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.
In this episode, we're going to talk about growth hacking and we're going to share some super actionable tips that you can apply to help grow your own business.
Now, what we're not going to do is share some secret never heard of before growth hacks that are going to magically double your business overnight.
Instead, we're going to look at three commonly used growth hacks, and these might be things that you've already tried before, but they didn't work.
Work.
So we're going to go and cover some of the common mistakes that businesses make with these type of growth hacks and how a few simple tweaks and changes in your approach could help you get significantly better results.
Okay.
Today's guest is the founder of keeping.com a Gmail extension that adds help desk functionality into any Gmail or Google Apps account.
It allows you and your team to manage your customer support right from your mailbox instead of using an external help desk app.
Now, this person first came on my radar when I came across a free online resource that he'd created called the Growth Hacking Experiment.
Basically, he'd taken all the growth hacks that they tried with their startup and documented both the process and the results they achieved with each growth hack, both the good and the bad.
So what I'd like to try and do today is to help share some of those insights with you.
So once you finish listening to this episode, you can go start implementing your own growth hacks.
So today I'd like to welcome Vincent Casar.
Vincent, welcome to the show.
Vincent Cassar (02:05.800)
Well, thank you for having me, Omar.
That's very kind of you.
Omer (02:09.160)
So you're talking to me.
Whereabouts in Switzerland are you?
Right now?
Vincent Cassar (02:13.560)
I'm in Geneva.
Geneva, Switzerland.
So we're having a bit of a heat wave at the moment, and it's.
It's boiling hot.
Tropical Geneva we call it nowadays.
Omer (02:24.890)
Okay.
I love Geneva.
It's.
It's a wonderful city.
I've only been there once, but had a wonderful time there.
So I like to start by asking my guests what drives or motivates them, what gets them out of bed.
Some people like to share a success quote that.
That resonates with them.
Others just like to tell me, you know, in their own words.
So what is it that gets you out of bed?
Vincent Cassar (02:52.180)
Okay, so I like creating.
I'm a creator.
When I was a child, when people used to ask me what I wanted to be when I was growing up, I used to say that I wanted to be an inventor.
And I am now 33 years old and I've invented many things.
So creativity and invention keeps me awake early in the morning and late at night.
Omer (03:14.320)
Sweet.
Okay, so keeping.
Tell me a little bit about where the idea came from and why Was it this particular product and market that you decided to.
Vincent Cassar (03:30.560)
Sure, okay, I understand this and actually this is quite interesting because it's a product that I've created from a pain point that I personally had.
So I was running a business that sold digital books and courses and as the business grew we were getting more and more emails from customers, which is normal, and I looked at ways to manage the process more efficiently.
So I looked at the various external help desks that are on the market, such as Zendesk desk, etc.
But did found them to be a bit complex and quite hard to set up actually just didn't have the time to set them up correctly.
And one thing that I didn't like was to being forced to migrate everything or that support channel to another platform.
And you have to realize that when you use another platform there's always a bit of a lock in.
And in the case of a help desk, if you stop using an external help desk, all of the previous conversations you've had with your customers are sort of lost.
So I didn't like moving away from email to basically have that risk factor.
So I had an idea.
Instead of being forced to move to an external help desk, what about bringing those functionalities needed for customer support directly into my mailbox?
My customers were already emailing me, so why should I be forced to move externally?
So this is how it came to existence.
And with this idea we started cold emailing other startups just to validate if our business was an actual pain point.
I've learned in the past that sometimes you think something is problematic to you, but you are pretty much the only one in the world, or there's not enough of a market to make it a substantial business.
So started cold emailing and cold calling as many businesses as I could.
And I realized two things.
Firstly is that obviously everyone is using email and that email is just not designed for collaboration and not for customer support.
So we decided to build the first iteration.
What we did, as I mentioned, is cold calling and cold emailing as many businesses as we could in advance.
And we leveraged the feedback that we received early on to see if our first iteration had the right product market fit.
Omer (06:16.070)
So I've got to say I kind of get the rationale about not wanting to move or be dependent on an external help desk platform and the customer conversations.
Because at some point, as you said, if you want to move, maybe there's a high switching cost, maybe it's hard to get the data and the history of those conversations out somewhere else.
I've never tried it, so I don't know exactly how easy or hard that is.
But at the same time it kind of sounds a bit of a nightmare to now think, okay, I'm already dealing with all of these emails in my inbox anyway, but now I'm going to get all the customer support mails in there as well.
So can you explain a little bit about just how that works within Gmail and why your customers like that experience?
Vincent Cassar (07:13.310)
Sure.
Okay, so there's one thing that I need to explain is that customer support emails, support inquiries will always be outside of your inbox.
So your inbox will remain the same.
And what keeping does is add a new section to your inbox where all of your customer support emails are located so you won't get overflowed by tons and tons of emails from customers in your personal inbox.
It will still be slightly away from filtered out of your regular inbox.
So.
The main advantage is that it allows for a team, a group of people to, to be able to answer support emails together.
Typically, one of your customers may email you at 2 o' clock in the morning and the person who's supposed to answer that support query is not there, but someone else is in the company may be online and could answer that support email.
Got it.
Omer (08:33.590)
Okay.
All right, that makes sense.
Okay, so as I mentioned in the introduction with one of the resources that you published on keeping.com is the growth hacking experiment and it's titled, you know how our startup is growth hacking its way to success and how you can copy us.
Why do you want people to copy you?
Vincent Cassar (09:03.950)
Yeah, well, you know, you have to stand out.
You have to stand out on the Internet.
You know, there's a lot of content and you have to be a bit unique.
So this is perhaps a cheeky angle that we decided to take.
But why did we start this experiment?
Let me tell you the reason and I'm sure that will also bring some transparency as well.
So if you look on forums, and I'm talking about any forums, not just web related forums, many of the most popular posts are diaries of what people Do.
For example, I remember saying something about following someone as he trained his puppy.
So people like following the ups and downs of someone's learning journey.
You could call it voyeurism if you want, but this posts are popular.
Secondly, I was looking for a topic for our content marketing effort that was actually getting more and more popular.
Growth hacking is a term that didn't exist just a few years ago.
And you know, just a quick look at Google Trends.
Google Trends for people who may not know what that is, it allows you to see for a certain keyword how it evolves over time.
And the term growth hacking is just increasing every day.
So from nothing a couple of years ago, there's more and more people looking for growth hacking.
And as we target startups and businesses that may not yet have a support system in place, these startups and companies are also interested in learning how to grow.
So we had it.
We had the perfect topic.
We decided to share what we did to grow a business with the objective to, to attract potential customers.
And it helps.
Omer (10:58.870)
So the smart thing here is that the, the people who are most likely going to be interested in reading about the growth hacking experiment probably are also a good fit to be a potential customer in many cases as well.
For the help desk product.
Vincent Cassar (11:21.190)
That's correct.
That's right.
So this was the thinking.
And it's also a topic that we can grow over time.
We can easily add new experiments and create a bit of a community around.
Omer (11:38.790)
Yeah, no, I think when we talk about it like this it makes absolute sense, but I think it's also very easy to fall into the trap.
And I've seen this happen sometimes where people are trying to do some type of content marketing or trying to create some sort of transparency about their business.
But your target customers may not be the ones who are interested in that.
And so the danger is you end up attracting a different sort of audience for, for that content and still have to sort of double down and figure out where you're going to get your customers from because they're not coming through those content marketing efforts.
So.
But I like the way that, that you've done this here.
It's transparent and I think in many ways documenting these experiments and these hacks has probably been beneficial for you as well, just to sort of distill your thoughts and track what you did and what the results were.
So it's the kind of thing that I think it's worth doing anyway when you're kind of doing these experiments.
But I like the way that you've Sort of done it publicly and given sort of that level of transparency.
One thing I wanted to ask you was what's sort of your thoughts and have you had any reactions on the term sort of growth hacking?
It seems to be a very sort of polarizing term where some people are just so into it, others sort of just hate the term.
Have you experienced that as you've kind of got more and more sort of visibility with this resource?
Vincent Cassar (13:21.150)
Well, absolutely, and tell you the truth, my personal perception of the term is that growth hacking is just marketing.
That's what it is.
The flavor of the month is growth hacking.
Fine.
But at the end of the day it's marketing without doing media buy.
That's, that's what it is.
So a lot of it can fall into it.
Content marketing could be seen as growth hacking, but it's just marketing.
Scraping for leads and then contacting those leads could also become, could be called growth hacking.
Some people call it something else.
So the term is definitely polarizing.
But at the end of the day, growth hacking is just marketing.
That's my take on it.
I was actually asked to do a presentation growth hacking a while ago and my first slide was growth hacking is bullshit because it's marketing.
At the end of the day it's marketing without media buying.
Media buying is easy.
You pay Google $10 a click and you'll get some traffic.
Anyone can do that.
Well, some people can do it better than others, but if you have the budget, you can do it.
Growth hacking is how do you maximize traffic lead generation with less of a budget?
Omer (14:39.040)
Yeah, but I would say that even on the ad buying side, I've seen a lot of direct response marketers
Vincent Cassar (14:52.880)
who
Omer (14:53.200)
for years have been doing what maybe we're seeing growth hackers do now, which is basically focusing very much on understanding sort of customer lifetime value, the acquisition cost of a customer, running very data driven experiments in terms of what the ad copy looks like, how it converts, what landing pages are doing.
They just typically drive the traffic through sources which are paid.
But I think in many ways it's just, I agree with you, I think that you can kind of take a different shift on it.
But once you sort of boil down what the essentials are, whether you're doing growth hacking or direct response marketing, it kind of boils down to there are just some fundamentals of marketing that, that don't change.
Right.
And so it's.
But yeah, it's that it's the term that I think probably resonates most with people.
I was just curious how, how how your experience had been with the reaction you get from people.
But okay, so let's, let's, let's spend some time.
And what I was hoping we could do was to deep dive a little bit into maybe three growth hacks that sort of were either unusual and delivered interesting results or just ones that have been most successful for you and sort of talk about again, what you did, what results you got from that and what the listeners can sort of learn and take away themselves with pleasure.
Vincent Cassar (16:31.680)
Sure.
Okay, well, I guess the first hack.
But let's, let's.
Maybe we shouldn't call this a hack, but it's almost a tip which is not on the website yet.
But I will write something about it.
It's something that anyone running a business should implement.
It's so simple and it's yet not very common.
And it's really the power of following up on emails.
So, you know, we get inundated with emails and if someone doesn't respond to you the first time, it's probably not because he doesn't want to speak to you or doesn't want to hear about your product.
He may just have gotten him at the wrong time.
What I've noticed is that when I follow up four times with someone I want to speak to, I increase my response rate to close to 80%.
Of course all industries and businesses are different, but it works.
So it's, you know, is this even a growth hacking, a growth hack?
I'm not sure.
But it does work and it's my advice to any business really just to follow up, follow up, follow up.
And this is how I implement it.
I use something called Write Inbox, but there are many other tools.
Essentially, Write Inbox is a Gmail plugin that allows me to be reminded of a message up to a specific day.
So for example, I want to speak to you, I send you a message.
I mark the message as remind me to send a follow up.
Next day, next day I get a reminder, I send you a follow up.
The response rate that I get on cold emails is sometimes close to 80% if the content of our message is targeted.
So this works and it's my number one hack.
I guess anyone can implement it.
Omer (18:32.020)
So it's called Write Inbox like R I G H T or Write as in wi.
Vincent Cassar (18:37.460)
Right now write R I H ght right Inbox.
And there are many alternatives.
I think there is Boomerang for Gmail Followup cc, which I think you mentioned in your toolkit that you can download on your website on the PDF that you can download on your website.
Basically it allows you to get reminded of a message and you can use it to make sure that you follow up on leads that leads or even people you want to speak to who may not answer you straight away.
It works.
Omer (19:14.380)
Yeah.
I had AI Mo, who's the co founder of Boomerang here on ConversionAid on, I think it was episode 30, which you can get to by going to ConversionAid.com 30 and I think Boomerang does exactly that, provides that type of functionality within Gmail as well.
So, okay, so tell me a little bit about that because I've seen people send out, do sort of email outreach and you're talking about cold emails here, right?
Vincent Cassar (19:49.430)
Well, I'm talking about cold email because, you know, that's what I've been doing recently.
I've been doing a lot of cold emailing, but it can be used for, for basically getting in touch with people as well.
Omer (20:02.680)
Okay, so let's, let's just, for, for anybody who's not familiar, let's just sort of define the difference between cold, warm and sort of a hot email.
Right, so just, just sort of, I'll sort of describe them and you tell me whether you agree with them or not.
So a cold email is, you know, you've, you've got an email from a list, you've looked up somebody's email address, you're, you're, you're contacting them, they've never heard of you, and you're trying to get some kind of response or engagement through that email.
I would say a warm email or lead is probably someone that maybe knows about your product, maybe you've been introduced through somebody.
So you're sort of going in there with some kind of sort of pre framing that they kind of either know about you or the product.
Product or they've been introduced.
So they kind of feel a little bit better about having sort of, you know, that email conversation with you.
And I guess, like, I guess for me if it was hot, then it's somebody that knows and trusts you.
And so obviously those conversations are very easy.
So with cold emails you're sending the first email out and typically what do what, what does the content of that mail look like?
What are you saying?
How much content are you writing?
Is it a couple of lines, a few paragraphs?
What do you do?
Vincent Cassar (21:28.190)
Okay, so what works the best is really to keep the content as short as possible and to just say, hi, can I speak to X?
Is that the right email to get in touch with X?
And that's sufficient to first start up first to start a first line of communication, and people respond well to it.
If you say, hi, is this email of Mr. X, Mr. Joan?
People will say, yes, that's me.
And once, once you have this first interaction, you can, you can then start a dialogue and explain who you are.
And typically, if people don't respond to this first email, then I would follow up a day later, maybe two days later, depending what it is.
Okay, I'm targeting.
Omer (22:11.480)
So if they don't respond one to two days later, what's the email that you were then following up with?
The same email again.
Vincent Cassar (22:20.110)
This is also very short.
Just a reminder.
Hi, did you get the email I sent you two days ago?
And that's it.
Omer (22:29.190)
Okay, cool.
Vincent Cassar (22:30.310)
Sweet and short.
Omer (22:31.350)
So how many times were you sending that kind of email before you would stop following up?
Vincent Cassar (22:42.310)
3 to 4 times, depending how important the person I want to speak to is for my needs.
Omer (22:50.040)
So three to four times.
And then you get to a point where they reply and they say, yes, this is the right email.
Vincent Cassar (22:56.440)
Correct?
Omer (22:56.920)
Yep.
Vincent Cassar (22:57.240)
And then.
And then you start a dialogue.
Omer (23:00.440)
Okay, and then, so what would be, what would you typically do there?
Give me an example of how you can.
Vincent Cassar (23:07.640)
I can give you an example.
So right now we are approaching businesses that are.
That are on, that are quite specific, that are quite niche.
And we just try to just once we have this report, then I introduce the product and ask them if they want a demo or a free trial.
And if they respond negatively, that's fine.
If they don't respond, I follow up maybe once or twice.
And if they say yes, then we have what I call a hot lead.
Omer (23:46.050)
So.
Okay, great.
And so that's really interesting because you're saying you're closing, you're getting up to an 80% response rate by doing that.
Vincent Cassar (23:59.810)
Okay, so 80% is really.
I don't think you should use that figure as you don't expect to get 80%.
I have gotten 80% sometimes, but it really depends.
The thing is, by following up, you will substantially increase the response that you would get if you only had sent one email.
Omer (24:26.430)
If you had to give me sort of a number, on average, maybe a more conservative number that you typically get on a response rate.
What would that be?
So let's say if I gave you a list of, I don't know, 100 email addresses,
Vincent Cassar (24:44.290)
I can give you very fixed numbers.
We're currently running an email campaign like this, and I've got actually figures as of Today, after the third email, we are at 36% response rate.
Omer (25:01.900)
36%.
Vincent Cassar (25:02.868)
36%.
And this will most probably increase to close to 40%.
And this is on call prospects.
People have never, people who don't know about me, people who've never, never heard of keeping either.
And 40% is not on the first email.
It's not on the first interaction of yes, this is the right email.
There are people who have responded and show an interest in, in learning more about keeping or even have taken a trial.
Omer (25:33.570)
Okay, okay, great.
Yeah, I mean that's an important distinction because this is not just 40% of people replying and saying, yeah, you got the right email and no, I'm not interested.
Vincent Cassar (25:42.610)
Yeah, yeah, right.
Omer (25:44.450)
Yeah.
Okay, good.
And what, what was the.
For that?
Maybe same group.
I don't know if you have that data.
But what would have been if you had stopped at, after sending the first email, what do you think the response rate would have been?
Vincent Cassar (26:01.370)
Yeah, I can only estimate.
I can't, you know, the copy that I use is also, has also been improved over time, so I can't really say, but I would say maybe 15%, maybe 10%.
Omer (26:15.850)
Yeah, I think even 10% would be a pretty good number from a first email.
Vincent Cassar (26:22.250)
You're right.
Look, I, the thing is I don't, you know, I just don't do it anymore.
Yeah.
I don't have.
Maybe I'm lost.
I'm out of touch with reality in terms of what it is.
But it's the point that I wanted to make is it will substantially increase your response rate and it's very easy to implement.
Use, write, inbox, use Collab, cc, use Boomerang.
Omer (26:44.600)
And I think the big takeaway here is I had Steli ft, the founder of Close IO on the show and I, yeah, and I remember he was the one who kind of really got me thinking like that as well when he said, you know, if you don't get a response, just assume the person is busy and just keep following up.
And he was, he was, told me that's, you know, I can't remember, I'm sort of guessing, but it was some crazy number.
Like, you know, he'd followed up 20 or 30 times with somebody once before he got a response and they were like, oh yeah, sorry, I've just been busy.
So.
And I think, you know, it's sort of before, before that conversation with him, I would be like, I'd send one email and I would.
If I didn't get a response, I'd be like, oh man, you know, it's sort of, you know, they're not interested.
Right.
But he kind of really had a really different way of thinking about it.
And I think that's exactly, I think what you're sharing here as well.
That it's simple and it can be very effective, but you have to, you have to follow up and there are tools out there that you can use to help you do that more effectively.
Vincent Cassar (28:01.920)
That's right.
It should just be part of your process, of your, your personal processes.
Omer (28:06.400)
Great.
Okay, that, I love that one.
I mean, that was, I, you know, it's not, it's not sort of, you know, groundbreaking or something.
People would say, wow, I've never heard of doing email outreach or follow up.
But just what I like about that is just by making a subtle shift in how you think about tackling that, you can significantly improve your response rates.
Okay, good.
So let's talk about another hack.
Vincent Cassar (28:36.400)
Okay, well, I can tell you about the.
Our best performing traffic Source.
It's Quora.
Quora.com perhaps listeners don't know what that is.
It's essentially a website where people can ask questions and people answer questions a little bit like Yahoo Question and Answer five years ago.
But the conversations are actually quite intelligent and the response, what people write has quality and it's our best performing source of traffic.
It's very little, but the conversion rates are incredible.
We get something like 30 or 35% of visitors referred by Quora who actually sign up as a free trial.
And that's great.
If all my sources of traffic were that good, it would be dandy.
Um, so what I do, what I do, if, if you, if you would like me to explain what I do to get.
Omer (29:40.540)
Yeah, I love to, yeah, I'd love to.
Because I think basic, the basic principle here, and I think maybe people listening to this might have tried it as well, is, you know, finding relevant questions that people are asking which are, you know, related to your product market or problem area and then answering those questions and sort of using that as a way to drive traffic back to your site.
Now that's kind of maybe is the simple sort of explanation of that.
But I think there are a lot of nuances, again, about how do you find the right questions to answer?
What's the best way to answer each question and how much time or how long should an ideal response be versus, you know, how do you, how do you deliver value on Quora and at the same time drive people back to your site?
So, yeah, I mean, tell me, tell me about the process that you guys have used here and some of the Learnings that you've experienced beyond just sort of like scratching the surface sort of explanation that I just gave.
Vincent Cassar (30:48.510)
Sure.
Okay, so I guess the first tip that I could add to this is you have to put the website URL close to the top.
I remember reading something about how people browse Quora when they actually looking for software.
They just click on the links, they don't read the responses, they just click on the links to maybe find the tool that will actually solve whatever problem they have.
So you have to make sure that the URL that you want to generate traffic to be placed quite high up in your response and the response has to be intelligent.
You can't just say this is my tool, thank you very much.
You have to answer the question and bring some value.
Tell you the truth, I don't think the value of your answers should be extraordinary.
I've looked at the other best performing answers and they are good answers, but they're not, you know, they're not essay long type of answers and they've been upvoted so people like them.
So answer the question in a very short manner.
Make sure that you add your URL.
It sounds obvious but expect people to look up who you are.
Omer (32:17.030)
So what is a typical.
The ones that you've said have performed well.
The answers, how long were they?
A paragraph, few paragraphs.
How long was a typical answer?
Vincent Cassar (32:27.630)
Yeah, I would say, I would say a paragraph, maybe five to six lines.
Basically answer the questions.
I mean some questions would need longer, longer response time.
Oh, and something else that I've discovered is by adding an image, a screenshot of your website or an image, you will just drive more traffic.
So you can easily.
What I do, at the bottom of each of the answers that I answer, I add a screenshot of keeping.com and that drives more traffic.
Okay, so it's laser targeted traffic.
It converts and it continues working even if we stop answering questions.
I haven't had the time the last three months to actually answer new questions and we still get the same traffic, if not a bit more.
Omer (33:29.210)
How do you find the right question to answer?
Because I'm looking at the Quora hack on the onkeeping.com and one example that you've got there, which you've answered the question was actually just says what are the do's and don'ts of referral slash invite programs?
So that's not typical.
Sort of, it's not directly related to keeping as a help desk.
Vincent Cassar (33:59.410)
That's.
That's correct.
I guess, I guess, I guess in that, in that Instance, the link, which is probably in the content, would redirect to a post that we have on our blog about referral.
So this was done, I think, before we launched and we had a blog post going before the gross experiment.
And we're just looking at documenting various marketing strategies that.
Omer (34:26.300)
Okay, okay.
Vincent Cassar (34:27.900)
So fortunately in our industry, and of course I can't talk about other industries, but there is a keyword, almost like a hashtag, encore customer support, which is very active.
So fortunately, we have a pool of open questions every day that we could answer, but it takes time.
Omer (34:48.719)
Okay, now, if somebody wanted to use Quora as a potential way to.
To acquire new users or customers and they're starting from scratch, how much,
Vincent Cassar (35:10.220)
how
Omer (35:10.500)
much time would you recommend that they put into this?
You know, should it be, you know, are we talking about, you know, 15 minutes a day or are we talking about, you know, know, a couple of hours?
Like, what should be the time investment and how should sort of people think about approaching this?
And so, in other words, if you were doing this again from scratch, how would you be doing it?
How much time would you be putting into this?
Vincent Cassar (35:38.900)
I see.
Okay.
So my initial plan was to spend 10 to 15 minutes a day answering questions on Quora, but unfortunately my routine changed and I just didn't have the time to do it.
So I would say try to do it every day, try, or at least a couple of times a week.
And I should really get back doing it on a more regular basis, but perhaps spend some time, the first time to understand, to follow the right keywords, see if your competitors are on it, because very often you can add answers to questions your competitors may have answered.
So that's also a way to discover not only the right questions, but also the right keywords and hashtags.
So spend some time initially doing this, which is pretty obvious, and then try to have it in your daily routine.
Something I wouldn't do is outsource it to an assistant of some sort.
Unless your assistant knows your industry well.
It's something that, I mean, if you want to bring value and you want to add a comment that is intelligent, you should really use your own knower of your industry, especially if you answer questions from that are very, very niche to your own industry.
Omer (37:06.870)
Do you always answer a question where there's an opportunity or a natural opportunity to provide a link back to your site?
Is that how you would maybe filter down and make a decision on which question to answer?
Or have you seen sort of answers, sort of effective answers work for you where maybe you Just answered the question, but didn't put any link or image or anything into that answer.
Vincent Cassar (37:40.620)
Well, as I mentioned, the link is vital.
I mean, this is, in my case, I want Quora to bring traffic, and in order for traffic to happen, I need to show where I want people to go to.
So a link is vital.
Right.
As I said, an image is also nice to have.
It brings more attention.
Omer (38:03.740)
Okay, so I think if I've got this right, initially, start by listing out what are keywords or hashtags that are relevant to your product, your market.
Also think about listing out who your competitors are and then sort of use those that information as a way to narrow down the searches of which questions that you're going to look for.
And then we want to allocate or dedicate at least, you know, 20 minutes a day, a few times a week, where, where you can go in, look through those list of questions, figure out which are the ones that you feel that you can give a good answer to.
And secondly, also where there's an opportunity to provide a, a relevant link that people can click on to get more information.
Vincent Cassar (39:09.130)
It sounds like a great summary.
Omer (39:11.930)
All right.
See, I was paying attention, Vincent.
Okay, cool.
All right, so let's talk about the third hack.
Vincent Cassar (39:21.930)
Okay, so something that was very successful for us actually was to speak to customers very, very early, actually before we even had a product that allowed us to get a pool of potential buyers as we released the first iteration.
And what we did was to ask for feedback.
Firstly, we needed to validate if we had a business case which was sustainable, if we actually solved the problem.
But by asking for feedback, we created report with a number of companies and they've been helping us grow, sending us referrals.
So maybe this is more of a hack, but that's for younger startups that need to, that may not have customers yet, but speak to potential customers very early.
This really, really, this, I think, is where our success lies.
Thanks to them, we now have paying customers that were referred and we also managed to get a better product and market fit more quickly.
Omer (40:49.760)
Would you think of that as a hack or is that sort of the same as the email outreach and sort of.
Vincent Cassar (40:57.440)
Well, you know, as I said, you know, this is, you can call it a hack, you can call it marketing.
It's a tip that really worked for us.
Omer (41:09.120)
Okay, how are you asking for this feedback?
Was that happening through the email outreach?
Vincent Cassar (41:13.750)
Sure.
So it was also done through an email outreach campaign, I guess.
Omer (41:19.830)
Okay.
Vincent Cassar (41:20.550)
And I can tell you what we did.
We looked at potential customers by basically getting the contact details of as many businesses as possible and starting, we started a.
Well, communication.
Hi, can I speak to, Can I speak to whoever is responsible with marketing of this or who is the founder of this company?
Start.
You know, use, use what I said earlier about following up and getting people to actually answer and creating a report with, with these potential customers.
Omer (42:02.240)
Okay.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I mean, I, I've seen lots of examples of that where getting that early feedback, even when you don't have a product, becomes a really valuable thing to do.
And in many cases, those people who provide the early feedback often convert into customers, but they also feel a lot more invested in the product because they kind of had a voice in sort of shaping what that product became.
And it also provides obviously a lot of valuable feedback on building the right product.
Obviously.
The caveat being you have to be careful there because when people aren't invested, they don't have any skin in the game.
They may also waste your time by giving you a lot of feedback that, you know, they think you want to hear.
Vincent Cassar (43:01.800)
Right?
Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.
I mean, that's.
Unfortunately, that's part of the game.
But I guess the key take here is if you don't have a product yet, by just speaking to a pool of potential customers, you will, once you launch, actually have someone to present what you've done and see how people engage with your app or with your SaaS software or whatever it is that you sell.
And that's extremely valuable.
Omer (43:38.660)
Yeah, that's a good point.
Okay.
All right, so those are the three hacks that have worked for keeping.
And obviously that doesn't mean that those are the three that are going to work the best for everyone listening out there.
I mean, I think experiment is the operative word here.
And different hacks or tactics or whatever you like to call them will have different levels of success, I guess, depending on what market you're in, how warm those customers are, how well they know that your product.
You know, there are all kinds of different factors.
So, you know, experiment, experiment, experiment.
Now, it's great to talk about the things that have been working well for you, but I also wanted to find out about one hack or tactic that didn't work that turned out to be either a surprising, surprising failure or just something that turned out to be a waste of time.
What's one.
One hack that comes to mind that you just feel like, wow, you know,
Vincent Cassar (44:56.110)
sure, okay, well, we try to automate promoting our content over Twitter.
So what we wanted to do was to automatically reply to Conversations containing particular hashtags, for example, growth hacking.
And responding with something generic like great tweet on growth hacking.
Check out this post, this resource about growth hacking.
So the hack here was that it was done automatically through a little bot that we created and it didn't work technically.
And most importantly, we actually pissed off a lot of people on Twitter.
You need to have conversations.
You can't just automate everything.
So there's also a suspected risk of getting your account shut down somehow.
So the idea was a good one.
And it did bring some traffic which was supposed to be targeted, at least to a certain extent, but it's definitely not good business practices.
It was perceived as spamming.
And we stopped.
Omer (46:09.070)
What were some of the negative feedback or consequences that you had of automating that?
Vincent Cassar (46:14.020)
Well, just, just a lot of pissed off people.
We didn't run it for too long because, you know, my sense was that it was, it wasn't worth.
It wasn't worth the game.
I mean, I could see it was essentially a way to, to spam Twitter.
And Twitter is not supposed to be.
To be, to be, to be a spam trap.
We shouldn't spam Twitter.
And you know, people, people realized that quite quickly and it was just not good business practice.
Omer (46:46.990)
Yeah, you know, I get that.
And I think that there are, I think a while back I had Maria Dijkstra, who is the founder of a marketing agency called Trade Digital, on the show episode 82 conversion a.com 82 and we talked at length about how to use Twitter as a way to acquire customers.
And she gave some incredible tips on how to do that.
But the key was using it for what it was meant to be, which is about being social.
Vincent Cassar (47:29.140)
Right.
Omer (47:29.540)
And, you know, I've just, I've been as guilty as, as, you know, other people out there where you kind of get into the habit of just posting stuff, right?
Maybe, maybe it might be some content that you found or, you know, adding things into.
You know, if you're using buffer or something like that to build, build sort of a backlog or a queue of things that you want to publish.
And I think Maria was the one who told me that's kind of like, that's not social media.
That's sort of like broadcast, right?
You're just saying, watch this, read this, listen to this.
And she sort of had a really kind of a good way to think about it, which was, I can't remember what it was like five, 15, five or something like that, where she said, five, five days a week spend 15 minutes a day and engage with five people.
And engaging could be, you know, obviously, you know, sharing some content or retweeting, but also maybe replying to somebody's question or asking a question or thanking somebody for something and just using that as a way just to engage and listen.
And she shared a lot of benefits that, that her business had experienced just by doing that.
And, and so, you know, these days when you see a lot of people who are sort of using auto replies, I mean, typically you get auto replies on follows, you know, which.
Which kind of are like, really, some of those are just so annoying.
But I think you guys went even further by just like searching for a relevant hashtag.
Vincent Cassar (49:18.280)
Right?
Which could.
That's correct.
We went one.
We one step forward.
And you know, the bot we created wasn't very intelligent.
So sometimes we're having conversations in an infinity loop with some people.
So it was going nowhere.
But I like what you said about or what your guest said about using it regularly and engaging with it.
I think this is powerful and I'm as guilty as you are right now.
We are broadcasting interesting articles because we need to be active, but it's not enough.
Omer (49:59.410)
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, let's move on to the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you seven questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Vincent Cassar (50:11.090)
All right?
Omer (50:12.050)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Vincent Cassar (50:17.470)
Failing is.
Okay.
Omer (50:19.470)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Vincent Cassar (50:22.910)
Okay.
Actually, you mentioned the author five minutes ago, Steli Ft.
He wrote the Startup Guide to Outbound Selling.
Great, Great book on outbound sales.
Really straight to the point.
Omer (50:36.030)
Awesome.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Vincent Cassar (50:42.520)
Resilience.
Omer (50:44.520)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Vincent Cassar (50:50.280)
Wake up very early.
Omer (50:53.160)
What's a new business idea or a crazy idea that you have in your head that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Vincent Cassar (50:59.800)
Convert all Swiss banks to bitcoins.
Omer (51:06.440)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Vincent Cassar (51:10.630)
I only work standing up.
Omer (51:12.550)
Seriously?
Vincent Cassar (51:13.430)
Yep.
Omer (51:14.710)
You know, I read something yesterday which said that standing up for two hours a day instead of sitting down has all kinds of health benefits.
So you must be a super healthy guy.
And then finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Vincent Cassar (51:36.400)
It sounds generic.
With nature.
I need to go back to nature very often.
Omer (51:40.640)
You know, that's really funny.
This is the kind of thing that I've heard from a number of Entrepreneurs lately where once we sort of get below the surface and sort of talk about, you know, business and raising money or acquiring customers and we sort of get into what they do, there are more and more people sort of coming out in, out of the closet and talking about meditating or getting out into nature.
And I read a great study, I think it was from Stanford where they talked about the benefits on the brain and your health by just getting out there and being with nature.
So it, so it's not like some new age stuff.
It's like there's a lot of science behind actually going out and doing that and, and how it's actually really powerful way to, to kind of I guess recharge your brain.
So, so I, it's something definitely that I've started do.
I mean I just, I was like a super urban person like never you know, wanted to do anything with nature and now like I can't go a day without just I have to sort of do the same thing as you.
I think I find it almost as a way to kind of like it, it sort of, it recharges me in, in many ways.
So yeah, there you go.
We have something in, in common that maybe people didn't know about.
All right, so thank you for sharing those, those hacks and experiences with us.
So if people want to find out more they can go to keeping.com where obviously they can find out about keeping the help desk product and in the footer on the site there's a link to the growth hacking experiment as well.
And I'll include direct links to both of those in the show notes and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Vincent Cassar (53:50.260)
Email is best vincentkeeping.com Wonderful.
Omer (53:55.220)
Vincent, I, I appreciate you making the time to do this.
It must be.
What, what is it now?
It must be like 8:30.
Vincent Cassar (54:03.380)
It's 8:30 Swiss time.
It's fine.
It's fine.
Omer (54:06.420)
Yeah.
So I'm sure your wife has,
Vincent Cassar (54:10.980)
is
Omer (54:11.300)
probably waiting for you so she should
Vincent Cassar (54:14.940)
be waiting for me and I hope she dinner.
I'm normally the cook so hopefully she, she cooked this evening.
Omer (54:23.270)
Great.
Well look, I appreciate the time you taking the time to do this and you know into your evening and I, I wish you all the best and you know, good luck with keeping and I, I will continue to follow the growth hacking experiment and uh, you know, learning from both your successes and your failures.
Vincent Cassar (54:46.700)
Thank you very much.
Emma, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much for, for your show as well.
Omer (54:50.700)
Cheers.
