcast, so I don't know what the hell to do because I'm having to look at a camera at the same time and then look down at Hans. This may be the weirdest podcast I've ever done, but also who better to do it with than Hans with that glorious beard? If you are listening to this episode, can I encourage you to go ahead and check out Trailblazer FM? Have a look in the show notes and there will be a link to this video as we're going to be on the YouTube. Hans did join us many years ago and it was actually in June of 2019 that he was on the podcast and we shared a little bit of his story then and also looked at their business. Today, many years later, he's lost all of his hair. He had red curly hair actually when he first joined us. We're going to find out what's been going on over the last few years. Before we do all that, Hans, could you just say hi to everyone and just give people who've never heard of the Hans a little bit of a background?

Hans:

Yeah, absolutely. I have to interject already right out the gate with just a small clarification. I'm not losing hair, I'm gaining face. That's the way I like to look at it. It's all about positivity. I have a lot of face now to give to this world. My name is Hans. I was a web designer, agency owner. I ran a 12 person web agency for seven years and I sold that company, married a privacy attorney and started Termageddon. Termageddon, we provide website policies to businesses, really of all shapes and sizes. Our tool is pretty comprehensive. What's nifty about it is we identify the laws that you need to make disclosures for, we provide those exact disclosures, and then we have the ability to push automatic updates to your website policy pages whenever changes are needed. At the time of this recording, there's six new privacy laws going into effect next year. We'll be able to notify our customers of any changes and even have the ability to push some updates. We have an agency partner program that's like why I connected with Lee and why I flew out on a whim to meet him at ATL in 2019, if I'm not mistaken.

Hans:

Our business model is that we work with web designers just because that's the space I know. I was asked all the time, what should I do for website policies by my clients? I'd have no idea what to recommend. I created Termageddon. We give web designers a free license, a free set of our auto updating policies forever in the hopes that you like our product and want to consider our reseller or affiliate programs for your clients.

Lee:

The moral of the story is if you want to add a service to your business, marry the person who knows how to do it.

Hans:

Is that right? Yeah. I've already I'm trying to carve out the privacy space for my own.

Lee:

Well, you just confessed to marrying a Privacy lawyer.

Hans:

That's true. That is a good route. I like to say I married a privacy attorney, so no one else has to.

Lee:

That's a good one. What I'd really love to do, mate, is find out a little bit about what happened in 2019, because the great thing about physical events is you get together and you meet with people. You met a whole load of people. I've got videos. We have roving video from 2019, and I could see you meeting loads of people, having conversations outside. I know lots of really great relationships were made. Could you maybe share a little bit about what relationships you got out of that one physical event where, like you said, from Chicago, you just jumped on a plane last minute, literally a week before you organized all of this, and you came over to my event fresh as a daisy with Termageddon. Just give me a little idea of what relationships you built at that particular event or as a result of it.

Hans:

I would be more than happy to because Magic was in the air. I had just sold my agency and I had 30 web agencies using Termageddon. I was like, Okay, I got to get the word out. I heard about this Lee Jackson guy. I was so scared to message you. I was so scared. It turns out you're a great guy and you're welcoming me with open arms. But we decided I'm going to fly out and come to Agency Transformation Live. I did not expect the bonding and the education that would be delivered pretty much for 72 straight hours of teaching best practices in this space. There are relationships. There are people I met at that event who I've spoken to at least once every two weeks for the last three years. I'm not kidding. I've had scheduled meetings that just we've never ended. It all came from that event. There were presentations where I was just like, I thought I was all alone and I thought no one else had these experiences. I boxed myself in and thought I couldn't share my successes and also frustrations with other people because they couldn't relate. Agency transformation brought these people together and shared the fact that we're not alone.

Hans:

We're actually all relatively in this together in the sense that we have very similar challenges. To be a part of a group of people that understand where you're coming from and can get on that level with you and then talk about ways you can improve your business and your agency. Oh, my gosh. I wish this was here back when I was running my agency in year three, year four, when I was really struggling because I didn't understand what SOPs were or managing client expectations. I used to give away things for free. That all changed. But it changed the hard way. I think an event like agency transformation live just expedites that process for anyone needing to learn things from others who want to give you that information for free. It's just a beautiful thing. I can't say enough good things about ATL. It was, I think, my favourite event I've ever been to in my entire working career. Although I didn't make it this time, just because I couldn't make it work, I cannot wait to be there next year.

Lee:

I think I've just accidentally had one of the best testimonials I've ever heard given for the event. That was a pure accident, but thank you so much. What I'm interested to find out is you had 30 agencies using Termageddon when you came over. What did the next year look like? What changed for you in order to scale Termageddon? Because obviously you now have people all around the world using your product. You're essentially a household name in the WordPress industry. What changed over the first year? What did you start to put in place to start that scaling process?

Hans:

Well, I first will say that the very first time I heard anyone say Termageddon publicly was you Lee because you were like, We're welcoming everyone to the event. You're like, and someone flew from Chicago. He runs some company called Termageddon. To hear someone say the name of a company I made, it was just like that. I still remember that moment. But yeah, we went off with the theory that agencies don't have any idea what to do when it comes to website policies for the clients because I didn't. And after marrying a privacy attorney and realizing the downsides to copying and pasting legal document templates for clients, I was like, Okay, there's a lot of potential here. So, The free license we give to web agencies really took off. And the first year, we went from 30 to just over 2,000 manually approved agency partners. Over the course of the next two years, we've gone over 5,000. I know we're at over 5,000 now. I have an employee that will still approve manually agency applications. W e've gotten over 5,000. I would just say that the real scale factor was just the fact that I got lucky in the sense that my frustrations and pain points just happened to be a universal issue.

Hans:

GDPR was out and new privacy laws coming into America. I feel agencies were probably just getting more and more uncomfortable with copying and pasting templates, like clients always ask them to. Just giving them the educational material to educate their clients on this stuff just seemed to be a very successful thing where agencies... By educating clients that they may be legally required to have website policies, but ensuring that they get to make that decision, I think that was a breakthrough for a lot of agencies, which is like, you don't have to feel guilty feeling like you have to go copy and paste legal documents for clients. No, it's the client's responsibility if they want to comply with laws or not. As an agency, you should just protect yourself by getting a document that you told them that they may need policies by law and then let them make that decision. I think that clarity is something that I think has been why Termageddon has been able to grow and have a lot of customers now.

Lee:

You hit the nail on the head as well with regards to the education. You guys went on a massive education drive then. Well, over the last few years, you've been on multiple events, including the 2020 Digital ATL as speakers. I've seen you on multiple events over the last few years. How much of, say, your role is the education side versus operation side, do you feel?

Hans:

Yeah. Donata, she's the President of Termageddon. She's providing guidance to legislators on how to write privacy laws at the American bar. She's a smart one.

Lee:

She's a freaking legend.

Hans:

FYI, everyone. Yeah, she's a genius. She's really operations. I'm more sales and marketing, but with marketing, rather than trying to be like Billy Mays, although at the time of this recording, it's about to be Black Friday, and I am going total Billy Mays style on Black Friday. But outside of that, I really just feel like education is the most important part because that's what I felt like I was missing as an agency owner. It turns out you don't need a lot of greed to tell your clients that, Hey, things like names and emails are regulated data. You should look into getting policies for your business and let the client decide how to do it. I know I simplified there, but that took at least six months of me working full time a term again to unlock those thoughts and be able to communicate it. So, yeah, education is something I try to do as much as possible just because too few people realize there's privacy bills out there that have passed. It's going to allow consumers to start suing businesses anywhere. I mean, it's just wild. It's great that people are getting a right to their privacy.

Hans:

It's just a joke that a small business owner needs to have super complex, ever changing website policies just to have a website online. I'm super talkative. This is my fourth coffee of the day, but hopefully that all makes sense.

Lee:

This is my sixth, mate. Right now, everything for me is in slow motion. Have you seen the film Over the Hedge? If you've not seen the film, I'm going to put this in the show notes. Priya, who edits this, please remind me we need to put a link to the squirrel scene from Over the Hedge because that is exactly where my brain is right now. The whole universe is going at three times as slow. I've had so much caffeine. Right now, mate, you're amongst a brother. You've hit some real key things here as well in a business. Number one is that you understood the key pain point. In fact, you've actually experienced the key pain point, which makes you a really good person to do the education. You've also then begun a form of education program. The third thing is that you're turning up in the right spaces. How do you make your decisions or your choices as to where to show up in regards to providing those sorts of education, be it events, be it podcasts like this one or wherever else you go?

Hans:

Well, I just can't help but think it's luck again. I just so happened to book a last minute flight to ATL and then showed up and it's like, Oh, my God. I just met like 50 new best friends. I will say Word camps I tend to just go to. If there's a Word camp and I'm feeling it, I'm just going to go. I don't really research those much. But really, when I sat down at ATL and other similar events, but ATL in particular is a place in my heart for and started to realize, Oh, my gosh, there's people coming together and teaching each other best practices about agency life, and everything I'm seeing them talk about is extremely valuable. I want to invest into this. I want to sponsor these events. I want to start participating more in them. It was just because I saw so much value with a lot of events that I was like, I want to have Termageddon's name associated with this because I think we can provide value too. I think this concept, because it can save an agency owner years of their stress and hopefully lots of their hairline, I think that's where I just gravitated towards it.

Hans:

I can't say it was some master plan or anything. It was just like, Okay, wow, that just blew my mind. How can I support that more? I just have a gut, listen to my gut, I would say, maybe might be a good way of putting it.

Lee:

Listen to your gut, but also you've already shared how absolutely invested in the problem you've been over time. So you already knew how it feels and your target audience. So it sounds like you're showing up wherever your target audience would be or the people that you can help would be. But also you're doing two things, you're educating and also you mentioned about the sponsorship, so that's the brand recognition as well. I think the biggest thing we can draw as agency owners ourselves, just from this 10 minutes of conversation right now is that when you know who it is that you serve, then you're going to know what their pain point is. You're going to know how to educate them to solve that problem. You're also going to know where to show up, be that physically at events or even as a brand recognition thing through just general sponsorship of those sorts of events or podcasts or wherever. It sounds to me, Hans, it's just been, like you said, an accidental but just an easy and obvious process because right from the get go, you've already had that identity. That's something we taught at Agency Transformation Live.

Lee:

This definitely sounds like an advertorial right now.

Hans:

It does. This is what we taught when we never had this conversation.

Lee:

This is exactly what we taught at.. This is exactly what we taught at Agency Transformation Live as well with regards to starting off with your identity, understanding the value that you have to offer, and then building your platform, which is your messaging, et cetera. This is definitely a good case study, if anything, if not just a podcast for that exact process, which I thank you for sharing accidentally.

Hans:

Yeah. If I could expand further there, I just had a flashback to 2019 at ATL. For the record, this is not supposed to be an advertisement to ATL. We just decided to get on the call together. This is accidentally. But how can we not talk about that? I want to hear about how it went two weeks ago. But I'll tell you, I remember I saw you showed a video advertisement you made of you in a suit and tie, and you're very stiff and trying to be very professional and everything. You're like, I just didn't never felt right. Then you decide just to be yourself. Then the clients that attract to you for you just being you feeds into itself. I just can't stress enough how important that is, is that once you know yourself, and I don't know if we ever fully know ourselves, but as you age, you understand more about what you value. I think naming our company Termageddon, has had so many secret benefits because I think people who are like, very, Oh, I'm so professional. Look at me, I'm the most... I'm very corporate. I work fine with those people.

Hans:

We have a couple of billion dollar companies using Termageddon. But the vast majority of people are just like, Oh, that's a cool name. I'd work with these people. Those are the types of people. I want to work with people that I could feel like I could get a beer with or coffee with and just have a good time.

Lee:

Or we'd throw in little references like, Get to the chopper.

Hans:

Get to the Chopper, of course. Any Hans Gruber references from Diehard? I'm in. All of those? But yeah, I would say that Termageddon was my second go around. This time I was like, you know what? I like to be funny. I'm not probably, but I like to try to think I'm funny. We named it Termageddon. We are slightly sarcastic in our content and stuff. Turns out that attracts a certain type of person that I enjoy working with. That's really exciting for me because every day I talk to someone, it is the same problems. Everyone has the exact same issues. It's like a set of 200. Once you memorize the 200, you're basically good to go. And Then from there, it's just take good care of people and hopefully the business keeps growing.

Lee:

Another lesson then that we can draw from that, mate, and I live just pulling out all these nuggets from everything that you're saying. You're full of them today, so thank you. But the important thing is there is that we can know who our target market is, but we also need to know who our target person is. Within a target market of agencies, there are many different types of agencies, some that are working with corporate who literally want to get to the point. They're very serious. Then you have probably more Trailblazer style audience, which is more chilled out young 20 to 60 year old agency owners, all still young, obviously, you're only old when you hit 90, who do like to have fun, who likes to spend time with family and friends, et cetera, who don't take themselves too seriously. The beauty of our community as well as we're all very supportive. With those corporate agencies, they're all very competitive with each other. You're not going to find them all in the same room helping each other out. Whereas with your target market or with our joint community here, everyone just wants to help each other out because we all have an abundant mindset, don't we?

Lee:

We're not going to try and steal business from each other. We're going to try and support each other, which is awesome. What are your plans for the next, maybe, two or three years with Termageddon? What are you hoping to do with the product? Are you going to add more services? Are you going to carry on as you are? What's the plan, Batman?

Hans:

We just hired a CTO who he's an absolute beast. He's going to do very good with this company. We're basically going to be launching an additional country. We're going to be launching language support, but we're starting it all with a complete new UI update. I have personally walked over a 1,000 customers through the set up just clients of agencies that are just like, hey, they need an extra helping hand. Can you help them? No problem. Just walk them through it. But after doing this so many times, I've just figured out how people think when it comes to website policies. It's like, I know they're important, but I have no idea what to do. Now what? How do I take them from there to, oh, my gosh, I know so much more about policies and I understand this so much more. We're basically going to redo the UI UX, and that's going to set us up to implement some scanning, some additional scanning components. We do have a scanner now, but some additional scanning components, which we think are going to be real nifty. We're really focused on giving our agency partners the ability to set up a license and embed codes, even if they're coming soon pages, and then share the license with the client to answer any business related questions all in one swoop.

Hans:

What I mean by that is if you resell a term again license, you can log in a term again once, get everything set up on your end, answer the website related questions, and then share with your client, Hey, fill it out. When you're done, your policies will automatically update on your website. I guess that's a long winded way of saying we want to expand into more countries. We are actively getting new translation set up for additional languages, and we're doubling down on what we have been doing, which is focusing on making sure web agencies feel confident in talking about the importance of website policies with clients.

Lee:

That's awesome. There's another lesson that we can learn. From your story arc here, right at the very beginning, you mentioned that for the first year you onboarded I can't remember the number, let's say it was 2,000 people manually. When you're building a business that scales, you don't have to get everything right at the very beginning. You don't have to have got all of those automated processes in place. You don't have to have created the best UI in the world. What Hans has done here is started onboarding people manually, figuring out what makes people tick. And over the last three years, it sounds like you've now got a very good idea of how things work in the minds of your target audience. You're now working on your latest version, and that will be your platform, therefore, to scale upon where you're automating all of that hard stuff, making things as easy as possible, and like you said, scaling and taking over the world.

Hans:

You said that about 10 times better than I did. That's exactly it. Thank you.

Lee:

No, that's awesome. Well, so, folks, be sure to check out the show notes in your podcast player. Just look down below and there'll be a link to the show notes. If you are watching us on YouTube, then again, go and have a look at the show notes and you can check out Termageddon and their services and get started with your account. This is not an advertorial for Termageddon either, but it's worth checking out for sure. There are many people in our industry that swear by it, so be sure to check that out. Hans, are you going to be at any events over the next few months that people might be able to come and rub shoulders with you before we go?

Hans:

I should know that probably, but I honestly.

Lee:

Can't remember. Probably. Well, in that case, I would recommend that you follow Hans. What are the best ways for people to connect with you on social media so they can find out where you're going to be?

Hans:

Twitter@DeepSpaceHans is my Twitter handle. I'll definitely be sure to post on there. And Lee, what do you have in the next couple of months?

Lee:

All right. So I am down, as in chilling out because the ATL 2022 was super hard work but went super well.

Hans:

I heard a lot of good things from a lot of people.

Lee:

There's loads of pictures and videos coming out soon on YouTube as well, folks. So keep an eye for that. But also then, over the next few months, we're doing some mini events around the UK, and we're in talks with different companies trying to work out what we can do in the USA for an ATL USA. You did mention that. We have also locked in our dates for ATL 2023 with the same venue that we use this year because the feedback was phenomenal. They absolutely loved it. That will be in October time, but exact dates are yet to be announced. I'm doing all sorts with regards to organizing events and obviously continuing to create content for Trailblazer. Don't follow me on social media, folks, because I'm closing most of my social media accounts. Just hit trailblazer.fm and obviously subscribe to the YouTube or to the podcast. With that said, I think we should just do a cheesy way of goodbye.

Hans:

All right.

Lee:

Bye, folks.