Supademo: From Cold Outreach Failure to 7-Figure SaaS – with Joseph Lee [443]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Joseph, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Joseph: Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

[00:00:03] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:06] Joseph: Good question. I. If I had to pick one as a proud Canadian, I gotta go with a hockey quote. It's don't go to where the puck is go to where the puck is going and we know it's the great Wayne Gretzky, right?

[00:00:19] Omer: That comes from so awesome. So tell us about Supademo. What does the product do? Who's it for? What's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:28] Joseph: Totally. So Supademo is an AI powered demo automation platform. So what that means, we help SaaS companies create high converting interactive product demos and tutorials for onboarding, sales enablement, product marketing and a plethora of other use cases.

[00:00:44] Joseph: And really the problem that we're solving is demonstrating how products work, how features work. It's essential. To not just salespeople, but across the stack. Again, in training, in marketing and in enablement. But doing so today is notoriously difficult. So it takes a lot of retakes, rerecording, scripting only to have it be outta date every time your product changes which is a problem that a lot of startups deal with.

[00:01:09] Joseph: We wanted to create a better system and a better product that could help. Alleviate some of those pain points. Great. So just, so for somebody who's listening to this and they're saying, okay, you, you help create demos. What does that look like? What's the output? Is it a video that they can put on their website or present to a potential prospect?

[00:01:27] Joseph: I. Both. Both. So basically, yeah, you turn on the extension, you walk through your product or your feature and Supademo automatically annotates all of the steps, turns it into this guided interactive demo. It's shareable as a link, just a YouTube video and it's fully trackable, but you could also end that it directly into your homepage or your support docs onboarding, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:01:49] Joseph: Yeah.

[00:01:50] Omer: And did I read on the website that you, it you add a level of personalization to the demos as well? What does that mean?

[00:01:56] Joseph: Yeah, so there's different ways you could personalize it. You can obviously like use tokens and variables to automatically personalize your content for I. A variety of different users, whether it's through the URL parameters or through like forms.

[00:02:10] Joseph: Or you can use AI in the actual kind of demo creation, demo editing process to personalize it for whatever audience that you want to tailor it for.

[00:02:20] Omer: Cool. So give us a sense of the size of the business where you today in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.

[00:02:27] Joseph: Totally. Yeah. So we're a pretty lean team.

[00:02:29] Joseph: We're a team of 10. Probably for the first eight months or so. It was just me and my co-founder. So happy to have a little bit more help now on the team revenue side. Last year we went from a hundred k to a million in ARR. So in 2024 grew about double digits every single month.

[00:02:46] Joseph: And yeah, right now we're at about 60,000 free users and a thousand plus paying companies.

[00:02:54] Omer: So a about a year ago you were doing about a 100K in ARR and now you've crossed seven figures. That's correct. Awesome. And I think you've raised about a million dollars as well, right?

[00:03:04] Joseph: Yeah, slightly over a million.

[00:03:06] Omer: Cool. I love that. I love seeing lean teams building stuff. Because in, in many ways it's like when someone, I can't remember who it was, may, maybe it was Adam Robinson on LinkedIn where he was saying he he was at someplace and somebody asked him like, how big your team?

[00:03:23] Omer: And he said, oh, we're this size. And it was like oh, you must not be doing very well then. And it's how, why is the size of team relevant? It's much more about what those people are doing. And I've seen some people do very well building multiple seven figures, having successful exits, and it's like just two people.

[00:03:41] Omer: It's that's pretty impressive to me. So let's break this down a little bit more and I want to, obviously we'll talk about, where the idea came from and how you've built this business so far. But you have an interesting story. This isn't your first startup. Previously you worked on a product, I think it was called something else, I think when you started, but it's called, is it Fresh Line now?

[00:04:05] Joseph: It was called Coastline Market, and then it became Fresh Line, afterwards.

[00:04:08] Omer: Cool. And I think you worked on that business for about eight or nine years.

[00:04:13] Joseph: A long time.

[00:04:14] Omer: Yeah. So just let's talk about that. Tell, let's share that story because I think in some ways it's it's relevant and it's a great story of moments and founder resilience and how to get out of, this, these sort of tough moments. So just tell us like what was the bit, what was the business and who was it for?

[00:04:32] Joseph: Totally. And it's a story of a little bit of stupidity and naivety involved in it as well, which I think you need as a young founder to dive in and just take risks.

[00:04:41] Joseph: But yeah. The original company was called Coastline Market and essentially what we tried to do is we were trying to democratize access to smaller scale fishermen and help small scale fisheries, fishermen sell direct to restaurants, and we would handle all of the logistics of getting, fish in seafood from point A to B, to C to D.

[00:05:03] Joseph: So ultimately we wanted to create a predictive b2B seafood marketplace, helping chefs get fresher ingredients, more traceable, lower priced, and ultimately fishermen would get more money in their pocket. They wouldn't be squeezed for pennies on the dollar. And that's the company that we ended up building for about three years.

[00:05:23] Omer: Okay. Let's take a quick breather here. Are you struggling to bring your SaaS idea to life without a technical co-founder? Gearheart is here to help. They're a product development studio founded by serial entrepreneurs acting as your fractional CTO. They've built over 70 successful products, including Smart Suite, which was named 2024 SaaS Startup of the year.

[00:05:42] Omer: After selling his last company for $200 million, smart Suite's founder turned to Gearheart to build his next big idea. Their Ukrainian born team combines world class expertise with Silicon Valley connections, helping you scale your product faster and smarter. Gearheart's Leadership team even works directly with founders offering deep insight into startup success.

[00:06:01] Omer: Book your free one hour strategy session with their leadership team before the end of May @gearhart.io. That's gearheart.io. When someone thinks they're going out and building a building software. Most people don't start by saying, let's build something for fishermen. So did you have some background in that or connections in that industry that, that drew you to it?

[00:06:25] Joseph: Yeah I think it was just hearkening back on my co-founder of that company his experience growing up in the Maritimes, which is the east coast of Canada and how he would frequently talk to lobster fishermen on the dock that would actually take their boats dock to dock across villages before going to the main packer and selling their catch to the broker.

[00:06:48] Joseph: When he asked that packer or the fishermen, hey, like, why are you going through all this trouble? To sell bits and pieces of your catch before going into the town. That's when we realized that the seafood industry was super antiquated monopolistic fishermen were getting pennies on the dollar.

[00:07:05] Joseph: And from there, we just decided to just dig deeper and learn more and more. So we were two students in university, like flying out to Boston and flying out to Nova Scotia, trying to learn more about the industry and just talk to fishermen and talk to packers to get the lay of the land and then the idea of vault from there.

[00:07:22] Omer: And how long did it take you to build the product and get those initial customers?

[00:07:27] Joseph: For that product we actually started manually. And I actually try to encourage that across all different types of businesses. So what that entailed was we had a dummy front end where restaurants could place holders and we were not dealing with big volumes at the time.

[00:07:42] Joseph: And what that meant is we bought a Ford F-150 truck and I would drive to the dock, pick up the fish from the fishermen on the boat. Put it on the back of the truck. I have so many photos of this. And I would physically drive to the restaurant and do the deliveries.

[00:07:58] Omer: Wow.

[00:07:59] Joseph: It was a painful experience.

[00:08:01] Omer: When you said to me, we did this manually. I had this picture of you in an office getting some kind of orders through the web, picking up the phone and coordinating something. I had no idea. Manually meant manually, like getting in a truck and delivering the fish.

[00:08:20] Joseph: I wish, yeah, no, nothing hardens you as an entrepreneur then getting yelled at by an angry chef at five o'clock because your delivery is late and they're just reaming you out and they're like patriots watching you, and I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry.

[00:08:36] Omer: So I'm assuming you did that because you wanted to validate the idea before you spent a ton of money. And I, and as students, I'm sure you didn't have a lot of money to, to play with. So how long did you do that before you, you turned it into a product?

[00:08:55] Joseph: Yeah. Luckily we only did that for probably like a handful of months three months or so. There were still the odd mistake that would happen where I would need to basically stop coding and rent a car and fix a delivery. That was supposed to happen by a subcontractor, but you're right.

[00:09:11] Joseph: I think what we were trying to do is, Hey, let's fully understand the problem that we're looking to solve by putting ourselves in the shoes of the people, like boots on the ground. And that really helped accelerate the product cycles as we got ready to actually build.

[00:09:26] Omer: And you, I think you eventually grew this business to around 3 million in revenue.

[00:09:35] Joseph: Yeah. Things started ticking. We were automating more and more. We were growing out the headcount. We had a swanky office. We raised the big round. Yeah, ultimately things were going really well and as I think in the midst of us preparing for Series A is when the unfortunate events of Covid hit.

[00:09:51] Joseph: Us being catered towards logistics, seafood high-end restaurants, probably three worst hit sectors of of the economy when it came to the pandemic. Yeah, we were in a position where we essentially lost, 95% of our revenue went from 3 million to probably less than a hundred thousand.

[00:10:10] Omer: Wow.

[00:10:11] Omer: And how much had you raised, how big was your team at that point?

[00:10:16] Joseph: So we were about, I believe we were about 13 people. Don't quote me exact numbers.

[00:10:21] Omer: And how much had you raised?

[00:10:22] Joseph: We raised about 2.5 million at that time.

[00:10:25] Omer: Okay. So I know I lo I talk to a lot of founders who say, hey, COVID was our pivotal moment because suddenly there was more demand for our product, and we started to see all kinds of growth. And for you it was the exact opposite, right? It was the worst time and it was a nightmare probably when you wake up and you realize what suddenly happened. What did you do?

[00:10:50] Omer: Like how did you, were you able to get out of that situation? Turn it around?

[00:10:55] Joseph: Yeah, I think the big thing that we took away after talking to advisors was just having that bias to action. Our investors, our network, everyone was very supportive in us. Basically doing whatever it was necessary to ensure the viability and the health of the business in the long run.

[00:11:11] Joseph: So ultimately what we ended up doing is we went through a series of probably four or five different micro pivots where we went into initially high end grocery delivery and then we went into essentially Shopify for food distributors helping, the distributors and wholesalers that were also struggling.

[00:11:33] Joseph: So our competitors who were also struggling during the midst of the pandemic, helping them set up home deliveries so that they could get some revenue in through the door to then eventually becoming just a white label, the e-commerce and operations platform for distributors.

[00:11:50] Omer: And how long did that process take on these pivots until you, you landed with something that seemed to be working?

[00:11:56] Joseph: I would say the process took about four months, four to six months and it was a very fluid situation. I think what we were trying to do again is not be so beholden to moving in one direction or another, but just, maintaining optionality and being flexible to what the market was demanding and where it was headed 'cause at this point we still didn't know whether restaurants would come back or it wouldn't come back, whether home deliveries would even stick around or not. Basically just taking all the learnings and trying to retrofit everything we had built already in terms of technology to different types of use cases within the industry.

[00:12:36] Omer: Got it. Okay. And then what, what eventually happened? Did you end up selling the business?

[00:12:42] Joseph: No. The business store is running, so it's coming up on, almost 10 years now of operating. Not quite a failure, but definitely not the venture backed success that we obviously raise money on and was we're hoping for.

[00:12:55] Joseph: So are you still involved in that business and like, how much of your time goes into that? I'm no longer involved in the business. So I left back in 2022. I do have a board seat and obviously I'm cheering from the sidelines and helping whenever I'm needed. But yeah, I'm not operationally a part of the company on a day to day.

[00:13:12] Omer: So a couple of years ago, you decide to launch Supademo worlds apart from the world of software for fishermen to sell their catch.

[00:13:21] Omer: Where did the idea come from?

[00:13:23] Joseph: Scratching my own itch. So during that transition from a B2B marketplace to a B2B SaaS product we very much became a sales led organization.

[00:13:34] Joseph: What determined success was how many demos we could get. So it was all about dialing phones, sending cold emails, getting people online to do a screen sharing session. And throughout that process, I think I was familiar with lube and, video based product demos and I was trying to use it to essentially help tech nascent audiences like owners at distribution plants or fishermen better understand what we were doing and why they should care. But it was a very difficult sale. First they didn't understand our marketing language. They didn't wanna watch a 10 minute product video or and sit through it.

[00:14:14] Joseph: They're very impatient. But what I realized is when I did actually manage to get them on a screen sharing session and went through that back and forth interaction in a more engaging, lively two-way street. That's when that light bulb moment hit for them and they're like, holy crap. I need this at my distribution plan.

[00:14:34] Joseph: When can you get started? And obviously you can't scale one to one demos. In the back of my mind I started thinking how do we actually replay and scale this moment of delight of like screen sharing and having that back and forth session that is a lot more interactive and engaging in a much more product led way.

[00:14:54] Joseph: And I had an action upon it for a while. But then eventually after I'd led the company and I was I like to say wandering the wild wilderness, trying to figure out what to do next. That's when I just started throwing spaghetti at the wall and this was one of the things that my co-founder and I ended up building.

[00:15:11] Omer: And did you do any other kind of validation other than scratching your own itch from the experience of your previous business?

[00:15:18] Joseph: Yes. Yeah. Talking to customers, figuring out what are they doing today, what are the workarounds they're going through, and what is the the relative pain of that workaround, whether it's effort based, whether it's time-based, whether it's monetary based.

[00:15:34] Joseph: First of all I came to realize that if they're not going through a workaround, it's probably not a painful enough problem for you to do, for you, for it to be worth solving in the first place. And then I just started digging deeper and deeper and understanding, Hey, how big is this industry?

[00:15:49] Joseph: How much of a propensity do we have to build a product that can carve out a niche? And when some of the math made sense and also the qualitative aspects of do I wanna build this type of product? Made sense. We just decided to go all in and build Supademo.

[00:16:04] Omer: Who was your ICP at the start.

[00:16:08] Joseph: Very different from what it is today, and I think that's just natural as like your product graduates and becomes a little bit more established. Initially it was for the busy founder, so for busy founders that are doing everything we wanted to give them a tool that would allow them to create engaging content, engaging product demos for.

[00:16:30] Joseph: Lateral use cases across their organization in a quick and efficient way and that's the ICP that we really honed in on and focused on in the beginning.

[00:16:39] Omer: And why did you end up picking a different ICP? Was it because you were struggling to get traction, or did you just find that it was a. It wasn't a big enough opportunity.

[00:16:51] Joseph: I think a big proportion of our customer base is still founders, but what I think naturally happened is the willingness to spend, the stickiness of the user as well as the propensity to like land and expand is obviously just greater within an organization that can naturally add seats from product marketing to customer success and in training and to sales versus I think the elasticity and the sensitivity to price is a lot larger in an organization that is sub 10. And not to say we don't wanna service them, but the realities of building a business that is durable over time, you're gonna have to graduate, I think naturally to bigger and bigger customers that are a little bit more consistent.

[00:17:36] Omer: So now it's like larger organizations who maybe have a sales team or a CS team. Is that who you focus on more?

[00:17:43] Joseph: Yeah. I would say our bread and butter is mostly organizations that are above, above 50 in headcount. And we go from there all the way up to, we have several Fortune 100 companies that use us as well.

[00:17:56] Joseph: Again, we don't necessarily dissuade specific types of customers from signing up or finding value or upgrading because we are product -led. We let it in one end. But I would say that's where we deliver the most value and have the stickiest customers.

[00:18:13] Omer: Yeah. No, it makes total sense. And I've seen a lot of founders who, when they start off by scratching their own itch, the obvious ICP is other people like themselves, right?

[00:18:23] Omer: So it's let's find more people who've been struggling with the same thing I have. And let's give them that solution. But the, one of the constraints you're gonna come against against, especially if you're targeting founders who are very early stage is, they're not gonna have a tendency to just splurge out on every new piece of software that comes along versus a larger organization where even if you're charging them a few thousand dollars a month, it's it's no big deal. So that, that makes a huge difference.

[00:18:51] Joseph: And I think you beyond monetary, I think you bring up a good point here, Omer, is also, I think you, it's hard to make your tool become habitual because the founder is wearing so many different hats. What they're doing today can be very different from two weeks from now, and you need that habitual, consistent usage, ideally to have a loyal customer as well.

[00:19:13] Omer: Yeah. Great point. I'm guessing, having somebody, a salesperson might be using it every day versus a founder who's okay, I've gotta do the demos. I have something that works now. Let me spend the rest of the week with the other 79 things I need to do right before I come back and do anything else.

[00:19:31] Omer: I want to talk about how you got some of your initial customers and people often ask me about Reddit. People, I would say, you can't just go on Reddit and pitch your right 'cause it's not gonna go down too well. But you did that, but you had a very unique approach and you were delivering value.

[00:19:53] Omer: Can you talk about what you did there?

[00:19:55] Joseph: Yeah. So I know, reddit, I think as a community can be extremely powerful. But people don't like to be sold to. So my twist on things was how can I insert my product into discussions or create a community where we're talking about the theme of my product without being overly salesy.

[00:20:15] Joseph: So the way I thought about it is, hey, we have a lot of people on Reddit that are early stage founders, that are building and maybe struggle to showcase their product in the right light or explain the benefits in a succinct way. I put out an offer on Reddit saying, Hey, this is who I am, this is what I'm building and I actually want to create product demos for you.

[00:20:41] Joseph: For your use case so that you can utilize this across your sales stack marketing, onboarding, et cetera, et cetera. So I flipped the paradigm on its head where I said, for people that want to opt in, I'm gonna prove value and give you value without anything in return. And if you choose to sign up or subscribe, that's an added bonus, but that's not an expectation.

[00:21:04] Joseph: So what I ended up doing was, Hey, post your SaaS. All you have to do is post your website. I will go through the upfront work and the hassle of signing up for an account, learning about your product, and I will actually create you an interactive guided Supademo. And I'll share an editable link with you so that if you wanna edit it and use it, you can.

[00:21:25] Joseph: But I'm gonna respond to your comment in line so that other people in the community can take a look and say, whoa, that was really cool. I'm gonna check out Supademo, or I'm gonna ask for my product to also be audited and created a demo for. And that ended up actually spiking our first probably a couple thousand signups.

[00:21:46] Omer: Wow. I love that. I love that because you found a way to creatively talk about your product on Reddit. You led with value. A lot of people would've just said, Hey, I'm building this new product, here's my signup link. Let me know what you think, or something like that. You were willing to offer to do the work for them and go the extra mile. I think if you're giving somebody say, Hey, I'm gonna give you an editable link as well, so you can tweak it as well, and you still don't have to buy my product. That's a very hard offer to say no to. And I think it's a great example of, I often hear this, what's the expression?

[00:22:26] Omer: What? Show me. Don't tell me. I think this is a great example of that because every time you're then coming back and posting a demo in the comments everyone's getting a very a very visible way of seeing this product in action, and what it can do and how it can work and so on. So I think that's a great. You were also doing some stuff with product updates that you were receiving, right?

[00:22:48] Omer: What were you seeing there?

[00:22:49] Joseph: So yeah, I would try to subscribe or sign up for as many tools as I possibly could. And I would respond to every single product update. So Airtable sending a product update, Zapier sending a product update. I would literally respond to the product update with the Supademo that I created for that product update, saying, whoa, this was really cool.

[00:23:11] Joseph: I love the new automation feature. It would be even cooler and people would understand the value far better if you embedded this Supademo. In your change log or in your product update. And I would just, again, start with value didn't have as much success with the larger organization. But again, I think any organization that was like, say some 500. They appreciated the gesture. Even if they didn't, use the tool or sign up for the tool a lot of them ended up telling other people about what had just happened.

[00:23:42] Omer: It takes a lot of energy and tenacity to keep doing that day in, day out, and especially if you're replying to a whole bunch of these emails and putting the work in to create demos and you're not getting replies.

[00:23:57] Omer: What, what kept you going?

[00:23:59] Joseph: I think it's always just conviction. Like the first thing I did when, we had our MVP is I made sure that I was the number one power user of our product. So I fully understood every pixel of our product and why it was valuable and because I was using it day in and day out and it was driving results for me.

[00:24:21] Joseph: I had such high conviction that it would drive the same amount of results if used the right way for other people. So I knew that it was a no brainer. And that if I could be tenacious enough and just pound the pavement enough the ball would start rolling. And from there it would get easier and easier.

[00:24:38] Joseph: And it has since then.

[00:24:40] Omer: Love it. You also were telling me that you started SEO. Very early on and but you also coupled that with making sure that your product was embedded in part of the content. Can you talk about that? Like maybe start with like how you came up with that idea or strategy and then how did you go about.

[00:25:03] Joseph: Yeah, on any execution the strategy was actually derived from something similar that Zapier does. So I think Zapier is very well known for doing programmatic SEO very well, where they will have keywords, for example, integrate Google Docs with. Why, and they'll always come up first for it.

[00:25:24] Joseph: And they've set up a beautiful structure for doing that. And obviously in doing so, they put their product front and center. There's like an embed of how to do that exactly on Zapier. I wanted to emulate something similar where people are naturally searching for high volume keywords.

[00:25:40] Joseph: How to export frames on Figma as PDFs. Obviously very low intent keyword when it comes to product demos, but it's a search term that we can easily position ourselves and explain to the viewer using an interactive Supademo that's embedded in inside of a webpage. We created an engine essentially that allows us to turn that out at scale where we.

[00:26:04] Joseph: Just get someone to create hundreds of these demos and then we create these programmatic templates where people search for it, they find it, they click through the demo, they get to value faster, and the hope is a sliver of them. Look at that and say, Hey, that was a really awesome experience. I could probably utilize this for other use cases at my organization.

[00:26:25] Omer: I, I love that. So initially when you talked about that, I was thinking, okay, so you were doing. You were creating content and by embedding your product, you were showing people how to create demos, but this was quite different because you were focusing on you tasks that people were trying to complete with certain software and then showing them a demo.

[00:26:56] Omer: How to do that. That's pretty meta. How did you figure out which, for that type of scenario. Zapier is very good at that, but I'm sure they have a huge content up slash marketing team or whatever, when you're a startup and I assume it was just, you too at the time, like how do you decide what types of keywords you're gonna focus on initially?

[00:27:23] Joseph: I think you obviously want to focus on. Products that are in the periphery of tools where maybe there's overlap in the ICP. I definitely didn't wanna go after tools that are used by, for example, insurance companies where like none of those viewers would ever convert. But if someone is looking for.

[00:27:43] Joseph: A screenshot tool or if they're looking for tutorials on Loom, we know that there's enough overlap where if somebody has a good experience, they're gonna convert. From the research side, it's just doing the work on Ahrefs, looking at keywords, looking at identifying products that we want to target.

[00:28:00] Joseph: And in a similar vein, we did something similar, more middle of funnel where people are looking for product demos, right? They're looking for a product demo of Canva or Product Demo of Linear and oftentimes for most of these sales led organizations. All of those demos are gated. So you have to talk to a salesperson and do that work.

[00:28:22] Joseph: So if we can do some of that work and create kind of an interactive demo that provides a high level overview of that demo, and again, follow the same strategy and try to place ourselves for Canva product demo then a portion of them are gonna see that and say, whoa, it's really cool that I can see this demo without talking to a salesperson.

[00:28:42] Joseph: I should do the same thing for my website and have a product demo page.

[00:28:47] Omer: So wait you were putting these demos on your own website? Exactly. And then basically saying you want the demo, the actual product you're gonna have to sign up for, but you can just come to our website and just see it without.

[00:29:02] Omer: Signing up or anything. Yeah. Interesting. I know that when we were talking earlier, the sort of the growth strategies and tactics we talked about that got you to, probably like the first thousand or so signups. Before we talk about some of the other things that you did I wanna talk about.

[00:29:24] Omer: This focus you had on being product led. You had come from this sales led background and that's what you had been doing day in, day out for years. You are building a product now to help people be more effective with sales led. A GTM, but at the same time, your own business, you want to be product led which makes sense.

[00:29:55] Omer: But tell me about some of the challenges you experienced trying to do that.

[00:30:00] Joseph: It can be very difficult as a founder if you have reached certain milestones or have built, a company that has gotten to a certain level of traction and gone through the rigors of daily company building to come back to 0.0 and have to restart and shed everything you have learned and start all over again.

[00:30:23] Joseph: So I think you need to shed your ego. You need to forget everything that you have learned. 'cause that could actually impede your ability to execute, especially if you are operating in a wholly new industry. I ended up endeavoring into, so I came from a very sales led enterprise-Y B2B startup to very much a sa product led lightweight B2B opportunity.

[00:30:49] Joseph: So I think, that is very difficult. And when you are especially product led you don't have the luxury of pitching every single customer yourself and selling them on the mission and vision. So you need to be so intricate and detail oriented and intentional about every little thing that you ship out, whether it be messaging.

[00:31:12] Joseph: Craftsmanship of the product or the features that you're shipping. So yeah, it was a huge challenge.

[00:31:17] Omer: Give me an example of a struggle you had with getting product led working because I know it was a tough transition to make and, you had. You told me it was demoralizing and also you didn't have much runway left at the time, and there was this pressure to get some traction quickly.

[00:31:37] Omer: But maybe give me an example of, one of the struggles with product led.

[00:31:40] Joseph: Yeah. I think there's a common fallacy and misconception that if you build an amazing product people will come. And we dealt with that too, right? We had, what we felt was a really exceptional product. And I also bought into this notion of, Hey, if we just have the best product possible, we're just gonna get customers.

[00:32:01] Joseph: And this was, again, before me, like pounding the pavement and posting on Indie hackers and posting on Reddit and doing all these things that weren't scalable. And, that was a difficult lesson to, to try to learn. ‘Cause we were spending so much time on the craftsmanship and the details with the product.

[00:32:19] Joseph: And I realized if people aren't hearing our story and seeing our product being distributed doesn't matter how good our product is gonna be.

[00:32:25] Omer: And all you had going was, was you started SEO pretty early, but we all know that, it doesn't happen overnight and all the other things you were doing were very non-scalable things. Which so you have no predictability?

[00:32:41] Omer: No. I guess you get these little peaks and troughs of, oh, this thing worked. I got a few signups today, next three days, nothing. And then something else. Tell me about like how that changed. What did you start doing to get, stop doing the non-scalable things and start getting more predictable leads.

[00:33:07] Joseph: I think the unscalable things are a necessary evil for you to get to a certain benchmark. Then naturally I think the snowball starts getting bigger and bigger and you end up getting more organic traffic, more brand mentions establisher kind of identity in the space. I wouldn't say there was like a single thing that got us there.

[00:33:30] Joseph: I would always like to say success in startups at different points. It's like a microcosm of a million different things that led to and bubbled up to the output that you wanted. So I think it, for us it was, Hey, let's do whatever is necessary, throw spaghetti at the wall and get us to a certain level of traction.

[00:33:50] Joseph: But at the same time, let's be really measured and intentional about trying to establish not 10 channels, but starting with one channel that is predictable, where we can accurately say if we put X amount of effort in, we're gonna get y amount of value or output. And then once that is established, then looking at the next month and say our focus this month, this to add one more channel and then one more channel.

[00:34:18] Joseph: And obviously you can't linearly add scalable channels, but that ended up getting us to three to five channels that are working like clockwork. And even today, we're just shipping new channels and new experiments to try to get us to 5, 6, 7, 8 different ones.

[00:34:34] Omer: How long do you typically run an experiment for before you know whether it's worth continuing with the channel or ditching it?

[00:34:42] Omer: I see a lot of founders who they know they should be testing channels, but the longer you do it, the harder it becomes to walk away from it, especially if you are getting some conversion, right? If you do something for six weeks and you get nothing, you're like, okay, let's just try something else.

[00:35:03] Omer: But if you get like a few leads coming in and you're like, oh there's some signs of life here. We should do more of this. But then it never really takes off. So what was that experience like for you and when, how did you decide when to say enough is enough?

[00:35:15] Joseph: I think it depends on the channel.

[00:35:17] Joseph: And I think when it comes to unclear results, I think that's a common mistake that a lot of founders have is being wishy-washy about the experiment and the output and the hypothesis of what is success and what is failure? You should be pretty concrete about your timelines and the amount of time or the results that you would like to derive from the experiment.

[00:35:40] Joseph: And it should be clear cut whether, it doesn't mean that you, that is a bad channel. We should never do it but if it doesn't meet. The benchmark from your hypothesis, that just means you need to set it to the side and do something else. So I think that's a common thing that founders, including myself struggle with day in and day out.

[00:35:58] Joseph: Results wise, again, yeah, I would say it depends to give you a specific example, one of the experiments that we ran was, Hey what if we could ungate our entire product? We're all about time to value. How do we get people to the aha moment and our hypothesis was, hey the signup process is actually impeding people's ability to like, see value more quickly.

[00:36:21] Joseph: So we made our entire product experience on gated, and as a byproduct of that, one of the benefits was we could then now spin up bits and pieces of our product as free tools without building anything new. For example, we already in our product had the ability to add hotspots to screenshots or we had a feature where you could edit screenshots.

[00:36:44] Joseph: So we would take that module and create an SEO optimized a free tools page where we optimized for the keyword free online screenshot editor and made it completely ungated so that someone looking for that search term could come on board, edit the screenshots, do everything they needed to do without signing up.

[00:37:03] Joseph: And at the bottom they would see, Hey, do you create product demos? And and you're like having a tough time scripting and re-recording. You might like Supademo. So that those set of free tools pages they drive probably 50% if not more of our traffic. And that experiment took probably.

[00:37:23] Joseph: Like a week to figure out whether it was successful because it just shot up, like in the organic SEO front, where within days it was ranking number one for a search query that was tens of thousands per month.

[00:37:35] Omer: That's smart.

[00:37:36] Omer: I, I remember talking to Sabba the founder of veed.io and they did something very similar where they were making.

[00:37:43] Omer: Like screen capture, screen recorders, all this type of stuff. And you could start using the tools before you ever had to sign up and, get into the product. But also there's always the risk. You're like, I'm gonna have all these people using this stuff. And I don't even have an email address.

[00:38:01] Omer: Were you, like, how were you coping with that and was the belief just if we get enough people seeing these tools. Some of them will actually sign up and then, and then maybe they'll be more qualified.

[00:38:14] Joseph: I think how we thought about it is let's focus on the tools that are, again, within our vicinity of ICP.

[00:38:22] Joseph: So what are product marketers using? What are CSMs using? What are founders using? And even if it's not the highest. Search volume tool will focus on that because the propensity for them to cross ate onto our tool is way, way higher. And that thesis has proven to be true because roughly 11, 12% of everyone that jumps onto the free tools page ends up converting as a signup.

[00:38:47] Joseph: So that's a pretty big number. Numbers we couldn't get just by our product and trhttps://saasclub.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/tools-and-materials-used-for-fashion-designing-4XD3MX3.jpgional SEO alone. So you're not gonna see us. Do a free tools for a pricing calculator. It's just not in our scope. And we heavily emphasize and try to use our existing product instead of building something new.

[00:39:07] Joseph: I think engineering hours, obviously, maybe not anymore with AI, but it used to be very expensive. So we would basically only use stuff that we had already created and just create a page for it.

[00:39:17] Omer: Lately I've been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn where people are showing these graphs of, HubSpot traffic tanking. I don't know if you've seen those. And they're like, oh yeah, this is the end of SEO and blah, blah, blah. I think it's natural that, you are gonna have some changes happening with, how much AI is being used and, I find myself using Google less and less.

[00:39:43] Omer: But at the same time I've seen, anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people who. Have done nothing to optimize themselves for showing up in the LLMs, but they're still getting traffic through there. So it's almost if you're doing some best practices and providing valuable content, whether you are optimizing it for Google or chat GPT, the chances are you're still gonna get some upside.

[00:40:06] Omer: But have you been seeing a decline in your organic search traffic like Google traffic. But overall what's the story?

[00:40:13] Joseph: It's tough to say in a certain, just because as organic search has gone down, we have been ramping. We haven't seen the effects 'cause we're not at scale, right? We're very much at the precipice of growing.

[00:40:27] Joseph: But with that being said, Omer, I think you bring up a very good point. I think if you've done all the fundamentals well and you have structured, valuable content that's not gonna be ignored by Chat GPT and perplexity and clo and all these tools. And like you mentioned, we, we haven't done as much optimization on the AI search side of things, but we are seeing an increasing number of people finding us because we have the authority with trhttps://saasclub.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/tools-and-materials-used-for-fashion-designing-4XD3MX3.jpgional SEO and we have the link building and we have the domain authority.

[00:40:57] Joseph: And that translates directly into being cited right by AI.

[00:41:01] Omer: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating kind of change we're going through and. I dunno what the answers are, but I know if we boil it down to first principles, it still is about create valuable content. And I. There may be some tactical things you need to do differently to to reach the right people on different platforms and so on.

[00:41:24] Omer: But that's, anyway, that's my opinion.

[00:41:26] Omer: Did you try outbound?

[00:41:28] Joseph: We did. Yeah. And it completely flopped. Yeah. It has not been a great channel for us.

[00:41:34] Omer: Why do you think that is? 'cause you're getting clearer about your ICP. You can potentially do the outreach and send them a demo of their product or something.

[00:41:43] Omer: I'm sure you were probably doing that given. You've, you done a lot of that from day one. Why do you think outbound hasn't worked?

[00:41:51] Joseph: I think generally, I think there's increasing noise in inboxes. You probably I know I have probably gotten 50 to a hundred junk sales emails just today.

[00:42:01] Joseph: So I think there's a lot of noise to cut through and to cut through the noise. You need to be exceptional at sales. And for us as a product led organization we don't have as much resources and effort carved out for turning outbound into a really methodical, successful machine. I think it's a misconception that just hiring a BDR and getting a CRM and getting some tools and warm warming up your domain or your email and sending out outbound is gonna solve it.

[00:42:31] Joseph: I, I just don't think that is the case. There's so much more to sales, whether it's like deliverability, messaging, cleaning leads, motivating staff timing that. Needs to be right in order for you to be successful. I think it has to be a huge focus of your organization for you to get it right. So for us we don't have the time, nor did it.

[00:42:51] Joseph: Did we give it the attention that it deserves for it to be proved true or false? So we ended up saying, Hey, at this point with our lean team, with our growth motion, we just we'd rather not do it, rather than do it poorly.

[00:43:06] Omer: Yeah, I agree with you. I think the noise is much greater now and more people are using AI tools to do outbound. And there used to be a time when I used to try to reply to every single email that I got, even if it was just to say no thanks, or something like that. And now that's just not a scalable thing to do. And so I've actually gone the opposite because I realized that, one of the most valuable things we have is your attention.

[00:43:33] Omer: And if you're in your inbox and it's just getting filled with random emails even, even if you're just gonna open it to look at it and decide you are not, it's not relevant or whatever. Just getting back to focus on doing things is a really hard thing to do for me especially and so I'm more, more these days about, okay, look, I can't reply to everything.

[00:43:57] Omer: What if people are using AI tools to, to bombard my inbox? What are the AI tools I can use to filter out those emails to only get the right stuff through? And hopefully, the people who are making more of an effort will get through those filters and, and. We can still talk, but yeah it's, it is more of a challenging thing to do.

[00:44:15] Joseph: A funny pattern that I've seen is more people are getting through the noise by getting AI to make mistakes in the subject line. So misspelling five years ago you would never respond to a cold email that had your name spelled wrong. But now it, it's actually a differentiator.

[00:44:31] Joseph: You look at it and you're like, oh, this definitely wasn't AI written. So it caught my attention, which is funny.

[00:44:37] Omer: Isn't that what spammers do as well? They do this stuff, they write, you write these ridiculous, they write these ridiculous emails and you look at it and you're like, who would respond to something like this?

[00:44:46] Omer: And that's what they're counting on. It's like the people I think who, who would respond to that are probably gonna be like their ICP. It's a, it's a really sad state of things. Okay, great. Great conversation. I think we should wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round and I've got seven quick five questions for you.

[00:45:02] Omer: Ready roll.

[00:45:03] Joseph: Yeah, let's do it.

[00:45:04] Omer: .All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:45:07] Joseph: Take the leap of faith. Just start.

[00:45:10] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:45:13] Joseph: The Happiness Advantage. I think it goes into the science why happiness and having positive outlook can actually change the physiology of your thinking and your body itself.

[00:45:24] Omer: That's the one by Shawn Achor.

[00:45:27] Joseph: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:45:28] Omer: Yeah. I had this I had this guy who turned up at my place today to work on the shutters, and he was the most positive, optimistic guy I've ever come across. And I was like, you know when I'm feeling down, I'm gonna call your office and make up an excuse.

[00:45:45] Omer: And he was like yeah just tell them something's wrong with one of your shutters and I'll be round and I'll cheer you up, man. It's like love, love that people like that. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:46:00] Joseph: I would say pragmatic grit. So not just grit, but being pragmatic about when to be gritty and not give up.

[00:46:07] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:46:10] Joseph: I like to do wim hof so like breathing exercises. So sometimes it's a good substitute for coffee.

[00:46:17] Omer: What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:46:20] Joseph: You know what? I would, when I am FU rich I would love to start a restaurant and just be that crazy boss that is in the kitchen.

[00:46:31] Omer: Ordering the fish.

[00:46:33] Joseph: Yeah.

[00:46:33] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:46:37] Joseph: I'm ambidextrous, so depending on the sport, I either play left-handed or right-handed.

[00:46:43] Omer: Oh, that's gotta be an advantage. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:46:49] Joseph: I'd say sports.

[00:46:50] Joseph: I've grown up playing sports since like pretty much since I was born. I've played organized sports my entire life. I think it's a really good conduit to turning off your brain as someone that has like a DHD and is always on. I think sports are often the only way for me to just be. Purely focused at the moment and not think cool.

[00:47:11] Omer: All right, so if people want to check out Supademo, they can go to Supademo.com and that's super supademo.com. And if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:47:23] Joseph: They can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

[00:47:25] Omer: Okay, awesome. We'll include a link in the show notes to your LinkedIn profile.

[00:47:30] Omer: Thank you Joseph. Great conversation. Really enjoyed chatting with you. Congratulations on going from basically zero to seven figures in two years. Looking forward to see where you take this business next, and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:47:46] Joseph: Thank you for having me.

[00:47:47] Omer: It's my pleasure.