Omer (00:09.280)
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 stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Farzad Rashidi, the co founder of Respona all in one link building software that helps businesses increase their organic traffic from Google.
In 2018, Farzad was leading the marketing team at Visme and trying to figure out how to grow their organic search traffic.
The team spent ton of time and effort creating content, but after many months, they'd hardly moved the needle on their SEO.
Eventually they realized they were spending nearly all their time creating content and almost zero time promoting it.
So that's when they made a major shift.
They allocated just 20% of their marketing resources to content creation and put 80% of their effort into content promotion.
They also knew that getting links from authoritative websites was key to building organic traffic.
But doing outreach, as anybody knows, is a slow and tedious process.
So they built an internal tool which which later would become Respawna to make their lives easier.
That SEO and content strategy has paid off really well for Visme, which currently gets almost 3 million monthly organic website visitors and the product has around 14 million active users.
But despite the success they had with the internal tool in helping them with their link building outreach, they really struggled to get traction when they try to sell it as a standalone product.
Well, it turns out a big part of the struggle was down to how they positioned the SaaS product.
And when they finally figured that out and simplified their positioning, things started to click.
So this is a great interview with tons of actionable insights.
I hope you enjoy it.
Prasad, welcome to the show.
Farzad Rashidi (02:05.560)
Thank you so much for having me, Omer.
I'm beyond excited.
Omer (02:09.320)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you
Farzad Rashidi (02:13.080)
can share with us now?
Omer, I was actually thinking about this before our interview and I think one quote that I use personally I would say at least once a week is good things take time.
That's by my own co founder Paymon, who says it a lot and it's.
It's definitely something that's quite inspiring not to get discouraged on the down days.
Omer (02:32.930)
Great.
So tell us about Respawna.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Farzad Rashidi (02:39.500)
So Responda is an all in one link building outreach software that helps businesses increase their organic traffic from Google, we predominantly cater to SaaS companies and also marketing agencies that do marketing for predominantly SaaS companies.
And the problem that we are resolving is basically helping folks get connected with relevant, authoritative resources and publications in their space in order to get the word out about their brand.
And also improving the backlink profile of their website so that increases their likelihood of being able to get better rankings in Google.
Omer (03:14.380)
Can you give us a sense of the size of the business?
Where are you guys in terms of revenue, customer size of team?
Farzad Rashidi (03:19.420)
So team size, we're about a team of nine, I would say six full time including myself and we have three part time contractors.
As far as the revenue numbers, my co founder is a little more private than I am, so just out of respect for him I, I promise not to share any numbers yet, but it's getting very close to seven figures, I would say multiple six figures and we're completely bootstrapped.
Never raised any outside funding and we've launched the 1.0 version of our platform in November of 21.
So it's been a little over eight months I would say.
Omer (03:49.630)
Great.
So let's talk about where the idea for this product came from.
What were you doing at the time and how did you come up with the idea?
Farzad Rashidi (03:57.230)
So I started my career in marketing, Omar, when I was, gosh, how many, however many years ago.
That was at a company called Visme.
I know we chatted about this in a pre show interview, but as far as for folks who don't know what Visme is, it's an all in one brand content creation platform that helps businesses sort of create presentations, infographics and whatnot.
And I joined as a first marketing hire was at it was another bootstrap company, seven or eight people founded by Paymon, who's my current co founder here at Respana.
And they were basically a team of engineers and designers who had built this really cool product and at the time where Canva hadn't taken off yet and they were like, okay Firetrud, you go sell this thing.
And I was like, okay, sounds like a good plan.
So my goal was not necessarily just to get a, to make a quick buck for the company.
My goal was to build a customer acquisition strategy, meaning, okay, how we're going to acquire customers today, but also what we're going to do five years from now.
So we quickly had to evaluate some, I would say acquisition strategies.
The first few ones that came to our mind was cold outreach for sales obviously.
But the problem with that was that our price point for the product we Also have freemium products.
The price point was very affordable, I think was like 1415amonth.
So it's not something that would make economic sense for you to go hire salespeople and go sell it door to door.
And paid advertising also was in a cards.
But as a bootstrap company, obviously we're always cash strained, so we didn't have the hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into paid advertising.
But another problem with that is not very scalable.
So it's something that is a diminish in roi.
So meaning if you double your ad budget doesn't mean you double the conversion.
So it becomes at a certain point plateaued because your, your CAC sort of, or customer acquisition cost sort of catch.
So with your ltv.
So we were like, okay, let's put ourselves in shoes of a customer and understand how they would go and find a product like ours.
All right, so Omer, let's say you want to create an infographic for this, for this episode as soon as it comes out and you don't already have a product.
What's the first step you do when you want to look for a product like ours?
What would you do?
Omer (06:05.660)
I guess I'd look for infographics software on Google.
Farzad Rashidi (06:09.180)
There you go.
So we knew from day one, okay, people are googling to find a product like ours, because first of all, you are aware of the problem you're trying to solve and two, you're googling about it.
So those two check marks, this is something I always Recommend to any SaaS company, to any business really, who wants to focus on SEO.
It's like, are your customers aware of the problem and are they googling about it?
If the answer to either of them is no, SEO is a waste of time.
We knew from day one SEO was definitely in the cards for us because we wanted to make sure that we show up in places where people who are looking for a product like ours would come and organically find us instead of us having to either become a household name that is super expensive or go door to door start selling, which is not very scalable.
So long story short, what we did was to start putting together a lot of content pieces and, you know, as one would when it comes to content marketing.
We just started the blog and built a bunch of landing pages and we basically released the, I would say the new version of the website within about two months after I joined.
And guess what happened?
Omer (07:12.890)
It was an amazing success.
Farzad Rashidi (07:15.690)
That's what I was hoping.
Unfortunately, it was not like that.
So that that sort of started the rest of the journey.
Omer (07:23.610)
Great.
Okay, so you decided that you're going to invest in content.
You know, what your target customers are searching for.
You're creating a whole bunch of this content.
Why do you think it didn't work the way you expected?
And what were some of the lessons you learned from that that helped you to figure out a better content marketing strategy?
Farzad Rashidi (07:47.300)
Absolutely.
So, Omer, one day I basically pulled up our Google Analytics and there were literally two visitors to our website.
And I'm pretty confident one of them was my mom.
So one.
Really?
So.
So I was like, okay, well, we're definitely doing something wrong here.
So I pulled up Google in a new incognito tab, and I just looked up one of our keywords, which is presentation software, and guess how many search results popped up.
Like, as far as you see how Google tells you, here's how many web pages contain this keyword.
So how many?
Just throw a number out there.
How many search results do you think come up for that keyword?
Omer (08:21.070)
I know, two million.
Farzad Rashidi (08:22.750)
Two million with an M. Close.
It was three.
Three and a half billion with a B.
So a little off.
Omer (08:29.080)
I was close.
Farzad Rashidi (08:30.120)
Yeah.
But so we were like, okay, well, we have spent all this.
We've spent all this time creating these pieces of content, and now, by the way, we're ranked number one for that keyword.
So if you actually go Google this now, hopefully we're still up there.
But just to give you the sense of scale, right now Visma is getting close to about 3 million in monthly organic traffic.
And we're about 14 million.
14 and a half million active users.
Close to a team of 100, fully profitable, still bootstrapped.
So keep listening.
It gets interesting.
Omer (08:59.090)
How long ago was it when you checked and it was your mom and one other person?
Farzad Rashidi (09:04.770)
It's been quite a few years.
Omer (09:06.769)
How long has it taken you to get to, you know, the volume of traffic you're getting today on Visme?
Farzad Rashidi (09:11.130)
Right.
I would say about five to six years at least, to get to this point.
So it wasn't an overnight success, for sure.
But what was really interesting for us was to try to figure out how these Google algorithms work.
As a marketer, you can't just go stuff keywords on a page just to imply to the search engines that, hey, our content is of high quality.
Right?
Because even if you're in the top 1% in terms of quality of content, when there's three and a half billion search results, you're in the tens of millions still.
So how do you Go from tens of millionth to top 10, not top three, they get over 99% of the clicks.
So we knew that it wasn't just enough to slap a bunch of content on our website.
So what?
What?
So obviously we come a long way in terms of figuring out what are some of the keywords that we need to target, what are.
Because there's a lot of big guys in the industry that are dominating some of the search key terms.
But as far as the real key that helped us sort of skyrocket the traffic was an in proportionate focus on our promotion tactics.
So up to this day, still we spent 20% of our marketing resources on content creation.
And the other 80% goes into promotion and link building.
Let me repeat that again.
We spend four times the amount of time we spend on content creation on promotion.
That's what really put us over the top and it's still propelling us forward because that's not how 99% of companies do content marketing.
And that journey sort of led to the creation of respondent because obviously when you put 80% of your resources in one thing, you want to optimize and kind of save time because it's an excruciatingly difficult process because it's a lot easier said than done, it turns out.
So that that's sort of the backstory there.
Omer (10:46.710)
So when you say content promotion, was this mainly emailing outreach to other website owners trying to get a backlink?
Farzad Rashidi (10:57.590)
Yeah, absolutely.
So through a variety of different strategies.
So unfortunately link building has gotten a bad rep because since it's, it's somewhat of a new thing, a lot of marketers are still trying to figure it out.
So they resort to spamming and sort of blasting emails to everyone.
I'm sure you get these every day.
Omer, hey, I would like to publish a guest post on your website.
So those things simply don't work.
And the ones that do respond to those pitches are from websites that you don't want to link from.
So building relationships with relevant authoritative publications.
There's a variety of different strategies that you can utilize in order to get there.
And normally those type of strategies strategies require you to have something of substance to pitch and that requires to have certain types of content that are built for sort of these link building outreach campaigns.
You can't just go out and pitch everything.
So say you build a product page, shouldn't go out there and try to build backlinks to that because you can provide little value.
But original research articles, stuff that is, you've done a Survey or you have proprietary information that you can share.
And these are normally the type of things that you want to do outreach for.
And then what we use is a process called the middleman approach, as Ahrefs guys call it, where you sort of have a beacon when it comes to links, when it comes to attracting external links to a website, and then normally have internal links within those pages that kind of pass on that link coded to other pages.
So that's just a fancy way of saying that it's not just simply spamming.
It does require a good amount of strategy and preparation before you start pulling your laptop out to start emailing people.
Omer (12:34.780)
Yeah, I think that you're right.
Link building has got such a bad rep because there are so many people doing it and doing it badly.
I think people are just tuning out.
It's harder to get people's attention because there's so much noise out there.
So I'm curious, when you say building relationships sounds great, sounds like the right way to do it, but it also sounds like a painfully slow process.
Farzad Rashidi (13:02.710)
It was, and you're 100% correct.
Omer (13:05.750)
So how do you do that?
How do you do that in a way that helps you move the needle while not being like all the other examples of bad outreach?
Farzad Rashidi (13:18.310)
Exactly.
So you're 100% correct, Omer.
It is a very painfully slow and unscalable process.
So what we were doing at the time was practically throwing spaghetti on the wall initially to trying to figure out what works.
And it turns out the stuff that works takes normally the most amount of time.
So I'm going to give you a couple examples.
What are some of the things that I that we do that work still?
Not to this day, but as far as the time part, since there is quite a lot of preparation needed and also in terms of building relationships and kind of opening up these conversations, that was sort of the reason why we started building Responder in the first place.
Because a lot of the tools that were already in the market were either mass average tools that I'm sure a lot of spammers use nowadays to send these emails, or there were CRM tools that are helping you keeping track of your opportunities, but it doesn't really so much help with the average part itself.
So what Responda really was built to do was to automate a lot of the dirty work and mundane tasks like, okay, you have this article, wanna promote it.
Here's a list of the these particular web pages that we think that you need to build links from.
And here are the right people at Each one of these websites that actually manage the content.
Here's a direct verified email address and social profiles.
And here's a.
Now spend time on personalization average.
So all of that stuff is sort of taken care of in terms of automations that are built in so that now as a human you can get yourself involved at the last step to actually start engaging in the conversations and personalizing these pitches and actually interacting with them through a variety of different channels.
So for example, I can, I'm happy to outline a few strategies.
One of them is again, I don't mean this to come across as a link building strategy.
So we, we chatted about this Omer and I said I want to talk about it.
I've been a big fan of the show for years.
I was telling Omer and I've listened to pretty much every single episode within the past, I would say at least two to three years.
I challenged Omer to quiz me on it.
And so the, the, the matter of fact is it's a true honor and a ple.
Be a guest on this show and it's something that I've been wanted to do and took a quite a, quite a amount of convincing.
Omer (15:32.160)
Yeah, I mean thank you for that and I appreciate that.
And, and talking about long term relationships.
You and I have been talking on and off for several years before we got to this point.
So you, you know, you walk the talk when it comes to building relationships.
Farzad Rashidi (15:46.960)
I appreciate that.
Thank you, Omar.
But so what, what are the strategies?
So for example, we are getting a backlink from your website SaaS Club to respond.
Did we ever spam you?
No.
Are we getting a backlink?
Yeah.
So one of the strategies is actually going on other people's podcasts as a guest.
So Responda helps you find some podcasts in your space that are relevant.
So you can find for example, hey, here's a competing company or someone in our space.
Where are they getting their interviews?
Are they getting going on podcasts?
Okay, what are these podcasts?
So that automatically tells you three things.
One, they accept guests, two, that are relevant to your space and three, makes your life easier when it comes to pitching because you can just say that hey, Omer, you know, came across the interview with this and person and that and I love the fact you guys talked about these.
So we can actually listen to that episode, see if there, if you're actually going to be a good guest, give you some metrics about the podcast to see if the audience sort of matches your target market.
If there is a match where you as a guest can provide value to the audience.
And also the the audience is the type of customer, potential customers for your business.
Now that's a match made in heaven.
So let's go ahead and find let responder find the host, get the email and then help you reach out to them with a personalized pitch referencing that episode they found through.
Now that has a lot of benefits.
One, you're getting free advertising to a niche audience.
Two, you're building relationships with smart people and publications in your space like yourself.
And also you're getting these backlinks and mentions to your website from websites that don't normally work with these email spammers.
So these are gold.
So that's one out of a gazillion different ways on how you'd be able to provide value to publications and in return.
Obviously it's not a quid pro queue.
It's normally a collaboration, a partnership that normally starts that conversation.
Omer (17:38.890)
So let's recap on what we've talked about so far.
You, you join Visme, you want to try and sell that product.
You invest a lot of time in content marketing.
Nothing seems to work.
Then through trial and error, you start to realize we're spending way too much time on content production and not enough time on content promotion distribution.
Farzad Rashidi (18:02.560)
That's right.
Omer (18:03.160)
And so it was a bunch of trial and error.
You basically have an internal tool which is helping you do this outreach and content promotion better.
And then you start to see results from that.
And eventually that led you to the aha moment, which is, hey, maybe this tool is a product itself.
So why don't we kind of move to that part of the story where you decide to build respond out as a standalone product.
How did you go about getting your first 10 customers?
Farzad Rashidi (18:35.160)
So Omer, I remember this.
I put together a.
So we were pretty much at the time doing everything manually when it came to research, finding opportunities, find reaching out to folks and as I said, didn't.
We did some investigations, some of them didn't really like the software that was already out there.
So I literally put together like this little, I would say sketch here and vision at the time and, and went and pitched it to Paymon who is the CEO of, who is the CEO CEO of BizMe.
And it was like, hey, I have an idea for this tool that's going to save us a lot of time, at least internally.
And you know, who knows, maybe if you actually end up working out, we can probably sell this as another tool.
And what happened was that we actually got one of the developers because we're already a SaaS company.
So we had some access to designers and you know, developers there.
So we got one of the developers to spend like 30% of his time on the site sort of building and duct taping together this little mvp.
The time wasn't even called responding.
It wasn't called anything really.
And we built it and then put it in front of our team members, marketing team, which I was leading at the time.
I was like, hey guys, I built this thing for you, you're welcome.
And they just loved it.
They're like, hey man, this is awesome.
It's saving us a lot of time was sort of, I would say zapier and steroids.
So it was sort of automating a lot of this work that they had to do by kind of, you know, building some scripts that was sort of connected to different APIs and kind of automating a lot of things.
And we were like, okay, that sounds great.
Let's, let's see if we can actually sell this thing because if it can help us, I'm sure it can help a lot of other SaaS companies.
So we reached out to a few, I know folks that were in the startup world, like on beta list, we scraped that list and I went and reached out to every single founder and I was like, hey man, I or lady, you want to come try this thing that we just built.
And some of them would say, yeah, because they're, you know, people are in the tech space and they're always open minded normally.
And out of the blue one or two of them actually started paying for it.
I was like, okay, well there's some sign of life.
You know, that's not quite a product market bid, but it's still something that other people are willing to pay their credit card, put down a credit card and pay for it.
So what I did was for a number of weeks actually started building this little e book that's still live, still getting downloads.
It's called Vis Me Marketing Playbook.
And it was sort of a step by step instructions to all the stuff that we had learned over the course of years, trial and errors that we did over on the Vis Me site to make our content marketing function.
And I'm happy to give you some snippets from that because I think there's a couple of good nuggets there I could share that is not just related to content promotion, but that ebook.
We're like, okay, well that sounds great.
We can, we can promote it to our audience on the Visim side but a lot of them aren't really target market for responder.
We have kind of users from all across the board on the visum side.
So that is also something that was kind of discouraging like okay, we got all these millions of users, not really someone we can cross sell to.
So we want to reach out to Appsumo and we're like hey guys, I wrote this ebook, about 160 pages and I literally outlined step by step everything we've learned the past like five years building our.
I think our traffic at the time was like a million or two.
Still wasn't 3 million.
And they were like sure, we can launch this maybe as a freebie.
So I was like great.
So we went to AppSumo and we already had a relationship with them because we had ran a ltd with them on a business side back in the day when it was very early beta and.
But Uber Respond is a type of product that doesn't make sense to LTDs for just because of reoccurring data costs.
It's not something you can just give out for free for life.
So we basically launched an ebook and it immediately got like almost 10,000 downloads the first two weeks and it was quite a sizable list.
So then we reached out to them at like a week or so after.
We're like, hey, by the way, we just built this product called we at the time, I think it's called AIPR or whatever we call it Respond eventually and then got a few people in and they were interested.
So I think 20 or so 10, 20 customers signed up for it.
So that's sort of the backstory there.
Omer (22:57.010)
They paid for the product.
Farzad Rashidi (22:58.130)
They actually started paying for the product.
Omer (23:00.530)
So when you wrote this ebook, did you do that intentionally for AppSumo or was it supposed to be Lead Magnet?
Farzad Rashidi (23:08.400)
It was just going to be a lead magnet.
Right.
So initially we were like we're going to promote it to our community.
We made some, put some ad money behind it.
We did, but it was obviously very expensive.
And we also tried to partner with HubSpot.
That fell through.
But AppSumo is the one that we actually collaborated with in the past that we had a better chance of working with them.
Omer (23:27.840)
So why create 160 page?
I mean who in their right mind does that?
I mean people give away lead magnets which are like one page PDFs or a ten page eBook, but a hundred, that's why did you do that?
Farzad Rashidi (23:45.210)
So you know, retrospect it probably would have been shorter.
It wasn't Supposed to be that long.
So what happened was that I was like, okay, I want to share stuff I learned and then create a step by step guide with screenshots and stuff.
And there's.
It's not just pure text.
It's actually like, okay, go, open this, do this, that.
It's very practical.
And it was sort of serving as an SOP also for our team.
We still use it up to this day for new hires.
We just send them this book.
We're like, okay, read the first two chapters.
Maybe not entire 160 pages, but.
So at the time it was sort of.
It happened sort of by accident because we weren't planning on it.
But then I just got into it and overnight and on the weekends I was like, okay, this is actually kind of fun to kind of document the stuff that we experimented with.
And I'm happy to share a couple of things with you again from that ebook.
For example, the process that we use for keyword research is still up to this day, still what we use now.
And it's a formula I developed.
We used to call it, well, I call it Fars score.
And then people were like, no, not calling this Fars score.
So they call it the opportunity score.
Where, you know, when you, for example, let's say you're a SaaS company, you want to start writing content, where would you start, right?
So using it, some of these SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, or if you're just starting out, maybe ubersuggest, you'll run a parent keyword.
Like, for example, for respondent, our parent keyword is link building.
So you can run that parent keyword and they give you like a gazillion search suggestions that you can pick from.
Because there's so many keywords, so many variations of how you can ask a question related to link building.
So the way we prioritize it is by little formula we developed that basically prioritizes keywords based on three factors.
Call it the three pillars.
One is a volume.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna get into that.
How many people are actually searching for that keyword every month?
Two is keyword difficulty, how difficult it is to actually get up in the search results with this.
And the last is commercial intent.
So is that keyword actually related to our business, how much business value has?
So we want to prioritize keywords that contain that are in that middle overlapping part.
So we have a formula that basically is.
So we use three metrics from these SEO tools.
One for volume, we Use the traffic potential metric, which is the amount of organic traffic that the first search results gets.
So that multiplied by one over keyword difficulty, which is a metric that these SEO tools give you that explains how difficult it is to get up in the search results.
If it's dominated with some of the big guys, maybe skip that.
And last but not least is the commercial intent.
So the way we basically objectify it is by CPC for that keyword.
So if other.
And the reason why we do it, even though it's not related to SEO, is because advertisers like to make money.
So if there's a keyword advertising actively paying for, that means that they're making money out of it.
So that means it's a higher commercially valuable keyword.
So we prioritize some keywords organically based on that.
And then one last thing that I also missed out is that we have a rule of thumb that we don't go after keywords to have a higher keyword difficulty, which is a metric from 0 to 100, than our domain rating, which is not a metric from 100, 0 to 100.
Which is again, fancy way of saying we stay within our lake when it comes to the keywords we pick.
So that's one of the strategies, for example, that I talk about step by step in the ebook.
Omer (27:11.930)
Great.
Where can people get hold of this e book?
Farzad Rashidi (27:14.250)
Just Google vis me marketing strategies somewhere on there.
Omer (27:17.090)
So we'll find a link.
So did you beyond the appsumo launch, did you use content marketing, SEO and content promotion as the main way that you found customers?
Farzad Rashidi (27:31.880)
Yes.
So respondent, we actually that's one of the first things we did.
And before even we had a product, we built a website and it started writing content now using the same strategy, picking out small keywords, building blog posts.
And so that's something we started actually two and a half years ago.
So now responder gets.
I think we're experiencing a little bit of a summer dip now since it's June, but I think end of May, I think we hit around 100k in monthly organic traffic.
So within about two years, which is still pretty impressive.
But again, it took us two years to get here.
So it's not a.
It's not a validation sort of strategy.
We didn't know.
I know first 10 customers don't normally, don't come through SEO.
That's normally your hundredth or more customer that comes through.
Omer (28:15.200)
So I also want to understand how much effort were you putting into the content that you were creating for responder I See, a lot of companies do the research, figure out what keywords to target, and a lot of the times they end up creating content which is almost the same as everything else that you'd see in the search results, right.
For that keyword.
One of the things that you mentioned earlier, which we just sort of glossed over, but I think is super, super important, is the uniqueness of content.
You talked about original content, you talked about doing surveys which create some kind of data which people might want to link to or cite or reference or so on.
So how much effort do you typically put into a piece of content and how important is uniqueness to helping you rank for that keyword?
Farzad Rashidi (29:09.710)
Absolutely.
So Omer, one thing that a lot of people don't talk about enough is that we create different types of content, each with different objectives.
So we create SEO content that's built for volume and bringing customers to our website or bringing relevant people to our website.
2 is link magnet content, which sounds bad, we have to pick another word for it, which these are original research stuff that is super high quality that people want to link.
And the third piece is conversion content, which is ranging anywhere from product pages to best XYZ tools to stuff that template pages stuff that we actually, you know, sell our product through.
So each one has a different objective and different strategy behind it.
Any starting from production all the way to promotion.
So for our bottom on a funnel content or money pages that we create, like for example, if you go Google link building software, like response should be presentation software, infographic tools maker, whatever, any of these keywords are related to our companies, we are always on the top results.
But we never do any sort of outreach campaign for these pages because even though they're very extremely hard to get, because they're very highly competitive keywords, this is not the right strategy.
Go and build backlinks to these particular pages.
What we do is that for each silo of content.
So for example, for responder, or let me actually talk about Visme, because I think it's easier.
So for Visme, we have a few silos like infographics, presentations, reports.
Each one has a money page, right?
That's the core page that everything links to.
And then that category also has three types of content.
Content that we use that we exclusively create for basically attracting links.
Content that we create that is exclusively built for bringing SEO traffic, targeting, higher traffic volume, keywords, and then content we create that is basically in the people are in the consideration stage of the buyer journey.
So let me give you an example.
For example, let's take the keyword like infographic maker or.
Yeah, that's actually a good one.
So the type of content that we create for SEO is how to make an infographic, right?
This educational pieces of content gets a lot of volume and that's the type of content pieces that we create that we optimize for search engines but also at the same time creating content that makes sense, right?
So people actually can walk through, et cetera.
So we don't actually, we stop our nerdiness when it comes to writing.
So all the nerdiness happens before we actually start typing in that Google Doc.
So all the research process happens before and we pick a topic, we get the writer to write about it right from the heart.
Like don't just over optimize things.
Now the type of content we create for consideration stage is for example the infographic maker landing page.
If you go Google it pops up or if you look up infographic templates, right, we pop up.
So those are pages normally that we don't do any sort of link building outreach for.
But here's the type of content that we do link building outreach for.
Omer, have you watched Game of Thrones before?
Omer (32:14.850)
Yes.
Farzad Rashidi (32:15.410)
Okay, perfect.
I was like, okay, friendship over if you haven't watched it.
So, so Visme is inherently a database tool.
So right before the last season came out.
By the way, I haven't watched the last season yet just because people keep spoiling it for me.
So I'm waiting till I forget what happens and it doesn't help that I talk about it on podcast.
But anyway, so right before the last season of Game of Thrones came out, one of my team members on our Vismy content team went and visualized based on a betting website, just put together infographic on who's going to win the Game of Thrones.
What are people actually betting on?
We ended up actually betting the wrong person.
But that campaign was still a success because people were betting on the wrong guy.
But then what we did was that, that so we created a bunch of really good looking visuals there and if you look up like vis me Game of Thrones should pop up.
And what we did then was to go and reached out to any journalist that covered Game of Thrones within the past seven days.
So there's a bunch of people like on for example Psychology Today there's written an article on hey, Game of Thrones last season's coming out, yada yada yada, reached out to the journalists.
We're like yo, John, you know, just came across your article about last season, Game of Thrones, I researched him actually just put together this guide or this graphic set on who's going to win the Game of Thrones based on how much people are betting on it.
Just send it over to you.
Let me know what you think.
Guess how many backlinks and mentions that particular piece brought on its own.
Just throw a number.
Omer (33:42.600)
Thousands.
Farzad Rashidi (33:43.640)
Maybe not thousands, hundreds.
60 of them were from top tier publications and like Psychology Today, Men's Health, I think Forbes, bunch of big guys.
Now that trickles in to all the other web pages that we have now tells Google that hey, these guys are an authoritative figure.
And because that, that is an infographic page that we had created or people were linking to.
And so it creates what we call topical authority for, for that infographic related keywords.
Now it also helps with, through these internal links, we pass on that link equity.
It also helps with other content pages to get up there.
Omer (34:16.550)
Right, but the question about that one.
So I think that's really cool.
I just googled it.
I like that you even put all the Game of Thrones characters into like a Myers Briggs infographic, which is pretty unique.
But this is going to attract Game of Thrones fans, isn't it?
They're not going to necessarily buy your software.
Farzad Rashidi (34:32.870)
Exactly.
So I'm with you.
So the link magnet content is not conversion content.
So this is the type of content that's going to bring in relevant publications.
So since we're a data vis tool, that's something that made sense for us to do, not something I recommend for every type of company to do.
Because VISMI caters to a long wide range of variety of users.
For example, for responder, what we were doing is and it's like we're releasing this guide on basically a survey that we ran with link building experts on how much link building costs in 2022.
Like each link that you were, it's proprietary data.
So then we're going to go and reach out to Search Engine Journal and a bunch of relevant publications in our space and pitch that content to be featured.
You know, you see what I'm saying?
So I want you to apply that to your industry for your niche.
Not saying that that Game of Thrones is particularly the type of campaign that you want to run.
Omer (35:23.670)
You're taking data that's publicly available, but you're putting a unique spin on it.
And I think that's what creates, you know, interest that people want to link to.
So I think we've talked a lot about the experiences of content marketing, SEO with Visme and how you've applied that to Respawna in terms of growing that.
We talked about the appsumo launch as a way to get some early traction and the first 10, 20 customers.
And so you're basically building that growth engine around content as you did with Visme.
Let's talk about the product a little bit because for quite some time Respawna wasn't link building software.
Right.
It was doing a bunch of things, or you were telling people it was doing a bunch of things.
So what was going on there?
And now that you look back, why was that not a good idea?
Farzad Rashidi (36:14.930)
Absolutely.
So the website that we put out, I remember this, the messaging was, it was our motto, which was don't spam, build relationships.
So that was a, that was the title of the web page which to anybody doesn't make any sense until you know exactly what, what we're, what we were selling here.
So our idea in our head at the time was that, okay, we're going to start from a wide market, so we're going to target people who are looking to do influencer marketing, we're targeting PR people that are looking to contact journalists to release the press release, we're going to target some SEOs, we're going to target some people who are doing podcast outreach.
So all of the functionalities that our app does, by the way, what happened was that we were selling to everyone and no one in a way that, you know, our process was, okay, we're gonna sell, try to sell it to everyone, see who pays for it.
And then we niche down.
And that was a bad idea in retrospect because it just sort of diluted a lot of our efforts in a way that we weren't really catering to anyone.
Like we didn't create word of mouth in any certain community.
It was sort of, yeah, I mean if you come across there, some people are like, oh, this is cool.
But then everybody sort of using it in a different way.
So our messaging was not very clear cut enough.
Our pricing was sort of, you know, we're overvaluing in some markets and we're undervaluing some certain ones.
It's just sort of a, I would say you, we're stuck within a hard kind of a rock between a rock and a hard place where didn't really know who our, who my target market was.
And then we really eventually settled was like, okay, what target market do we actually provide the most value to?
And those turn out to be content marketers.
People are into SaaS, companies or marketing agencies, maybe even some affiliate marketers that are actually looking to gain more organic traffic from Google, they have to do some outreach in order to get some backlinks.
Now let's go make their lives easier and build this product cater to directly towards them.
So that also reflected in our pricing changes in our features and our onboarding flow, all that stuff that in retrospect I would have done differently.
Omer (38:17.740)
But when you think about product market fit, the approach you described didn't sound that unreasonable.
We're not sure what the target market is and so we're going to target a few different markets, we're going to figure out where the product resonates the most and then that's where we're going to focus.
Farzad Rashidi (38:34.220)
Right.
Omer (38:34.700)
If you look back now, how do you think you could have got there faster?
Because there are a lot of people who struggle with the same issue.
So what did you learn from that experience?
Farzad Rashidi (38:44.870)
So it was the initial problem we were solving.
So remember we were a SaaS company building this in order to build backlinks.
We knew that already from day one.
There was no reason for us to dip into other industries that are dominated with some of the big guys like pr, there's Cision and Meltwater or influencer Marketing, there's upbound influence and there's a bunch of other companies that do this.
There's sales outreach, which there's like sales loft and outreach, etc.
So there's so many, so many tools in the, in these saturated markets that a bootstrap, tiny little startup with an MVP product wasn't really going to make it.
So it was a lot of wasted time and effort to understand that in a way that, because we already knew from day one that hey, we are a link building software for SEO purposes and that's something that we should have stuck with and not sort of dip into other industries from the get go.
Omer (39:36.040)
So internally this is, this is interesting.
Internally you knew you had super clarity on what the product was, what problem it solved and you could articulate that in one sentence.
Farzad Rashidi (39:50.720)
Yes.
Omer (39:51.320)
But when you went out to the market, you kind of watered down that message.
Farzad Rashidi (39:55.960)
Yes.
Omer (39:56.320)
And try to appeal to everybody.
Farzad Rashidi (39:57.720)
We were like, we're for everybody and then we're trying to sell it to everyone.
And it just wasn't really the right approach.
Omer (40:04.020)
So how long did that go on for?
And then what happened when you went all in and focused on link building software?
Farzad Rashidi (40:12.980)
When we started, so it was quite a gradual process.
It wasn't a clean break.
And what we really did, that sort of focused us a lot was back in, I would say late 2000s.
It was like sort of a year of playing around with MVP and we had some customers getting some feedback on and we were like, okay, now we got a.
We got a decision to make.
Because building software Omer as you know is kind of like building Legos.
You're starting with a base and you building on top of it.
So we were like, okay, we can keep building features and capabilities on this base of a MVP product.
We have to remember we didn't have the right infrastructure set up.
There was no mark your services.
Like one thing that could go wrong that we took take the whole app down and there was like no clear cut like database structure, no kubernetes, no like I would say it was just very bare bone because it was built for ourselves internally.
So we made the decision and I think we made a good decision to take the entire year of 2021 to actually build the right foundation in terms of infrastructure back in front and everything from scratch with a professional designer that we're going to simplify the product that becomes self serve intuitive to use.
Super high performance.
Everything loads super quickly and with very minimal bugs.
And we underestimated the amount of time it would take because as one would in the software space.
And we have kept having to push the launch back and back and back.
We were initially shooting for six months and it became seven months and eight months and until November 2021 rolled around and everybody was kind of getting impatient, including our investor vis me guys paymon.
And we're like hey man, what are you guys doing here?
Why aren't you releasing this 1.0?
So right before our CTO had a planned sailing trip in the middle of the ocean, like with no Internet access for 10 days, we were like okay, we either going to have to push the launch back to a week or we're going to do it now.
So we made the horrible decision to release a brand new version that was gonna get migrated into like other people or data would actually get migrated in the middle of the week.
So in retrospect it was a very dumb decision on my end to do because obviously it took some time and because we had to take the system down and migrate everyone over and bring up the whole new system.
And obviously so right before our main engineer is in the middle of the seas in the middle of a sailing trip on the ocean.
So not the smartest decision.
I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
We should have probably taken those two weeks for more testing and wait until everybody is ready, brace ourselves for impact before we launch.
But we ended up going through it and our customers thankfully were so empathetic and understanding because we had very close relationships with each one.
All of them I talked to at least twice on a zoom call like we knew each other very well and finally rep the band aid and released the 1.0 and and then the rest is history.
Omer (43:21.000)
Awesome.
So we should wrap up, move on to the lightning rounds.
You know the drill.
Farzad Rashidi (43:25.640)
Yes sir.
Omer (43:26.280)
You've probably heard these questions more than I have.
Ready?
Farzad Rashidi (43:31.680)
Yes sir.
Let's.
Let's do it.
Omer (43:33.440)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Farzad Rashidi (43:37.120)
Niche down from early on.
Don't do it later.
Omer (43:40.000)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Farzad Rashidi (43:42.480)
It's a book that I'm actually just about to finish and it's called how to Not Be Wrong.
It's called the Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg.
Omer (43:51.040)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your
Farzad Rashidi (43:53.360)
mind of a successful founder being comfortable with uncertainty?
Omer (43:57.830)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Farzad Rashidi (44:01.510)
Something I've actually a few months ago started doing is leaving my cell phone outside the bedroom and Instead reading for 15 minutes before falling asleep and go to bed.
Improve my life quality sleep, happiness as
Omer (44:16.070)
a person, I need to do that.
I used to keep my phone downstairs and then I got a cool new charger and I was like, yeah, I'm going to put it next to my bed.
Worst decision I ever made.
Farzad Rashidi (44:26.920)
No screens in the bedroom, just an Alexa for alarms.
That's right.
Omer (44:31.240)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had
Farzad Rashidi (44:34.120)
the extra time building smart clothing with IoT, which is completely random and irrelevant to software founder, but that's one thing I'd like to work on at some point in the future.
Omer (44:44.760)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Farzad Rashidi (44:47.880)
This is somewhat embarrassing, but I used to be a professional rollerblade racer back in high school and I thought I was being very cool, but in retrospect, it was not.
Omer (45:00.540)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Farzad Rashidi (45:03.980)
I would say fitness.
It's a boring answer, but I'm a big fan of physical exercise, hiking, working out and staying healthy physically.
And that's one thing I tend to prioritize right after work.
Omer (45:18.540)
Awesome.
All right, Farzad, well, thank you so much.
I think the last time you and I talked responder wasn't link building software, right?
It was Kind of a bunch of,
Farzad Rashidi (45:27.560)
bunch of different things, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Omer (45:30.280)
So great to see the niching down the focus and you know, congratulations on the traction you've had so far.
And if people want to find out more about Respawna, they can go to respona.com that's R E S P O N A.
And if folks want to find out about Visme, they go to is it visme.com we own both.
Farzad Rashidi (45:52.810)
Yes.
Visme.com and main domain is Visme Co. That's where we started and still hosted.
Omer (45:58.610)
Great.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Farzad Rashidi (46:02.290)
I know my name is just like yours.
My name is Farzador Sheeti and there's not a whole lot of them out there, so I stick out like the sore thumb and LinkedIn in case you want to drop by and say hi.
Omer (46:12.540)
Yeah, not the most competitive of keywords.
Farzad Rashidi (46:15.460)
Keywords, right.
That's.
That's a little cheating right there.
Omer (46:19.660)
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Appreciate you sharing a bunch of insights that I think can help SaaS, startups and founders to, to do a better job with content marketing and to do, if you're going to do link building, doing it the right way, which I think, you know, the bar has got so low in some areas that if you take the time and you have the long term approach and you think about relationships, you stand out, you get more attention.
So I appreciate that.
I wish you and the team the best of success.
Farzad Rashidi (46:46.970)
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer.
This, this one, this one was a good one.
Omer (46:51.930)
My pleasure.
Farzad Rashidi (46:52.610)
Thank you.
Omer (46:53.290)
Well, let's just.
