BGP 007 Jake Hower Automating Business Systems FuzedApp

In this interview, Spencer chats with Jake Hower from FuzedApp about how automating business processes with FuzedApp helps small businesses. Jake started FuzedApp to automate the processes in his own travel agency business in Australia. As he described what he was doing to other business owners, he found their was an interest to offer his system as a service to other entrepreneurs. As he is building the business, he is taking the old school approach Gary Vaynerchuck mentioned this week of actually picking up the phone and calling your customers to find out what they want and how it’s working for them. He is also extending that personal touch to hand written cards to each of the new customers. With a little over 20 customers at the time of the interview, he is still in the early stages of the game, but definitely gaining momentum as more business owners find out about the tool through word of mouth and social media. Currently, the system is focused on two platforms, Infusionsoft (Jake uses this) and Ontraport (formerly Office Autopilot which we use). The tool then allows you connect those systems to other systems we use like Wistia, GotoWebinar, and Timetrade or ScheduleOnce. Wistia, is a great video we player we use that allows us to track how long individual members of our membership watch our videos. FuzedApp allows us to collect that data, and save it into Ontraport allowing us to create a lead score based on how much of a video the contact has watched. The same technique is also applied to GotoWebinar scoring contacts based on whether they showed up for a webinar and how long they attended. FuzedApp integrates with Timetrade and ScheduleOnce by connecting to Google Calendar and saving appointment data in Ontraport and Infusionsoft. This allows you to then assign those contacts to follow up sequences, tag them based on lead sources, and automate the creation of tasks based on what the scheduled event was. 2:40 – How he came up with his business idea over the weekend 3:48 – What he did to validate his business idea 5:20 – Paid vs Free customers 6:17 – What he did to get traction 7:04 – Going deep vs wide 9:08 – How he’s interrupting the marketplace with his approach 11:00 – Marketing tool he’s using to keep customers during trial 12:03 – Why connecting with his customers is so important 12:25 – The big mistake most businesses make 13:45 – Jake shares his metrics 15:06 – He shares his most important tasks for growing the business 15:55 – Why he’s not always doing the most important daily tasks 17:01 – What he really thinks of his customers 17:35 – His 12 month vision 19:00 – Content marketing vs personalization 21:45 – Why using the product is the real test 23:05 – Key takeaways 23:40 – Jake’s final piece of advice 24:57 – How to keep in touch with Jake[/box]