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 stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Josh Haynam.
Josh is the co founder of Interact, a SaaS product that makes it easier to create shareable quizzes for your website.
You can create a quiz to engage with your audience or generate new sales leads.
Josh and his two co founders bootstrapped the company since its launch just over a year ago.
In 10 months, they went from zero to $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue and they landed clients like Disney, NBC and the American Red Cross.
And they did that with zero outbound sales calls.
It was all through content marketing.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh Haynam (01:07.140)
Hi Omer, thanks for having me on.
Omer (01:09.860)
Now, I told the audience just a little bit about your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about you personally.
Who is Josh when he's not working?
Josh Haynam (01:18.500)
Yeah.
So Josh, outside of the work, most important thing is family and friends.
I just really enjoy spending a good few days, days hanging out with the family or good friends, having great conversations, very much relaxed.
In work, I'm always on the clock, always have something to answer.
But when I'm not working, I prefer to just have no ties to technology, just spend time with good people.
Sometimes that means traveling around the world, sometimes that just means hanging out on a Saturday.
Also really, really enjoy sports in all forms, watching, playing, pick up basketball at the local gym, things like that.
So that's Josh outside of work, untied from technology and just enjoying time with people.
Omer (02:03.630)
Cool.
Sounds great.
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Josh Haynam (02:15.070)
Yeah, so my quote kind of goes back to sports a little bit.
Don Sutton, who was a big baseball player, his career was before my time, but I still like his quote.
It's luck is the byproduct of busting your fanny.
I think it's so true for so many people, including myself, where, you know, at some point everyone's gonna say you got lucky and made it or had some success.
But you know that it's because you persevered through the sucky times, through the good times, through all the times, and just kept learning and that's when you get lucky.
Great.
Omer (02:53.780)
And for our listeners in the UK and Australia, fanny doesn't mean what you think it means.
Your backside.
Josh Haynam (02:59.940)
I know that I have been to London.
I should have remembered that.
Omer (03:05.780)
All right, so let's start by giving our listeners a better understanding of interaction.
Who are your target customers and what is the pain that you're trying to solve for them?
Josh Haynam (03:19.310)
Yeah, so our target customers are enterprises, medium to large companies.
And the pain that we're really trying to go after here is that these companies, and especially the marketing teams within these companies are responsible for bringing in new sales leads all the time.
And if you are familiar with the funnel, you know, where you get people in through their email or something like that, and then you funnel them into becoming paying customers.
The marketers are responsible for filling the top of this funnel all the time.
And there's tools out there for filling this funnel, you know, content, white pages, things like that, case studies.
But a lot of these ways of filling the funnel and getting people's contact information are really boring.
Nobody really wants to download a case study about how some company increased their revenue.
Not that interesting.
So what we did is we made a tool that allows you to use quizzes, which are the most shared content right now on the web, and turn them into a lead generation tool.
So let's say you have a quiz.
What kind of dog are you?
And this is an actual customer.
What kind of dog are you?
And at the end of the quiz it says, sign up to learn more about the kind of dog you are.
And then they'll send you information and products and things based on the kind of dog you are.
So you not only have that really, really fun what kind of dog are you?
Quiz that everyone wants to take, I took it, I was hooked.
But you also have the aspect of that website now being able to grow their email list, grow their paying customers through this really, really fun form of content.
Omer (05:06.630)
Where did you come up with the idea for this product?
Josh Haynam (05:10.950)
Yeah, so my team, it's still mainly just three of us that run it, used to do web contracting jobs when we were in college.
We would find friends or friends of friends who needed websites done and do it for them on nights and weekends and things like that.
And a few of those people ended up asking us for quizzes to be put into their website.
And everyone's goal with their website was to grow their email list.
We would sit down with them and say, what do you want to get out of your website?
And they'd be like, well, I want to grow my email list.
And so some of them had the idea of using quizzes to do that as either some sort of assessment or something like that.
And we Ended up building a few of these quizzes for clients just on a one off basis and they performed exceptionally well.
They would get 30%, 40%, 50% opt in rates.
Half of the people taking the quizzes were putting in their email address and that was blowing everything else out of the water compared to the other websites we were making.
So we just kind of saw something there and gradually turned it into what it is today where anyone can make a quiz.
Omer (06:28.890)
So when you came up with the idea and you guys decided, okay, we're going to go and build something, did you look out in the market and see what was already available?
Josh Haynam (06:41.290)
We did a little bit, Honestly, not very much.
We kind of just started to run with it and, and made something on our own.
We looked at a couple of different survey tools just to figure out how exactly you make a website where someone can come in and make their own quiz, like a self service thing.
So we had no idea what we were doing, but we really didn't do too much market research.
We were mainly just going off of what we knew people were interested in and building it for just a couple of people that had asked us for this exact product.
Omer (07:18.500)
So initially it was kind of like something you were building for your existing clients, right?
Josh Haynam (07:23.620)
Exactly, yeah.
Omer (07:25.380)
And then at what point did you decide to turn this into a product?
Josh Haynam (07:29.620)
Yeah, so it started to kind of ramp up and actually one thing I did.
So we had a few existing clients that had asked us for quizzes and I ran, I wanted to kind of feel this out and see if other people were interested in just paying for the quiz part.
So what I did was I actually made a post on Elance and Odesk, some of those sites where you can pay someone to just do a small programming job for you and ask people if they wanted quizzes.
And we ended up having a couple of people pay us a few hundred dollars to make these quizzes.
And at that point we were just using our own product to make the quizzes.
But then it was validated because people had paid us for it.
So that's when we kind of made the switch and we realized, okay, someone will pay just for this quiz part.
Let's really jump in, spend the time, build a platform and turn this into something that anyone can use.
Omer (08:30.960)
So that's interesting.
So how did you, how did you do that on Elance?
Because I guess you can post a job.
So I'm just trying to figure out what you did to actually find a customer on Elance.
Josh Haynam (08:47.449)
Yeah, so I guess I wasn't super clear on that one.
So basically people would post jobs like, I want this quiz done, I want a custom quiz made.
And I would just answer and say, hey, we can do that for you.
And then we would just go back, use our own shell of a product that we had so far, make the quiz and give it to them.
And if they liked it, they'd pay us for it, and if not, they would reject the job.
So we ended up getting a few people that really liked it and it worked out.
Omer (09:23.240)
Got it, Got it.
Okay.
Okay.
So you've got a few people who paid you for this quiz.
So you see there's an opportunity there.
But these guys probably weren't the people who are your target customers today, these enterprise type customers.
So at what point did you make the shift and decide which type of customer you were going to focus on?
Josh Haynam (09:55.900)
Yeah, so that's a really good question.
So definitely at the beginning we thought this was going to be a product for bloggers, for individual companies, because that's what we were familiar with.
Those were the clients that we had had building websites.
We figured, okay, this is what's going to work.
But I believe early on, when we first launched the site, the Red Lobster, the restaurant signed up.
And that kind of was a light bulb moment.
We realized that a larger company could get a lot more value out of this product we had built because they had such a massive audience and they were able to reach more people and things like that.
So that was probably when the shift happened.
You know, we had kind of hit a wall in some sense because we were trying to reach these bloggers, but they just didn't have the audience or it just wasn't exactly the right fit.
You know, product market fit just wasn't there.
And then when the Red Lobster just kind of signed up one day, we realized, hey, this could be really useful to larger companies.
Let's start going after that.
So again, I think it goes back to that quote, you know, when you're working really hard and doing your best, luck kind of happens.
And that was an example of that.
Omer (11:25.480)
How long did it take you to get your first customer not from your.
The consulting work you were doing, but the first customer for this product.
Josh Haynam (11:37.560)
Yeah.
So that's a story that I think will resonate with a lot of people when.
So we had the few people that paid paid us to do it on a consulting basis and then a couple on Elance.
And then once we felt like we had validated the product idea, we went back and started actually building out the website where people could come in and make their own quizzes.
So during that time I started cold emailing people to just come in and use the product for free.
And I think I sent about 1200 cold emails.
I actually wrote a blog post about this as well, just to bloggers and things like that, trying to get anyone to use this for free.
At this point we weren't charging for it and it was just an awful time.
It took probably 20 to 30 emails back and forth to get anyone to use this even for free.
And we were just trying to get feedback to make a better product.
It just, you know, it was awful.
And that's when I started looking into content marketing.
And I know we're going to dive into that a little bit more here, but yeah, it took a really long time of just cold emailing people and no response.
And then we started doing content marketing and we ended up getting our first customer, I believe about six months after we had started building out the product.
So quite a long time of just trying and not getting anywhere.
Omer (13:16.090)
So you weren't even charging for the product at all or there was some sort of trial for a free product or how was that working?
Josh Haynam (13:22.729)
We weren't charging for it at all during those six months.
So there was a six month gap between when we were doing them on a consulting basis and when we actually implemented a paid product.
And during that gap we weren't charging.
I was just emailing people, trying to get them to use it for free.
And yeah, it was just, it was just a tough time.
Omer (13:44.540)
So you have a free product, you know that it solves a problem because you've already validated it and some people have been willing to pay you for that.
You send out 1200 emails.
Most people would say, even if they're cold emails, surely I'm going to get 5 or 10% of those people sign up and use the product for free.
I mean, I'm not asking for anything, right?
But that didn't.
So what sort of usage did you get from those 1200 emails?
Josh Haynam (14:19.410)
I think we ended up, you know, it wasn't a terrible conversion rate as far as getting people to do it.
We got about 100 people to sign up and use it, but again, it was for free.
And it took just an absorbing amount of time to get anyone to actually make a quiz.
And a lot of times we ended up having to help them write it and do all this stuff.
You know, we were basically free consultants at that point doing stuff for free that we had formerly been charging people for.
And so yeah, that, that was all we got out of that.
And it was just a really long time of emailing a lot of people and not getting a lot of response.
Omer (15:02.530)
If you were doing this again, if you were starting over today, would you not do any kind of email outreach like you did before, or was there a lesson you learned that would get you to do it differently this time?
Josh Haynam (15:19.890)
That's a good question.
Yeah, I think I would not do the email outreach.
I think I would start with content marketing.
I would start with doing some really in depth customer interviews.
You know, I did learn through that process of talking to different people who were somewhat interested in the product.
But I think I could have learned a lot more if I had just sat down and really had a long conversation with maybe five or 10 people, rather than trying to ask everyone what they thought and getting a bunch of different responses.
So I think I would go back, I would find 10 people that I thought really should be my customers, do whatever it took to get them to talk for an hour, ask them a lot of really specific questions about the product and how they might use use it, and then start doing content marketing and things like that to actually go and reach those people rather than emailing so many and just trying to piece it together.
Omer (16:33.660)
So at what point did you start charging for the product?
Josh Haynam (16:38.540)
Yeah, so we had sent all the cold emails.
We realized, okay, we need to figure out if we can actually charge people for this.
And so after, yeah, about six months, we just implemented a paid plan.
Nothing happened.
No one signed up for about a month after we implemented those paid plans.
And then how much were you charging
Omer (17:04.150)
at the time when you started?
Josh Haynam (17:06.190)
So we started out at $29 a month.
That was our lowest plan.
Okay.
And you know, yeah, so we implemented the paid plans.
Nothing happened again, I was still doing cold email outreach.
And then I decided to start answering customer questions through content.
So we were getting a lot of questions like, how do I make one of these personality quizzes?
Or how do I make one of these multiple choice quizzes, things like that.
And I didn't really think that would make good articles.
But.
But one day I decided to sit down and write an article, how do I make a personality quiz?
It was a Friday because I was in college at the time, and so the only time to really write was on the weekends, wrote the article.
Nothing happened over the weekend.
I was disappointed again.
This has been like a month since we released our paid plans and no one had signed up yet.
Then Monday morning after I wrote that post, someone signed up for a paid Plan.
And I could tell it was from that article because it was the only article that was actually getting any traffic on our blog.
And we got a sign up the next day.
We got another sign up that week.
I think we ended up with four, all from that article.
And that was the beginning.
Paying customers in the first week.
Yeah.
Wow.
Omer (18:28.680)
So looking back, you know, that sort of the first year of being in business, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you guys made?
Josh Haynam (18:40.050)
Yeah, so when we first built the product, we thought the problem with making quizzes was that people didn't have the time or didn't want to spend the time actually making the quizzes.
Right.
So this, this was derived from all my cold email outreach.
When I was emailing people and they would ask me a bunch of questions, we'd go back and forth and I would end up actually having to make the quizzes for them.
So I figured, okay, the problem with quizzes is that no one wants to write them.
And we created a product that was based off of templates.
So you could just grab a template that we had made and use the exact quiz.
So for example, we had a quiz template.
What's your content marketing iq?
It was five questions.
You could come on our site, use that exact quiz and put it on your website.
So we figured, okay, that that solves the problem.
But when we released it and people started using was just really confusing.
People weren't sure if they could edit the quizzes.
They wanted to make their own but couldn't.
And then maybe they could.
So it was just a whole mess.
And we had spent months making this template system that was the basis of our product.
Then when we released it, turns out that wasn't the real problem.
And the real problem was that people just didn't know how to make the quizzes.
They didn't want someone else to make it for them necessarily.
They just wanted to learn how to.
So we ended up having to retool the entire product to go from a template based thing to a blank template where you could just come in and write whatever you wanted to write.
So, yeah, that was a big deal.
And that was a few months of development time again when we didn't have any customers.
So very fragile time.
Not a lot of basis for keeping the product going.
And we ended up having to redo a lot of stuff which wasted valuable time when, when we really needed to be developing.
Omer (20:53.870)
So again, going back to, if you were starting out today, what do you think you would do differently to try and identify that that problem sooner.
Josh Haynam (21:05.710)
Yeah.
So I think I would just listen more to what people were asking.
You know, in the early days when we just had a couple of people signing up, you know, for the very.
For the free version.
This is before the paid.
They were still asking questions and I just wasn't listening well enough and I wasn't really thinking about why they were asking those questions.
And I think that led to the templating system.
People were asking questions about, how do I make this quiz that I want?
And I interpreted that as, oh, we should just make it for them.
But in fact, what they were really asking was, how does this work?
I want to understand.
So I think just really listening to people and then diving into why they're asking the questions that they are asking can lead to a lot of really valuable information that'll help grow the business.
Omer (22:05.250)
So let's talk about the business today.
What sort of revenue are you guys doing at the moment?
Josh Haynam (22:10.130)
Yeah, so currently we just hit 15,000 in MRR, so monthly revenue, and we're growing a little over 10% per month.
Some months it's better, some months it's not quite as good.
And that's where we currently are.
Omer (22:25.650)
And what is the.
Is there one thing in the business that you're most excited about right now as you look sort of towards the rest of 2015?
Josh Haynam (22:36.820)
Yeah, definitely.
So the main value add that we provide for our customers is that they can use quizzes to generate leads.
And some of these quizzes have just amazing conversion rates.
So right now what we're doing is building out some really deep integrations with CRM.
So customer relationship management programs like HubSpot and Marketo and Oracle and Salesforce, so that when people use these quizzes and they're collecting one of their potential customers contact information like a name and a phone number and an email address, that information goes directly into their Salesforce.
And all of a sudden these quizzes are now being extremely useful at building up this pipeline of leads.
So that's one thing I'm really, really excited about.
It's just making it so easy for our customers to get new sales, essentially using these quizzes.
Omer (23:32.820)
Awesome.
All right, that was part one of the interview with Josh Haynham of Interact.
You can get to the show notes for this episode by going to ConversionAid.com57 where you'll find all the links and resources that we discussed today.
In episode 58, you can listen to part two of this interview where we get tactical and talk about content marketing and we'll talk about the step by step process that Josh and his co founders used to grow from 0 to $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
We'll talk about the 30 or 40 posts that Josh wrote which didn't even generate one free user of their product.
And then we'll talk about the one blog post that he wrote which suddenly started generating paying customers.
