Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
How do you market and sell a SaaS product that your prospective customers don't even know they need?
These customers aren't searching for your product or any product like it.
But if they knew that your product existed, they'd probably buy it.
This week's episode is a story about two guys who were in just that situation.
They were running a services business and helping their clients with software projects.
And they kept hearing the same question from their prospective customers over and over again.
How much does it cost to build an app?
It was taking their sales team a lot of time to answer this question.
So they built an interactive tool and put it on their website.
Then they started customizing the tool so their clients could use it on their websites.
And that's how a new SaaS product and business was born.
But marketing the SaaS product beyond their clients proved to be challenging.
No one was looking for a solution like this, so they had to figure out how to reach new customers and help them understand that they needed this product.
There are some great lessons here on customer development and we explore how to market a product that no one is looking for.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Today's guest is the co founder of Outgrow, a platform that lets marketers build and launch interactive calculators and viral quizzes that help engage your website visitors and generate more leads.
Outgrow was founded in May 2016 and is based in New York.
The company has been bootstrapped from day one.
Previously to launching Outgrow, my guests worked in venture capital, private equity, and at startups in financial services, transaction processing and machine learning.
So today I'd like to welcome Randy Reyes recommendations.
Randy, welcome to the show.
Randy Rayess (02:20.770)
Thanks for having me, Omer.
Omer (02:22.610)
Now let's talk about you.
What gets you out of bed every day?
It's my icebreaker.
So what is it for you?
What drives and motivates you to work on your business every day?
Randy Rayess (02:35.490)
Sure, that's a great question.
I think it changes as you develop as an entrepreneur.
I think right now at this point, it's obviously being able to train and support your employees, help them grow, and to help facilitate your customers.
Those are like the kind of the day to day grind stuff.
You know, you're helping your customers grow, you're helping your employees grow.
And then so that would be like My short term, the way I look at it and then from the bigger picture, the way I like to look at it is that, you know, we're helping marketers really adapt to this transition that's happened over the last five, seven years in the way we market to customers.
And we're kind of really helping them change from this kind of purely advertising based mentality to a more helpful and value added approach to marketing.
So we'll help you, we'll acquire your lead information, but we're going to help you through the process.
And I think that's a great way for marketers to, to look at their kind of role and the fact that we're facilitating that and making it easier for them to do it without the technical skills they have, I think that's kind of like the bigger picture, which we like and we think is kind of like a fundamental shift for people
Omer (03:55.740)
who aren't familiar with outgrow.
Can you explain to them a little bit more about the product?
What are these interactive calculators and what are they designed to do?
Randy Rayess (04:06.140)
Sure.
So the quick kind of way to think about it is that instead of focusing mainly on selling to your customers and just advertising, you can augment your marketing by trying to create an experience that helps the most common questions your customers have.
So if you're selling app development services, you can tell them how much does it cost to build a mobile app?
That's going to help them a lot.
You can build this calculator which asks them a set of questions and provides them with an estimate that's not only useful to them, but now you have a lot of information, you have a much more qualified lead.
And so what our tool does at Outgrow is it makes it easy for a marketer who's non technical, who's not a professional designer, to create this experience and launch it without any need for external help.
And so that's kind of what the platform does in a nutshell.
Omer (04:57.059)
Where did the idea come from for Outgrow?
Randy Rayess (04:59.940)
Sure.
So we have a second business called VenturePact and it's basically a marketplace for software services.
And you know, in five, just a bit over five years ago, there were very, very few companies that had mobile apps because it was just like a new platform.
And we basically saw that and we venture Pact was a marketplace to connect people with development teams and to help them build mobile apps at the beginning and then other things as well.
And so what we saw was that so many people had this question, which is how much does it cost to build A mobile app.
How much does it cost to build a web application?
Depending on.
So I built Android or iOS and web or kind of all these different questions that people would come to us with.
So when we launched this experience, we launched this to just help them.
So our sales people weren't just repeatingly saying depends.
The cost of mobile app depends here.
We would send them something automatically, they can do it on their own and get a pretty good estimate.
And it became such a big lead source for us that we thought other companies should do it.
And that was kind of like a marketing strategy, right?
Even though it was something we built with a dev team, it was a marketing strategy.
And so that was the, that was kind of how we came up with the idea.
And then when it worked really well and the time was right and we were sufficiently far along into the business where we thought we could kind of launch a separate product to make it easy for everyone to do it, that's when we did.
That's when we started outgrow.
So that's kind of how it developed.
Omer (06:20.240)
So when did you realize that there was another business opportunity here?
Randy Rayess (06:26.080)
So I would say between two and a half to three years ago.
So about three years ago we were kind of starting to see that this is something that's interesting.
We just wanted to wait for a few things.
One was it was working really well for us.
You know, what does it work in other verticals?
The second is, let's see kind of how this is going to be, how people, how receptive it is for other people.
And the third is, do we, are we ready to kind of, you know, is Venture Pack late stage enough where we can kind of really have two products at the same time?
Because you can't start two products at the same time.
It's very difficult to do that.
So is venture back far enough in the process that we could do that?
So those are the three things we wanted to look at.
So we were patient at the beginning and then we started testing it with our venture customers who were building custom software.
We started with the marketers on that platform trying to help get their feedback and have them try it.
And when they had kind of a good demand for it, they liked the concept.
That's when we started to see that it can go beyond consulting or services based applications that you can build a recommendation tool, you can build an ROI calculator, you can build an estimator, you can build an outcome quiz or an assessment.
There's so many different things you could build with these types of experiences.
That can go beyond just the examples that worked well for us.
Omer (07:47.920)
Did you charge these customers initially, your Venture Pack customers for the product?
Randy Rayess (07:52.720)
Yes, yes.
So the reason we could charge them was, I mean they had two options, right?
They could either build this thing custom and they were already paying a lot for other custom software projects with us, right.
Or they could use outgrow and pay, you know, most of them are paying around anywhere from $45 a month up to a few hundred dollars a month.
So they could pay like a much more, you know, favorable fee then dishing out a bunch of cash on a custom software project so we could charge them and we had that pre existing relationship so it was a bit easier for us, right.
Giving that we had a, an existing network to acquire our first customers.
Omer (08:35.950)
So it was really a no brainer for these guys and I guess.
Randy Rayess (08:39.230)
Yeah, well, yeah, if someone's willing to do this custom, right.
Then their willingness to do this as a product is kind of a no brainer, Right.
Because there's a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of cost, right?
Instead of paying 1,000 or maybe an order of magnitude instead of paying $1,000, you would pay at least 10,000 for around 10,000 for maybe 1, 8 involved experience, you know, so it's like a pretty big difference.
And with the 1000, you can build multiple and you won't don't have the back and forth going to the developer.
There's a lot of benefits.
So we thought it's definitely no brainer.
But you have to also think about the types of companies that we were talking to, right?
We're talking to innovators, we're talking to people who are ahead of the curve, who are thinking at that level.
So as we at the time, you know, as you go to other people who aren't as, aren't as experimental, aren't as comfortable kind of going ahead of, you know, being kind of ahead of the crowd, then they're not as receptive, right?
They're like, oh like let's wait until all our like a good percentage of our competitors are like successful with it and then we'll kind of jump on board and get it.
So there is that second component as well.
Omer (09:52.400)
So I'm curious, in the first year
Randy Rayess (09:54.560)
of
Omer (09:56.960)
trying to build and grow Outgrow, what did you get any pushback or objections like how you just mentioned from people and did you have any surprises once real customers started using the product?
Randy Rayess (10:19.450)
Yes to both.
So the first part, which is pushback, so we have a lot of objections that Companies will come back with, right.
So marketers can object.
So early on we didn't have many templates, so like design templates.
And the reason it's so easy to use is because we have pre existing design templates.
So some companies will push back and be like, no, I want like more design templates.
Right?
So that was like things that are related to product.
And we would basically say like, hey, we're going to build more.
Obviously this is kind of like a work in progress.
We're going to continue to establish on that.
But then there were more fundamental questions that people had was like, oh, like, okay, so we're going to launch this kind of calculator and what should we do with it?
Should we put it as a social post?
Should we put it on our blog?
Is it a piece of, is it like a content marketing strategy?
Is our advertising strategy?
Is it a landing page?
What happens if our blog doesn't have any that much traffic?
So there's all these questions around positioning that we kind of didn't have fully figured out.
So we didn't really know for us the fundamental calculators or quizzes which are really core to your sales, the sales process, you know, we make them separate experiences and those were clear.
But then for things that were more content based, that would be just like a blog post or a fun assessment.
The promotion strategy of like, oh, for this type of, this, this type of experience, like this entertainment type of experience, it should be done on social and this is kind of how it should be done for this business, for this type of consumer.
Those types of things we didn't really have a lot of data to optimize for.
So we couldn't tell them what, oh, these types of people targeting consumers in these types of areas saw a lot of success by doing this, creating a fun quiz with this type of outcome page and promoting it in this way and using this template.
So that type of data we didn't really know exactly.
So we had to tell them, hey, we have some data, but we really don't have a lot of data on this.
So it's going to be really an experimentation process and we're happy to work with you on it.
But we don't know the exact answers to these things.
So those are things that we had to, we had to handle early on.
And so you needed people with an appetite for risk for those things.
For your second question around the first one was, did people push back?
And the second one was you had
Omer (12:33.310)
a certain set of assumptions when you went out there.
With this product.
But inevitably when real people start using it, they often come back with feedback that you didn't expect.
And so that's what I'm trying to get to is did you get those kinds of surprises in terms of feedback that challenged your assumptions or made you think differently or made you kind of change the course, the direction that you were taking with the product?
Randy Rayess (13:07.890)
Yes, we got a lot of interesting feedback.
We had a customer come to us and say they want to include it in their VR experience.
Right.
They want to have kind of a VR experience and part of the VR experience to be have some sort of interactive use of content.
And we hadn't done any 3D visualization or any kind of work in that space before.
We had customers come to us and say like, hey, I don't just want this for myself, but I want this for my sponsors.
Like sports brands, they want it for their sponsors and their sponsors can create co branded experiences.
Right.
So it's not just me, you know, XYZ Sports Team, it's XYZ Sports Team and the sponsor creating this kind of interactive piece of content.
So how can we track an advertisement within the experience?
So I might have seven questions.
I want to put an ad between two and three and an ad between the last question, the results, how do I track it?
How do I charge for it?
There's all these questions that we were like, oh, that's not even.
We were thinking more of like, oh, you're qualifying your lead through the questions and you acquire the lead data through the lead gen form.
That was the way we thought about it.
Right.
And so you certainly have people thinking about this thing and these very different perspectives and you have to decide these are all amazing ideas.
But you know, we're trying to figure out where to focus our energy.
And so we could, you know, early on we started off as a calculator.
Right.
Tool.
And then we got a lot of feedback.
They wanted more advanced recommendation type functionality, like to recommend what shirts you should wear and things like that.
We got feedback to add more like outcome quizzes, assessments, graded tests, all these things.
But we took them in a strategic way.
We didn't just like say, oh, we're going to build everything immediately.
And we took them one by one.
And as the feedback came on, we expanded.
And so now you'll see all the different functionality, but we didn't roll out like that.
So that was based on the feedback we got and we chose obviously there's still a lot of feedback we've gotten that we haven't taken or we haven't got to yet.
So it was actually very surprising because there was just an overwhelming amount of overwhelming amount of feedback on what we could do and what we should add.
Omer (15:13.440)
So as we said, you guys launched in May of last year.
Randy Rayess (15:19.120)
Yeah, like a more publicly.
Yeah, that was when we were more public.
Omer (15:23.120)
And so how long were you working on the product before then?
Randy Rayess (15:27.920)
So that was what, a year and a half ago?
So just about, you know, I would say six months to a year before that was when we were doing our more like internally within Venture Pack type of testing.
Okay.
So we were just.
So it wasn't like public.
No, like no non venture backed customer was kind of like using us or working with us.
So it was mainly just the venture back tech people from our, from our other business.
Omer (15:47.180)
Got it.
So let's call it like you know, two years.
Randy Rayess (15:52.140)
Sure.
Omer (15:52.499)
That you've been kind of working on this.
As I mentioned earlier, the business has been bootstrapped from, from day one.
And you now have about 3,000 paid customers.
And these are people.
Your plans on your website range from $25 for a freelancer through to $600 a month for larger companies.
So presumably you've got a mix of those people there and the team.
You've grown to 40 people now.
So you know, for a bootstrap business, that's pretty rapid growth.
Now I want to talk a little bit about like what has driven that growth.
So you obviously had the existing customers or the clients from Venture Pact to help you get some initial traction, the feedback and so on.
But beyond that, what were the strategies that really worked in helping you find new customers and grow the business faster?
Randy Rayess (17:06.550)
That's a great question.
So you're right.
Definitely having that advantage of seeding our early customers was a huge advantage because now we could say, oh, we have some customers, we have some case studies, we have some reviews.
That was very helpful.
Instead of going out cold and saying like, hey, we have zero customers, zero reviews, can you use our platform?
So that was kind of definitely very helpful.
The second thing was we had a lot of experience with events.
So we had done events with the Venture Pack business.
We had seen how events, which type of events work best for us.
And so when we went to do events for Outgrow, we were able to get an ROI much faster.
So it took us about two years to really figure out what we were doing with events.
And then right from the first event we were kind of seeing, we were closing deals from that.
So our event strategy was we were just Much faster in terms of executing on events.
And so that was a good channel for us.
So we were basically saying, hey, this is something you're not searching for, you're probably not looking for, but this is why you should try it.
And most marketers who come to events that are about digital marketing or events that are more about kind of innovation and how you can improve the way you market tend to have an appetite for trying these new things.
So that was a good strategy for us.
The second thing we did was so we obviously are promoting this concept of kind of building interactive tools to help the customer and help the marketing team as well by qualified lead gen.
So we wanted to, we run a lot of experiments with this.
So you'll see a lot of like, you know, basically every week we're running different types of experiments.
We'll run different types of calculators or quizzes and we'll try to see what works best with a customer, how should we launch it, how should we promote it.
And so we use a lot of that, our own product, to market ourselves and to help us acquire leads.
And then when we send this to our salespeople, right, so we have the integration, then it's a much kind of easier thing for them to do because now we can.
Our lead scoring is a lot better than just, you know, you have a name and an email, you have the answers to a certain set of questions, usually between four and eight questions, in addition to name emails.
So suddenly your ability to segment and lead, score and prioritize is going to be much better.
And so that's been helpful for us as well in terms of being able to prioritize your energy and the salespeople prioritizing their energy.
So those are a few things that really helped us early on, kind of in our growth phase.
Omer (19:32.050)
Okay, so let's talk about the events.
Can you give me an example of an event or type of event that you have tapped into and what you did there to acquire customers?
Randy Rayess (19:49.460)
Sure.
So the types of events that we like to do are events that aren't massive.
So the massive events are just kind of super overwhelming and they focus a lot on kind of the standard trends.
Right.
So like Facebook marketing and social media advertising and things like that.
And it eats up a lot of the content.
And there's some events that are mainly content based events where you just have a sponsor put their logo.
So those ones, we might do some of those, but those ones aren't the ones where we kind of will do many of.
But the types of events that work well for us are the types of events where there's a lot of time to meet the actual people at the event and where we're able to either give a speech or meet with them one on one.
So those both do well for us.
The mid market marketers do well.
That's kind of like an area that resonates all them in terms of speed at which we can close them, their interest, their ability to pay and things like that.
So those kind of tend to be a good area for us and so we like to do those types of events.
Again, we will do some larger enterprise type events, but those are just going to be longer payback periods.
So you're not going to close a deal, deal with a large enterprise usually in the first three months, you know, maybe not even the first six months.
So it takes a lot of time to kind of get those goals.
So you got to have to, you have to have good expectations going into an event thinking, okay, this is when I'm going to be able to get paid back.
So I would say the things that worked well with us in summer would be mid market, digital marketing, digital innovation, you know, digital marketing innovation, digital marketing software, you know, technical marketing or you know, marketing technologists.
Those types of titles which are a lot of.
There's a lot of new titles like chief Digital Officer that are coming up.
Those types of type, the events that focus on those types of people are good for us and those are the ones we do well in.
Omer (21:41.710)
Number one I guess is like, you know, picking the right type of event and through trial and error, presumably you've got a lot more focused on what type of events work exactly the kind of person you're looking for.
And so you mentioned presentations.
Are you, are you typically looking for an opportunity to go in there and do a presentation and presumably talk about marketing and some sort of link to Outgrow in terms of how they can acquire new leads?
Or is it just the opportunity of being somewhere where you can network with people and have that one on one conversation to sort of effectively, you know, tell them about your product?
Randy Rayess (22:26.100)
Yeah.
So the reason I think the thing I want to qualify about this specific answer that I'm going to give it, the answer will vary by business.
Right.
So for us specifically, Algo is a company that is a type of product or type of experience that many marketers aren't actively searching for.
Right.
So we have to first educate them in the concept in the category and then explain to them why they should use Outgrow specifically.
So first get them excited, interested in the topic, and then say, this is why you should use Outgrow versus building it custom or not doing it at all.
Those are kind of the three things that we try to think about.
Okay, first, the main thing that people are doing is not doing it at all.
Then some people are doing it custom and then they should use our product so it's cheaper, faster, better, et cetera.
So that's kind of the thought process we have.
So the good thing about the talks, while they're very expensive, when we're able to go there and kind of educate them on the concept and on the category, then we've at least established some interest in the category where they're interested in learning more.
And so that part's important.
So then they're more excited to come to meet with us and to talk to us afterwards, either during the networking parts or during the booth part or whatever structure that event has.
So I think those are the.
That's why for us we do speeches.
Now I know some people who don't do any speeches and they've done well at events, but I think the main reason is that they're not in a.
The category has a bit more.
Is a bit more mature and there's a bit more education and knowledge kind of around how it works.
Omer (24:04.970)
Right.
So if somebody was looking for, you know, if you're in a CRM business, you don't need to spend a lot of time educating people on what a CRM is and why they should use it.
Right.
Whereas with you it's almost like a new category or a very unique category.
And even though people might, they have the problem in terms of, you know, they want to figure out how to generate more leads.
Something like Outgrow is not something that would automatically be top of mind when they're trying to figure out a solution.
Randy Rayess (24:35.700)
Exactly.
That's a perfect way to put it.
Yeah.
Omer (24:38.820)
Okay, cool.
And so let's talk about the other piece.
You talked about, you know, leveraging your own product.
Product as a way to grow.
And I guess there are like probably two parts to that.
Like one would be like using Outgrow and building your own calculators or whatever as a way to engage people and generate leads.
And then I guess the other one is the built in virality that comes with using a product.
So every time somebody is using your product, there's an opportunity to.
I don't know if you actually do this, I didn't notice this, but I presume you're doing something like, you know, Powered by Outgrow or something like that somewhere as a way to kind of spread the word as well?
Randy Rayess (25:31.110)
Yes, that's true as well.
So I would.
So they're kind of the main.
Is the main question around kind of how we execute on it and what's worked or on our A B testing process?
Because I think there's kind of two parts.
The AB testing process is how we learn what works, and then what has worked is like, what we kind of have found to be more successful.
Omer (25:52.860)
Yeah, I would say let's start with like, first of all, like, give me an example of, you know, maybe an interactive calculator or a quiz or something that you guys are using yourself to generate leads or sort of specifically things apart from like the Powered by Outgrow.
Are there other things within the product that you're using as a way to get the word out so that I think will help us to understand the baseline?
And then beyond that, I think I'd love to talk about the A B testing after that.
Randy Rayess (26:23.890)
Perfect, Perfect.
So the types of things, I mean, so the standard thing that you'd start with is like, what's the ROI of using NowGrow software?
Right.
So that's what the standard thing you would do in a B2B setting.
Usually you start with an ROI calculator.
The second thing you'd look at is kind of, how should you invest your digital marketing spend?
Or how should you invest your content marketing spend?
So those are things we do experiment with.
We'd see kind of, okay, how much are you spending on static content like your blog?
How is that performing in terms of the number of leads generated?
And so most people will see like, okay, blog doesn't generate that many leads, but it might get some good visits and it's good for SEO.
Okay.
Then you look at ebooks.
So how is ebooks doing in terms of leads and engagement?
So how many people downloaded?
How many of those ebooks are sticking around and purchasing and kind of how does that cycle look like?
And so then we look at Outgrow.
Okay, have you done anything in terms of interactive tools or tools that actually help the customer or more personalized tools?
And then what numbers do you have for that?
Most people will say, no, they have not.
So then we'll be like, okay, so right now you're investing in kind of these main categories, and so how would it look if you were to invest in these categories as well?
So how and how much should you start with?
And so we'd be able to tell them, hey, you probably should start with maybe a basic investment.
If you're kind of still early or if you're later on in terms of your content marketing strategies, you can probably start with this type of investment and at least try this out.
And so that would be a type of calculator where we look at you specifically look at content marketing.
And then we'll have things that are like knowledge tests.
So the way we like to look at it is a funnel.
So we say, okay, people who are top of the funnel, we'll ask them like how much do you know about lead generation?
How much do you know about your email open score, Right?
And then we'd ask questions about email open score and how does email open vary based on the subject line and how do quiz based open email subject lines vary?
Improve your open rate or improve your click through rate if you have a fun quiz versus on an email.
So I have a bunch of these simple things that are more top of the funnel, they're just kind of getting people in thinking about this category.
And then middle on the bottom of the funnel things will ask things a bit more, a bit more specific, right?
So that would be roi, that would be savings, that would be advertising investing across different categories, landing page performance, how do you run AB testing across your landing pages, social posts, engagement on social posts specifically and how you can improve that.
So those types of calculators, quizzes would be more middle, bottom of the funnel stuff that we would use.
And then to the second part which is AB testing, the way we think about that is we say we're going to run a bunch of these, right?
And so we'll also change how do you calculate the gain on increasing your blogging frequency and then calculate the gain on increasing your ebook and calculating.
And so then we would try different phrasing also within blogs, within ebooks, we tried different ways of saying it.
Instead of saying calculate gain, we would say calculate, boost, calculate lift, right?
Or then we have it as a question, are you doing everything you can in terms of your blog optimization?
And then we'd recommend like, hey, this is how you can improve that.
And so we would take a category, come up with a list of ideas, run experiments, and we would try to send them to relevant people.
So if someone took a top of the funnel experience and we saw them talk a lot about content marketing as a key driver for them, then we'd send them a lot of content marketing stuff.
And then if it's social and we try to send the more social type stuff.
So the key that we look for in a B testing is the click through rate on the email, the open rates, the click through rates.
We look at where they drop off within the questions in the calculator quiz.
Do they give us their lead data, the accuracy of the information they're providing?
We have lead verification so we can tell like did they first give a false email and then because there's lead verification, do they then give a real email?
They give the real email at the beginning and then do they click the CTA on the results page?
So we look at all these things and so obviously if people do the whole thing, but they really email and click the CTA and they're engaged a lot.
Omer (30:35.600)
Can you give us an example of a customer who has used Outgrow and maybe describe like what kind of calculator they built and sort of what sort of results they got from that.
And if you can't talk about company names or something like that, that's, that's no problem.
But I want to try and get a sense of sharing with people listening, like, you know, a good example, a case, sort of a mini case study of what somebody built and how it improved their ability to generate more leads.
Randy Rayess (31:10.760)
Yeah, sure, that's a, that's a really good question.
So I'll give you know, two or three quick examples.
So we had basically a company, they're like an online book retailer, they sell books online, right?
So they're like the equivalent of Amazon.
They're not like they do something similar to Amazon, they're much smaller than Amazon.
So they basically sell books online.
And so they had the idea of like, oh, let's kind of come up with different ways to recommend which book you should read next.
And they created this and they promoted it on social, they promoted it on their email list and they were able to generate within four or five months over 90,000 leads.
And so it was a very successful process.
Now the reason that worked really well was a few things.
Just a lot of people say, okay, let's just copy that.
But they put a lot of thought into how the recommendation process was going to work and what questions they wanted to ask.
So the first thing they did well, the second thing they did well was how they handled the lead gen form and the sharing.
So they really wanted to promote people to have people share the experience when they were done.
So not just kind of see the calculator and click on the link to buy that book, sorry, click at the end of the results page, not just buy the book but also share it.
And so they Kind of came in with that strategy and getting people to share it and having a fun results page with a good recommendation is how it got free, free extra visits which got extra leads.
Right?
Because otherwise you have to pay a lot to get that much traffic to get that many leads.
And so, you know, there is a luck component to it.
You can't like guarantee that that many people are gonna like share it.
Right.
You don't know that going into it.
You can't like, oh, I'm gonna build an automatic virality.
You try to incentivize morality or you try to encourage it, but you're never sure.
But that one, it worked really well.
And they've done very well, obviously kind of in terms of they've been very successful.
It's kind of surprising for us to see it grow that much.
So that one was a great example.
There's, there's a lot of like fun examples that do really well.
So like one that did really well was, there's like two famous cricketers, one is Kohli and one is Tendulkar.
And it was are you a Kohli or a Tendulkar?
Right.
And that was like an engagement strategy for like universities to engage with high school students in their own, their existing students.
And so they, they posted that and it went, you know, it did like 6,7x better organically than their, than their paid posts.
Right.
In terms of.
So they were basically focused on engagement and their usual, their usual click through rates and the usual engagements they have on a post they would probably get you know, around 30,000 kind of click throughs and without grow they got over 200,000 clicks and engagement on the screen.
So it was like a significant improvement in terms of engagement.
So those are kind of two fun B2C examples.
And then I'll give you a couple kind of good B2B.
So we had kind of this kind of company that basically they were launching this new product and they wanted to educate people in terms of why they would need that new product.
And so they created the equivalent of a credit score for your data quality.
So they had a data quality product that they were launching and they wanted to say, hey, we're going to create similar to credit score for data quality.
And we're going to ask these questions like a very sophisticated calculator with a lot of math behind it.
But so it took a lot of time to really kind of hone in on how the math was going to work and how we're going to do the numbers.
And sometimes it's not like A trivial thing to do.
But because they did it really well, it ended up getting not only good start rates, but on the results, they got a lot of kind of requests for more information.
And so you want to look at not just, oh, how many of our starting it, but when people finish, are they interested in kind of seeing like, oh, like this is actually something that I should work on.
Right.
So you'll get your score and you'll see, like, where you lie and then what you can do to improve and that what you can do to improve.
Doing that well, which is using our conditional messaging feature, is really important because that's where you know, as a, as the, as the business taking the experience, you're like, oh, they're not just telling me that I'm like a B minus, you know, approximately, but they're saying these are the specific things you can do to improve.
And if you think those make sense, then your trust factor for that business is already going to go up.
Even though you've only spent like, you know, maybe three minutes with them, you already, you already have that additional trust.
So that's kind of pretty cool in terms of the speed at which you can build that relationship with the customer and have them know that you actually know what you're doing and you have a lot of experience in the space.
Omer (36:10.100)
Now, for somebody who, let's say, you know, is a founder of a SaaS business and is listening to this and thinking, you know, that, you know, it sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if that would work for me or they don't really have an idea of the type of calculator, interactive calculator they would build.
Can you offer just some general tips or ideas that might sort of help them think through how to come up with a compelling idea?
Randy Rayess (36:47.420)
Sure.
So there's kind of two things we always say.
One is you have to experiment to see what resonates best with your audience.
But when you're starting, you usually have a very good sense just by asking your sales team for their most common questions and asking your customer success and customer support team what are the most common questions they have, those two lists of questions are going to be really useful.
So you'll see that the customers are getting a lot of question around quotations, they're getting a lot of questions around ROI value, they're getting a lot of questions about when they're using the product, they're getting a lot of questions around, you know, which features should they focus on based on their business?
And so you can have an experience like assess.
Assess how well you're, you know, you're doing in terms of usage or in terms of how you're promoting.
So for us, it would be like, we will tell people, assess how well you're promoting your experiences, your interactive content that you build on, outgrow.
And we can then tell them, hey, you're only getting, you know, you're only 60% of the way there.
These are what.
This is what you should.
So that's kind of a helpful experience that usually our customer support, customer success has to then work with them on manually.
Now we can send that to them.
So those are things that are great.
And you'll be able to just take the top five sales and top five customer support and success.
And that should generate around 10 ideas that you can say, you know, okay, I want to start with these three.
But you'll have 10 that are great candidates.
That's the most common way people start.
They ask the salespeople for those questions and they ask the customer success.
Omer (38:20.130)
We talked about sort of where you are in terms of 3,000 paid customers, 40 people in your team.
And you and I have been talking for a while now, and it seems like every time we talk, the numbers get bigger.
Right.
So you guys are obviously doing something right and it's, it's helping you to, to grow the business.
But I, I also want to try to figure out what have been some of the hard things, what have been some of the challenges that kind of result in you guys losing some focus along the way or just have.
Experiencing some, some pain.
And so I know that hiring has been one challenging area for you in the past.
So can, can you kind of tell us about that?
Like, what, what has happened?
Randy Rayess (39:07.740)
Sure.
I think sometimes the way you like to think about it depends on the person.
But like my, so my co founder, Pratham and I are both kind of thought at the beginning that you really want to focus on intelligence when you're hiring people.
And so it was very.
We focused a lot on kind of, oh, we want to hire really smart people.
And I think the, the thing that people who are more math oriented, they think of management and culture as less important, especially early on.
And we definitely made that mistake.
And so when we were hiring people, especially like, important people, so early employees or leadership people, people who are in leadership positions, we didn't look at cultural fit as much as we should have early on, and we didn't, we didn't check enough references.
So we just checked like a couple of references that were the people they Told us to check, right?
But when you're taking someone who's going to be a leader, right, he's obviously going to be able to at least generate one or two people who he's worked with or he knows well who's going to say something positive about him or her.
But you want to do, like a thorough review of references and you want to really think through cultural fit.
And so what matters to you in terms of the attitude of the person, right, in terms of their personality, in terms of their leadership style.
You know, have they led before or are they just super smart?
And you think, oh, they've done well in a junior role, so let me just put them in a management role because they're really smart.
But that doesn't always translate well.
And when you make that mistake, the reason why it's so costly is because it takes.
When you identify the issue, you want to try to make it work at the beginning because you're like, oh, you want to give the person at least a couple chances so you're fair to them.
Them.
And you also want to make it work because you know, you know that to replace that person is going to take a lot of time and you already have so many things going on, so you're going to.
So then, you know, it makes it much harder for you.
You slow down, you have more anxiety and more stress that the team, everyone under them, who you've spent so much time building up and training is now not happy and they're frustrated and you might lose people.
So there's just a lot of consequences from this one bad decision.
And so you gotta be very careful.
So this kind of concept that we were, we had was like, oh, we can hire people fast, and then if we identify it's a mistake, we can move them to a different department or separate ways quickly.
That doesn't work as well for leadership positions where they're influencing so many people below them.
So definitely recommend taking that very seriously and being a bit more patient thinking about, okay, what are the things we should really look for and what are the things that matter to us so that we don't hire people who are just smart, but they have.
No, no, the cultural fit is just really weak.
Omer (42:00.060)
What do you do now to.
To assess if somebody is a.
Is a cultural fit for you?
Randy Rayess (42:07.820)
Yeah, so that's a.
That's a really big challenge, right?
Because if you ask someone, are you positive?
We want to hire positive people.
They're not gonna be like, oh, I'm the most negative person in the world.
So you can't, you can't.
There's a lot of things that are not easily identifiable, right?
So we just say, like, we try to just put them in situations and say we ask them about, like, you know, tell me about situations you've been in where you've had to lead someone, you know, what are, what are issues that have come up and how have you handled them.
And they just talk about the way they think about things, talk about the way they perceive things.
And you'll be able to say that they might be doing things in a right way.
Right.
Or in, in a way that makes a lot of sense, but that's not relevant.
Not, not necessarily not relevant, but not a good fit for the way you would want someone to handle it in your company.
And so we try to put them in situations.
We take reference checks a lot more seriously.
And so it's not like, oh, we're going to call the one or two people you told us to call and we're going to ask them like, oh, yo, so how was that guy?
He's pretty good.
That's not useful.
Everyone's going to say, pretty good.
But that has no information to you, right?
So you've got to ask smart questions when you do reference checks, right?
So that you want it so that you can really dive deep into what are the issues.
Because especially the first couple of reference tricks that you're going to talk to, they're going to say mainly positive things, but you need to dig a bit deeper to see, like, no one is perfect.
And that's fine.
We're not saying we want to hire perfect people.
We want to understand where the weaknesses and are they these things that are inconsequential or not significant to the way we want to run, or are they super significant?
And so that's where you want to get a few extra reference checks and you want to be a bit more thorough.
So those are a few things we do with them.
And then of course, not just interact with them in purely an interview setting.
Trying to interact with them in other settings as well, like over a lunch or with having them interact with other people in the team informally so that you can just get a sense of them when they're not under the kind of, oh, we're both sitting in front of each other.
And this is like a, you know, organized formal interview so that then you get to see them in different scenarios and you get to see how they, how they approach that in different settings.
Omer (44:17.390)
Now, another area that I know we talked about was a Lack of focus in the past and how that had been a challenge for you guys.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Randy Rayess (44:28.910)
Sure.
So this was definitely relevant for our venture backed business and even relevant for the outgrow business.
We, we are very passionate, you know, me, myself, Pratham and our early hires, we were just super passionate people and we had this kind of mentality that you have to be like a bit overconfident, right.
As an entrepreneur, otherwise you'll just get too hung up on things and you'll quit early.
So you got to be a bit overconfident.
But I think the level of overconfidence we had was too high.
And we thought we could do anything.
We thought we could take on every customer we could get.
We thought we should go after enterprises and large mid market and small mid market and small business and even like freelance and young mom and pop shops and we can kind of work with everyone.
And that kind of mentality is actually very difficult.
Right.
So a crazy entrepreneur might be able to convince themselves that they could probably do it.
Especially if you have like, you can learn a lot and you can learn about different industries and you can learn about, about different types of companies and their processes, but you have to understand that as you grow the business, you're actually going to hire salespeople and you're not going to be able to tell a salesperson like, hey, I need you to learn everything about financial services, healthcare, insurance, e commerce, sports, et cetera, automobiles, logistics.
And you're going to have to handle all these companies also, by the way, you're going to have to understand how to sell to these different roles because in a bigger company you're going to have to go to the top and then come down or go into the the middle and come up and there's going to be different processes.
So by the way, you have to learn all of that and that's not possible.
And so you realize the limitation that you have.
And then when you start hiring marketers, you're like, wait, who am I messaging?
Like, who am I targeting?
You're like everyone.
Or you know, every marketer, every, every cio, every cto, every chief product, every chief digital.
And that's also a challenge.
So those are all things that are real issues that I think are things that you got to understand.
That focus just gives you so much more clarity in terms of what you should do in product, what you should do with marketing, how you should hire and train salespeople.
It's just so much easier and it seems Counterintuitive.
You're like, I'm limiting myself.
And we're entrepreneurs, we're supposed to do what we can, especially bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
You want to take everything you can get.
So it's a hard thing to train.
I think people have told us this before, but I think once, only after we went through it and actually witnessed it and kind of fully understood it did we realize why they said that.
Omer (47:09.640)
So I'm still.
Because when I look at your pricing plan, I see sort of it starting out at the freelancer plan and then it goes to essential business.
And then there's even an option for an enterprise plan plan.
So that on its own seems pretty diverse.
Having to accommodate the needs of a freelancer versus enterprise.
So how do you rationalize that?
Randy Rayess (47:34.180)
Yeah, that's a great question.
So yeah, the freelancer plan has been added, I think in the last maybe eight months, like this year.
Sometime this year, I think it was added.
So we didn't always have the freelancer plan, which was for small business.
And the freelancer plan is not something we do.
So you have to like the way I think a lot about is like our outbound strategy versus inbound.
So inbound freelancer people can come on, they can use the product and it's, you know, they sits powered by outgrow and they're helping us market our product.
And it's mainly self service.
And so that doesn't require salespeople, that doesn't require one.
It's just like, okay, if they want to use it, they can.
And so really what we've been, what we started focusing on was really the mid market right to the business plan.
And that was what we would do for outbound and inbound and we'd focus on that for inbound.
So we would try to generate those inbound.
We might get other people.
But at the beginning it wasn't really a fit.
This is for outgrowth, specifically for venture practice.
We went after everyone a lot.
But yeah, so we had removed.
We said that we wanted to remove kind of any attention to that category and only have kind of a higher price.
So that was where we focused mainly on the business plans.
And then we added essentials soon after so that we could kind of give people something where they could go ramp up to business.
So people who weren't even a bit smaller and they said, I want to start with something small like experiment and then move up to business.
And so that's when we added essentials, which was probably like a few months down the line from business But I would say that the way we've handled it internally is we've said our outbound strategy when we go outbound or when we do events is we're focusing mainly on mid market.
We're mainly focusing.
And then in terms of verticals, our salespeople are focused on certain areas.
So we have like a salesperson who focuses on financial services insurance.
Right.
And these people will do financial services insurance mid market.
And so that's kind of a much easier focus.
They're not trying to run after everything.
And the same for.
The same for healthcare, the same for E commerce, things like that.
So we kind of have focus on the hiring part and then it's mainly mid market that they do.
And only recently have we started to say, oh, we're going to really start to think a lot about agencies and enterprise.
And so that wasn't something where we were aggressively doing.
We might have done an event as an.
We do like events educationally, so we'll do like enterprise events to learn more about the vertical.
Maybe get a couple.
But that's mainly handled by me or a salesperson business for a while and who can handle that.
And so we kind of are very thoughtful about who we're handling and why we're doing it and things like that.
So now that we have the different verticals, they're mainly saying, okay, this is for inbound, These are for outbound and for inbound.
But this is what our sales people are going to focus on.
This is what our marketing is going to focus on.
Omer (50:36.410)
Right.
So I think the biggest takeaway for anyone listening to you describing your experience is don't try to do it all at once.
Right.
You can try to do all of it over time, but you've got to sort of break it off in digestible chunks that you and your team can handle at whatever stage of the business you're at.
Randy Rayess (51:02.410)
Sure, yeah.
I think you always want to think about three things.
One is which industries you're focusing on industry and territory.
Two is size of business.
Three is what are the axes of growth you want to have for your customers.
And so our freelancer essentials business enterprise.
Those are just like.
These are axes on which businesses can grow as they grow into our business.
So those are like three things you want to think about.
And the timing at which you do them is very important.
So like, when do you really want to build out like these axes where you have people grow into different business plans?
Some people don't have different plans, they just have the same plan.
But it's like per lead, you just pay per lead price.
And so as you get more leads, you pay more.
But you want to kind of think about those things diligently before you jump.
Omer (51:46.690)
It's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Randy Rayess (51:52.850)
Sure.
Omer (51:53.410)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Randy Rayess (51:57.670)
So I would be hiring.
It would be focused on hiring great leaders in the firm, and that can promote your brand, and that's probably the most important.
Omer (52:07.190)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Randy Rayess (52:12.150)
I like Andy Grove's books Hyper Management, Only the Partner with Revive.
And I like Dan Pink Drive.
Omer (52:21.030)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Randy Rayess (52:26.040)
Persistence.
Omer (52:27.400)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Randy Rayess (52:32.600)
I like kickboxing.
I like going to the gym.
Those things are just like, important.
They help me unwind.
Omer (52:38.840)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Randy Rayess (52:43.640)
Well, now everyone's talking about the blockchain, but I do think the blockchain is actually very powerful.
And so it would be cool to try to build something on that that's powerful.
Omer (52:57.530)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Randy Rayess (53:04.490)
I love dancing.
I've been dancing for a very long time and I enjoy it.
Omer (53:07.770)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Randy Rayess (53:12.250)
Well, I do like, I love playing basketball, so I play a lot of basketball outside of work and then dance.
As I said before, I love dancing.
Those would be the main things.
Omer (53:23.480)
Cool.
So thanks for making the time to join me today.
For people who don't know the backstory on this, the reason you know, you and I have been talking for a while, we've tried to schedule this interview a number of times and for various reasons, we have been able to pull it off.
So I'm really glad that we were able to finally do this.
If folks want to check out Outgrow and maybe try the product themselves, they can go to Outgrow co. And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Randy Rayess (54:00.780)
So LinkedIn is great.
So my LinkedIn is just LinkedIn.com in forward/ Randy Reyes.
That's R A n D Y R A Y E S S. They can also email me.
My email is randyoutgrow co.
Omer (54:16.980)
Awesome.
Thanks, man.
I'm really glad we did this and I wish you and Pratham all the all this best with outgrow.
And I'll be following what you guys are doing over the next year or two.
Randy Rayess (54:31.220)
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Omer (54:32.820)
It was awesome.
Cheers.
