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.
Okay, today we're doing part two of the interview with Gabriel Weinberg.
Gabriel is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you with over a billion searches in 2013.
He's also an angel investor and co author of Traction, a Startup Guide to Getting Customers.
Gabriel has been featured on cbs, Fox, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and many more.
So with that, let's bring on Gabriel.
All right, Gabriel, welcome back.
Guest (01:00.330)
Great to be here.
Omer (01:01.770)
Okay, so today we're going to talk about your book, A Startup Guide to Getting Customers, which you co authored with Justin Mears.
Firstly, give the audience an overview of what the book is about.
Guest (01:16.090)
Sure.
So, okay.
I started writing this, you know, five years ago, so it's actually a long time in the making.
And the reason is, is I had started DuckDuckGo.
If you listen to the previous episode, you'll know about it.
It's a search engine, and I was struggling, you know, to get traction with it, to get customers good to take off.
I also started angel investing around the same time, you know, giving startups some startup cash to take off and, and also advising.
And they all have the same exact problem.
There are great product development methodologies, lean among them, you know, agile and whatnot, but there was no structured approach to getting traction.
And as a result, people were taking these unstructured approaches.
I liken it to, you know, essentially doing archery blindfolded, trying to hit the bullseye of what is the thing that's going to make your startup take off, and just doing it randomly based on what, you know, maybe running some Google Ads or some blog posts or stuff like that, which is essential.
People do, and they give up.
And what I saw, and this is only accelerated, is, you know, people would launch their product, they'd often take too long, as you probably have well documented on your podcast.
And then they're like, okay, I launched this thing.
Now how do I get customers?
They take this unstructured approach.
They have fits and starts.
They never really get to take off, and they run out of money and the company dies.
And that is unfortunately the common narrative.
And the sad part about it is a lot of the time, those startups did not have to die.
That is, the product that they made was probably able to get traction if they had approached it in a better way.
And so what I did is I set out to figure out what that better way was.
And that's exactly what the book details.
Omer (03:12.170)
You know, quite often I'll still hear startup founders sort of talking about building the product and.
And when you ask them about marketing, a common response I still hear is, well, we're going to worry about that later.
Why, why do you think that.
That so many people still think of marketing sort of as an afterthought to building the product?
Guest (03:38.000)
I think it is two reasons that are very ingrained and pernicious, and that's why it's really hard to change.
One is people get into startups and software because they like products.
That's just the reality of it.
And most of those people are not marketers and don't.
It's unknown to them.
It's out of their comfort zone.
And so it's a rationalization, essentially, because they want to spend time on product and not on this stuff.
I think that is a primary reason, a secondary reason, which I hope is getting more dispelled.
But still, probably half the people believe this, that they believe that if you build it, they will come fallacy, that if they build the right product, that marketing will solve itself.
And that's what I think they're going to put off later because they're like, oh, I'm just going to build the perfect product and then, you know, everyone's just going to beat a path to my door and then it just doesn't happen.
And they're just, you know, you know, it's too late at that point, basically.
Omer (04:39.090)
Now, how long did it take you and Justin to write this book?
Guest (04:44.290)
So it was a long process.
What happened was, is, you know, I didn't set out to write a book.
I set out to figure out what the good process is for myself so I could get traction.
And so I went and did a.
A lot of unstructured interviews for about a year and a half, public on my blog.
They're still on YouTube.
You can watch them just talking with really successful founders like Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and Alexa Hannay from Reddit and dozens of others, trying to unpack what I would call their miracle function.
So, like, in their startup history it says, like, then they started Wikipedia and then a miracle happened and then it took off.
And I wanted to focus right on that early miracle part, right?
And say, okay, what exactly did you do?
You know, did you, you know, did you have speaking engagements?
Did you run?
Did you go to a trade show and have it Take off.
You know, like, who were those people that first made it take off?
What did you do to get them?
And that's really what I dug into.
And that led me to the early theses for the Bullseye process, which we talk about in the book of how to get traction.
And then, you know, then DuckDuckGo started to get traction.
You know, I ran the process and it worked and I didn't have time to write a book, so I didn't.
And I kind of sat there and then I realized that it was only going to happen if I found a co author.
And then eventually Justin came on and said, I really want to help you finish this book.
And then we severely underestimated what it would take to turn into a book.
And I could get into details on that about why, because the book we wanted to write ultimately took a lot of, a lot of work.
And so it's been five years, but the last two really spent hard getting, trying to get over the finish line.
Omer (06:24.830)
Now, in the book, you describe Bullseye as a simple framework that'll help you find the channel that will help your startup get traction.
Can you tell the audience a little bit about the Bullseye framework and how it's used?
Guest (06:44.350)
Yeah.
So the premise that underlies it first is that from talking to all these people, we discovered that there is 19 different channels, marketing channels, user acquisition channels, whatever you want to call them, of ways people were really getting traction.
And so some of them you're familiar with, you know, like search engine marketing, search engine optimization.
You know, some are, you might be less familiar with like, you know, one way has a name called engineering as marketing, but other things like offline events, using affiliate programs, using vyral marketing, using unconventional PR.
So the first thing to realize is that there's 19 of these.
The second thing was in any given startup that really took off, one of them was dominating and they couldn't tell really a priority which one was going to take off.
And it was often, this is the really kicker.
It was often the underutilized thing.
They would try a bunch of things and then kind of off the wall try this other thing.
And that other thing that no one else was doing was the thing that got them to take off.
And a lot of these people kind of happenstance onto it.
And what Bullseye does is it takes a more structured approach and says, okay, what you need to do is run a real brainstorming process against all these 19 channels and try to come up with tests of how you would test them.
And, and then really try to rank analytically, what are the top ones and then run tests for those cheaply and in parallel to figure out which one might actually work.
Then hopefully one of the early ones you test starts to work and then you really focus on that.
And the key is oftentimes that'll work for a while and then back off and then you gotta run this process again.
So at DuckDuckGo, we've actually run it like six or seven times now.
Omer (08:34.230)
Okay, so the bullseye framework is this five step process where you describe brainstorming, rank, prioritize, test and then focusing.
Can you give me an example of how someone or some company that you know, has used this framework?
Guest (08:50.950)
Yeah, I mean I like to just eat our own dog food here at DuckDuckGo.
So I can explain this by explaining another one too if you like.
So at DuckDuckGo, you know, we've been through like I mentioned, six or seven of these processes.
And so what happened was is early on I started Getting traction for DuckDuckGo via search engine optimization, which is sounds ridiculous because we are a search engine.
What that means is I ranked highly for the term new search engine on Google at the time and that drove users, you know, to DuckDuckGo initially.
And this was before we had the Bullseye process.
And this is an illustration of the mistake that most people make.
So the reason I did search engine optimization was I was familiar with it.
I had bias towards it because my last company used it.
And that may sound like, well that's what you should do.
You knew about it, you should use it.
The problem was is I spent a lot of time on it and I did get it to work, but it topped out at not that much traffic for that term.
I got to about 10,000 searches a month with it.
And to give you reference, now we're at about 250 million.
But to really move the needle in search, you need millions and millions of searches.
So that was not going to work.
And I spent way too much time on it.
And it was because of my bias, I didn't actually run a process of what else could work.
So when I started running that process, the next round, next time around I had some tests.
So we tested content marketing through my blog and we tested social display ads via was that the time some banner ads, it's like pre the actual good social ads.
And also tested search engine marketing, actually buying from higher volume keywords, ran tests on all and realized the volume that I was at actually blogging and making microsites.
The Content marketing piece was driving real good traffic and good scale up to the next level.
And so then really decided the test worked and doubled down on that and focused until that started to plateau.
And then I kind of reran this process and ultimately switched from that to social display ads, which was an earlier test and that worked.
And then PR went through print.
Sorry, went through online, then print and tv and then did a business development as the last one over the last year.
If you want, I could go into another company example, but.
Good illustration.
Omer (11:32.390)
Yeah, no, I think that's a great example.
Okay, so as you mentioned, the core of the book is made up talking about these 19 traction channels.
And we're not going to go through the whole list here today, but I thought it would be helpful for the audience if we picked three of those channels and focus a little bit more on each one.
So maybe let's start with viral marketing, which is the first one that you mentioned in the book.
First of all, just, just tell the audience a little bit about what you mean by viral marketing.
Guest (12:05.830)
Yeah, so one word of backup.
So the, the, the book is kind of in two sections.
One is explaining about how to run this process that we've talked about.
The other is a chapter for channels.
And the idea is, you know, to run an effective brainstorming process, you actually have to know about how the channel works.
And so you don't have to read a whole book on it, but you got to read a chapter on it basically to be effective, actually coming up with tests.
Because if you're not effective, then you're just kind of biased again.
So anyway, that's the background.
So viral marketing arguably shouldn't have put first in the book because it's kind of one of the more complicated ones.
But really what that all is is getting your customers to refer other customers.
So on its face, it's very simple.
And any great product is going to have some traditional word of mouth, which is also a form of viral marketing.
But the problem with the word of mouth is you can't really control it.
It happens.
And even the most viral companies, like Dropbox for example, you know, that's not really how they're spreading via viral marketing.
They all have what they call a viral loop, where built into their product, they are having this process of friends getting recommended as part of the signup process and often have incentives around it.
So as Dropbox Sizing and Sample, which is that company that lets you upload files to the cloud and syncs them between your computers, they have a freemium Product where you get free space when you sign up and you can pay for more, but they'll actually give you more free space to both you and your friends if you refer to your friends.
So there's this basic incentive to refer friends.
Additionally, it's built into the product that you're sharing files.
So it's also collaborative straight away.
Products like that have this notion of this viral loop that when someone signs up they're likely to invite a friend at some point.
And if you can get the math to work in that loop, you can grow just based on that.
Omer (14:14.430)
What is a common mistake that you've seen startups making when it comes to viral marketing?
Guest (14:21.310)
The most common mistake is not quantifying it.
This is the reason why I arguably shouldn't have put it first in the book, because it's the only one where you really should do a tiny bit of math and make a spreadsheet and really figure out what they call your viral coefficient, which is essentially a measure of how much spread is actually going on.
Because if, if you have very little spread built into your product, there's a very high likelihood you're not going to get viral marketing to work.
However, if naturally you have, it's not, it's not working virally yet in the traditional sense of the word, but you have some decent spread, there's likelihood you could run tests and run this kind of a B testing process we describe in the book to really get your viral marketing up and then it become your growth channel.
So the number one mistake is like just to build it into your product without really measuring it.
Omer (15:14.610)
Okay, good.
So I was going to talk about maybe PR next as a traction channel, but based on what you just said about viral marketing, maybe not shouldn't have been the first one in the book.
Do you think that there are another two that might be better to talk about?
I'd been thinking about PR and content marketing.
Guest (15:33.970)
I mean, I view them as independent, all independent, and they're all worth talking about.
So I say pick what you like.
But the reason why I think it's me getting the book, maybe I scream that as best is just because it is probably the most complicated one.
And I think I might have scared people away by putting vyral marketing first.
But I am very excited about viral marketing.
I used it my last company and so I know a lot about it and I was just very excited to write about it, you know, but it just might have been too advanced too quickly.
Omer (16:04.740)
Well, before we go on, give me an example of how you Use viral marketing with DuckDuckGo.
Guest (16:10.560)
Oh, yeah.
So we have not done great Vyral marketing.
DuckDogo, my last company, used it.
But VyralMarketingDuckDo, we are testing it because I do think we have a very passionate user base who inherently wants to spread us and tell people about how they can get great privacy and great results.
The problem with DuckDuckGo is you can't build it into the product easily because people want search results right away.
They don't want you to bother them about inviting their friends.
Interestingly, I don't know if you experience that Bing, but like Bing had done interesting viral experiments with the kind of social portion on the.
Right.
But.
So one thing we're doing now is we will give.
We found out we have these nice T shirts at duckdigo that I spent a lot of time making sure the quality was awesome.
You want to wear this T shirt all the time.
And so we're trying to do is for our evangelists, the people who really like DuckDuckGo give them a free T shirt because we found out that they wear it all the time.
And then that naturally leads to conversations and spreading that they wouldn't have done otherwise.
And that is actually a kind of viral loop we can do.
So that's an experiment we're actually running right now.
Omer (17:28.610)
Interesting.
Okay, so let's move on to traction channel two.
I don't know if it is number two in the book, but pr.
So first of all, just for everyone's benefit, just explain what you mean by PR in public relations.
Guest (17:43.520)
Right.
So PR generally in the general notion of PR is just the communications you make with the public from your company in the sense of traction, or more specifically, talking about trying to reach media outlets who are writing about startups and reaching their audience to try to get conversions from their articles to you.
Omer (18:10.960)
Okay, now some people listening to this might just say, okay, that means pitching to TechCrunch.
Right.
But as you talked about in the book, doing that right away isn't always the best idea.
Guest (18:23.520)
Right?
Yeah.
There's several notions here that are kind of non intuitive.
One is the way press has started to unfold in the modern Internet age, which is bigger outlets feed on smaller outlets for stories.
What happened is you have this 247 news cycle now on the Internet and it's moved from a fixed space of we're putting out a newspaper today to let's put out as many stories as we can, because stories equals page views, pages equals advertising, and as a result, reporters are not they're out there looking for stories all the time and they generally look at several places and you can figure out where they're looking at.
So people still pitch TechCrunch.
These reporters get hundreds of emails a day and it's actually kind of harder to stand out there.
It's easier to stand out actually, if you go to, and you kind of do this bottom up strategy and you go to where they're looking.
So for instance, getting on top of hacker news or more niche startup blogs and areas is kind of a faster way to get credibility to get bigger coverage in TechCrunch.
So that's one thing.
The second thing is I think most people are misguided that TechCrunch is either going to do them any good in the first place.
And this starts with, you know, who is your audience and that's what PR starts with.
And really all traction marketing, you know, who are you really trying to reach?
What is going to be the best audience that is going to convert and for most startups is actually not TechCrunch.
TechCrunch may help you get investors and do some other things for you.
So you may want to do that, but in terms of actually interaction with customers, it's probably not your best bet.
There's probably very specific outlets that would do much better for you.
So the starting process is basically to figure out what those outlets are and then kind of back up and say, how do I, you know, how do I go about targeting them?
Omer (20:27.060)
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
You know, I've heard of people who talk about, you know, getting TechCrunch coverage, seeing a spike in their traffic, a lot of excitement, and then pretty much none of that traffic actually turns into paying customers.
Guest (20:41.860)
Yeah, I think that is the norm, you know, and that's why you also, like, you don't want to go with any of these channels.
You don't want to go full in with.
Depending on who you are, this may deviate, but you don't want to hire a huge PR firm and start spending lots of money on it right from the get go.
You want to run some small tests and try to figure out whether the traffic in this channel is actually going to convert for you.
Omer (21:11.030)
How did you guys get included in time magazine's top 50 sites back in 2010?
Guest (21:18.870)
So I'm going to tell you the brief story, but there is a long story that I wrote up on my blog that anyone can go look at and it kind of tells.
But essentially one thing PR is really all about.
Relationships, you know, the.
In any area, like it feels like a mystery, like, oh, I need to get covered with TechCrunch or this or that.
But in any particular industry, like the number of people that are really know about and covering your industry is actually quite small.
You know, we're probably talking on the order of 10, 20 people say in search, who are really know about and write about search.
Right.
Or who are knowing about any area.
And so the first step, if you're really focused on a pr, is to go figure out who all those people are.
And then there's, you know, you want to find a way to make a relationship with them.
And, you know, one of the tricks we use in the book, I don't even have a college at this point, but is Twitter.
And that's really how the Time magazine started story started too.
You just follow all these people on Twitter, they're generally unknown and they don't have many followers.
And you engage with them and you start having a relationship over time and that leads to something.
And that's what happened here.
Well, before he wrote that article, you know, we had been in communication with him and other Dr. Go users.
So it was when he went to write the article, it was in his mind and then he was primed to do it.
Omer (22:48.360)
I see.
See, okay.
And traction number three, I picked content marketing.
So I think most people are familiar with what content marketing is.
But is it more than just blogging?
Guest (23:05.170)
Yes, it can be more than just blogging.
In particular, in DuckDuckGo, when we went through kind of two phases of content marketing, the first was my blog, and then the second was microsites.
So essentially completely separate domains of content that were very specific and in our case, very privacy oriented.
Explaining people what's going on with search privacy and in general Internet privacy, and then converting those users back.
So there are other ways to do it besides blogging, but I'd say the blogging is still a super underutilized channel.
It had a peak and then it fell off.
And the reason why it's super underutilized is because it's kind of a big pain in the ass and it takes a long time to build an audience.
And so we heard time and time again that even big companies trying to.
The first six months, they're basically writing to no one and slowly building that audience.
And then it kind of hits this critical mass where people then start to spread it and submit it to things.
And there are some ways to jump that by like guest posting and things like that.
But even then It's a slow go at the beginning and most people really give up early.
So that's the big lesson on content marketing is if you're serious about it, run some small tests like a guest post to see whether it's useful.
But if it is, don't give up that early.
Omer (24:39.430)
Is there an example you can share around either how you guys at DuckDuckGo or maybe somebody else that you know how they used content marketing successfully?
Guest (24:50.510)
Yeah.
A great example is OkCupid.
OkCupid is a dating site for people who aren't familiar.
And that's one of the most competitive industries out there.
And they were struggling to get traction really.
And they had actually run a version of this bullseye process and we explain it in the book, but they had been using SEO themselves, very much like Dr. Go I CEO to content marketing and decided they were going to try to break out and differentiate with their blog.
And they wrote very detailed posts that they researched, very data driven and very exciting about like how to improve your dating profile essentially.
What, like images, you know, if you post images about yourself, which kind of images are working, which were not, which cameras are better, you know, some more racy stuff about race and you know, what people's preferences were in an anonymous fashion.
And almost, you know, they, like I said, they, they also struggled right at the beginning, but once it started to take off there, there's a graph we put in the book where you can see where they started the blog.
Once it kind of got critical mass, it just skyrocketed.
Their company.
Omer (26:09.480)
Okay, good.
Now one thing that I've noticed, and we talked a little bit about this before we started recording, is that you really do practice what you preach.
And in fact, I read a blog post where you wrote about how you use these principles to get traction.
For the book you had a headline in there somewhere which said getting traction for traction.
Right.
Which really stuck in my mind.
Was it any different applying these principles to a book instead of a software product?
Guest (26:40.610)
Not really.
The only real difference was, I guess there's a couple of differences.
One is a kind of a sub difference of the process in general, which is the launch.
Right.
So like DuckDuckGo didn't really have a launch.
And in many cases, if you look back at a company and their launch moment, even the successful companies, the launch actually didn't matter that much.
They still have to then dig in and figure out which traction channel is going to work and focus on it.
But for a book, the launch is actually significantly important.
And so we ended up having to do more tests than we probably would have otherwise and in a compressed timeframe.
So I line them up at the beginning, at the launch point, because you're trying to get a lot of Amazon reviews at first and if you're trying to get on bestseller list or things like that all has to happen within like a week.
So that's one difference.
The other difference, which was just us messing around with our own methodology, is we just wanted to test more things because originally we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we tested every channel and shared all those results and it would be cool.
But that ended up being too much work.
So we backed off of that, but we didn't back off it fully because we had already had these things in place.
So for both of those reasons, we ended up kind of doing more tests than you might otherwise.
Omer (28:11.880)
Great.
I think it's a great book.
In fact, I own both the Kindle and Audible versions of the book and I paid for them.
I didn't get them free from Gabriel.
In fact, after reading the book is why I reached out to you and invited you onto the show.
Now, if folks want to get a copy of the book, I noticed that the Kindle version on Amazon is available at the moment for just 3.99.
So if you don't own the book, it's a no brainer.
Go buy it today.
The book's called A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mears.
Gabriel, it's been a pleasure having you back on the show and thank you so much for sharing so many valuable lessons and insights with our audience.
If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Guest (28:58.050)
Thanks for having me back.
And the best way is on Twitter.
YEG Y E G G is my handle.
Omer (29:04.690)
Awesome.
Thanks a lot Gabriel, and wish you continued success.
Guest (29:08.770)
Thank you.
Omer (29:09.490)
Cheers.
