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 episode is part two of the interview with Josh Haynam of Interact, a SaaS product that makes it easier to create shareable quizzes for your website.
In episode 57, we explored how Josh and his co founders bootstrapped their business and went from 0 to $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue in 10 months.
In this episode, we're going to get tactical and learn how they use content marketing to do that.
We'll talk about the 30 or 40 posts that Josh wrote which didn't even generate one free user of their product.
And we'll talk about the one blog post that he wrote which suddenly started generating paying customers.
There are a lot of valuable lessons and insights in this episode.
Okay, let's get.
Let's get tactical and dive into the content marketing because that's obviously played a huge part in helping you guys get traction with your business.
Now, when we were talking about this a little earlier, you talked about sort of the different phases that you had gone through with your content marketing efforts.
And the first phase you described as the spaghetti on the wall.
Can you talk about that?
Guest (01:51.710)
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is at the tail end of my cold email outreach phase.
And I had heard of content marketing.
I knew that it was something people did to grow their companies.
And so I started to follow some conventional wisdom about content marketing.
I made a couple of really long list posts, things like that.
Just like very run of the mill content that you might see on a general website.
I was like, okay, let's, let's start to drive some traffic and see what happens.
So that's why I call it the spaghetti on the wall approach, because I was literally just writing anything that I thought might get traffic, and some of them actually worked and got traffic and some like email subscribers for my newsletter, things like that, whatever.
But none of those people signed up for the Interact product, even in its free state at that time.
You didn't have to pay.
But still no one converted.
And we're talking about posts that got a few hundred to a few thousand hits.
Just nothing was working.
Omer (03:02.590)
How many posts did you write of
Guest (03:07.190)
the spaghetti on the wall approach?
Probably 30 to 40 different posts.
Wow.
Yeah.
Omer (03:15.430)
Okay, so 30 to 40 posts and not even one free user.
Guest (03:20.550)
Yeah, Pretty depressing.
Omer (03:24.470)
Okay, but you kept going, right?
Guest (03:26.630)
Yeah, so I kept going with that and it just wasn't working.
And that's where I got into stage two, which is what I call the answering questions stage.
So I was writing all these random blog posts, speedy, on the wall, whatever.
People were asking me questions.
And we're talking about like a few people who had signed up for the free Interact product, but they kept asking these questions about how do I make these quizzes, how do I make a personality quiz, how do I do this multiple choice thing, how does the scoring work, all these different things.
And I would answer through email and these emails would be like paragraphs.
But I don't know why it didn't click in my head to turn those into blog posts until I decided to one day.
And I just answered a question that someone had asked.
How do I make a personality quiz?
I wrote a blog post.
It was not a great blog post.
It was maybe 800 words, didn't have very interesting graphics or anything, but that was the post that led to our first paying customer.
Omer (04:39.440)
So a couple of questions.
You know, you, you obviously shifted from creating any content that you thought might generate traffic to content which specifically answered a question that one of your own users had about using the product.
What, first of all, what were the lessons that you learned from the spaghetti on the wall?
What, what are some of the common mistakes that, you know, other people who are in a similar situation may, may also make with content marketing when they read about, you know, do X, Y, Z and you're attracting a whole bunch of new leads and customers.
Guest (05:34.950)
Yeah.
So I think the big problem is that there's just too much content out there.
I did a guest post for Buffer and had a stat on there.
I think 4.75 billion Facebook updates are made every day.
And if you consider that to be some sort of, sort of content, it's just too much.
And if you think about, if you are just trying to start a company, you maybe have a few customers or maybe you just have a shell of a product.
You're not an expert at everything.
You're not going to be able to compete in the general market.
Let's say a post like how to be good at content marketing, something very, very general like that, you're just, you don't have any advantage over anyone else and you don't have a built in audience.
So you're not going to win.
And I think that's what I learned is that I was trying to do just very general type posts.
I remember one of them was called 72 blog post ideas.
And sure, that could be Helpful.
But there was also a thousand other websites that wrote the exact same article.
And they had a lot more authority than me, a lot more connections than me.
And so I just found myself competing with a lot of people.
But then when I shifted to answering questions about something I knew not a ton about, but a lot more than most people, which was quizzes, I actually had a competitive advantage when it came to content because I could speak from experience.
I had worked with people who were making quizzes.
I knew what I was talking about to some extent.
So people found that a lot more interesting.
Even though I thought it was really boring because I was just answering people's questions, it didn't seem like that great of content.
Omer (07:35.130)
So I think this is a really, really important point here.
You know, initially with the 30 or 40 blog posts that you wrote, you were really thinking you weren't really targeting anybody, right?
I mean, it was a very general audience.
Anybody who might read this, and you were tackling very general topics.
And then when you shifted that and said, I'm, I'm gonna get, you know, and I, you know, maybe, maybe it wasn't the thought process you went through at the time, but sort of looking back at it, going into sort of, I'm gonna go towards a very specific audience, people who want to use quizzes.
I'm going to focus on a very specific topic, on how to create a certain type of quiz.
And I'm kind of getting really hyper focused by solving a very specific problem that this type of person has.
And I think that's huge because I think the natural instinct with any kind of marketing is, well, the broader my reach is, the more likely I am to get the word out about my product.
Guest (08:48.090)
Right.
Omer (08:48.730)
And you have a great example of why that doesn't work.
And when you go into, say, you know, I'm going to go hyper, hyper focused into a very specific type of customer, a very specific topic, a very specific type of problem, and I'm going to focus just on that.
And that one post, which, you know, you said wasn't, you know, a particularly great post, had bigger returns for you than the 30 or 40 posts you've written before that.
Guest (09:23.540)
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Just the temptation is always to try to reach everyone.
And I tell this to people who are making quizzes now because people will make a quiz that tries to reach everyone.
And I tell them, you know, I learned this from experience.
You're not going to reach everyone.
No one is going to care if you try to reach everyone.
And it's much better to reach a very small group of people who care a lot than to try to reach everyone who doesn't care at all.
So by just narrowing it down and then narrowing it down again and then narrowing down again to just people who are marketers, specifically lead generation people who are interested in making quizzes and want to put them on their website but don't know how.
Right?
So you have all these criteria and then you write a post just for them.
It's not going to be that many people, but they're really going to enjoy this post.
They're going to get a lot of value out of it.
They're going to care a lot because they've been searching for this exact specific problem.
And then you don't have to compete with the Forbes of the world, with the Vox Media of the world that's writing general content marketing articles, because they're not going to bother to write an article about how to make a specific type of quiz.
It's not worth it for them, but for you it's perfect because you're reaching this very small group of people who is struggling with a very specific problem that you have a very specific answer to and expertise in that area.
Omer (11:10.240)
How did you write that, that article, that post, was it very specific to using Interact to create that quiz?
Did you try to keep it more general in terms of just, you know, how you could do this with any kind of solution?
What was the approach you took?
Guest (11:31.850)
It was pretty specific.
I mean, if it was a guest post, it for sure would have been rejected because it has all kinds of tie ins to the specific Interact product.
But I think when people are at the point where they're looking for a tool to do something so specific, if you show them, mine will do it.
Here's the exact steps, here's how you should write the quiz title, here's how you should write the questions, here's how you should write the results, here's how to tie in the lead generation piece of it.
They're not going to care that much that all the screenshots are from your product or that you're recommending your own product.
They're just looking for an answer.
And a lot of people that I've talked to at this point are thankful because they read through all kinds of stuff, they've searched all over the net trying to find this specific answer to a problem, which is how do I make this type of quiz and how do I do all of the pieces of it that by the time they get to your article it's not going to be an issue that you're recommending your own product.
Omer (12:42.080)
How did you promote that post?
Guest (12:45.440)
That post I didn't promote.
I'm not sure.
I think this is one advantage that I did have from doing the spaghetti on a wall approach.
Some of those articles that I had written, like the 72 blog post idea article, had gotten a few backlinks which had built up our domain authority just a little bit.
You know, it was maybe 10 or 15 backlinks altogether.
But when I wrote that post, I think it was just so specific that it ended up ranking on the first page.
It was at the bottom of the page, but it was still on the first page of Google for how to make a personality quiz.
And that's, that's how people found it.
Omer (13:32.240)
Okay, so you've had some success with the first post.
Where did you go next?
Guest (13:41.280)
Yeah, so that's, that's what I call part three.
So expanding on the one question, right?
So I answered one question, got some results.
But when you're, when you're taking an approach like this where you're answering very specific questions, you know, you're not going to get 100 hits a day on that post because 100 people aren't asking that question every day.
So I had to start answering other questions.
So things like, how do I make a multiple choice quiz?
How do I use my quizzes for lead generation?
How do I share my quizzes on Facebook?
And I call this.
And I wrote a blog post about this.
I called the blog post how to succeed at content marketing when you have nothing interesting to write about.
Because I just thought this stuff was so boring.
I was basically explaining to people, how do you make these quizzes, how do you share them, how do you use them?
Things like that, just not that interesting.
You know, the conventional, like content wisdom is, you know, you should tell stories, you should have a lot of numbers and graphics.
My posts didn't really have any of that.
It was just the very down to earth basic stuff.
But I was answering questions and solving problems for people with these posts.
And I just kept answering people's questions.
You know, they would continue to ask questions about how to do things and how to implement these quizzes.
And every time I got a question, I would answer it.
And I think I realized that there's a rule.
This is actually a rule from school, right?
So if someone raises their hand and asks a question in a lecture, odds are 10 other people had the question but just didn't want to raise their hand.
And the Same thing applies to business.
So if someone sends you an email and says, hey, how exactly do I share this quiz on my Facebook page?
There's probably 10 other people that have the same question, but just didn't bother to write you an email.
So then you write a blog post about it and you reach all 11 people instead of just one.
So that's kind of what I realized in this time is that people were asking me questions.
It wasn't a lot of people asking me questions, but it was enough to where I would write a post about each question and it would end up getting more people and they would ask more questions, I would answer their questions, more people, so on and so forth, just answering questions.
Omer (16:06.920)
So I just searched for how to make a personality quiz, and you're still the number one result there.
Guest (16:13.030)
Perfect.
Omer (16:13.750)
So, all right, so, okay, so how many more of these types of posts did you create and how many customers did they generate for you?
Guest (16:25.350)
Yeah, I did quite a few.
I started to get a little excited about it.
You know, anytime anyone would ask a question, I would write a blog post as soon as possible.
So I think I did probably about 50 of these posts that were just explaining how to do different things with quizzes.
I started to get more specific into different industries and things like that.
And those articles led us to getting our first hundred customers, 100 paying customers.
That is.
So just writing all these random how to's, things like that ended up getting us 100 customers.
Omer (17:04.550)
See, a lot of people wouldn't even think as this type of content as being blog posts, right?
I mean, they might think of it as this is stuff I'm going to put in my knowledge base or something like that for users when they want to use this stuff.
Right.
And I think it's just really interesting what you've done here.
Okay, so you clearly got some good traction with this and then you decided to do guest posting, right?
Guest (17:37.960)
Yeah.
So this is the part I call running out of questions, right.
So at some point you either run out of questions to answer or you just can't answer the questions technically.
Right.
So people are starting to ask questions that you just can't answer because your product can't answer the questions.
And this is something that every company runs into.
Right.
You run out of engineering capacity to answer all the questions.
So at some point you have to start branching out.
And so what I did was a couple of things.
I started writing answers to questions that I hadn't been asked yet.
So I started with how to make a personality quiz, and then I branched that out into how to make a quiz for your health and fitness business.
And.
And then I made how to make a quiz for your travel business and how to make a quiz for your restaurant business, and all these different, like, really, really, really niche things.
So not only was I making an article for people who wanted to make quizzes, but now I was making an article for people who wanted to make a quiz about a restaurant.
And this is like very specific.
So I did that.
And then I also started doing some guest posting.
So.
Omer (18:50.080)
So hold on, let me.
Before we get into the guest posting, sorry to interrupt you there.
I want to talk about what you just said.
So when you were talking about, like, I'm doing this post for different types of businesses, how different was the content on each of these pages?
Guest (19:08.300)
Yeah, so what I.
Omer (19:09.260)
You weren't just like, you know, find and replace restaurant, hotel or something, right?
Guest (19:14.220)
No.
So what I, what I did was tried to get really specific using examples.
So by this time, you know, this was after 100 customers that were paying and we still had a free version.
So we had a few hundred more free people.
So I looked for good examples from each of these industries.
And so I would take an example from travel.
I remember we had one guy that was a Chinese like travel tourism website guy, and he was just a personal website, but he had some really great quizzes about China.
And so I would take his quizzes about China and kind of do a case study how you can do the same thing for your travel website.
Just getting really specific with travel.
And so I would take a specific example that I liked from an industry, do a write up about it, explain how you could do it.
A lot of times I would get the actual person who made the quiz involved to give their thoughts on how to make good quizzes and get a lot of leads from them and get a lot of shares and things like that.
So I'd get really specific using an example.
Got it.
Omer (20:23.940)
Okay.
All right.
So then you started to do the guest posting.
Guest (20:28.300)
Yeah.
So this was the middle of 2014, and 2014 was kind of the breakout year of Buzzfeed quizzes and Zimbio and Disney and all these websites.
And there was a lot of interest around quizzes.
And I started reaching out to different websites, asking if they wanted a post on different ways that marketers can use quizzes to generate leads and things like that based on what I had learned from our customers.
So our customers were doing a lot of really, really interesting things with quizzes and these websites.
I did a post For Copyblogger, who didn't have any articles on how marketers can use quizzes or specifically how bloggers can use quizzes.
So I started doing guides that were very specific to the audience of a website.
And so for Copyblogger I made how to make a quiz or how to use quizzes in your marketing as a blogger.
So again, very specific.
But this was a post specifically for their audience about how to use quizzes as a blogger and a marketer.
So I used a bunch of examples from our customers and just made this really long form guide and it continues to drive a lot of traffic to their site.
You know, it's a, I think the SEO term is, you know, copyblogger.com quizguide.
Right.
So they have this very high level term and people are searching for it and it ended up getting shared a lot.
So I just started doing these posts because there was so much interest in quizzes.
Not only could I do more marketing for my own business, but I could write really solid articles for these other sites that ended up getting them a lot of traffic.
Omer (22:15.600)
Now how did you decide which sites you were going to target and pitch your guest posts to?
Guest (22:22.000)
Yeah, so it was really based on who had been getting a lot of value out of our products.
So by this time it had become more clear that our two buyer Personas for our company were lead generation people and social media content people.
Right.
So I started to look around at which websites were providing content for those two Personas and reached out to them.
Omer (22:53.230)
And you know, Copyblogger is not the easiest site to get a guest post published on.
What was your experience?
What, how did you, you know, what was the steps you went through there?
Guest (23:05.800)
Yeah, so this, this one goes back to my quote.
Right.
So byproduct of just working your ass off.
Yeah.
Some of these posts took months of revisions to get done.
I did one for Unbounce that I worked on for probably four months before I ended up getting published on the site.
And it's a matter of just having a compelling pitch to start with.
So again, there was a lot of interesting quizzes.
So a lot of sites were interested in having a post about quizzes.
But then you have to formulate an excellent post, send it to the editor, get revisions, go back and forth.
Fourth, they are always going to want more numbers, more examples, things like that.
And you just have to be really, really perseverant about it because it's easy to give up after the third or fourth revision when it looks like it's not Going to work.
But then all of a sudden, after four, five, six rounds of back and forth, they're like, oh, this is good.
All right, we're going to post it.
But it just seems like crazy from the start.
But yeah, that's kind of the process.
A lot of revision and a lot of just being really humble about your writing because it's gonna get torn apart.
Omer (24:28.480)
So what was the first site that you submitted a guest post for?
Guest (24:32.479)
The first site I did was the Oracle Marketing blog.
So Oracle has a marketing arm and that actually is an interesting tie in back to my spaghetti on the wall.
So some of the posts that I did back in the day ended up getting shared.
And one of the people that shared my 72 blog post ideas post was Oracle.
And so I reached out to the manager of the blog over there and said, hey, you shared my article.
Would you be interested in a contribution?
And that's how I ended up getting my first blog guest post.
Omer (25:11.310)
And I think.
Guest (25:12.190)
Did you.
Omer (25:12.630)
Did you write something for Entrepreneur?
Guest (25:15.470)
Yes.
Oh, I did do something.
And that was actually I wrote the article for Buffer and then it got syndicated to Entrepreneur.
So I got two for one on that one.
Omer (25:25.149)
Got it, got it.
And so again, you know, at this point, the content was still focused on, you know, your domain expertise, which was quizzes.
But the emphasis shifted away, I guess, from how to use Interact to more about some of the lessons that you were learning from how your customers were using these quizzes.
Right.
So is that sort of the general gist of what the topics were about?
Guest (25:54.370)
Yeah, so a lot of it was how businesses can benefit from using quizzes, things like that.
There's was interested in quizzes to start with.
And then there was a lot of specific applications based on industry things like that.
And then our customers had been learning interesting things.
You know, if you put the word celebrity in your title, it gets more shares on Facebook.
If you have a more conversational tone in your questions, it gets shared more on Twitter, so on and so forth.
So there was these interesting statistics that we had from our customers, interesting things about lead generation.
And we were just tracking a lot of numbers based on what our customers were doing and using those numbers to write really interesting kind of story, like content about the way that people were using quizzes.
Omer (26:47.620)
And then so looking at today, what's your approach to content marketing now?
Are you still focusing mainly on guest part posting?
Where is this going for you guys?
Guest (27:00.460)
Yeah, so we have now kind of created a strategy and it's the college humor method.
The editor at College Humor has this method for creating all of their content where they sit down every Monday and just throw out ideas.
And for us, that means a lot of what people have been asking about the week before.
Again, we're still doing a lot of answering questions, but for us now, it also means guest post ideas.
So it's myself and one of the other co founders that write content.
And every Monday we just think about which ideas we might want to do, and then we each pick two and do them that week.
So we do a total of four articles a week.
Sometimes those are all on Interact, sometimes those are all guest posts.
Just depends on what kinds of things people have been asking about what's interesting, interesting in the industry that week, things like that.
Got it.
Omer (27:58.790)
Okay, Josh, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Guest (28:05.670)
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Omer (28:07.750)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Guest (28:12.470)
To remember that you're in charge.
You're the one who understands your business.
People are always going to tell you what to do, but you're the one that knows in your gut what's going on.
Omer (28:22.580)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Guest (28:26.660)
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Because it just goes over a lot of really, really great stories of how people work together, what kinds of things rub people different ways.
And it's just an amazing book that I refer back to all the time when I'm thinking about how to deal with a situation.
Omer (28:46.910)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Guest (28:51.710)
I think just perseverance, the ability to keep going when things are tough and stick it out.
Omer (28:59.310)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Guest (29:04.030)
I really like I done this.
So they send you an email at the end of every day and say, what did you do today?
And it's just an amazing way to keep yourself on track.
You know, if a few days in a row you're not getting anything done, it's time to take a break, maybe go on vacation.
So it's just an awesome way to keep yourself accountable.
Omer (29:24.190)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or market or problem would you want to go and tackle?
Guest (29:31.710)
I think I'd go into hardware.
So I really like building things.
And there's so much interesting stuff happening with 3D printing and things like that right now that hardware just seems really exciting.
Omer (29:45.580)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most People don't know.
Guest (29:51.580)
Okay.
So I never got on an airplane until I was 19 years old, and I'm 22 now.
Been to 11 countries or.
No, no, no.
I've been to 12 countries.
I just got back from Canada at the end of last week, so that's interesting.
All right.
Omer (30:11.340)
And what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Guest (30:15.820)
I think learning and helping other people learn.
So I've been able to actually tie this back into work a little bit.
Any public library that signs up with us, we let them use the product for free, and they've been using it to promote reading and learning for kids.
And we have such a great opportunity to just learn and better ourselves all the time.
But I am personally guilty of just not taking advantage of that enough.
So I think just learning and promoting learning for other people, you know, learning is the key to freedom and getting out of poverty and things like that.
So anytime I can help anyone else learn or, you know, just provide the tools for other people to learn, I really love doing that.
Omer (31:02.060)
Great answers, Josh.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Interact, they can get go to try interact.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Guest (31:23.340)
You can just email me directly.
I'm joshryinteract.com I usually answer pretty quick.
Omer (31:30.050)
Awesome, Josh.
Thank you.
Wish you all the best in the future.
Guest (31:33.410)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I enjoyed it.
