Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a 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 Vlad Gorzman, the co founder and CEO of of Involve Me, a no code builder for interactive forms, quizzes, surveys and more.
In 2018, after spending two years building a content management system for virtual reality experiences, Vlad realized there wasn't enough market demand.
During that time, he and his co founders were also doing some agency work to finance their startup and they realized that there seemed to be a consistent need from clients to create customized web forms.
But building the forms manually was often time intensive, so they started automating parts, which eventually sparked the idea for a self serve SaaS product.
After validating the concept with a few initial customers, they launched an MVP as a freemium product and they were able to get their first 10 customers by switching their agency customers to the new product.
But it had taken Vlad and his co founders almost two and a half years of trial and error to get to this point.
They hadn't paid themselves anything for years and kept investing money from the agency work back into their startup and paying the salaries of a small team.
And having made the decision to bootstrap, the business was adding to the pressure for the founders to grow faster and start generating meaningful revenue.
Today, Involve Me is Now a profitable 7 figure ARR SaaS company with thousands of customers.
They've grown to a team of 14 people and are still fully bootstrapped.
In this episode you'll learn how Vlad validated the idea for Involve Me by showing prospective customers competitor products and asking why those products didn't work for them.
Why?
After having previously built a VC backed startup, Vlad decided that this wasn't the right path for Involve Me and decided to bootstrap instead.
How the founders came up with a creative approach to raising some money, acquiring engaged customers without giving away any equity.
We also talk about how Vlad and his co founders figured out how to position and differentiate their product in a very crowded market, and why that seems to be working for them, and how the team is eating their own dog food by using Involve Me tools on their own website to continuously improve the product's weaknesses.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Vlad, welcome to the show.
Vlad Gozman (02:45.960)
Thank you for having me.
I'm happy to be here.
Omer (02:48.360)
My pleasure.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Vlad Gozman (02:53.400)
Yeah, kind of.
The one that pops to mind is something along the lines, only the paranoid survive.
I think it's from the former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove.
And basically it's probably just an exaggerated form of saying that within your business you should never take anything for granted and always plan for the worst.
Be always acting like a challenger, even when you become an incumbent so you can keep your spot at the end of the day.
Omer (03:30.550)
Yeah, I think I still have that book somewhere here on a bookshelf.
I mean, but it's tough being a founder, right?
Because on the one hand everyone's saying, hey, you got to be, you got to be optimistic, you got to be the one leading the way and having the vision.
But at the same time, you're right.
You also have to be kind of paranoid and think about all the things that could go wrong and then how you're going to deal with them and stuff like that.
It's a tough balancing act.
Vlad Gozman (03:52.510)
It is definitely.
It's a weird contradiction, but I think every other founder will know what I'm talking about and it's something that you live with every day.
Omer (04:03.290)
So tell us about Involve Me.
What does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Vlad Gozman (04:09.690)
Involve Me is an online form builder that leverages AI to automate the creation, personalization and analysis of forms, quizzes and surveys for businesses.
We target mainly marketing and sales teams from SMBs, increasingly mid market and we, we solve an everlasting problem, I would say, which is data collection and knowing your customer and having better digital conversations with your customers.
Omer (04:39.780)
Awesome.
And give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
Vlad Gozman (04:47.220)
So we launched early 2019 and we're a bootstrapped team of 14 people, partly remote, partly in Vienna, Austria at our HQ.
And yeah, since then we've grown into a seven figure ARR.
We have thousands of customers, as said, mostly SMBs.
Omer (05:10.130)
That's great.
And before we get into talking about Involve Me, can you just tell us a little bit about your background because this is not your first business.
So maybe just like one or two minutes in terms of what other kind of businesses have you run in the past and so people understand where you're coming from when you started Involve Me, sure.
Vlad Gozman (05:32.620)
So yeah, you're right.
Omer.
It's not my first rodeo.
I founded my first company out of university.
I'm originally from Romania, I'm living in Austria and back then it was around 2007, Romania had just joined the EU, meaning there were a lot of funding opportunities for companies and new regulation changing and stuff like that.
So I actually did my thesis on how to get European funding to align with the European standards.
And out of that thesis I started my first company which was a consulting business.
I helped companies in industry get EU funding.
So I did the business planning the whole bureaucracy around submitting that and getting the funding so they could align with the standards of the eu.
So that was my first business venture.
I would not call it a startup.
I'm not even sure how to put it.
So it's at least not a digital venture.
In parallel to running it, I already dabbled in a few would say online experiments on my own, putting together a classified site, trying to launch that in Romania, failed miserably and I managed to have a small exit and I decided to look around Europe and try my luck elsewhere and experience life in a different setup in a different country.
And yeah, came to Vienna and I remember I joined back in 2010, a small gathering where people started pitching their startup ideas.
It was completely new to me and talking with the people there, I basically ended up asking them, so the startup Picos is like Vienna, where can I find different venues, different gatherings?
They basically told me that's it, this is the startup ecosystem.
That was 2010 and I had the luck to be around people like Markus Wagner from i5Invest, Oliver Holle who was just starting Speed Invest, the first VC in Austria.
And I've seen the startup community sort of spring to life and there were a few opportunities there and I got a chance to work with some amazing co founders and most notably I co founded Adverity out of the i5 ecosystem.
And adverity is a data analytics company for marketing data, basically an ETL tool.
Much more than that nowadays.
It also grew over the years.
It's a venture backed business, it grew into hundreds of employees and in the early years I was basically one of the product guys.
I was co CEO as well.
So that gave me a lot of insight into also the sort of different world than where it involved me at, which is the VC backed SaaS, sales driven enterprise SaaS.
Whereas Involve Me is a self serve freemium SaaS, more or less no touch sales.
Omer (09:21.110)
So let's talk about Involve Me.
Where did the idea come from?
I mean you founded the business in 2019, so kind of around that time, 2018, 2019, what were you doing and how did you come up with this idea?
Vlad Gozman (09:37.310)
Yeah, sure.
So the interesting story behind that is that the business was actually founded a few years prior.
We launched involve me in 2019 and that is because before Involve Me we did something completely different.
So around two years prior we set out to build also SaaS but in a completely different space.
We looked at virtual reality and we started building prototyping CMS for VR applications.
We basically went full force on this idea, prototyped it.
You know, we didn't do the basics, we didn't validate it well enough in the beginning.
So like, luckily we realized that there is not an immediate big enough market for it and decided to pivot.
Omer (10:36.420)
So you worked on that for about two years and then you made the pivot.
Vlad Gozman (10:41.540)
Exactly.
Omer (10:42.740)
And so it's kind of, I mean help me connect the dots here because it was like they don't seem like, it doesn't seem like a natural pivot from like saying a CMS for VR to building a product like Involve Me.
So how did that happen?
Vlad Gozman (10:57.440)
Yeah, we stumbled upon it or into it.
So while building the CMS for VR, me and my co founders, we started doing some agency work to finance our activities.
And one of my co founders is also the founder of a digital agency, Screenagers in Vienna.
It's a boutique agency with, with some interesting clients such as Universal Pictures.
And I singled Universal Pictures out because it was basically our first Involve Me customer.
I would say before Involve Me existed and we realized that they needed these type of forms and quizzes to gather customer data for each of their releases around movies.
And at that time they had several releases per month.
Each one was different in the way they styled it.
But in the end in the back it was the same need.
So front end wise it would look differently, in the back it was the same.
So we started creating these content types for them and also while doing it, automating parts of it for us to make it easier.
So the next piece that we roll out would require less resources from more margin.
And out of it came the idea of creating a self serve product.
And then we got a few other customers from the agency or through the agency, validated it with them and then created an MVP for a self service tool.
Omer (12:47.000)
Got it.
Okay.
So at least this time you validated the idea.
Right?
So that's good.
And what I want to try and understand is at that time, I mean form building software, very crowded market.
And so we're going to talk about how you differentiate Involve Me and position the product and why customers would choose you versus some of the other products on the market.
Because I think that's always an interesting conversation to have.
But Even back in 2019 there were a lot of these products around.
So on the one hand you've got the validation from some initial customers who are telling you, yeah, this is the type of solution we're willing to pay for.
Actually not even willing to pay for, they're actually paying for it.
On the other hand, if you look in the competitive landscape, you must have seen a bunch of these products out there.
So what was your thinking at the time in terms of why did you decide that there was an opportunity here?
And the reason I ask you is because I heard, I think it was on LinkedIn or something.
Somebody said, I had this great idea, googled it and then I was like, oh, somebody's already come up with it.
And I was like, actually that's probably not a bad thing.
It's actually validation that this people out there willing to pay for the problem and you know, maybe there's, there's room for you here to do something else.
So I think people maybe are too dismissive.
But then there's also the other extreme of this where you go into a market and there's like lots of players.
So how did you decide, like how did you decide we're going to go into this?
And this makes sense for us to build a business here.
Vlad Gozman (14:36.990)
Yeah, I know, that's, that's the million dollar question.
So first of all, I, I agree.
I mean whenever, whenever you validate an idea, you look at the market, you look at the competitive landscape and especially in the form building area, it became pretty clear to us that it's a crowded space.
So what we did is before even putting the first sort of line of code for the self service tool, we scouted the tools that were out there at that time that we thought would solve the needs of these customers who we were doing agency work for best.
And then we had sort of customer development discussions with them and calls and presented them with these solutions and asked them like, look, there are off the shelf tools.
Why aren't they solving your need?
Maybe you don't know about them, maybe you do, let's look at them together.
And we identified a few areas where around customization first of all, and some around functionality where we said, okay, this makes sense.
It seems that it would give us a competitive advantage if we would from the get go include that besides customization, which basically means making each content piece look like, have the brand identity of that company and not look like a third party tool, sort of, that was the, that was the solution that they were looking for.
And there was nothing off the shelf coming close to it in a no code fashion.
And the second is that the, there were a lot of forum solutions out there even back then.
The angle that we found was to focus on the quiz functionality behind it, basically allowing our first customers to, allowing them to score their leads, to basically have a better sense and qualify the users that they get through these forms.
And, and I think with these two angles we found something that at that time gave us enough of an edge to get the first 10 customers, basically.
Omer (17:16.970)
I love that because when you're in the early stages, when you're trying to get those first 10 customers and you get into this situation where maybe you've got some prospects and they seem interested in your product and you know that there's a bunch of products out there that might also help them do the job.
I don't know, sometimes secretly you're like, well maybe my market is the people who don't know about those products.
Right?
I could go after those people.
But you tackle this head on and you, you know, putting these products in front of those prospective customers and saying, why don't these products solve, you know, do the job for you?
I think that's a great way to, to, to validate this and to understand that because you know, we, I think maybe the natural thing to do would be to like do the competitive analysis ourselves.
But there's bias in there, right?
And we're like, well, you know, we could build a better feature than that and they don't do that as well.
But when customers are looking at that and telling you, then it's like some real, there's some real data there in terms of, okay, this is objective feedback in terms of what's good about these products and what isn't.
And I also like how that eventually led you to build the form builder.
But focus in on this use case of the quiz as being kind of a core thing that you would differentiate on.
Okay, great.
So that gets you to the first 10 customers.
Big milestone, right?
Great.
What did you do next?
I mean, it's great that you had the agency and you had some customers through there, but then what was your kind of go to market plan and how did you start finding more customers?
Vlad Gozman (18:53.760)
I think we were already two plus years in at this time with the new company.
As I told you before, I was coming from the back of a different experience where there was VC funding.
We've built a product for I think two years before actually getting customers in.
I mean we had also there a few development Customers, if you will, But a different ballgame, I would say.
And I'll be frank, it was a tough two years.
Even though there was a liquidity event for me, a small one before the first two and a half years, I didn't pay myself anything while investing in the business.
So when we were putting sort of the finishing touches on the MVP of Involve Me, which by the way also had a different name, it was called Brand Quiz.
So you know, the quiz angle.
My aim was to monetize as soon as possible and to switch from doing agency work to having the MVP or the MVL or minimum lovable product, mvlp, whatever you want to call it, but paid, right?
So the 10 customers, we were basically agency customers that we switched to the tool and I think that was easier because they were already paying more actually to get these custom coded content pieces out.
And then it was an easy sell.
But the next phase was the harder one because we hit the point where we already had a few people in the team so we were not paying ourselves, we were paying people in the team to build out the product and we started monetizing it with the first few.
We also wanted to go the bootstrapping route.
We did a small befriended angel round, but we kept the lion's share, most of the company.
So we didn't dilute, but we knew we needed a bigger capital infusion.
And I think this was an interesting moment for us, another pivotal moment as we looked around and we decided to do something we had no experience with, something that could have backfired and that is we did a lifetime deal, a limited deal with a group of potential customers that became customers, marketers and salespeople.
And we got a big enough capital infusion on the one side and secondly we got a bunch of very invested new customers that even though they just paid once for, for a lifetime, they, a lot of them provided invaluable feedback for, for that, for that next phase.
So we on the one side financed the next 12 months with one swoop and then secondly, we got the best type of customer because they gave us constant feedback on which features to prioritize, what is valuable, what they would pay for as an add on and so forth.
Omer (22:52.380)
Was this an appsumo launch?
Vlad Gozman (22:54.460)
It was not an appsumo launch.
We found a private group of a few thousand people and did it within that private group.
We therefore, I was a bit wary, to be frank.
Doing lifetime deals can be a double edged sword because you give, you know, you have people who invest in your, in your vision for the future, but you also give the product away potentially for free, forever.
And there might be another way to monetize or upsell or.
You know, in our case, I looked at appsumo, I wanted it to be a more private deal and also to be more in control of how much it extends.
And I think that we did it.
We did a great job with this group and it worked for us.
Omer (23:54.110)
Yeah, I think that's an interesting way to do this.
And what I like about that is it doesn't have to be an appsumo launch to get to a lifetime deal.
I think when you're going and selling to somewhere like Appsumo, you are getting people.
It's funny because I've seen there are some people there who will buy a lifetime deal and you're right, they're very invested, they provide tons of feedback and it's almost like they're almost making like a tiny investment in your business and they want to kind of go on the journey with you.
Right.
That's like amazing when you get those types of people.
On the other hand, you also get the people who will pay for the lifetime deal and then will act like they're giving you $10,000 a month and they're like complain about every single thing that doesn't work perfectly.
Right.
And so it is a double edged sword and a very tough thing to do.
I've never heard of anybody kind of going into a, kind of a private community and doing that, but it kind of totally makes sense.
How did you find that community and was it just somebody you knew or was it, you know, you went out on a search to, to find the
Vlad Gozman (25:13.370)
right place actually went out on a search.
But in this case we, the community found us, I would say because while we were doing the search, somebody from that community found out about it and then reached to us and, and, and yeah, we hooked up, I would say.
But yeah, I completely agree.
I think they're, yeah, you open the doors to all types of users and all types of perspectives on what they are to you and what you are to them.
I think in our case it was a net positive, but I can see it going also wrongly and some products being stuck in that lifetime difference deal sort of aura.
And we were very mindful of that back then as well.
So we made an informed decision.
Omer (26:11.570)
Yeah, I've seen like on appsumo, I've seen some products that will do a launch and then you never see them on appsumo again.
So that's like a very deliberate thing that they Came in, they wanted to just get some momentum, get a cash infusion, help them on their journey.
And then you have the products where you see over and over and over again coming back to do launches.
And that's like, okay, something isn't kind of working out here that if you have to keep relying on this as a way to.
Maybe it's just to get more money, I don't know.
Right.
Vlad Gozman (26:48.660)
It's like.
Omer (26:49.220)
But it's an interesting space.
Okay, great.
So that's pretty cool.
Because taking that approach, not only do you get more customers, it's not recurring revenue, but it's still money, which is important, especially for a bootstrap business.
And it gives you people who are giving you more feedback and helping you make the product better.
One thing I want to understand is from you is why did you go down the route of bootstrapping?
I mean, you started your career becoming this expert who's helping other businesses figure out how to raise money.
You've built VC backed businesses so it's not like something that you haven't done before.
Why did you decide that you wanted to bootstrap this time?
Vlad Gozman (27:36.440)
It was also a deliberate decision, having seen the VC side of things.
And by the way, I haven't completely exited the other company, so I've seen also the next stages of the VC of the VC route up to Series D. So Adverti has raised over 120 million euros.
I've also seen the downsides of it, I would say, but I'm not a preacher for bootstrapping and I think there are businesses that are better off as a bootstrap business and others that would simply not work without VC funding.
And also I'm also a believer in there's also middle ground.
So you don't have to be either bootstrapped or VC backed.
You can't be capital efficient and get the capital that you need at a specific stage and then get to profitability or wherever you need to go growth and hit those goals and then go to the next stage.
So I think making these decisions in a logical, deliberate way is the way to go.
In the case of Brand quiz, back then involve me now, I had the privilege of having the best of contacts in Vienna and Austria having been seeing the birth of the startup scene here.
I told you in the beginning.
So I reached out to a few venture capitalists, talked with them, told them where I see the product evolving into and asked them, do you think this is a VC backable thing?
I made an informed decision after discussing it with people Who I would argue had a better view or a more holistic view on market wise.
And with all the information that I gathered, I decided that it's just a better route being bootstrapped.
Giving control was part of it definitely, but not the only factor.
So how feasible is it?
Can I get this business to 100 million or is this a business that can grow in the tens of millions, which is perfectly fine, so wouldn't mind that.
Omer (30:40.520)
All right, great.
So I know one of the ways that you grew beyond that was through paid search, which kind of is interesting to me because number one, most of the times when I talk to founders, same story, we tried ads, they didn't work.
But what's more interesting is bootstrap business spending money on paid searches and acquisition channel.
It's not a cheap thing to do.
I don't know, did you kind of find out a secret way to bid low and acquire customers profitably back then?
Vlad Gozman (31:16.230)
I would say so, yes.
I think we found a few keywords that worked for us really well within the quiz category.
As I told you in the beginning, that was the angle and combined with lead gen and lead qualification, we found something that at that time was not as sought after or fought over as it is today.
Things change though, and it's a dynamic space.
But to go back to sort of the storyline, we got that sort of capital infusion and we directly focused on mrr.
Right.
So as you perfectly noted, the capital infusion was not recurring.
So we needed to maximize its impact on the business.
So we wanted something that could give us the most immediate signal that this works.
And on scale, that was search.
I mean it basically was me at I didn't have any marketer in the team.
It was me setting up the Google campaigns, maybe getting input from a few freelancers, but at the end of the day doing different tests and finding a few keyword categories that worked for us and it's still a channel for us.
So as I told you, over the years we expanded, we expanded the campaigns, we expanded keywords, the product is a different product today and it's way more, I would say, a more competitive space than it was when we started.
Therefore also its position in our mix is a different one.
Right.
But at the beginning, in the first months it was paid and that gave us this feedback.
Okay, we can acquire, we can have like a self serve motion.
What I didn't say is it involved me as a freemium tool.
So you know, low friction, get users in, get them to the aha moment where they can publish A form, see it in action, put it on their website and then have this sort of product led growth motion in place with the trigger being paid search.
Omer (34:05.880)
How well are you converting those free users into paying customers?
Like what's a typical good conversion rate that you've been able to achieve or what percentage of your users are paid versus free?
Vlad Gozman (34:20.240)
So it's well in the double digits in terms of conversion rate from our free.
But that doesn't include only users who come through paid search.
Right.
So we do content as well at scale luckily now, and I can go into that later.
And there are also a few growth loops that we have in place that bring in new users.
Omer (34:45.910)
Yeah.
So let's talk about content.
So you know content marketing, SEO, it wasn't something that you did early on, but it is something that you've continued to invest in and kind of build out.
Firstly, what, what kind of roughly what percentage of your revenue or customers come through content marketing these days and what does that journey look like for a user or a customer?
Vlad Gozman (35:14.580)
Content marketing became more important over the years.
Obviously it's a bigger share in the pie.
I would say right now between 60 and 70%.
So quite important I would say how the journey looks like.
So we have a lot of content.
We have over, you know, over a thousand different pages ranging from educational content, right.
Trying to educate about the different use cases, educate on, on how to achieve a certain business goal and then obviously plug into, plug, plug, Involve Me in there to more broad traffic oriented pieces.
Omer (36:11.410)
So
Vlad Gozman (36:13.730)
up to our templates where we have over 350 professionally designed optimized templates that you can use as a starting point in Involve Me.
And each of them has, has its own landing page, its own content.
It describes the business goal that you can achieve with it.
So some of these are very long tail.
So you asked me about the user journey.
A user might ask how can I create a price quote for my service business and have that as sort of top of the funnel lead generation content piece.
They would get to maybe a how to article or they would get to the template page with a, with, with custom price quotes and from there they would try out the template, register to see it, to see it in action, modify it, edit it.
And yeah, they're in the product and the interesting thing is the aha moment for them is when they're able to adapt a template or start a project from scratch and see it in not only their use case but also in their own brand identity and the likes.
So that's how content feels Funnels, new registrations.
Omer (37:58.010)
Yeah, I mean I think the content marketing is like attribution is often a big challenge and I think especially with top of funnel content.
Right.
Somebody who reads some top of final content for the first time and discovers involve me is not going to sign up and then become a paying customer next week.
Right.
There's this multiple touch points before they get there.
So is that something that you try to measure in terms of the effectiveness of content marketing or are you more on the sort of the opinion that we just make the investment and the overall investment across content marketing will help get us there?
And kind of as a follow up to that, did you do any kind of retargeting?
So once somebody discovers the top of our content, how do you make sure they come back to the site?
Vlad Gozman (38:49.700)
I'm more in the former camp, so try to be as data driven as possible, which is always a struggle and will always remain a struggle.
But yeah, I'm no fan of just putting out content and there's good traffic and there's traffic that is not valuable.
So.
And we aim for the good traffic.
So we're trying to map as much as possible the touch points and to have the user journey for each new registration.
It's also important to say that the content, it was an oversimplified depiction of how, how a user gets in because that was basically the last step before the registration.
Usually looking at the data, they would have interacted with around on average five pieces of content.
So it's important for us to interlink that content to provide value, to not have it stop.
Right.
To interlink it with different content that adds value further on.
So that is important to mention.
And in terms of retargeting, yes, we also do a bit of retargeting to get them back to the platform.
But I would say in our case the onboarding, the surfacing of potential value, has so little friction that it's not as hard as I've seen it in other places to bring them into the tool.
Obviously it's hard to activate and keep them in the tool.
But those are different discussions.
But getting them into it and seeing it and finding out if this is what they were looking for.
I think up to that point we've done it well and there is no secret sauce.
Others do it as well.
I think again to summarize it, it's providing value in those content pieces and then also directing them to something that is actionable.
In our case it's a template, it's a use case that they can then, with a click of a few buttons, own and make their own.
Omer (41:43.470)
Yeah, and I think you're right.
I think the freemium model makes it a lot easier to get them to at least sign up for an account they're seeing.
This is not a free trial.
There's a free product.
Right.
So there's a little bit more incentive to say, okay, even if this isn't the right product for me, there's still something that I can use and try and maybe it'll work out.
The other thing is you're not asking for a credit card or anything like that when they're signing up.
So I think that lowers the bar.
And I guess the challenge you have is probably filtering the high quality users that are going to convert versus probably thousands of people who are signing up who are never going to become paying customers.
Vlad Gozman (42:32.990)
Yeah, exactly.
So what we do is also interesting is we're eating our own dog food.
So we use Involve Me on, on the marketing website within the tool at every step we can.
And that allows us to obviously be our own customer, which is the best.
So we know the weakest points of the tool so we can improve it constantly.
On the other side, we are able to surface the value of involvement to our customers while they or to our users while they become a user of Involve Me.
For instance, one example is right within the content on the marketing website.
We might use something like Template Recommender, which is basically a product recommend or a template finder built on Involve Me.
Simple quiz that will give you sort of a template.
We use it in the onboarding, so we have an onboarding survey built with Involve Me that asks a few questions and then also provides a more personalized experience when getting into the tool.
Giving you templates around your use case and industry.
So when you get.
But when you get going, you're directly led to something that is relevant for you.
And doing all these kind of tweaks we've seen over the years that each one makes an improvement and a dent.
Omer (44:25.670)
So I think we're going to have to wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
Before we do that, just one super quick question is today Involve Me is not positioned as a quiz builder.
It's a form builder, an AI powered form builder.
How have you figured out how to position yourself in this crowded market?
Vlad Gozman (44:45.930)
While we started building out the functionality, we didn't want to get sort of trapped in this quiz builder world where Involve Me was getting to a place where it was much more.
More than that.
What we did is we took the Quiz functionality and out of it created a lead scoring lead, qualification functionality and focused more on this part of the value.
So we were helping businesses know their customers by creating better lead funnels, lead magnets.
And with that we sort of it struck a chord with customers Then another thing to mention is that we took a bold step last year when AI became mainstream, I would say with the advent of ChatGPT, but even before that with the GPT APIs that came out.
And we decided to infuse AI in the tool and make it AI powered.
So what we did is we identified three points of value where we said, okay, AI can help improve.
Either improve the way people users use the tool or improve and offer more business value to them.
And the three areas are the creation part.
So you can go to Involve Me.
You can input your website URL and use case and we can create forms with different variations on brand with your assets.
The questions, the assets, the whole design of it, the packaging is being whipped out by the AI.
That's the creation part.
So making it even less friction with less friction there.
The second is the personalization.
So we added a way for users to use AI within our forms to give personalized feedback and responses to their users while inputting and answering forms.
And thirdly, once you've published the form, once you gather data, you might have tons of qualitative data within the form.
We've created an AI Insights module that allows you to basically generate business reports with key findings, summarization and also recommendations from the data that you get within Involve Me.
So with this positioning, we're sort of adapted our tool to this new world where we're pretty sure that AI is here to stay.
Omer (48:22.080)
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
All right, let's get onto the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Vlad Gozman (48:33.600)
I think it's around people.
So basically your company is as good as its people.
How we live it at Involve Me is we're trying to keep it humane and have a good work life balance.
This resulted in us having a four day work week one and a half years ago.
It's going great.
Omer (48:54.560)
That's another thing you and I should talk about.
I'm fascinated when somebody actually makes that work.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Vlad Gozman (49:02.590)
Yeah, right now I'm reading Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaw which follows the professional life of John Malone.
For people who don't know John Malone, he's an iconic figure, basically one of the people who built up the cable industry in the US and it chronicles the creation evolution of the modern category cable industry.
I think it's awesome.
I haven't finished it yet, but a lot of learnings around monopolies and how industries are formed and all the dynamics.
Omer (49:34.280)
Fascinating.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Vlad Gozman (49:39.400)
No doubt it's resilience.
Just being able to have the grit and go through it.
Omer (49:45.720)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Vlad Gozman (49:48.840)
It's Slack.
I mean I use slack on the go on desktop everywhere every day.
Omer (49:55.530)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Vlad Gozman (49:59.290)
Oh man, so many.
I have a list as I'm sure you have as well.
I think when I think about B2B it would be something around selling picks and shovels for the generative AI race.
Something around making it easier for SaaS companies to integrate generative AI into their offering.
Similarly to how we did at Involve Me.
Omer (50:20.020)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Vlad Gozman (50:23.300)
In my late teens and early twenties I used to rap and that was actually my first entrepreneurial endeavor.
I self published an underground rap album with some friends.
Omer (50:36.420)
Wow.
Oh, this wasn't just some casual thing.
You were seriously into it.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Vlad Gozman (50:45.470)
I try to stay informed, interdisciplinary.
So I think constantly scouting new ideas, learning, curiosity and I get to do that by hosting and curating TEDx conferences together with my wife.
We have a non profit and we do this in Vienna for almost 14 years now.
Omer (51:09.070)
That's awesome.
So you've been in the startup scene and doing this stuff in Vienna like you're one of the OGs in Vienna, right?
Vlad Gozman (51:18.690)
Omer, don't make me feel old.
Omer (51:22.930)
Love it.
Cool.
Vlad, thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a pleasure.
I love chatting about Involved Me and just the general story of how you've built the business so far and then the lessons you've learned along the way.
I think there's some super helpful for insights and lessons there.
I think for a lot of founders who are maybe a little early earlier on the journey.
So thank you for sharing those.
If people want to check out Involve Me or start a free, you know, get a free account, go to Involve Me.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that.
Vlad Gozman (51:57.680)
Yeah, just over LinkedIn, I would say.
Just hit me up.
Omer (52:02.330)
We will include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure and congratulations on the success so far with the business.
And maybe like you and I were chatting, maybe we'll do a follow up when it's an eight figure business and have you back and tell us the story.
Vlad Gozman (52:25.610)
Thank you for having me, Omer.
As I told you, I'm a big fan, so keep doing what you're doing.
I love listening to your podcast.
Omer (52:33.810)
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that.
Vlad Gozman (52:35.330)
It's been an honor.
Thank you.
Bye.
Omer (52:38.050)
Cheers.
