Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's episode is part two of the interview with Tim Sekou of tint.
In episode 54, we explored how Tim launched his business from an idea into a seven figure business.
In this episode, we're going to get tactical and learn how Tint was able to reach profitability in just three months after launch.
And we'll talk about the step by step process that Tim and the team at Tint went through to go from Nothing to over $400,000 in revenue per month in about two years.
Let's talk about a little bit more about some of the things that you did to, to get traction in those early days.
Now I'd love to sort of get a little deeper, a little bit more tactical.
The WIX deal was obviously a big player in getting you, you know, in getting you Distribution.
Tim Sae Koo (01:25.210)
Distribution, yeah.
Omer (01:26.410)
But what else were you doing?
Were you guys doing content marketing?
Tim Sae Koo (01:31.090)
Exactly, exactly.
So two main things, aside from the partnership we made that really helped us scale the amount of users and the customers and exposure to give you a quick premise, 90% of our business today is inbound.
And that was not by mistake.
It was built from the ground up.
Ever since the beginning, two things.
First, one was just the support I was offering.
So like I mentioned in the beginning or ever throughout this interview that I offered my time and I was very serious about that.
But I said, here's my direct number.
Text me if you want to, if you need to have some emergencies like text me.
And having that sort of relationship obviously doesn't scale.
But in the beginning, again, you need to do whatever it takes to like build that relationship, get the money, close the deal.
I went through my, I backed up my promises by being there and available for all our users.
And then after each event or after each implementation or after a few months of them using it, I would ask them very kindly and say, hey, you know, would you be able to help me find some other potential customers that would be very like, we would find this solution very valuable.
So what I did was I emailed them and I said, I think you did a fantastic job with your implementation.
I love it.
I want to be able to showcase that with your peers or your other network people in your network.
Is there an opportunity for you to do one of three things?
One, here's a pre canned Text to just share on on Facebook or Twitter, you know, and I would that pre canned text would be like, you know, I'm using tint to do this, should check them out, right, Something like that.
Secondly, if you don't want to do that, do you have maybe three emails of people that you know relative in this industry or you know, other people that have this title but in a different industry that you can pass on to me?
I'll make sure I reference you.
I'll make sure I'll be very respectful and politeful and I won't make you look bad at all.
I want to bolster what you did already and make you look good.
If they don't want to do that, the last one was here again is a pre canned text email that shows exactly what we do and a contact information to me.
And if you don't want to give me an email, maybe here's an email that you can just send off to three other people.
And I made it so easy that they can choose one of three options and that started generating deal flow very quickly as well.
Like we started to be able to get introduced to other big brands that we never thought we could be able to.
But obviously they will take the meeting because they got referred by an individual they trusted and I got in real quickly.
So if you can provide the support, create the relationship, you can make the ask after you have some success with that, that client.
The second thing was, did you want to ask a question about that?
Omer (04:17.350)
Yeah, I was going to say that those are really good tactical steps that I think that anybody could start implementing with their customers today.
But it doesn't sound like you're building an inbound marketing.
You know, it sounds more like you're building a sales machine with that in that model.
Tim Sae Koo (04:38.110)
For me, it made sense at that time we were, yeah, we were closing deals.
I mean we were a B2B company so we had to close deals and sales and we needed to bring revenue.
And so in that case, yes, it was trying to generate a sales model.
And again, even till today, like I get emails saying like, hey, I want to introduce you to so and so because they, I saw that they need probably something like this and we had success with you.
So I want to make sure you guys are helping them or they can make sure that they can use your solution.
So it was more of a, yeah, you're right, more of a deal flow solution.
Not as quote unquote scalable.
But my second point is really addressing that scalability, which is content marketing.
So every Week, me and the co founders and I wear would write one to two blog posts every week, whether it's related to the social media industry, digital marketing industry, entrepreneurship, startup, tax tips and tricks.
We wanted to share everything we learned to the world, and it was providing free advice, trying to be a thought leader in the space and ultimately have people share out that content and be exposed very quickly to many other marketers or many other digital marketers that would be potential leads or customers to our solution.
So that's actually what helped us grow a lot.
So we blogged a lot.
We also created special landing pages for certain keywords that matched our product.
So that's another hack and tip that I would suggest anybody, which is create specific landing pages fully cater to the keyword that you think your customer or your user will be searching for.
And the reason behind that is just SEO.
So right now, if you search like best Twitter widget or best Instagram widget on Google, we're probably your first three results.
And that thing gets searched many, many, many, many, many, many, many times a month.
And so we focus a lot on SEO and content marketing as a scalable way to generate a lot of exposure.
We would have people subscribe to our blog and we would shoot them email newsletters every month for the new blogs.
And it's just free content, great, practical content that they can learn from and if they like it, they can share it.
And before you know it, you get exposed to that marketing world, in our case, our target market, and get more exposed and get more deal flows coming in potentially.
Omer (06:59.280)
How are you figuring out what type of content to create?
You know, was this about stuff that you were experiencing yourselves or were you actually looking at saying, hey, here's almost like a Persona of our ideal customer and here are the things that they care about.
What was the process you went through?
Tim Sae Koo (07:17.690)
We did both, obviously from the startup entrepreneurship tactics.
It was things we faced and we love connecting with the entrepreneurship world.
And entrepreneurs are typically very well connected in other spaces.
So if we can reach to them, maybe they can expose us that way.
So any sort of entrepreneurship failures that we learn, successes that we went through, we would share that very quickly, very easily, no problem.
At the same time, we wanted to make sure we hit our industry properly.
So we would look at, you know, Google Ad.
There's a Google AdWords keywords tool that allows you to see how many times a certain search term is searched for per month.
And we would search for like, you know, what are problems people are facing?
We would think, like, what problems People are facing in the social media world at that time in 2013, it was all about like getting more followers or getting more exposure.
So we started searching up like, you know, what is the number of search terms done a month for how to get more followers on Instagram, for example?
Obviously a lot.
And so we would then come up, we would do our research, come up with a very practical guideline on how to get more followers, and we get a ton of traffic on that.
Because people are constantly searching and get exposed to our blog doesn't mean they have to purchase from us.
At least they know they recognize us as a social media thought leader and, and they get exposed to our product.
And so anytime they have conversations with people about like, hey, I need a social wall display.
And then they'll be like, oh yeah, I know about this company Tint.
I might have forgotten how I found about them because it's been so long.
And I read a blog post about them, but it just comes to their head because they were exposed to that.
Omer (08:46.260)
Were you doing any guest posting or were you publishing on your own blog and then sort of figuring out how to distribute?
Tim Sae Koo (08:54.180)
We did both as well.
So one, I'll kind of address both of them on our blog.
When we posted on it, we would first make sure we SEO the crap out of it, which means making sure the keyword that we focus on is all around the page, all around the content, even in the description of the images.
We would make sure that the keywords were that.
We would then distribute it on sites like Quora.
So anytime someone searched for relative questions, we would actually paste the whole blog.
We wouldn't paste our link because that's shady in our opinion.
We would make sure we share the whole blog.
They didn't even have to come to our website.
But we get a lot of upvotes for that.
People feel like it's more genuine.
People feel like we are actually trying to help them out.
And so we did that on core a lot.
We posted on Reddit, hacker news, kind of social media blogs as well.
And again, we would post the whole thing so that people knew that we weren't trying to trick them into link baiting them into our site.
And then on the guest blog side, yeah, I would do some guest blogs.
People, people would put some guest blogs on here.
We would do trades.
And that is a great way to get exposed very quickly to a whole new subset of customers that you don't have access to, but your guest blogger that you partnered up with do.
And then sometimes you don't ask for anything in return.
All you say is, can you have just a link back to us?
But I'll spend time to write some great content for your readers and then host on your blog.
But, but all I ask for in return is a link back to our site at the same time, either on the top or bottom.
It's going to give you an SEO boost on the keywords that you keep optimizing for because your URL now is living on another site.
So there's always benefits for guest blogging and having your URL on another person's site.
Omer (10:36.560)
How did you figure out which sites to go and guest post on?
I mean, you probably want, your resources are limited.
You probably want to focus on sites where you know that your target customers are going to be spending some time.
Tim Sae Koo (10:51.180)
Absolutely.
So like it would be like anything social media blog related.
Right.
So like, I would research, you would definitely want to research all the other blog posts that they've written and make sure it matches something that you can feel confident and have thought leadership on and actually provide value to the readers.
The way to approach the guest blogger at the same time is, is to say, you know, I thank you so much for that article that I read about, you know, what you blogged about.
Learned a lot from it.
I thought it might be great for your audiences and readers to maybe learn a little bit more about this.
And I so happen to be really good at that and I love to share a blog post or guest blog post on that.
Would you be interested?
Right.
So that's the approach I did.
And again, it was like, what's in it for them?
You focus on that and what's in it for them and is making sure their readers are getting more value.
And so if you can position it that way, they'll most likely say, yeah, sure, just make sure you have this and that and then, you know, make sure you're timely with it and then submit it to them afterwards.
Omer (11:48.560)
And so, you know, it's interesting that you said, you know, you weren't trying to link bait.
You were posting the entire contents of a post into Quora or, you know, wherever else that you were sharing this content.
Were you doing anything deliberate to try and convert that reader into a user
Tim Sae Koo (12:09.210)
or a customer after they got onto our site?
So on each blog post we would have an example of a tint on there so people could just see right there what it actually does.
And we would have call to actions on the top of each blog post because they're on your site.
You get to control that flow.
From then on, they showed interest in your brand in some form or manner and now you need to control your fate on trying to convert them.
So we would have called actions on the top, call to actions on the bottom.
We would have maybe a pop up after they spent X amount of time on it to see if they wanted to subscribe or even just check out what we did.
And then making sure it's very easy on the navigation to go into the homepage to see what people what you're doing.
Because typically after you read something and you're like, yes, I'm in agreement with them.
These people are smart, they're a thought leader.
Who are they and what do they do?
It's a very natural curiosity for many.
And so making sure that you have that opportunity on the nav bar to access that is key as well.
Omer (13:07.210)
Okay, so you went from hitting $90,000 a month within nine months of launch, and then the next big milestone was 14 months and you are now doing $290,000 in monthly revenue.
What do you attribute that growth to?
What happened in those six months?
Tim Sae Koo (13:32.820)
Yeah, we did a lot of crazy things.
Again, it was super messy and we still are cleaning that up a little bit here and there nowadays.
But it gave us a lot of confidence in the market that we were trying to attack at the same time.
It helped us generate some market share to block out some of the other competitors coming on or trying to attack us at the same time.
So a couple things we did.
One was we.
I still live by making sure our support is really key.
So we implemented a lot of support tools all around the site.
One namely called Olark.
That's the live chat widget.
You'd be surprised how many deals we closed just on that widget.
Because people love live chats and the last thing they want is like friction to actually purchase.
So when we live chat with people, we just say, what can we do?
Answer the question.
Ready to purchase.
Here you go.
So flows were like within the minutes versus days.
Omer (14:26.320)
Now I had Ben Congleton, the co founder, on the show.
There you go.
Yeah, I met him before.
Tim Sae Koo (14:30.640)
He's awesome.
Omer (14:31.400)
Yeah, awesome guy.
All right, so one point for Odo.
Tim Sae Koo (14:35.160)
Yeah, support there.
We also experimented, like discount deals for doing annual plans.
So we were trying to generate more cash flow to feel more secure in the bank because again, we didn't raise any money and then did a lot of annual deals at that time too.
So we said like, if you're willing to commit to us for a year, we'll give you like, you know, X percentage off and, you know, here's our potential roadmap that we're going to be building out.
So you can expect, you can have some expectations on what we're looking at to build and you know, we'll be, we'd be excited to work with you.
So there's that.
And then we obviously started growing our team.
So, like, one of me can only do so much, but I replicated and duplicated myself multiple times to have like four or five people pretty much doing the similar things that we're doing.
The interesting thing also with that is a big play into that is also the culture.
So what I mean by that is when you have more of me doing those sales, obviously you want to find a way to like make sure they're compensated well and fairly, but not get too competitive and have commissions.
Right?
Because the last thing you want is have some sort of internal debate and competition on like commissions and it makes the customer feel so awkward that they don't know who to go to.
Who, who should they be talking to?
Extending the life cycle of the sales cycle.
It's not fun.
So what I did in the culture was we took away commission structure and we only hired people that believed in this model in that everybody on the team would get a fair piece of the profit that we make on that monthly basis.
And so everybody had a stake in the game.
Now the developers were willing to build out things quicker and fix the bugs because they had a stake in the game.
The marketing people were willing to find more people in a quicker pace and qualified leads because they had a stake in the game.
And the sales people now wouldn't be fighting each other for, you know, this, my, this is mine, this is not yours.
Because everybody has a stake in the game in a fair manner for all the profits that we made at the end of the month.
At the same time, you know, I've talked to other sales companies and they say like, you know, they'll do a round robin.
Obviously it's, that's the most fair thing to do in a commission model.
The reason why we didn't think that was right for us was because what if someone was really good in the education industry, but now because of the round robin, they had to be passed on to someone that didn't really know much but had an awkward and hard time to even close them and the likelihood of closing them would be much smaller.
So in our case, all deals went to everybody and first person who saw that they wanted that or they were excited about it or they knew a lot of knowledge about it, they would go after it.
So because deal flow was given to everybody, some people were like working late, some people like working early.
The timeframe of us getting to a customer was within five minutes after they requested a demo or they had a question.
We were so fast at responding to them even on Olaric that deal flows were getting closed much, much quicker than having some sort of system that was trying to account for something that we just didn't believe in, which was the commission model.
And that could have extended the life cycle of the sales cycle so much more.
Instead now we just focus on serving the customer, closing the deal and continually moving forward with them.
Omer (17:35.650)
Okay, okay.
So you have, you have certain types of customers who come along to the site, they like what you guys are doing, they pick a plan and off they go.
Tim Sae Koo (17:49.170)
Yep.
Omer (17:50.210)
You have other types of customers who probably are more, you know, maybe enterprise type customers who maybe will say I want a demo.
Tim Sae Koo (18:02.060)
Right, Correct.
Omer (18:03.420)
So just give me a quick overview of what the process is behind there.
What does that sales cycle look like with that type of customer on your site?
Tim Sae Koo (18:12.940)
Yeah, so a typical sales cycle will be someone comes onto our site, they look around, they look at their clients, look at the pricing, they can request a demo or they can go through a seven day trial, free trial, everything's unlocked.
And that's something very rare in our industry for some reason, I don't know why, but you know, typically it's a little expensive to host all this and so we're willing to take that cost to make it a very self service and get the customer to really trust us.
So two main actions and we try to bring it very easy which is, you know, you can request a demo or you can request a trial.
I mean go into a trial automatically by yourself.
If you're ready to purchase, you can purchase on our pricing page, no problem.
That's actually another difference between us and our competitors, which is our competitors like just charge by custom pricing.
So obviously you need to talk to someone.
It's of kind going to extend the life cycle, the sales cycle for us, all the pricing is exposed.
If you want a super custom plan, then you can talk to us.
Obviously you'll probably want to pay more and we're willing to spend that, invest that time with you.
But you can just purchase on a pricing page right then and there.
So when you request a demo, we'll go through a demo.
We'll actually qualify them first.
We'll have a.
Right now we have what we call like a qualifier, make sure they're actually a customer that would find value in us.
Then we'll pass it off to a demo.
We do the demo, we close them and we pass them off to a strategist so they, they can dedicate their time.
Now pretty standard sales team model, but we make sure we follow it in a way that everybody feels like it's fair and everybody has a stake in the game again.
So that's the cycle for someone who requests a demo, typically an average life cycle or sorry sales cycle for that ranges from one week to two weeks tops.
Unless you're talking about a big enterprise deal that may take maybe one or two months.
But because our platform is very focused on self serve, pricing is all there, all the information is exposed to you, we're not going to stop you from upgrading.
We have even self service coming in every day as well and we don't have to do anything, which is great and obviously a very ideal thing for a lot of entrepreneurs in the software space.
So it works for some companies, it doesn't work for others.
Obviously our preference is if it works.
We're definitely going to try to go in the self service model.
We want to position ourselves as a technology company, be as transparent with our pricing, let them purchase it, let them trial it and we're here for support.
Omer (20:30.040)
What has been one of the hardest things about building this business?
Tim Sae Koo (20:34.680)
Yeah, I think it's right now, which is like a combination of like.
So we grew from four people at the beginning of last year, 2014 to 22 people at the end of 2014.
So like 20, we're 2024 now.
And you know, it's about this is my first company and so I think one of the biggest challenges is how to work with a growing team effectively, effectively.
And when I mean effective, I mean like they will all want to possibly work on this company for the next two to five years of their lives.
Right.
Like there's a lot of times when companies grow too fast and you know, turnover rate within the first year is huge.
I don't want it like that.
I want to build an organic, sustainable company.
So if big challenge today in growing this company is like how do you account for those opinions and making sure that they feel like they have a stake in the game in terms of being able to make a huge impact in the company but also move efficiently.
That's so hard because obviously you want to account for 22 people's opinions, 24 people's opinions on stuff, but you gotta move fast on certain things as well.
So sometimes you can't ask for that.
And so it's a very delicate balance.
And I think a lot of that to solve for that right now is to make sure that we all trust each other full heartedly.
Which means that, you know, if I had to make a call, you understand that I had to make a call.
But it's because of this thing and they trust me on that.
Obviously you'll do that not too many times more.
So try to get some good feedback and create a feedback loop that's very efficient.
So I'd say that's one of the challenging things on the, on the culture side, operations side and then on the company side, business side.
Now it's about making sure we track everything properly.
And it's a very data driven numbers game now, which means that, you know, we're getting this much revenue per month, how do we get to the next stage?
And that means that we can't just be guess and checking anymore.
It's about making sure we invest the money properly in certain areas of the company and we need to track that all and have the numbers to back it up.
And some quote that we're throwing around and some mentality that we follow around now today is like gut.
Gut feelings spark the conversation, but data is what closes the decision.
And so every of our meetings now we want to have data that backs our gut feeling back.
And obviously sometimes we have to operate on gut feeling if we don't have the data.
And sometimes that may be the best gut feeling.
Gut feeling can be the best thing in the start of the beginning of your company, but as you move forward it's less reliable because there's a lot more risk involved.
Omer (23:05.690)
And what's your revenue looking like right now?
Tim Sae Koo (23:08.730)
Yeah, averaging anywhere from 400 to above that a month now.
So we're still growing very healthily.
Looking to do some international expansions now in the uk, looking at Dubai, looking at Australia, looking at Brazil, there's some great opportunities there and trying to hire out the right people, but really focused again on how to.
How do we keep growing the company with the balance of accounting for everybody's opinions and mindsets.
Omer (23:37.480)
So did you ever go back and get more funding apart from the initial seed round that you did before you
Tim Sae Koo (23:42.720)
launched Tint, we have not raised any more additional funding after that.
That may or may not happen.
Not sure yet.
We're not in the market of raising solely because we have cash flow to reinvest in the company.
We would then want to raise if we saw an opportunity that just made sense for us to go after, we saw a big fire and now we need to bring fuel into that fire, whether that's international expansion or product development, we're staying very wary of that and making sure we have that data to back that up.
Omer (24:17.490)
Awesome.
All right, Tim, it's now time for our lightning round.
We're going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Tim Sae Koo (24:26.210)
Are you ready?
Sure.
Let's do it.
Omer (24:28.100)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Tim Sae Koo (24:31.300)
This was given to me by a person, a mentor of mine, when I was deciding to start the company or not and I needed to go find a job or not, they said you can always find a job.
A job will always be waiting for you.
But an opportunity to start your own company and you have the right opportunity will only come once in a lifetime.
So go after that and you can always use plan B to find a job later on.
Omer (24:55.320)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Tim Sae Koo (24:59.160)
There's this book I'm reading and I'm really enjoying it, so maybe that's just a little biased, but it's called First Break all the Rules and it's about you can really foresee a new way of managing and leading people in your company.
Omer (25:14.840)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Tim Sae Koo (25:19.890)
I think it's going to be persistence and the number of times you can pick yourself up after you keep falling.
It's going to be so difficult in the beginning.
You're going to fail so many times.
But every time you pick yourself up and you learn something from it, you're going to be that much stronger and that much more closer to that success.
Omer (25:38.850)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Tim Sae Koo (25:45.740)
I like using this tool called Boomerang on Gmail.
It's all about helping you remind yourself when to go follow up on an email.
Whether it's business related or just personal related.
I love using Boomerang as a personal productivity tool.
Omer (26:00.220)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business would you go and build?
Tim Sae Koo (26:05.020)
I have some fancy towards either hardware technology or something with music.
Obviously music is a very difficult industry to tackle into and I have no experience into hardware, so this is me kind of just dreaming right now.
Omer (26:21.360)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Tim Sae Koo (26:27.040)
I have a bald spot.
Too bad you guys can't see it, but I have a reverse widow's peak Essentially because I liked cutting hair when I was young and I cut my own hair accidentally too much.
And so who knows, maybe that'll be a profession of mine later on to answer my calling.
Ever since I was young.
Omer (26:44.860)
And it never grew back after that.
Tim Sae Koo (26:46.300)
It never grew back because it got a scar.
Wow.
Omer (26:50.780)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Tim Sae Koo (26:55.420)
One of my most important passions is reconnecting with people all around me.
I think there's so much to learn and so much to extract information and be able to connect with people that we don't do enough.
And so I love spending time with strangers, people at the coffee shops, just randomly meeting up with them and conversing with them, or even my Uber or Lyft drivers, because I just love understanding, like, what problems they're facing, something I'm not realizing things that they're facing.
And ultimately, maybe sometimes they're, you know, your life is just not as bad as you think it is because you talk to others and they you realize that you are very fortunate and lucky, and always reminding yourself of that can help you stay focused and stay humble.
Omer (27:36.650)
Great answers, Tim.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Tim Sae Koo (27:45.690)
Thank you so much.
Omer (27:46.890)
Now, if folks want to find out more about Tint or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Tim Sae Koo (27:53.130)
Yeah, at the end of every interview, I like to give my email away just because I'm all about trying to help other entrepreneurs and answer their questions.
So My email is timtimintup.com T I N T U P and our URL is tintup.com Go ahead and shoot me an email if you have any questions.
Obviously, I might not be able to respond immediately, but you should hear a response from me at any time that I'm free.
Obviously, ask me if it's something that you have a question about or you want to talk about.
Just let me know.
Omer (28:27.980)
Awesome, Tim, thanks again and I wish you continued success.
Tim Sae Koo (28:31.500)
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate Omer.
Cheers.
