Killer Content Marketing – Hiten Shah – MicroConf 2013

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0:07[Music] so I was supposed to I had a bunch of topics and I asked Bob a lot of different things about what I should talk about and I kept bothering him and he kept giving me information about what all the attendees have said and what's the top of mind for them etc and I decided a while ago to write about content marketing or killer content marketing and and I've deliberately striked out the content part and then also striked out most of my slides on content marketing so you just get to hear whatever I want to say for another 39 minutes or so anyways what I've done

0:44is I've actually posted this online already I've already tweeted it out and so you guys have access to it you can follow along there's lots of links in there to other things so this is more of a guide and what I'm gonna say is probably going to be much more depth than what's on there I also don't have a hundred and ninety slides I was trying to hold the record of the most number of slides I have about seventy nine and mine are probably more dense than Dave's but anyways I'm gonna get started the big thing I want to say before I do get started though is that the reason I

1:15crossed off content is because when everyone thinks of content marketing they think of a blog and that's a misconception I think what we should be all focusing on is actually killer marketing and I'll define that a little bit more give a bunch of examples and we can go from there first up I do want to take something Jason said which is what I call the goal so the goal is for everyone here is basically a recurring revenue cash machine for lack of a better term you know a lot of people are consultants here I used to be one totally get it but the end goal for everybody whether

1:53you're consultant or already doing this is a recurring cash machine I thought this was basically a good way to start off kind of and literally talk about what all of our goals are does anyone disagree with this for starters all right we're doing good so far so this is my username or whatever on Twitter that's the hashtag which I know all of you know someone made a joke yesterday about trying to get it to trend while I talked which I don't think is possible but I'll take about 30 seconds to let you guys tweet so maybe it can trend in Vegas just kidding so the big thing I want to say before I

2:31continue though is the reason my slides are dense and the reason I'm going to share a lot of stuff is because all the information you've already heard I could repeat and probably provide even more value to in some cases and some not like I don't know enough about SEO anymore although I ran a SEO company for a while but the big thing is nothing like this existed when I started and I started in about 2003 on the Internet and that's why I keep coming back and that's why I love talking to all of you as much as possible because I really wish something like this existed when I

3:04started let me define a little bit more what something like this means to me so this is a conference for people who are trying to create something literally out of nothing whose focus is not on raising money or scaling a business by someone else giving you money instead you're making a business as you grow for the majority of you from what I can tell and there's no other conference that I know that is actually specifically designed for that case that's been around long enough so that they're actually attendees here which I'm going to talk about as well that have been successful doing that and that that to

3:38me is the future so all of you all of us are the future of business which is basically starting things out of nothing with nobody's money except our own and our own sort of blood sweat tears whatever you wanna call it so a little bit more about me I have a unique experience where I have run a consulting company like many of you which is not in the slides and that did SEO and social media marketing we got into design and stuff like that I started that company in 2003 and kept going and decided that we decided we wanted to build products we tried building lots of different

4:14products in lots of different ways hired many designers developers because we were making money in our consulting company and Dave can tell you how profitable SEO and stuff like that is and so we ended up getting luck with a business called crazy egg which I know many of you have used or heard of or whatever the thing is it's self-funded and it's very profitable there's only three full-time employees two full-time and two that are half-time but they don't work on anything else and the rest are either contractors or freelancers or whatever it is that we need at any given time and it's very profitable and I'm just gonna leave it

4:47at that whatever metric you have on employee profitability we probably are number one on that and that's what our goal is so I think there's two different goals that you can have when you build a business pretty deliberately which is hire a lot of people to make it bigger and bigger or hire as little as possible people full-time people but still keep growing revenue as fast as you possibly can in this business we opted for that in the next business KISSmetrics my co-founder and I are really into sort of learning things we know nothing about just by doing them and people laugh when I say that for us venture capital was an

5:25experiment but it was because we wanted to learn how it felt so I am sure crazy egg and anything else I did would be much bigger if we didn't decide to do KISSmetrics and you know take a venture capital we've raised all of it's not announced but we've raised over six million dollars so far this company started in 2008 so it's been about five years at this point we're about 35 employees which for the amount we raise and where and how long it's been is actually kind of low but there's a bunch of lessons learned there but so my experience is a consulting company shifting to products

5:58shifting to actually trying to raise money and grow a business by raising money and still having a very profitable sort of software-as-a-service business we've done all kinds of stuff with that but when I'm actually going to talk to you about first because this came up in my conversations with a lot of you not just about marketing but more about how to take a product which this product specifically is called kis insights we don't own it anymore but I'm gonna tell the story of how we went from basically a product I'm sorry an idea to a product to a business to an acquisition and I am 100% sure any of you in this room could

6:37build this product or business and either do the same thing with it or key running it the first thing that keeps ringing true for me that I put in all my slides is customer development so how many of you know this book specifically okay so about 1/3 2/3 1/2 ok 1/2 how many of you are actually doing customer development ok all right how many of you are confident in your customer development and the methodology that you're doing it well ok cool I have met some of you and I do believe that 3 or 4 or whatever that raise your hands are actually good at it and very good at it

7:16so to me if you take anything away I know there's been a lot of tips and tricks around tactics and even some strategy around pricing and marketing and all this crap all good stuff all important stuff the one thing I'll tell you that to change everything about how I do business is this and this whole idea of customer development of talking to your customers in the right ways so I'm the story of kiss insights is very much oriented around customer development how we learned what to build the right thing to build etc I also have a lot more to talk about so I'm gonna keep going

7:49the reason I like this is it to me any feature any product any business anything is all about finding the core problem the core problem that a customer has the thing that actually matters so you know speaking of an attendee in and you know he mentioned I'm building X and I think I have to do X Y Z ABC for that to work and all those things were features so X was a feature and all the other ones were features and all I could say to him was well then you probably haven't figured out what this is what the core problem is what's that one thing that actually does matter that

8:20sort of helps you start and helps you evolve that thing so this is really important next up and I've got links down here to related stuff is actually to find that core problem you actually have to write learn how to ask the right questions there's again this link down here when you go look at the deck will kind of give you the answers on how to do customer development interviews how to ask the right questions how not to be biased about it but if we're at the party today or anything and you guys have questions around that I'm always happy to chat about that this is very

8:50important though because if you ask questions in the wrong way you get bad data and bad data leads you in the wrong direction or helps just validate what you already know which is not useful necessarily so this is the process and I'm going to talk about it in relation to kiss insights the process I always like to go through is starting with a hypothesis believe it or not in my company's everything starts like this as much as possible if we're doing a new marketing channel it starts with the hypothesis and assumptions of how much it can what it can do for us and then we find the minimal way to figure out if

9:24that's true or not we've got engineers in all my companies and companies I try to be involved in actually doing customer development thinking of things as hypotheses so when people come to me with an idea I actually try to help them break it down into some kind of hypothesis because every idea is actually just some form of a guess some form of an assumption that's not proven yet the framework I like to use especially for when you're thinking about a product and this is what they call a problem hypothesis would be our hypothesis is that a certain type of person have a problem doing a certain

10:00type of task you can tweak it a little bit but being very specific about this is very useful and the one in orange is all about certain type of person as specific as you can get would be very useful what I mean by that is if you say you know your person is a plumber and they have a problem managing appointments I would tell you that what can you get more specific are you in a local area plumbers are local can you say plumbers in San Francisco or plumbers in no Val know a valley in San Francisco have a problem scheduling the only reason I say that is because then

10:33that helps define how you reach out to them you know another thing a lot of people ask me is well how do I find those customers all you got to do is have that sort of drive to just go find them and be very specific about them and that's that's the only secret to it the rest of it is today we're in a world where we have so many different ways to reach a customer that shouldn't be your big hang-up it should be more about defining who that customer is early on and really laying it out as a hypothesis versus any other way and as I was saying

11:00before we use this in different forms for all kinds of things from marketing to sales to new channels we're trying to reach partnerships features not just a whole product everything and it works really really well at sort of breaking down the barriers barriers of opinion which is really what I think holds a lot of us up so with the kids insights we started with something like this which was our hypothesis is that product managers have a problem doing effective customer research so that was a hypothesis then what we wanted to learn and this is actually pretty standard for any software product so you could probably take this and sort of frame it for

11:38whatever you're doing what are they doing now what are other tools missing who else is involved in the process of customer research that was a really key one for our product you'll see why later how frequent severe is a plane it's back to getting to that core problem is this really the most painful thing for them is this really worth solving for them or is it something where it's kind of important but not the most important thing you could be doing for them and the last one is what our other what our other customer complaints had to reread that because I worded it weird but essentially that would help you if you

12:10were asking questions like that are trying to learn that they'll help you figure out what the next thing to do is in case the problem you thought the hypothesis you had was untrue and that that wasn't the most painful thing so how we learned is we did 20 phone interviews we just reached out to product managers I know there's been a lot of tactics shared of how to email cold email all that were covered there so we did that we did a bunch of paper user tests just by showing people stuff just to see if they could understand our verbage and our language that we decided

12:36to use after the phone interviews we did a few landing pages I love collecting email addresses you'll learn a little bit more about that possibly later and then we did a hacky MVP just to test out the concept to see field work for us and for our customers or a few handful of customers but we did end up learning is that people aren't doing customer research they want private feedback in targeting so the way they were trying to do this today is things like user voice and this was about 2010 2011 so this is a while ago now but that's what they were mainly using and that it required

13:08developer involvement when they really wanted to do it in a private way which was why we asked like well who else is involved in your coming in and helping you accomplish that and then the last thing we learned is it's a constant pain so if they could do more they would like to do more of it but they camped and it was a big holdup for them in their jobs and this is product managers that tech that you know are usually some form of a cost center in a company large and small and that you know always sort of unless they're yeah unless we're really into the team and

13:36stuff like that always butt heads with engineers on a daily basis I don't mean to be that you know aggressive about it but that's what I've noticed in general and so it's a constant pain for them they don't want to bother their engineers with yet another thing that has nothing to do with features on the product so what we ended up building which is kind of popular now and lots of other companies have done it was this little micro surveys that pop up on your website I won't get into that you can look it up I'll talk more about it in a second so that was essentially all the way from

14:05a hypothesis to how we did the interviewing what we learned and all of that stuff and there's a lot of links in there to help you kind of do it yourself I would highly recommend that whether it's a feature or a new product or whatever you're doing you actually take that approach versus just building it this is one of my favorite quotes about marketing this was actually from a couple days ago my friend Patrick who actually wrote that little blue book ironically said how you get to the customer is as important if not more than what you get to the customer and this goes back to why I crossed out the

14:36content part in the killer content marketing because everybody thinks the way you get to the customers with content you know my belief today is that it's actually how you get to them relates to exactly like kind of what you provide them and I'll give you an example with kissin sites one big thing though before I get into that is the reason everyone talks about marketing and it's so important to everybody is because channels are getting crowded very fast so I know Jason came and talked about Adwords and a lot of other people are using AdWords here but one big thing that you know we've learned time and time again is that AdWords can

15:08be expensive especially in crowded markets and every market if it's worth it typically gets crowded over time and what I mean by that is a cost goes up so at some point you know for Dropbox who's a storage file-sharing company which is basically some of the first companies that started creeping up after ecommerce on the web they had to pay about 230 bucks to 388 bucks just to acquire a customer for a $99 a year product and so that just really didn't map out for that I've got the presentation link in here and everything so they actually couldn't acquire customers on Adwords some of you are lucky enough to be in markets where

15:40the costs are so low that you can still do it that doesn't mean that'll last forever and for a lot of us it's impossible even for for my business today both of them well for crazy Edward Edward still works but for KISSmetrics Edwards is almost impossible to make work at scale and keep growing the business that way so what Dropbox did is they'd be essentially equivalent of making their own channel everyone knows about their double referral I'm sure everyone's got extra gigs and stuff like that because of it but that's how they did it they basically created their own channel that's what I sort of referred to as

16:13this whole referral program and all that stuff that they did and that have you know sort of popularized that concept although it may not be right for you so you don't necessarily need to implement it but the whole idea is they made their own channel they made their own path to a quat to reaching the customer that's really what I mean by that so I've got a simple three questions which I actually talked about last year but I think are still relevant and important one is who are your customers so this is to figure out how to create your channel where do they hang out because if you don't know

16:40where they hang out then you should go find out and how should you engage them and if you notice the where do they hang out and sort of who they are can actually start with your hypothesis because what you define in their who they are and it's likely you have to go find them so that already starts giving you an idea of where they hang out give them giving you the opportunity to even talk to them and learn about all this stuff even before you get into building a marketing channel before you even build your product so with kiss insights we have the same problem Adwords paid

17:10acquisition and all that stuff wasn't going to be scalable and workable for us so this was the hypothesis who the customers are where do they hang out and that was an interesting insight as we started talking to them what we realized which is probably obvious to many of you who probably are you know some level of a product manager is that they actually hang out on other people's websites and then does anyone know why they do that it's pretty obvious but they're a product manager they're trying to improve their own product so they go try other people's products so that was an insight that we got and that we got that

17:40insight by actually talking to them and as a result of that we deliberately made the product in such a way where it's sat on a website and there was little powered by kiss insights link and that was what I would call the marketing for kitchen sites that was our channel it was this little powered by link I'm gonna talk a little bit later a lot about channels and the way we did it because I know everyone likes to talk about metrics and me cuz apparently I have a metrics analytics coming but we tracked him just by adding UTM codes which are basically parameters there's a link down there to help you figure that

18:10out and then we actually got exact little screenshot of KISSmetrics but like exact channel tracking so we knew every single if you go back and look we wrote it as UTM campaign equals google comm which is actually the site that the survey was sitting on and what we did is we basically segmented our data by that campaign name which was essentially every site the little survey sat on and essentially figured out how many signups what the conversion rate was and what the revenue was from all those channels and that's how we used that's what we use to optimize who else we reached out to or did some manual stuff to to get

18:45them to put our little thing on their sites or educate him about it and that was the whole strategy for that business we had over 25,000 signups before we actually ended up selling it and it was profitable when I looked at it from when we looked at it from how many people are working on it and what's our marketing cost which was basically zero for maintaining it and things like that and it was a zero dollar marketing budget which is some of my favorite marketing budget and we sold it and it's now called koala rue kissing site redirects there and they've taken it to a whole

19:18nother place that acquisition was a very healthy software as a service multiple about three to seven X is kind of the range that I've seen work out really well when you're doing less revenue we were doing about five figures in revenue at the time and we did all that basically for free that's what I'm saying all of you guys could do this with no money and just engineering and design skills and some sort of thinking on marketing it was a very good acquisition by all numbers it was you know in the very high six figures didn't hit seven figures in the acquisition but it was great and the key to this is your

19:54marketing has to align with your customers that's the most important takeaway I would have even in most of my presentation about marketing mates that has to the customers you can't go out and you know you use things like StumbleUpon or you know things that are irrelevant to your audience but there are a lot of channels out there and a lot of more interesting ways to think about this type of stuff so you know going kind of into some examples of people that are in the room not just my own examples I wanted to talk about sort of another simple framework and I also was I'm trying to be highly tactical so it is

20:30kind of dry but oh well everyone else was very fun and exciting and we're before lunch so I can be kind of dry I guess I get the best spot so the formula I came up with was essentially build grow and convert and I can divide almost any marketing up into that and this is very related to like basically how do you create an audience how do you actually create your own marketing channels and stuff like that so Nathan berry raise your hand he's somewhere in the room we've mentioned him before he's gonna speak later I think he says the more I help you the more you will trust me and I think that

21:01was really he says a lot of things and half of them are BS I'm just kidding but uh I've been basically watching him for a long time and you'll you'll learn why in a second but this is one of my favorite things that he said sort of publicly which is basically which essentially exudes kind of how he thinks of marketing in my opinion and how he does things so his model is basically he builds an audience by providing free content he grows the audience by basically charging them for some content and then he converts them now with a new SAS tool that he's built and he might

21:36built other ones and things like that but that's kind of the model that I see for him so you know in combination of having a hypothesis I would think through this kind of stuff and I would also think through your marketing channels between those three things you've got your early almost the whole first year of your business pretty much covered and that's why I you know kind of want to talk about these three things so with him what he did is at Nathan Barry calm the way I first discovered him I don't remember which exact blog post of it of his but he has this very

22:04awesome way of providing really long in-depth blog posts on topics that are very relevant to designers and essentially entrepreneurs like all of you and so I bumped into his blog at some point probably from hacker news or something like that because he's pretty popular on there in terms of getting traffic or I'm sorry getting all his posts on there and sort of ran into his blog the way he grows the audience like I said he charges for content so what he does is he basically has a bunch of stuff that he's created that he charges for that are targeting specific audiences so this one was all about

22:40mobile app design this other one was all about designing web apps you can see there's some form of a theme for what he's doing and then a new one he's doing is on Authority which i think is super interesting because everything he's done seems to be coming from some level of experience he had and so he probably has a lot to say on it and can be Authority so it's kind of interesting that he's writing on that but I can see a pattern and a thread and how he does things and the last is his new thing called convertkit which I know has been mentioned a couple times which is all

23:10about basically drip marketing and landing pages and sort of all that kind of stuff next up is Brennan Brennan you hear right there and this was a quote that he wrote which is write with the intention of appealing to a specific audience if you guys have been paying attention to what I've been saying that's essentially what I'm talking about so I thought it was brilliant and he did that on his podcast which I don't think he's doing anymore I'm not mistaken oh yes kind of yeah he got busy I get it and so with him what he did and what I found interesting and by the way I love

23:40breaking this down that's why I broke it down for these guys and specifically what they're doing I think this is all achievable by any of you and that's really what what gets to me about it but basically it was an email newsletter it looks like an email newsletter which I'll talk about then he does paid content as well and then has a subscription model but he really targets a specific audience across the board which I find the smart thing to do and you can tell you understands his audience too by the way he's doing it so freelancers weekly is basically for freelancers which I know some of you

24:12might be or any of you on his newsletter awesome there you go yes he's speaking to you guys so that's that's kind of the email newsletter I think has over 3000 emails on it right now I think that could be a lot more by the way but all good and then he grows it or he basically grows the audience by basically having them pay for something he's done so this was all about doubling your freelancing rate and he has a book worksheets and interviews and he charges 49 bucks for it has anyone paid for it awesome see I didn't get here so this is working obviously because you guys are

24:44paying for it and all that kind of stuff the next thing he did was one about basically how to get more clients from your website which i think is a pretty awesome topic now the pattern I saw in his work is that it's always targeting a specific audience has anyone bought this yet awesome there you go you have customers in the room have you talked to them awesome all right and so the pattern I saw is that it's always targeting freelancers and it's hitting on problems and pains that they have which is a pattern that I see of success for people that are doing this stuff and

25:15last he has a plan scope dot IO which is essentially his version of building software for the same audience anybody using this why not dude what's up you got like these handful of people they're rabid alright anyways everyone's got something to improve on so I like giving them a hard time about that I have a apparently people tell me I have a special talent of poking on the right bruised and salt in the wounds that's my job apparently any of you that talk to me probably noticed that I like the way I like to say it is all I got is hate so if you talk to me just be warned that I

25:54don't mean bad it's just everyone else loves you and says everything you're doing is awesome well that's not really helpful to you so I like to poke it kind of what hurts you and what will make you stronger so to speak so Ruben I have known Ruben for a while now I don't know if it was a first micro Kampf or before that Ruben you're here I'm assuming yes back there he's interesting because I've actually seen him all three years right yeah and what he says and this is on his website that I think is kind of defunct now when he was sort of his product

26:22website is like umbrella he says who has a time to learn every new piece of software they run into not me I'm pretty sure you don't either and that really hints on the simplicity and kind of the ideology that he has when he built software which I which I think is super interesting and appealing to me and you can tell that he's taking that to heart when you look the next stuff so the way he did it is actually different than Nathan and Brennan probably because he's been doing it a little longer and you know everyone should congratulate him because he was actually able to quit his job by the

26:53business he started and I'm sure that was a big moment of joy for him and and for me as well because I just loved people quitting their jobs and being able to sustain themselves on what they've built so for his build it was basically a free guide and a newsletter and it's a interesting strat strategy which I rarely see which is he actually has a sample proposal option and then it's a SAS subscription so I'll explain so on his blog and I'm sure in other other ways he actually promotes this free guide and this is getting to be a more important population he's got a whole bunch of people that have

27:30basically got the free guide and it's all about how to create a perfect proposal because his software his proposal software and then what he does is and this is where it gets interesting in my mind on his home page if you're not going to sign up he basically has a big offer of giving you a sample proposal which is essentially like a a mini demo of his product and then what he does is I know we've talked about email a lot he actually breaks out this email that he's already actually updated so how to update this and this is the updated one but basically he sends you

28:03an email pretty much right away he has a reminder of what kind of the product what the email is about like you know and he also thanks to you already for taking the time to check out the sample which is always a brilliant line I'm sure miss copy hacker over there can kind of tell you the same thing and then he's got a link obviously to check it out and download the PDF and this is it's actually a pretty cool demo of what the product can do and kind of what it is and it's literally the product and then benefits of his product and there's a whole bunch of awesome stuff he's done

28:33on learning what his website visitors are thinking when they come to the website using KISS inside slash koala rue which I'm sure he can teach you all the tricks of I think he does one of the best jobs of doing that and one key thing in here that didn't exist in the previous version this email was so why is bid sketch better than using ms word proposals and before he just said why is it better than using proposals or something like that and the he specifically says ms word microsoft word is because he learned from his website visitors that that i think it was like sixty something percent of them

29:03actually use microsoft word right now today to do proposals and so he incorporated that into his marketing which is another learn from your audience and you know all the stuff everyone's talked about and then lastly he has a CTA for sign up that goes right to the pricing page I also when I signed up for it for the sample proposal I recommend all of you do because the flows are super cool and useful to learn from he actually right after you sign up he drops you right into the his pricing page so I'm obviously curious how that converts but that's pretty cool and then so he send you back to the pricing page

29:31this is just his home page I thought I'd show it he's also got a cool thing on the home page that says you know 193 million dollars earned by bids catch customers which is awesome it's a it's somewhat of a vanity metric but it's also proof that this this product might work for you so I really like that so if you can see the pattern here it's all about teaching people how to solve their problems and that's what all these folks have done one way or another and that's really to me what content marketing is one of the one of the things that people always ask

30:02me about rightfully so I guess is that oh you have you guys have built an awesome blog at KISSmetrics how do I do that and that's again what this talks all about maybe you don't need to do that that's probably not the thing you need to do for us what we learned is people that have a marketing mindset always want to learn about how to do it better and there was also a lot of marketing content out there in lots of different places and lots of different blogs so we saw an opportunity for SEO for kind of social media and stuff like that to build a blog but the

30:33secret for us is actually that it's not our blog that actually is the main thing for us the main things actually our Twitter account how many of you follow our twitter account at KISSmetrics yeah all of you should follow it and you should ask the people that follow it they they would tell you the same but we were able to opportunistically grow our twitter following before anyone figured out or a lot of people figured out that you need to share interesting stuff so our twitter feed is actually arguably somewhat more useful than than our main blog because one out of ten tweets are our own maybe a little bit more now

31:08all the rest are other people's content and that did so many things for us it's not even funny but we actually had the Twitter account first which has over about a hundred and ten thousand followers now and then we created the blog because then we knew we could drive traffic to our blog we could have easily done white papers and other things and we still could do those and drive traffic to those so it's really this channel that we found that was an opportunity and we created it and now it just keeps growing and you don't even have to feed feed it too much it just

31:35works I still manage that account myself so lastly it's all about learning from your audience and your customers and that's what this whole process is so I'm gonna do another plug for this in customer development because not enough of you are doing it even the ones that are doing it don't feel 100% comfortable about doing it but it's actually our secret weapon in all my businesses especially when I can get our engineers to start doing it which is actually easier than you think because the last thing any of you want that our engineers is to build something that nobody wants and waste all that time coding it and

32:07this actually helps you not have to do that the last thing is if you actually have customers already there's a whole bunch of questions you can ask them I thought I'd share all of these they're in the deck I'm not going to go over them these have also been very useful just like with the kind of stuff Ruben's doing and understanding your customers so that you can kind of feed what they need to hear what they should hear what what you know problems you solve for them back to them so I've got about 8 to 10 minutes left most likely and I'm gonna go through probably the most

32:38interesting part of the presentation that is actually about marketing now this was actually a talk I gave at a conference called unsexy which was about b2b stuff but there's a lot of venture-backed people in the room so they liked it but might not have been as relevant to them because I guess they can spend money and stuff in different ways and so this is lots of stuff about how to get distribution not buy content but essentially buy all kinds of different ways including some of the examples I already gave but very specifically not about content because I think content is some of the most difficult thing to do especially for

33:12engineers and the like and it takes a lot a lot more deeper understanding of your users and any any time you pour into a sort of content that's like for marketing you're not pouring into necessarily content for your website and conversions and improving those things because those are really important things so these are things that are not content that can help you actually grow so the first category is integrations and and the big big one there is it's all about other people's platforms and there's a ton of them out there you know all the way from mobile to other ones and so I'll give some examples I didn't do the cumulative

33:45account but there's a ton of people you can reach so this is a little bit of slide porn but essentially all the different products that you can integrate with and literally everyone in this room can probably find one of these to be relevant for them and there's also at least 10 times more than this the number of products that you can reach some of the notable ones are I know constant contacts in the room I updated my slide I only had 500,000 users now they're at 550,000 which is awesome and every one of these companies I just updated the slide yesterday have grown so that means this is a growing

34:18opportunity and you know there there's a there's a slight misconception about integrations that like you know you turn them on and they just start making you money it's not I think these are very different than a partnership you know same problem with partnerships you turn it on or you do it and then all of a sudden you're making money this is more about the way I think about it is how can you involve these products these platforms in your product in your business so that it's better for the customer with it than without it that's a better way that I would treat it because then it's natural and back back

34:49back to the custom development if you're doing customer development you'll essentially figure out what other things are using what platforms are using what tools are using and then it kind of gets obvious as to what you should integrate with so that's what I mean they make your product better I just talked about that I think it's really important to have really good partner pages or integration pages so that people can find them back to the SEO stuff and you know it's all about talking your customers stuff like that this is all standard this is another interesting one which I don't see enough people using but I think it's awesome so if you're

35:19targeting b2b I would actually target work emails so what I mean by that is like if you go to PO do comm they essentially ask for your work email they don't ask for your Gmail they don't ask for any of that they want your work email same with Yammer Yammer sort of popularized this concept or other how many's doing it before that there's a lot of value you can get when you do this so some of it is that you can essentially optimize your onboarding so if you know that there are work email and your tools all about doing better work one way or another you could

35:48basically make sure that you can analyze your user base see if anyone else from the company is using your product you can you know if it's like a little bit of a social collaboration tool you can follow other people in the company and this also gives an obvious reason for you to ask them to invite their co-workers into the product which is huge especially if you have a per seat model or something like that next up is embed I actually don't see enough people using this this was very popular maybe four or five years ago YouTube's obvious one SlideShare is another company that I actually was an

36:21advisor to and still AM before they got acquired by LinkedIn and and the embed strategy I learned a lot about it working with them my slides are on SlideShare anyways so you really want to figure out why people should embed I think SlideShare had figured out a lot of things around presenters like myself and the fact that I'm presenting and I should either in bed or link to my slide show so they've sort of grown a lot of traffic that way you want to make it as easy as possible to embed there's a lot of different ways to do that you want to track them well so just like I was

36:50talking about tracking the powered by link you want to track which type of embed what sites they're sitting on what type of sites are sitting on and how they convert into actual users and/or paid signups etc you want to test call to actions and those embeds and then lastly you want to optimize for search by doing a little anchor tag or links and stuff like that but don't don't obsess but they've already talked all about that so powered by is obviously another one which I've already talked about and gave you guys a pretty good case study on the whole key is what are you powering and really figuring that

37:24out if there is anything that's that you can power sometimes you can incorporate that right into the core of the product so with kiss insights the fact that you had to sign up put a JavaScript on your site and you got these little pop-ups and they were valuable to you and they're also valuable to your visitors because there could they're able to communicate with you it was really huge I see a lot of businesses that have powered by end up growing a lot faster than ones that don't that could and so I would really think about that and back you know all the normal stuff about measuring

37:50effectiveness and all that kind of stuff related to that and the last one which I find super cool I think you know the best case study here is greater calm from HubSpot which is all about free stuff so basically what free tools can you build that help start solving the problems you want to solve for your customers and get them sort of into your funnel the next one is by New Relic they do this new thing which was really just like which type of apps have the fastest response time and it's a little bit interactive it was kind of a cool thing they did I think they could take it

38:21further but I thought it was really neat that they did that and it's more free stuff but it's actually more of taking your engineering time for marketing by building little free tools if you can't build it into your product the key to I think a lot of this stuff is really about mapping the cus customer decision-making and really figuring out what are the decisions customers need to make as they start buying your product you should think about what you can repurpose it that already exists in your product I think bid sketch is actually a pretty good example of that around the free sample proposal it's all

38:52about educating I think that's that's a key takeaway on marketing these days which is like you're just oh you're just teaching you're educating people want to learn you want to teach them you want to be the brand that teaches them you sort of want to own that as much as possible you want to test your ideas minimally just to make sure that you're not wasting any engine any any significant engineering time to see if it'll work lots of different ways to do that and obviously use it to measure and optimize your revenue so I did it in 40 minutes Wow go yeah no no yeah okay cool well I

39:26mean that's what the conference is about it's all about like go and you know I you know this is one of the just you know before I end and go for questions because I'm sure I have enough time one of the things I love about this conference is every year and this was great after Jason's talk and it puts a lot of pressure on the speakers but it's awesome somebody tweets after the first talk like I already the conference is already paid for that's like you don't see that at any conference like any conference this is the only conference I've been to where I get that you get that response

39:56in a tweet so you know I got to say that like you know for the organizers and just the fact that all of you are here this is awesome and you know I'm looking forward to seeing hearing more more of you hopefully in the future speak at the conference and learn from what you guys are learning every time I come here I learned more than anywhere else I can go for two days so you know kudos to everyone for being smart talking about this stuff and also trying to do stuff without money I know Jason likes money a little bit like from other people but it's not a good thing trust

40:22me all right so you talked about using problem hypothesis yeah do you write those down and put them where you can see them or you just talk about them out loud how do you put those together and yeah we we always write them down and we always take a deliberate approach to brainstorming so we take a hypothesis we write down what the riskiest assumptions are or whatever assumptions we're making and essentially the idea is what are the assumptions that would make this not viable so you know the cost of acquiring so if my hypothesis is I can acquire 100 customers a day from AdWords one of the

40:58riskiest option is a cost of acquiring from AdWords is too high which means I can't acquire 100 with the budget I have and so I would go use a keyword to a like Dave was looking at just to see pricing right so that it's just a deliberate approach that kind of put more method to your mayhem and I love things like that you talked about asking questions when you go and talk to your customers and how important that is can you see me had a little more time can you speak a little more about that sure so for me I like to ask questions like that essentially get the person I'm

41:34talking to to tell me a story and and and what I try to find is if I get stories from 20 people I've talked to it's easier to find what that core problem is that they have so for me it's all about just asking questions that are not leading that don't assume anything I actually don't like asking most interviewees what problem they have because that already makes them in this you know I mean you know what's your problem like like that mode right so I always think of that sort of reaction or that question or that sort of anger out of that so I try to more make it

42:06conversational one way I think about it is you want to almost leave the interviewee in such a place where they felt really good about talking about themselves and they almost felt like they didn't learn anything about you because you don't want to teach them anything about you it's not the point of saying I got this awesome thing I'm building do you like it that's the worst you can do right because what this whole process is about is finding out their problems in fact even in the link I sent you that's actually from our product manager at KISSmetrics or now product manager he wrote it before he was he mixes in the

42:37interview the problem and understanding problems people have and his solution and I'd actually don't recommend that I like very specifically just getting stories out of people about themselves never talking about what I'm doing except that hey I want to solve you know you're not even problem but I want to do things to make your life better that's actually a better way to frame it that's why I want to talk to you about what you do every day or every week or whatever it may be so that's what I like to do that's how I do it I'm also lazy so I'd rather just ask to get stories out of them it's much easier

43:08anymore

43:15so when you're talking about the customer development and stuff that you do do you typically build an email list first get people that have expressed least some sort of interest or synergy there and then reach out to them or would you when testing a product or problem I thought Pappas's would you just start cold calling people and trying to engage them in stories so you get that information it depends so these days between my own personal brand my co-founders and the KISSmetrics account and the crazy agate county and all the emails we have it's much easier to just push out an email push out a tweet and

43:53get a bunch of survey responses and then use that to go have conversations and usually if the survey responses are designed well it doesn't buy us some it more aligns them with the kind of things that you want to talk about or the thing you want to talk about so that's I think what I do now if I know I can drive free traffic or cheap traffic if I can't do that or if I'm doing something completely new and prefer sort of just reaching out I'll reach out to people and just try to talk to them and ask them about you know how you know ask

44:25them to talk about what they do on a regular basis and that's really the way I would do it so I think it really just depends on where you are and and what you're trying to do and newer stuff I actually like cold outreach better and just reaching out to them know surveying nothing like that