Omer (00:12.240)
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.
To learn more about the show and previous guests, go to the SaaS Podcast.com in this episode I talk to Rick Perot, the co founder and CEO of Unbounce, a SaaS product that makes it easier to build custom landing pages, improve conversion rates, and drive more leads and sales.
The company was founded in 2009 and went from zero to over $7 million in annual revenue within five years.
Rick was an early guest on this podcast on episode 25 back in 2014, where he shared what happened in those first five years.
Since then, Unbounce has continued to grow and is now a $20 million business.
In this episode we talk about the growth challenges the company has faced in the last four years and how they've overcome get to over $20 million annual run rate.
We talk about how the marketing channels that helped them grow in the first few years have become less effective.
And we discuss new marketing channels they're currently using.
And we talk about the lessons that Rick has learned as the company grows about communication, transparency, hiring, and firing.
I hope you enjoy it.
Rick, welcome to the show.
Rick Perreault (01:50.130)
Thank you very much for having me.
Omer (01:52.290)
This is a repeat visit.
You were one of my first guests, episode 25, back in 2014.
So it's great to have you back and to be able to catch up on what's been going on in the world of Unbounce.
Rick Perreault (02:11.170)
I'm glad to do this.
A lot has happened since December 2014, that's for sure.
Omer (02:15.970)
Yeah, I've been hearing.
So let's start by I want to ask you, like, what gets you out of bed every day?
What what drives and motivates you to work on your business?
Rick Perreault (02:27.010)
You know, I think it's really the impact that we're having on, on people's lives, whether it be our customers, our employees, the community locally.
That's actually I feel as we've grown, that has become a big motivator for me.
And because we see it, I, you know, you know, actually I had someone walk up to me at our conference.
I walk in, there was a one of our guests where one of the attendees walks right up to me, said, Rick Perot, pleasure to meet you.
I just want you to know you're the reason why I'm able to feed my four kids.
Wow, I brought tears to my eyes.
You Know, and it was like, so powerful, but we actually, the impact we have or, you know, people who, you know, who at Unbounce are saying, this has been a.
Know, it's like the best job I've ever had.
I'm learning so much.
And you treat us well.
And, you know, it's just, it's, it's.
That's motivating.
It really is.
When we, When I, when I can see that we've, we've.
We've grown to a, to a place where we can actually have an impact on people's lives.
Omer (03:26.000)
You know, I know you.
And I don't think it's just kind of.
Some people might say that because it sounds good, but I really believe that with you because, you know, you get to a point where you guys are doing well.
You know, you get to a million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, and, and after a while, I guess they just become numbers.
Right?
But once you have those real stories and real people telling you what an impact it's making or you're making and your business is making on their lives, that's really what matters.
Rick Perreault (03:54.290)
I think that's the stuff that gives you goosebumps.
These, at this scale.
As you say, in the early days, it was, you know, we watched the numbers every day.
I mean, we used to have, we used to have.
Every time somebody would start a sign up for Unbounce, our ph would go ding, ding.
And you know, that was exciting in those days, but now it really is those, those stories, whether it's from customers or employees or, or actually even the impact we can have in the community.
And you know, we, we have space available at Unbounce and it's, for example, ladies running code.
We're home base for them.
And you know, when they, you know, when we get a thank you card from them for allowing them to use the space and, or for whoever, anyone else who uses our space after hours.
And it's like, that's, that's, you know, that's.
It means something to us and it's great to get that feedback.
Omer (04:42.330)
So for people who aren't familiar with Unbounce, can you just kind of give us a quick recap of what does a product do?
Who's it for?
What problem are you trying to solve?
Rick Perreault (04:51.290)
Yeah, okay, I'll start.
Basically, Unbounce is a landing page and conversion platform for marketers.
It basically, we help you grow your business by making it easy to get landing pages pop up and sticky bars so that you can convert more.
We're focused on the SMB market and what I mean by that is generally kind of self service and the price point is in that range for small mid sized businesses.
And we're really, you know what we've learned, we've seen it still.
When I started Unbounce, it was really, we couldn't get these pages made without having to get developers involved and that was really expensive and time consuming.
And we, we said it's got to be an easy way for a non technical person to be able to create a page, post it live and then point your advertising to it.
And the reason why this is important is because having target specific landing pages for your, for your online marketing activities, unique landing pages that matches the ad, you'll convert way more than you would if you were just pointing all your, you know, your, your marketing traffic to your company homepage.
So that's the problem we're trying to solve.
Basically help customers grow their business faster with, with landing pages now as you know, with pop ups and stickies and you know, we're just trying to make it super easy to, to create this kind of convert, you know, content that converts.
Omer (06:30.250)
Now when we talked last time, we spent a lot of time talking about the early days, how you came up with the idea and kind of how you built the product and got your initial customers.
So we don't need to cover all of that.
Again, people can go back and they can listen to episode 25 if they want to hear the full story.
But I would love for us to do kind of a, maybe spend the next 10 minutes giving people a quick recap because it's an interesting story about, you know, how you kind of came up with the idea and what you did to kind of figure out if there was a need for it.
So maybe we spent a little bit of time talking about how you went from idea to say like the first hundred customers and then we can really spend the rest of the time talking about everything that's happened since then and some of the new challenges and lessons that you've learned.
Rick Perreault (07:21.930)
Well, as I said I, so actually I'll step way back.
So I actually had the privilege, I was working in digital marketing and I had the privilege of working with some really smart people that taught me that hey, if you know, you, if you've, if you're doing some, you know, some advertising, your ad, your ad should match the landing experience.
And if you use a landing page, which is, you know, campaign, you build these for your campaign, we'll get much higher conversions.
And better yet, if you can, even if you can test these things.
But the challenge was back in those days and still in a large part today, the, the, you know, the landing page developing web content was not, you know, develop.
You had to go to your IT department or your developers to do that.
And for us that was a challenge because developers don't necessarily want to work on marketing landing pages, they want to build apps and stuff.
And you know, and you know, our story was always, you know, I'd get a landing page, a couple of landing pages made for a campaign and they're not really working well.
So we go back with some one and everybody well wait, we just gave you some and we're busy on something else.
So these things would never get done even though we knew, you know, we didn't use them as much as we should.
And so I went looking for a solution and basically I actually went looking for a vendor.
I thought, well somebody must have solved this problem, make it easy for non technical people.
At the time I saw in the marketing landscape a lot of when I started my career, if you want to send an email to your customers, you type it all up, print it off and bring it to somebody in the IT department and they'd take care of it for you.
Now that's, you know, that'd be absurd doing something like that.
Now you have mailchimp or you know, enterprise email marketing solutions and then you know, banner ad serving.
I mean Today, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the IT departments used to manage custom built advertising solutions.
And you know, today that's all in the cloud.
There's vendors looking after all that.
So I went looking for something like that and there really wasn't anything in the SMB say space.
There was some enterprise CMS that had some marketing that had some components of what we were looking for, but there really wasn't anything that was really kind of self service, you know, sign up, pay with your credit card, get, you know, cloud based.
I wanted something as easy to use as mailchimp.
I remember that I had said that at the time I was looking around it has to be as easy to use as mailchimp.
And there really wasn't.
And so I actually took an ad out on Facebook, advertising landing page solution.
And if you clicked on it, it would take you to a survey, an apology saying I haven't built it yet.
And explained to them that I'm just, I'm looking for a solution and if I can't find one, I'll maybe build one.
And 42 marketers left me there.
You Know left their story about how they need something like this so desperately and left me their phone numbers, their email and please contact me.
So armed with that I decided to become an entrepreneur and with five other long time friends and colleagues who, we decided to go solve this problem.
Omer (10:30.110)
Yeah, I love that story that you know, it was just like hey, I used a Facebook ad just to find out if anybody else had the problem and there are people giving you their phone numbers to talk more about it.
Rick Perreault (10:42.030)
Yeah, I was doing kind of customer development and kind of working lean before I even knew what that was.
And, but it was, it was the only way to know if, if this was actually a pain that people would, would pay for and that it, and that was a pain that was widespread.
More importantly, you know, there's lots of, lots of great ideas but it may not be a, might not be a big market for it.
So, so yeah, so with that we, we, we, we started that journey and you know, and I, I look back on what Unbounce was way back then, you'd never recognize it today but it was, you know, at the very, we went out to make it easy for non technical people to put up a landing page to point their marketing at and fundamentally that's what we're still doing today.
Omer (11:34.160)
And so once you had these people who kind of give you their contact information, what did you do with it?
Did you start talking to each one?
Rick Perreault (11:43.600)
Actually no, I reached out to, personally reached out to everybody.
Try to understand in some cases, many cases got on the phone with, with people and, and try to understand their pain and they were seeing the same thing, they had the same need I had but couldn't find a vendor.
They just weren't seeing it.
And, and I heard time and time and time again and it was actually through that process actually because when I went out, when I, my original idea for Unbounce didn't involve testing.
It was really let's just get these landing pages built and we'll get some reporting.
It was actually through that, through that kind of early customer development I realized that at the time I thought you could use a, like Google had their tag based testing.
But what I learned through that and I thought everybody would, you know, anybody would just the landing page.
Building the landing page I thought was the real pain.
But then I, what I really learned after is actually no they, they couldn't use the solution, the tag based solutions that were existing because they were really complex and required some knowledge of coding.
So they, you know, what they really wanted to do is be able to build the page and test it in a very simple way.
So, so that's.
Yeah, and that came out of those conversations.
And yeah, it's something, you know, to this day we look back on those early days and it was like so important that feedback we got from the, you know, 40 people we didn't know.
Omer (13:04.800)
Who were you guys, you guys were self funded for the first couple of years, is that right?
Rick Perreault (13:09.440)
We, for the first year.
So we bootstrapped.
Then we, then, yeah, then we, I guess we kind of friends and family helped us go from product launch to some level of, I would say profitability, but some level of where we were making enough, where we were now independent, we were nowhere.
You know, we weren't going to run out of money.
And so we could keep the lights on.
And then at that point we raised a seed round and yeah, and we never.
So we've raised less than a million dollars all told.
Omer (13:45.030)
You know, that's so that's kind of like the early days of building Unbounds.
And you know, as I said in episode 25, we went through the full story and basically kind of how you went from zero to about $7 million in the space of about five years.
And that's where we kind of left the story at that point.
And things have changed since then.
Right.
So in the last four years you've gone from $7 million run rate to you're doing over $20 million a year now.
And also, I can't remember how many employees you had back then, but you've got what, like 170 odd employees now, 130 odd now.
Rick Perreault (14:35.440)
We would have been back in December 2014.
We were, oh, between somewhere 50, no more than 70 for sure.
Omer (14:44.150)
So let's kind of talk about growth first of all because, you know, kind of going from 7 million to $20 million a year comes with its own set of challenges.
It's not, it's not just, yeah, you're, you're generating X million.
So it kind of keeps, you know, it's going to keep going.
So what kind of was that process like for you and what, what were kind of, you know, some of the biggest challenges you faced along the way in terms of being able to grow the business well.
Rick Perreault (15:18.630)
And actually, well, in the early days in terms of growth, we, we didn't, we didn't have a lot of options.
Not like we had a lot of money.
So we, we did a lot of, we did a lot of blogging, we did a lot of, you know, we created a lot of kind of Quality content around a B testing and landing page best practices.
And then we work with thought leaders in the market to kind of distribute that we'd share on social and those things really worked for us.
And then it was actually just the last few years where that stuff, there's so much content now, so many companies producing content.
Content marketing is actually becoming far more mainstream.
So those actually things are working less effective than they were back in the early days.
So that's been a challenge for us because we, that's what's one of the things we stayed focused on for so long.
And in fact one of the, one of the things where one of the missteps we realized just last year we think we made where you know, a lot of people in the market, if we go out and survey the market, it's like, you know, seven out of 10 marketers we talked to and heard about us.
Only two of them, three of them actually knew exactly what we did.
And I was like, ah, you know, we've.
So that's actually, we've really, over this last year, really trying to change or add a new dimension to the way we communicate in the market.
It's really about, here's the pain that we're solving and here's how we do it.
We didn't do that as much in the early days.
We were always, we were always scared to blend in.
I mean, we never used to have an ad to, you know, to our product on our blog.
We were scared to mix that thought leadership with, you know, kind of what we call today product marketing.
Omer (16:56.500)
So you didn't promote your own product on your blog?
Rick Perreault (16:58.980)
No, not as well as you think you should have.
Omer (17:02.740)
That's funny.
Rick Perreault (17:03.620)
No, it's.
But it's just these, you know, these silly mistakes we'd make in the early days and you know, we'd hear it from people after.
It's like, yeah, I love your content and you know, I've been to your conference and you have a product and yeah, so definitely don't be shy to promote your product.
I don't know why.
You know, we always had this thing.
It wasn't that we wouldn't talk about a product, but we didn't want to.
We never would talk about it close to our thought leadership stuff.
We thought we wanted to separate the thought leadership from making it sound like it's a product ad.
And I think there's ways.
Well, I think we've learned now there's ways to do it that's tasteful and it doesn't come across like this piece of content is just here to advertise a product rather than here's a piece of content that's a help you be a better marketer.
So we're getting better at it.
But that was definitely a mistake in the early days and that today we're really trying to recover and really try to get good at this piece because I think we've done really well historically building that thought leadership.
Not so good at promoting our own product actually.
Not only just through the market but even to our own customer base.
You know it's, it's amazing how often actually we talked.
Communication has been a, we talked before we started recording about how at scale communication is so hard internally.
But not just internally before I get on to that but even with our customers it's, you know, we'll, we, we'll release a piece of fe, a new feature.
We send out one email and we think, well everybody now knows about it and I, I, here's a story where you know, so unbounce supports mobile tool.
We have for quite a long time.
It's such an important channel now for, for marketers and, and it's actually a device that most of us are on long before we're ever on our computers.
The first one we pick up and yet I remember talking to a colleague who was using a competitive product and he says yeah, well you guys, you don't support mobile yet.
Oh, we're so terrible at actually promoting internally what we do.
And we, I've learned, if there's one thing I've learned in nine years is how deliberate and never to be scared of over communicating.
Whether it's to our customer base, it's to our own team.
As we've grown as a company, when we got from, well actually probably in December 2014, we were probably just starting to have those challenges because at the time we want to do an all hands it'd be hey everybody, you got a minute?
And everybody was just kind of, we'd just get around and it was easy to stay aligned.
It was easy for all our employees to know we were going because they could see my desk, they could hear me talking to my co founders, they could hear me talking to our head of marketing or they could hear the discussions going on between customer success and our QA team.
It was so easy to just have a, for everybody to have this shared sense of where we're heading as our direction and, and things we're working on and why we're working on them.
I think it was a really great understanding of why, with everything that we were doing.
But boy, once you start adding a second floor, other rooms, an office in a different time zone, that becomes really, really hard.
And I'd say that's still one of our big challenges.
As we've gone from, you know, the last time you and I spoke when we were 50, 60 employees to today being over 170, that's.
It's still a huge challenge.
And it's something we just got to be really deliberate and know it's a challenge.
And it doesn't matter how many times we say something, we just got to keep on saying it.
Omer (20:52.470)
Yeah.
So in terms of what that means for your customers, I want to kind of talk about that.
So you said, hey, you know, there's.
We're still learning that there's a lot of markets, marketers out there who don't really understand what we do.
And then secondly, we're probably not communicating as much as we should be because there's still, you know, maybe some misperceptions about what we can and can't do or if we're releasing new features.
We think we've.
We've told people, but they're not.
It's.
The message isn't necessarily getting through.
So what.
What are you doing or what have you been doing to address that?
Rick Perreault (21:33.880)
Yeah, it is.
It's really.
It's coming down to.
It's over.
Communicating.
Communicating all channels, finding different ways.
It's not just email.
It might be.
So for example, from a product perspective, in app, a lot of communication in.
In app, we're using our community where we're bringing early on, we'll bring in our evangel kind of our power users, our unbounce experts, bring them on board so they can actually be part of telling that story.
And it's still hard and it's still like, we're still constantly looking at ways to talk to the market.
We're definitely talking more now about the product, the pain that the product solves.
Different ways that we do a lot more case studies now on the success of the problem a customer might have had and how they've used our product to solve that product and the success they've actually had a lot of stuff that you might think, well, that's just.
We should have been doing that day one.
But we were taking a different approach in the early days.
But yeah, even like.
So, yeah, communicating within the product actually you try to make the product, designing the product in a way.
And we have, you know, in the early days, we had one designer working on not just product ui but marketing.
And now we have a team kind of dedicated to that, but trying to make the product kind of almost when you get in there it's like, oh, I see where all these capabilities are.
So, you know, so it doesn't require much description and I'm not doing this justice.
There's so much we're trying to do now, but just trying to find different ways of communicating because everybody kind of learns differently.
Omer (23:18.530)
Yeah, but the kind of, the key takeaway I'm hearing is multi channel communication.
Don't just communicate once and expect that people will get it.
Rick Perreault (23:30.610)
And that is 100%.
And I would say you could take that exact same philosophy.
And that's true for communicating to your organization at scale.
Omer (23:41.010)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'm curious, you mentioned somebody who wasn't using Unbounce because they said you guys don't support mobile.
When was that conversation?
Rick Perreault (23:54.940)
A couple years ago?
Yeah, a couple years ago that was.
Omer (23:58.540)
And how long have you supported mobile now?
Rick Perreault (24:01.020)
Oh, it's been, we've been supporting mobile probably since not too long after you and I were talking first time.
Omer (24:09.090)
Yeah, yeah.
Because I remember back, I think when we spoke last time you'd mentioned that, hey, you know, we don't really support mobile yet.
And I was like, yeah, but you got to $7 million, so something doesn't add up here.
And I remember also I'd often hear people, you know, the marketers talking about it and they'd be like, oh, what software should I use?
And when people would talk about the pros and cons.
A con that I'd always see coming up with Unbounce was the lack of mobile support.
Rick Perreault (24:39.160)
Right.
Omer (24:39.480)
But I think it's funny that even some years after that it still continued
Rick Perreault (24:44.480)
to be a perception that is, that's true.
And we, I'll be on.
We kind of missed the boat on that one.
That's something that kind of caught us by surprise.
The, the how fast our market and our, that it became a check, it became a required checkbox and if we didn't have it, they just moved on to something else.
And that happened really quickly.
It went from very little.
You know, I think we do a pretty good job at talking to our customers and getting that, having a really good feedback loop.
But that's something, I'll be honest, I think that's, you know, one of the founders and myself, we talk about that and that's, we look back, that was one of the things we weren't fast enough on in the early days in terms of growth.
Omer (25:29.100)
When you guys launched unbounce back in 2009, there weren't that many products out there that solved that problem or helped you build landing pages.
Today that different.
That situation is very different.
How has that changed the way that you do business and have you found it more of a challenge to kind of stand out or has that not been an issue?
Rick Perreault (26:04.970)
Well, actually in terms of the marketing landscape, I will say there's just so many companies out there now in general for technologies in the SaaS kind of whether it's analytics or top of funnel solutions, bottom of the funnel solutions.
And even in the space we're playing, you know, there's dozens of players now and then a lot of the email marketing, marketing automation, they all have components of what we are doing.
But there's a lot of companies in the marketing space.
So there is a lot of.
It's hard to get.
A lot harder today to get attention of a marketer than it was.
I think when we started the company there was far fewer kind of marketing solutions out there.
There was definitely far fewer solutions to build content and to test.
And there's a lot that now.
So yes, it's actually more challenging.
In fact, that's actually, I think as we've grown it's something that we're constantly.
How do we address this?
How do we get people's attention?
And it is, it's a challenge.
So yes, that is true.
There's far more competitive and I think for us, I will say we're just trying to get, we're looking for new, you know, we're always looking for, you know, new channels and new things, you know, we want like last year we, we launched, you know, our benchmark report trying to get.
So it was the first time in our, in our market where we, where we've actually identified based on our experience and you know, benchmarking different industries and conversion rates and things that have worked and not so, you know, trying to do new things like we, or you know, we've, over the last five years we've invested in a conference and that's gone from a quite a small event to a much larger.
Last two years we've had, you know, over a thousand marketers attend.
Yeah, it's, we're always looking for new, you know, what's those.
We can't just, it's not, it's not, it can't be just our blog.
It can't be just a webinar.
It's.
There's, we're constantly trying to try lots of new Things because it's getting more, it's, it's getting, it's getting harder to get marketers attention because there's just so much, there's so much demand on marketers time right now.
So it's.
Yeah.
Omer (28:39.610)
So the event is, is clearly a way to get attention.
Rick Perreault (28:43.970)
Yeah, we saw that as almost like an extension of our content marketing of our blog.
And actually we're really focused there on creating a really great experience so that people who attend will go off and talk about it and then talk about us.
And so we're really trying to create a really great experience.
Experience.
And I would argue actually, and you ask about how differentiating.
You know, it was interesting.
Even as an early day startup, in the very earliest days, if the phone rang, it was one of the things, if someone's calling, we gotta pick up the phone, we gotta be there.
If I walk by a customer success and they're busy all on the phones and there's a phone ringing, I'd pick it up.
And we, and that kind of stuff set this kind of internally like this, making customer care really one of the most important, the most important thing we do.
And we're always looking at ways to get better and better, but even in the early days, it was always something we really went out of our way to do.
And I do think that sets us apart today from some of the competition.
And just interesting enough last week, 10 days ago, we were, we were down, we were down for an hour.
And it's, you know, I do like to say something I'm pretty proud of is that we're, we're rarely ever down.
And this was actually our fault too.
Omer (30:14.010)
And.
Wait, so you would.
You were down, your, your site is down and all your customers landing pages are down?
Rick Perreault (30:20.610)
That is correct.
So it kind of worst case scenario for us.
And, and it was our fault.
It wasn't like the Internet went down or which happened once before and.
But I was watching and unfortunately I was actually, I was away.
I was, I was, I was, I was out of town and so I wasn't there in the office.
And so I'm watching, you know, our own internal team dealing with this.
But then I'm watching Twitter and I'm watching our customers kind of who they basically got our backs.
It's like, you know what, I've been a customer for, you know, X amount of years and this is the first time this has happened.
You know, you know, good luck on balance.
Let us know when this is.
And it was really supportive and I was just like this is why we take care of our.
This is why, you know, we pick up that phone when it rings.
This is, you know, and that culture of doing everything we can to help our customers be successful is because when we do screw up, they've got our backs.
Omer (31:18.400)
Yeah, that's really, really good.
I mean, the fact, one, that, you know, this was a very rare thing to happen, which is always good for a SaaS business, and then secondly, that, you know, your customers were very supportive of it.
So when you say, like, take care of our customers, give me, give me some examples of the kinds of things that you do which have resulted in people going out and defending unbalanced.
When, you know, everyone on Twitter is kind of complaining about the service being down.
Rick Perreault (31:45.320)
Right.
I would, I would Just the level of customer support that we provide, like I said, I think our net promoter score is somewhere around 80.
When you call into Unbounce, whether actually the interactions you'll have with Unbounce with our customer if you're having a problem or if actually, if you're not even early on, like with onboarding and every touch point, we really go out of our way to continually improve, whether it's how fast we get back to you with a ticket, you know, and if someone, a customer is having a problem like it, we just don't.
The team really goes out of their way to solve it as fast as possible.
And we hear that feedback constantly.
So I'll get the daily.
Every day, when a customer responds to, after a ticket's been solved, they're asked to comment on it.
And I see that feedback and it's actually, it's.
You know, as this founding CEO, I look at that, I'm proud of the team, but that team just says, hey, we can do better.
And they're constantly going out of their way.
There's everything they can do.
How do we improve these processes?
How can we.
And then they bring that feedback.
Hey, if customers, we're getting all this feedback around this particular feature or something's hard to use, and they bring that back and let's make this a point.
Let's solve that for our customers.
Yeah, I think it's just the culture of the customer is right.
The customer has a problem.
And if, if, if that, we have to do everything we can to help them as fast as possible.
And yeah, I think that's something that's kind of ingrained in our culture also
Omer (33:30.830)
in terms of growth.
What, what are some of the things that, that you've kind of were doing before that kind of helped you to get to the $7 million.
But at some point you just found this, this isn't working anymore.
Rick Perreault (33:46.280)
Oh, things that just aren't working, that might have been working.
We don't blog as much as we used to.
Omer (33:55.000)
You know, it's interesting what you said about that with content marketing because for so long we've heard about, you know, the importance of content marketing and Google loves really long in depth articles and everyone is doing it.
And I don't know about you, but these days it's like, I don't want to read a 6,000 word blog post.
I just want an answer to my question.
Rick Perreault (34:20.350)
It's definitely, we don't do as much as we do as we used to.
In fact, there are, you know, we used to blog 34-555.
There was a blog post almost every business day.
And that's certainly not the case now.
We don't do.
For a while we were doing actually 2014, 2014 webinars accounted for about 30% of all our customer acquisition.
That's now we hardly ever do them.
There's just so much of that today.
It's really hard to get people's attention and that.
So we're just.
What else do we have done in the early days that we're not doing today?
I don't think fundamentally things have like we're not doing, we still do some of this, a lot of the same stuff.
We just do it a lot differently or we're doing, we're just doing a lot less than we're trying to do other things.
Actually we do a lot more paid advertising today than we, than we did in the early days.
In large part we had, in the early days we were budget constrained.
But today we've actually found ways to.
We're getting a lot and we actually didn't get the results in the early days.
It's.
It just wasn't working for us as well as it is today.
So today we spend a significant amount on paid search and that does well for us.
Omer (35:49.490)
Okay, so we talked about kind of what that's meant for you and in terms of the way you run the company and communication is kind of a whole set of new challenges not just with customers, but with your own employees.
Now that, you know, you've grown to, you know, getting close to 200 employees.
You've got some people working remotely.
You've got, you've got an office open up in Berlin now as well.
So it definitely isn't like, you know, Rick standing up at his desk and talking to the whole company.
Right.
So that's kind of changed a lot of things.
What else has, has changed about the, the business?
Rick Perreault (36:37.550)
Wow.
Actually.
Well, I think.
And that's actually.
You raise a good point, Rick, standing up there in front of the company.
That is, it is change as you scale, you really.
And this was actually hard for us as founders, you know, because it's your baby, right.
And when you're seeing it grow and successful, it's like, no, no, I got to hang on to this or else, you know, somebody else might screw it up.
But it's actually been a big challenge for us to actually let go of a lot of things.
But we've been doing it and it's been successful.
I'll be honest, the more we're letting go of things and as like so now, you know, in the early days it was, you know, the six founders ran the day to day of the business and today that's not really the case anymore.
From a day to day.
Now we've hired, you know, we've had either internally, we've had early employees who are now part of the senior leadership team and are running with certain areas of the business, or we've brought in experienced executives.
But that was, that's definitely something that's changed a lot in terms of our like, best founders, like, for the most part, like, we have a team.
Like one way I like to describe is like we have a team kind of executing on what needs to be done today.
Our job is thinking about tomorrow and thinking about that future.
And that was something.
It was hard to let go, whether you're running a department or being really hands on into the product.
We have a product team now who are actually really good and who are doing a lot of the rigor and the interviewing and the, and the analysis to actually, you know, to really to help get us where we need to be faster.
Where I think in the early days it was as founders we were just like, hey, we're going in this direction and with not as much validation or than we need at this scale because we still can't afford to be building things that our customers in the market don't need.
But as we scale, we've had to let go of wearing multiple hats and really kind of have, I think as founders really have kind of heart to heart with ourselves and realize what are we good at?
Where are we standing in the way and what is it that we really aren't good at or, you know, what areas of our jobs don't get us up in the Morning.
And somebody else would do it way better than we are.
And that's actually a really challenging thing to go through as a founder because you kind of think you're, you've built this, it's your baby, you must be good at everything.
Of course.
And you know, I, yeah, so, yeah, so that's definitely, I think myself.
So as we've scaled, I know myself, I, I've actually have.
Not only have I gone through that and I'm trying to focus more on the future and tomorrow.
What are we doing tomorrow?
And.
But I also can't work the kind.
I have two children now that I didn't have in 2014 and I had a very understanding wife who if I was working 80 hours a week, she was super supportive.
And today I have a 3 year old and a 16 month old.
So I try to get home a few nights a week to put them to bed.
And that was actually something that really is taking some getting used to.
And you know, in the early, earlier on, during that process, it's like if I'm not there with my family, I'm feeling guilty.
If I am there with my family, I'm feeling guilty for not being with unbounds.
So I know personally, for me that was a challenge that I've been dealing with.
But yeah, at scale.
In order, I think for the company to really accelerate now to scale and really grow in the right way, it's like I need to be myself and founders really kind of let go and kind of keep an eye on things, but let people run.
Empower people.
Empowerment is one of our core values.
So really living that core value and keep an eye on things, but really empower people to kind of run with their ideas.
And so that's actually something that's changed a lot.
And it's something that has to.
When you're at this size, it's something you just kind of have to do.
Omer (41:11.140)
Yeah, yeah.
But I think as a founder, it's a hard thing to do.
As you said, it's your baby and it's hard to let go in many ways, especially when for so many years you've been used to getting involved in all aspects of the business and all kinds of details.
But yeah, at least you recognize.
Yeah.
Rick Perreault (41:34.970)
And it's, and I'll be honest.
And what happens is when you hire really good people, they want some independence, they want to be held accountable.
They want to be.
But they also want, you know, they want to be able to run in a certain direction with something so you can't stand in their way.
You know, we have to, I like to say, you know, we're providing a sandbox for people to play in.
So this is like, hey, we're generally going in this direction, but how we get there, let's leave that up to, to some really smart people that we're hiring.
And if we're going to hire these really smart people, we have to get out of their way.
So that's.
Yeah, that's something.
And it's hard to do.
I'll be honest.
It's even, you know, I think, I like to think I'm, I'm pretty good at that.
And I, and I, and I see that, but I even myself, I find myself, oh, maybe I should step away from that.
I'm getting.
I'm crushing someone here and I shouldn't be.
So, yeah, it's a, it's a hard thing to do.
And, and it was.
You realize that then, you know, as soon as you realize that and I think, and empower people to run, it's amazing.
If you've empowered a team and just provide them a bit of vision and direction and, and then just kind of get out of their way and let them run with stuff, it's, it's amazing how much stuff gets done and really good stuff.
Omer (42:46.090)
So hiring great people makes a huge difference.
And, and you can kind of tell the difference in terms of if you've had somebody doing a mediocre job and you hire a, a star that it's like a day and night difference in terms of the way they operate.
It becomes very evident very quickly.
But I also remember talking to you and you also told me kind of you'd also had some challenges with the other side where you'd kept some people on for too long because you wanted to be nice.
Rick Perreault (43:20.790)
Yes.
Yes.
So, yes.
Yeah, I would say that's another thing as founders, you know, where, you know, we, we want to, you know, we actually really early on, I mean, I think the founders were all, we're all pretty nice people.
And early on we actually, we always said UNBAs will be.
We want it to be a place where, you know, where we'll, you know, where we're.
It'll be a nice place to work.
And yeah, I think over years we were not disciplined.
We confused being a nice.
Being nice and a nice place to work and a great place to work.
And with not being, not holding people accountable as much as they should.
So there were some people we hung on to far too long because they became our friends and we cared about them.
And their family.
But at the end of the day, we were doing them a disservice.
And it's like.
And it's amazing.
It's just actually, this is a hard one to learn too, whether you're a founder or in management in general, is that, you know, if you're hanging on to somebody who's not doing a great job, they already know that.
You know, most of the time they know that.
And by letting them go, and it's actually almost every time we've let.
Finally let somebody go because they weren't doing a good job and it just wasn't a fit, they went off and did something even better.
Like they had.
They had their next.
Their real opportunity was that next thing they did.
And I've seen it time.
And they come back and say, rick, I'm so happy you let me go.
My life now is so much better.
I just, yeah, I knew I wasn't cutting it.
But you know, as founders, you hang on because it's like, ah, we want to be nice, you know, and we want to look after people.
And, and so that was actually definitely a lesson learned.
And even.
Yeah, even now, sometimes not as much now, I think, but it's taken a while.
But even, you know, we've gotten a lot better at it.
But that was definitely a challenge for us over the years, all of us, I think as founders.
And I think that's probably a lesson in management.
I don't think I've ever really been good at letting people go.
I think I've always kind of, how long do people.
Too long.
Omer (45:40.380)
All right, let's.
Let's wrap up.
I'm gonna go into the lightning round.
You know the drill.
Seven questions.
Rick Perreault (45:46.260)
Okay.
Omer (45:47.340)
As you can.
Rick Perreault (45:48.060)
All right.
Omer (45:49.180)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Rick Perreault (45:52.620)
Spend company money like it's coming out of your pocket.
Omer (45:56.140)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Rick Perreault (45:59.100)
Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin.
Omer (46:02.380)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Rick Perreault (46:08.900)
Tenacity.
Omer (46:10.740)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Rick Perreault (46:16.100)
Daily walk an hour every day.
Omer (46:19.380)
That's a new one.
I like that.
What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Rick Perreault (46:26.740)
What is that?
The wiki.
Oh, God.
Our internal wiki.
I'd come up with a really user friendly, non technical to these internal wikis.
That's what I would do.
Omer (46:39.150)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Rick Perreault (46:46.270)
I try to spend thinking time.
My Zen moments.
I don't play golf, I don't play sports or anything, but I do like to grow vegetables.
In fact, I came up for the idea of Unbounce the very first year I started gardening.
So I figure it's probably good therapy and good, good, good thinking space.
So I, I, I, I keep a small vegetable garden.
Omer (47:10.780)
Dude, you know, I, I don't know if it's just both of us are at that time of our lives, but, you know, it's something that I've been thinking about as well.
It's just like I look at the yard and I just go, I need to kind of go out there and, and get some green fingers and, and
Rick Perreault (47:24.380)
grow something therapeutic out there.
You know, you're away from your keyboard and you got your hands dirty and you're watching something grow.
It's actually is.
There's a lot of similarities to running a business and growing a business.
I got to talk about this for a while, about how you start from seed and you watch it, you prepare for it, and then, you know, these plants, if you look after them, they'll start producing fruit like a big tomato plant.
You, you look after that well, and it's going to start producing fruit, and it's rewarding.
Yeah.
So it's fun.
Yeah, it really is a lot of fun.
Omer (48:00.400)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Rick Perreault (48:05.280)
Oh, my family, without a doubt.
Omer (48:08.000)
Cool.
Great.
Well, it's been good to catch up after doing the interview almost four years ago, and kind of great to hear what you've been up to and how the business has grown and sort of the lessons and, you know, challenges you've had along the way and how you've dealt with them.
I am going to take you up on your invitation at one point, drive up from Seattle to Vancouver, and come to your offices and hopefully attend your event next year.
Rick Perreault (48:40.230)
That'd be great.
We'd love to have you.
And then we can continue this conversation face to face.
Omer (48:45.430)
Yeah, yeah, that would be a good.
That would be a first, actually.
Maybe we should do that the next time I interview Rick.
It's going to be faced.
Rick Perreault (48:51.370)
That'd be awesome.
Omer (48:52.410)
And then we can compare our beards.
Rick Perreault (48:53.810)
Yeah, we can do that, too.
Omer (48:56.970)
Awesome.
All right, now, if people want to find out more about Unbounce, they can go to unbounce.com and if you want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Rick Perreault (49:06.130)
Rick.com send me an email.
I'd love to chat.
Happy to help.
Omer (49:10.570)
I wish you all the best.
And thanks for taking the time to join me again.
Rick Perreault (49:14.530)
Thank you very much for having me.
Omer (49:16.250)
Cheers.
