We were lucky to catch up with Jonathan Richter recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jonathan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made?

If you have a question or are looking for a product or service, where’s the first place you go to search? Google search is the obvious answer!

As a business owner, you want your business to show up as a result when people are searching for what you offer. But running Google ads can be expensive, especially if you’re a startup.

That’s why we invest heavily in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you’re able to create an awesome piece of web content like a blog article that’s super helpful, then that one webpage can bring in website visitors for years to come–without paying for ads. This is known as Inbound Marketing and Evergreen Content strategy.

How do we invest in SEO? At Winnona Partners, we use a powerful tool called Semrush that provides incredible data and insights about organic SEO traffic. Not only do we get to see how our websites are performing, but we can also find out valuable information about our competitors’ websites.

With Semrush, we’re able to see which content is working well for the competition based on the keywords and pages they rank high for. As a result, we’re able to create similar–but better–content than the competition. This allows us to make smart decisions when choosing content to write about since we know it’s already working for others in the same space.

Ultimately, this tool gives us more confidence that we can show up on that first page of Google search results for the keywords we want to rank for!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I manage a custom software development company called Winnona Partners based in Decatur. We started as a mobile app development company for startups and entrepreneurs.

While we still enjoy mobile app projects, we’ve also expanded to web app and website development. Specifically, we build custom CRMs, business automation tools, and help companies integrate their business processes.

A lot of business owners reach a point where they realize they’re spending way too much money every month on enterprise CRMs like Salesforce or Hubspot.

These platforms are fantastic when you’re first starting out. But as your business grows, many people get frustrated having to pay for each additional “seat” whenever they need to onboard another employee. It’s not uncommon for small to mid size businesses to pay thousands of dollars every month for these platforms.

Business owners also get frustrated when they realize that they’re having to compromise the way their business operates to fit the requirements of these systems. At Winnona Partners we believe software should be built to fit your business process, not the other way around.

Although developing your own custom software system is a bigger investment up front, it will save you money long term as you scale. Most companies can see an ROI on their custom system development within two years.

In addition to Winnona Partners, I’m also a classical guitarist and instructor. I offer classical and flamenco guitar lessons both in-person and online, and have tons of free resources on my guitar website (richterguitar.com).

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One thing we learned early on with our first mobile app project is that you should never rely on third party social media platforms for any core features.

For instance, we made a social nightlife app called Yule that displayed photos and videos from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter on the profiles of nightlife venues. Our thinking was that by doing this, we’d be able to have tons of content already displaying on the nightlife venue profiles right when people downloaded the app, rather than relying on users to have to create posts on our own platform.

After over a year of work, we launched the app and it was awesome! People were able to get a “realtime” sense of what the venue was like all by being able to quickly see posts from all other social media platforms in one place.

But five days after we released the app, Instagram removed the permission for other apps to use their places API data. So all of the sudden, our app went from being full of recent posts to being…completely blank.

And the worst part?

Since we relied so heavily on these other platforms for content, we didn’t yet have our own way for people to post unique content. The hype of the app and daily active users basically died overnight.

A couple of months later we pushed an app update that gave people the ability to make their own posts. But it simply wasn’t the same as before.

Eventually we shut the app down, but this taught us a super important lesson: make sure you custom code all core social features of your app!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Here’s some of the most inspirational resources I’ve encountered on my entrepreneurial journey:

Podcast and Online Courses:
• Foundr.com

Books:
• Business Made Simple by Donald Miller
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
• Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Khaneman

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.winnonapartners.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richterguitar/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/winnonapartners
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/app-developer-jonathan-richter/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JonathanRichterGuitar
• Other: https://richterguitar.com