A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:10:49 · Alex Halliday, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:49] S0: I mean, for us in those days, there was an initial concentric circle of investor intros and network intros. And so, we would try and book our calendars as full as possible, just talking to people about this again and again. And then the outer concentric circle, which is almost more important to me, was starting to just do the basic growth tactics at a low level of scale. Meaning like just having some LinkedIn outbound going from a founder to your ICP. Start sending cold emails, start asking for intros and the goal here is to really look at things like the response rate and the appetite. And how quickly people get back to you when they don't have a natural incentive to. And I think the other thing I did not appreciate as someone who spent most of their career in consumer was just how important positioning is. And I cannot state this enough. Everybody, I mean I'm a product person, I really believe in the great product wins in the market, but I have been humbled so many times over when we have not clearly articulated what we do in a way that resonates with the buyer and it's like that is a continuous game of iteration. And to your question, at no time is it more important than when you are initially testing the waters in those early motions and you're listening for signal. [00:12:05] S1: Do you remember the messaging that didn't work and the messaging that ultimately worked?
00:12:05 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:12:05] S1: Do you remember the messaging that didn't work and the messaging that ultimately worked? [00:12:10] S0: So what worked for us at the very, very beginning was, this is a bit of a cheat code for us. Was we mentioned our investors in the outbound to get people on the phone. That doesn't pass the sniff test of saying with the second concentric circle. I think what we realized, and another reason to get very, very focused, was that proof point driven outbound is just so important when nobody's heard of you. So you have to leverage other people's brand equity. So really being thoughtful about who you know that you can turn into a referenceable proof point really early, and then using that to at least get people to open the email. So when we had this Deepgram case study, when we had those early proof points, those early wins. That was the thing that stood out far above our name or any other detail about us and then, can you get them past the second or the third message with the problem statement? And for us, it was very much about this notion of organic growth being very challenging for the people we trying to reach out to, and they were a higher sales process. You have to arm the seller with the right talk track. You have to make them feel like they'll get promoted. You have to continuously kind of nail that as you get introduced to other actors in the buying process, especially as you start to ask for bigger and bigger contract sizes. [00:13:39] S1: And then like what you're doing today is pretty different than what you were doing then, right?
00:13:39 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:13:39] S1: And then like what you're doing today is pretty different than what you were doing then, right? [00:13:43] S0: So about seventy percent of what people use our apps for is a combination of content creation and refresh sort of operations. So that's a huge part of what we do. That's where we're like light years ahead in the market and where we really take a lot of time and care to make people successful. We have a team of about forty people who just work with brands all day long to sort of do those use cases, albeit generation eight of those. Given how much the market has changed and now we have a new consumer, a new audience in town. Which is agents, who are a big, big focus of the kind of content work we do now and then the other thirty percent would be all of the analytics we do around how agents are reading content. Which content they prefer and why? Which content is influencing the sentiment of agents. So it really is the combination of the production of content, the mainstays of content, and the analytic story that drives that.
00:14:36 · Pablo Srugo
[00:14:36] S1: So maybe let's go deep on content marketing. Clearly you're an expert on it, and the product you've built is around this, and, frankly, everybody's interested in getting more traffic, getting more views. That world is completely changing. I mean, the old world of SEO, at some point the playbook is pretty figured out, write content, write blogs, high quality, fresh, keyword density, etcetera, etcetera, and rank over time. That's very, very high level, but that's more or less a playbook. What does best in class look like? We get to start high level, or if you have any examples that come to mind of something that somebody's done recently, or something that you're doing for someone that is really working and really driving traffic, that would also be interesting to hear.
00:15:12 · Alex Halliday
[00:15:12] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting that we created this separate category of AEO for a long time and now I think there is this conflation again into one system. Which I think is actually a better model. You know, Google is going AI first with AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, and now Claude. Very important for businesses to understand. I think much of the practices that worked very well in SEO continue to work, but the contrast is turned up on some of the sub-bullets. In particular, the importance of information gain, so adding materially like net new information to the market through the content that you write. So Zola is a customer of ours. They have all this pricing data on how much things cost in weddings. So they create these pages which talk about how much wedding florists cost and wedding buffets and all the different variants of weddings. Because they have all this really interesting data inside the business and so their play is really providing, the models and human users with just this amazing set of content. That talks about all of those interesting pricing and vendor questions that come up. Maybe Klaviyo is another example of ours where they have all this data on email open rates and the behavior of email for marketers, and they can use that to combine with their internal experts, and internal expert interviews to create rich content about all the practices that email marketers do. Because that's the audience they're really trying to talk to. So I think information gain is one big theme of how can you take unique information from inside the business and put it outside the business.
00:16:43 · Pablo Srugo
[00:16:43] S1: Let me ask you this, maybe because I'm selfish and maybe we can make it tangible. We go through some of the ideas through this. Let's say I was actually a customer, for the Product Market Fit show and I'm like, I want to get more views. I want to get more traffic. I want to rank on all the chat apps and on Google and all this stuff. And money is no object. I'm not going to, I don't want to do paid stuff, fully organic, but money is not the issue, right? What would be some of the things that would make the most sense to do?