Omer (00:09.280)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Ryan Culp, the founder of fomo, a social proof marketing solution that enables online businesses to automatically show purchasing activity on their website.
In 2016, Ryan acquired a Shopify app called Notify, which later became FOMO and grew it into a seven figure SaaS business which he recently sold.
The Shopify app already had a few hundred customers, so it was less about a zero to one problem and more about how to make the investment worthwhile and grow to thousands of customers so he could quit his job and work on it full time.
In this episode we unpack that story and share Ryan's journey.
We talk about how he went from a few hundred Shopify customers to thousands of customers with FOMO now being used on over 30,000 websites.
We chat about how Ryan used cold email outreach to get the initial growth and something a little unusual he did that he's not proud of, but it worked.
We also dig into how they use integrations with other products as a major growth channel and how they were able to get over a hundred integrations quickly.
And Ryan also shares the lessons he learned from a bunch of other tactics that didn't work, content marketing, SEO, newsletter ads, and more.
So it's a great interview.
I hope you enjoy it.
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Kulp (01:48.190)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:49.630)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Ryan Kulp (01:54.910)
I do.
I've probably said it 20 times on social media, but I'll say it again here.
All you have to do is whatever it takes.
The quote is actually in a romantic comedy by Zach Braff, writer, director, actor, and he basically cheats on his soon to be wife, his fiance, and he goes to her father and asks what can I do to fix this?
He's been sleeping outside and doesn't know what to do.
And the father, potential father in law, says all you have to do is whatever it takes.
And then the rest of the movie is him trying to win back his fiance.
And so and I watched it in like a romantic comedy mood.
I wasn't looking for sass advice but it's really applied to me and any type of challenge I've had, big or small, business or personal, all you have to do is whatever it takes.
Omer (02:47.710)
So tell us about fomo.
What does the Product do, who's it for and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve with it?
Ryan Kulp (02:55.150)
FOMO is a social proof tool.
We started it, slash, acquired it.
Actually it was a Shopify app in 2014, 2015 called Notifying.
And what it does is it shows recent, or what it did at the time, it showed recent sales notifications.
So if you've ever gone to an online store and it says, you know, omer bought this pink sweater five minutes ago, extra small, then you kind of have probably seen either FOMO or one of our dear, dear friendly competitors.
Sarcasm.
And so we acquired that app in 2016 and then kind of rebuilt it, reimagined it and expanded it to beyond Shopify as well as beyond just sales.
So now, you know, live visitors, any, any type of social proof, any type of information that would be useful to your visitors to, you know, encourage them to convert or maybe to not convert.
We help you show off and it's sort of a no code solution to do that.
Omer (03:56.400)
So when I looked at FOMO first and I saw the idea of, I mean, I know you call it a social proof marketing platform, but this idea of letting people know what somebody has just bought, as you said, it's, you see that on a number of different websites.
What stood out to me was the part where you said, we help honest entrepreneurs show off customer interactions with one line of code.
And that was the thing.
The first thing I wanted to ask you, why honest?
And why is that relevant and important for you to, to put out there?
Ryan Kulp (04:29.730)
Well, I think there's a pattern.
It's not a 1.0 correlation, but there's sort of a pattern with honest entrepreneurs.
And let's say we all can agree on what that is.
It's like the neighborhood shop down the street struggling against Walmart and they try to have as good a price as they can, but they're never going to overcome the David Goliath scenario, right?
And now apply that to online.
There's these honest marketers everywhere, honest entrepreneurs.
And the pattern is that in some cases, the more honest someone is, the more they are focused on simply providing a good service product price, the less likely they are to think about, invest in, care about fancy copywriting, fancy JavaScript animations on the landing page, fancy opportunities like this, right?
Going on, going on shows and doing PR and promotions, they are more likely to just focus on the product.
And so then it creates this scenario where consumers are out there buying the products that are the shiniest and not the products that are the Best and kind of everybody loses.
Except those antithesis of the honest marketer.
Except those sort of conorists.
They get all the revenue, I get a crappy product.
The honest marketer, honest entrepreneur wonders what's going on.
Why is no one buying my excellent ham and cheese sandwich with the recipe passed down five generations?
So that's kind of what we meant by honest marketer.
And you know, we also meant that in a separate way, which is over the years of running fomo, we had a few situations where someone would reach out.
And some of these people you've, you've heard of, I've heard of, they're, they're sort of big in the quote unquote digital marketing space.
They reached out and they said, hey, can we sort of manipulate or hack your tool to do X, Y, Z?
So one example is like one of these huge guys that's been covered by Coffeezilla and he said, hey, I want to, you know, plug in FOMO to my pre recorded webinar.
And at like minutes, 37 seconds and at 5 minutes and 10 at all of these different sort of like a choreography.
This is how he envisioned it.
FOMO notifications would appear in his webinar live, you know, quote live, but really prerecorded webinar and show purchases.
And it's like, okay, this isn't a technology problem.
That's what you realize when you run a company like FOMO.
Yes, we could do that, right?
It's, it's JavaScript.
You could do anything you want, but no, we're not going to.
And the only way we're able to make that decision is looking at it through the lens of who are we trying to serve.
It's honest marketers, honest entrepreneurs.
And someone who wants to fake social proof is not one of them.
So therefore we made the decision to not work with that person.
Omer (07:11.010)
I guess the business was launched in 2016 and you recently sold it.
So congratulations on that.
Why don't you just tell us about.
Ryan Kulp (07:21.170)
Thank you.
Omer (07:21.890)
The exit, what happened there?
Who was it acquired by?
Ryan Kulp (07:24.610)
You know, we've been grinding on FOMO for about like you said, six years.
And every entrepreneur, I think inherent to why you got into this space to begin with and didn't just stick with a regular job and more security.
So you have some kind of ambition that isn't bridled or isn't like rewarded at your job.
And a lot of times when you convert that to entrepreneurship, it means increasing revenue or increasing profit or building a bigger team or with politicians.
Right?
Getting more Power, there's sort of something driving it.
And so at fomo, we had a mission and a vision from the very beginning.
Our mission to help consumers make better buying decisions online.
Our vision, what you just mentioned, to give honest entrepreneurs credibility they deserve.
And over the years we actually updated our mission a few times.
It was like literally help 1 million consumers make better buying decisions.
And then it was help 20 million.
I don't remember if I published these or just had them written down internally.
And it's like we kept raising the bar, resetting it.
It's like, okay, well now I realize we've helped, let's say a hundred million consumers make better buying decisions.
So doesn't that mean our mission is accomplished?
And that started probably around the four and a half year mark, five year mark.
And so we started launching new products and suites, but none of them performed as well as our core social proof tool.
And so that was kind of, it all came together and we thought, you know what, maybe we're not the right steward for this product.
We all love it, but we're not maybe the best people to take it to that next level.
Maybe we can find someone with a different type of, you know, not early stage startup experience, but that mid to late stage.
And so then we started this kind of client search.
Spent probably a year, little over a year, not full time, but part time, over a year looking for that right buyer and suitor.
We engaged a couple friends throughout the process who helped us sort of as brokers, liaising between leads and trying to keep our name somewhat confidential.
Right.
We never wanted to do the full blast like phonos for sale kind of thing.
And so that also extended that timeline.
But ultimately we found Relay Commerce who, who eventually acquired us very recently.
And what they're doing is really lined with what we were doing because they want to buy e commerce apps, they want to get into Shopify, they want to do a little bit of a roll up strategy.
And we've been, you know, just incredibly bullish on Shopify and E commerce platforms as a service since our founding.
So that was a really good fit for us.
And then to what I mentioned a moment ago, they actually also have a lot of that later stage, you know, startup growth experience.
So I think after you get past, like, hey, I made a company and it makes money and pays my bills, the next thing you want, for better or worse, is a little bit of that legacy.
You want the new people to take it to the next stage because you want to watch your kid grow up.
Right?
And so that's something I'm really thrilled to now sort of be a part of.
I'm literally watching things happen at FOMO that I wasn't a part of that decision and it's a weird feeling, but you know, a really gratifying one as well.
Omer (10:29.180)
So you're completely free of the business now, right?
What are you doing these days?
Ryan Kulp (10:33.340)
I'm doing well.
Omer (10:35.540)
Why don't you start by telling us about the rate the radio show that you're doing in about an hour.
Ryan Kulp (10:40.620)
Sure.
So in an hour.
So right now I'm actually in Korea.
My backdrop is I guess a couple of movie posters today, American movies, so you wouldn't know, but I'm in my film studio in Korea.
I've been living in Seoul for a couple years, basically learning the language, getting into Korean broadcast media, music, entertainment.
I've done tv, radios, commercials, voice acting.
Really whatever, like whatever shows up on Craigslist, I go do it.
And so in an hour I'm going to talk about the top 10 guitar solos of all time.
So it's a totally different vibe from when I was in tech, but it's been a fun experience.
Kind of taking a break from that for a while.
Cool.
Omer (11:20.550)
Give us a sense of the size of the business when you sold it or where was it in terms of revenue, customers.
Ryan Kulp (11:27.830)
So I'll be, I'll be vague in some places just because I'm not sure to what degree the new owner wants to disclose.
But it was, you know, over a million a year revenue, tens of thousands of active websites, you know, using the tool, we show billions and billions of notifications and you know, all through that one widget line of code.
Right.
So if someone wanted to see the exact numbers, they could probably go to cough built with.com cough and, and look this up there.
But that was some of the scale.
And then in terms of, you know, marketing and growth or product, we have over 100 native integrations and we have hundreds of reviews.
And I think as of a couple days ago when I last checked, we have like 165 full length case studies, like you know, 500, 800 word case studies where we interview clients.
And so that's been also really cool.
We probably publish three to five case studies every month for four years.
Right.
So dot all that up together and those are some of the sort of metrics that I'm most proud of.
Omer (12:33.200)
Great.
That's awesome.
Let's go back to 2016.
So you've acquired this little tool.
What point did you decide to launch this as fomo, like, what was the seed of the idea here?
Ryan Kulp (12:52.530)
First of all, I've found out about your show through Arvid's episode.
And then I was on this sort of mission and about page, and there's all these questions that everybody has before they start, as you've articulated, you know, how do I get, like, the first customer?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody want this?
When you buy a product, you don't have any of those problems because whatever it is that you bought already has customers.
And so some of that's been demonstrated.
But you do have a new problem, which is, how many customers could this thing get?
Right?
How much interest could I acquire?
When you start something over a weekend, if it gets like, 10 users who pay you 50 bucks a month or 50 users, that's sort of all free money, so long as you're not always fixing bugs.
But when you buy something with 50 users or a thousand users, you sort of have to double it or have to triple it to get a return for yourself or your investors or your time or whatever.
And so when we bought fomo, we bought Notify.
That was no different.
It's like, okay, we have the Shopify tool and has a few hundred customers.
This is awesome.
But we have to get thousands of customers for this to be worth it, for this to be worth quitting our jobs, for this to be worth living in San Francisco, where I was at the time.
And so the first thing I thought was, well, we can go deep or we can go wide.
Deep meaning we can get more Shopify stores.
Wide, meaning maybe we get Magento customers.
Maybe we go to BigCommerce or WooCommerce.
And we essentially did both over the last six years.
Sometimes we focused on just one or the other, but I think over the last two or three years, we sort of always did both simultaneously.
We were always shipping new integrations for new customer use cases.
And we were always trying to deepen relationships and partnerships with each integration to capture more share of market there.
So that was sort of the first thing we wanted to do.
And so I think in the first couple months of Notify, we expanded from Shopify to Big Commerce and Woocommerce.
And then that was our wide and going deep.
We started doing, you know, just the most rudimentary stuff, like cold email, where our cold email would offer, you know, 14 days beyond the publicly stated free trial.
And that was really how we got, you know, off the ground.
Omer (15:08.320)
Did I read somewhere that you.
You founded the business with.
With Justin Mears?
Ryan Kulp (15:12.600)
That's right.
So we were, we were co founders, 50, 50 for a while.
And then as, as some of his fans will know, he started a couple food brands that became very successful kind of later that same year, 2016, starting with kettle and Fire.
Now.
Omer (15:27.440)
He's making bone broth now, right?
Ryan Kulp (15:29.720)
Yeah, he's making bone broth, he's making protein bars.
I can't wait to get back to the States in a month or so and order all of that food again.
Um, but after probably six, eight months, we kind of realized, like, he's going to focus on food, I'm going to focus on code.
And so we tweaked our agreement a little bit.
Um, but that was cool.
We did get to all, you know, come back together, you know, just a few weeks ago when we had the, we did the exit to Relay.
Omer (15:55.920)
So.
So he was involved in the early stages and then he, he sort of had other priorities.
And then.
Was it really just you at the
Ryan Kulp (16:06.320)
time then as the sort of founder or, or, you know, quote unquote, C level suite?
It was just me.
It was me.
And I always said that FOMO was like, me and a few dudes.
I mean, until it wasn't.
Until we hired women, it was like a few dudes in a room.
That was kind of how we addressed ourselves.
And it was basically an engineering led organization.
So I was in charge of marketing, as founders usually are.
And the engineers, we tried to just figure out ways where they could write code that would help me and I could do campaigns that would give them gratification for whatever code they had just written, you know, and so that was kind of how we ran it.
I never actually addressed myself as CEO.
Anything you see online that says Ryan FOMO CEO is wrong.
Anytime I've ever done a show, anytime I've ever filled out a form for a conference, anytime I filled out taxes for fomo.
I never wanted to be CEO.
I think there's a big difference between leadership and management.
And I didn't really want to be a manager, so I never gave myself that title.
However, that said, the last two years we have had a CEO and it's been going better.
So take that.
Omer (17:15.810)
And it's a, it's a woman CEO as well.
Ryan Kulp (17:17.890)
Right.
Omer (17:18.210)
So it's not just the dudes there anymore.
Ryan Kulp (17:20.930)
No, no, no.
It stopped being a few dudes in a room in like 2018, 2017, I think.
Omer (17:26.720)
So let's, let's talk about how you've, you've grown.
So you've got this tool that you, you acquired and you've set out this goal that you want to start growing, you want to go wide, you want to go deep.
The cold email you mentioned that, like, who.
Who are you sending these emails to?
How did.
How did you figure out who to send it to?
Where were you getting.
How are you building the list?
Ryan Kulp (17:48.880)
So cold email was probably one of the first marketing channels I became proficient at.
You know, we all read books about marketing channels when we're 22 or 23 or whatever it is.
You get your first marketing job and you learn about ads and just turn up the budget and you get more clicks and you learn about SEO.
Just write a long blog post and you rank on Google and get a lot of views, and then you, you know, sort of get hit in the face with reality, which is that every business has its own prescriptive set of channels that work for it.
It's not that one channel is better than other channels inherently.
It's that one channel is better for this business.
And so at fomo, we, we wanted to try a lot of things.
We turn on ads, and guess what?
No one's searching social proof tool in 2016.
We start writing blog posts, and guess what?
No one's searching social proof tool in 2016.
We tried all these different things, but cold email was sort of something I felt could be good for us because we can articulate what we do in a sentence or two.
So suddenly now cold email looks reasonable, right?
We show off recent sales.
It increases conversions.
That's the email.
And so we wanted to build a list.
We wanted to build a few lists because, as I mentioned, we expanded from Shopify to Big Commerce and woocommerce.
So what we did.
And I'm actually not super proud of this part of the tactic, but I'm going to share it just.
And, you know, full disclosure, it was me and Justin, right?
And there were nobody else.
And me and Justin were actually both working full time at other companies.
So we would meet to do FOMO, like, once or twice a week.
We'd get Uber Eats, you know, and we'd work for two, three hours and go home.
So we had to be really efficient and really careful with our time.
So what we did was we created on the Notify app, Gmail domain, we created something like Wendy, which starts with a W, Betty, which starts with a B, and either Sarah or Sally at, which starts with an S. And we used those to partition each channel.
So Betty was BigCommerce, Wendy was WooCommerce, Sally was Shopify.
And we sort of let them compete, right?
Will Betty, Wendy or Sally do the best job with cold email?
And so Betty only emailed BigCommerce stores.
Hey, we want to try our BigCommerce app.
Here's a 30 day trial instead of a 14 day trial.
And then Wendy and Sarah did the same thing.
And I say I'm not proud of it because I've never since then ever made up like a false identity for a cold email.
Um, I do think, you know, women might be better at selling.
They might get higher reply rates.
There's a lot of data about this, but that doesn't mean I should have made up a fake woman.
But that's what we did at the time and it felt clever and it worked.
And then we built those lists using, I think built with.
Com.
And that's relatively easy whether you use a tool or do it yourself, because as you know, these platforms, big commerce WooCommerce, you can basically find public sitemaps where you get a list of all their customers.
You know, my store.myshopify.com, acme.myshopify.com and then you go to those stores, you scroll down to the footer and nine times out of 10, if they're using one of the default Shopify themes, which is like 60% of all Shopify stores, they're going to have a contact section with an email address unless they remove it.
So you can get a pretty high hit rate and build a list of hundreds or even thousands of entrepreneurs if you're targeting Shopify store owners or something similar, and then send them that quick message.
We did run into issues like, you know, your store email is not your personal email, right?
So someone makes supportystore.com good luck getting in touch with the owner of that store if they have a couple employees, right?
That's going to be connected to like a shipping and an inbox or like Zendesk or something.
And the owner's probably not in there.
So that also shapes your marketing.
You know, who are you going after?
We were not trying to cold email the world's biggest stores, you know, running Shopify.
Plus back in 2016, we were emailing mom and pop stores who, you know, would really experience a nice boost if even a few extra sales came in per month from a tool like fomo.
Omer (21:53.130)
And were you, were you manually building this list or were you scraping websites?
How are you doing that?
Ryan Kulp (22:01.320)
I wasn't good enough at the time at coding to scrape myself, but I believe we were.
I think we did one or two purchases of list with Built with.
Com, it was like 200 bucks at the time.
And I think you got like a whole month of service and you could download a few lists.
And then we also, I think we got some free credits because we basically emailed back and forth with the Buildswith.com founder.
I think it's a guy in Australia or New Zealand.
And we said like, hey, add our tool as a profile, we'll help you identify the JavaScript a bit.
So I think we got some like free API credits and we use that to then download just a raw CSV.
And then of course comes the sanitization.
So anyone who's done cold email knows you have to do massive, massive formulas and functions to deduplicate and fix like first names to hey there versus hey Omer or whatever and make things not all capital letters so it doesn't look insane hey Omer when you email them.
So that was sort of like one of my first forays into cold email at scale.
And we didn't do it forever, we did it for a few months.
But if you go from, if you have zero customers on a product and you send a thousand cold emails and a month later you have 25 customers, you kind of go, wow, like marketing works.
I can do this.
And I think that bit of self belief, that feedback loop is essentially what all of us are looking for in marketing.
You know, I throw something against the wall, it sticks.
What that really means is the feedback loop of self, self belief.
I can do this.
And then you try a new channel or you try something that's a little bit more, you know, sophisticated than two sentences called emails.
Omer (23:36.549)
Yeah.
So if this was working and you're, you're generating leads and customers, then why did you only do it for a few months and then move on to something else?
Ryan Kulp (23:48.530)
Well, like a lot of cold email campaigns, we eventually began landing in spam.
And we also decided at that time, summer 2016, that we wanted to rebrand from Notify to FOMO, which means new domain, new app, new everything.
And as you might know, spinning up a new Google suite, Gmail campaign domain and then putting a bunch of cold emails through it is not going to go well.
You'll either get shut down or throttled or whatever.
So sort of to save the reputation of our new domain.
The moment we started FOMO, which was summer of 2016, about five months after we bought Notify, we never sent a cold email again.
Omer (24:27.700)
Wow.
So what, what did you do next?
What was the.
Well, let's, let's talk about what were the Next few channels you tried until you figured out the next one that
Ryan Kulp (24:38.380)
was working well at this point, that customers, more customers were coming in.
We kind of hit that predictable revenue.
We're, you know, meaningful growth, up to double digit growth month over month.
We had some money, some resources to play with.
We were still Justin and I not taking any type of salary.
So every single dollar the business made was just, how can we invest this back in the business?
Our engineers at this time are sort of a fixed group of three or four people, so their salaries were, were locked in.
So every dollar above that was this flex spend.
And so one of the things we tried, of course, like I mentioned earlier, we tried ads.
We tried adjusting budgets there, but there was a very obvious ceiling, like a very, like, you know, I'm talking $20 a day.
Couldn't spend above that if, if we wanted to in ads.
So we started doing things like content.
Of course we wrote post ourselves.
I've been blogging personally for about 10 years now.
But we also hired a friend of mine named Nat, and he has an agency called your growth machine.
And they did a really awesome job writing tons of posts.
They shipped like two or three posts a week for maybe three or four months that we worked together.
And actually I meant to tweet this the other day to sort of give him a little ego stroke.
Some of Nat's team's posts are still in the top five and top ten most trafficked posts on the FOMO blog.
And the FOMO blog has like 300 blog posts.
So Nat's team knows what they're doing and that brought us some leads.
But you know, when you're writing posts, like, for example, one of our posts is five, you know, power words, business power words that you can include in presentations or emails.
Okay, so we have this list of like 200 power words in this post and each, each list has a description.
Those are great.
And they're businessy and they're from marketing.
It's right.
It's our right target audience.
But that conversion rate of like someone Googles power words, they land on our blog post, which is the authoritative guide to power words.
And then as they're scrolling, they see our navigation bar and they go, what's fomo?
And then they click and then they sign up and then they become a happy customer who tells their friends, that is a small, that is a small group of people, right?
That is a, that is a tough funnel.
And I think a lot of content marketing is really like that.
And people just aren't critically Asking themselves this question of like, is this our best use of resources?
When our funnel looks like, looks like this, you know, like people aren't watching me, but instead of a typical triangle, we're talking about like a, a crazy triangle.
Right.
So very pointy.
And so ultimately, I think actually Nat came to us, to his credit and said, we don't think this is working as well for you as it has for some of our other clients.
They were working a lot with e commerce brands where if someone Googles why is my poop brown?
And then they land on a keto brand that sells food that makes you not poop brown.
Okay, that's a really nice, like, relevant crossover.
But when someone lands on one of our blog posts and then tries fomo, a little bit of a tough sell, you know, kind of like have to like take a shot before that really makes sense.
And so that was just one of several channels we tried that.
Uh, in many ways we executed it really well.
Our blog's great.
It's been important to me.
Uh, they wrote great content and the content ranks and gets views.
So why didn't it work?
Well, it's just that, you know, finding out if content strategy works for you for social proof tool is maybe a little more niche than Google.
The Google gods were ready to handle at the time.
Omer (28:08.360)
Right, right.
And, and especially I think it's an awareness problem with, with a product like yours that there aren't, as you said, there aren't people searching for a product like that.
Maybe that's different today because there are so many tools that people are looking.
But you know, a few years ago people aren't looking.
So then you have to write content for sort of related keywords to attract the similar types of people.
But they're not going to be going from looking for some piece of content, answering a question to say, oh, I just discovered fomo, let me sign up for a trial and get going.
It's, it's just too much of a leap to make in such a short period of time.
Ryan Kulp (28:48.810)
It's a little different now.
So for example, now you're going to have, we have a lot more traffic for simply people typing in recent sales notification.
So even they are not kind of sort of calling us or our competitors by name.
They're not necessarily saying social proof tool.
Right.
That's just sort of a three liner, a three word line that we think describes us pretty well.
But people actually searching for recent sales notification or they'll literally search what they see in the notification.
So someone recently bought what Is this.
So there, you know, you have to get kind of creative and then that creates a new challenge.
Right?
Because now every one of our competitors will advertise for that.
And who's willing to pay the most per click?
And hey, maybe we're willing to pay the most per click, but if we're a SaaS tool and we charge like 19 bucks a month and someone else is for WordPress and they charge like a hundred bucks one time, well, you can make the argument that they actually have an advantage in the PPC aspect of marketing because their customer lifestyle value is like an instant 100 bucks upfront, whereas we have to retain that customer for five or six months to even hit that same, you know, that hit that same payoff.
So there's always new, new challenges coming about.
But yeah, at the time, that's why, you know, cold email, going to users like this, push and pull marketing, you always have to be cognizant of.
And I think maybe a lot of people start a company and on day one, they try to do pool marketing and then it doesn't work.
Right.
They go on product hunt, they go on hacker news, and then they get a hundred views and that's 80 upvotes.
And then they go, I guess nobody cares was like, well, on day one, you have to do push marketing and if you're lucky, on year six, you can do pull marketing and people will come find you.
Omer (30:29.300)
Yeah, and I guess it was.
You had the benefit that you'd already bought a product with some customers, so it was kind of already warming up and, and growing by the time you got to 2016.
And, and, you know, launched FOMO.
So you've tried SEO, PPC.
Did you, did you also, you tried newsletter ads as well, didn't you?
Ryan Kulp (30:54.020)
We tried newsletter ads.
That was, I don't want to say a disaster.
It was just another experiment that didn't, didn't make us any money, you know, and so if every experiment doesn't make money is a disaster, then this is like the worst company in the world.
But yeah, you know, newsletter ads was essentially like, I think our average CPC was 40 or 50 bucks.
Our CPA was like a couple hundred bucks.
You know, it just didn't make sense.
And, and you know, we can argue all day if I didn't find the right newsletters.
But we tried a bunch.
We tried several newsletters.
We tried advertising on websites.
We've always had a great designer or designers on the team.
So our banners and copywriting we've always been really proud of.
So I take all the responsibility on me or just on the channel that it wasn't the right fit for fomo.
But ultimately what really worked well for us was just building more integrations, which was super cool because our core competence from day one has been like awesome engineers who work really hard and are creative.
And so we went from Shopify only to Now, I think 104, 105 native integrations in six years.
So I don't know, ended up, sometimes we'd build three in a week and then we'd go a few weeks without one.
But engineering product led growth has been definitely our number one strategy over the, over the last six years.
Omer (32:10.560)
Anyone who's tried to build an integration, any developer who's listening to this knows that's not easy to do.
So when you say, you know, two or three a week, what kind of integration are we talking about?
Ryan Kulp (32:22.890)
Well, first of all, when we think about building integrations in the tech speak way, you know, let's say you have a user account in your app.
An integration sort of means like adding new attributes to that user so it can store your ConvertKit API key and your ConvertKit preferences.
And then of course you add an interface and then maybe you have a little microservice of code that actually does the ConvertKit thing.
Well, at FOMO we were no different.
We started and when we wanted to build a new E commerce platform or we wanted to integrate with Google Analytics or whatever, we were just always adding new attributes to like that same database table.
And it was getting really messy because then you need new API routes, like new mvc, new everything, new test suite, copy and paste all the HTML CSS to have that interface.
And so after we built maybe 10 or 20 of these integrations, our engineer Clemen looked at it all and was like, his head exploded, I guess, and he's like, there's gotta be a better way.
And very, very quickly in a few days he re architected it so that essentially again, geekspeak, we just went from like everything on one table to these like join tables where now, without ever running database migrations, writing a single line of HTML or css, and even a lot of the code and unit tests we never had to rewrite, we would just plug in a single file of Ruby code like map this to this, map this to first name, map this to what they bought, map this to the title, and boom, the integration was done.
So integrations went from being like 3,000 lines of code each to sometimes being 60 lines of code each with zero difference to that end users, you know, experience using our website.
I probably spent more time on some integrations finding a proper SVG of that integrations logo to put on our website than I did, you know, writing the integration code.
And that was how I was able to cut my teeth on engineering as well.
So I think being that marker who codes was what really kicked in here because engineers don't necessarily like doing repetitive, redundant, easy, low level work.
But as a marketer who's talking to customers all day, they someone says hey, I'd really love it if you integrated with X.
And I would just ignore their support ticket and I would go build X and then reply at 3am Hi John, I wanted to let you know that X is now done and getting that reply from them after you told them that, you know, you did this was like such a, like a sugar high, you know, it's like I wake up the next day and just do it all over again.
Like who can I blow away today?
Whose brain can I make explode today?
Because I'm finally in a position to as a marketer to give customers what they want without asking developers.
But ultimately that was thanks to the developers who sort of set up that architecture for us.
Omer (35:05.669)
What was your first successful integration that you did?
Ryan Kulp (35:09.029)
Maybe the first big success was WooCommerce because we were able to get connected to their core team Woo themes and they were able to put us on the WooCommerce Marketplace.
So there's the WordPress Plugin Marketplace and WordPress has like, you know, a million plugins.
So it doesn't mean anything to have a plugin on that marketplace.
You still have to drive all the traffic.
But the WooCommerce extensions marketplace at the time had like 40 plugins, right?
So like if you're on there, you're getting free traffic from them.
So we built that.
We had a person on the team who knew a little PHP.
So we built the WordPress plugin component that you could download and install on a WordPress theme.
We got really good at the WooCommerce API because it's actually quite messy, no offense, WooCommerce.
And we had a good relationship with that team.
We set up a revenue share.
That revenue share was sort of customized and not necessarily the same as what other WooCommerce apps were paying.
So that was sort of our first example going through the whole rodeo from scratch where it's like we do a cold email to biz dev outreach.
I think we actually just applied on the website, we negotiated, we built code custom for Their solution, they helped us co market it.
We got to see the users coming in with that WooCommerce connection like activated to true and doing that once or twice, then became sort of our playbook for how we try to do connections ever since.
And after that, you know, we've had other wins.
We've been on the homepage of the mailchimp partnership portal for months.
We've been on the homepage like the square, you know, the square up credit card reader for months.
Infusionsoft features.
We've had a lot of kind of like similar repeats of that success once you know what's possible and what did
Omer (36:51.320)
you have to do on your end?
So you were getting listed in like the WooCommerce Marketplace and you're doing some cross promotion, which I want to talk about in a minute.
But what, what was in it for them?
What, what were you having to, to deliver into in sort of value to the integration partner?
Ryan Kulp (37:10.130)
I think to some degree, if you are.
I mean WooCommerce is sort of huge.
WordPress is huge in its own right as sort of being one of the pioneers of why everyone in the world now gets to have a website without code.
And that's amazing.
But in the E commerce, through the E commerce lens specifically, which is where FOMO plays, you know, I think a lot of the platforms out there are just figuring out how can we keep parity with Shopify, right?
Because people are probably emailing them every day, hey, I'd love to use you, but Shopify has this one killer app I want.
And so some of those platforms have marketers that are going out and looking for people like FOMO and saying, hey, have you ever considered building on our platform?
And sometimes they offer incentives like we won't do a revenue share for the first six months, or we'll give you this bonus or we'll feature you as a featured app for a month, you know, to help you get those first batch of users.
Um, and so we always were on the lookout for those kinds of opportunities.
And so with WooCommerce, I think it was this kind of very similar case.
It's like how can we offer arguably at the time a larger group of users, right?
There's like hundreds of millions of websites with, with WordPress and at the time there were not even 1 million Shopify merchants.
So arguably WooCommerce was, could have been a bigger opportunity.
And if you go on online or on the, on the WordPress forums, I think the WordPress community is a little more outspoken as well in the things that they're looking for.
I think there's a lot more developers in the WordPress community who use WordPress than there are in the Shopify community.
Using Shopify, like Shopify or Shopify, store owners don't code, but a lot of WordPress site owners built their own site from scratch.
And so that opened our eyes as well to opportunities beyond Shopify.
And it's funny because even today Shopify is like half of FOMO revenue.
So you do always have to go back and look at the numbers and say, okay, this is what's exciting, this is what looks cool.
This is a shiny object.
But where are we really getting our growth from?
And for us, Shopify has still been, you know, half a FOMO's revenue from day one.
But we build integrations because at least, you know, there could be that long term karmic payoff, right?
We build an integration and eight months later we'll get a rush of even 20 or 30, 50 customers.
Well, that more than enough paid for that engineering time six months prior, you know, into the future.
Omer (39:27.930)
And these 100 plus integrations that you've built, have they been the main driver of, of revenue for the business?
Ryan Kulp (39:35.290)
Definitely.
And we actually have a sort of, I don't know if I've talked about this before.
We have a little bit of a strategy for how we choose what to build.
If you go to fomo.com integrations, there's a search bar and if you type in whatever, it will automatically sort all of the sort of panels on that page and show you what you're looking for.
If you type in WordPress, it will show you everything connected with WordPress.
But what isn't obvious from that page is that we actually use the Google Analytics events feature.
And every time you type in a query on key down or on key up, we actually send that to Google Analytics.
So we know that someone searched for WordPress, we know that someone searched for ABC.
And so what I would do is I would, in my custom Word Google Analytics view, I would look in the analytics and see, oh, what are people searching for and getting no results for?
I think what happened was we would send up the query as a Google Analytics event when the results count equals zero, like in the JavaScript.
And so we started seeing very early on that people were typing the Word Word and getting no results.
So they were typing Word and hitting like space and the results.
So we're like, wait a second, Word.
They're not talking about Microsoft Word, they must be talking about WordPress.
And then you see people type in ECW and that's the query like ECW.
You Google it.
Ecwid.
It's like a e commerce platform.
Okay, let's build Ecwid.
So this became this like almost crystal ball.
I don't want to overstate its importance, but this was definitely a driving source for several integrations we built where no one emailed us saying, ryan, can you build ecwid?
But we saw in our own website search query traffic that people were looking for ecwid.
And then by the way, we also got to see how many people, right?
So Google Analytics, if whatever the event label is, it will sum them together for you in the Google Analytics view.
So if 30 people, psyched word, it would say word 30 and give you this like leaderboard of what people want ranked by demand.
So we used that to make several integration build decisions.
And I think that kind of kept us on this bleeding edge of like when someone's determining to use FOMO or product like fomo, we wanted them to come to our site and go, wait a second, these guys are always shipping, they're always building new stuff and they happen to have all the random apps I need.
And we tried to communicate that through like a change log.
So I think it's still live today.
New.foma.com we have been populating that on a weekly basis with new updates, bug fixes, whatever, probably for six years.
I think it has hundreds of improvements on our line, the changelog.
And that's just something that I think is really exciting to customers, especially customers of startups, is they don't necessarily need to have the best product right away.
And Paul Graham talks about this.
What they want to see is that you're always shipping a better product.
And that's definitely what we've tried to do.
Omer (42:27.180)
I think there are so many great lessons in what you've shared about your experience with integrations.
Number one, like how you were able to make this work.
But as we talked about with the SEO example, just because it works for some companies doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody.
Like it didn't work for you.
And so I think when I look at the integrations, what I'm hearing is that, number one, are there integration partners out there who are motivated and you had those, can we implement an integration relatively quickly and do that at some sort of scale?
And then what are the opportunities there for cross promotion?
And I think having gone through that experience and tested that, you figured out that I was going to work for you.
And the reason I'm saying that is because it sounds great and I can go, wow, this is great.
I'm going to go and do a bunch of integrations, right?
But there are probably a few fundamental questions you want to ask before you go and go all in on that.
Like we talked about with SEO, are people searching for your product or the problem that you solve?
So let's talk about cross promotion.
Like, you had these integrations in place.
What kind of cross promotions were you getting?
Was this something that generally you were finding the integration partners were motivated to do?
Did you have to put some effort into convincing them to do something?
How did that work?
Ryan Kulp (43:53.170)
So I will say in this regard, the other side of that coin of integrations, the fun side, what we just discussed is like, go to the API docs, build the thing, ship it and see what happens.
The not as fun side or not as predictable side because you're not in full control, is figuring out by, I don't know, scanning LinkedIn, like, who do I tell at this company that we just built this integration?
How do I become like those other integrations that are listed on their partner page, like, how do I do that?
And that process, of course, is different for every single integration.
They might all have the same general structure.
It's managed by the marketing team.
They discuss internally at a weekly or bi weekly meeting.
You need to be nice to them.
And when they say yes, you need to be prepared to have all the copywriting and logos fit to their dimensions.
So those are like the basics.
But what we found in terms of doing those cross promotions is we very much so took a permissionless approach whenever possible.
So one thing we learned at FOMO or because of all the integration that we built at FOMO, is that a lot of companies have APIs that no one uses.
They built the API because they use it.
They either use it because they have a single page app.
So it's literally what you're hitting when you're logged in as a consumer.
Or they built it because they have, you know, a visionary CTO who said, one day we'll need this, like version one namespace API.
And so what we found was actually that sometimes we were maybe one of the very first companies to use somebody's API.
And when we reach out, you know, you're, you're sitting in your office at XYZ company and then you get an email from FOMO that says, hey, we just built this full fledged integration with you.
Here are the docs.
And the docs have like screenshots and by the way, we put this logo on our page.
Is that okay?
Or do you want to update it with the new, you know, P and G logo?
They click that.
It's like they're opening a Christmas present, right?
Like, they're like, wait a second.
This API we built a year ago is finally being used.
And these people didn't ask us any questions.
They didn't have any bugs.
It seems to be working.
So if you do it just right, that company is going to be so stoked to share your integration with their customers, because it's a flex for them.
And that's what people maybe don't realize.
When you start thinking about building integrations, you were doing them a favor.
When you build an integration, they get to put in their next newsletter, which they're inevitably sending within the next 30 days.
Everybody sends a newsletter once a month or more often.
They get to put our friends at FOMO build this integration.
Check it out.
Oh, and here's an extra 30 days free.
So we had several successes like that where it was sort of just like, you gotta rip the band aid off.
This is not difficult.
Reach out to them.
It's gonna be another, like, marketing, bro, like you or I, and they're gonna think this is cool and they're gonna share.
But when you start moving up the ladder to the bigger companies, you know, those are the groups getting connected with every day.
Omer (46:44.250)
Those are.
Ryan Kulp (46:44.600)
Those are the groups that have developer engineers just running support for people to ask those dumb questions.
You know, I'm getting this bug.
And when you connect with those groups, you have to be a little bit more strategic when you reach out.
But even in those cases, what we would try to do is we would try to get a customer first.
So we built, for example, some, like, dentist appointment scheduling app.
I think it's a startup based in Australia.
We had a customer reach out at FOMO and say, I want this.
And that was one of those days where I just, you know what?
Forget it.
I just built the whole thing.
Matches them back.
Congrats, Dennis.
You know, connect here.
And after they connected and they were happy, then I reached out to the marketing team at that company and said, hey, one of our mutual customers is enjoying this integration we built.
Would you want to do something like a mutual case study?
And when that happens, that's really neat because every company wants case studies.
So maybe they're a bigger company and they have a lot of integrations, but case studies are always going to be similar to reviews.
There's this power law of, like, if you have a hundred customers, you have three reviews, right?
If you have a thousand installs, you have like 27 reviews.
It's really hard to get reviews.
Some people are really good at doing everything, engineering, scaling, doing marketing, but they still don't know how to get reviews.
And so now instead of trying to pitch them a flex that someone's using their product, which was the first use case, now we're pitching them a way to show that they are awesome because they have a great product.
So now that mutual case study is sort of a Trojan horse for us because when they publish this case study, that will write for them.
And this is another aspect.
So there are cases where we integrate with product A, we write a mutual customer case study and we give them the text to copy paste onto their own blog.
Like, we don't need the authorship, we don't care about the byline.
We just want your blog, your website, linking to our website with some positive words connected to it.
So that's another kind of strategy.
And then the third strategy would be the first one I mentioned, the whole BD cycle, get in touch, smooth talk, go to conferences, shake hands, sign contracts, negotiate.
And that's a pain.
But if it's with the right size company, with the right audience, it could be worth it.
But I would say for people getting started, go with those first two.
Just use their API.
Don't ask them dumb questions over their support, don't give the bad taste in their mouth before they, before you've added any value.
Reach out to them with all this great documentation, they'll be blown away and share it or do a mutual customer case study.
Omer (49:14.360)
I think it's interesting that you said that a lot of these companies have APIs that aren't being used.
I have a personal story with that and I'm not going to name the company, but this is a company that has over like 100,000 customers at least, and they have an API.
And I started to use the API for, for my podcast.
It was just a personal thing.
I wanted to automate the production and using the API made my life easier.
So I started using it.
And then one day, the workflow I set up was failing and I spent days trying to figure out what was going on.
And I was like, I've done something stupid, da, da, da, whatever.
And then eventually when I'd kind of exhausted everything, I reached out to, to my contact to this company.
I said, hey, you know, has anything changed on your API lately?
Because this is happening and I've checked everything and I Kind of out of ideas here.
And he was like, oh, yeah, we.
We kind of made some changes a few days ago and.
And thanks for letting us know you fix it.
I was like, am I the only one using this thing with all of these customers that you have?
Nobody else kind of told you about it, so, like, it's really surprising.
But, yeah, maybe kind of underscores your point.
Ryan Kulp (50:23.920)
It could happen.
Well, again, it's like there are companies that are huge, but not a single one of their customers is a developer.
You know what I mean?
So they'll have an API because one nerd on their team thinks it's cool.
It doesn't mean anybody else cares.
Omer (50:37.200)
All right, we should wrap up.
Let's get on to the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
So you ready?
Ryan Kulp (50:44.480)
Let's do it.
Omer (50:45.160)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Ryan Kulp (50:48.290)
Sales cures all.
Omer (50:50.290)
What book would you recommend to our audience?
And why?
Ryan Kulp (50:53.330)
The Innovator's Dilemma.
Because it will help you take out larger companies than you.
Omer (51:00.210)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Ryan Kulp (51:04.770)
They keep going until it works.
Omer (51:06.930)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ryan Kulp (51:10.530)
Ice Americano.
Omer (51:13.570)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Ryan Kulp (51:16.690)
An API as a service so I don't have to build a front end.
Omer (51:20.610)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Ryan Kulp (51:24.450)
I've been learning to speak Korean for absolutely no reason.
Omer (51:27.570)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ryan Kulp (51:31.090)
Music.
I'm a. I'm a singer and a musician.
Always have been and hopefully always will be.
Omer (51:36.530)
Awesome.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for.
Thank you joining me.
If people want to learn more about FOMO, they can go to FOMO.com where else do you hang out online or where people can find out more about you if they want to?
Ryan Kulp (51:51.770)
I like to tweet, specifically troll Ryan Culp on Twitter or my personal blog, where it's a little more serious and hopefully helpful.
Ryan culp.com awesome.
Omer (52:02.570)
Thank you, Ryan.
It's been a pleasure.
Wish you the best of success with whatever you do next and enjoy the radio show.
Ryan Kulp (52:11.620)
Thank you, Omer.
Appreciate it.
Omer (52:13.780)
Cheers.
