Building a Content Marketing Flywheel — Fares Ksebati, MySwimPro

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Ferris saetti co-founder and CEO of my swim Pro the leading swim coaching app on the podcast I talked with feris about how to build a Content marketing flywheel the importance of content that's inherently valuable and why you shouldn't give up on content marketing even if your early attempts only get a few views hey FIS thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today David thanks for having me excited to be here we got so much to talk about I love your content and how much success you've seen with content marketing and so we're going to

0:35get to that but to help the listeners kind of understand the context around that let's just start off with what is my swim Pro yeah my swim Pro empowers people to swim for life and we want to be the One-Stop Shop app if someone wants to improve their Fitness their performance through swimming they come to the app and it's like your personal coach the difference between our app and actually going to the pool and hiring a coach is that you get a personalized workout at a fraction of the cost of actually hiring the coach so we started this in 2015 and so far we've been really focused on helping swimmers

1:08improve their performance and health in the water fantastic pitch number one lesson if you're building an app you need to have that good of a 60-second pitch to explain your business to people that was fantastic you can tell you've done this a lot and do a lot of content because that was very nailed down I know you have several co-founders so tell me just a little bit of the story of like why you built the app and who your co-founders are just a little bit of the story of how you got to this point yeah for sure and today our company is five swimmers for swimmers and even in the

1:38early days when we started the app it was myself Adam oxner and Michael Alan I actually met Adam who's our CTO now through the swimming world so it was a connection within swimming and we both swam in University but it was really my experience as a coach which really pushed me to want to take this idea to more than just an idea and actually create an app because I was coaching swimming and I was still swimming myself but I had people asking me for workouts for training for advice and what happens when you get out of the system as I like to call it where you're no longer on a

2:08team you no longer have a coach there's this huge gap and at the time and even today really nothing was addressing this Gap and the Gap is you want to swim but you go to the pool and you have no idea what to do so you could just go back and forth and swim mindlessly which what a lot of people do or you can follow a structured training program which is what you would do with a team as if you had a coach so that didn't exist at the time this was back 2014 2015 so the first version of my swim Pro was simply to give someone a workout as simple as

2:37that you couldn't log it there's no profile there's no analytics none of this stuff the Apple watch didn't actually exist yet and that's become a major part of our business so when it was just Adam Mike and I we were basically hacking together different ideas of how can we deliver this workout in the most efficient and simple way and obviously in the last seven eight years it's become a lot more personalized a lot more granular and Powerful as to what it can actually do but from the very beginning it was always how do we help swimmers and we use the product ourselves which I think is a really

3:06important component of building a great solution if you're solving your own problem so did y'all raise money or did you just bootstrap are you technical or are your co-founders Technical and did they kind of write the first app and you were writing the programs and overseeing yeah mix of everything so we're very multi-skilled in the company even from the founding days so I studied business you know I don't have that technical background I like to think I'm selftaught in a of things but not at the level of what we have today obviously so Adam our CTO built the first version of the iPhone app and the Apple watch

3:36integration Michael did the Android app but we skipped over an important fun story when we started the app it actually was before having an app at all so we wanted to validate that this was really a problem and with my technical skills I basically bought a domain it was my swim pal at the time my swimel.com and I created a mockup of what I thought the app would look like and I had four value propositions on the screen so I had the mockup of the app and then an email capture and I used Twitter to drive traffic to this website the equivalent I think would be an

4:07Instagram DM but you just kind of look at the keyword swim and I just find people who are tweeting about swimming and I would just message them favor their tweets send them to this URL and then they put in their email to download an app that didn't even exist yet still a good way to validate demand and so after just a couple of weeks I had 200 people who inputed their email to download this app that didn't even exist yet and a lot of these people had no idea who they were so I was just finding them on social media and I think the social media landscape has changed but

4:34this principle still technically applies of here's the screen that we want to test send traffic to it either paid or free and then see what the demand actually looks like so that was the end of 2014 and then 2015 we had the myum Pro app so that was the humble beginnings it was bootstrapped we didn't raise any money we weren't making any money we can go into that we didn't charge anything for the app at first the first year we literally just were listening to feedback from people who use the app it wasn't that many and then we just iterated on it over and over and

5:02over 2016 we actually launched a subscription offering for 10 bucks a month you get basically more workouts we actually paywalled some of the free workouts that we did have in the app we had different categories and then that's when we did our first startup accelerator so we raised $50,000 through this accelerator we went through the program and since then we've done a few different rounds of equity crowdfunding so we raised about $1.2 million mostly through equity crowdfunding and it's gotten us to where we are today but it's been a wild ride even if I say that out loud yeah how was the accelerator I've had folks on who did why combinator

5:39generally people have a good experience there but I haven't talked to somebody who's done a more traditional accelerator like do you feel like that experience was worth it do you think app Founders should potentially go through an accelerator or or do you think it wasn't as helpful I think it's definitely a caseby casee basis so for me it was beneficial in our team because even I had worked at other startups before launching my swimpro so I had a little bit of startup experience and digital marketing but it wasn't like I had started the company myself and the rest of our co-founding team was the same thing so if you're just getting

6:08started even if you have business experience it can be extremely beneficial to learn the skills of customer Discovery and to build a network because you probably don't have a network if you haven't started a company or done something like that before so I think in that perspective it was very valuable what I do another startup accelerator at this point probably not if I were to start another company but I think it really depends Case by case I don't know I could recommend it to like all app Founders but if there's a program that is in line with what you do like we did a program it was through the University of

6:36Michigan and so you don't have to have gone to the university but I know a lot of universities have a program like this some are more geared towards health and wellness they're partnered with a healthare company so if your app is aligned with the initiative of the program that might make a lot of sense yeah no that's super cool and then it sounds like I was going to ask you what the top two or three things were from going through the accelerator it sounds like networking and understanding some of this product Market fit and being able to connect with customers any other top lessons that you feel like the

7:06accelerator really helped with I think refining the pitch you mentioned the way I presented what we do but you're presenting all the time and not only when you meet with mentors they connect you with mentors and you have to explain what you do in a relatively quick fashion the whole point of the accelerator is at the end of the program you do a three or five minute pitch to The Community and it could be investors or other folks and so if you don't have a good pitch you will be forced to learn how to pitch correctly and you get a lot of feedback and you eliminate the things

7:35that don't really matter and I think doing those repetitions is really valuable especially when you're still trying to figure out what the heck you're doing I think if you're a little bit more mature in your business it's probably not as useful because you've already hopefully put in those reps but yeah I think it was a good experience overall all right so you went through the accelerator you had collected these emails you're kind of seeing early traction what are some of the early marketing things that you experimented with and once you had that $50,000 in the bank did you start experimenting with paid or how did you get that early

8:06momentum and then keep that momentum going I think from day one it was a Content marketing machine I can say that now but at the time I didn't know what I was doing we had a Blog we had social media accounts started producing YouTube videos literally every social media channel I was on top of it and at the time I just thought we have to be out there people need to know that we exist there's a name called my swimpro and it has this blue icon the shirt that I'm wearing but it's how do we get people aware of this brand and then educate people about the things that they need

8:36to know to be successful in swimming so in retrospect it all kind of makes sense but to be honest in the moment I didn't have as clear of a direction as I think I do now and part of that is just my own experience that was developed but also I think the landscape has actually become a lot more mature specifically the way that you can leverage social media and build a community digitally is a lot more clear I think now there's a lot more best practices compared to in 20145 it was still somewhat mature I guess but it was relatively new compared to where it is today so was creating a lot of

9:07content Adam and Mike were building out the app and then by 2018 is when we actually hired our first additional team member and it was Paige who's now our VP of marketing so she's been with us for like six years and basically I handed off a lot of that content marketing to her I continued to do a lot of it and eventually became like the face of the brand which was not intended either so there's a whole bunch of things that were lumped there when you were first starting out with the content what kind of stuff were you producing and were you seeing traction with that content like

9:37how did that go early on cuz even me like I launched a big update to my weather app recently we got some press but once that dies down it's like you got to get that ball rolling and I think a lot of Founders expect I fell victim to it as well they oh I'll get it out there it's going to get some attention and that's gonna snowball but actually it takes a lot of deliberation I mean some apps do just like explode out of the gate but it sounds like y'all just slow roll and built that flywheel that just kept going but what did that really

10:05look like in the early days sure in the very beginning it was writing about an article a week and I was just answering basic swimming questions so if you wanted to learn how to do a flip turn or how to improve your freestyle technique or your efficiency come and search optimize things basically leveraging the power of Google biggest search engine in the world what are people searching on the internet and I knew what people are searching part because there are tools that tell you this but also just qualitatively because people are asking us questions so for example the whole reason why I started making YouTube videos and it became sort of what it is

10:38today is because we would get the same questions via email every single day so I would get you know in the app people who are not as experienced in swimming would ask a question and you know we actually had my phone number in every automated email that came from us I was getting WhatsApp messages at all hours of the day I was getting emails people asking the same questions and one day I was like you know what I'm just going to make a video that explains this because I've had to copy and paste like the macro basically I'm telling the same people over and over the same thing so I

11:06got up a whiteboard and I just explained swimming terminology and then I started doing this on a weekly basis and it became known as the Whiteboard Wednesday so I stand in front of a whiteboard and for 15 minutes I elaborate on something swimming and in the very beginning like I didn't even have any cool looking footage it was just me standing in front of a whiteboard which you think for swimming like why would anyone pay attention to that because I was answering their questions so you go to YouTube which is the second biggest search engine in the world people have questions and they want to learn and I

11:34think now that's a little bit more obvious than in 2015 but by 2018 like after three years of consistently doing this I became even more consistent and then we started to see some compounding traction but it didn't like all of a sudden Spike the usage of the app I think content Marketing in general is a very long-term type of thing that you're really building brand and you're building trust so that way people not only have the awareness that you exist but they trust whatever it is that you're telling them so that way if you are to sell them something or come up with an offer whether it's your app

12:09subscription or something else then they feel that they've already made a connection with you and you know what you're talking about and their conversion to paying for whatever it is that you're offering is going to be that much higher so in 2015 to 2018 we're talking thousands of social media posts and hundreds of articles that I had written so it's not like we wrote five articles and then now we're SEO relevant it was a very just consistently today just a continuous routine and building that pattern of habit and this is where I think a lot of people get discouraged with content marketing is I imagine in

12:39those early days you'd put up a video and you get tens of views or was it just that slow building it it's a slow grind so the very beginning like I mentioned I just created the videos not to be a YouTuber simply to answer the questions people had so that might only be seven people great now I don't have to write seven emails I spent a few hours making this video but I know that there's a compounding effect of this is a better delivery of the information anyway so in the very beginning yeah I mean it was 75 views 300 views 4,000 now we have a few

13:09of those videos of me that have millions of views of me standing in front of a whiteboard talking about swimming that didn't happen overnight you know that took years and at some level it is discouraging I know I tell people that and they're like how do you get half a million followers on Instagram like what's the trick well if you look at our account we have like 7,000 posts it's not like one blew up and then it happened so I think there is some level of patience that you have to have I think for us and I remind our team like if we don't have the patience to be

13:35consistent and build the procedures and the best practices then we shouldn't really be doing it because if you're trying to build a brand and trust that takes a long time and I don't know who said this quote but it's the concept of brand is the only thing that transcends technology so technologies will come and go products will come and go the Apple watch didn't exist when we started the company the Apple watch is a majority use case of our business in five 10 years like who knows what the thing is the Apple Vision Pro like we don't know what that is but if you have a brand and

14:02you build trust and you have that Community whatever the thing is if you can innovate in it you'll have an audience to purchase and engage with whatever it is that you create what made you stick with it because I think a lot of people again starting content marketing they put out a few blog posts they do a few YouTube videos they get 75 views like you said and they're like okay this is not working I'm going to Pivot and try something else was there early signs that it was was paying off that made you stick with it or you just had this Vision that you saw that it

14:34would compound over time and just kept at it like what kept you motivated through those 75 view videos to keep going I think there were a few things one was simple naivity at the time I was 23 24 years old and I think I was really deep in the hustle culture of like you just need to work harder you don't have the right to complain about anything so I think that was part of it you're just naive to like well I'm supposed to work it's not really work smarter it's just I was just working hard like that's part of it the other is you have to love what

15:00you do so like I'm the one who's the face behind the camera and a lot of this stuff and I love it so it doesn't really feel like a lot of work to me even though it might take a certain amount of time the mental load I think is what actually inhibits a lot of people because the thought of like okay I need to prepare what I'm gonna write in the article or if I'm G to make a video I need to have all my talking points and even from the very beginning I was pretty fast at doing a lot of these things because I'm talking about

15:25something that I know I think if someone's trying to be the online expert and create the content or build that flywheel if they're not interested in the topic if they don't have the expertise it's gonna feel like a huge mental weight how do you find the time to do this it really doesn't take as much time as you think it just is decision fatigue and that decision fatigue can be very overwhelming so I think there's a few variables between my naivity and as well as just I love doing it and then having some level of vision that you know I'm not here to pack up tomorrow I'm here to build a brand and I

15:57think I got a little bit of a taste of success somewhat early on in the sense that hey wait a second you know I created this video how to do a flip turn as an example it did take off and it got 75,000 views okay well why did that work because it clearly answered a need in the market and I think it goes back to more specifically our app the success that taste of success it doesn't need to be 75,000 views all it takes is a few people to say this video answered my question the most common one that we have which is the impetus for this is

16:27four time 50 I am so if you see that in our app or you see it in swing that means you do a 50 of each stroke in the individual medly order so if you just see it on paper and you don't know anything about swimming what does this mean so just answering that question in a video and being able to send that to people and getting the oh this helped a lot thank you like as simple as that that is very gratifying to know oh okay this actually delivered value and now they use the app and tying it back to the subscription they're probably going

16:54to keep paying for it because they understand how it works what were the signs that it was starting to pay off and how did you measure the impact I mean were you tracking views compared to app downloads and subscribers like did you have a spreadsheet that one video you said that did kind of go somewhat viral I guess 75,000 views is a lot for a video you it's not Millions like Marquez brownley or whatever but that's pretty good were you tracking that impact like we got 75,000 views and that led to X number of downloads and X number of downloads led to Y number of subscribers I will say we're a lot

17:29better at this now than at the time at the time it was more about I need to make content let me go write some articles and I had a weekly Cadence of just building stuff and then when Paige joined we basically built a mini Army to compound that but in terms of tracking we were tracking everything but it's hard to measure the direct impact we have really good metrics around each individual social Channel now we use the app store like custom product URLs and we actually measure how many leads we get from YouTube vers we have a different URL for Instagram stagram for YouTube for Facebook for our website and

18:01then we can see and attribute Revenue directly to that that's a very recent thing that we actually I sound like know what I'm talking about but that's only in the last few months we literally implemented that but in the very beginning it was more just I was willing to take the short-term potential loss in time for the long-term benefit of building a brand and now I think it's easier to quantify because we have two full-time video editors on our team and most apps don't have something like that and I can better justify the expense of that and the way our team is set up because we able to monetize beyond our

18:32app subscription through YouTube AdSense through brand Partnerships and there's a whole story of how we thought about building that but now it's easier to Roi that because I know how much money that alone is making so even if the app was not benefiting at all it's still Roi positive just for this segment of the business now I want to be able to more accurately attribute and the product URLs are one step in that direction but it is difficult like I'm not gonna sit here and say we have the golden bullet of how Instagram view converts to XYZ value in our app I do think there would

19:05be some level of shrinkage if we just all of a sudden disappeared off the internet so if none of the content exists if our brand disappeared we would certainly see some level of hit in organic traffic through the App Store and how people are discovering us we don't do this but some apps they actually ask you how you came across the app in the first place directly in the onboarding we've done that through our surveys so we qualitatively measure to our subscribers and even free users how you learned about the app and we can see some numbers there so there is some level of measurement but I don't have

19:37the perfect answer you know it sounds like you really started on YouTube and that's kind of been a main stay I hadn't heard anybody say that but actually makes a ton of sense that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world that people are looking for answers to their questions and they'll go to Google but then I mean I do this I go to YouTube you know I need to do something with my washer dryer it's like what what do I do I go to YouTube and figure it out so it makes a lot of sense but how did the channels evolve over time like did you initially start with

20:05YouTube and then slowly move to Instagram and others or did you just glass to all those social media channels and what does that mix look like today well actually we started with Twitter I don't remember if it was my personal Twitter or the my swim Pro Twitter at the time to DM people and get on to that landing page but it was actually Twitter because it seemed the easiest to get started like tweeting about swimming or Twitter's more events driven for anyway so when there was a swimming competition happening it was very easy to jump on that but very shortly after I basically created an account for every channel and

20:36some have come and gone over the years so for example Snapchat was something that I was more engaged with and now we don't do anything with Snapchat Tik Tok is a relatively new one so we didn't start doing Tik Tok until 2019 which now it sounds like we've been doing it for a while but relative to the other channels it was a latecomer in that regard I think the YouTube Focus has really come to where it is now only in the last few years so I did mention we have all the channels a few reasons why I choose to focus on YouTube and why I want our

21:06company focus on YouTube is because it is the best place for the deeper connection so you can have a big Twitter following for example and now it's a little different because you can have longer threads and conversations like that but it's a lot different when you're hearing and seeing the person explain something to you so when it goes back to building trust there's a reason why YouTubers can charge the highest for any kind of a brand deal because they have the trust of the person that they're communicating with and so even if it's not fully aligned like right now it's I'm not saying you know I have all

21:37these subscribers and our company page has all these subscribers we don't have that many app subscribers right so there's a lot of people who are engaging with the content that are maybe not interested in the app because the app has a very specific use case has a very targeted Persona that we're designing the product experience around whereas YouTube it's oh you want to go swimming like anyone who wants to improve swimming in any capacity competitive young old beginner Advanced it it really doesn't matter and we have content that can apply to them so maybe that opens the doors for new features in our app down the road new apps new products new

22:11Services there's a lot of different things that we could expand to but I think there's a lot of moving parts so it's hard to pick one social Channel and that's what you should start with I think it depends on what kind of a brand you're looking to build and how it fits into your overall marketing acquisition funnel has Tik Tok been a good channel for yall have you seen a lot of traction have you had some videos go viral on Tik Tok or is it just kind of you're there it's easy to take the content you're already producing for YouTube chop it up and throw it on there uh yeah I mean

22:41it's interesting what works on some channels doesn't really work on other channels so we can take content on YouTube and chop it up in a few different ways some of that will perform on Tik Tok but it won't perform on Instagram reals so in terms of to answer your question like is Tik Tok working I think we have like 300 something thousand followers but I wouldn't say it's a primary channel of acquisition and awareness for us we have had some posts that have millions or tens of millions of views but it's not okay we got 10 million views on this video and now that gave us 50,000 new downloads

23:12it's like that one million view video may have had nothing to do with our app which could be seen as a problem as like well now you have a bunch of bad traffic I don't really see it that way there are some people who probably did find Value and now they went to other content and now they ended up downloading the app but it goes back to building the brand in this world we are fighting for attention so whether it's in the app or someone's phone right I don't know what the hours are but people are spending five hours a day in their phone where are they spending those five hours

23:37they're not spending it in your app unless your app is Instagram or Tik Tok or YouTube right so because people are spending their time in those apps you want to make sure that you have a presence so for us it's being everywhere all the time no matter what it's a lot more work and you need more manpower to be able to do that but depends on what level you're trying to compete at in that attention game you kind of alluded to this but now that you do have such a big YouTube following specifically you kind of mentioned that the content itself is monetized I thought that was

24:08really interesting that most people would view the content as solely content marketing but tell me about how the content is actually driving revenue and is a second pillar of Revenue to the app yeah that's a great point because when you get to a certain level of viewership especially on long form content you can monetize in few different ways so YouTube does pay the Creator directly and you know everyone's seeing the ads at the beginning or in the middle of a video if it's if it's a longer video you might have several ads you can go online very easily and see what the cpms are but for every thousand views of a video

24:41you could get anywhere from three to $15 depending on your category so if you have a video with a million views that could make $110,000 so if you look at one of your favorite YouTubers and you see every video they're and let's say they're doing tech reviews like MKBHD and every video he makes has five million views and his CPM in that category is probably $10 to $20 so each of those videos you do the math on that he's making maybe $50,000 a video that pays for his production team now for him he's a pure YouTuber so that's his primary thing if you're building an app

25:12like us I have my channel the company's Channel we monetize through YouTube AdSense which is like a nice to have but also now we can do brand Partnerships so these are the shout outs in the middle of the video that you've seen on YouTube where the Creator is promoting some product that might be relevant that're actually using in the video or elsewhere and so those will actually pay even more money than the CPM rate because the brand knows that you're communicating with a very dedicated audience so it goes back to that trust Factor so the more trust you have the more dedicated your viewership now you can add another

25:44layer of monetization which is the brand deals we're starting to talk more about like the content creator World more than the app world but I feel like I've stepped into this role now I didn't really plan on it but since we're there and there's an opportunity to not only Market swimming and then get more audience to the brand but then also monetize it this is really the only method of marketing that I know where you can actually do marketing to get more customers and you get paid to get more customers to do the marketing yeah so it's kind of interesting but I think this goes back to the fact that you're

26:15creating content that is super valuable for people and I think that's where people who think I'm going to do content marketing their content often is overly focused on the app like I watch it few of your YouTube videos a few of them I watch you don't even mention my swim Pro so it's not like the video is an ad for the app directly you're just creating really good content and so it kind of makes sense that by creating that really great content you're creating multiple flywheels that you're building this audience that is monetizable through the content itself which I do think that's really cool and like maybe not as

26:52directly relevant to this audience in that a lot of folks have not built up that kind of Content Library that's eventually monetizable but I think it's cool that you built it and it's something others can aspire to do is that if you build this up where you are creating great content it's not just going to drive downloads and subscribers you can eventually potentially monetize that content directly so I do think that's relevant and super interesting so I did want to dive back into the content production itself I think this is where you started out just you and a whiteboard but how did it evolve from there and like what is that content

27:28production look like today and then how did it evolve over time yeah this is a a very interesting story on I think just scalability in general it's applicable to more than just content marketing so in the very beginning let's take the Whiteboard Wednesday which is the weekly video series that had a Blog and an email Associated to it so basically it would be Wednesday in the morning we' go to a wiiw work and I would think what video am I going to make today so literally it would just be like my Wednesday project and I would think okay what's the video I would draft it up

27:56film it edit it and ship it all in the same day try and keep it as simple as possible write the email write the blog based on what I said in the video and that was what I did for basically a couple of years and then eventually it became a little bit more sophisticated when we had another team member where I basically handed off a few of those responsibilities so I would still make the video and even edit the video but then I wouldn't do the blog I wouldn't do the email eventually we hired a video editor to take the editing off my plate so all I had to do was come up with the

28:25concept and then just go and film the video and then upload it and then I would do a review next thing you know it's on the internet along the way we would take that one long form piece of content and we would split it up into multiple versions so we would have the shorter form content posts for different social media channels and what you mentioned a few minutes ago about not having an overly salesy feel to the content because fundamentally I'm not trying to sell someone our app I'm trying to help them improve their swimming so if they came to YouTube to search for a specific skill like how to

28:58do a flip turn they want to learn how to do a flip turn our app doesn't teach you how to do a flip turn what it does do is it teaches you how to structure your workout so you get the most out of your time so when it is applicable inside the long form and inside the Articles the emails and everything it makes a lot of sense to answer their question of how to do a flip turn and then also share and if you really want to take your s to the next level this is how you can do it with the my Pro app and yes you can do

29:24your flip turns inside the my Pro app just as an example so we did that for a few years and then if you fast forward to where we are today it's a little bit more team intensive production in the sense that now we're on location when I film some of these things we might not do it at a whiteboard I might be standing at a swimming pool we might be hosting an inperson event like a swim camp our videographer is with me we're at the pool deck he's filming me and then two weeks later it's on YouTube there's a few steps I skipped in there but it's probably not as applicable for

29:50this audience because we now we have like an in-house studio so we have two full-time video editors our VP of marketing manages that team I have someone who just manages my brand deals that come through myself and the company and he's part-time works on commission and then we have another team member who just does the social media posting a team of five people is the engine that I was basically doing you know a fraction of that by myself so now it's more team more expense but we're also making more money through the AdSense the brand deals and the app is in a stronger position so it all works to complement

30:20each other that's really cool when did you post your first YouTube video on this channel on the stuff that we're talking about 2015 I've been making videos my whole life so I have another Channel I call it my uncut Channel like 15 years ago wow okay so eight years of building to get to the point where hiring five full-time people makes sense to do the content Productions so again I think people get discouraged with content marketing or even think if I'm going to do content marketing right I need five people today and they go out and hire all these people and they get 75 views and it doesn't work it's like

30:54you got to build this up over time and I think you build building this channel is the perfect example of that that just continuing to grind away at it and creating that value can snowball into where those five people full-time does make sense yeah if anything it's actually much easier now I know people say there's so much competition how do you stand out but the barrier to entry is like nothing so if someone is watching or listening to this video or this podcast you have a smartphone probably with fast internet that shoots in 4k you can get on Amazon or microphone so you have Crystal Clear

31:29audio in 4k you can record in slow motion you get cap cut you have videos that go viral like easily if anything it's easier now and you don't need five people to scale up really quick whereas eight years ago yes there were smartphones but you actually needed a decent camera otherwise it would look pretty crummy you needed a very expensive microphone now microphone's 20 bucks and you got something not amazing but you have something to kick you off so I think the barrier is definitely lower which means there's more competition but if you're adding genuine value and that's part of your long-term vision of brand if it correlates to your

32:01app or whatnot then yeah I think you should go for it you just got to be ready to keep doing it for a long time you kind of touched on this a little bit but I wanted to go a little deeper on how you think about when to add a CTA to the app and when to not so how do you think about that there's actually different schools of thought on this I think I'm somewhere in the middle so on the one side you have people like Gary ve and he's all about jab jab right hook so you give away 10,000 pieces of content you build the ultimate brand

32:32trust and then in one of them you transact so it's very very extreme you also have people like he's a big YouTuber Ali abdal and it's like I think a 99 to one rule so you give 99% of the time and only 1% of your audience you actually even expect to transact with you but the other 99 percentile they're not going to transact and the idea is you build an audience so massive and you're so dominant in your category that 1% is actually huge but if you sell sell sell well now your audience is going to be a fraction of the size and yeah you might get 50% penetration but you got

33:0550% penetration of seven people so it's trying to find that balance I think I'm somewhere in the middle in terms of how you think about adding the CTA this is tricky but you always want to come back to what is the point of that specific piece of content are you truly trying to sell something or are you trying to answer the question of the audience or the viewer or the subscriber the app user whoever it is so if the piece of content going back to my flip turn analogy if the whole point of the video and why they came to it in the first place is to learn how to do that

33:34specific thing you have to really focus on answering that question because if you do they're going to continue to want to see stuff that you create and that's how you build a trust and you could have the call to action in that piece of content but it might actually make sense to have it in a different piece of content that maybe you know that first piece is your lead generation you get them to follow you and pay attention to what you do and then it makes more sense to actually transact I think the best approach is more integrated I'll give you an example of what we're doing right

34:02now so I'm currently in Dubai and I'm training for the Masters World Championships in Doha so in this series I'm doing a five-part video where I'm showing how I prepare for the world championships and I'm using the my swimpro app to train for this competition so every single video I have the app on screen showing the workouts that I'm actually doing and so I'm not selling the app I'm just using the app as my tool to achieve the results that I'm trying to show so if someone's been following along this journey it's cool they feel like they're making a connection they're watching like this guy trained for a big competition but

34:37the way I'm doing it is the ultimate Showcase of what the app can do and I'm showing the true power of it and I'm never really selling the app but the app is on the screen for 30% of the time so I think that's like the perfect method of integration and I think when we have done that and we've created stories where like I did a challenge where I swim every day for 30 days straight I swam a mile for 100 days in a row and so we made videos for each of these things I'm not selling the app per se I might have some sentences of like how you see

35:05how I'm doing it in the app and you can follow along or whatever but it's more about how can I integrate the experience of what I'm teaching what I'm educating or the story that people are following along and also showcase yes I'm using the app to be able to do this and then just one more thing that's just on like how my perspective is as a company we do have our own YouTube channel as a company and that we're using to tell stories gold medal moments we call them people who have had success they lost 100 pounds they did a crazy amount of swimming at the age of 67 and how do

35:36they do their crazy swimming they use the my swim Pro and so it's a very clean way to integrate without just being an advertisement you mentioned that kind of 99 to1 where would you say you end up landing on like how many videos do have call to actions versus ones that don't I think at some level I do want every video to have at least a minor call to action some might be a sentence that integrates with the storyline pretty well and it could just be something quick on screen I think the meat of it is maybe 30% of the videos have a very very solid insertion meaning over 60

36:11seconds where it's a very clear like I'm teaching you this thing and the way that I'm teaching you is showing you how it's done in the myum Pro app where the app screen is on the video screen for an extended period of time so maybe a third of videos have that level then you might say well okay so 70% of the videos don't have an advertisement in them and it is a more subtle approach to it I think as a viewer you have to think about it too like from your own perspective if you're following someone on any social media you don't want to see them just selling

36:40you something all the time you are either following them because one of three things if someone's listening or watching and they take away anything from this content marketing you have to do one of three things you either have to educate people you have to entertain them or you inspire them and so if you think about anyone you follow on social media any plat they're either teaching you something they're entertaining you in some way or you feel inspired now if you're really good at any of those that's great but if you're amazing you can do multiple at the same time and I'm sure people are thinking about

37:09individuals they follow on social or brands that are able to connect the entertaining part and the inspiration or the inspiration with the education I think for us it's a combination of those some videos might be more inspirational when you hear about a 67-year-old who did some amazing feet and that's inspirational it maybe wasn't the most entertaining thing but maybe you were educated as well I think my style is less inspirational it's more educational with a little bit of entertainment I don't want to Spill the Beans I have a very entertaining I'm doing I'm swimming a mile with a certain piece of clothing on multiple pieces of

37:46clothing right so that's going to be more entertainment but a lot of the content is more educational where I'm teaching you something I did want to move on from content marketing and talk about a few other aspects of the business again not every app is going to succeed with content marketing I think a lot more could than have maybe tried or have dabbled in it and then not found success and kind of given up but I wanted to talk about a few other things what other forms of marketing have you experimented with and or found success or is content marketing really where it's at for my swim per content is the

38:22bulk of it but we have tried paid acquisition I think we've done three different rounds of paid acquisition at different points of the company life cycle we're sort of in the middle of the third one right now and a lot of it like what's the difference between the three it's who we worked with you know we were doing sometimes inhouse working with agencies the product was in a different spot when it comes to the download conversion rate the price point is different so now I'd like to say we're in our third attempt at trying to make it work at scale this is probably our best attempt and we have the best

38:52analytics infrastructure in place to actually assess the effectiveness of the campaigns that we're running on various channels so I'd like to think that we're moving in the right direction but paid acquisition is very tough and I think depending on the funding of the business so for us we don't have a bank account with $17 million in it so when you're doing ads you have to be more methodical your test budget is not as large and the algorithms especially these days they favor big budgets and they will put a better audience to a bigger budget as horrible as that sounds I mean that's the reality of it so yeah you can make

39:26it work with a small budget great I'd say we're still trying to figure that out that's one Avenue of acquisition that we've experimented with over and over we talked about content marketing quite a bit another Avenue of acquisition that we're looking at is inperson events we've gone to events we host swim camps now that's one method but that's not the most scalable because you can only have so many people at an in-person event we have some other creative ideas that we haven't yet executed on like how can we put put ourselves at every swimming pool in America or every pool in the world right there's in the US there's 300,000

39:58commercial pools there's 10 million or so like private pools so how do we just get some kind of a presence at a swing pool so we haven't figured that out yet maybe it's through different Partnerships that's one Avenue of acquisition that we're pursuing right now but It's Tricky especially when you get to a certain scale where you basically tap out your organic traffic which is kind of where we are right now there's only so many more organic downloads that we can get that's not going to 5x our growth so what can we do that's not depending on someone going to the App Store and typing in swim that

40:26can get us another one that we're even testing right now is referral marketing so in app being able to invite someone getting different promotions and incentivizing why the power user would want to invite someone in the first place these are some different things that we're testing no Silver Bullet yet but we'll keep trying so you mentioned you're in phase three I think a lot of folks can learn from failure as much as success what would you say were the failures of phase one and two like what did you experiment with what were the results you saw that you had to give up on it the biggest mistake you can make

40:57is not having the right analytics in place so if you don't know okay you spend $1,500 what happened like if you don't know what actually ends up happening with that 1500 and you don't have some level of confidence in the attribution that's the biggest mistake so you really can't put any significant budget besid just oh we'll boost this post and see if we get more app downloads right that's not how you scale something so I think that was one mistake that we did we didn't have the right infrastructure in place another thing is just making sure you work with the right people and also making sure

41:26that you on top of the analytics so now that you have the analytics in place okay that's good that's one step but now are you actually like paying attention to the analytics and making improvements and iterations fast enough so that way you can improve and not burn too much money in the process because the reality is like any AB test you know a lot of them are going to fail so you have these ads these different creatives you don't know which one is going to hit and so if it takes you a long time to figure out which ones are your winners and which ones are your poor performing ad ads

41:56then you're just going to end up spending more and more money and you're eventually going to have to stop because you're not able to get results quick enough to justify the amount of money that you're burning so that's another and yeah there's probably quite a bit of smaller little learnings but yeah those are the big ones as we're wrapping up I did want to ask you about one more thing I know you've done a lot of price testing I actually saw several reviews complaining about the price no matter what you priced you're going to get complaints like I priced my weather app at $40 a year and I got three or four VI

42:26saying oh that's just way too much money and so you were charging and have been experimenting with $180 a year now totally different you're replacing a swim coach just the weather app there's way more competition so I probably have more reason to reassess my pricing but what led you to that $180 price point and then how's that been working for you from the beginning of the app we have had probably eight different price points at some level of duration meaning over three months or six months when we first launched the app it was free then we added a $10 a month option because like I said in the

43:01beginning naivity like that felt right 10 bucks a month that's what other apps are I think at the time most fitness apps were like 79.99 a year and they had an offering that was 15 20 bucks a month 10 bucks a month so 10 bucks a month sounded right and then we added a yearly offering around 100 bucks then it was 120 then it was 180 and what what happened is we didn't really see much of a change in conversion rate so we kept on increasing the price and we kept on making the app better and better and here's the key so we've done AB testing

43:29we continue to do ab testing the thing is inside of your segments of people who are paying for the app there are some segments that are willing to spend way more than others and I think this is a mistake that we've done recently where we kind of just bundle everyone together well we do the ab test and this is the price that wins yes that's the price that wins for the overall population but there's a segment maybe 20% of your paying customers that could pay 10 times what your current offering is but you're not charging anything else so the only way to do that is having different

43:59pricing packages and different product offerings and any mature business has these there's a reason why there's more than one iPhone there's a reason why there's multiple in a car the same car could be $40,000 or $90,000 so there's a reason why there's different levels to that so I think for us one thing we're looking at doing is how do we continue to test not only the price point but the way that we're actually packaging the offer to serve different segments of the audience that have different problem sets but also and maybe more importantly different willingness to pay and price sensitivity actually one of the guys that was on this podcast the founder and

44:34CEO of the ladder app he actually mentioned there was a a price test sensitivity thing that you can do I actually after listening to his podcast on this show I actually went and we did a survey implementing that exact study where you ask four questions to see what people think is too expensive so this is a qualitative way to assess and you end up with like four lines on a graph then between the two lines is your ideal price point so we sent this out for free members we sent it out for paid members and it's remarkable to see just how many people are willing and able to spend way

45:06more money than we're currently charging so that the actual average ends up being around what our price point is now 20 a month or 120 or 100 a year but there are people who are willing to spend $200 $300 per year we don't have a product offering right now and a packaging that is able to access that kind of a price sensitivity so I think we're still evolving and as the business becomes more mature and I think like any more mature business that's been around for a while you have to be able to create different offerings and packaging to different segments of the market with different price sensitivity for those

45:38who do experiment with higher prices and get those kind of reviews do you have any advice like do you just ignore those personally when I get those reviews at like oh $40 is way too much I'm like dude like come on that's not that much money and we're doing something really unique like are you able to just ignore that or how do you put that in perspective I think part of it has to go with the packaging so one mistake that we've done is it's not really a mistake but as we've transition we went from a completely free app to a paying app and we we've actually over the years we've

46:09taken away free features we put them behind a pay wall so some of the complaints are attributed to that so at some level yeah rightfully so they could do something for free now they can't so you build a level of entitlement with your community because they feel entitled to use the software that you've created for free because that's how they've has done it so now if you all of a sudden charge for the thing that you spend time and resources on and now they have a hissy fit so I think it's just how you package it that's one area we can definitely improve in because if

46:36people know that this is a paid offering but no one has the right to complain because they don't feel entitled to something for free but if you advertise yeah this is the best app for free and you can do all these things and then they get into the app and they can't do a lot of the things yes they can do some things but like the good stuff is behind a payall then you're going to have some level of resentment that you create and I think every company at some level has had to deal with this what I've noticed though is that the more premium you're

47:03offering at at a higher price point and the more you package it in that orientation you just attract a clientele that are just ready to pay anyway because some people will complain at any price point even if it was 45 cents they're still going to complain whereas other people they won't want to buy a product that is perceived a lower value so there's a little bit of psychology that plays into this and I think it's trying to balance the qualitative psychology with the data this is something we're constantly trying to balance is being data driven at the same time looking at how humans behave which is not in line with what a logical

47:39decision would actually be I think we've seen this kind of industrywide I like that you brought up the word entitlement because I think this is something any subscription app practitioner should be aware of and be thinking about in how they do like you said the pricing and packaging how they balance premium and all that kind of stuff is that folks are used to getting things for free and paying with attention with their data and so there is this entitlement nature I think to software is like that people just kind of expect software to be free but I think what we've started to see over the last five to even 10 years is

48:16just this slow kind of shift of the industry of hey software can actually create a ton of value in your life and that value is worth paying for that's what actually makes me really bullish for the next 10 years is that more and more consumers are starting to actually not feel entitled to software but actually see it as something valuable that they are going to be willing to pay for so like that person today who would complain about just 45 cents maybe in three or four or five more years I think the market for people who are actually willing to pay for software that delivers value to them will continue

48:57expanding over time and so it's like we have this dual flywheel going on in the industry of creating more and better software and then attracting more users to that software and then more and more of those users being willing to pay over time and so if you are getting those complaints like f is and myself about people saying uh it's too much money and why should I have to pay and all this kind of stuff I think we can all take a little bit of heart in the fact that that's going to continue to get better and better over time I mean have you seen that I mean you've been doing it

49:28eight years now people willing to pay more and then now as you're charging even more people being I mean it's crazy to me in some ways that people will say on a survey that they're willing to spend hundreds of dollars but it also does speak to your category that a swim coach would be way more expensive than hundreds of dollars a year and you're delivering a level of value maybe not quite like having a personal coach but directionally you're creating a ton of value that would otherwise cost way more money how have you seen that kind of value perception evolve over the eight years you've been doing this yeah I

50:00think one guy that you had on Eric Crowley he he was great showing all the industry data where he was showing how the wind is in our sales the market is moving in the direction that more and more people are willing and able to spend money on app subscriptions that's growing faster than the population it's growing faster than inflation it's growing faster than adjusted gross income so I have seen this in the last eight years so in 2015 very few apps had a subscription business bus model at the scale that most apps do today and even in our category of health and fitness the big apps of the day were my fitness

50:33pal Under Armour acquired them and also M my fitness M my run all those apps were completely free they never had any paid offering the only way they could monetize was they had 20 million people using the thing so they had sponsors inside of the app and they were basically that attention value that's how they were able to monetize only recently in the last five years has it become the norm for every health and fitness app to have some level of inapp purchase subscription and I think the perception is now that people are willing and able to pay at a much higher level because the consumer Behavior has

51:07shifted where it is now an expectation at a certain cohort where people will actually spend the money because now it's a line item in their budget because they've already spent money somewhere else for an app and so I think what we're doing in swimming what you're doing bringing on all these apps and talking about this it is pushing the market more and more in the direction because most people who use the myON Pro app and pay for the subscription we are not their only subscription they're probably paying for some other subscription whether it's Trava or literally any other app they could be using and we're not the only

51:41subscription so I think that benefits everyone there is a little bit of subscription fatigue that I know people have talked about that where it's like I don't want to have 17 different subscriptions that goes back to competition so what kind of value Are you delivering in your category and is it better than what someone else can deliver in the category and I think as a capitalistic system I think that's good I think it's healthy and it pushes us to deliver the best value no matter what well as we wrap up anything else you wanted to share are you hiring I'm going to put links to the app and your YouTube

52:11channel so people can see what kind of content you're producing see what's going on in all those different channels but anything else you wanted to share as we wrap up I think that was great I hope people enjoyed this conversation yeah if anyone wants to get into swimming we are the app for you so connect online on LinkedIn and wherever else and hope to see you guys in the pool all right thanks so much for joining me thanks David thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub do.com to

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