Andy Fletcher Interview

Editor:

Today we're chatting with someone who I guess you could call a disruptor, as together with his business partner, he's become one of the major players in the field of lead generation and funnel pages. In fact, you may have heard of Andy's company already, because it's rather well respected in its field, it's called Convertri. And it's well worth checking out if you plan on having your own online business. Andy founded Convertri because he thought landing page platforms could do things better. So, I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation. Andy Fletcher, welcome.

Andy Fletcher:

Hey, thank you so much for having me today.

Editor:

It's great to have you here. I think we should start in the time honoured tradition though, of going back a little while and finding out more about you and what got you involved in the online marketplace.

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, sure. So, my background is all technology. I have a computer science degree for my sins and after university I worked in a couple of tech jobs, and at one of them I worked at this absolutely terrible startup where we did all manner of things that never worked. We burned through a lot of venture capital while I worked there. I'd like to add this, that wasn't my fault. And one of the things we did was celebrity websites. So, my stupidest claim to fame is that I worked on the official website for Ant and Dec.

Editor:

Nice.

Andy Fletcher:

Which also dates me rather a lot too. So while I was there, some of the other people were aware that there was going to be, somebody was needed for SEO. And a mate of mine there bought an SEO book, because he knew I would read anything put on my desk. He bought it at lunchtime, he left it on my desk knowing that I would pick it up when the senior managers were coming around looking for somebody to be the, can I swear on your show?

Editor:

Of course. Go right ahead.

Andy Fletcher:

I was politely referred to as the SEO bitch. And they were coming around looking to see who to make the SEO bitch. And sure enough, I was sat there reading this book on SEO and the guy was like, "Ah, Andy, you know all about this. Fantastic. You get this new job." And I was like, "Wait, what?" So that was the big setup. That's how I got started with online digital marketing, got into the idea of it. And at that point learned some SEO skills, learned how to rank websites, learned about OnPage, doing all the typical stuff for getting stuff ranked in Google. And then when that startup went belly up and they decided that paying us was optional, I went into business with myself doing SEO for clients and then making SEO products.

Editor:

Great. So, in terms of online, it's been one of those things, I guess it's in your blood in many ways, right?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, definitely. I'm definitely a child of the internet. I grew up with it. I had my first computer when I was about 15, I think? And an internet connection at 16. Which I still am, I was then, but just the biggest nerd in the world. I can still remember my parents going away, when I was 16 years old, for the weekend and I was super excited, where all my contemporaries were super excited to get rid of their parents and have parties, I was super excited because it gave me unfettered access to the computer for 48 hours so I could learn HTML.

Editor:

And then fast-forward, you started Convertri, which has really established itself as one of the major players in, how would you describe it? Landing pages, funnel building?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, definitely both I would say. We have a lot of people that use us specifically for landing pages and then plug in other best in class tools. And then there's a lot of people who use this as a full stack funnel builder.

Editor:

Right. So for anybody who's maybe not come across Convertri before, maybe you could just give us a bit of a background as to first of all how it came about, but secondly how it's evolved since it started.

Andy Fletcher:

Certainly. So, Convertri is actually the punchline to a joke, a really bad joke from an internet marketing conference in summer 2015, something like that? I was on a panel of digital marketers, more tech-focused digital marketers, answering questions about how software gets built and things like that. And my mate, Jay, who was sat at the back and sorry, before I tell this story I would like to point out that alcohol was involved in this event, because of course it was.

Editor:

All the best stories are, aren't they?

Andy Fletcher:

And it will make me sound like slightly less of a jerk when I tell you the punchline. So anyway, my mate Jay, sticks his hand up and he is like, "Andy, you're a developer. It's 2015, why when I get my developer to, say I want to move my logo to the other side of the page. I want to move the sign-up button a bit to the right. Why does it take him so long? Why is it so expensive? Et cetera, et cetera." And at the time, my answer was, "Jay, speaking as the kind of developer that has to do it for the kind of people like you? Off." And I got a laugh from the crowd and it was funny, but that thought really nagged at me. Why, at the time, was it so hard to get pages live? There was all kinds of page builders that promised the earth, but if you wanted to do anything that was slightly off-piste, certainly if you wanted to take advantage of breakthroughs in [inaudible] technology or anything like that, you just couldn't.

Andy Fletcher:

It was really hard, you had to custom code stuff, you had to hire developers. And that was pretty wild given the number of page builders that were already on the market. So, that's when we started putting together the first version. At the same time, my business partner Neil, was reading all of the page feed reports coming out of Amazon and Google where they were talking about how you lose, at the time it was 40% of your traffic, if your pages didn't load in three seconds. It's now up north of 50%. And we realised we could combine these concepts of, you put a thing on a page, you hit publish, and where you put it is where it appears. That's it. You don't have to understand responsive technology and rows and columns and all of this complicated stuff. It's a simple thing. If you can use Word, you can use Convertri to make a page, and then that page will load really, really, really fast. And that makes such a big difference to ad spend, to any landing page.

Editor:

It's one of those things, isn't it, that I guess once you've set up a website using something like WordPress, you know how much of a challenge it can be to actually set up a page. So was that part of the thinking behind Convertri, as in we just want to make this super simple for the end user?

Andy Fletcher:

Very much so. The goal was as simple as it can possibly be. We made all of the developers working on it print out the words "just like Word" and stick it up on the wall.

Editor:

Right.

Andy Fletcher:

So every time we developed a new feature, they would often ask, "Oh, how should this bit work? What's the decision?" And I tap the sign, every time. I want a 60-year old to pick this up, move some things around, start typing and be like, "Oh, it's just like Word."

Editor:

And, you have achieved that. I mean, if anybody who's not used Convertri yet, it's definitely worth getting an account so you can just see how simple it is. What are the advantages though, Andy, of not using WordPress? Because WordPress has become a bit of a default in terms of online websites.

Andy Fletcher:

Certainly. So WordPress still has its place. We still run our own blog on WordPress. It's definitely not a either or thing, but there's big chunks of the experience that WordPress makes really hard for people. With a tech background, I've worked on a tonne of WordPress sites and it's always the same sticking points. Things like the security's been compromised, like some update, they forgot to run it, they haven't logged in a little while, they come back and the site's been compromised. WordPress itself is simple-ish and it just works. And then anytime you want to do something, it's like, "Oh, you need a plugin for that." And then this plugin isn't compatible with that plugin, and this plugin doesn't work with that theme you've got, and this theme has this other file that you have to connect to that plug...

Andy Fletcher:

And it becomes this mess of tech when a marketer just doesn't care. It's not what they're interested in and nor should it be. They want to focus on, "How do I write a compelling message? How do I build a simple page that will generate me leads and make me sales?" And what we've set out to do with Convertri is just push all of that into the background. Let us worry about all of that technical stuff so marketers can focus on marketing.

Editor:

Got you. And, I guess in recent years, a lot of people now when they're visiting a site, they're doing more so on their mobile device than a desktop device than ever. And how has that affected Convertri, and how you developed Convertri itself?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, that's a really good question. So Convertri gives you a mobile specific mode, which to our knowledge, hardly any other builder out there does. Whereas most give you, it's a responsive design, so you design the desktop page and then it will produce the mobile mode based on that. But whatever it produces, that's it. You can't really influence it that much?

Editor:

Mm-hmm.

Andy Fletcher:

With Convertri, we'll still produce an automatic mobile mode for you, but then you have complete control. You can move things around, custom fit it, change all the scaling, change any part of it you want to really craft that mobile experience. And that makes such a huge difference to conversion rates. Even simple things like being able to hide certain things on mobile, maybe shrink the headline font down, or just swap the ordering around by simply dragging things up and down the page, makes a really big difference to that mobile conversion experience.

Editor:

And that's super important these days, I guess, because more and more people are using their mobile device for more and more things. So I guess it makes sense that when you have, would you call it, a mobile first approach?

Andy Fletcher:

I'm a bit reticent on the whole mobile first thing.

Editor:

Okay.

Andy Fletcher:

I still encourage people to think about the desktop experience and then scale it down to mobile. Trying to design mobile first and then add things into the desktop, I find causes people to leave out key elements they really wish they had on a mobile device.

Editor:

Makes sense.

Andy Fletcher:

So generally we encourage people, build a desktop version, generate your automatic mode, and then think about what stuff you are taking out rather than building one thing and then adding things in and being like, "Oh yeah, my testimonials should really be on the mobile site as well."

Editor:

Makes sense. Makes sense. When you have a site with Convertri, because it's not just about the landing pages or the funnel that you can build, but it's also about the checkout process I guess, as well. And Convertri's really good at being able to have, it's almost like an all in one solution. But if you don't want to use Convertri's built-in checkout systems you can, I guess, attach others as well. Can you just talk a little bit about what you are finding now out in the real world and how people are paying online? Because before, I guess, it was so difficult to get out your credit card and enter all your details, but now with things like Apple Pay or Google Pay, mobile wallets I guess, has that made things easier or are we still in the infancy of that?

Andy Fletcher:

We are definitely still in the infancy of that. Our industry has a bit of a fetish with the latest, greatest technology. And while Apple Pay's big, all of these wallets are big business now, but compared to the number of people that don't have it, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, they have a credit card, they know how to type digits into a box. And I think a lot of people are very focused on these, "How can I make it easier for the user?" By having these, no typing your stuff in Apple Pay style stuff?

Editor:

Yeah.

Andy Fletcher:

But what they're doing there is optimising for the subset of people who are right at the cutting edge, and they're going to make it work, whatever your UI looks like. Whereas your average user doesn't understand that stuff, doesn't want to understand that stuff. They understand they've got a card, they type the numbers into a box and then they've bought your thing. And we find optimising for that side of it generally produces a better result than going, "Have you got an Apple Wallet? How about one of these Google things? What about Amazon Pay? Have you got any?" And your average user is like, "No. No, I don't. Give me the box."

Editor:

Yeah, yeah. It makes sense. I guess though in the future that's going to become more and more relevant, isn't it? That most people will end up with some kind of digital wallet that, I guess the most well known is PayPal, which isn't without its flaws we know. But would you say there's a move towards the online wallets?

Andy Fletcher:

Oh, definitely. They're coming. They're here in a fairly big way and they're only going to get bigger. We've just noticed this theme of people obsessing over the cutting edge part and ignoring just the big bulk of users in the middle who don't really get it. Maybe they've got Apple Pay set up on the phone and they know how to wave it at a checkout rather than waving their card at it. But for online purchases, we're just not seeing a lot of that stuff yet.

Editor:

Makes sense. Makes sense. Now being in the advantageous position of the owner of a platform, I guess you get to see the various ways people are using the software, but what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making online?

Andy Fletcher:

Oh, there's a really good question. So, I would say probably the biggest mistake is trying to be too clever and too fancy. So, a really good example is everyone comes to our platform wanting things like fancy animations? When study, after study, after study has shown they ruin your conversion rate. Animations appeal to the person that has to look at the site seven times a day for a year, whereas somebody just trying to get the information gets distracted by things moving around, and fading in, and dancing around the page, and all of that.

Andy Fletcher:

Your average user is very happy to start at the top and maybe they'll skim read, maybe they'll read the whole thing, but they're very happy to just know that all they've got to do is pull that scroll bar down and get to the end.

Editor:

Yeah.

Andy Fletcher:

You'll notice a really big theme in a lot of what I've been talking about here, and that's a focus on simplicity first. Everyone online is obsessed with the latest widget, the latest craze, the latest this, the latest that, and a great many people would sell a great many more products if they would just focus on the basics.

Editor:

It's the old KISS principle, isn't it? The keep it simple process.

Andy Fletcher:

Absolutely that. There's so many parts to this that you just don't need, and some fangled guru has said, "Oh, you must have this magic thing or you can't sell online," and it just doesn't make a difference a lot of the time.

Editor:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in terms of funnels and funnel creation, I know some people kind of go, "What is all this about? I know the idea of building a sales page, having a buy now button at the bottom, and that's it." Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit about what is a funnel and how Convertri can help people create these funnels?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, of course. That's another great question. So, we think about funnels in a couple of different ways. So the first most important one is the idea of the positive and the negative action, which makes everything so much easier to test. So with a typical website, you'll find, and I imagine anyone listening has at some point logged into Google Analytics, you've maybe got a WordPress blog, you installed the plugin that you let you put Google Analytics on it, you log into Google Analytics, you're like, "How is my website doing?" And then you log into Google Analytics and Google Analytics is like, "Here is a load of random data." And you're like, "No, no. How's it doing?" And it's like, "No, I can't help you with that." It'll tell you that a bunch of people clicked on this page. A bunch of people clicked on that page. But it's very hard to determine what people actually did and didn't do. Where did they drop off? What made them buy, what didn't make them buy? That's where a typical website falls down.

Andy Fletcher:

With a funnel approach, each page has a specific action. So, talking about a sales page the way you just did, we have a product for sale and ideally we have no other links on the page other than the ability to buy the product. So everyone that comes to our page either buys the product or they don't. So when you look at your analytics, you don't have to look at it and go, "Oh, okay. So 3% of people bought it and 7% of people went to this other page, and then 1% of them..." It's like, "On this page, five out of a hundred people bought the product, and tomorrow we're going to try and make it six out of a hundred," which makes everything about it just so much easier to think about than the complexity you get from a typical website.

Editor:

Makes sense. And I guess my big question for you, Andy, on more of a personal level, are you a codie yourself? Is that how you came up with the idea for Convertri?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah, so I think I mentioned I have a computer science degree. I am a completely nerdy, techie guy. I fell in love with digital marketing. I love direct response marketing online. This idea that we can tell how our marketing is doing, we can run an ad on Facebook, and then people come to our landing page, and then we know how much we spent for those clicks. And of those clicks, how many people made it to the page. Of the people that made it to the page, how many people opted in or how many people bought. And everything is just so much more measurable compared to, "Well, I stuck 5,000 flyers out there and I don't really know what happened because I can't tell which ones produced the callbacks." Or, "I put up a load of billboards and I think my calls have gone up, but I don't really know how." I love that aspect of direct response online, which is where my tech skills got converted over into marketing skills.

Editor:

Right, okay. And in terms of your team now, obviously Convertri is a major platform, I'm sure there's not just you, Andy. How big is the team?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah. So, contrary to some people's belief, we still get some people who will email support and be like, "Hi, Andy." And, I'm really flattered, I'm genuinely flattered that people think that I still write all the code, and answer all the support things, and do all the webinar, I do everything. However, it's true, I don't. There's a team of 20 of us now. It's grown, almost in spite of me at times, we've got an incredibly talented team that handle a lot of the day-to-day operations now.

Editor:

And how do you keep the team motivated? I guess this is, it's the insatiable beast in many ways, it's never actually finished. So it must be quite difficult for you as CEO to carry on that motivation, coming up with the ideas to continually evolve the platform?

Andy Fletcher:

So we've never really struggled with a motivated team. We seem to be really good at recruiting just really driven people, people really excited to build the next feature, or design the next feature, or answer support questions, or whatever it is. We've got really lucky in the staff that we've been able to hire, they do a fantastic job every day. And my job is to feed the pipeline, it's to talk about what's next. But, I rarely have the issue where it's like, "Oh, I've got to motivate them to today." They will show up really wanting to play, wanting to add the next feature.

Editor:

Nice. I mean, it sounds like a great team. And where, whereabouts are you based?

Andy Fletcher:

So I'm in South London, I'm in Streatham Hill. Way, way back when I was first getting started online and seeing some success, me and my business partners, we were mimicking what we thought business was. And as we got money, we got an office in Central London, and then we got some staff in the office in Central London, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you, that was really expensive.

Editor:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Andy Fletcher:

So, now I work from home. I'm sat in my garden office right now. I live at home with my partner, Sarah, and my cat, Rufus. I'm sat in my garden office and then the entire team is spread all over the world.

Editor:

Great. Like most big companies these days, that's the way to do it. How important though for you, Andy, is the work life balance?

Andy Fletcher:

Oh, not important at all. I'm a complete workaholic. I love it. This is my hobby, this is my passion, this is my job. This is what gets me up in the morning. This morning I woke up at 1:00 AM with my brain buzzing with ideas, and I got up and I started writing them down because I was awake. I love doing this.

Editor:

Wow. That goes some way to show how important Convertri is in your life, which is great. What is the benefit of being based in the UK would you say, rather than being based anywhere else in the world?

Andy Fletcher:

Oh, there's a really good question. So, certainly in terms of just core infrastructure, I think being based in the UK, this is going to be true of any first world nation, but the majority of the world's population didn't roll the lucky dice that I did to be born in a first world country. In terms of the UK over somewhere like America though, or France, Germany, any first world nation, I'm honestly not sure it makes the greatest difference these days. We've all got really similar access to this global marketplace of talent and tools. And I often think it's like, I live in London because I live in London. I like it here. But I could do this job from a beach in Thailand, or Frankfurt, or New York, or anywhere. I don't think it would make the greatest difference.

Editor:

Yeah. Just don't tell Sarah that, you may give her some ideas. Anybody who's thinking of starting out, making their first steps online, do you have any tips for anybody who's thinking about starting or growing an online business?

Andy Fletcher:

Get over the fear and do it. Just embrace the fact you are going to suck horribly and just get started. It took me so long to do the first few things, and I sucked, and I didn't want to suck. That was awful. I hated it, so I put off so many things. And when I finally got over my own ego and accepted that it was just better to do a bunch of imperfect stuff and learn some lessons, that's when things really started working for me.

Editor:

Nice.

Andy Fletcher:

But the mad gap between wanting to do the thing and doing the thing, because everyone's afraid, you don't want to have that feeling of just how badly you suck at it. But that's going to be true for the rest of forever. So, you may as well embrace whatever the next thing is. I still suck at so many things in my job to this day, but my brain wiring is different now and it's just like, "Cool, let's get up. Let's learn how to do it. Let's figure it out. Let's try a thing." And I wish I'd got to that a bit quicker.

Editor:

I normally ask in these interviews, are there any tools or resources that you can recommend? So, what do you think, Andy?

Andy Fletcher:

Oh, I don't know. I mean, I've heard there's this really terrible funnel builder that everyone should have. No. Obviously, I think people should come and check out Convertri. We've got a 14-day free trial. It's completely risk-free. Come and give it a go. I think it'll be really useful. I feel like I should mention some other things though. So, I'm currently obsessed with Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers book, like most of the internet is, and his new book, $100M Leads, which is coming out next month. I imagine will be just as good as the first one. The dude is amazing. So for anyone listening that has somehow not heard of Alex Hormozi, you should definitely check out his YouTube and his podcast.

Editor:

Great.

Andy Fletcher:

I have learned unbelievably much from that guy.

Editor:

That's amazing. I mean, that's a great resource as well to share. How do we find the 14-day free trial that you mentioned?

Andy Fletcher:

So, www.convertri.com, and then just click the sign-up button and it's readily available there. It'll give you a choice between whether you want to pay monthly or annual, but either way you get to try it for 14 days before we bill your card.

Editor:

Great, great. And what's next for you, Andy? Is there something else you're working on?

Andy Fletcher:

Yeah. So what's next is probably our Editor 2.0 project. While Convertri's editor, it's been cutting edge the whole time, it's the core focus of our product, we see really big opportunities to take it the next level still. So, we are starting work on it at the moment. We're hopeful to have something out later this year. Certainly a bunch of beta tests and proof of concepts for how we take a lot of the core technology we already have and really level it up and push what's possible.

Editor:

Excellent. Excellent. Well, all the best with that, Andy. Thank you so much for your time today, it's been an absolute education. So thank you so much for spending your time with us. Really appreciate it.

Andy Fletcher:

No, thank you very much for having me. It's been amazing to be here.