Category: Articles

  • SaaS vs On-Premise – Good vs Bad?

    Running multiple software script companies and projects before, I knew immediately when I started a new project I had an important choice to make: SaaS vs On-Premise…

    Back in 2015, I started working on a project for myself to build up alongside the FB Group Auto Poster I had created alongside my wife Sharon.

    I got the domain, got the hosting, and started building a website and membership section on it for people to sign into. I then started thinking of what I wanted to provide my members with. The years before Sharon and I started making and selling our own software, courses, ebooks, and more and wanted a centralized place to promote everything in one.

    This would make it much easier for affiliates to promote all of our products and for us to inform affiliates of new offers they could promote and earn commissions on.

    While developing the backend I found a client who wanted something similar, which allowed me to finish the project and actually sell it… Not only did it sell, but it generated $1.3m in revenue for this specific client and their downlines, sky-rocketed them into the leaderboards and even won them prizes for the best offer and most sales during that year.

    Much of that was attributed to the offer, but without the funnel system I had developed it wouldn’t have worked out the way it did. More and more people heard about the success and wanted a copy of the software for themselves, and I decided it was time to turn the software into a turnkey solution.

    This means that whenever someone wanted a funnel system installation, I had a “turn-key” solution ready: all I had to do was install the code and they could take it from there.

    The Saas vs On-Premise question was a tough nut to crack!

    If we’d go for the SaaS model, we could charge less and have more clients have access to the product. 

    This would mean that I’d have to sell more to generate more revenue to re-invest back into the turnkey solution that Sharon and I were building, but we’d have to automate it all and run against the time vs money clock to make each customer happy with their setup.

    OR… with the on-premise model, I could sell the software for a higher price, but take on fewer clients. This in turn would free up more time to ensure that each individual client would get EXACTLY to the T what they’d want, and use it to grow their business…

    We made our choice when we had to choose: SaaS vs On-Premise… We went for the latter to start out.

    And that is exactly what we did… We charged more and were able to help clients 1on1 get their system setup done and completed and launched. We re-invested everything we could – minus some money to live off of – and over the next 5 years we turned it into a solution that is ready for the future.

    saas vs on-premise

    Now, after 6 years of hard work and dedication, we feel the software is at a place where it’s ready to be opened up to the masses. We’re turning it into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, deprecating our standalone offer (only for VIPs), and making Downline Builder Software available to everyone at an affordable price.

    Cheers,
    Aron

  • The Personal Touch

    The personal touch -> acknowledgement of artist to fan / business to customer

    There are many that say “Personal branding is the key” and that it’s the way to success… But why?

    Working online for over 10 years, I found out that it’s not the fact that the physical person is across the customer. It is the acknowledgement that the receiver gets. It makes them feel special and appreciated and sometimes even turns them into advocates of whatever the sender is offering or sharing.

    A perfect example is NY based rapper Ryan Leslie. Ryan’s an independent artist and entrepreneur who started a new phone-based app SUPERPHONE. The sole purpose of this app is connecting fans and consumers with the artist or business and enabling them to understand their audience which potentially results in a better experience, thus more sales.

    Not only does this enable the artist to acknowledge the fan or the business the customer, but it opens up another way to start collaborations. Collaborations of joint forces that result in a new project or product that is eventually revenue generating.

    As you see, the personal touch is a way to connect and learn from your audience. Whoever you have in front of you, just ask what you need to know. If you want to share your content (a blog post, meme or video) figure out what your audience currently watches and match your brand or product against it to produce a converting creative. Do your research and create a target that you can easily communicate with… Basically your ideal customer.

    When you send an e-mail simply ASK for a reply to start the conversation. Be available, and actively connect with people you think might help spread your word. The bigger your network, the bigger your profits. Your network is your net-worth.

    Action Tips

    Go to your favorite autoresponder and create a new list. Create a new opt-in form, create a copy of your landing page and connect that new opt-in form with that new page.

    Build a list with that page, and setup a 7 day autoresponder series where you repeatedly ask for contact. Ask them to reply to the “lead magnet” you gave them. Ask for their opinions, thoughts and work your way into figuring out what people want. Once you know what people want?

    Give it to them.

    Find a way that you can make a profit of what they want. It sounds cold. Find someone -> Figure out what they want -> Sell it to them and make a profit. But in the end, that’s the simple formula of business. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they want, it matters how you bring it to them.

    Let me ask you this: who’d you rather buy from… A sales person who pushes you to buy that new TV? … Or Tom! Your new friend who drinks the same beer while watching “THE GAME” JUST like you do :O

    And if you combine the above with genuine love for your product, knowing that you have something that can benefit the person you give it to + a good service that backs up your product… You have a winner.

  • Own What You Build.

    Working with a lot of people in a lot of different industries, a few years ago my focus was shifted towards the music business while working with Ryan Leslie on a project of his.

    In doing so, talking to him and looking at what he’s doing I came to realise that being independent in business takes longer… But results in owning more of your sh*t.

    What I mean? 

    Owning something could make the difference when your business is on the line. Let’s create a theory here: you start a website, buy a domain and order hosting from a hosting company like GoDaddy. You pay them to deliver a product and you become their customer and you’ll be depending on their services. They own the server, they are the registrar (fancy word for domain registration company ;)).

    You run your business as normal, but one month you’re short in money to pay your hosting bill. 

    Wouldn’t it be better at that moment to have your own your servers and be your own registrar rather then using another company’s resources?

    It would wouldn’t it?

    Am I saying that everyone should go out, start their own hosting company and thus “owning” more of their business? No.

    This works for me and Sharon, and let me remind you: everything works. Not everything works for YOU.

    We’re in the service business. We create tools and softwares that we need to run our own business from our little home near The Hague. No fancy cars, no fancy clothes, no extra rooms. About 75% of our home is dedicated to our business like full-size desks with 27’ iMacs, seating area to receive guests, a (very small) kitchen where we cook and a tiny bedroom that barely fits the bed we sleep in.

    It’s all we need. Can we get a bigger house? Sure. But we don’t want to just yet, it’s sowing season ;).

    Point of my post is, that in the end it’s better to have as much control as possible and if you want control, you’ll have to literally own the process. You’ll succeed where others fail and will make more money along the way…

    The value of this post: How can you do what we do?

    Another theory: you’re looking into sending bulk emails but have no clue who’s good, what works and what doesn’t and you don’t want to find out either: you’d rather manage it yourself.

    Here’s what we did: we started our own email system. Our own opt in forms. Our own lists on our own servers. Our own autoresponder system that does EXACTLY what WE want it to do for our business. We spent hours and hours setting everything up, getting it ready to rumble and making sure we’d achieve the best results possible for our email marketing.

    While working on other projects, we figured out customers needed the same software we needed… So we sold it to them for a monthly fee months ago… AND THEY ARE STILL PAYING EACH MONTH TO RECEIVE OUR EMAIL SERVICE.

    So trust us when we say: It’s worth it owning your sh*t.

  • It’s not about ethics… It’s about cash.

    In today’s market, I can’t help but see that people don’t care about a product anymore… They just want a product that converts. 

    How? Don’t care. Why? Don’t care. When? ASAP. X% Commissions? Mucho important!

    But what if the product is bad? What if it does not deliver what is promised? “Well, I made a commission!”.
    Years ago I was working at a call center. I worked a 9 to 5 calling people who had an internet plan with their provider, and it was my job to upsell them to a higher plan… Whether they needed it or not. 

    I found myself calling people at the age of sometimes as high as 80, offering them “double the internet speed and double the internet quality for the same price!” which of course is something no 80-year-old would ever need. They hardly used the internet at all other than to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren, but were not downloading albums, movies, and software. They browsed the web and sent some e-mails… No need for a double-speed internet plan.

    Being me, I asked my floor manager if there was another product to sell. It didn’t feel right.
    When I walked out of the door at work, you know: the point where you are supposed to “leave your work” it didn’t stop. I was thinking to myself why I just sold a high-speed internet plan to an 80-year-old man living in a retirement home, where the most exciting part of the day was what type of meat he’d get during dinner. How could I sell this man high-speed internet…

    That’s the feeling I’m talking about: People don’t care. Let me adjust: Marketers don’t care.

    They think about the conversion rates, the commission they get on a sale, and before promoting a product making an estimate for themselves how much they could earn off their promotions.

    Now don’t get me wrong: we’re here to make money, but shouldn’t the first priority be what the product is? If it’s of good quality? Would it actually suit and benefit the person I’m offering it/selling it to?

    These are all questions that revolve around ethics and in my opinion (and Sharon’s too) should always come before the need and/or desire of making the sale.

    If you’re in this game long enough, you know how to close a sale: perhaps that’s for another blog post, what I’m trying to say here is that your name is more important than making a quick buck. Look into your audience, reach out to them, get to know them, and see what product matches their needs.

    Make sure you know exactly what they want, and understand what they want, and look into your product arsenal and see what you can deliver. Go to JVZoo, look for a product that matches their need (search for a product as an affiliate) and request your affiliate link. Depending on the offer and product you’re looking for, you can rake in up to 100% commissions per sale. 

    You don’t need your own product, you don’t need a website and you sure as hell don’t need to invest in a $1000 course to learn how to do all this… It should “make sense to you”.

    All you have to do is be well informed. Know your products, own the products (if possible), and recommend them with the knowledge that it actually fits the person you are selling it to, not your wallet. 

  • Get Better Results With The Same Campaigns!

    Back in the day when we got started – in 2012/2013 – we had never even heard of e-mail marketing. We started off as a 1 man company (Just Aron) who handled everything: the website, the app, the customer service, seo, blog articles but most importantly: the marketing.


    At Aron & Sharon, we’re self thought like many of you out there, meaning that we learned as our little business grew to adapt to the situation we’d been given and worked our asses off to success. Aron started as a web designer, period. 

    No SEO, no Marketing -although he worked at a call center- Online, no app development, nothing. Just web design. 

    As he started to learn more about all of this, he soon realised the SEO was the way to go. Finding a good domain name and ranking it to appear on the first pages of all search engines, we believe that you set yourself up for the future. We are in a position where we start a project, work on SEO to rank the site and once ranked we simply let it sit. Traffic builds up organically and therefore have the best converting traffic generating leads and eventually sales.

    In a matter of months, we’d built up a little network of domains of which some ranked on the first page. We setup a landing page, added our opt-in form and started to build what we all hear so much about: an e-mail list.

    Within weeks we had a “list” of a whopping 150+ leads and had no clue what to do with them… Ok come on, we knew that we had to email them… Duhhh… But how? Send them all an e-mail at once? 

    Working at a call center, Aron knew that “mentioning the customers name in a conversation works in the benefit of your relationship” but had no clue that this also applied to bulk e-mailing.

    Long story short, we’ve built our business on e-mail marketing. We learned it all: the well known autoresponder systems, copy, highlighting, repeating links in the e-mail so people don’t have to scroll back and forth and all the other little things that you need to think about while writing your e-mails.

    As you can imagine, over the years we’ve sent so many e-amils that we learned what worked and what didn’t. Not by reading a book, not by buying an expensive e-course on “Generate 6 Figures in 4 weeks with e-mail marketing”: we learned it by testing to see what works and what doesn’t and we’ve built up quite a few tips & tricks of our own.

    The one we feel is the most important: Connect 1 on1 with your leads.

    We’re not suggesting that you should call them, meetup and have dinner with them or start a business together but when you e-mail them… ASK for a reply. 

    “Let me know how you’re doing {FIRSTNAME}!?” or“Reply to this e-mail if you need me, ok {FIRSTNAME}?”

    This doubled, if not tripled our results. Why? Because the people that respond took the time to:

    1. Opt-In to your list
    2. Put in valid details so they actually get your e-mail (don’t take this for granted!)
    3. Open the e-mail you’ve sent them
    4. ACTUALLY REPLYING BACK TO YOU!!!

    You asked if you could be of help – in this case – so you should expect some response. By applying this simple thing into your e-mails, you actually get the chance to “filter” out the people that are actually interested to work with you.

    Apply this to your e-mails, and let us know how it works for you!!!

  • When I was 6…

    I was 6 when I first saw the internet. It was 1996, I came home to my Dad and he showed me a big white screen with an even taller big white box next to it:

    “Aron, this is a computer. It gives us access to the internet!”

    He connected to the internet via a dial-up modem and he fired up the Netscape internet browser:

    “Type in anything you’d like to know!?”

    Being 6, I couldn’t come up with anything better then what would be on tv, which back then was unheard of (if I’d had only seen the potential then, hahaha!) so he showed me some results he came up with, making me realise immediatly that this was going to be big.

    At 7, I was introduced to a friend of my Dad, still remember: Fred Philippo.

    I have no clue what he did at the time, but I remember him as my Dasd’s cool friend who had a ton of games and software, computers galore, and an entire room dedicated to it all.

    Fred was awesome enough to introduce me to CoffeeCup, one of the first HTML editors online. He attempted to teach me basic HTML and showed me how to make a web page.

    No WordPress. No Themes. No Plugins.

    I had 0: a blank notepad file with some weird scribbling in it which at the time… Didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
    Fast forwarding: gaming (Wolfenstein 3D, Tomb Raider I and Max Payne), my Dad passing away (I was 14), making ny own websites since 8 years old…

    I picked up the art of magic, and was able to get in touch with a magician in the USA. He was one of the many magicians creating his own effects and selling them on his website.

    I bluffed myself into making him a site, to become friends with him and work together. 
    Thats when I learned determitation: I had just bluffed myself into a job and the client accepted!

    I had to learn HTML, learn Photoshop, and create a full blown website that would actually be a complete site, blog, webshop system and e-mail system in one installation. It’s one of my specialties by the way but anyhow…. I did learn it all doing it with little bits of PHP, HTML, CSS, and some tables xD

    He thought me magic for free, he got a cool website! He was selling via PayPal at the time, and all was running smoothly.
    He teamed up with other magicians:

    “Need a website? Aron’s your guy!”

    Since then, and still I work with a group of magicians and cardistry artists ( click that link, you’ll like it. Promise 😉 ) and maintain their sites, and sometimes even host them through our hosting company. 

    I got into internet marketing around 2010, being introduced by a vague (dutch) video that promised something along the lines of: work 4 hours a day and get $2500 a week… An impossible promise that simply couldn’t be lived unto, unless they have a magic machine that generates a product, website, converting sales copy and of course, please don’t forget: The traffic, that needs to be of such quality that it actually converts with the offer… In just four hours a day? And btw that’s just the beginning of starting your own product and services.

    I had my own physical phone repair company with a friend, which we ran out of my home.

    All said and done, we ran it for a year and a half and decided it was best to part ways. Had a lot of fun, but for some reason it just wasn’t profitable -> Should write a story about this xD

    From there I started to figure out how to work online from home, and came to the conclusion that it was best to run SAAS services: Products that require such software that fills a gap, something someone might need for their business, and a product that you can charge monthly for. 

    Each customer you rake in, you can bill monthly as your product offers a service which needs high maintenance for example.
    Servers, domains, support, interaction, finances and so much more that comes around the corner when you have your own business.

    So when I started out, I got with a shared hosting package for all my sites. They where good, cheap, and charged me per year at a fair price. Had a bunch here and there, and built up a product the published at a social network.

    I charged monthly for it, and offered a free version to test out.

    Doing all this at being 22, I considered this  “easy”. I setup PayPal recurring billing, created a nice big clear buy button ($1 Trials!) and did some SEO work – If you want my exact methods, hit the contact method above – and landed on the first page of Google. 

    Traffic came in organically, people where LOOKING FOR MY PRODUCT……………………. which was of course the best situation to be in as a seller.

    I even got word around town, and I guy came up to me asking me if I could create a poker website for him. He was paying too much renting a script then if he’d let one be made. I offered him to partner up and together we started pokersitesnamehere.nl 🙂

    Thinking about the site I had made a few weeks later, I considered the fact… What if I sold this site… I could create unlimited duplicates of it, license them and charge them X amount to run the script.

    So back to the hosting 🙂 I met Sharon after creating my initial product, and together we started looking at ideas, domain names and so much more an registered them with various hosting and domain registration companies.

    We’ve done a lot of things together already, and we’re now proud to introduce you to Cloudustries, our hosting and domain registration company!

  • Predicting The Future

    In this post we’re going to predict the future: Bots for Messenger is going to be one of the next biggest selling platforms that will be available to the general public.

    It could be used to generate income online more easily than ever.

    The simple fact alone that you can now auto-reply to a Messenger message is going to absolutely change the game:
    Imagine being able to predict the question that the customer will ask you, and auto replying to that within just five minutes.

    But not only that the: Facebook API is now allowing you to build your own custom bots. 
    What we’re planning to do is create an application that allows to define keywords and based upon those keywords you’re going to be able to auto-reply a Message to your potential customer.

    Once this is done we’ll release a beta version to the public where people are able to get in for life and get limited updates, support, feature requests and so much more. 

    Imagine the ability to create an autoresponder for your messenger app…
    That’s all we’re going to say about it though because we’re already working on a platform for you to use… We’re looking forward to inviting you soon to what we predict is the future of online selling.

    Cheers,
    Aron & Sharon

  • Busy planning & the future.

    The last couple of weeks Sharon and I have been very busy with planning. The future, how we’re going to duplicate what we have accomplished so far but most of all: how can we give back?

    We’ve been very fortunate to launch our business and within a year be fully independent. By independent, I mean no third party stuff. We do it all ourselves, in-house.

    Exciting times are ahead, and we can’t wait to share what we have coming. For the past 4 months, we have been very focused on building our own blogging platform, creating training courses and converting received feedback to reality, and creating what is in demand. 

    Stay tuned, we have some awesome stuff to share with you very soon.

    Take care,
    Aron