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.
All right, today's guest is the co founder of Listly, a product that helps bloggers and publishers engage their audience with continuously evolving lists.
According to Listly, 30% of all content on the web is built around lists.
But these lists can quickly get stale and often don't do a lot to engage their audience.
So Listly allows bloggers, content marketers and publishers to create interactive lists, lists which they can embed on their own site or syndicate across other sites.
So today I'd like to welcome Nick Kellett.
Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Kellet (01:05.840)
Hey, great, thanks for inviting me.
Delighted to be here.
Omer (01:08.720)
Now you are joining us from beautiful British Columbia or otherwise, also known as a part of Canada, for other listeners outside of North America.
Nick Kellet (01:20.240)
Yep.
Omer (01:21.360)
And so we're actually not that far from each other, right?
Well, actually, no, we might be because you're.
Nick Kellet (01:26.800)
You.
Omer (01:27.000)
British Columbia is pretty big, right?
Nick Kellet (01:29.200)
Yeah, we're probably like 400.
We're about a, we're about a five or six hour drive away.
400 kilometers, maybe 500, I guess, to Seattle.
Omer (01:36.480)
You know, I've been living in, in Seattle for over 10 years now and I have never taken that two hour drive up to Vancouver yet or gone into.
Nick Kellet (01:46.400)
Oh, you should.
It was beautiful.
Omer (01:48.240)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know why, but I did the same thing when I was living in London that, that there was a bunch of places that I wanted to go to and never got round to doing it.
And, and then now when you end up in, in the US you're like, oh my gosh, it's like it would have been just so much easier to go, go and fly down to, I don't know, south of Spain or something when I was in London.
So yeah, don't, don't procrastinate.
You got to go and do those things.
Nick Kellet (02:16.350)
Local tourist.
Omer (02:18.530)
Yeah.
All right, so I like to start off by asking my guests for a favorite quote or just to share with us what gets them out of bed, what drives them to do what they do.
So is there a favorite quote that you have or otherwise just tell me what gets you out of bed.
Nick Kellet (02:41.890)
Yeah, there's a Steve Jobs quote that's kind of come to mind recently, which is, you know, everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.
And it's so, you know, you look around, everything in life is made up.
Money is made up as a concept, language is made up and everything.
We believe that, you know, the fact that we use Facebook, not something else is made up.
Omer (03:06.530)
Right?
Nick Kellet (03:06.770)
We choose.
These are choices that many people make.
So if you choose to accept everything that everybody else makes up, you'll be a passive consumer.
And if you want to be an entrepreneur, you better start questioning and coming up with your own truths and being a producer and maker of, you know, creating things that other people can then consume as their beliefs.
So I think ignorance, not knowing something, offers great power to those who are brave enough to go and explore and make that become a truth.
Butterflies should not be able to fly, but they don't know that, right?
So I. I'd never.
I published a board game.
I knew nothing about board gaming, right?
Physical cardboard board game.
I published it.
I ordered 10,000 games.
They arrived in a massive container.
You know, just.
I went and did it because I wanted to do it.
And it's, you know, you don't know the rules you're breaking if you don't know the rules.
Omer (04:05.580)
This is the game called Gift Trap.
Nick Kellet (04:08.380)
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
So if you just stick in the same domain and accept all the rules and everybody else's truths, you can be a passive consumer.
You think about it, you can either get on a bus and be the passenger, you could get on the bus and be the driver, and you have more influence over where things are going.
Or you could be the bus company owner, set the roots right.
It's up to you what truth you take.
So I think the thing that gets me up in the morning is just this perpetual curiosity to keep finding things to ask questions about that seem wrong, that seem inefficient, or there's an opportunity there to change something.
Omer (04:47.270)
Right now, your background is kind of more in the marketing space, is that right?
Nick Kellet (04:56.720)
Yeah, that's right.
I'm a closet coder, you know, in many ways.
I've always built early prototypes of things that I've made.
And I mean, you wouldn't want to hire me, you know, to go build a production system for you, but in the old days, I could, you know, hack it with the best of them in kind of, you know, my VB and Access.
I write wicked SQL, but that seems so dated these days.
And I.
These days I can code in Ruby on Rails.
I'm not a rock star, but enough to be able to express an idea.
And I think crafting and playing with stuff is where the Best ideas come from.
So sometimes sitting on the sideline trying to design something is not the same as actually trying to make it.
Omer (05:41.520)
Yeah, I guess I was kind of fascinated when I was doing some research for this interview was what you had done with Gift Trap.
And how did you, I mean before we even talk about the software business, how did you end up building that game?
Where did the idea come from?
Nick Kellet (06:03.570)
Well, I mean I've always had a board game kind of in prototype stage, different games over 20 odd years and kind of gathering dust somewhere in my life.
And I just got to this point where I said, you know what, now is the time I'm going to focus on.
I've always got.
I tried to sell Connect 4 as an electronic game to Milton Bradley back in 19, probably 84.
They kind of didn't think there was a market for electronic games, which is kind of funny, right.
But I got as far as interview with them and pitched them the idea, showed them my working prototype of how they could have made an electronic game and the computer used to play people and win.
You know, it's kind of cool.
I wrote that on a Commodore 64.
Omer (06:51.440)
Wow.
Nick Kellet (06:52.480)
Yeah, kind of dates it, right?
But so I was always kind of inventing stuff and I had some board games at the same time which I showed them and they, which were way too technical and they kind of made me realize, you know, the market is in mass consumer volume games.
Right.
So I was, I moved to Canada and I chatted with my oldest daughter and she asked this question one day and she, we were driving along kind of Africa, we were driving somewhere and she asked this question, how does Father Christmas decide what gifts to give people?
And I was like, it's a pretty good question.
And then I just sort of.
We've been talking about games before and I just thought is there a game about that?
And I went and researched and there's an awesome website out there called boardgamegeek.com which if you haven't heard of and you're a gamer, if you haven't played Settlers of Catan, shame on you.
Go play it.
But go check out BoardGamegeek.
And so anyway, I went to BoardGamegeek, found this, found there wasn't any games around, gift exchange.
And so I just started kind of prototyping some ideas and it took me two years after that to kind of finally get the prototype to market.
And I play test it with like 500 people plus obsessively play testing.
Right?
Because I think with software you can, you know, you can Just ship a new line of code, right?
And you get a new product and you fix the bug or you've, you've fixed an oversight that you haven't thought of.
But when you've got 10,000 board games in your garage, you haven't got much chance to fix that, right?
So the software tester and me got obsessed with, you know, and I basically would, you know, the end.
I think the last people who tested my board game, I went up to the ski rental desk at my local ski mountain.
There was a bunch of Aussies there and I bought them beer and on the condition they'd sit down and play my game.
And I just put the game down on the table, dropped down the beer, stood back, left them with the rules.
I wasn't explaining anything, let them pick up the rules, watch the experience they play, tested it, they laughed, they joked, they learned stuff about each other.
I was like, okay, we're ready to go.
This worked.
And so that was a fun experience.
There's a lot of parallels you can draw from being a software guy applying to real world problems, feeling physical cardboard games, learning from the software process.
I think that was a heap of fun, but scary as hell when 10,000 of them turn up at your fill your garage, right?
Because 10,000, it was a 40 foot container full of games.
Omer (09:17.740)
Wow.
Nick Kellet (09:18.300)
And then you start jumping on the phone trying to sell people this game and they go, nah, so what?
Don't care.
And so then basically I did started reaching out and doing kind of like blogger outreach, sending and I knew a few people who were, you know, serious gamers.
And one guy play tested it and he really liked it, but wouldn't write a review for it, just wasn't his thing.
But he then suggested five other people I should write to and he was more than happy that I could add his name and that just something I kept going finding more people who would review the game and it really became a domino effect that everyone who wrote a review wrote a good review because then after the first five, everyone had read everyone else's reviews and I mean it was a great game.
So it wasn't like making up good reviews about a bad game.
But you create this mindset and swell of opinion around things, right?
And I think that totally can apply to software as well.
Omer (10:14.450)
And you ended up selling all those 10,000 copies in your garage, right?
Nick Kellet (10:18.210)
Yeah, exactly.
No, I mean to this day, like this year, we'll probably break 90,000 copies worldwide, so.
Wow, it's in 12 languages.
Which one?
It's won 20 plus awards globally, including a spilled as Yara prize.
And that's the German.
Like, you know, Germans are big on games.
It's like the.
And winning one of those awards is like getting an Oscar, right?
So that was.
It was a lot of fun.
A lot of fun, hard work, you know, a roller coaster ride, but.
But awesome as well.
Omer (10:49.220)
And then from there, obviously it was a natural progression to get into the software business.
Nick Kellet (10:53.460)
I was already in software, right?
So.
So I'd already started as a software guy and I built a company.
I had a CRM startup very early, back in the kind of days of Telemagic and act, which was kind of, as you say, nice try, no cigar, didn't amount to anything, but got very close and didn't really understand the game.
But when I saw that Telemagic did a massive exit and acted to, I was like, this is interesting.
You can create software and sell the company.
Cool idea.
Try that.
So I went on to take just the segmentation elements of the CRM product that we'd built and created a tool that makes Venn diagrams or visual Venn diagrams for selecting data.
So in business intelligence, we're all obsessed with ands and ors in Boolean logic, and nobody understands them because you start nesting them, they get really complicated, right?
You start asking a question of a database, it gets horrid.
And so we use Venn diagrams to say, I have these people, but not these people.
You just click on the Venn diagram and you drag gender and you drag income and you drag something else into the diagram and it lets you choose who's there, right?
And it had what we call a fast counting engine just to show you how many people matched your question as you built it up.
So you could ask a question and go get closer and closer to the answer.
And this would work against any business intelligence tool out there.
So in the end, well, two and a half years after starting it, I sold that to Business Objects, which is now SAP, because they got bought.
So that was a fun journey and a kind of indoctrination and baptism of fire.
And it was actually really cool to actually stayed way longer at Business Objects than I thought I would after the acquisition.
And it was, it was cool.
It was like finishing school, you know, just like I'd been on the startup end of the equation.
But seeing how the big machine works was pretty fun too.
Omer (12:58.020)
Was it public on how you, how much you sold that business for?
Nick Kellet (13:01.540)
No, it wasn't.
It was, you know, in a kind of, you know, it's sort of 8 to 10 million range.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Omer (13:11.140)
I missed that completely when I was doing the research on this.
It's a little detail in your background which is kind of hidden away and there's not a lot of information about that.
Nick Kellet (13:20.180)
No, because the funny thing is it was 99, right.
This stuff wasn't.
All the websites that established this kind of easy public domain of acquisitions and history really started 2000 plus, more like 2003, 2004 probably something like that.
So that was all pre.
Order of that.
Pre.
All of that stuff.
But it was, it was a lot of fun.
It was, you know, and it was weird because I didn't really know you could do it.
I had this vague idea that I'd seen it in CRM with Telemagic and, and act.
And then I was like, you know.
But it became very, very obvious to me.
Like, I think I just, I.
We went, we built this product, it was literally six weeks old.
And we were, we taken a stand at the Business Objects user conference in the UK and we were talking to customers there and they didn't really understand us, like.
But there was a guy from Abby national who's a big bank in the UK and he's like, can you guys come and see me?
I don't understand a word you're saying, but there's something in it.
And you know, that's, that's the kind of.
That is the early adopting customer you want, right?
The guy that goes, I don't know what you got.
I don't know what you're saying because you're very confusing because you would be right?
That's the whole note notion.
You haven't figured out what this thing is yet, but there's something cool you're doing that I think applies to my problem.
And he was very.
They became an early adopter of our technology and really helped propellers.
And at the same, that same conference I got to meet the CTO of Business Objects and it became very easy and obvious, you know, what we were doing.
We were just like basically driving in front of them across their path.
They didn't like that we were there because we kind of could mess up and complicate their sales cycle because we were making their technology easier and faster.
And so they didn't like that because they didn't own it.
So they stepped in and wanted to license it.
And then they progressed from licensing to an acquisition very quickly.
So driving in front of somebody else's bus and being very annoying is a really solid strategy since people will.
Well, that's.
That's how they.
Big companies are not good at making something from scratch and innovating.
It's much easier for them to understand how to buy you because they're also buying your passion and clarity of vision for what you're doing, which doesn't come to internal employees.
Right.
So certainly my experience.
Omer (15:49.650)
So did you have co founder or co founders in that business?
Nick Kellet (15:55.010)
In that I did, yeah.
Yeah, I had a co founder.
Omer (15:57.650)
So it was just the two of you?
Nick Kellet (15:59.290)
There was two of us, yeah.
And there was a team of.
Team of about 10 in the end.
But there was me and my co founder and he basically I built the first prototype in Access of all things, just to prove it worked.
And then he went and built it in Delphi back then.
Wow.
And then we deployed that.
And this thing would run an Oracle, MySQL DB2, all the databases that were.
The database world's changed a lot from, from 99 to now.
Right.
So.
But it was.
And the funny thing is that the whole and, and or problem is still there in my mind.
So it's, it's, you know, that problem is definitely resolvable.
I.
Every now and then I kind of scratch my head and say, should I go back?
But I, I have this curiosity to solve new problems.
Some people love solving the same problem six times over.
And I've.
I seem to get more excited by jumping from, you know, business intelligence to content marketing to, you know, I did a little dabble in hyperlocal, which I'm still really curious about, but also jumping into board games.
It's just fun.
Right.
So I don't know, it's cool to jump space, but I don't know, sometimes I think I'd probably be better off if I'd stuck in a space, but I've enjoyed the journey and I enjoy challenges.
Omer (17:17.830)
So you mentioned that you sold that business for 8 to 10 million.
Was that pounds or dollars?
Nick Kellet (17:24.710)
Yeah, pounds.
Omer (17:25.470)
Yeah, pounds.
Nick Kellet (17:26.269)
Oh, no, just a minute.
No, was.
It was dollars.
Yeah.
Right.
Omer (17:30.749)
Okay, cool.
All right.
Nick Kellet (17:32.429)
So.
Omer (17:32.629)
And then you stayed with Business Objects for what, the next six years?
Nick Kellet (17:37.469)
I was, I was kind of golden, handcuffed for three and nearly, nearly kind of, you know, a couple of times.
Anyone to bounce out that way earlier than the three, but sort of held in.
And then just as I was about to leave, I kind of made a mental decision to come to Canada.
And they were acquiring Crystal Decisions who were based in Vancouver.
And I was like, well, this is just too much of a golden opportunity.
So I volunteered to move to Canada and help with that project and I actually picked up a brand new role based in Vancouver as sort of as VP of New Markets.
So looking at the way consumers and the way businesses will be using information in the future.
So it was a really awesome kind of Greenfield, Blue sky kind of role.
And so that locked me into coming to Canada, but got me Canadian citizenship.
And then on the back of that and the sort of hobby status, I was building my game.
And then at the end, once I produced the game and begun it all arrived, I was like, this is bigger than my job.
I need to.
So I quit at that point.
But it was great.
It was awesome, fun experience.
Omer (18:51.900)
So let's talk about Listly.
How did you get started on that and your co founder, Shyam.
Nick Kellet (18:59.500)
Yeah, so Shyam had basically had a fascination for kind of structured data and that the idea that the web isn't very structured at this point and sort of came across the idea of lists.
And he was looking at lists and did some research and if you do a quick tally of blog posts across a bunch of popular blogs, it really holds true because I didn't believe it when he told me it, but I went and checked and 30% of posts usually are in the form of a list post.
So 10 ways to do this.
27 things you didn't know.
You look at Buzzfeed, there's a lot of.
They even coined a name for them.
Listicles.
Right.
So literally one in three of blog posts.
Our list posts.
And the reason we love lists is basically they're highly skimmable.
Firstly, the title says it's a list, so you know it's skimmable content, so you can jump in and out.
We skim the list.
We don't necessarily read it.
We check off what.
We use the list post to check off what we know.
So we go, got it, got it, got it.
Oh, didn't know that.
So list posts also make us smarter because they fill in the gaps.
But even if the list post doesn't fill in the gap, it just makes you feel smart because you knew everything.
10 greatest development platforms for blah.
If you're a developer in that space, you want to be on top of all the tools and knowing what's going on.
27 thought leaders in.
Oh, I know all of them, but not that guy.
We all want to be smart and socially savvy and lists are just the perfect way of consuming that.
Omer (20:37.310)
Yeah.
So when we were talking earlier, you'd mentioned that you had raised a small angel round to get this business off the ground and that currently you had about 200,000 users using the product.
Talk to me a little bit about how you got traction.
And once you had guys that sort of built this product, how were you going out and acquiring customers?
What was working?
What didn't work for you?
Nick Kellet (21:08.150)
Right.
Well, we'd done, I mean, before I joined in, Sharma began this and he already got a couple of, he had two different interviews with Robert Scoble so that you got him some exposure to video kind of clips.
And then there was seemingly early adoption in the church space.
And there was one guy who was running a church conference and was crowdsourcing speakers for his conference and he picked up Listly, which I think he picked up via Robert Scoble.
And in the church space there's a lot of people writing a lot of blogs around it and a lot of people and they all like to jump in, sociably, create this stuff.
So he had, I forget the numbers precisely, but something like 2,000 people voting and contributing on this list of the top Christian blogs.
There were multiple people in the Christian space that then sort of jumped the religious space, jumped on it and started building other lists.
Right.
But that's what you really need, right?
Is something that I think of what you're building as a startup is you're building a living beast that, you know, it's a growing thing.
And the emotional connection that people approach to that tool is what grow, helps you grow that product.
So you know, when people start using it and you're not pushing it and promoting it, but it's actually growing itself, that's when you've got, you know, something to keep building upon.
Right.
And the question is, is that natural growth sustainable?
Is it self propelling?
Do enough people get it?
And the, and that's what you're constantly trying to check out is how do we smooth out the product we've got?
How do we improve our communication about what it is?
What words do we use to describe it?
What category do we put ourselves in?
Because if you get enough exposure to that, to more people, you can hone what's the right idea about what's the right buzzword to describe yourself as?
Right.
What problem are you solving?
Excites people, that makes them want to try you.
Right?
Because in the day there's so many, it's so easy to start something out there.
You know, there are so many other people distracting everybody.
And in terms of the newcomers to the, to the space, right?
And you're one of those people that's trying to get in traction and entrenched and literally people have this list in their head of the tools they actively use.
It's a very short list because really, they can't manage too many tools and they have this list of tools that they've heard of that they're aspiring to check out.
And that's a short list too.
And if you don't stay on the top of that list, if you don't make it to the top of the list and they're like, now today is the day I'm going to use Listly or whatever, you insert your tool name.
If you don't make it to that position, you're fighting a losing battle.
And then once they use you, do they stick around and come back?
Do they get enough value from it?
And I think one of the things to focus on there is what's the.
Especially when you're selling something that has a network effect to it, which is kind of Listly says, yeah, we can come and help you scale and get hundreds of people or thousands of people to contribute to your content.
You need to be very careful about what you claim there because you need to offer value.
On day one, that brings them personal utility.
Forget the scaling and the collaboration piece, because if people don't see what they get, how you made their life on their own easier with your tool, then they might not experience the network effects because maybe all their friends are on your platform yet.
So when you try and get them to use it, they're going to reject you because they don't.
Or their use of listly is going to join the queue of the things that they want to evolve, try out and adapt.
Omer (25:15.730)
So give me an example of how that applied to Listly in the early days.
Nick Kellet (25:20.450)
Well, so people just take the Christian blogger example, this guy, I forget his surname.
Now, Rhodes was influential in his space, right?
So if he's.
Because he already had a big following, he had clout to use the, you know, the typical expression, right.
So when, when he started using a platform, people kind of just followed through because it was him.
So they didn't really question less.
People questioned the existence of listening in that equation.
But when a smaller person comes along who's got no influence and probably way less traffic and traction, and he tries to use a new tool, he's way less impactful than the thought leader and he's not even a technology thought leader.
He's just like in a particular niche and domain, people have got way too many tools on their shortlist and so they're looking for reasons not to use them.
People are over signed up, like, oh, another thing's asking for my Twitter feed.
Another thing's asking for Facebook authorization.
Another person wants my email.
All of us in software have trained people, we've trained the consumer like a hamster in a wheel to be very skeptical and careful about what they sign up for.
So it's not so much getting a write up in TechCrunch is all glossy.
But getting somebody, because TechCrunch don't use your tool, they write about it.
They probably even didn't touch it.
They probably wrote about it because someone, somebody who was a friend of a friend said they should.
So they did.
When a blogger, Todd Rhodes was this guy's name, he started using it for his Christian blog and sourcing speakers for his event.
And he used this event, he used this for several years in a row.
That just adds massive kudos to you.
And in that niche, the kudos doesn't carry beyond the niche.
You can describe what they did, but everybody in that niche, because he had weight, jumped in and used it.
And then other bloggers who were smarter and savvy go, oh, I could use this on my blog.
Right?
And that's how things tip and roll.
And you don't know that the guy that's doing that other Christian blog has a day job somewhere else that's of significance.
And if he has a great experience with your product, he's going to roll it in there.
I had a, I had an example of.
There was a guy using Listly for, for a cooking blog and you would look today it was so.
It was.
I didn't even notice him.
Right.
Because there's so many, you know, when you got so many users, you don't know what, you have a gist of what people are doing, but not everybody.
Well, I happened to, I happened to find myself in Sydney and I just jumped with a guy, got a delayed flight and I just jumped on, on Twitter and like, I'm here, flight delayed, who wants to meet?
And I literally filled up my calendar with meetings of really seriously cool people to meet.
Was a really awesome experience and kind of, I already had great faith in Twitter, but it reinstantiated it.
And one of these guys was running a bank, the tech for a bank in Sydney and he'd already tested Listly.
I didn't know this because it was a food blog and I didn't know that was his connection to the bank.
But there we are having breakfast the next day because he'd had an experience with List Liu that was positive.
He'd been testing it outside of his enterprise because.
And this happens a lot, I think I didn't know this at the time, but this seriously happens a lot because people are so fed up with being bombarded with software companies trying to close them down that they actually have on a sale, they actually have these alternative identities outside of their software.
Full time day job.
They test stuff so that you can be.
You are being tested by bigger companies than you actually know because of these kind of identities that people create.
These alternative kind of lurking identities that people create.
And this is why it's important that you should always project a consistent, curious, happy, engaging, supporting kind of mindset to your audience because people are judging you and voting you up and down these lists, whether you get in or out, the things they'll try.
And you know that my experience that day in Sydney was to fill up my diary with great people.
And it was really, really amazing to see that all the hard work that you'd done, if I hadn't followed that, if I hadn't been working hard up to that point and constantly building and priming the pump that day when I jumped into a city and I asked for help, there would have been nobody there.
Right?
Omer (30:06.210)
Yeah, that's great.
Let's go back a little bit to what you were talking about earlier with this, this particular blogger.
And what I was trying to kind of figure out was what was some of the mistakes that you made in the early days.
And it sounded like that, you know, he was getting, he kind of got some meaningful results by using Listly.
But maybe you kind of got yourself in a situation where everybody else who was also wanting to use the product expected that they were going to get the same kind of results from that.
Nick Kellet (30:48.150)
That's definitely a lesson we learned was, you know, it's so easy as a marketer to want to make a bold, brave claim, you know, that you're X times better than something else.
Right.
But people discount that and be careful that will they really get it.
Because if you set that expectation that we'll get you 10 times or 1 times your engagement, people think, oh great.
They don't think, I've got no engagement today.
So 100 times zero is zero.
They think, oh, you're going to get me some great engagement.
And so if you make that claim, the claim is only applicable if you put it in front of people who have a seriously active audience.
And also what matters more than anything is he used this thing.
People who've got amazing results with Listy have used it multiple times.
Right.
They won't necessarily get the greatest results first time because they need to learn and master a platform.
Right.
And there is a strong thing called building a body of work that really matters.
If I start using slide deck today, SlideShare and I publish a deck, I'm going to get no traction because I've got no followers.
I don't really know what works on the platform.
If I go to YouTube, I'm going to do the same.
If I go to Listly, the same.
I have to invest in a platform and learn how to use Pinterest or learn how to use Listly or learn how to, and create multiple pin boards, multiple lists, multiple slide decks, multiple videos.
And that's, that's sort of one way you get traction.
So.
But one of the things that we've learned was with Listly is not about overstating what we bring.
We say, look, we make, making lists for your blog is tedious, which it is.
We make it fun and simple and visual.
We've downplayed the fact we can amplify the engagement.
That's like we're leaving some delight in the box where people open it.
Yes.
If they've got a great blog, they'll get that.
If they use it over time, they'll get that.
But you can't make people stick around.
They have.
This is why they have to get personal utility from it that makes them like something.
You know what, if I'd have made this blog post on my own, it would have taken me, you know, two or three hours and it would have still not been as flexible and dynamic and look great on mobile and desktop and whatever.
But I used Listly.
It was quick and easy.
It looks great.
It took me 20 minutes or 10 minutes.
Right.
That's a simple, deliverable.
Sometimes you actually need to do less or claim less to get more faith, more, buy in, more traction.
Omer (33:24.480)
Now, now, earlier we had been talking and you'd mentioned something about people coming and trying Listly and having maybe expectations that, you know, they're comparing it, you know, against Pinterest or something like that.
Nick Kellet (33:46.560)
Yeah.
Omer (33:47.510)
And I guess, you know, the danger of, of that with any, any early stage stage startup is you're not going to have feature parity with something that's been in market for years before you, or you're not going to have feature parity with a product that has, you know, 10x or 100x developers than you do.
Nick Kellet (34:07.910)
Right.
Omer (34:08.310)
So how did, how did you deal with that where people would maybe come and use a product and say, actually you don't have that many features.
Nick Kellet (34:15.229)
Well, you have to just like.
I don't think it's even.
I don't think they're even comparing features.
I just think they like say like if you just.
They have an expectation of finish and things being rounded off.
Right.
And no sharp edges.
I think so you're better off to make sure that the few things that you give them are fully finished.
So they don't feel that it's.
They don't really like.
Only a certain type of user likes the stuff that's raw and edgy and they could see and feel the bugs but they don't care.
Right.
As you mature a little bit, people want to feel like it isn't broken.
Maybe it isn't extent.
They can handle it not being extensive enough to some extent.
But if things are fully finished off that you give them and people want.
One of the things I've always found is if you offer two choices, two choice doesn't feel like an option but three does.
So one of the things we did early on was create multiple layouts for listly.
So you can basically have a list.
You create it once on listly and then you can choose how that layout looks on your blog.
You can have it as a short static list, as a gallery layout.
As today we offer a slideshow mode, we offer full blown full size photo mode, we offer multiple of those.
Right.
And that as long as you have three.
If I'm going to use something as a marketing feature to show that it's flexibility that we offer, people don't get that two is a choice.
Somehow they think it's an option.
But three makes it.
Oh, I get it.
You could have more and I could ask for another one if there are three.
Right.
And getting people to ask for feedback and ask for what they want and what's missing is easier when you demonstrate where there's choice.
And one of the interesting things, and this was poly if it was a mistake, but it was smart.
We started off listening by not hosting any images at all.
We just used links to other people's images that worked because we didn't have to pay for all of the hosting and storage of all of that stuff for two plus years of listly.
But really as the bar rose, people expected to be able to control their images, have high res images, one flexibility to do that.
And so we added.
Eventually we shifted to that.
Right?
We shifted to hosting our own images and letting people manage that process.
And that's the thing that was kind of an example of the Bar was set by Pinterest and it wasn't just Pinterest but lots of websites set this expectation that we should have this kind of control over imagery.
And so when people don't get something they expect very, very few people actually say anything to you.
You know I don't know if you, I think I mentioned there's a rule called 1990 on the what it's called a 1% rule.
And 1% of people create, 9% of people contribute and 10% of people lurk.
Well if you have 100 people on a using something, only 1% of those people are actually going to complain.
If you're lucky, right?
So most people will see something, it will frustrate them and most of them have left.
They don't vocalize and say you know what, Listely looks really cool but if you'd had only had your own images, I'd use it mostly will say nothing.
And so when that one person speaks up, don't go looking for another hundred people to be like them to speak up to and say we haven't got any data that says that's the norm.
Right.
Just apply the 1% rule that says you know what, if 1% was brave enough to speak up, there's a lot more like those people.
So you can overly justify sometimes where you are but do you think that's.
Omer (38:05.730)
You get into danger of maybe listening to people and building features that nobody else cares about.
Nick Kellet (38:13.810)
And that's.
That is the ultimate dilemma, right.
Who do you deciding who to listen to, deciding what features are necessary for who at what point in time is totally.
And also you can say well that feature is great but we don't have the budget to go for it.
Right.
So I think we did the right thing by not having to worry about images for such a long period of time.
We got on with other stuff that other people found valuable.
You can't build everything out and people have.
There was an awful lot of behind the scenes effort went into making this the as scalable as it is to basically deliver lists to 10, 15,000 blogs across the web.
Good news.
How many blog posts?
I mean some.
We got lists with over a million views, right?
So we've got lots of users who've had over a million views of their lists.
So we're rendering a lot of stuff to people and 60% of you know, 50% of our traffic comes from embedded content on other blogs.
Which is great, right?
That is in the paid owned earned media poem acronym listly is we are giving blogs earned media because that their content is getting seen on other blogs away from their own website.
Right.
And that's a phenomenal thing to do.
But that thing has to scale fast or the blogger will rip it out of their blog before they can blink.
So they don't want to.
They'll try stuff on you go to another site, you'll try stuff and it can be, you get what you get and if it's working, it's working.
If it's not, it's not.
When you put it in your own blog, that's a massive leap of faith and trust that you are using a piece of infrastructure inside your WordPress or whatever.
That is a serious signal of trust, belief in a platform.
That's where a lot of our early days effort went to make sure that Listy would scale.
We rolled out as things grew, but we went from lazy loading to pagination to caching.
All this stuff, it had to be at a scale.
And there was crazy stuff that just little bits of detail that matter because people would do this, they would embed the same list on the same page multiple times in different ways or multiple things on one.
It looked good, right.
This stuff was hard to do and this, they did that well.
So we built out that infrastructure to allow us to scale and maybe there were other options we didn't build in.
You know, like I said, we added, we added images later because, you know, eventually it became the norm to want to do that.
But it's.
Omer (40:58.580)
Yeah, some, some good, some good lessons there.
And I think that what you said earlier about focusing on, you know, a small set of features, a small, you know, set of scenarios or one scenario, and just making sure that whatever you do provide works really well, is well rounded out, doesn't have any sharp edges as you described, is much better than trying to sort of overload the product with lots of features.
And I think another important point you made here as well is that, you know, even though a lot of people will, will refer to Paul Graham's famous essay about do things that don't scale.
When you're building a business or a product that people are going to use in their own sites, you probably need to make sure that it scales, otherwise they're not going to leave it on their site for very long.
Nick Kellet (42:01.460)
Exactly.
And you've basically done all this hard work to earn to get them to do it, and then you lose some.
But you're worse than losing them.
They'll tell other people, yeah, I tried list three.
It just crushed on me.
And that's going to Push people away.
Well, that was important that that didn't happen.
I think we've done pretty darn good job of protecting that.
And for example, we went deep and we built a WordPress plugin that extends the integration.
So when Google sees a list post on your blog that's got a Listly list in it, it doesn't see listly, it sees text.
It sees the text that's in the post.
So it's fully indexable.
That's detail that a lot of people don't appreciate because lots of people use the Internet and have no clue what really where SEO value comes from.
But an embedded list, that's a listing list on a WordPress blog is seen as text.
And that level of finesse and precision and there's another level of that also caches as well.
Right?
So the WordPress, there's caching on Listly, but there's also caching inside your WordPress blog.
So if you get a blog post that gets thousands of hits, it's going to hit your cache first, then the listly cache.
But if somebody updates the list in that time period, it will sync and those changes will propagate.
So it's pretty cool to have that.
And some of the great examples like there was a company called Edublogs, they're a teaching hosting platform.
Hosting platform for WordPress for teachers.
They've got a million WordPress blogs hosted on their platform and they've been running contests on their platform for probably 10 years now.
A contest of like the best teaching blogs, the best new this, the best, whatever, right?
And they run crowdsource platforms and they've run various platforms.
And three years ago now they came across listly because one of their users submitted their entry for their submissions for the contest using listly, which was pretty cool.
So they hadn't heard of it, but saw someone use it and went, hey, could we use this?
So we jumped on a call and explained to them what it could do for them and we just crushed it for those guys.
They amplified because what we taught them to do was.
So here's the, here's your contest on your blog and this is what you've always done because they'd used, I don't know, yeah, SurveyMonkey and various other kind of contest type platforms for voting and stuff.
And with listly, we said, look, you should teach your audience that they can embed this content on everyone's blog.
So everybody that was a contestant was celebrating the fact they were in the contest by writing their own blog post.
And Embedding the whole list or just their entry on their blog.
As a consequence of that, they got massive.
Like I had the blog post that I wrote about the amplification they got.
It was huge.
And that basically put listly in front of so many people.
And they've been using that for several years now and just loved that.
As a comparative experience to other platforms.
Omer (45:13.710)
Yeah, that's.
And again, really critical point there is that one is kind of doing anything which is inherently viral is.
Is going to.
To help you get traction.
Nick Kellet (45:26.900)
Yeah.
Omer (45:27.940)
But also just the social proof.
I think somebody else telling those guys about listening was a lot more powerful than maybe you telling them about it in the first place.
Nick Kellet (45:41.140)
I could go blue in the face telling people how good it is.
And because I'm telling them and I'm from, you know, the source, they're just like, you know, tuning it out.
Right.
But I mean, they can see on the.
Literally it was funny because Listy makes the voting totally transparent.
So they can see everybody that's voted on every item and they can see if someone's jumped in there and created different profiles and trying to fake it.
Because contestants are funny people.
They get very obsessed with trying to win.
Right.
But it makes it totally transparent.
So they, if they're trying to fake it and make themselves win, they just also look stupid because they can see, you know, the six profiles they've created, which you don't get in most platforms.
A lot of these things are you have vote every day and come back and they're just checking your IP address as opposed to like making people log in and leave a trail of who's voted for something.
So it was cool.
Omer (46:38.560)
Yeah, some great lessons.
All right, Nick, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm gonna ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Nick Kellet (46:47.690)
You ready?
Yeah.
Omer (46:49.530)
Let's do it.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Nick Kellet (46:54.730)
Okay, this was a guy I worked with in my first job asked me this question.
He said, who are you to the tiger?
And it is the most simplest statement, but it's mind blowingly complicated and challenging to answer.
So are you the parasite that's on the tiger's back?
Are you the lion tamer, the ringmaster?
Are you the hunter, the hunted?
Are you the audience watching at the circus?
Ask that for your startup.
Who are you to the tiger?
Because it makes you.
It puts you in the frame of.
It's not just about you.
And who is your tiger?
Is Another like that question you could literally spend weeks pondering and you could ask that, who was Facebook to their.
Who's their tiger?
Who was Etsy?
You can discuss other people's.
But that simple question makes you go and answer your own advice.
Right.
Omer (47:52.900)
Unique.
I've never heard that before.
Nick Kellet (47:55.540)
Yeah, it's very different.
Very different.
But it just.
I was just like, to this day, I go, how did you do that?
This guy was Harish.
Guy called Harish Davdo.
And I was at French Connection in the UK at the time, working there.
And he just.
He was just cryptic, but it was just like, oh, my God.
And 20 years later, I still like.
I don't know how even the answer that.
It's nice.
Omer (48:16.160)
All right.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Nick Kellet (48:21.360)
You know, I've read a couple of books lately that I really liked.
Obstacle Is the Way and Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday.
There's something about Obstacle is the Way.
It's just like, it's not meant to be easy.
It is meant to be a struggle.
It's good to remember that sometimes you're bashing away at your startup, you're thinking, oh my God, it's me.
No, this is just normal.
It's meant to be hard.
If it was easy, everyone be doing it.
Yeah, Enjoy the journey, you know, and then trust me, I'm lying.
I really like.
Because he does a great job of exposing the way media works and he's very truthful about it and provide some awesome, awesome insight.
Omer (49:00.680)
Cool.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Nick Kellet (49:07.480)
Not giving up and then equally knowing when to give up.
You need to know that it's a long haul and a slog, but who to listen to, when to stop and how and when to change direction.
You know there is no answer provided in those things.
Right.
That's why entrepreneurship is a skill.
It's a.
There's some luck in there, but, you know, it's who you surround yourself with, who are your advisors and who do you listen to will determine whether you do the right stuff or don't.
Yeah.
Omer (49:43.050)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Nick Kellet (49:49.190)
I like to author things visually, so I tend to author content in keynote more than writing words because it basically makes me ready for designing stuff for Omnimedia.
I can design stuff with an Instagram quotable image in mind rather than writing a long blog post.
I can always add more words later, but I'll try and work it as a short, snappy story that might be like a 10 slide deck.
Um, that's an.
I think that's, you know, thinking in slides and thinking visually is a good technique because it keeps you brief.
Omer (50:25.780)
And then do you turn that into a blog post or just.
Nick Kellet (50:28.820)
Yeah, I would.
Yeah, totally.
Because then you can.
I mean you should.
I will embed that depending if sometimes it's a list, I'll actually turn it into a list as well.
I'll embed it on the blog.
So I'll embed the slides or the list back on the blog.
But what you're doing then is you're getting each platform to amplify and what it's good at and you turn it into a short video that discusses why you did it and then put it on YouTube.
Like each media platform has traffic and traction for good reason.
YouTube is a search engine, the second biggest search engine in the world.
SlideShare is pretty big.
Listing is a big search engine.
People go there to find stuff, right?
So if you just blog, you are working in a vacuum on your own media that people are not going to find because they don't go to your blog to find stuff.
They go to YouTube, SlideShare and Listly and other places to go find things.
So I think people don't understand the way the modern consumer hunts stuff down.
It's another reason to use stuff like Medium as a blogging platform instead of your own.
It's another reason to use LinkedIn blogging platform because you can get found there above and beyond where you are.
But you should create content and put it to multiple places and understand why if you don't, then you're.
You're operating in a vacuum.
Omer (51:49.430)
I think what's a crazy business idea or a new business idea that you would love to pursue if you had the extra time.
Nick Kellet (51:58.950)
I am super curious about Hyperlocal.
So you know, the idea of local media and local has been tried and failed by many people just because I think they were too early.
So I don't know if you know about Patch.
AOL bought Patch.
There have been multiple failures in the hyperlocal space.
Gowallo is another one.
They kind of got consumed and ended up as an acquihire into Facebook pretty much.
There are many, but no one solved it yet.
But someone's gonna solve it at some point.
So I'm curious about that.
Omer (52:37.780)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Nick Kellet (52:41.940)
Huh?
Well, so most people.
Most people don't know so much about my board game.
I actually got an offer from Hasbro to take an option on the game.
I turned that.
I turned it down, which kind of shocked them.
And, you know, as I think I mentioned before, It's.
It's in 12 languages, 20 awards, 95, 90,000 units worldwide.
So that's.
Most people don't know that.
I kind of.
It's amazing what you can have out there if people look.
But people don't necessarily find that stuff about you because people.
People don't read your profile.
Omer (53:14.880)
Very cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I mean, you definitely have a lot of, you know, incredibly interesting background where.
I'm glad we had this conversation because they're not that obvious when you look around.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Nick Kellet (53:34.480)
I love going sideways.
So I snowboard, I wakeboard, I skateboard, so I still ramp ride.
I went to the pub last night on my skateboard.
It's pretty cool.
I just love it.
It's like, give me a chance to get out on the snow, on the wake, skateboard, anything sideways, kind of fun.
I don't know why that is.
Just seems to be right.
Omer (53:57.240)
Nick, it's been a pleasure having you here and thank you for sharing your experiences and insights.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Listly, what's your preferred domain?
Because both List Ly and Listly.com go to the same place.
Nick Kellet (54:13.400)
That's right.
Yeah.
We started off owning List Ly because it's shorter, and then we.
We bought Listly.com because it became available, but we still use List Ly because it has the word list in the name and it's shorter, which we think is better.
So they both end up the same place, but it's cool.
Omer (54:33.250)
So list Ly.
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Nick Kellet (54:39.010)
Well, people can.
I'm on LinkedIn, so I do accept invites on LinkedIn where I used to find me as LinkedIn Nick Kellett.
I'm on Twitter as Nick Kellett.
I'm very accessible and invite me on LinkedIn.
Totally great.
Omer (54:57.920)
So thanks again and I wish you all the best.
Nick Kellet (55:00.720)
Yeah, thanks very much.
Well, thanks for thinking of me.
Been fun.
Omer (55:03.680)
Cheers.
