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.
This week's episode is a story about two guys who bootstrapped a SaaS business.
In less than three years, they went from zero to 5,000 paying customers and over a million dollars in annual recurring revenue.
But it wasn't as easy as it might sound.
Before they achieved this success, they had six or seven attempts at trying to build other businesses which either failed or or just didn't get the traction that they'd hoped for.
In this interview, you learn about the specific strategies the founders used to get 5,000 customers.
We deep dive into specific tactics from content marketing, email outreach, product integrations, and more.
The episode is jam packed with actionable nuggets that I'm sure will be incredibly valuable to a lot of you.
My guest is a great guy and he doesn't hold anything back, so I hope you enjoy it.
Today's guest is the co founder of Gleam, a growth platform that helps businesses to drive more engagement with customers.
Gleam provides a suite of marketing apps focused on giveaways, rewards and user feedback.
My guest's background is in search engine marketing.
He's originally from the UK and moved to Melbourne, Australia in 2005.
Gleam was founded eight years later in 2013 and currently has over 400,000 users and 5,000 customers, including companies such as HubSpot and Shopify.
So today I'd like to welcome Stuart McKeown.
Stuart, welcome to the show.
Stuart McKeown (02:09.030)
Hey, thanks very much for having me, Omer.
Omer (02:11.190)
So let's kind of start by one of the things I always like to ask my guests is like what gets them out of bed?
What motivates them?
Do you have a favorite quote or in your own words?
Can you just tell us what drives you to work on your business every day?
Stuart McKeown (02:26.470)
That's a pretty interesting one to start out with.
You would be familiar with Carphone Warehouse in the uk?
Omer (02:31.830)
I am, yeah.
Stuart McKeown (02:33.830)
I used to work there when I was a student and they used to teach this philosophy that when you're dealing with customers that you should always under promise but over deliver.
You shouldn't try and promise something that you don't think you can deliver, but you should always try and over deliver on that promise.
I think that's something that's always stuck with me all these years where you want to try and you don't want to try and Especially when you're releasing a product or you're speaking with customer, you're doing support or something, you want to go above and beyond what they expect from you.
We had an example yesterday where we had a customer who they were doing a Pinterest hashtag campaign and there was a bug on our end that was stopping hashtags that had capital letters in it from being pulled through.
So we had the bug fixed in about 15 minutes from their support email.
But we went above and beyond.
We actually wrote a script to go back in time and pull all the people that it had been affected by and pull all their entries into the campaign, which they weren't expecting.
So I think that's kind of something that's really stuck with me over the years.
Omer (03:43.240)
Let's start by giving folks a little bit of a better understanding about gleam.
I sort of gave a kind of a quick overview about that.
It's a suite of marketing apps and what they kind of help with.
But in your own words, can you help the audience just to understand GLEAM better?
Stuart McKeown (03:58.840)
Yeah.
So I mean, there's a lot of tools, platforms out there that we use to manage our business.
You know, platforms in sort of this social listening space, you know, where you can listen to what your customers are doing.
You know, there's analytics space, we've got, you know, tools like Google Analytics where you can, you know, see what customers are doing.
But the, you know, the space for actually tools to grow your business is really fragmented.
You know, it's like if you're a Shopify store, you've got all these different apps that you can install.
You know, if you're a Magento business, you've got all these apps that you can install, you've got all these software as a service solutions.
The things that we wanted to do is we want to try and consolidate a lot of the activities that people use to grow their business into one platform and build it out from there.
So you could say we're a suite of tools to help you grow your business.
We want to try and reduce that dependency of installing all these multiple apps, managing all this stuff all over the place and bring it, bring it into one platform.
Omer (04:57.190)
How did you come up with the idea for this business?
Where did it come from?
Stuart McKeown (05:00.150)
My co founder and I, we've been working together for over eight years now and we had a lot of content focused businesses back in the day.
And I'm not sure if you ever remember of the Tula platform called Wildfire.
It was acquired by Google, I think for quite a Significant sub.
So we used to run sweepstakes competitions around, like, particular events, you know, so when a new iPad was released or when a new iPhone was released or, you know, so we had an e commerce focused content site.
So during Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday sales, Christmas, we'd always run competitions to try and engage our users and also reach new users.
And we used Wildfire and I think to run a typical campaign there, they charged you based on the length that the campaign would run.
So a campaign for like 30 days would cost three or $400.
And the platform wasn't that sophisticated at the time.
Like, it didn't have integrations into email providers.
It was very focused around sort of Facebook likes and that sort of thing.
And we always thought that we could do better.
So we just decided to build, you know, we did like a hackathon.
So back then we were still working, you know, still had jobs.
We would do a lot of hackathons in the.
In the weekends, you know, so I'd go over to John's house or he'd come over to my house and we'd just, you know, work on a feature or work on fixing bugs or whatever it might be.
And just one weekend we said, look, you know, why don't we.
Why don't we build an app and, you know, to run our competitions and, you know, we can use it ourselves.
So we spent a weekend like hacking this thing together.
I think in the, in the beginning we supported, I think like Twitter, Facebook, I think SoundCloud.
I don't know why we chose SoundCloud because, you know, I have a music background.
So I think we just did SoundCloud and we ran a.
We ran a campaign.
The campaign we ran was like 10 times more popular than anything we've ever run on the platforms that we paid for.
And all of a sudden we had all these people saying, hey, what is this?
Can we use this?
Can we try it?
We kind of thought, all right, maybe we've got an idea here that could be quite popular.
So we kind of said to ourselves, all right, look, we're going to spend three months working on this thing.
We're going to try and get as many people using it as we can.
And if we can hit, you know, if we can get 100 people using it, we'll launch it to the public and we'll start asking people to pay for it.
So I think we started building it in May of 2013.
We ended up launching it in October of 2013.
And on launch day, I think we had 10 paying customers ready to pay straight away.
And it just sort of took, it just sort of took off from there.
So that's kind of the rough timeline as to how we built it, why we built it.
Omer (08:03.890)
Now, one of the most interesting things about what you and your co founder John have done is just the trajectory of how you've grown this, this bootstrapped business.
So from what I understand, you launched within four months of launch, you had your first 100 customers, in 18 months you had 2,000 customers and a year later you had 5,000 customers.
And from what I understand, currently you're a seven figure business, right?
Stuart McKeown (08:38.450)
Yeah, that's correct.
Omer (08:39.570)
So that's a phenomenal story of what you guys have just kind of done in such a short amount of time.
But I kind of want to go back to probably like seven or eight years before you and John launched Gleam.
And I want to talk about the kind of, the journey the two of you went through to be able to get to 2013 and launching this product.
Because, you know, we people can listen to this and say, wow, you know, guys have gone from 2013, late 2013 launch to 2016.
They're a million dollar, they're a multi million dollar business.
Sounds, sounds too good, right?
But from, from talking to you, I know that a lot happened before you launched this business.
So kind of share, share a little bit of that with us and tell us the story of how you and John met and then, and sort of some of the not so successful business attempts you had before you were able to launch Gleam.
Stuart McKeown (09:52.110)
Yeah, so, you know, when I first came to Australia, I was very fortunate to get a job at a startup here called hitwise.
So hitwise was like an online competitive intelligence tool.
They monitored data ISPs and you were able to subscribe and see, you know, what traffic keywords your competitors were paying for getting traffic for.
So I was very fortunate to be part of that business.
When I got here, they actually sold to a UK company called Experian for 250 million.
So I think it's one of the biggest outside Atlassian.
I think it's one of the, you know, biggest sort of tech acquisition stories in Australia.
I don't think I've seen too many businesses sell for more than that.
So that was my first sort of experience with a startup and startup culture.
That business was very sales, you know, very sales focused, you know, so I learned a lot about marketing, sales, you know, people.
So I ended up working for Experian for close to six and a half years, I think but you know, I'm a very curious person.
You know, I was never very good at university.
I did my degree, but you know, I wasn't very, I wasn't academically smart.
You know, I seem to sit in that sort of, you know, range of people who learn from doing things practically and you know, doing things academically like reading books or, you know, you know, studying was never my thing, you know, never really caught my interest.
So I, you know, I did a lot of my own sort of affiliate websites, things on the side where I just kind of learn.
All right, you know, how can I make this website rank?
How can I try and sell these products?
And I did some stuff, stuff in the, like the coupon space, you know, so similar to what the guys are retailmenot were doing, you know, where you were building like targeted landing pages, trying to rank them for, you know, coupon related terms.
If somebody was searching for a coupon for Victoria's Secret or one of the stores.
The idea was that you get those people on the page, you present them coupons that work, they click it, you get an affiliate commission.
So I'd always wanted to try and take that to the next level and actually build an automated version of what I was doing manually, you know, so I was manually creating all these pages in WordPress, updating all the coupons manually, and I could only manage like maybe 100 merchants.
I couldn't physically do a lot, so I just kind of picked the ones that were working for me.
Omer (12:36.000)
How are you getting the coupons?
Like when you sign up as an affiliate, did they just send you this information or were you kind of looking every day to see what the latest coupons were out there or something?
Stuart McKeown (12:47.200)
Yes, I mean that landscape has changed a lot even since we started working it.
So you know, back then you would have your affiliate networks, you know, commission junction, link share, whatever it might be.
You sign up, you get approved by merchant.
And a lot of merchants would give coupons via the affiliate program.
And depending on what their terms and conditions allow, you know, some of them allow you to go and grab the coupons from their newsletters.
Some of them would generate unique coupons for high performing affiliates.
There was a whole range of ways that you could get, you could get the codes.
So, you know, at that time I was using a combination of the codes from the affiliate networks and then codes that I had found elsewhere that I had checked that were working, that I was allowed to use.
And you know, I kind of put together this brief in my own mind.
Like I was Like, I really want to try and take this to next level.
I'd love to build, like, some sort of automated system that can pull these coupon codes in, automatically, update them, verify them, check them, a whole bunch of other stuff.
So I put together this brief, and I was like, right, I need to find a developer.
And this, you know, finding a developer is probably one of the hardest parts of the entire journey.
You know, it's like.
It's like dating.
It's like trying to find your wife.
It's probably hard.
It's actually harder to try to find a wife because, you know, when.
When you put together a brief and you go to these people, you know, I hit up.
So I went to all the Ruby on Rails meetups in Melbourne.
I hit up all these guys.
I was just getting rejected.
Rejected.
You know, they were like, no way.
You know, there's no way I'm gonna do this.
You're gonna have to pay me.
You know, nobody wants to work on this stuff for free.
Like, you know, you're getting all sorts of rejection.
And until one day, you know, I came across John.
You know, I showed him an idea, and he was like, yeah, I got nothing better to do.
So he kind of said yes.
And, you know, we met up and I showed him the idea, and he's like, yeah, you know, so he was married.
I wasn't married yet.
His wife was pregnant, so they were very close to having their first child.
So in the beginning, we just, you know, I went over to his house on the weekends.
He would work, you know, in the morning before going to work in the evening.
When he got home, we'd do some work on the weekends.
So we were working, like, you know, 14, 15, 16 hours a day.
We built a prototype in two months, and we launched it in December.
I'm not sure what year that would have been.
Maybe 2008.
And the site went crazy.
We went from zero to sort of $10,000 a month recurring revenue inside, like, 30 days.
It was going great.
The problem with those sorts of sites is that there's a lot of maintenance.
So checking coupons, adding stores, expanding your inventory is quite tough.
So we used upwork, which was called Odesk.
Then we hired a bunch of cheap labor in the Philippines that were really happy to do the work.
Really nice girls that would go in, verify all the coupons.
We assigned them, you know, like a thousand stores each that they would manage.
They'd update all the content, and, you know, things are going well.
We were happy.
You know, we kind of had the Conversation.
All right, you know, do we.
Do we quit our jobs and do this full time?
And then Google Panda came along and, like, wiped out pretty much 90% of our traffic overnight.
You know, that.
That's a really.
That's a really tough place to be in because you're like, all right, things are going well.
We could build a business out of this.
All of a sudden, something changes, you get wiped out overnight.
And the problem with algorithmic changes when it comes to Google is that you don't know where you stand.
And we really made a mistake where we tried to.
We actually tried to fight the algorithms.
So we wrote more content, we added all these extra features that would make all the pages look very unique, and nothing worked.
We spent like a year trying to recover the site when we actually should have probably just moved on to something else.
Omer (17:03.180)
What did that do to your revenue when Panda came out?
So how much revenue were you doing the day before and then what did it do, like, the day after?
Stuart McKeown (17:15.900)
Yeah, so we sort of maxed out about $50,000 a month revenue.
And then when Panda came along, you know, we're down to, like.
We did a lot of SEM as well.
So SEM was quite profitable, you know, so we were able to kind of keep the wheels of the business and still generate revenue by SEM, but the majority of the sort of free traffic was gone, you know, so you're gone from like 50k a month down to, you know, between 5 to 10k a month profit, which is, yeah, it's a, it's a big hit.
But I think more so than the money was the fact that.
All right, you know, back to square one.
Like, we can't quit our jobs now.
You know, we're going to have to grind again and find something else to do and that, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of people might give up at that point.
We kind of said, all right, so the good thing about that business is we generated.
We didn't spend any of the money.
You know, we didn't pay ourselves anything.
We just put it all in the bank, you know, so we had like six figures in the bank just from that, that business.
And we thought, right, okay, back to square one.
Let's.
Let's try something else.
So we did a Pinterest website before Pinterest was cool.
And then realized that you can't really make any money from, you know, people bookmarking images.
We did a, A, like a managed service coupon site for businesses, which is probably before its time.
You know, if we built that into Gleam.
Now, it probably worked quite well, but the idea behind that business is that, you know, we got more and more jaded about the sort of the coupon space as time went on to the fact to the point where we're actually like, you know what?
You know, the coupon sites in a way are actually stealing from merchants.
Because if I'm a person and I'm on your website and you sell products and then I come to the shopping cart and I see that coupon code field, and then I go to Google and I search for your website coupons, a coupon site hasn't really done anything to earn that money other than be in a top position for that coupon code search.
The idea behind the affiliate or the coupon management was that we could try and help merchants manage the coupon codes themselves on their own site.
You know, so they have like a mini site on the sub domain that would rank well for their coupon code searches, but it would also maybe help auto complete coupons in the shopping cart for customers or show them what their choices were so they didn't have to go to this third party, get the codes, come back, and you'd have to pay them a commission.
So that didn't work out because we couldn't get enough people using it.
It was too much of a change in the way things were done.
Then we launched a website for comparing web hosting and we put a unique twist on this.
So instead of just comparing web hosts, we actually wrote a script that benchmarked your server.
So you'd run the script and it would show you how fast the server was, how fast the disk speed was, how fast the network was from different locations.
And then you'd be able to benchmark it against other people that were using different web hosts.
So you'd be able to put hostgator in there, benchmark the server, and then compare it against DigitalOcean and see, wow, if I go and sign up for DigitalOcean, actually the performance is like 10 times better for the same price.
And that got reasonable traction.
That was making good revenue.
The problem is the affiliate space for web hosting is pretty shady and it's got really high chargeback rates and really high cancellation rates.
So it makes it really hard to be a sort of viable business model.
And that was the website that we were doing the competitions for.
And that's where we started building Gleam.
We'd also made the sort of conscious decision, you know, you'll notice a pattern with a lot of our sites in that we were reliant on other people for generating the revenue.
Nobody was ever paying us directly.
We kind of said, look, we're kind of over this idea of being reliant on someone else for money.
Let's build something where people can pass directly and we're sort of in charge of our own destiny.
Omer (21:18.240)
Okay, so you went through like six or seven.
I don't want to use failed attempts because at least a couple of those businesses sounded like they were doing reasonably well for just, you know, bringing in a nice chunk of change for you and John.
And maybe if it wasn't for the Panda update, maybe that first business could still have been growing.
But yeah, I mean, you guys definitely tried a bunch of different areas before you got to launching Gleam.
Stuart McKeown (21:52.650)
That's right.
And the market was different back then.
There's a lot of software as a service businesses now.
There wasn't so many then.
You know, people, you know, like the whole subscription box these days.
You know, someone wants to be an entrepreneur and they're like, oh, I'll launch a subscription box company or I'll launch.
You know, you've got Create Joy and you've got all these businesses that kind of automate you the log sheet of your business.
You know, back back then, even that, not that many years ago, there wasn't as much of that around.
And I definitely think it's becoming a lot easier to realize your ideas.
I saw this really interesting post on Reddit.
I read the Reddit Entrepreneur section quite quite frequently.
This guy had a Shopify store.
He was just like a solo guy.
He was selling sunglasses and he wrote a post where he had all of the apps that he uses to run the Shopify store.
And he had like 120 apps that he was paying for.
That's 120 things that he didn't have to build himself and he could just leverage and use straight away.
It's phenomenal the amount of help that you can get for various parts of your business these days.
And that was a segment that we wanted to slip into.
We wanted to try and be an app where if someone wants to run a giveaway, they don't think about using anyone else.
They'll come straight to us.
Omer (23:14.720)
Okay, so you finally get to launching Gleam, and I want to dig into specifically what you did to go from zero to 5,000 customers and a seven figure business.
Like, what were the growth strategies that worked for you guys?
And I think there are three specific things that, that we're going to cover.
But before we do that, I know that you Guys made one big mistake when it came to kind of targeting the right market for gleam.
And maybe that's one area that you sort of look at and wish you had done differently.
So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Stuart McKeown (23:57.660)
Yeah.
So when we first launched, we thought that our target market would be bloggers.
At the time, I think you had Punch Tab and a few others that were in that space and it was mostly bloggers that were using these sort of widget based competitions.
A lot of businesses were running sort of Facebook tab related campaigns.
And we kind of made a decision, I think because we had been burned by Google in the past and by other people in the past.
We kind of want to say, right, we want to integrate with Facebook, we want to integrate with Instagram, we want to make everything seamless, but at the same time we want to make it so that if Facebook changes something and they kill competitions tomorrow, that it's not going to kill our product.
We can just remove them as a partner or do something different and it's not going to change the way we do things.
So we decided to make our product modular in that way and that did happen.
So Facebook did make a lot of changes, Instagram have made a lot of changes.
And it's about, I think, how you adapt to those.
So I think in the beginning a lot of bloggers were using these campaigns and what would happen is that a brand who has a product would form a relationship with a blogger to give away their product to their audience.
You know, so let's say that you're, you know, let's just say for arguably sake, your Amazon, you're launching the Kindle, you reach out to like 10 bloggers and you say, hey, we're going to give you this Kindle for free.
We're going to let you give it away to your audience and you can, we're not going to pay you any money for the engagement or the work.
We're just going to let you have the product.
And they would then try and find a use a tool to give the product away.
So we spent a lot of time and effort contacting those bloggers in the beginning, you know, having conversations with them, setting up their campaigns for them, you know, migrating them off other tools onto our tool.
And then like, we very quickly realized that these people, these people don't want to pay any money.
These people want to like use these tools for free because they're not actually generating any revenue from the relationship, from the brand that's giving the product away.
And I guess that's another story.
There is a lot of merit in monetizing that relationship, which we don't do currently, but I mean, that's a story for another time.
So we very quickly realized that, hey, this is a mass market and this may be a good way to get our product out there, which it was.
It's not going to be a market that helps us make money.
So we need to rethink, we need to rethink this.
Omer (26:31.360)
How long were you kind of down the road after launch before you guys realized that?
Stuart McKeown (26:36.530)
Probably four months.
You know, so we had, we, we had over 100 customers at that point.
But we, we realized quickly that, you know, we need to, I guess pivot our message rather than, you know, we, because we don't want to become the competition platform for bloggers.
That's, that wasn't what we wanted.
So we, we brainstorm ideas and we, we said, well, you know, what are we trying to do here?
You know, we're trying to build a platform to help businesses grow their business.
And so overnight we changed all of our messaging to focus on growing your business.
And that allowed us to do a number of things.
So number one, it wasn't generalized.
So everybody wants to grow their business.
Whether it's a tradie that's running his own home business, or whether it's a Shopify store, or whether it's a blogger trying to sell more things by affiliate links, or whether it's a enterprise business or an agency, everyone wants to grow their business.
So that allowed us initially to do a lot more things.
So number one, it allowed us to do more varied content.
So I could write content on our blog about launching your startup, pre launching your business.
That's a really big topic when people launching a business and they're just starting out like that is the hardest time for a business, you know, so helping people through that, that period is really, is really valuable, I think.
You know, so the, the stars and the planets kind of aligned around that change.
It allowed us to do more things with our content.
It allowed us to change our message.
You know, for example, like we've got landing pages on our site that, that help people, you know, hit here's how our app helps you reach your Kickstarter goal, or here's how our app helps you launch your indie game.
So we were able to sort of target content, target our message to lots and lots of different segments
Omer (28:37.390)
or how often were you creating content for your blog?
Stuart McKeown (28:40.670)
So we believe in quality over quantity.
We typically would do one to two quite detailed posts every month and then we would syndicate those posts.
So we have a, I think we have a list of about 30,000 people subscribe to the blog and then we use in app messaging.
So if somebody's in the gleam back end we'll pop up messaging messages, letting them read the list posts and people will share it out that way.
But we don't blog that much.
But we try to write really, really long form posts when we do.
Omer (29:15.330)
Tell me about the syndication.
What were you doing there and where were you syndicating to?
Stuart McKeown (29:19.650)
So when I say like syndication I mean like exposing the content because the blog is, you know, you got, when you've got a software as a service app, you've kind of got two parts of the site.
You've got like the marketing front end that people will see before they sign up and then you've got the app back end that all your customers are using.
You know, so we got 400,000 plus registered users that just come and use the app.
So they probably don't even read the marketing site anymore because they're just coming in to use the app.
So we have a product called Capture which is like behavioral email pop ups and bars and that sort of thing.
But you can also use it for notifications.
So for example, we will set up rules in the back end.
If a customer is on a certain plan and they've got this many competitions running and they reach a certain number of requirements, then we'll display different types of content that we think that they might be interested in.
So for example, we've just launched an integration with Zapier and we wrote a whole big guide on how to integrate with Zapier and connect it with various tools that we don't support.
So we'll look at people that have either shown an interest in that type of product previously that are on a certain plan and use certain features and then we'll have like a, like a bar that pops up and say hey, check out our Zapier integration.
They'll use it.
Or we might have, you know, we might have a post on how to maximize your sales as a Shopify store.
We have a Shopify integration.
So we'll look at all the people that have integrated us via Shopify and we'll show them specific calls to action to get them to read that post.
So we'll try and keep it fairly targeted to what people are doing in the app.
Omer (31:06.790)
Okay, got it.
No, when you said syndicated I thought, you know, like how some people write the blog post and then they Will, once that's been out there for a few days or week or two, then they basically take the same content and they'll publish it in multiple places, whether it's on the full blog post on LinkedIn or Medium or all of these different places.
And I guess that's kind of what I thought you were talking about, some kind of content syndication, but now I understand.
Stuart McKeown (31:37.100)
Yeah.
So I mean, that's interesting.
That's one thing that we didn't do, you know, the whole guest posting thing.
We've done a couple of guest posts, but I kind of always fought with myself internally where it's like, if I write really good content, like I want it to be on our site, I don't want to write really good content and put it on someone else's site.
Fair enough.
I might get you the exposure.
But I always kind of thought I'd prefer to write really good content and have it on our, you know, locally.
Whether that's the right strategy or not, you know, I don't know.
But I always kind of fought with myself on the guest posting thing.
It's like I'm spending all this time, but, you know, we're not going to get the full benefit of the post.
Omer (32:13.440)
How long did it take before your blog started to get some meaningful traction?
Like in terms of, okay, now all the work that, you know, you'd put in and all these blog posts, these detailed blog posts that you'd written seem to be paying off and generating enough traffic and new leads for the business.
Like, how long did that take?
Stuart McKeown (32:39.740)
Six to 12 months.
Like it's a real long term investment growing a blog.
Like it doesn't happen overnight.
Omer (32:47.100)
And I know currently you're getting about what, a few hundred leads a day.
Stuart McKeown (32:51.580)
Yeah, from content.
Omer (32:52.880)
From content, yeah.
Stuart McKeown (32:53.840)
There was a couple of things I think that were pivotal in the blog's growth.
I think we wrote an article on, I think it was 25 pre launch strategies to launch your startup back then.
Have you ever used the tool Buffer?
Yeah, Buffer used to have this thing called Buffer Suggestions.
So basically it was a, it was like a little tab inside buffer where you could get suggested content to add to your buffer queue.
And they used to have a submission form where you could submit suggestions to them and they would add them if they thought the posts were good.
So when we created that post, we actually sent it to Buffer Suggestions and they ran it at the top of suggestions for like two months.
I think we got something ridiculous, like 30,000 shares on that post and that post went crazy.
And from then that really increased the exposure of the blog.
Like we were getting more organic traffic, we were getting more social engagement via the blog.
There was a couple of points sort of in the blog's lifespan where some of the posts really did a lot better than others.
I had no idea why, but there is some sort of formula there as to why a post might go more viral than others.
I think it's a bit of a science.
And then there's a couple of other posts on the blog that do well that I think are really important for software as a service business is that we try and automate sales.
So we don't really do sales phone calls, we do a lot of pre sales on email, but we try and focus on education.
So we have this one post which is called 25 Growth Hacks using Gleam.
So it's basically a post that shows 25 different ways that you can use our product to grow your business.
And we link this post to every single signup, every single customer.
It's in, you know, if you go to Twitter, it's the link in our Twitter.
If you go to LinkedIn, it's the link in our LinkedIn.
If you look at my email signature, it's the link in my email signature.
If someone views that post, they're like 600% more likely to sign up and pay for our product.
So we try, we put as much effort as we can trying to get people to go to that page.
That's our selling page.
And that's probably one of the most valuable pieces of content I've ever written.
Showing people all the different ways that they can use your product.
Omer (35:27.350)
That's really smart because it's a content marketing page.
Because if you're creating content and it doesn't lead to a new customer, then isn't it really just content?
And you could have done just a standard sales page with, you know, hey, you know, here's the product, here are the benefits, blah, blah, blah, which is kind of like the usual thing.
But I think it's pretty clever to kind of blend the two together.
Create an in depth blog post like that and then almost use that as your, your sales page.
It's pretty smart.
Stuart McKeown (36:02.990)
I mean, there is a, you know, there is an internal struggle when you're writing posts, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, posts on your blog, you know, the idea is that you essentially do want to promote your own product, whether it's directly or indirectly.
But you know, how much do you promote your own product?
And you know, do you just slip it in there, you know, as a little paragraph.
Or do you go all in and make the entire post about your product?
There's a whole bunch of different ways that you can do it.
And, you know, I think you have to balance that.
You know, you have to balance between, you know, informational posts, you know, posts about your product, posts that aren't about your product, and about strategies or tactics or whatever it might be.
I think you have to try and create value there.
You know, if every single post in your blog is just, you know, a post promoting your own app doesn't.
Doesn't really offer any value that people are going to read it.
So it is a.
It is a bit of a balancing act, I think.
Yeah.
Omer (37:02.890)
Now, I also, I think I want to point out that the content marketing piece, as you said, took six to 12 months before you start to build some momentum there.
But in the early days and getting those first 100 customers, you were doing a lot of outreach yourself, right?
I mean, in fact, I think you were the only guy doing any outreach and sending out, what, 10, 20 emails a day just to anybody you could find.
Stuart McKeown (37:23.670)
Yeah.
So we would create spreadsheets of contacts, and we just email them.
Twitter was the tool of choice there.
So we'd look at bloggers that were running campaigns.
We'd look at businesses that were running campaigns either on competing platforms or people that were running campaigns and not using a platform that was.
That was a much better one.
And then we'd, you know, so if I'd email them and if I could get a response from them, I'd basically say, look, you know, we can build your camp.
We'll rebuild your campaign in our platform, and we guarantee that, you know, it'll be better.
Omer (38:07.120)
How did you find these people on Twitter?
Like, how did you know they were running a campaign?
Stuart McKeown (38:11.120)
You know, so you can search hash, hashtag competition, hashtag giveaway.
Omer (38:16.170)
Okay.
Stuart McKeown (38:16.530)
Yeah, you would.
So you'd see the brand is running the competition, and then you'd go to LinkedIn and you would, like, stock on LinkedIn for, like, the marketing contact for that business, and then you would email them.
So, you know, and it's interesting, like, you know, I got a lot of rejections back then from big companies, you know, big companies, like, no, you know, you're an unproven quantity that are now customers many years later.
So I think in the early days, it's all about persistence.
But I think once you have built a.
Because you got to convince people to use a new product that nobody is Using, yeah, totally.
So there's a sense of doubt in people's mind.
And there's a lot of businesses that took a chance with us where we were in beta and we had lots of bugs.
Like, we had bugs left, right, and center.
We use this tool called bugsnag, which is amazing.
So it integrates with Hipchat.
And basically, if, you know, if you're on our site and you get, you encounter a bug, it'll post it in our chat room for everybody in the company to see.
So if somebody gets some sort of bug, we can fix it in like, five minutes.
And then we'll email you and say, hey, sorry, we screwed up.
And I don't think I've ever had that happen to me.
I don't think I've ever had that happen to me in a business.
But in the early days, we had lots of bugs.
They're like, it doesn't work well on mobile.
It doesn't do this, doesn't do that.
And while in the early days, that was painful and people were maybe complaining, everything that you fix makes you better.
So you kind of just got to work through that negativity and, you know, bad feedback to build a better, positive, you know, more positive experience.
Omer (40:05.660)
You know, I'm curious, like, when I talk to people who kind of are in the business of sending out cold emails as kind of like a sales tactic, they'll often tell you, you know, getting like a 2% response rate from people is kind of about what to expect.
And I know this outreach that you were doing was some years ago, but do you remember, like, roughly what kind of response were you getting?
Was it as low as 2% or were you seeing a better response rate?
Even if it was somebody saying no, at least they responded.
Stuart McKeown (40:37.440)
I'm pretty sure I have this number in a post.
I don't want to get it wrong, but I've got a feeling it was high.
It was as high as, like, 50% at the time.
Omer (40:44.400)
Wow.
Stuart McKeown (40:44.960)
I get a lot.
I get a lot of outreach emails and 99% of them are terrible.
I actually got a really, really good one a couple of months ago.
So this guy sent me an email and he said, hey, Stu, really, really like this blog post to viewers.
I noticed that no one has submitted it to inbound.org do you mind if I submit it for you?
I was like, hey, that's really nice.
I said, yeah, go for it.
That's basically all I said.
And he said, yeah, hey, cool, I really like your stuff, blah, blah.
So we did.
We Just had a little back and forward conversation for like four or five emails.
He wasn't trying to sell me anything, he wasn't trying to do anything.
And then bang on like the fifth email, he said, hey, look, I'm launching a product and I'm doing a bit of a survey and I would love to understand such and such something about your business.
Could you give me a couple of paragraphs on what you do and how you do this and how you do that?
And by that point, we'd already kind of built a relationship and I was quite happy to help him.
That's probably one of the smartest ways that I've seen someone go about outreach recently, build that personal relationship.
You know, don't ask up front, you know, because if you're not providing any value, you know, people are going to ignore it.
And that was the whole point of the outreach emails, I think, you know, I was trying to provide some value in that.
You know, I think we can do a better job in what you're doing, you know, rather than, you know, hey, come check out this product xyz.
It's better because, you know, you don't have been those sort of like templated emails that they just send out to like a thousand people and hope that, you know, 2% respond or whatever.
Omer (42:12.200)
Yeah.
Stuart McKeown (42:12.480)
You know, each email, each email was very personalized to try and meet the needs of that person.
Omer (42:17.240)
So, yeah, I found the blog post.
This is the one on your blog called Lessons Learned growing to over 100 customers.
Is that the one?
Stuart McKeown (42:24.720)
Yep.
Omer (42:25.200)
And I like that because, I mean, in there you've mentioned that from your experience emailing founders, you were getting a 90% response rate.
From marketing teams, you were getting a 50% response rate.
And from using Contact Us feedback forms, you were getting a 10% response rate.
And you also included a screenshot of a sample email that you were sending.
So I'm going to include that in the show notes so folks can go and check that out.
One of the things I noticed in there was that you've got this little Gmail or Chrome plugin there for the prospecting and helping you create templates.
What is that?
What is that tool that you've got there?
Stuart McKeown (42:58.400)
That's yesware.
Omer (42:59.360)
Ah, okay, cool.
Stuart McKeown (43:01.320)
Yes, I was using.
So yesware will tell you, somebody opens the email, um, it will also.
You can create templates and you can actually look at the success rate of each template, you know, so if you, you know, if you build like four or five, it'll show you, you know, the opens and clicks for each template that you've created.
You can kind of get a feel for, you know, which one works better.
Sweet.
Omer (43:20.809)
Yeah, I had Matthew Bellows, the, the co founder and CEO of yesware on the show.
I think it was, it was a few weeks ago the episode went live.
So folks want to check that out.
Just head over to ConversionAid.com 127 and you can listen to that interview with Matthew Bellows.
Okay, good.
I want to kind of keep moving here.
I mean, there's a ton of great stuff you're sharing.
So we've talked about how outreach worked for you in the early days to get to your first hundred customers and some of the lessons there about cold email and how to engage with people and how to get a better response rate.
Secondly, we talked about content marketing and what you've done to build the blog and the fact that you weren't going for, you were going up for quality over quantity and, and how you, you built momentum over that over the six, six to 12 months.
I also want to talk about integrations and what you did there to integrate with other products and how that helped you.
So is there, are there like one or two examples of integrations that have turned out to be particularly successful?
Stuart McKeown (44:30.160)
Yep.
Yep.
So I guess, you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, we wanted our product to be modular, to treat integrations like, you know, like they're an add on, you know, that can be independent.
So, you know, so we integrate with a lot of different social networks, you know, Facebook, Instagram, you know, do Snapchat, LinkedIn, we just added Amazon login.
You know, we do a whole bunch of stuff there.
And those integrations are important because if people are looking for certain features within your app, they're looking for an app that supports LinkedIn or they're looking for an app that supports certain Facebook or Instagram entry methods or actions.
That's important from a selling your product marketing point of view when they're comparing features versus features of you and a competitor.
The second type of integration that's important is getting data out of your platform and into another platform that someone uses.
And the most common one there is, you know, email marketing provider.
So for example, our first integration was mailchimp.
We, I think if you look, you know, so I mean, we've got over 5,000 paying customers.
We have, we currently have 3,462 customers have a Mailchimp integration active.
Omer (45:37.800)
Wow, that's a lot of, that's most of your customers.
Stuart McKeown (45:40.200)
So we got a lot of Customers have a mailchimp integration active.
So, you know, if we didn't support mailchimp, we may not have those customers.
And, you know, mailchimp's been great in that, you know, they have a, an app store or like a partner store that, you know, when people are logged in, they can go and see which apps support them.
And a lot of the integrations that you work with will do that.
So the second integration that was really probably pretty powerful for us was Shopify App Store, that it allows a Shopify store to install your app, get automatically logged in, and start using it straight away.
So we've got a couple of thousand Shopify app stores that have installed the app and that use the product.
So that was a pivotal one.
And then, and then you kind of got a range of, you know, mailchimp type, you know, email providers.
The email provider space is really crowded at the moment.
Like, so we integrate with like 40 email providers.
You know, you've got a lot of different ones that do different things.
Like, so we recently just integrated with Drip.
You may be familiar with Drip, they just got acquired by LeadPages.
So we do some stuff with LeadPages because people want to embed our app in a landing page.
And now it integrates with Drip so they can do all the email automation.
So each integration opens up a new marketing channel for you.
So, number one, you can market to that integration's customers.
Now, you know, so if you want to do a Facebook ad, you can look at all the people that use mailchimp, you can write a post on, you know, why your app is amazing to work with mailchimp and how they could grow their business.
You can use that to generate leads or if, you know, if you speak to their marketing teams, you can do some co marketing.
So do some webinars, some joint blog posts, you know, all that sort of stuff that will help you share customers and sort of build up that partnership together.
So, you know, integrations are an amazing tool for growing your business, but it's also, you know, I think more so for us, you know, we didn't build integrations with that in mind.
We want to build integrations because we want our customers to be able to use our products and get the data to where they need it to go.
So primarily they're for our customers.
But it just so happens that, you know, there is a, an extra layer to helping you, you know, grow as a business yourself.
Omer (47:54.180)
Talking about the mailchimp integration and Shopify, am I right?
That you, like, how did you decide to do those integrations, did you look at your existing customers and say, okay, we know this about them, and these two places would be a good, good integration to do, to serve our existing customers, or was it kind of the other way around?
You sort of identify these potential integration opportunities that had a large user base and a number of your customers also happen to be using those same services, but then they also help to you to acquire new customers which came.
It's kind of like the chicken and egg thing.
Like, which came first here.
Stuart McKeown (48:32.770)
Yes, you've hit the nail on the head, like there is.
And you know that that process has changed over time.
But in the beginning, you kind of want to find the integration partners that you think can bring you the most business, and they're the most popular.
But over time, you will start getting feedback from your customers on what they want.
You know, so we just built Zapier.
You know, I think we've.
We've had like 350 customers have asked us for Zapier kind of over like the last year.
And so we, you know, some of the stuff we're building now, we're building it based on what customers want.
But then, you know, stuff like.
So we did an integration with Typeform, and that was.
That was something that we decided to do because we saw an opportunity there, because none of the other.
None of our competitors integrate with any sort of survey platform.
So some of the decisions to integrate are strategical.
Probably one of the most strategical integrations that we did was with some of the esports platforms like Twitch TV, YouTube, Steam, which is a game platform.
They're probably some of our most popular integrations.
And that was an area that none of our competitors did anything in.
None of them are really strong in esports.
Some of them are now after they've seen the success we've had.
But that was a strategic decision to say, I'm a gamer at heart.
I love playing games.
John loves playing games.
Gaming is going to be huge.
We need to do something here.
So he came over on a weekend and we built this integration and that sort of history.
But definitely you got to listen to your customers, but you also got to listen to the market.
And, you know, you've got to make up your own mind.
You know, like decisions around your product can make or break your product.
You know, you can make decisions that kill your product.
You can make decisions that grow your product.
You know, it's just up to you as a business owner to decide what's best and try and, you know, obviously you don't want to piss off your customers either, you know, so if you are making changes like that, especially that involve pricing or anything like that, you want to try and grandfather existing users.
You know, no one wants to be in a product that's continually charge you more and more for all the features or integrations that are.
That are adding.
Omer (50:35.860)
Yeah, totally.
Okay, good.
So we talked about integration and then the last area that helped drive growth for you guys or the significant area was the virality that you had built into your product.
And I know you from kind of going to get to the first 100 customers took a lot of work with the outreach and cold emailing, but at some point, once people started using your product, it kind of started doing a lot of the marketing by itself, didn't it?
Stuart McKeown (51:04.330)
Yeah.
So it definitely was a tipping point which sort of came, you know, I would say you probably look at our Alexa graph to see the tipping point, but there's probably a tipping point maybe, you know, six months into the product where people started really taking off with the product, you know, using it more.
Different segments in different areas would find the product and start using it, and then all their competitors would start signing up.
You know, just.
It just went a bit crazy, to be honest.
Omer (51:30.860)
So.
So a competitor would, or a company would see their competitor running a competition or giveaway or something like that, and you had some kind of thing like powered by Gleam built into sort of that widget.
And then that was the.
The kind of the virality and people would see that and either be able to click on it or go to Gleam IO and sign up themselves.
That's kind of how it worked.
Stuart McKeown (51:54.980)
Yeah.
So we had this customer, we still do have this customer called beardbrand guy called Eric Bandholz.
He was very popular on the Reddit entrepreneur subreddit and he had been working on this business which does like beard oils and, you know, stuff to help men keep their beard nice and fluffy.
He's sort of becoming like this.
This industry that was kind of growing out of, out of nowhere.
And he made this post on how he went From, I think zero to like $20,000 revenue and then 20,000 to $100,000 revenue.
And then these guys are now in the millions.
And in one of his posts on Reddit, he detailed how he used our product to help him grow.
So I read it and I instantly reached out and we did a case study and that case study just went crazy.
I think it's had over half a million views in the past sort of 18 months.
We get emails every day saying, hey, how can we replicate this case study?
So I think there is an element of people seeing your product, but there's also that element of trust where it's like, here's a respected person in a community that's using this product that's getting really good results that can kind of show the outcome as well.
And we've kind of leveraged that through quite a few case studies of people in a similar space.
Omer (53:17.440)
And you didn't ask him to post on Reddit, did you?
Or did he?
Did he just do that himself?
Stuart McKeown (53:21.520)
No, he just did that himself.
Omer (53:22.720)
Yeah, yeah, I can see the case study here on your website.
We'll include a link onto that.
But great case study and great beard.
Stuart McKeown (53:31.920)
Oh yeah, he rocks the beard.
Omer (53:34.720)
You know, I grew a beard over the last year from never having done it before.
And mine's like, no way like that.
Mine's kind of just a much smaller one.
But I just discovered this whole new world of beard oils and beard butters and butter and brushes and all of this stuff that I just didn't even know existed.
You know, it's like, it's like a huge industry these days.
Stuart McKeown (53:56.720)
Yeah, we've got like other customers like Dollar Beard Club, which is kind of like Dollar Shave Club, but for beards.
Those guys are really cool.
They use our product.
We dominate the beard industry all because of that one case study.
It was fantastic.
But yeah, I can't grow a beard.
I end up getting the sort of Pirates of the Caribbean mustache.
And so unfortunately, my efforts to grow a beard haven't been great.
I just stubble it up.
Omer (54:28.830)
All right, we're almost out of time, so I want to.
Let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven rapid fire questions.
Just answer those as quickly as you can.
So you ready?
Stuart McKeown (54:41.950)
Yeah.
Omer (54:42.510)
Okay.
So what's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Stuart McKeown (54:45.790)
Well, obviously the first one was under promise and, you know, over deliver, but I think it's, you know, just be true to yourself.
You know, make sure that you're doing something that you enjoy and you're doing it out of your love and your passion for wanting to do it and not doing it for the money.
You know, I think, I think if you can do that, then you will be happy, you know, because growing a successful business is one thing, but doing it and being happy at the same time, you know, is another.
You know, I know a lot of people that have been successful, but they're miserable, you know, so try and try and do something that makes you happy.
Omer (55:16.210)
Yeah.
I've been having an interesting conversation with.
Do you know Derek Sivers, the guy behind CD Baby?
Yeah, an interesting conversation with him.
And I kind of asked him about everything he seemed to have done to go from building this.
This webpage which sold his own CDs to a company that was doing over, what, $20 million a year.
Seemed to be about him picking things which, like, if they energized him, he would do them.
And if they drained his energy, he'd kind of not do it or get somebody else on the team to do it, you know.
Stuart McKeown (55:49.420)
Yeah.
Omer (55:49.780)
And that seemed to be kind of a big.
And so it was just fascinating conversation about, you know, did that happen by accident or was that, like a deliberate thing that, that, that.
That he did?
But yeah, I totally buy that.
But anyway, let's get back to the lightning round.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Stuart McKeown (56:07.020)
When I was in Experian, actually, so they were the company that bought Hitwise.
My.
My boss at the time gave me a book called From Good to Great by a guy called James Collins.
And the proviso of the book is why some companies make the leap to being great companies, while others don't.
It's a really fantastic read that has a, you know, a strange principle called the hedgehog principle.
So I really recommend, you know, checking that out.
You know, talks about why big companies aren't, you know, agile enough, why they don't.
Why they don't foster great people.
It talks about a lot of different.
It talks about.
The reason I like it so much is that there's no one formula to having a great company.
It's a mixture of a whole bunch of things like your culture, your speed to market, all these different things that you have to get happening at the right time, moving in the right direction.
The book talks about all these different levers that you can.
Can pull to go from, you know, to greatness, so to speak.
Omer (57:14.170)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Stuart McKeown (57:18.490)
Hunger.
You know, so just being hungry.
You know, don't settle for, you know, don't get lazy.
You know, just get out there and just attack every day, like, you know, like you want to crush it.
Omer (57:30.250)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Stuart McKeown (57:34.500)
I've got quite a few, but so my biggest one is it's more of a habit, which is to start your day as a producer, not a consumer.
What I mean is, like, when I wake up in the morning, I don't read the news.
I don't read Reddit, I don't do anything.
I get up and I work and I try and work and create something because I find that that really sets the tone for the rest of the day.
If I get up and I'm lazy and I start reading, that sets the tone for the rest of the day.
And I'm not, I'm not as productive.
So I think that's my biggest one.
And that, that, that's me personally.
That might not be everybody, you know, but I find it very hard that if I don't produce and I don't get into that habit that it's, you know, that kind of sets the tone for me for the rest of that day.
Omer (58:16.130)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Stuart McKeown (58:20.290)
Does it have to be gleam related?
Omer (58:22.050)
No.
Anything.
Stuart McKeown (58:24.290)
John and I come up with crazy business ideas all the time.
But we would love to build in train stations around the world.
You know the little sleeping pods that they have in Japan where if you're
Omer (58:35.830)
out one night's got overnight.
Stuart McKeown (58:38.070)
Yeah.
And that you're really drunk and you can't get home.
We'd love to rent those out.
And funnily enough, we talked about this about a year ago and there was an article in the Age or one of the newspapers yesterday about a guy that makes $100,000 a month renting these out in, in train stations in Tokyo.
So I reckon that's a winner.
Omer (58:58.490)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Stuart McKeown (59:03.050)
I used to make electronic music.
So I used to be a musician.
I still dabble, but that's another conversation itself.
Trying to make money from art and music is extremely hard.
Harder than building apps, that's for sure.
Omer (59:15.930)
And you drink a lot of tea, Correct?
Stuart McKeown (59:19.210)
I made a cup of tea before the call.
Omer (59:23.540)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Stuart McKeown (59:27.220)
Probably my kids.
Omer (59:28.260)
So you have two kids, right?
Stuart McKeown (59:29.780)
Yeah, I got two kids.
And that's one of the advantages of working from home.
You know, you get to spend a lot more time with them.
Can take the small one to kinder every day, pick them up.
You know, there's no commute in the morning, there's no commute afterwards.
You can have dinner together every night, you can put them to bed.
You know, you're not sort of like that absent father that gets home at 7:30 each night.
And that's one of the real luxuries of running your own business.
Is you got that flexibility.
Omer (59:53.290)
Yeah, totally.
Stuart, I want to thank you for joining me today.
It's been a pleasure.
Stuart McKeown (1:00:00.730)
My pleasure.
Omer (1:00:01.410)
Yeah, I feel like we could kind of just keep talking forever, but I know both of us have got some deadlines to do with family.
If folks want to find out more about Gleam, you can go to Gleam.
That's G, L E A M. And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Stuart McKeown (1:00:25.830)
They can email me at stuartaim IO directly.
If anyone listens to the podcast, has any questions, email me directly.
We can maybe link the 25 ways to use Gleam post if they want to.
You know, an overview as to capabilities and stuff like that.
But, you know, happy to.
Happy to entertain any questions about any things we talked about.
Omer (1:00:46.800)
Yeah, no, definitely.
I'm going to include a link to that page as well in the show notes.
Yeah.
So thank you for making the time.
I really appreciate this.
I really enjoyed this chat.
And I don't know if you noticed, but I was drinking my tea as well while you were drinking yours, and we chatted.
Stuart McKeown (1:01:04.480)
I didn't even notice.
Stealthy tea.
Omer (1:01:07.360)
Yes.
Stealth mode.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I'm serious.
I'd love to.
Let's kind of figure out how I can kind of get you back at some point and talk more, because I think you just shared a ton of really useful stuff here.
I know people who listen to this are going to get a lot of value from it, and I'd love to get you back sometime and just.
Just pick your brain on some other topics.
Stuart McKeown (1:01:30.430)
Yep, yep.
Anytime, you know, just let me know and, you know, hopefully we can.
You know, hopefully the guys enjoy listening to what we talked about.
You know, for me, it's all kind of normal stuff because I've kind of lived it.
But, you know, I know that there's probably a lot of people out there that are maybe going through early stage, you know, growth stage, whatever it might be.
So if there's any way that I can help them with any doubts or questions or things like that, you know, I'm happy to.
Happy to do that.
Omer (1:01:57.790)
That's awesome.
Thank you for that.
Cool.
Stuart McKeown (1:01:59.910)
All right, cool.
Thank you.
Omer (1:02:01.390)
Yeah, Cheers, Stuart.
And we'll speak soon.
