Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Welcome to the Rogue Startups Podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 2 00:00:19 Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Rogue Startups. This is Craig Hewitt. This week joined by special guest, Farzad Rashidi. Farzad. How's it going? It's going very well. Thanks for robbing me on the show, Craig. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, mixing it up a little bit, you know, I think for a long time it's been kind of just Dave and I, um, but entering into kind of a, a time and a, an an epoch maybe of, of the show where like, we're, we're doing a bit of both, right? So Dave and Albi on for a bunch of kind of, uh, you know, just he and I chatting and we're gonna have some guests on who have really interesting things to talk about from a bootstrap startup, SAS online business, uh, perspective. And Barza has a lot to talk about and a lot of experience that I think is gonna be really interesting, uh, and helpful.
Speaker 2 00:01:04 And we're gonna unpack a lot of things here. Um, but far as I'd to start off with, why don't you give folks kind of the, the quick and dirty on kind of who you are and where you come from and stuff. Sure thing. Well, um, Greg, again, uh, thanks again for having me on the show. It's always great to, to connect with the fellow founder and also a, an existing customer. <laugh>. I didn't another until earlier, uh, right before we started the show, but yeah, so just to kind of give you a little background, I joined as the first marketing hire at our parent organization called Vis Me. Have you heard of vis me at all, uh, Craig? Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Ah, beautiful. So, for folks who haven't heard of, of vis me, it's an, uh, brand, uh, creation platform for businesses. So any sort of presentations, infographics, et cetera, uh, I could create that.
Speaker 2 00:01:50 It's kind of like a B2B version of Canva, uh, that way. I will put it simply. Uh, but anyway, so when we, uh, when I joined the company, uh, we practically didn't have any marketing department or budget for that matter. And my, my job was just to figure out how to sell the product that the team had spent years building. And so at the time, we were basically thorn spaghetti on the wall, right? Different, trying out different strategies. And coal outbound was normally, uh, the, you know, the, the go-to strategy for a lot of startups at the time. But the problem was unit economics didn't really make much sense because our platform was quite affordable. Like, I think at the time we started like $15 a month or something on our startup plan, just around along the lines of what, like CASA's costs, right? So Yep.
Speaker 2 00:02:35 It's not a type. Exactly. So it's not a type of product that's, that makes sense to hire like US based STR and AEs and go door to door start selling. Obviously now since the company's larger for some of the enterprise accounts, we, we just hired like a VP of sales and now getting that sales motion running. But as far at the, at the beginning goes specialized a bootstrap company, we have to raise $0 in outside funding up to this day. Still true. Uh, we have to figure out an evergreen flow of, uh, uh, basically, uh, figure out a way how to drive customers to our platform without having to spend a ton, uh, when it comes to paid advertising. Uh, which again, as a bootstrap company, <laugh> was a challenge because there's some diminishing returns, uh, as you kind of grow that advertising budget, because when you double the conversions, you don't normally get double the conversions.
Speaker 2 00:03:23 So anyway, so going back to, um, our strategy and what we landed on was what's figuring out, okay, what is our buyer journey looks like? And, and so Craig, so Leslie, you are our customer, potential customer for our platform, and you want to create an infographic for this episode. What's the first thing you do when, when it comes to researching, uh, Google <laugh> looking, looking for recommendations? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I look for, like, if I need to create a presentation tomorrow, I'm like, Hey, what are some of the PowerPoint templates? Right? Or some, some, or what are some of the ways to create an infographic, et cetera. And then very quickly come across a few tools, and then you maybe read a few reviews and you pick one and sign up, right? Uh, so very quick and straightforward. So we're like, that's great. It's easy, right?
Speaker 2 00:04:11 So we're just gonna go create a bunch of content, build a few landing pages, and we did all the keyword research and on page optimizations, right? Made sure it loads fast and mobile friendly, all that good stuff. And guess what happened when we put it out there? Nothing <laugh>. Exactly. I'm sure a lot of people are listening kind of like, yeah. Power's, like, you know, I've done all that content. Marketing's broken, it doesn't work anymore. Yeah. SEO is dead. Yeah. <laugh>. So anyways, so we're like, okay, this makes no sense. Let's try to figure out what worked, uh, or, or what we did that was wrong, right? Because obviously you spent months, uh, develop or investing resources into this, and this is quite embarrassing. So let's go back to the drawing board. So what we found is that the way Google app basically, let, let me actually walk you through another example that would make sense.
Speaker 2 00:05:02 Let's say, let's pick one keyword, like presentation software. How many search results do you think pops up in Google when you type in a keyword like that, which is one of our parent, uh, keywords, throw a number, couple hundred thousand. Couple hundred thousand. What if I tell you is 1 billion with a B? Okay, yeah. <laugh>. <laugh>, yeah. Right. So we were like, okay, when there are a billion search results, even if you're in the top 1% when it comes to quality of content, doesn't matter however way you define it, right? So it could be like, you could have the best website in the world, you are in the top 1%, you're still in playing the millions <laugh>, right? Yeah. So how does, how in the world Google figures out what to start ranking in the top 10 or top 20 or search results versus, you know, the millionth, uh, if, if the quality of content is, is relatively good across that, you know, cream on the, the crop webpages.
Speaker 2 00:05:58 So what we found and experimented with was basically the, um, um, uh, the concept of authority. So the way back in the nineties, how Google kind of took over the search engine market was developing this algorithm called page rank, which I thought is because they ranked pages, that's what they called. And, but apparently it's because Layer page or founder developed it. So that's how they called it. Anyway, that's a fun thing. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Anyhow, so the way they, what happened was back in the nineties when SEARCHs became a thing, they were basically only looking at the OnPage metrics. So you as a marketer could stuff a bunch of keywords on your webpage and you would immediately get rankings for keywords, right? So what would happen over time is that the search results, uh, quality were junk <laugh>. So cuz marketers ruined everything. So how Google went around around that, uh, to kind of get weed out some of these junk search results was to start focusing on webpages that were popular.
Speaker 2 00:06:55 So not only looking at what's on the page, but understanding how credible that information is, and a way they is assign popularity by looking at other websites in your space that are also popular and authoritative and see how often they're talking about you. And they measure them in terms of these hyperlinks, which we call these back links. And so what we found is that that's really a main driver, uh, for a lot of webpages to start building authority and trust with Google in order to get higher search rankings. Um, I, I want to go back to like a, a bigger, a bigger question. And I know you didn't kind of quite finish the story of like how you got where you are today, but, but, uh, an interesting thing to me is, um, you said you were hired to try to figure out how to sell this thing that the engineers had made mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 2 00:07:40 Um, and, and to me, like this is the cardinal sin of, of hiring at the wrong time in a company's evolution, right? I is to, to really rely on anyone but the founder, uh, to, to figure out a, a repeatable and scalable marketing channel, um mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, or customer acquisition channel sales or marketing, like, do you, do you agree? Like, did you get lucky or was it fair or unfair for them to hire you and say, far as, I'd go figure this shit out, I'm a developer, I don't wanna figure this out. Or, or do you think that in certain situations, maybe yours was one of 'em that, that that's like a reasonable approach? So, uh, I may be taking a little too much credit, uh, when it comes to the early earlier journey of sme. Uh, so the founder of Payman, um, was doing a great job at attracting, uh, data users, right?
Speaker 2 00:08:28 So we had a free platform at the time. We still are a free platform to this day, okay. And so he had driven, you know, by going on different events, uh, by basically, uh, you know, start that content strategy early on in the game. And so I may be oversimplifying the journey a little bit. We did have a, not as significant, but still a, a smaller group of beta users, free users that were using the platform and, you know, giving us feedback and whatnot. So that was still something that was in place and done over the course of the past few years before I joined the company. So it wasn't that, you know, they had done zero marketing before I joined. Uh, it, it, it may have been an oversimplification, uh, but when, when I joined the company, my goal was to now take things to the next level and actually start, you know, attracting the, the icp, which is not only just beta users now getting act, getting people to actually start paying for the product, right?
Speaker 2 00:09:24 So understanding, uh, where we need to show up in order to attract that group of customers was, was, uh, my primary role. Okay. I, I guess the, the question's still fair though, right? Like, do you think it's fair to even hire a, an early employee to, to figure that stuff out? Or do you think that founders should have established that first good customer acquisition channel and, you know, before they hire someone? I would say depends on the founder, right? So when it came to respondent, I come from a marketing sales background, so that was sort of my forte and I was good at it. I'm not a technical founder, so our first hire was actually a cto. So, uh, you could do this backwards. Uh, so say if you're a technical founder, you're a great developer, don't go hire another engineer. Invest that money to hire a marketer, right?
Speaker 2 00:10:10 So I would say got the early group of employees should be complimentary to each other. Uh, so whatever skill sets you have should utilize, and whatever you don't, you should hire. So I don't think it's necessarily like a cookie cutter way of going around it. It's, it's, it really depends on the founder. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. And so like I'll, maybe I'll, I'll kind of like finish some of the story for you. So, so like vis me, you, you saw that like, uh, increasing, you know, back links and everything to, to the site was the way to encourage page rank and authority and, uh, and traffic responder, which is, uh, a blogger outreach, backlink outreach tool, right? Um, that, that's, that's kind of customized to be able to do this. Was the, was the kind of little baby of the, the need you had at Vis me.
Speaker 2 00:10:55 Is that, is that the short version? Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So we, we built Sanaa, um, as an internal software initially just to kind of put together the process that was done manually, that was excruciatingly difficult, <laugh> Yep. Uh, to kind of sort of cut through the time that it would take to conduct outreach and, and it worked really well. And you, right now, just gonna give you a little overview of, VIS has now got, I think a little over 18 million active users and close to 4 million in month organic traffic by three and a half to 4 million. Uh, so in terms of AdWords, if you were to pay for the same level of traffic from the same keywords that we were ranking organically, we would have to pay, I think, close about 1.7 million a month in advertising. Yeah. We're getting for free, quote unquote. And so that, that's really been the main driver of signups and traffic.
Speaker 2 00:11:45 But respondent was sort of the platform that we were like, Hey, this is too good to kind of keep as an internal software, let's release it as a standalone product. And that was kind of the journey of how responding to me actually, I, I left the Viu team now running respond, and also, uh, you know, going back to drawing board and start all over again. So that, that's been, yeah. Yeah. It's been a journey. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. I, I mean, I'm curious, um, we, we've done a bit of, uh, kind of outreach like, you know, leak outreach, um, to, to folks in our, in our space mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and frankly, the reason we stopped doing it is we saw very few high quality opportunities, I'll say mm-hmm. <affirmative> based on this, you know, anything it comes down to the targeting on my end or, or what, but like, uh, the pitch that I had or something.
Speaker 2 00:12:28 But like, I think that's probably a lot of folks kind of criticism of this, and y'all probably hear this objection like all the time, is like, yeah, I'm not gonna do like outreach cuz I hate getting these shitty cold email <laugh> like pitches from someone just asking you for a link or a link swap, which I think is, you know, quite dangerous, uh, in a lot of mm-hmm. <affirmative> in a lot of cases. But, um, like how, how do you coach your customers to get around this? Like, all right, I want to do like, I'll say social outreach, right? For, for links with people in my target space, but I don't wanna look like a jerk, um mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like what's the, what are some of the ways that you help folks get around this? Sure. So let's dissect that a little bit. I, I think it's an excellent question.
Speaker 2 00:13:07 So, uh, let me start with a hook and then we can dig a little deeper. All right. The hook is, how do you think I landed this interview? Uh, yeah. With, with a cold email. And, and where do you think that cold email was sent from <laugh>? Uh, no, fair enough, fair enough. From respond, I, you know, what I think back, back backstory, uh, to, to give this a little more, uh, credit. Like we, we were a customer of responders for a bit because we did some, some outreach stuff. So I knew of you and had seen kind of your onboarding videos and stuff like that. So, uh, and maybe, maybe that's it, right? If it's just dead cold, it doesn't work. But if you've seen someone on a podcast or visited their YouTube channel or seen other shit that's out there that it works much better.
Speaker 2 00:13:47 And I'm sure you'll have data around that, that if it's not cold, but like warm, right? It works much better. Yeah. Obviously. But, you know, we, I I was on about 50 podcasts last year and one a week, and most of the majority hadn't heard of us or of me personally. Yes. And so what, what I'm trying to get to is that the, the issue is not necessarily the issue that a lot of users don't get, a responses isn't necessarily in the platform or the tool set that they're using. I always, I look at responder as a knife, right? So you are the chef, the knife doesn't really make the food any more or less delicious. Uh, it's more so how you use it, right? Yeah. So that strategy is really what's gonna make or break the campaign. So let's, let's dig a little deeper.
Speaker 2 00:14:30 So that's actually one of the main challenges. We had a respondent and grown respondent early years because we had built, so link building as a term just means building relationship. It's a very broad concept. Now. It's, we, we, we've kind of sort of segmented into a few different, um, uh, steps. So step one is to find the right opportunities to reach out to and get the correct person who's in charge and get their contact information and send and personalize the pitches, and send an email on automated follow ups, and then keep track of all of them and, uh, manage the relationships. So each one of these steps that I walk you through it are two to three software tools that help solve parts of these. So we had to basically build <laugh> this entire flow from A to Z because then any piece that was missing would, would make the, the flow broken, right?
Speaker 2 00:15:22 So it was a big engineering challenge, first of all, as a small team and boots and not our bootstrap company to kind of build all this together. But when we did that, we were like, people who had, who had already been link doing link building, they were already successful at it manually. It was like a, God sent them, they were like, oh my God, this is amazing. Because like, they would just do what you do manually just 10 times faster without losing quality, which is at significant value prop. The main challenge we had is that only a small percentage of users who would come onto the platform. Our platform had actual any experience, successful experience with LinkedIn Link in the past, uh, I would say 90% were, were doing this for the first time. So early on we had a big challenge. And that, that's when you probably joined our platform, is that, uh, you, you had probably only had started outreach, right?
Speaker 2 00:16:14 Just kind of experimenting with it. And you sign up for responder and, and you started going through the campaign process and outreach and didn't get any good results. And that's probably why you turned, right? So that was one of day one. That was one of the, the biggest challenges we had. It was, it was customer education. How do we actually get our customers to get results? And so what happened was we started creating YouTube videos, we started writing articles, we started doing this and that. And what happened was that people don't care. Uh, very little of our customer base would actually spend the time to go watch a tutorial video and, and try to figure out to do things. So what we did last year or later last year, uh, that was actually released, uh, early this year, um, what was the development of what we call these campaign templates.
Speaker 2 00:17:00 So what we did then was to build the education inside the platform. So if you now log into your respondent account, I'm happy to also extend your trial for you, uh, <laugh> now. I'd love to just get your feedback on it and kind of compare that with your initial experience. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Now, we don't just basically just drop you into the campaign editor from the get go. When you go to start a campaign, we're like, Hey, what are you trying to do <laugh> first? Right? What is the goal here? So let me walk you through one of these strategies, which is Podcast Auto, which I think is very timely because this is something that worked and I'm here. So I would love to kind of walk you through it. So this campaign template, basically I say, I want to get podcast interviews, or like, okay, great.
Speaker 2 00:17:41 Let's just answer two or three questions for me. Alright. Question number one, who is a person in your industry that you respect who potentially goes on podcasts a lot immediately? You think of four or five people in your industry, right? Podcasters, like obviously in MySpace, it's like Rand Fishkin or like Neil Patel or these guys or any industry, anybody who's listening has a few people in their mind that they're like, okay, these are influencers. All right, great. Put in their names and the company to work out. And then what? And then what happens is that just give us a little brief bio by yourself and also a little bit of, uh, information about the topics you'd like to talk about. And so what respondent does, it just takes that info and automatically, uh, creates an email template for you so you don't have to sit down and come up with a template and all of the, the searching actions is automatically done for you when you click use this template.
Speaker 2 00:18:35 So as a user, you don't have to think anymore. You just click <laugh> next, next, next and done. Yeah. So what happens then respondent is like, okay, I know that Craig wants to, is in the podcast space and for example, Andrew Warner of Mixer G right? He's the type of person he is targeting, or he is a person that, uh, that he respects and is an industry, uh, expert. So what, when respondent's gonna do is gonna go and look at all the podcast interviews that were published in the past year and find all the Andrew Warner interviews, like anybody that, any podcast that interviewed him, not just mixer G, right? And then, so that automatically tells you three things. One, this podcast accept guests in the first place, right? Two that are relevant to your space, and three, makes your life easier when it comes to pitching, because then you can reference that episode with Andrew that was published within the past few months.
Speaker 2 00:19:23 Yeah. So you, so we automate. So this is something that would normally take us 30 minutes just to explain to someone how to do it. We're like, okay, so you need to go find someone in your space, right? <laugh>? Yeah. Run a search through respondent to the podcast. So all of that stuff is now automated. So you don't have to think, you don't need to know the strategy or how it works on the backend. You just answer a few questions, let respond, do that third work for you. So then when you go and launch a campaign, then you have a much higher chance of getting responses because you are not just, again, Thor and spaghetti on the wall. You are actually following the best practices of campaigns that we've learned over years of trial and error, and we understand how things were. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's such, I mean, super compelling.
Speaker 2 00:20:07 I mean, I think that you'd be hard pressed to find someone in our space who thinks that like, going on someone else's podcast is a bad use of their time, right? Like, I think we always see like whatever social traffic, increased, web traffic, signups, all that from, from podcasts that're on. So yeah. That's, that's cool, man. That's really compelling. Thanks. I think, um, for me and like super biased, right? Cause I, on a podcasting company, that's a much better use of a tool like this than just link building. Um, so like you mentioned, like relationship building, uh, to me, like that, that's how I would position something like this, right? For, for myself in terms of like the most good value. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I can think of getting outta this. It's not like I don't wanna build links to an article. I think there are other good ways to do that, um, right.
Speaker 2 00:20:48 But like, you know, pitching to come on a podcast, uh, is a way that I can deliver more value, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So I think that makes sense, Craig. Absolutely. I agree with you. And I think the reason why you have that, uh, view is, is that there's so much negative connotation that's associated with link building, and that's so much span that's going on. Yeah. Uh, because the way we define link building is, is relationship building. So podcast outreach is one out of a gazillion different strategies Yeah. Uh, that we do. And, and, um, and at the end of the day, what happens is that there is a mutually beneficial collaboration that happens. It's not so much that, Hey, let's give me a back link. I'll give you a back link. Right? So it's, it's not that type of average that we advocate for, and that's why we kind of built these templates in place and ask for you to kind of give us some, uh, you know, uh, information by you, and then we'll help you build those campaigns to prevent some of those spammy average from happening in the first place.
Speaker 2 00:21:44 Um, I can get into a few more examples if you like, but, but at the end of the day, what happens is when I reach out to Craig, I'm like, Hey, Craig, you have a podcast. Let me help you. Let me spend an hour of my time to come onto the show, help you create a podcast episode, help you create content, right? So what happens that you get a podcast episode created? I get free advertising to a niche audience, right? And you mentioned, as in the show notes, that's great. It's beneficial. One plus one, it equals three, right? So yeah, it's a mutual beneficial collaboration that when we come out of it, we are both better off. And that's the type of relationship building that a respondent kind of helps you do. But again, you don't have to do that. Even using respondent, you can do this manually yourself.
Speaker 2 00:22:24 We, we just kind of speed that process up. So you'd be able to do that at a larger scale. Yeah. No, fair enough. Fair enough. Can I give you another example? Go ahead. Yeah. Another example of a type of campaign that I will run, especially for a platform like Casto, um, I is what we call partner recruitment. Uh, so what that means is that there's lots of other block posts that are reviewing or mentioning utter competing products in the podcast hosting space like Transistor. And this is a bunch of other platforms that are mentioned that are not obviously as good <laugh>, but Yeah. But they're out there, right? Any, any company has some competitors. So, yeah. Um, one of the things that like, uh, what I would recommend for a platform like that to do so come up with a list of other bloggers in your space that have reviewed another competing product.
Speaker 2 00:23:13 So let's say if I own a blog in the podcasting space and a review transit term, like, is it worth it? Is it not worth it? Um, or for example, I'm like, Hey, what are some of the best transistor alternatives? Because as a podcaster, I had didn't have a good experience and I'm looking for a better alternative. And these are webpages that obviously it would add more value to that page for castles to be mentioned than not, because it just adds another option for folks. So one of the other ways is that identify, okay, what are some of these pages? Let's reach out to them and build our relationship with that author, whoever's the content manager, and say, Hey, let me get you a cast this account on the house if you want to check it out. And if, if you deem it worthy, go ahead and mention it here.
Speaker 2 00:23:55 And I'm more than happy to share that article with the edition with my social media followers and also included in our newsletter, because obviously we are featured here as one of the best, uh, podcast hosting platforms, right? So these type of strategies like competitor reviews, uh, competitor alternatives, or listicles, uh, so these are low hanger fruit opportunities that should be done on a regular basis cuz there's new articles that are published every day. Yeah. Yeah. I want to, I want to kind of switch gears into like the, you were talking about the hook, right? Like to the, to the actual like content of the emails when you're, when you're pitching someone, I think it mm-hmm. <affirmative>, regardless of whether it's for like podcast appearances or partners or actually a kind of straight link building. Like, I like to think about the bad stuff <laugh>, right? Like Sure.
Speaker 2 00:24:39 What are the worst things that you see people do that, like folks listening to this show should definitely avoid? Cause I think like finding the good stuff is, is like a whole different thing, but like, what, what are the things that we should absolutely not do, uh, if we're, if we're doing some of this outreach, right? So there's normally three pillars when it comes to, uh, running any sort of successful average campaign. So any, any one of them you miss, it's gonna just break the campaign, right? Number one is finding, so let, let's actually break it down a little further. Number one is the strategy, starting from the, from the top. If you don't know what the goal of the campaign is, that campaign is bound to fail. Uh, so that's one of the most common issues that we ha we see with folks when they start with that average platform.
Speaker 2 00:25:21 They're like, Hey, let me just reach out to any blogs in that space and then see what they say. I'm like, what is, where is the strategy here? <laugh>, you don't know what you're trying to get out of this and neither would Yeah. So being really specific. Exactly. So what is exactly the objective? And that leads me to the second one, which is the incentive. So, okay, now that you defined what is the goal of your campaign, what are you, what it is, is it that you're trying to get out of this campaign? What's in it for the, the party that you're reaching out to? Because at the end of the day, we all have limited time, right? So what, what, why would that person take time outta their day to respond to you and actually want to collaborate with you in some shape or form?
Speaker 2 00:26:00 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So having that incentive is placed, incentive in in place is key. And the third one is just personalization. So unfortunately, or fortunately, there has been so many tools out there to help you kind of automate sending emails, right? There's a gazillion of them. But what, what happens is that nowadays people are very good at sniffing out these automated emails. So actually spending a few minutes doesn't have to take too long, but just imply to the recipient that, Hey, I've actually done my research <laugh>, and yeah, it's not just an an email blast I'm sending out to everyone. Um, having those three things in place and e either one of them, you, you miss, is is that recipe for a disaster? So tho those are the things I, uh, I would say are key. Cool. Got it. Got it. I have another kind of strategy question and, and I ask these not, not to like pepper you, but, but I think it helps, uh, frame the context and value of like when someone would, would use respondent mm-hmm. <affirmative>
Speaker 2 00:26:57 Or, or cold outreach in general. Uh, and, and the question is for whom or, or what stage of companies or what types of like customer acquisition channels does this best support, right? So like, is this best for like, you know, real b2b like sales driven? Is it best for companies like yours and ours maybe that are more like self-serve, uh, lower price point, you know, maybe even freemium signups. Like, uh, does it support content marketing at its core? Like what, what are some of the pattern matching, uh, that you've seen with customers who benefit the most from this or types of companies, I guess, and not our excellent question and a love of chatting with podcasters are founders themselves, because it, obviously you've experienced a lot of these pains yourself and, and, and I'm with you there. So again, that's something that I, I I'm looking at like thousands of people who've used our platform and, and the type of people we see are most successful.
Speaker 2 00:27:50 They have a few things in common. So the goal of responding is, is to increase inbound. So, uh, the goal of using respondent in general is that, okay, you build relations bloggers, you place yourself in place, your product or service in places where people who are looking for a product like yours would come and organically find you. So you don't have to go chase after customers, right? And so taking that, uh, and then kind of walking back from it, there's two questions you really need to answer before understanding what the right customers strategy is. One, are your customers aware of the problem that they're solving? So for Casa, if I'm looking to create a podcast, I know I need a podcast hosting platform. So it's a, it's not a nice to have, it's something I need to have <laugh> if I'm trying to create, so I, I'm aware of what problems trying solve.
Speaker 2 00:28:37 Two, how am I, or what, what channels do your customers were aware of that problem or, or looking for product like yours? So if I'm trying to create a podcast tomorrow, what, what is the chan, what is that journey for me look looks like? And, and answer that as simple, I'm gonna start Googling. That's normally step one. Yes, I may talk to my friends, yes, I may go on some Facebook groups, but that's a very small percentage. 99% of people would go and pull up Google and like, okay, what are the best podcasts and platforms to read a few reviews, right? So caster is a prime candidate for that. Now, let's take a few other businesses that are not a good fit. So let's say if you sell t-shirts, right? You sell polo shirts. Am I aware of the problem? Yes, I know I need clothes, but my buyer journey is rarely ever me googling about shirts, right?
Speaker 2 00:29:25 Yeah. So I probably see some influencer wearing it or I go to the store. So your customer acquisition strategy is probably building relationships with retailers or hey, hiring some TikTok influencers and, and Instagram ads, right? That's probably your, that's bad. Yeah. Or on the other end of the spectrum, let's say if you run an enterprise SaaS company or, or even more traditional, you say, say you sell hospital equipment, no doctor or hospital administrator is gonna Google, Hey, how do I buy an MRI machine? <laugh>, right? Right. It's just stupid because these are like millions of dollars worth of equipment, or a little more realistic example, like enterprise task companies that sell like 20 plus K or a hundred plus K a year licenses. So these are normally the, they have different sales cycles and buyer journeys. So maybe, uh, trade shows is a, is a better channel for you, right?
Speaker 2 00:30:15 Maybe coal average outbound is the best deal. Uh, just higher SDRs and the AEs and go door to door. So I would say that there's no silver bullet when it comes to acquisition strategy and, and it's entirely reliant on the, the icp the target market and the type of product service that you're selling. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Uh, kind of related, um, with the, the kind of current state of the economy and, and just like how businesses are thinking, and I'll share, I'll share from our perspective what we've seen in the last year. So starting about May of last year saw a big shift in the economy, right? People started getting nervous mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but budgets were tightened, canceling, downgrading, <laugh>, all this kind of stuff. It was terrible. Um, about October of last year, we saw that coming back up mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and, and I think this is consistent with like talking to my friends in other, in other industries and even like some, some like leading indicator kind of industries, like people that run invoicing softwares, right?
Speaker 2 00:31:14 They're, they're the ones who see revenues going up because their, their customers are charging more. And, and so their, their business goes up accordingly. Um, to, to now where I feel like we're, we're out of the crazy like recession fear, which was like, say the middle two quarters of last year mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, now we're in this like, it's not terrible. It probably won't get worse, but it's not gonna get better for a while. Uh, it's not gonna get great for a while. Like it was the last <laugh>, you know, 12 years or whatever. Right? Um, or eight years, uh, that, that's my impression of like where the economy is, um, and, and maybe where it's going. But where do you see, you know, marketing strategy in general, uh, as, as it pertains to like the, the current state of the economy? So that's a great question, Craig.
Speaker 2 00:32:00 Yeah. Big question. Big question. And to be honest, pressure with you, Anna, my opinion may be incorrect or, or as a matter of fact, whoever's listening to this interview, take it with a grain sand because nobody really knows. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I'm not gonna pretend I'm this know-it-all person, uh, who knows everything that's going on in, in the world economy, but I mean, I obviously, I'm my opinion, but doesn't make him correct or incorrect in any way. Um, I, I definitely think that we are in a recession and tech has definitely hit, har has been hit the hardest just simply because they, we also gained the most, uh, when Covid hit. So there was some artificial demand that, uh, basically, um, transitioned wealth from a lot of different industries to tech. So if you think, like, for example, a lot of gyms, for example, went out of business, but a lot of online influencers that sell yoga classes, uh, gained a lot of followers and gained a lot of, uh, revenue.
Speaker 2 00:32:53 Yeah. So that also, you know, gave a lot of ego to a lot of tech companies and, and they started hiring like crazy, which created a lot of problems for small companies like ours because, you know, when you want to hire a developer, now you're competing with Salesforce <laugh> or Amazon 200 grand a year or whatever, hiring like crazy. Yeah. Um, and so obviously I saw a bubble coming at the time because I was actually in a hiring process and I was like, something just doesn't make sense, like in the previous past few years, and it happened at the tail end of Covid. And, and so I definitely saw that bubble coming again, looking back retroactively, it's obviously a lot easier, uh, but yeah. Uh, but I think economy always bounces back. Uh, it always works in cycles. It's never something that's gonna go downhill forever.
Speaker 2 00:33:39 And I think it's this year tours at tail end this year, I think we're gonna start seeing more rapid growth, and you're a hundred percent right. That's sort of aligns with the, uh, with sort of the trajectory that we are also experiencing ourselves. But to be honest with you, I think, uh, companies like, I mean, I can only speak to Verana. Um, we're, we're too small to be like super swayed by these type waves of general economy. I think, you know, companies like AWS for example, or like Salesforce probably feel it a lot more, uh, compared to small businesses like ours. But, you know, all we can do is just embrace and hope for the best. And, you know, people say yes, you can change a marketing strategy, go from growth to savings. Yes, you can do that. But again, as I said, as a small business, uh, that I don't think significant changes, uh, are, are necessarily the right way, um, to go about it.
Speaker 2 00:34:34 I think it's more so just making sure you have enough cushion just as standard like business advice. You know, you have enough margins, yeah. You have enough cushion who can stay afloat and keep doing what you're doing, uh, you know, work on a product building, marketing channels, things will always bounce back and it's not something to kind of get bogged down on. Yeah, no, fair enough. Uh, the part of the reason I ask that I think both of our businesses potentially could have been or could be affected by, um, by our customers who are businesses and their shift in customer acquisition strategy mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, so like, I don't think either of us have super core business critical mm-hmm. <affirmative> things, right? Right. If you stop your outreach tool or you stop your podcast, like the business probably will, <laugh> will survive you, you won't die. Right? <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:35:18 Yeah. Yeah. You won't die. And so I, I think what's, what's interesting is, um, compared to paid acquisition, uh, I think both, you know, podcasting and you know, what, you know, kind of, uh, relationship building tools like respondent maybe mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, offer a more sustainable, um, and sustainable meaning like able to, to do it for a long time approach than just relying on AdWords or TikTok or whatever that, that seems more flippant. Um, that's what we're betting on at least. And, and actually we're, we're doing, we're doing a fair bit of paid at this point mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, which we haven't done a lot of in the past. Um, mostly to supplement content that we're doing. So getting all the way back to like link building and stuff like that. Like we're, we're kind of using a, a multi-pronged approach at this point, which is like content to get folks to the site and then, uh, a fair amount of like retargeting and stuff.
Speaker 2 00:36:05 Yeah. Um, which I think that's a pretty, it's a pretty handy strategy because then kind of like your email, your email to me, it wasn't cold. Like I think retargeting is is a pretty decent place for folks to, to hang out. I agree with you a hundred percent. Again, by no means I'm against paid ads or any channel in particular, you know, obviously outbound, we're still experimenting with it. We're terrible at it, but we're still experimenting with it. Yeah. We do some paid ads, right. Not a significant portion of our revenue, but, uh, we do a decent amount and mainly retargeting. And yes, I mean obviously a good marketing mix is a mix. It's not just putting all your eggs in one basket. Yeah. Uh, but any marketing strategy in my opinion, has one core that drives like the majority, like 80% of new customers.
Speaker 2 00:36:50 And for us it's always been inbound organic traffic, but obviously it's not true for all kinds of businesses. But I think Cass is in responder are very similar in that sense. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome, buddy. Uh, far as I, it was a pleasure to chat. Thanks so much for folks who wanted to check out more about you and responder and, and everything. What's the, what's the best way to get in touch? Sure. Well we have responder.com. That's the best way to learn about the product. We have a very, uh, solid average strategy hub. So folks wanna learn more about different strategies. The bottom footer of the website is an on gated free piece of content. Uh, so I recommend folks to check it out. It's not related to our product necessarily, it's just strategies they can implement manually. And, uh, folks wanna get in touch with me personally, my name is Far Rashidi aren't a whole lot of us out there in the world, so LinkedIn is only <laugh> your best bet. I stick out like a so thumb normally. Awesome. Awesome buddy. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:37:49 Thanks for listening to another episode of Rogue Startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show. For show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
