Vista Social: Building a Million-Dollar SaaS in a Crowded Market – with Vitaly Veksler [424]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

Omer (00:01)
Vitaly, welcome to the show.

Vitaly Veksler (00:03)
Thanks for having me.

Omer (00:04)
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Vitaly Veksler (00:10)
Yeah, so Arnold Schwarzenegger once was asked how does he sort of manage to get everything done? He said, listen, I used to wake up at five, go to gym. Then I went to work. Then I went to the gym again. Then I went to the acting school, then I had a job. And then the next day I just repeated. People just asked me, know, Arnold, how do I do this? Like, you know, I'm tired, you know? And Arnold said, sleep faster. So I just love the sleep faster part.

Omer (00:38)
faster. Love it. Great. So for people who don't know, tell us about Vista Social. What does the product do? Who's it for? And what's the main problem you're hoping to solve?

Vitaly Veksler (00:50)
Yeah, Vista Social is a social media management tool, which essentially means that any brand, business, agency, anybody really with any reasonable purpose on social media can use our tool to effectively manage their social schedule content, respond to conversations, run reports, customize things. So quite literally, it's every business out there who uses social media for marketing needs our product. And that's why we built it.

Omer (01:18)
Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Vitaly Veksler (01:25)
Yeah, so we are in our third year of operation. We have well over 10,000 customers on our platform. We are in a sort of a seven-figure ARR range, which we crossed into about a year ago. And sorry, what was the other metric you were looking for?

Omer (01:50)
Size of team

Vitaly Veksler (01:51)
Size of team, think we are right around 15 people, all globally spread out around the world.

Omer (01:57)
Great. And did you raise money or are you bootstrapping this business?

Vitaly Veksler (02:01)
I've bootstrapped it myself because I did have a prior sort of exit success, so which allowed me to kind of have the funds necessary to fund the early parts of the business. Although I have to say super frugal operation to start, it was not a big lift to kind of find in some of the early development and preparation work.

Omer (02:21)
Great. So, so let's talk about that, that first, product, which, was social report. And this was something that you also bootstrapped and it was also a social media management platform. So in many ways, you know, you're doing this another time round. but it from, from when you and I were talking earlier, you said it took, it was like five or six years to get to like the first million in ARR. And there was a bunch of, know, now you look back and there was a bunch of mistakes that you made. And then the second time around, when you did this with Vista Social, you went from zero to the first million in, I guess like two years or listen to you. Yeah. So I think just that on its own is sort of, you know,

Vitaly Veksler (02:51)
Took a long time, yes.

Vitaly Veksler (02:57)
For sure.

Vitaly Veksler (03:07)
Less than two years, yeah, just about two years, right?

Omer (03:15)
Great because it's almost like, you know, a founder being able to get a second chance to build a very similar type of product and business, but know what they shouldn't do and what they do need to be doing. So let's talk about that. why, and you said, you know, eventually you exited the business, but why did you, why do you think was the main reason that it took you five or six years to get to the first million in ARR.

Vitaly Veksler (03:48)
just not knowing how to run a business. When I started Social Report, I had probably around 10, 12 years of just corporate America sort of experience. I was a techie. I had a very successful career at that. It was really good. And I think this going into the startup, building the product, I kind of went in.

Thinking that I know how to do it. And a lot of the things that I've attempted to do were really based on nothing. It was based on just presumption that I know how to operate, how to build a product, how to operate a product, how to bootstrap the product. And as a result, a lot of things I've tried really didn't work. Everything from the product that was not built in a way that users would use it to the support of the product that was not done in a way that the users would keep on using it to the marketing, which was sort of non-existent to begin with. So there was a lot of things that are part of operating a product that I just didn't have experience with back in the day. And even though, again, the unfortunate part, I came into it with too much confidence, right? Because I had that corporate background, I had that experience, so that confidence did not help the cause at all.

Omer (05:03)
Yeah, yeah. Because I think, you know, you I mean, I came from the corporate world as well. And you you, you learn a lot. And it's a very, I think a very enriching experience. But then once you sort of leave that you realize that you know, it's a whole different ball game and there, you know, there are a lot of skills that you can apply, but there's, I don't know, it's just, why don't you tell me?

Vitaly Veksler (05:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's sort of like, think about, let's say you are an electrician, I don't know, and you know how to do the electrical wiring, but the next project is to build the entire home. And let's say it's a five-story building, let alone the home, right? Try it. mean…

Foundation alone is probably a massive subject that probably people go to school to learn how to do, right? So you can't quite transfer your specific skills. In my case, these were a lot of technical skills. I was a developer, an architect. Yes, some of it was useful, but business, logistics, operations, marketing, hiring people, know, even the product side, you know, figuring out what is it that the product needs to look like.

Mind you that a lot of these things are fairly straightforward. For example, on the product side, have a system in place to look at what the competitors do, right? Have a system in place to interview some of the prospect customers. You know, put that on a piece of paper, look at it, try to build your tool off of that versus something that you perceive as being the necessary product and feature set.

Omer (06:39)
So when you started building that product, you focused on analytics as like the one core thing that you were going to solve. And we'll talk about this and it turned out that that's not what your prospective customers wanted or needed the most. But where did that idea for analytics come from?

Vitaly Veksler (06:50)
Correct?

Vitaly Veksler (07:05)
Sure, a good friend of mine, his name is Mark.

Had a bar site conversation with a marketer, this must have been 2010, right? And the marketer basically said, listen, this whole social media thing is a thing and we are now having to, this is again, this is over a decade ago. But there are no tools, there are no tools to tell us how we're doing on marketing, right? And my readout of that conversation was somewhat limited, right? So I view that as an analytical kind of a problem, they don't have the analytics in play and that's why the name social report came about. It was a lot of reporting.

And subsequently, that's kind of what we kept on building without realizing that it's the complete set of features relating to the management of social that the customers really wanted, where the analytics were just one of the pieces of the puzzle. But unfortunately for us, it took quite a bit of time to sort of come to that realization.

Omer (08:04)
How long did it take for you to get your first 10 customers?

Vitaly Veksler (08:09)
With social report, I wouldn't remember. was pretty quick. Again, social media was a hot issue. I mean, it still is. and a product out there that does, you know, stuff for social media is still sort of in the hot enough of a space for you to be found. So I think finding the first subscribers, was not a huge deal preserving them was a much bigger challenge because again, the feature set was incomplete, right? Not to mention that even from the standpoint of my background, a lot of companies that I worked with, they were in a financial space, so I knew quite a bit about that. I knew nothing about marketing, I knew nothing about social media. So it's also likely that even the analytical product that we were building was not really, you know…

Even in the right ballpark, know, as to what was required. So I think, again, getting those few customers initially was not that difficult, but preserving them, I think we almost had 100 % churn for like the first 12 to 24 months, just because, again, people sign up, but then they quit right away, right? So, again, getting them into the door at that time was not as difficult as it is perhaps today with how crowded the space has become.

Omer (09:08)
Well.

Omer (09:22)
So spoiler alert, things changed for the business and you started to get traction when you realized that customers didn't just want the analytics, they wanted everything else that comes with a social media management tool, scheduling, all of that stuff that we've come to expect. I think it sounds like the challenge was that on the one hand,

It wasn't like you weren't selling the product. So you're getting customers. So that is almost like, you know, a false positive in terms of, yeah, we've got the right product because people are buying it. And then when they churning, you're like, okay, there must be something wrong with the onboarding or something. And it's about improving the product. So you're, you're kind of more focused on retention. and

It's kind of like this, this, the situation where I think a lot of founders can very easily get into where it's not that obvious. It's not like, I put this thing out there and it's like, nobody's buying it. So I go and do something different. You were, you were kind of growing and just slowly, people are buying things are improving. How long did it take for you to get to that point where you were like, no, there's a whole bunch of stuff missing in this product.

Vitaly Veksler (10:45)
Yeah, unfortunately it took solid four to five years for Ferf. Because you're right, there is this false sense of progress because you're kind of getting customers but then they're quitting in droves, the churn is high, you're kind of spending time trying to figure out as to why that's happening. But the elephant in the room…

Is that fundamentally the product is not what users need. And just to give you perspective, the end product, 10 % analytics, 90 % everything else. So basically I had 10 % of the product hoping that I have enough. So that's the scale, that's the magnitude of the missing link here. And what makes it remarkably painful is that the writing was on the wall throughout that time. So all I had to do is, A, speak to my customers and have a system of collecting that feedback. Exit surveys, why are you canceling? Even while they were using, trying to talk to them more in terms of what they needed.

Simply looking at my competition and seeing what is it that they offer. So the painful experience here is that there is this presumptuous disregard for that and instead one is relying on my own, my personal view of what I need to do, right? So I think it's that sort of hyperrealism, whereas your reality, you don't make the reality, reality exists. You can ignore it at your own expense, but the longer you do it, the longer you'll end up paying, the more you end up paying for it, right? So this was a completely unnecessary loss of time, loss of effort. One would argue that I've learned a lot and very expensive education, right?

Vitaly Veksler (12:45)
Very expensive.

Omer (12:46)
Yeah. I think that the other thing is that in many ways you were doing what conventional wisdom would say is the right thing to do. Don't go and build a product that has feature parity with everybody who's been doing this for the last 10 years or whatever. Focus on, you know, a slice of that, do that really well, and then kind of build up from there. Because if you try to build everything, you might be spending the next three, four, five years trying to catch up with them. And so in many ways, was like, you know, it kind of sounded like you were doing the right thing, right? That was another.

Vitaly Veksler (13:17)
Yeah.

Vitaly Veksler (13:23)
But I think it's the defensive reaction, right? You're right, because you look at the competition and you're like, my God, it will take me like three years to build it. So, my God means Vitaly, you need to stop, you need to go out, you need to raise some money, and that's what you need to do. But instead, I was probably telling myself,

There's probably still a way to compete. Let me build that subset of features. Let me build. So the minute I stop doing that, the minute I stop kind of telling myself that I can build half of the product and be successful is when good things begin to happen, right? But it is kind of scary, right? Because you're looking at this and you're like, you know, these people spend two, three, four, five years in a team of like 50 people doing this. Here you are. If you're lucky, it would maybe a couple of people by your side.

Trying to compete with that monster, it's very daunting to just see the path in front of you and realize that it's going to take so much, you know, sweat and blood to get there. And it's very daunting. And the natural reaction is to just ignore it, unfortunately.

Omer (14:24)
Yeah. So, so for those first four years when customers were churning, like were you not doing anything, any exit surveys or conversations or follow-ups?

Vitaly Veksler (14:33)
I think it took me probably four to five years to even learn the word churn, that that's kind of where it was happening. Again, just not enough of a system in place to turn that information into concrete strategic decisions. So a lot of the anecdotal evidence that I was gathering was probably being put into more tactical solutions to the problem, but the strategic shift happened.

Year four, year five, when I quite literally stopped and I said, listen, that's the direction. That's what we need to do. And within probably, I would say three to six months as we made that extra, you know, kind of progress with the feature set, everything just began to change, right? Things were just kind of normal after that.

Omer (15:22)
What gave you that aha moment? when, how did you come to that realization?

Vitaly Veksler (15:28)
Exhaustion, true, like physical exhaustion. There just came a point where you're doing it for a few years and you're just physically exhausted. And at that point, you either give up or you just have to somehow change it. So it wasn't through some introspection or reflection or no, was just physically, I was physically exhausted and a very blunt question was asked and very blunt response was received, you know? And then it was either that or quit.

Omer (15:54)
Yeah.

Omer (15:59)
Okay, so now you've got a new challenge, which is you've been investing years, building a very specific product around analytics and selling that and marketing and messaging and all that stuff. And now you're like, okay, I'm going to try to do that feature parity game. in many ways, it's still a bet because know, success isn't guaranteed, right? That's a bet you're making that this is what I need to do next. But then how did you deal with this kind of feeling of overwhelm in terms of when you look at competitors and say, how am I going to catch up and get all of these features into this product in a realistic amount of time?

Vitaly Veksler (16:42)
So lucky for me, that's the one thing that I was good at. I was good at tech. So getting into the feature parody was actually kind of a walk in the park once I got sort of like underway. Just the one thing that I know how to do is tech and building stuff done. Like that was just sort of done. But certainly the loss of time and so just, think…

There is a phrase I think that hockey goaltenders are being told by their coaches, you gotta have a five-second memory.

Like you can't have that like you know if you miss it like if you're to continue reminiscing on things you didn't do well you're just going to continue getting those bucks into your goal right so i think once it was realized it was a brand new day it was just a brand new full throttle this is what we're going to do but in terms of having guarantees

On one hand, you're right, there are no guarantees, but on the other side, think about it this way, if you can build something that's already proven to be successful by others, right? And at that point, I was playing the catch-up game, right? And if it works for them, it will work for you. Maybe not at that same scale, but you're guaranteed an outcome.

Vitaly Veksler (18:03)
Which is sort of like almost like a remarkable thing. It's almost like saying, hey, if you can build another car, people will drive it. Like if you can build another Gmail, people will use it, right? Will there be millions of users? No, will there be a few thousand? Without a doubt. That's one of the more remarkable things I think about building SaaS products is that you're pretty much guaranteed an outcome. It's really just the size of that outcome, right? It's like, you know, can you get from like five figures to six figures to like seven? And obviously like the further out you go, the more challenging things come.

Omer (18:33)
Yeah. The other thing we didn't mention was that for the first couple of years, you were working full time. And doing this is, I guess, like a side project before you went full-time. And I think that's kind of normal, because for a lot of founders, when they're bootstrapping, they have no revenue when they launch a product, and things aren't moving as fast as they would like.

You don't want to quit your job and just jump in and do this thing. You want to have a certain level of confidence. But the trouble is the other side of it is that if you don't do that, it's really hard to focus, right? Because you're trying to juggle so many different things. What was the kind of the pivotal point for you that got you to jump in full time? Because

That was only kind of like two years in. So you're still, you know, in that kind of four-year window of things kind of moving really slowly and trying to figure things out. But what happened at that point where you decided, okay, I'm going to go all in.

Vitaly Veksler (19:44)
Yeah, so I think.

Not doing it full-time initially is totally expected, right? So it becomes first, it probably was like a weekend project, then it was an evening project, then it was, you know, morning project, and then, you know, just sort of it then, then it consumes you. Very difficult to make a switch, right? Because it's the unknown, right? I mean, you're venturing down to the space, right? I mean, here you are on the golden leash, you know, going to work every day, guaranteed to make that mortgage. So it's a psychologically very difficult decision to make, first of all.

But ultimately, I think I probably made the switch not until the point where there was a little bit of a money. So I kind of figured that I can probably last a couple of years between some savings and some of the initial money that was coming in. I think we've gotten to like a low, maybe five-figure kind of space where I had a bit of money. So I think the decision was made even when I kind of reached that point.

But I think more importantly, you may be confident in yourself. That while having another job, you can kind of put in enough effort. And that's totally fine. If however you have partners, right? Or if you have people you rely on, right? And they have that issue. So that could be a lot more detrimental. So I think one thing that I did do really quickly is that I've hired a developer to help me with this. And developer was full-time. Luckily he was, you know, from an offshore kind of destination and it was affordable, but he was full-time. So quite early.

Vitaly Veksler (21:20)
I had somebody full-time dedicated to the product building that I could rely on and then I kind of joined. So yeah, so I think that's pretty natural I think for teams, for people.

Omer (21:33)
So I think it was like 2019, 2018, 2019, the business gets acquired. And then a few years later in 2020, you decided to launch Vista Social.

Vitaly Veksler (21:43)
Correct.

Omer (21:55)
And I want to kind of understand like why you did that. Because we've got to kind of set the context with the landscape as well. Because when you were doing this the first time around, as you mentioned earlier, there's a you know, it's it's kind of a hot space. It's it's still early days, things are evolving, new stuff is coming along. And 2020, you're in you're in probably a very crowded market.

Omer (22:25)
To then say, okay, I'm gonna go in and do this again with another product. So what kind of drove you? Why did you decide that this was something you wanted to do and this was the type of product you wanted to build?

Vitaly Veksler (22:38)
Yeah, it was more extreme. There was actually a three year break there, which probably only made the idea of launching another SMM SaaS even more problematic. So I think we didn't launch until 2020 early, 2022 early in the year. So the…

The space is more crowded, right? But basically, there was one trigger that caused the whole idea of building another SMM SaaS sort of come to fruition in my head. And it's a little nuanced in our space, but there was a time when meta used to be Facebook had quite a few features limited to only partners access.

which effectively, essentially what they have done, I don't know if they knew that they were doing it, but by doing that, there was actually for quite a number of, quite a few years, they restricted new SaaS, SMM SaaS from being built.

So I think that feature had to do with video publishing to Instagram, which is very fundamental to any SMM tool. Well, that feature was only available to partners, I wanna say from like 2018 to 2021 or so, 22 maybe even. Essentially, you couldn't build another SaaS because if you do, you're not gonna have Instagram video publishing, you can't And again, I don't know.

Omer (24:05)
I remember that there was like, back in that time, were like tools doing things like you can schedule your Instagram video, but then they send you a notification to go and manually publish it when it was time or something like that.

Vitaly Veksler (24:11)
Yeah.

Vitaly Veksler (24:16)
Well out there were tools that scraped Instagram. I think a lot of them were based in Eastern Europe like skits was one of them I think And then Cambridge Analytica blows up the whole business of the privacy and the data congressional hearings ensue Bunch of so landscape is totally shifting and I think by like to 2021 Either

Facebook just noticed that they had that restriction. I'm not even sure that they realized. Makes no sense that that restriction existed, but they lifted it. And they're like, okay, API is fully open. And by then I was free of my contractual obligations and I just decided to do it again. And yeah, and we started and we launched in 2022 and here we are.

Omer (25:09)
So this time you got to the first million in ARR in under two years. You didn't pick a slice. You went all in trying to get feature parity as quickly as possible. How long did it take you to build that product?

Vitaly Veksler (25:29)
I think we had feature parity within 12 months. The first product was built by half of me basically and a full-time person, so person and a half. This one was built by three people all full-time, including me, who kind of knew all the nuances of what needs to be done. So clearly…

Much easier undertaking. Obviously, the technical challenges still existed. Obviously, the tech has changed, right? Mind you, the first product has been built in 2010. The other product is built in 22. But we have all sorts of cloud tech, which makes development that much faster. So, yeah, so think we've gotten to a feature parity quickly. I think…

Partial feature parity, like maybe 90%, probably within a year, 100 % plus within two years. And it showed. It showed in a sense that the customers would sign up, not quit, right? Which made the growth that much faster. Like I said, you're pretty much guaranteed to acquire customers, just simply because, you know, this is a proven space.

There are tools out there doing the same thing. Yes, you're not unique. Yes, you're doing what others are doing. Yes, it's difficult to differentiate. You're not going to win over thousands upon thousands of customers, but a few hundred you're guaranteed to have. And that's your entry point. That's how you get the features tested. This is how you get concepts proven. That's how you set up the team. That's how you pay the bills initially.

Omer (27:00)
So the product took, you said kind of a large part of it, about 12 months. What point did you launch the product and start selling it? Was it at the end of the 12 months or earlier than that?

Vitaly Veksler (27:12)
No, early. I'm a very incremental sort of thinker and operator, which is sometimes, in most of the cases, it's good. There are certainly times when you kind of need to go and only live when things are complete. So we launched very early because we sort of understood that scheduling is by far…

Sort of the most important feature getting the content out there. So the scheduling with the light analytics was probably like the alpha version. But pretty quickly we had the inbox, pretty quickly we had the listening, things were just getting edited and on. The type of product that SMMs are, it's almost like a Christmas tree.

That you just keep on dressing up and dressing up and dressing up and there's just no end to the dressing up of the tree. Yet a tree in a room with a couple ornaments on it is still a tree in a room with an ornament on it, right? So there is like this bare minimum that was launched very early.

Omer (28:12)
So there's some interesting challenges that I can see. Like, so once you get to the point where you have feature parity, you then have to figure out how do I market this and give potential customers a reason to buy my product instead of all the other products out there, like what makes us different and so on. But when you're in the, when you launch with just a subset like scheduling,

Omer (28:39)
I think a lot of early stage founders would be very uncomfortable with that because they'd be like, well, all of these products out there do a hundred things. I'm going out there with one or two features that yeah, they're important, but why would anybody pick my product when

Vitaly Veksler (28:53)
Great question.

Yeah, fantastic question. So we knew exactly that to be the problem, right? And for that reason, we didn't go after the ICP in question, ICP that we wanted to eventually. Instead, we went for a completely different ICP for whom the feature parity with the bigger products would be not as significant. Right. In our case, the ICP that we wanted would be like the agencies of the world or social media managers, know, people that operate social

accounts for others, for example, right? That's probably our target ICP, right? But initially, we knew that a lot of SMBs out there just looking to schedule content very simply to their socials, a lot of creators out there just looking to get their content out for their own brands. And that was the initial ICP that we targeted. And they were perfectly happy. Our pricing point was negligible. It was a very cheap product with a basic set of features. And that's probably within the 12 months as the product matures.

We introduced new payment plans, like the new features went on to the higher tier plans, and that's what we got an agency plan in there, and that's how we started approaching the ICPs in question as well.

Omer (30:08)
How did you figure out who those initial target customers were going to be?

Vitaly Veksler (30:13)
So this is where the experience comes into play. So all of my time at Social Report, I knew who the customers are and the new ones differences, right? Among them, and that's invaluable information. Unfortunately, for me early on with the first company, I didn't have that, right? So it took me a while to really appreciate the differences in the ICP because they seemed almost…

Negligible because you can say they all need the tool, but they need the tool in perhaps similar ways to entirely different outcomes. There are certain customers that don't need certain features, that care about a certain subset of features, right? And there is even in the demo as you are presenting the product, depending on the ICP, you'll be basically telling different stories, right? Depending on who you're talking to. So I think not having detailed and in-depth understanding of the ICP and their needs and categorize being able to classify them could lead to a lot of mistakes.

Omer (31:20)
Yeah, I think in many ways you had five or six years of great training to deeply understand the market.

Vitaly Veksler (31:28)
Yeah, experience is always king, right? So you can read all you need, but I've probably done easily thousand demos to customers during my social report days, maybe even more before we've scaled our support team.

Because had I had the support team and not spoken to a thousand customers, I probably would not have such intimate understanding as to what an agency business is like or what an SMB is like. For example, that, hey, in the case of a small business, the owner actually views social as something that he has to do but doesn't have time for. Versus in an agency situation, the agency actually cares a lot more about renewing their contract than the success of their customer.

Vitaly Veksler (32:15)
It's remarkable how new ones that could get because on the surface you might think that the agency really cares for the outcome of the business. They do certainly, but only after the renewal of that contract. So what can you do in terms of features to make sure that the contract gets renewed, that the customer is happy?

Omer (32:33)
Now in terms of those early customers and acquiring them in terms of marketing growth, what was the playbook that worked for you? Like what was the growth channel that eventually clicked and helped you acquire these types of customers?

Vitaly Veksler (32:52)
Good question, because initially, you can't do paid media easily because obviously the ROI on that is gonna be just disastrous. So you're gonna have to rely on organic, And again, to my sort of theory that you don't need to do much to acquire initial customers, just the basics of SEO and the basics of social.

Just a few useful hashtags, just a basic community engagement out there will get you initial customers, right? It's how you then scale that out to kind of go from initial 50 customers to then 500 customers to subsequently to 5,000 customers. That's the difficult part, but I think it's not going to be, it sort of seems kind of remarkable. You build something and all of sudden something is coming through and registering and signing up, but we live in such a noisy space.

Where it's not going to take too much time for you to kind of plant some seeds of who you are out there and see some initial sort of response to that. It's the scale. Like that response could be there, but it may not result in much if you don't somehow harness that.

Omer (34:01)
Okay, so a year later, the product has evolved. You're close to feature parity with a lot of the competitors out there. And so you start targeting your ICP, right? The customers that you actually wanted to go after initially. How easy or hard was it to convince them to use Vista Social versus ABCD XYZ product out there.

Vitaly Veksler (34:31)
Mm-hmm.

Vitaly Veksler (34:34)
Yeah, that's actually, it's a great question because it sort of points at a slight oversight that I had going into this, again, experience, right? Once you do one company, two companies, one product, two products, third product, you kind of have the ins and outs of what could go wrong. And I think I did overlook slightly the fact that this time around, the social media management space is much more established. That if the first time around we were talking to customers about signing up for a great new way of managing social, right?

Something that some of them didn't even know existed. So this time around, we're talking to customers that are sort of, you know, our users are well aware of SMMs. They've used all of them or some of them. And in many instances, actually in most instances, and that's actually part of our recipe for success, is that they pretty much hate their SMMs. And that kind of what helps us quite a bit. But we are now, in terms of marketing, talking to people about switching where we are better.

Versus why SMMs exist, which if you think about it is interesting also because your marketing is no longer focused on educational aspect as to what SMM is.

The world has already done that job. Everybody knows what SMM is, right? You are now focusing purely on differentiation, new ways of doing things. You're focusing on that delta on that sort of the next tier. But it is a bit of an oversight early on for Vista Social where we did kind of went on to talk about the product a little bit too much without realizing that everybody knows what SMM is and they're just needing a reason to switch.

Omer (36:14)
Yeah. So what, what was, what were, what was, or what were the reasons that you gave them? So you said a lot of them hated their existing product. so did you focus on some kind of feature differentiation? Was it more about the way that you were marketing and the messaging? I know support was an area that you felt was

Omer (36:43)
really important to invest in and get right. So how did you figure out that differentiating? What was the reason for them to switch?

Vitaly Veksler (36:53)
First of all, I think it's still an ongoing process. So I don't think we fully figured out and attracted.

Good enough of a majority of SMM users out there. So I think the road is still ahead of us. But the few things that we are focusing on are things like the fact that a lot of our competitors, especially the older ones, they are layered cakes, basically. They've existed for over a decade. Social has evolved and they kept on layering and layering and patching and page, which makes their system very behemoth-like.

They're very inflexible. They're very rooted in a lot of things that don't even exist any longer, right? It's very difficult for them to readjust and a lot of customers who are using them have found themselves being used like using data tools not having all the latest features for example, right? So we're certainly positioning ourselves as just a modern solution to it's a very clean cut no archaic nonsense of link shorteners or whatever else used to exist right within this space and was considered to be important. We're just a more modern clean tool, right? So that's sort of one angle. The other angle is obviously price. As I pointed out, there was a time when no new SMMs could be built and that lasted for a few years, which allowed a lot of our competitors to just hike up their prices.

Pricing is a bit tricky because at certain level, a lot of customers don't care about the pricing too much, larger companies, et cetera. But there is a significant portion of the customers that does. And I think pricing is an important distinction. And also the complexity of our world. And I think as listeners kind of listen to this, think SMM is on one hand fairly straightforward as a business.

Vitaly Veksler (38:48)
But the challenge is that we are hostage to what the networks do, right, and allow us to do. And what makes our position worse is that their native functionality will always be better than whatever that is that we build. So essentially, we can never build a perfect tool that matches the native experience, right? And it's…

Vitaly Veksler (39:15)
Helping the customer through that imperfect experience Both a making sure that you do as much as humanly possible on the product side to close the gaps But when all you've done all you could and it's purely now a matter of customer experience and customers having issues connecting profiles or whatever else exists in our world in terms of various systemic type problems, the fact that a lot of our competitors don't handle support well plays to our advantage, right? And I think support is one of the areas that we've really taken…

In my opinion, to another level, understanding the questions, responding to questions, caring about the questions. Like, I have such negative experiences contacting support for a variety of products. In many cases, I would dread even contacting support just because I know that it's gonna take me like three, four emails just for somebody to even look at my question, right? Big companies can afford that.

For the smaller company, each customer question is a relationship building, right? So you can build that relationship. You can solve the problem. Customer will be the loyal customer. Like it's expensive and it's laborious, but it's one of the things that sort of stands out as fairly key to our success here.

Omer (40:32)
When you said that a lot of potential customers you spoke to hated their existing products What was the main reason for that? Was it just the the complexity of the products? Was it the kind of the poor support all of the above?

Vitaly Veksler (40:47)
Perhaps all the above with a different product, one of those could maybe be at the higher level. Certainly support is key. A lot of products just don't provide one-on-one support, very difficult to get through people.

But I think fundamentally again, within the SMM space, so for example, if I build an email tool, if I build a banking app, it'll be perfect. It will never miss a dollar in your account. The email will always be delivered, right? Versus if you build an SMM and a user needs a feature, but it's just not possible, right? Just not possible because that social network or that social network did not make it available. Or for example, that you've done all you could, but there's a failure on the side of let's say meta because just because they have any bad day, right?

So it's a complex experience that we're in and frankly looking at this, if I build a third company, I'm definitely gonna try to find a simpler space. So we've certainly picked a space that's very complex to get right. And I think that is what…

More seasoned customers that we have, right, they've been using tools, they understand the complexity and they appreciate the fact that it will never be perfect and they kind of accept that as a, but obviously a lot of customers kind of view that differently, so not everybody has the patience.

Omer (42:11)
Yeah. So once you, once you've persuaded a customer that they should switch and try Vista Social. And as you said, you know, for, for a lot of companies, that's just an ongoing thing, right? When we talk about differentiation, it's, it's an easy word, but actually executing is, you know, much harder than, than, you know, most people think. But once you get them to say, yeah, I'm willing to switch.

Then you've got the challenge about, how much work is actually involved in moving over? And often that is one of the reasons why a customer may not, it depends on what the switching costs are like. Yeah, it's fine to sign up and connect your social media accounts, but what about all the stuff I've already set up in the previous system and whatever. So what did you do to try and overcome some of that?

Vitaly Veksler (43:07)
Right. So most strategically, what we've done is that as we were building Vista,

We really looked at lot of competitors, right, to make sure that we don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to navigational aspects. So we don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to structural aspects, because again, SMMs have existed for a while. A lot of things are fairly standard terminology wise, layout wise, calendars, inbox, like people expect to find things. So we're trying to kind of do things in a way that's not going to be just startling difference when people come around, right? So that's one aspect of it. And the other one,

We know where the Exodus is happening. So we know that there is this competitor or that competitor We have plenty of documentation plenty of onboarding material plenty of willingness for us to train people in that regard. So frankly, the effort is not significant, in my opinion, for people to switch. It's a hassle, it's retraining, it's the evil that you know, it's the, works for me mentality, right? So yes, it's an imperfect product that I have, but it works for me.

A lot of factors and I think a lot of personalities, lot of considerations.

Vitaly Veksler (44:27)
When it comes to switching. But yeah, so it's a daily battle for us to convince more and more users to switch over.

Omer (44:35)
So now having gone through that entire journey from doing this once and then kind of building it a second time and reflecting back on some of the mistakes about not paying enough attention to what customers or maybe not asking the right questions or listening to customers and maybe not paying enough attention to competitors.

What do you do differently these days when it comes to, you know, customers or how much time you spend looking at what competitors are doing?

Vitaly Veksler (45:10)
On the product side, I pay really a lot of attention to what is it that we're building. Because once you reach the future parity rate, what do you build beyond that? So do you stop building? Do you continue building? So we spend a lot of time, and now that we have the luxury of time, because we're no longer chasing our tails trying to build stuff, we can really try to perfect a lot of things that are considered to be dead end, impossible to perfect areas of our system. Video processing.

Majority of our competitors would not be able to process some of the videos that we are able to process. That video processing stuff that we have is terribly complex and we keep on reinvesting in it to make it even better. So trying to perfect the system instead of trying to make it bigger, because bigger is problematic. Like we can get into say, a CRM business or some content management business as well, right? Some payment processing, store support, inventory. Listen, we get these ideas. We have the suggestion box where users are like recommending things. If we're not careful, we can easily dilute our attention away from things that truly matter. So I think like that's my day-to-day challenge is to kind of keep an eye on things that matter and keep us away from things that don't matter because it's very easy to get diluted.

Easy to get too big. So that's sort of on the product side of things. And obviously as our aspirations kind of go beyond the seven figure MRR and now we're looking at, okay, so how do we get to the eight figures? That requires almost a complete rethinking of the processes. So like this more natural organic stuff, right?

Vitaly Veksler (47:00)
It works. It produces decent outcomes. It even produces a fairly remarkable growth, but remarkable growth over small outcomes is still small, right? So even if you can show like in our case, we're like 5 % every month increases, amazing, but over something pretty small, right? So if you look at the trajectory, it's still not quite at the right level. So right now my challenge and our challenge is to, how do we become a much bigger company, how do we achieve much bigger results? And it does mean a lot of structural system changes. And this is where, yet again, now I'm entering, because with social reporting, you have that problem because we exited earlier. Now that we haven't exited and now that the business is growing, now we're going to have to figure out the scaling aspect of it, something that I will no longer have the backing of my first company to help me with, Discover. So this will be a brand new effort, brand new world.

Omer (47:56)
Yeah, yeah, that's great. I think in many ways, focus is about exactly that, right? As a leader, it's about being able to not figure out what more to do, but what to say no to. So you can keep everybody focused on what really matters. And it's very, very easy, especially if you're a product guy, to come up with a whole bunch of ideas on what you could add into a product, right?

Vitaly Veksler (48:18)
And listen, I have, luckily, and also that I need to be careful about, I have the team, especially the technical team that is, to build all that stuff. And this team will, you will literally do anything you want them to do, which is both powerful but also dangerous because like you can easily ask them to do things that are just going to over complicate the product or turn us into something that's hard to explain, hard to demo because one of the criteria that we have for our product can we demo it another 30 minutes.

Omer (48:39)
Dangerous, yeah.

Vitaly Veksler (48:57)
I think we still can, although I do get criticized that I sound like an auctioneer from like a Texas, know, sometimes when I'm doing it, I kind of, but that's kind of like a good indicator. Like, can you explain your product like another 30 minutes? And can it make sense to the user? I think for us, the answer is still yes. Although again, as I'm doing these demos, I keep on telling the users, like, listen, it's a quick overview.

Omer (49:06)
You

Vitaly Veksler (49:21)
There is always an opportunity to come back for more demos. And I still kind of get involved in demos from time to time. even like make my schedule available because I really want to hear what people are saying about our product because a lot of stuff could get lost in translation. And again, we have our processes where we get reporting on issues that customers are reporting and we try to build some systems around it, priorities and things like that. But it's not until you actually get in there and do a demo for the customer and try to complete functions and

And it's only then when you really kind of like me as a founder and as a leader here to really have the appreciation. think I'm not the only one who does this. think Steve Jobs, I remember reading about him, he would have some of the customer support calls wired to his home so he can quite literally pick up a phone and like talk to the customers on how to like reprogram the iPod or something.

Omer (50:13)
Yeah, yeah, never lose touch with the customers. All right, we should wrap up. Let's get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick-fire questions for you. You ready? Okay, what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Vitaly Veksler (50:23)
Sure. Yes.

Vitaly Veksler (50:30)
I think when it comes to product, the best advice I had was that whatever you build has to feel like a toy. You have to feel excitement of playing with the toy. And if you do, your customers would love it. So that was about the product.

Omer (50:45)
I like it. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Vitaly Veksler (50:49)
Freakonomics was a book that essentially allowed me to sort of understand that conventional wisdom is not a good guide in life. That a lot of conventional stuff is really more of a misguidance than a help.

Omer (51:08)
I was talking to somebody about that book like last week. I think it's still a great read. It just opens your eyes a lot, I think. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Vitaly Veksler (51:22)
Tenacity and acceptance that you're to be the only one putting in all the effort as crazy as that is. So you can't expect the same level of tenacity out of people who you're to hire and you're going to have to be okay with that. So it's a difficult thing to accept.

Omer (51:40)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Vitaly Veksler (51:44)
Routine. So having a routine in place is extremely helpful. Without a routine, this becomes a never-ending, never-stopping sea of information and tasks. So get up at five, exercise at four, pick up a kid at six, read a book at eight. That keeps you sane.

Omer (52:12)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

Vitaly Veksler (52:17)
Listen, I would love one day to have a farm. But my true spirit, I think I grew up in a fairly humble farm-like surroundings and I would not mind, it's a lot of work, but I would not mind trying that out one day.

Omer (52:33)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Vitaly Veksler (52:38)
I was born in a country that does not exist. Although maybe some people do kind of know where that is, but USSR has ceased to exist when I was 12. And it kind of sucks to be from a country that's no longer there.

Omer (52:52)
Yeah, that's interesting. I I grew up and yeah, you know, it's funny. I wonder how many people even know what the USSR is these days. It's like, and finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Vitaly Veksler (53:00)
You

Vitaly Veksler (53:08)
I like to work out. I like the sports, I like the active lifestyle, whether it's the bikes or the weight lifting or whatever that is. But I like to divert the energy.

I feel like my day-to-days are full of energy diversion, but it's the different kind of energy. So I like to divert my physical energy as well. that's in my line of work, it takes a very special dedication. It's pretty easy to spend the day working, coding, doing the startup stuff, and then just go to bed, right? But you haven't diverted that physical part of your sort of energy.

Omer (53:48)
Love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been great conversation. I appreciate you kind of looking back over the last God, 10 years. Yeah. And I think it's particularly interesting with your story to have basically gone through once building a social media management product.

Vitaly Veksler (54:00)
12 years, actually 14 years, 14 years almost, yeah.

Omer (54:15)
Made some mistakes, eventually figured out how to solve them, and then had the opportunity the second time to basically avoid making those same mistakes. I think it's lot of valuable lessons that I think even if somebody is working on a different area that has nothing to do with social media, I think there's still a lot of valuable lessons here. So I appreciate you sharing those with us. If people want to check out Vista Social, they can go to vistasocial.com.

And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Vitaly Veksler (54:49)
LinkedIn is probably going to be the best option. I think there's a form on the website to contact our team as well, so either way.

Omer (54:57)
Yeah, we'll include link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Other than that, thank you Vitaly. been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success for the future.

Vitaly Veksler (55:01)
Sounds awesome.

Vitaly Veksler (55:07)
Thank you, thanks for having me today. Thanks, bye.

Omer (55:09)
My pleasure. Cheers.