Omer (00:10.080)
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 talked to Matt Barnett, the founder of Bonjoro, a SaaS product that helps businesses to build relationships with their customers at scale using personal video.
Matt used to run a small market research agency in Sydney, Australia.
Most of his clients were based in other countries, so he decided to use video to help him build relationships with with those clients.
Every day he'd check to see what new leads they'd had.
And then on his morning commute, which was on a ferry across Sydney harbor, he'd record personal videos on his phone for each potential client.
The quality of the videos wasn't great, and sometimes there was so much noise on the ferry that people watching the video couldn't even hear Matt properly.
But they all seem to love getting those videos.
One day, a client asked if they could also use the tool that he was using to send those videos.
But the truth was, they didn't actually have a tool.
They just cobbled a few things together with Slack, Zapier and a lot of manual work behind the scenes to record, publish and share those videos.
But it seemed like an interesting project.
So Matt and his team decided to spend a weekend building a basic tool for that client.
They weren't able to spend much time on it and it looked awful, but it worked.
And that was enough for them to be able to charge the client $15 a month.
And that's how Bonjoro was born.
Within a year, Matt had completely stepped away from the agency and was working full time on Bonjoro.
Matt Barnett (02:13.940)
He.
Omer (02:14.210)
In this interview, you'll hear more of that story and we dig into how Matt's acquired over 40,000 users by building a viral product and partnering with influencers and affiliates.
It's an interesting interview and it's a fun company, so I hope you enjoy this.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Barnett (02:37.490)
Omar, great to be here.
Omer (02:39.250)
So do you have a quote, something that you can share with us that inspires or motivates you or kind of helps you when you sort of think about running?
Matt Barnett (02:46.750)
Yeah.
So we have.
We have an ethos that we live by at the company, which is automate processes, but never relationships.
Omer (02:54.430)
Nice.
Why is that important to you?
Matt Barnett (02:56.670)
So we'll get into this.
We're not really a video company.
I wouldn't say.
I'd say that we are a company that Helps people build better relationships with their customers.
And so we believe that, you know, automation and processes are amazing in business, but they really exist there to do the jobs that you as humans don't have to do.
And that frees you up to work on the things that as humans only you can do.
And customer relationships, partner relationships are absolutely slap bang in the middle of that.
Omer (03:26.880)
So you're a Brit living in Australia now I'm a Brit living in Seattle.
And we kind of, for the large part, kept our accents, or at least I like to think so.
Tell me a little bit about Bonjourno, the company.
Like, what does it do?
Who's your target customer and what's the big problem that you're helping to solve?
Matt Barnett (03:53.360)
Yeah, so Bonjoro is essentially a layer that sits on top of any CRM or customer data source that you use.
So an Intercom or Salesforce, but all the way down to things like Shopify, Patreon, even anywhere that your customers live.
And what we do is, let's say that at certain points on a customer journey, on your funnel, generally lead conversion, new customer activation, and then existing customer engagement and advocacy.
We suggest that it's better to send personalized video messages to customers at those points to get them to take the next action or to get them to do something beneficial for your company.
And personalized videos are much more effective than sending emails or generic emails out to clients.
So we provide the system that tells you when to send these and lets you spend 30 seconds making a message for someone that they're then delivered off, tracked, integrated back into your systems and again leads to much higher conversions at those custom points.
That's essentially it.
Omer (04:52.330)
And who's your target customer today?
Like who are you focused on in terms of industry or businesses?
Matt Barnett (04:57.290)
So we actually have quite a wide user base.
We tend to focus more on jobs to be done as a methodology rather than industries as such.
So what we found is really again, where we used a lot of people use personalized videos in lead conversion, a lot of people use them in activation, a lot of people use them in advocacy.
And so with that in mind, we do fit businesses who have an understanding of funnels and have an understanding of metrics.
So generally slightly savvier businesses.
Obviously SaaS is a big part of this, but we're not limited to SaaS.
So for instance, we'll also be used in education with a lot of universities, will be used by creatives and creators on Patreon, photographers.
Again, anyone who really has a funnel where they're facing challenges to either convert or activate leads online courses is a big part of us as well.
You'll find a lot of online course producers actually do attack their business the same way as a SaaS company does.
I think a lot more companies these days are taking a SaaS mindset to how they, you know, grow a company and grow a funnel.
You definitely see it happening more in all kinds of businesses.
Omer (06:04.790)
So you launched the business in 2017.
Where did the idea for the business come from?
Matt Barnett (06:11.990)
Yeah, so we had an agency, I mean a startup agency that there were three of us here in Australia and we sold two large FMCG companies.
So fast moving consumer goods and large agencies.
And it turns out that Australia, although a wonderful place to live, is not the business epicenter of the world.
So all our clients were in London, New York and Paris.
And I wouldn't say we were great copywriters.
So we would have leads coming in, we would be asleep.
So we had this problem where trying to engage in those leads was difficult.
We couldn't exactly hop on the phone and call them because of time zones.
So we thought there had to be a better way to get us across and to kind of engage those leads.
We're very good at selling in person.
So I used to take a boat to work across Sydney harbor if anyone's ever been here, and it goes past the Opera House.
So we would collect a list of leads every night and I would record a video for every single lead the next morning on the journey to work.
So, you know, I'd see that John from Ogilvy signed up, I do a bit of research, find out, you know, that he owned the Budweiser account.
And I'd record a video as it went past the Opera House saying, hey John, look, Matt here from Australia, obviously with the Opera House, saw you sign up, you know, from Ogilvy in London, see you work on Budweiser.
We've already done some projects with Budweiser in Singapore and, and Hong Kong, et cetera, et cetera.
I'll be in London in six weeks time.
We'd love to come in and show you the team what we do.
And we spend time packaging this video up.
We wouldn't edit it, we'd just send it off as it was.
And that would be the first piece of communication they ever got from that company.
And we tripled out conversions pretty much.
So everyone started responding to these and they were like, this is awesome.
A lot of people got back and they were like, look, I can't really understand what you're saying.
Because it's too much win.
But this is hilarious.
I heard you mentioned Budweiser and that you in London in six weeks.
They're like, absolutely coming and see us.
And all these did was make people want to meet us and then we go and we do the, we do the meetings, you know, business as usual and we do really well out of this.
I guess what got interesting was that one of those clients asked if they could use this and then they started sending these video emails out.
We put on a very basic version and then some of their customers came through them to us and asked if they could also use it.
And so we launched out this, this beta in 2017 and suddenly everyone just, it just started spreading.
People started using it.
And then we had kind of a product background and we kind of saw the growth and thought, you know, despite all the vice of never doing two companies, we've kind of got to give us a shot and overtook the original company within 12 to 18 months.
Omer (08:38.350)
But when you started out, like when you started replying or creating these videos on your way to the office, you didn't have any software at the time.
You were just like getting your iPhone or whatever, just recording like a video like any of us would.
Matt Barnett (08:50.410)
Yeah, so, so we like, we just built a little thing where we, where all new leads went into Slack, send them away.
I'd have the Slack stuff there.
I'd do a little bit of research on the way in, see who they were.
So again, like I would try and personalize this to that individual so they knew it was me.
I mean, obviously video isn't really fake.
Well, it wasn't fakeable at the time and hopefully it won't be for a while.
So, you know, just saying their name and their company was already, already pretty powerful.
But we would do a bit of research and try and see who, what they'd done when they came in as lead, had they filled out a certain form, had they suggested what they were looking for?
So yeah, I recall this.
And then we manually get this online and manually send it out to them.
So it's quite a process behind it.
Omer (09:28.090)
And when these customers started asking, you said they started asking if they could use it.
What had happened?
Had you been sort of kind of evolving this and kind of building it into a tool for yourselves?
Matt Barnett (09:42.750)
We'd made the process slightly simpler on our side.
So we started to do something where I could upload a video to be hosted and ready to go.
When they first asked us, I think we spent a weekend building something they could use.
So we actually built something that then would email out the message for them.
And then we started to again, the first client, I think they were using pipedrive or mailchimp.
And so we built it.
So it worked with that.
It was kind of, again, it was kind of hacked together.
We use APU a little bit to get it working.
And then obviously when more people came in, although people liked that, we got very quick feedback that it was pretty difficult to use.
So we just spent another couple weekends, built it out.
It was kind of a side project that we were doing.
We didn't spend much time on, looked awful, but it worked.
And that's.
And everyone was happy using that.
And then we decided to put a price point on it.
I think we charged $15 and we put it up and said very much, this is a beta.
And the first day we had it up we had paid customers coming in.
And so I guess you see that and that gives you confidence that if something that looks that terrible and half works can get a paid customer, then you're like, okay, well there's obviously something here.
And so you start to look into it deeper from that point on.
Omer (10:50.780)
Yeah, so you said you sort of, you know, you sort of hacked it together and used Zapier.
But when you did some more work on that, was it just again, cobbling together other tools or did you guys actually start writing some more code?
Matt Barnett (11:05.110)
Yes, we wrote code.
And one of the caveats is the agency that we did, we did a lot of work around video.
So it was basically a research agency where we would, you know, working for large, let's say Danone or Huggies, be doing research by remote video around the world.
So we did have the tech background behind us.
So for us to go and build something for this, it wasn't the biggest ask for us.
And we kind of figured it out pretty quickly.
So again, we weren't stepping into this unknowledgeable.
Omer (11:33.430)
Okay, so you've got your first customers and you're making $15 a month.
That still feels a long way away from this becoming a full time business.
So what did you do to sort of figure out where to go next?
Tell me a little bit about the steps you took to get your first hundred customers.
Matt Barnett (11:59.960)
So it happened pretty quickly.
And this is, this is interesting.
I think, you know, we had these couple.
I then would go to a few events.
I was running events and doing things in Sydney.
So I then when I was at those, ask other people if they would use it.
We started to put on some early customers pretty Quick, you know, within like a couple of weeks.
We probably hit 100 within a couple of weeks.
And then when they started sending them, there's natural viral elements the product.
So obviously messages being sent out, we had a link on there to the site and then people will be coming in and trying to sign up.
And I'm not saying we were great at converting then, but we would hop on calls with people whenever we could.
We'd chat to every single person.
And it honestly started to go quite quickly.
And then I think we had maybe Basecamp signed up or we had Basecamp, we had convertkit, we had like Firefox come on board like super early on.
I don't know.
To this day I don't know how they got it or where it came from, but some obviously one of them received it and then one of them started sending it and then you know, when those guys started using it, we obviously start to get more, more SaaS companies on board and then we had some influencers come on board and again it kind of snowballed a little bit out of our hands and then we ended up just playing a lot of catch up.
So at this point we're obviously getting a lot of interaction with customers and learning from them.
What we needed to build, we did very much focused on it as a tool.
So at the beginning it was like, how do you make this tool work well with other people's systems and the way that people want to use it?
And that was our first base was like, let's just get the tool working well.
Which is a lot easier to solve because you're not trying to build necessarily a business or you know, a long term vision here with like let's just make the thing work.
And obviously where we are now is very different to then, but we move pretty quick and seeing some big names coming board gave us confidence and I think we had an inherent bias that we wanted to do SAs.
I mean preaching to the converted, but.
But as a business model it is wonderful compared to agency land.
Omer (13:56.870)
Yeah, I hear that a lot.
And how long did it take for Bonjourno to become the full time business?
Because presumably for a while you were building this up while still running the agency, right?
Matt Barnett (14:12.310)
Yeah, so we kind of went in full time, I guess it's probably around 10 months, I want to say.
So the agency still ran.
We kind of like run it on the side and then we actually just, we just very recently took someone on to start growing it.
Interestingly, one of these things where we kind of dropped the agency because I know Melchi met this as well.
So we kind of dropped the agency and we're like, okay, we'll just, you know, sideline that because of focus.
And then the year we dropped the agency, I think it went up by three times in revenue.
I have no idea.
We don't know why now.
I think it would just be in the market where it started to get its own momentum.
And so we face this thing and so we actually, we actually went and hired someone to start to give that its own wings and probably split out into its own company.
That's a side note.
Omer (15:01.890)
So you still own the agency but aren't involved in it on a sort of a day to day basis.
Matt Barnett (15:07.220)
I really don't touch it at all.
I haven't done for, you know, 18 months.
Again, it's got its, I mean it's interesting.
It's one of these things where it's a great cash cow and now we look at it and we go, well actually it's starting to grow and you know, like it's a shame to stunt it and we don't need to.
It just needs different team.
It's.
It's got a very different sales model.
It's got a very different.
Yeah, it's outbound, it's inbound, it's different brand.
It's a different personality and culture that needs to be built in there.
So why not sit on the board and give all what it needs and let it go and see if it can do its thing.
That's kind of where we've got to.
But to be honest, we were going to drop it for the first couple of years.
We were always assuming that this agency was just going to go away.
But hey, we're not really complaining about that.
Omer (15:50.110)
Yeah, that's a good quality problem to have.
I know you guys don't talk about specific revenue numbers, but give us a sense of where the business is today in terms of size.
Matt Barnett (16:03.240)
So about 40, 45,000 users to date across the plans.
Team is 12 full time based out of 6 countries and 5 continents.
So we kind of jumped into going global like after those three people, we started hiring people overseas.
That's where we are, I guess.
Omer (16:21.480)
And you've raised about a million dollars Australian dollars in funding?
Matt Barnett (16:26.760)
Yes.
You raised a million dollars Australian funds from two funds here, which has been great.
We're very focused in who we raised off.
And so you raised, I guess, two funds with one's very product focused and one's very, I guess, kind of SaaS B2B focus with probably More focus on the business ops side of it.
So we have this great board now where we have a great balance of product and business ops to help us grow.
And we're 96% of customers are not in Australia.
So we're not really an Australian company.
I would say we're definitely global.
I think maybe 70% of the states and then the rest tends to be European around the place.
And that happened very quickly as well.
Omer (17:09.840)
Okay, so I want to kind of dig into the growth pots here because you guys have been able to grow pretty quickly over the last three years or so.
And you already talked about the sort of the inherent virality in the product that if somebody uses this and shares a video, there's a good chance that the recipient is also going to check out Bonjourno and sign up and try it out.
Beyond that, I know there were a few other things that you guys did to grow the business and one of them was to start to focus on influencers.
So tell me, tell me a little bit about like what you did there and how much of the growth can be attributed to having influencers kind of marketing your product.
Matt Barnett (18:07.740)
Yeah, when I say influencers.
Yeah.
The one thing we don't, it's not paid for influencers.
So it's not that that's how the marketing.
What happened very early on is that we had a few people of influence sign up and start using the product.
As I mentioned, basecamp, we had Convertkit came on board.
We had a chap in the States called Pat Flynn who's a big influencer within the kind of, I guess, kind of small business space and automated revenue kind of space.
Omer (18:31.760)
He runs smart passiveincome.com, right?
Matt Barnett (18:34.200)
Yeah, that's the guy.
Yeah.
And then we had other ones in his space come on board.
Now, I mean, Pat Flynn, I'll be honest with you, we didn't know who he was because the founders are British and well, the fan team is, is British and Australian.
So this guy came in, he was a paid customer and then, you know, one day you start to see all these sign ups just come pouring in and someone's like, oh no, this guy's on stage talking about you guys.
And turns out he's like.
And they're like, oh, who is this guy?
We look into it, it turns out he's, he's a pretty big deal.
But then the same with Convertkit and we ended up, you know, talking to Pat Fly and we ended up talking to Nathan at Convertkit.
You know, we chatted to quite a few other Customers who are much bigger than us and, and a lot of them, it turns out I'd grown for the same kind of ideal.
And what's.
So what we needed to work out was, look, we have.
These people have influenced signing up.
We had Jack Conti, who runs Patreon, sign up and start using it himself as well.
And so we'd.
Whenever we could try and recognize individuals and get on calls with them, we ended up building an affiliate program.
And this is off the advice of Pat and Nathan at ConvertKit, something they did very successfully, where we run affiliates, give away 30% month to month of revenue, add infiniteem for any revenue that comes to affiliates.
It's not.
I mean, the interesting thing about affiliates is I would not say your best affiliates don't do it in order to make money.
They do it regardless.
And the affiliate revenue you give them is almost a thank you.
And it's really nice to have.
But take someone like Pat Flynn, the money we make him versus some of his other revenue streams is minute.
And yet he will routinely get on board on stage and talk about us at many, many events because our ethos and what we do aligns with them.
But we've sponsored koalas for his kids and we sent out bare seats to all of our customers at certain points on the funnel.
And so what we realized is that this idea of creating influence and advocacy is incredibly powerful, but you can't need a system to do it.
And so the way we do it is that certain points on customers funnels, depending on the activity, on the product, depending on their industry, we can't build automation things that get our teams to engage with them at certain points.
So like I said, if people hit certain milestones, we send them or their kids bear suits.
We run a pretty active community online now, have a big Facebook community where we only invited like our top performers in who really got it going.
And then we started to drop the bar and bring in lower performers who the top ones are now educating up.
We push a lot of stuff around the culture.
We hire people.
We have a chief delight officer, Amy, whose job it is to make sure that we're doing this and to inject these moments of light into every customer journey.
And as a result of it, whereas at the beginning we would have these influences who we would, you know, recognize only when things start to happen now we tend to pick them up a lot earlier.
We tend to work out if someone's an influencer quite early on when they come in the funnel.
And then we obviously dedicate time to them and we dedicate time to growing them.
But then we always do a lot of stuff with what I call micro influencers.
And again, this is a lesson from Kaverk, who did this really well.
For those who don't know, they're at like 20 million AOR, never having raised a dollar of funding, and they're about six years in, I think, so pretty interesting company to look at.
And they figured out this idea of obviously influencing in niches.
So we'll see that we get swathes of photographers come in because we work with a couple of people who are influential in the photography space.
We'll have lots of chiropractors come in because we work with these micro niches of chiropractors and.
And again, trying to spot who those individuals are, engage them, obviously make them want to be part of the company and part of the culture and part of the brand is really important.
But when you get below your Pat Flynn's, they're not obvious when they come into the funnel.
Omer (22:09.160)
Okay, so it's great if somebody like Pat Flynn comes along, signs up for your product, likes it, is talking about it, and then, you know, reaching out to him and saying, hey, let's do more or let's kind of promote jointly or kind of talk about the affiliate program or whatever.
But you sort of also alluded to a process.
So were you actually going out and trying to find these people and getting them to try the product, or has it all sort of been inbound?
Matt Barnett (22:45.700)
It's mostly been inbound.
We're starting to.
So we haven't traditionally ever done outbound.
We're starting to look at it a bit more now, but we've generally done inbound.
It's been a case of recognizing, I guess again, how we term influencers in our inbound funnel.
And bear in mind we'd be getting thousands of signups and we never really meant to go into the space.
So we spent probably a year trying to work out how to do this.
So we tend to use a mix of.
We'll analyze data as it comes in.
We use something called Clearbit to try and work out if you have certain social media followings and sizes.
We do a lot of stuff to engage every single early user.
So for instance, and obviously we're biased here, but we still send a video welcome to every single sign up we ever get.
And this is all of our free trial signups still.
Every single one gets a video from one of my team within about four hours.
Omer (23:37.320)
I did that.
I've got to tell you Sorry to interrupt you, but I can't remember how I discovered Onjourner.
Probably because somebody sent me a video and I think it was like somebody said, yeah, they'll send you a personal video.
I was like, they're not going to do it for me signing up for a free trial.
I mean, they must do it if I sign up to become a paid customer.
And it was like, yeah, Literally, I signed up for a free trial and I got a video from somebody on the team.
And I was like, wow.
Matt Barnett (24:02.530)
Yeah.
And it's one of these things.
Again, we obviously own the product, so we're going to use our own dog food.
But the reason we did it in the first place was because of this.
So we still do this today.
We need to dis between the team to make sure we can cover time zones, etc.
But we do it because as a result, things like this happen today.
I find that if you treat every single customer extremely well on day one.
So if you give everyone the best possible first experience, you will get talking to a lot more customers.
And when you talk to customers, you'll very quickly find out who they are and what you can do with them.
And then people start to mention you.
Because we do this.
Yeah.
Again, whoever comes in, we tend to recognize at that first stage, are they personal, of.
Of influence, potentially.
We actually do more videos down the funnel.
So we actually do do paid users as well.
We do a lot of.
We do onboarding calls with every single paid user, which at our price point and, you know, for listeners, you know, we have free plans, but our first price point starts at $15 a month, which is not high.
And we obviously do accelerate up through that.
But Even if a $15 a month customer wants to do a walkthrough and a demo with the team, then we'll get on and do it.
It's been a lot of work.
But again, when you do these calls, it means that we find out who people are pretty quickly.
We also find out how they use the product as well.
And that alludes to some.
We find out, we recognize if we have a bunch of photographers come in where that comes from.
We're pretty open about the affiliate program, so we track our affiliates and who's successful.
And again, if someone's successful, we can pick up on that and then further engage them at that point.
But I'd say it's interesting doing those videos at the first point still, to this day is amazing because again, it means that when we have the conversation or when something comes up, everyone's absolutely open to talking to us straight away from day one.
Omer (25:48.990)
I mean, a lot of things that you're telling me sound really counterintuitive.
I think a lot of people would sort of, if they were starting a business like this, they'd be thinking if you're charging $15 a month as a starting point, you probably can't afford to give away 30% affiliate revenue and then also send personal videos to everybody who signs up for a free plan.
And potentially most of those people will never become customers.
Right.
Just because of what free to pay conversions are going to look like.
So what would you say to somebody who maybe would be in that sort of situation today, building out their company and maybe having some of those thoughts about their own business?
Matt Barnett (26:39.710)
Yeah.
So a couple of things.
Number one is if you're early, go with what Paul Graham says, do stuff that doesn't scale.
So if you're an early company, doesn't matter anyway because everything you do matters.
Look, as you get larger at the end day, it comes down to that first phrase I mentioned at the beginning, which is automate processes, not relationships.
Spending time with customers is the most valuable thing you could ever do alongside spending time on product.
So building great products and then building, I guess, advocates within your customer base.
If you have an advocate, and this is why we invest in it so much, because it doesn't matter if we have to do 10 videos to get one person who comes on board as an advocate, that one person will then go and get us another hundred signups, you know, which would be another 10 users.
So to that point, that person is not just worth their lifetime value.
If you treat them well and you engage them and you really blow them away, they will talk about you and they will bring you in more users who will then bring in more users again.
So there's actually a kind of K factor, like a kind of a viral factor with your advocates more than anything.
When you start off, if you don't have a really good process of working out who these are going to be and where they are.
And to that point we know now certain industries and certain profiles that are more likely to be an advocates, we'll spend more time there.
But if you don't know this, it's worth just blanket doing it because the successes you make will be worth it.
And you talk about again time, you know, when you think in terms of ROI and funnel, because we're a SaaS company like any other SaaS company, but we ran the numbers, we were running the numbers the other day, I Mentioned, we do these calls with any paid conversion and it's something we've been doing for about six months.
And we ran the numbers now we've got some really good data and we found that spending the time doing that call, every customer who's been on the call, it reduces their churn by 25% which I look at that and I go, I go, well, what that back to lifetime value doesn't matter if they're, you know, and our average revenue is not $15, it's higher because we have higher plans.
But for 30 minutes of all my team on a call, I would spend that dollar every single day.
It absolutely pays back in terms of lifetime value.
So again, run the numbers back.
Doing videos for every leads, if it increases their conversions by double, again, it pays back.
The videos take 30 seconds.
It's not a lot of time.
And again they share between team members.
So I think when you run these things, ultimately if the money you're putting in is less than the money you're getting out, and that payback period is fairly quick, I mean, treat it like any kind of marketing funnel really.
If you're getting back three months, your time is money.
In three months, it's worth it.
If it's in six months, it's probably still worth it.
But I think you'll be surprised how quickly you get that payback.
Omer (29:26.220)
Now the other thing that has been part of your growth channels, I guess, is content.
But unlike just doing sort of creating a blog, which you guys also have, you've tended to focus on creating these sort of very long, in depth, sort of downloadable guides.
So tell us a little bit about like, what is that content and why are you doing that in addition to having a blog as well?
Matt Barnett (29:55.560)
Yeah, so we found that longer guides, longer pieces, longer playbooks, when done well, and this takes about three months to write, really work in giving absolute value to, I guess, the market and in positioning our brand.
So I think a company that does this really well is, is, is Intercom have generally done their guides and they've really gone deep on, I think on a couple of topics, but they've really gone deep on, on the idea of jobs to be done in terms of like product growth.
That's interesting because if you think about it, Intercom's not a, not a platform for building products, but they are a platform that sells to SaaS companies who are all extremely focused on building product.
So they started to position themselves as a brand alongside building great products and it works really well for them.
And so with us we try a few things, but we've done papers on how to delight users, how to use video as the light piece.
And then the most recent one we've done is around what we call video funnels.
So it's how to use personalization to convert customers at all these different parts of the funnel.
When we write these, we've always gone to customers for the content.
Now it helps that we have some pretty good logos as customers that we can talk to.
And we have a lot of people in network so you know, we've interviewed like the guys at Zapier about things and yeah, and having these is excellent.
But again we focused on doing really, really high quality long form content.
And we don't put any restrictions on downloads.
So we don't ask for emails, we don't ask for any payment, we give it out free to the market.
But we routinely see people come in and they're like, oh, I've read this or read about this or I heard about you guys through here.
I think it's this idea of the kind of open business is give away as much value as you can.
Don't really worry about trying to sell, focus on writing better content.
And if you create really good content, at the end of the day it will get picked up, it'll position your brand and it'll bring you in inbound leads ultimately.
Right?
Omer (31:52.370)
Yeah.
I mean I know people and companies who do very sort of in depth content, you know, like guides, but they're typically like mega blog posts.
What you guys are doing here is like these are typically like PDFs that you can download and in most of those cases you'll find those behind some kind of opt in.
So kind of like, I guess one question was like this in terms of like how do people discover this stuff?
And if this was published as kind of on, on the website versus a PDF, would it help with search, organic search, or does it not make much of a difference whether it's on a webpage or a PDF?
Or like just curious like, like why you've implemented it this way.
Matt Barnett (32:42.570)
So specifically talking about the kind of the video files piece, the PDF was actually version one.
So we are releasing this on the website for SEO purposes.
And this is almost like building little mini products and testing.
So we get this piece written, we do the research, we get it out there, we see how it's performing in the market and then when it hits and this one's hit extremely well, we're then like, okay, look, we need to get this online.
And so now we're doing it and taking it beyond just being a PDF.
And in fact, we'll be taking it all the way through from looking at who's reading what pages to giving them specific onboarding flows that come out of that.
It allows us to work out who users are, work out a lot more about them.
Again, companies like Intercom will do this where they see what is the job that you're doing and therefore should you be taking down a different workflow than someone else, that's where we go now.
But writing these, again, they take a lot of time to do well getting as a PDF.
We even put paid ads onto that PDF as well as test it and see how it converts and how it works.
We do that to test it and see if it's going to work as a bigger piece.
I'm pretty paid stuff behind.
It's interesting because again, so we'll pay for people to come and access and download it, but we still don't ask emails.
We still pay to give people the value, if you like.
Omer (33:52.500)
So you've been testing by spending, using advertising, paying for ads, driving people to this that they can download for free and never potentially interact or sign up or anything.
Matt Barnett (34:06.270)
Yeah, and this is.
It's not, it's not the main way that we get downloads.
It's something that we do that we run alongside.
It's almost like if we can pay people and people interact with extremely well, then we know it's like the first product we ever built.
We know it's got legs.
I think it's fine.
Again, like we talked about this earlier, I think it's absolutely fine to not have like the idea of collecting emails, you know, when people come in to download something, it seems a bit counterintuitive to us if you're creating something valuable, you know, and you're trying to educate the market and you're trying to help people and trying to help the market.
Maybe it's a different attitude.
You don't need to ask for something in return.
I feel like that's your ask.
Whereas if we give this way free, then the ask we have is that people, I guess, have goodwill about us.
And when someone mentions, they'd be like, oh yeah, these guys.
Bonjour.
And this plays back into the whole advocacy and influencer fit piece.
I think if you're, if you're seen as a good player and you see as just trying to add value the whole time, it builds up this brand where the recognition ends up being huge.
I would say with us as a company, our brand is as valuable as our product.
If we sold tomorrow, it'll be worth a sale on paper because of doing things like this consistently.
Again, a little bit of different take, but I don't think you should always be asking for stuff.
I think if you do things for the right way and again, the content has to be good, you get your results anyway.
We track those through and it works.
We track downloads, who ends up paying, and it works very well.
Omer (35:33.080)
Let's talk about, I guess, positioning and competition.
Like, what you've told us in terms of this was sort of really about scratching your own itch and sort of it evolved into a product.
But how much time, you know, have you spent over the last few years looking at what your competition is doing and how have you sort of figured
Matt Barnett (35:59.090)
out
Omer (36:01.370)
sort of what is the strongest positioning for Bonjourno?
I guess in a market that's getting more and more crowded every day.
Matt Barnett (36:10.970)
Yeah.
So no one's going to win this by being a video tool.
And it's interesting how many copycat people come in and just go and build video widgets and we're like, that's fine, that's a tool.
It goes back to this first point.
Again, the idea of, you know, automating process and not relationships, that's really what we're doing.
We don't see ourselves as a video company.
So I would suggest that our competition is other companies that are trying to help build advocacy and build lifetime customers.
That's really what we're doing.
It's not the videos themselves that help people increase conversions.
It's the fact that somebody's stopping for a minute of their day and engaging with lead and saying, hey, you know, like, we're human and we're here.
That's actually really why this works.
And so for us, it's a question of if you follow that rabbit hole, where else does that go?
Can we tell you what customers need more love and when can we give you the tools so that you can go and systematically create advocates and create influencers, which is incredibly hard to do.
Can we help you do that?
And video is just one tool in a multitude of ways to use that.
So it's interesting.
You look at competition and we go, well, we're in this weird spot where there's people trying to do video.
And we're like, yeah, that's fine.
Everyone will do video.
Everyone should do video.
It's just a medium now that people are getting more comfortable with.
It's not a product.
It's no different to writing or to calling.
They're all just mediums.
To build a true business, the value needs to be around how?
Well, with that tool in your suite, how can you really build customers that stay an extra five years?
That's what we're trying to solve.
So our competition of people in spaces that do that, even though I'm sure they don't know it when they look at us again, the caveat here is that we never meant to build this part of our journey, which has been difficult, is trying to work out what it is really doing.
And maybe because we were never set out to build a video tool, maybe that means that we're in a better position to look at it and go, look what's really happening here.
It's not video.
Like, absolutely isn't video.
If we sat on day one and said, we want to build the best video tool.
Sure.
But because we haven't, we're like, you know, there's always.
When you build products and services, there's always something behind.
There's always psychology behind the surface as to why people really use you.
Like, again, this is the kind of job to be done.
Like, what are you really solving?
Like, we're not helping people make videos.
Like, no one wants to go make videos.
We're helping people convert and keep more customers.
That's what we're doing.
Omer (38:36.050)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a great lesson.
And I think it's.
When you were saying that, it kind of reminded me of.
Was it like the railway system that some time back, like, you know, if you sort of defined yourself as being, you know, we're in the business of building railways.
It's kind of like the video thing.
Right?
You're all about tracks and carriages and stuff like that.
Or are you in the business of transportation?
Because then maybe, you know, hey, maybe trains aren't the future of transportation.
And then there's something else that you should be focusing on or like connection.
Matt Barnett (39:07.260)
Yeah.
Like at the end of the day, people taking trains to meet with family and meet with people for work, you know, do you end up building zoom?
I mean, like, as far as rabbit hole, you can go in crazy places.
You know what's interesting?
Yeah.
So you look at, like, companies that have come to redundancy.
I mean, I mean, not.
Nokia is kind of one where they were.
They were in the space of.
Of understanding what could be done with plastics.
So they were first of all, like, Nokia originally made Wellington boots, was their first product and ended up becoming, you know.
Omer (39:39.670)
Did they really?
Matt Barnett (39:40.750)
At a point.
Yep.
Omer (39:42.469)
Wow.
Matt Barnett (39:43.150)
And they worked out that they were in the.
So they were basically excelling in manufacturing on what could be done at the forefront of plastics.
And they ended up coming to phones because people, it was too prohibitively expensive to make phones that add a metal or whatever's being used at the time.
And so they went into that and then, and then off they went.
Triple M do this.
And these are not necessarily tech companies, but they are in the industry of, of innovation.
And so they.
Triple M started with a sticky note.
The number one product was the post it notes, but now they do adhesives on like everything in every single area.
They're not a sticky note company.
Nokia was not a Wellington boot company.
Tech companies, you know, obviously Tesla, Tesla's not in the industry of making cars or making spaceships at the end day, they're I guess trying to disrupt energy and how we utilize systems and everything else.
So whatever company you're building and do this earlier on later, you need to know what the real problem you're solving is.
And it's probably not the tool itself.
Omer (40:43.940)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great way to sum that up.
So the most important question I guess for you is you said you like to send people bear suits.
If you go to your homepage, you see you in a bear suit.
What's with the bear suits, man?
Where did that come from?
Matt Barnett (41:01.300)
Yeah, so look, so, so I'm actually design founder, so I definitely have a flair for this kind of area.
But like brand I mentioned a few times, brand I think is absolutely crucial to building a successful business.
And yeah, you can build great businesses without a good brand for sure.
It's a lot harder where we play given the fact that we're about customer connection and relationships.
One of the things we really think is at the heart of this is, is dropping down barriers.
So, you know, no longer is it the corporate in a suit that necessarily converts customers.
You know, it's you as a, you know, as a human in your kitchen with your kids running around your feet.
That's what people connect with because they connect with individuals.
Now from a brand point of view, we're like, right, if we take this a little bit to the extreme, then our customers hopefully will come a little bit further along that, along that trajectory with us.
So we tend to go a bit over the top, you know, where I mean, the bear thing maybe got out of hand.
But we kind of start off like as a, it's like characterizations, our logo kind of like mailchimp.
So kind of like that, that impression.
But then now I think every Team member that joins the company gets to design their own bear suit from this specialist manufacturer.
We send bear suits to kids and customers, kids when they hit certain milestones, we sponsor bears.
You guys got it all in on it.
But it's, but the idea is it's very light hearted and we are absolutely a B2B company.
So all our customers are businesses.
We don't do anything in the consumer space at all.
But what we're saying is, look, business is fun.
Yeah, it's still, it's still enjoyable.
Enjoy.
We do have some fun with it and those are the kind of customers that we want to attract.
So.
So for instance, we'll have more corporate customers that come in and they go, oh, look, you know, it's a bit too playful for me.
And we're like, yeah, that's fine, you know, go and use X, Y and Z.
They're a better fit for your company.
You're not the right fit for us anyway.
But yeah, as a result of doing that, we're known as a very light hearted team.
We're known as a very personable team and that's probably given us more to grow the business than anything else we've done.
Omer (42:58.770)
Yeah, I mean, you made me smile and came across as, you know, very approachable before you'd even said any single word or I'd even had any kind of interaction with you.
So it definitely, I think, plays a big role in people connecting with you
Matt Barnett (43:14.940)
in a different way in our space.
We have to, we have to build this culture and build this team.
Like if we're trying to solve like relationships and communication, then we have to build that brand anyway.
I wouldn't say it's a choice.
So we have to hire for the brand and we have to be the people who can, who can solve that problem.
Omer (43:32.670)
All right, it's time to wrap up, so let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm gonna ask you seven quick fire questions, so just answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready to go?
Matt Barnett (43:43.230)
Ready.
Omer (43:44.030)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Matt Barnett (43:47.710)
Never stop, just keep going.
If first you fail, get up, go again.
And again and again.
Omer (43:54.910)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Matt Barnett (43:57.710)
I'd suggest reading Superfans by Pat Flynn.
I think this idea of trading.
You only need 100 huge advocates as customers to build a massive business.
You don't need millions.
It really pushes home the whole advocacy piece.
Omer (44:12.750)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder back the first One.
Matt Barnett (44:18.430)
I just don't think they give up.
Omer (44:20.720)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Matt Barnett (44:24.240)
My favorite habit is 5am Club.
So I get up at 5am every day and start working before the rest of the world gets online.
Wow.
Omer (44:33.680)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Matt Barnett (44:37.920)
I would do a foundation called Ugly Creatures.
So basically trying to raise funds around saving species that don't that are not cute and cuddly like moths, frogs, insects.
I think these are the ones that need help.
And I would go after those and build a brand that would give them global recognition.
Omer (44:56.540)
It's not quite the same thing, but it reminds me of something I saw with Jamie Oliver and Ugly Vegetables.
Matt Barnett (45:01.580)
Exactly.
Omer (45:02.180)
And it was like mind blowing how much food is wasted because these big grocery stores don't want an ugly looking cucumber in their store.
Matt Barnett (45:14.940)
It's not.
Omer (45:15.460)
They taste the same though, right?
Matt Barnett (45:17.740)
Yeah.
Omer (45:18.730)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Matt Barnett (45:22.570)
I'm a professional beekeeper.
Omer (45:25.850)
Really?
Matt Barnett (45:26.570)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gotta love the bee.
The bees need help right now.
Omer (45:32.650)
Okay, that's just another picture now with you in your bear suit going out to get honey.
Matt Barnett (45:37.370)
That's it exactly.
Omer (45:39.530)
Now, finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Matt Barnett (45:43.290)
My art.
So I worked as an artist many years and still do it as a passion.
Keeps me creative.
Omer (45:50.120)
Awesome.
Love it.
Cool.
Now if people want to find out more about Bonjoro or they want to try it out or send a video, they can go to bonjoro.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Matt Barnett (46:07.080)
LinkedIn.
If you type in Papa Bear, which is my title, then I think it's me and three other people.
I'm the guy in the bear suit.
So if you'd like to reach out, please do.
I have a lot of advice getting where I am today, so very happy to pass it on.
Omer (46:21.120)
Yeah, you're the second one in my list.
There's a singer called Papa Bear.
Matt Barnett (46:26.480)
Really?
We should meet.
Omer (46:31.120)
Cool.
Matt, thank you for joining me.
It's been a pleasure.
It's great hearing your story.
I love the way that you guys are sort of thinking differently, focusing on doing the right thing to build connections and relationships, even if it doesn't seem like the right thing for the business.
I think in the long term you're proving that wrong.
And yeah, it's just been, it's been kind of fun talking to you.
And I'm grateful for the opportunity to sit down and have had this conversation.
Matt Barnett (47:00.400)
No problem, Omar.
Likewise.
Thanks for having me.
It's been.
It's been awesome.
Omer (47:03.840)
Cheers.
Wish you all the best, mates.
