Become the Wise Advisor with Mike Ritchie

0:00(upbeat electronic music)

0:07- All right, we are live back with our sixth and final keynote of MicroConf Remote, thanks again for joining me and sticking around. We're going to have about a 20 minute conversation with Mike Ritchie and myself and he is the founder of Seekwell.io. He's gonna, share how he tapped into authority building platforms to reach their earliest customers by providing insights and solutions to potential customers specifically

0:33on Quora and StackOverflow. But during our conversation, we'll talk about I'll bring up several other Q&A platforms that I believe can be used for similar purposes. It's early stage SaaS, it's getting 10, 50, or the first hundred customers. And with that, let's welcome, Mike Ritchie to the show. How's it going, sir? - Good to have you.

0:56- Doing all right. Thanks for joining us today. We're gonna, as I was telling folks we're gonna have about a 20 minute chat. You have some slides prepared and then we will have 10 minutes of Q&A-ish. And we'll wrap around some around 9:30 PT 12:30 ET. So with that, I'll let you take it away from here. You can intro yourself and dive

1:22into the slides and then we'll, I'll chime in as needed. - Yeah, sounds great. And just set some context because I'm sure not everyone is familiar with with my small niche of the world, my small company. So Seekwell is an app that helps customers, our customers which are generally data analysts, people that know SQL

1:40but are not too much more tech savvy than that. It helps those analysts push data from their data warehouse into other applications. So you can think of those things are places that are interesting to push data as places like Google sheets, Slack even things like Salesforce, just all this insight and data. That's locked up in a customer

1:59in one of our customer's data warehouses. We just make it dead simple for anyone that knows SQL to get it out of their warehouse and drop it into other places that they're interested in. And when I first built the product I started completely as a side project. It was something that I kind of used and, and doubled with a bit at my last company,

2:17and decided, kind of spin off as a little side project. Got some customers pretty early but after that very first customer, I realized, okay this is something that people might actually want to use might be interested in. So it started to kind of think about like how, marketing would look and how we could kind of get

2:32on the first 10 users after that first user. And Rob are the, slides up. Cause I only see myself right now. - There you go. - Cool, and I guess that I can control it with this. There we go great, so yeah, this first slide, is basically what the initial strategy was. Which was try to find places that people were asking questions or really trying to figure

3:01out how to build our products on their own. So that would look like, for our specific use case, it would look like people trying to write Python scripts and trying to set up servers and do all these things to try to like automate this data flow from their warehouse into these other destinations, like Google sheets. So there's this like really clunky process that people were following, hitting problems,

3:22and multiple steps along the way. They might be getting they might be getting caught up with going through the Google OAuth process in terms of like getting credentials set up. They might be getting jammed up with getting it set on a schedule. So having a server set up and making sure that that's running reliably 24/7. There's a ton of different places that they could be,

3:41falling into a trap or hitting a roadblock. And, basically that's what we try to do is we try to help people overcome that individual roadblock that they hit. So, maybe it was authenticating to their database with Python. We were helping people answer that question. But then we were also saying, hey, by the way this is gonna be a pain 12 more times

4:00like you're gonna run into 12 more roadblocks. Seekwell is perfectly built to solve this problem. So you might wanna give that feedback to try and instead of building it yourself. So, this tweet was, mentioned I guess earlier, earlier this month but it's basically kind of encapsulates our early strategy. And, one of the first places that we looked was basically just, Google searching and finding places,

4:25that people have bumped into this issue. And, it kind of already answered the questions are starting to answer the question. So this is, a screenshot from StackOverflow and it's funny, there's, there's 12 upvotes here. But I could say, with pretty solid confidence that this one post on StackOverflow has generated thousands of dollars in MRR for us.

4:47Since we initially answered the question. So it's only 12 upvotes but tons of people have seen this and it's really highly qualified traffic that we'd get in. So this StackOverflow question ranks pretty highly, on Google for various questions that are related to our product. And you can see the answer here is, crisp to the point, hey, if you don't wanna

5:08solve this yourself, you know, Seekwell's out there. We've always tried to be as transparent as possible. Like, hey, we're one of the founders, just full transparency. Like we built this product. So it's, it's clear that you're aware where the pitch is coming from. It's not, that we're trying to hide it and post it from, a ghost account, or position it as though it's one of our customers that's answering it,

5:29anything like that. We're always transparent that it's us that's answering the question. And then we just try to be crisp, and not canned in terms of the response. So we try to cater the response, whether it's, a place like we're StackOverflow we'd be catered the response to the exact question as opposed to just pacing in,

5:47a blanket response that's used, for all questions. I think the next slide has a, an example of Quora. So this was another question that we found pretty early on in our history in terms of, when we initially launched. One thing with Quora that's nice is it's actually StackOverflow as well as, you can update the question or update your answer over time, as you add new features

6:16whereas you kind of improve the product. So this is exactly what we did here is when we initially launched the product, it was, the UI was terrible. It was, actually, a pretty janky and clunky product. So this post was actually updated multiple times as we improved our product. And as the screenshots look cleaner as the product envisioned became more concise we updated these answers and,

6:38they made the value prop, more clear. So it was actually something we did call it like every quarter to every like six months as we kind of go back through these top posts, which obviously like attribution and tracking is pretty important for understanding where your customers are coming from so you know, which of these posts actually matter to update. But that we kept that like log of the posts

7:01that still matter or the answers that still matter to us. And we'd go back and update those regularly, if necessary. So this is one example in Quora and then the third place that we really found some initial and early traffic, and it's not really a Q&A site but it is a place that a lot

7:19of our customers were going to for answers. So there's actually, and this is a very little known marketplace that oddly has a very large user base. Like you can kind of see some of the numbers that are in just this screenshot, but if you're looking for an idea, I fully encourage you to go to Google work workspace marketplace, and just kind of search around

7:39at some of the products that have traction there. There there's applications that are literally just born, like add ons to Google forms that have millions of users and terrible reviews. So there's like apps that are being widely used. There are paid apps that have terrible reviews and are poorly built. It seems like a pretty good combination for someone looking for,

8:00a side project or a new project to work on. But in our use case, pretty early on we realized that customers were looking for solutions here. We actually, by default had to have a listing here, for the initial version of our application. So it wasn't something that we discovered on our own like we had to be listed here. But once we realized how many customers were finding us through the marketplace, we've really worked to

8:22improve our ratings, improve our reviews. You can see here in this screenshot we have a 4.9 star review, with almost 3000 users for the first app. We actually have two apps in the marketplace one for forms and one for Google sheets. So five star review on the other one. And we really worked on making sure we were number one

8:40in the search results for different terms that matter to us. So basically anything you search for that matters to our company, like Postgres, Snowflake anything like that, we are the number one search result and we get a ton of traffic through here. So again, you have thousands and thousands of dollars of MRR with no spend.

8:56So it's not like we're paying for placement here. It's, purely just doing the work, to get the app reviewed well, and listed well.

9:07And I think, yeah so I think that that's it on the marketplaces. Those were the three that we really leaned on early on especially to get the first ten first a hundred customers. The, I guess, the overall strategy, I already mentioned being transparent. So making sure that anyone that we anyone that we were quote unquote like selling to through these marketplaces knew, who it was that was selling to them,

9:33and knew that we were associated with the company. Always trying to speak the language. It was, it was pretty easy for me just because I was, I kind of was our customer. So I knew SQL I wasn't much of a developer. So it didn't know a ton about like backend infrastructure and things like that in terms of setting up servers.

9:50So I was kind of our customer. So I was able to kind of speak that language but if you're not your customer make sure that you're not getting too far into like technical jargon things that the customer doesn't care about in terms of, you sound like a salesperson. So we were just very direct

10:05in terms of answering their questions. And then the last one which is probably the most important is really, showing how painful free can be. So, we were like Digital Ocean has some great posts on this. Their early strategy was very much along these lines is like just showing how incredibly painful it is to manage machines on AWS, or set up a new, spin up a new instance on AWS

10:31at the time that the DigitalOcean launched. So we took that exact same playbook and exact same strategy in terms of like, hey, setting this all up on your on your own is going to be a complete nightmare. This is not something you wanna manage especially when our product starts at $50 a month. This should be kind of an absolute, no brainer

10:47for you for at least, to at least give us a trial. As opposed to trying to solve this problem yourself because free isn't always, really free when you when you kind of factor in all the hours it's gonna take to for you to kind of build this on your own. So that's pretty much the tips,

11:02Rob, any questions on your side? - Yep, yeah. Let me, let me dive in with a couple of comments because actually I have a done very similar approach to what you've done. And I did it with HitTail which was a long tail SEO keyword tool. It was a SaaS app. And so at that time, I went to Quora subscribed

11:21to all the SEO and keyword research topics. And I would chime in. Similar to you, I use the, I was very personal. I always, divulged, that I by the way I run HitTail, but the big thing was I would absolutely show them. And this is a decade ago, but I would say, they would say

11:39how do I do keyword research? And I'd say, here's how you can do it. Screenshot, screenshot, go through Google, do this or look through to this site, pay $20 a month you know, but disclosure, I'm the owner of it, but, it literally became it's almost like a, doing the selling for you. And even it's funny, cause you said,

11:58one of those posts had 12 up votes. But it's great, if, thousands of dollars in value for you similar with with HitTail and then with Drip, actually I went you know, Drip, being an email service provider. I subscribed to all the email marketing and the or really a bunch of just email marketing questions. And it was similar where ones wouldn't get that many up votes

12:19but it would just drive highly, highly targeted traffic. So even if I only got 30-50 visitors a month from those threads, they would convert to trial at like 10-20% when the rest of the site was converting at 1 or 2%. It was because they were so qualified and already so interested in the problem.

12:38So there's a lot of value there. And of course these days, even I answer stuff about SaaS and marketing and this and that because, it's the, the podcast MicroConf and TinySeed stuff that I'm thinking about these days. So there's a lot of value here and what we do have a question that I'll get to in a second but I wanted to point out some other sites

12:55obviously Quora is, is the general one. But, and it covers it covers a lot of it started out as more of a Silicon Valley kind of startup topics. And then it's really expanded from there. StackOverflow is the technical one. And obviously StackExchange has a bunch of different. I mean, I believe they have hundreds of different ones now. I mean, they have RPG.StackExchange and they have English literature and grammar

13:18just all kinds of stuff. So there's a lot of options there. Reddit is another place that I've seen folks if you're involved in, a specific if there's a SQL users group or a developer users group, or, a startup users group, whatever that's a place I've seen people be helpful on the internet. And those can rank, if there's a question

13:35they can rank in Google. Clarity.FM is another one that I think people forget. Clarity is for phone. Mostly it's for connecting with consultants via phone chat about phone calls but they now have, that you can get involved with. And those are the ones that, the interesting thing is there's this whole other strategy where it's go on Facebook groups, forums and Slack groups,

13:59like MicroConf Connect. Those are also helpful, but they're different in that you don't get SEO out of it. That's the thing is that Quora, Clarity, StackOverflow, Reddit these things tend to rank in Google, for the answer to the question that that person is asking. And you would love for your website to rank number one for the answer to that question but you don't have the juice, none

14:21of us have the juice, the Quora or these other sites do. So that's what I'll say kind of is bringing my personal experience to it as well as kind of expanding on that in terms of there are other options, it's not just the three, you pointed out StackOverflow and Google workspace marketplace which I had never heard of, that's funny. All right, we've got a couple of questions,

14:41from one from Adam. He says, I think you may have covered this, but, reiterate Mike, he says, "Do you have any thoughts on using personal accounts for example, Adam versus company accounts, example the name is My Company on Quora, StackOverflow, et cetera?" - We always used personal accounts. I always felt that that was much less salesy.

15:02So, wherever possible we always use a personal account. - Yep, that's what I did as well. And the nice part, especially on Quora you can put Rob Walling, Founder of Drip, founder of Whatever. And so, your company makes it in any ways but then you're a human being. It's like, nobody wants a question answered by a company.

15:21It's, I'm instantly suspect when I see that. But if it's by a person who's the CEO or a founder, I actually give give them credibility. A question from Kristin Carney. How do you find questions? Let's see. How do you find the right questions to answer on the platform? Did you answer hundreds of questions

15:39or did you somehow ID the questions with a lot of views? You weigh in first, I wanna tell folks, how I did it. - No, that's absolutely a great question. Cause Quora is just an absolute flood, of the same question over and over. So you can waste a lot of time answering 100 versions of basically the same question

15:59the way the simple method we used is just Google searching. So if so, we search through Google for the questions that we cared about for the key terms that we cared about. And then whatever ranked there from Quora, we would then click through to Quora and answer those questions. So if you search directly on Quora for something like if you just search a job, a broad term, like a Postgres or a Google sheets, things along those lines,

16:22there will be dozens of the same question over and over. The, ones that we really focused on were the ones that were basically the ones that were ranking in Google. One other side note, on Quora is that you can get tricked probably into running ads there or promoting your post. Just, to our own experience, we actually tried that out.

16:44It seemed like a no brainer. It's like, Oh, well, like we can instantly get our our answer, to pose a it's jumped to the top. It was a complete failure, it, did not work at all. They actually, their ad platform is also terrible in terms of like setting all that up and then getting it, to display appropriately. So getting the promotion to display

17:04on the questions that you want it to was also a disaster. So just a quick, a quick aside is that like ads on Quora did not work at all for us versus doing the questions completely for free worked as well. - That's good to know, cause I've never tried Quora ads. And I always see Quora ads cause I am on Quora, I get their weekly digest. And so I'm on it once a week

17:25kind of searching through the stuff. Of course the digest is always like at MCU movie, trivia and what's going on with dungeons and dragons and that kind of stuff. So it's like nothing to do with start up which is actually a nice break. But I see the ads all the time and I I kind of have in the back of my head, like I wonder

17:39if I should try those so interesting data point there. I like that about Google searching. I wish I had thought of that. Cause I would go through, I would subscribe to the topics and then I'd try to be the first answer for a lot of them. And I, that worked, it worked, well, it always worked in terms of I would usually start getting upvotes quickly, but if those didn't appear in search results anywhere

18:01that I wouldn't get a lot of traffic from those. So it's, it is an interesting approach, unlike, what's your, what's your thinking. Another question, how do you make your answers not to sound promotional. - Yeah, and, that is actually hard. So if you, the first draft if you're thinking, selling the product it's probably going to come across to sales. Like, they always came back to is if you are answering the question from a place that you're not involved with the company at all, so almost put yourself

18:31in a, customers or potential customers shoes. But that, that absolutely is something that we had to work on early on. And I found that the best way for me to do it, was to pretend that I was answering the question either to someone that I knew. So like just put yourself in a an actual situation where someone that you

18:51know is asking you the question and like a specific person. So I would pretend like, Oh, like our product manager at our last company is asking me this question how would I answer him? Like, and making it a specific person worked really well for me. Because if you're answering it to like the internet like just broadly, you can come across as like maybe sounding a little bit too like polished or maybe too, like on the PR side, versus if you're answering a friend or,

19:18a previous coworker it'll probably come across more natural. We, didn't AB test this obviously. So who knows if it works or not but that's the way that it felt better to me. And I guess if like upvotes versus downvotes mean anything. It seems like, broad mentioned places like Reddit, when we answered more naturally, it seems like, people appreciate that and, welcome it more

19:43than something that's more kind of salesy or marketing. - Yeah, I like that of just talking, pretend you're talking to a human or you're answering a friend in an email thread or a Slack thread. And it's like, what would I actually tell them? I would say, well here, I'm gonna answer your question. And then I'm going to tell you probably don't do that

20:01is usually the way it winds up. And, it can come off, not salesy then. Another question for Mark, he says I don't have a Quora account. Can I create one today and start answering right away? Or do you have to warm up your account first? - I don't think you have to warm your account.

20:19I definitely answered the first day. So I started answering questions. I did use like our domain. So I signed up with our, like@seekwell.io domain. So I did create a separate new account, for Seekwell for the company. But yeah, you can start answering right away. I don't, think they do too much. I don't think they're trying to be too clever

20:40around like new accounts. There is a lot of spam on Quora. So you, do I have the possibility of being drowned out by a lot of other spam, but yeah, I don't think you need any more of a period. - Yeah, I agree with you. I think they rely on their upvote downvote system. Since it is a human powered, you know, voting system

21:02the spam does get, can get downvoted quickly. And so I think if you sign up and start answering questions with value, and you do get up votes that pretty quickly you'll get the reputation you need to continue answering. Any other questions from folks, checking the Slack. And I have a question for you. Did you, was this something you did in the early days to get early traction and then you stopped at a certain point where

21:30it just didn't move the needle for you anymore? Or is it something that you continue to do today? - Yeah, this was definitely, this was the very first thing we did, which was just Google search. And we knew we weren't going to have domain credibility from day one. So we Google searched, found places that we could answer this question that did have

21:47domain authority that would show up and rank in SEO results. And that was like the very first thing we did. As far as like ongoing, it has not been much of a strategy like say like the past year. And we have mainly just been in maintenance mode. So, if a post of a particular post is just looking outdated, so it's just not really displaying the current product anymore, we will, update them some newer channels like as opposed to like Quora

22:16in StackOverflow have worked well for us. So like, as we added more integrations and destinations new forums became relevant to us. So specifically like Salesforce, when we added Salesforce as a destination for our product, we did go, we kind of dug into their their archives and their previous Q&A forums there, which are very active. Like there's a ton of Salesforce developers out there

22:40a ton of people that use Salesforce in general, obviously. So there are questions that are super relevant to our product that we've kind of gone in and answered but, the amount of work to like keep up with it is actually like, really low. So like, if you kind of like have it to do once or twice, once a month or once every other month, I think that's more than enough to like keep up with, maybe even like a dozen or so

23:05different sources and questions. - Yeah, and I think that's something good to take away is that's why this is, these are, this whole MicroConf Remote 2.0 event is around getting that first 10, 50, or 100 customers. It's this is not gonna, I don't see the scaling. The only time I've seen this scale is Jason Lemkin

23:23built the entire SaaSter brand on Quora. And then he republished on his blog and that's the one person I've seen who like built up, a huge personal brand. But other than that, it's usually what you've said and how I've described HitTail and Drip is you do it in the early days and it gets you highly qualified folks, not a huge amount

23:41but enough that, you can use it to get early traction. And then there on it's just maintenance. There is a question from Eric and he's asking, like I think during the active time, when you were really targeting this, how much time in a given week, did you spend answering questions? - Super low, like five or 10 minutes a week, maybe. It was, it felt, a lot of it was a, one-time find everything make a spreadsheet with, all the questions

24:11and go through and answer them all at once. So, kind of upfront investment, definitely less than 10 hours. And, especially when you think about like getting how painful it can be to get your first 10 customers. If you have the right product that kind of fits into this the type of product that can be successful

24:30with this strategy. We easily got more than our first 10 customers, with less than 10 hours of work. Of just going through finding the relevant questions answering them really well. And, just tracking and making sure that we knew where those customers were coming from. So we had like less than 10 hours initial investment and then ongoing,

24:50we've been around for almost three years now. And I'd say like, life to date is probably another like 10 or 20 hours. So it's really low investment. - Yeah, and I like about what I like about doing Quora and StackOverflow and these others is that usually when you see the question it's obvious to you what the answer is,

25:10but it's not obvious to everyone else. because you're the expert like you're knee deep in this stuff. I mean, you can call out particular API calls or you can call out particular numbers. I mean, again, when I answer questions on Quora about B2B SaaS marketing, I'm like referencing page 27 of the State of Independent SaaS that we ran up. Because, it's just all in your head and you forget how knowledgeable

25:30and how deep your knowledge is. These are not things that you research. I, at least I never did. It was always like, what, our best, what are the biggest mistakes people make in email marketing? And it's like, well, I can list five right now because I see it everyday on Drip. Right? It's not that I have to go

25:43and spend a bunch of time, like writing a dissertation. It just kind of, it comes out of me because, you're knee-deep in it. Another question from, there's a question from Justin. Go ahead, yep. - I was gonna say that's a great point, on our product as well as like this, this is a lot of times a person that spent like 10-15 minutes

26:02trying to figure out how to solve this problem. And we've meanwhile spent like six months building a company around it. So like, you're exactly spot on Rob. It's like, it's someone that's like, Hey this is a really annoying problem. I'm trying to solve it right now. They're asking it from a place of like,

26:17maybe 10-15 minutes of experience on like working on it. So you might come across as like the most brilliant person on earth. If you, answer their question well after, having worked on the product or the problem for three to six months. - We have a question from Justin. He says, what were some examples of the Google

26:34searches you did?

26:39- Literally the question. So for our product, we, and this is another I think this is a general theme that Rob and MicroConf in general pushes is like niche down. Like, find a niche. We were super niche at first. Like we basically only solved like one problem which was getting data from your database into Google sheets. So it was like write SQL connected to your database,

27:03whether that's like Postgre, mySQL, whatever it is. And instead of having the results, returned into your IDE we were sending the results to somewhere like Google sheets. So like, was the, problem we solved but that was the niche. So we just searched every iteration of that problem. It's like, how do I send or how do I connect Postgres to Google sheets? And those different words in between

27:27were actually pretty important to us. So things like, how do you send

27:35Postgres data to Google sheets? How do you connect Postgres to Google sheets? Like all these different iterations and kind of synonyms for various words in that search term were important for us finding those, those first few questions. So trying all the different iterations, like, mySQL instead of Postgres, snowflake which is a popular data warehouse, instead of PostGres kind of like adding all those different iterations and combinations, like that's what we did

27:59to build that spreadsheet. And say, hey these are the 50 questions that we wanna answer. And then we just went through and knock them out, again in like less than 10 hours that first, go around.

28:11- All right, yeah, Justin responded, he said, those examples are gold, thank you. And that's the thing, you, can you go to Google to find out what's ranking in Google. But you can also go directly to Quora and you can type in in your example, you could type in Postgres Google sheets in the search box and see what comes up to see what wording cause there's gonna be a bunch of questions

28:28with those two in it. And then there's going to be all those connect, transfer, transmit, you know, whatever else. And then you can do the same thing, Seekwell server, Google sheets, and yeah, that's great. All right, we are at time, sir. Thank you so much for coming and, dropping your knowledge today. I know that, judging by the level of the questions and the number of them,

28:48I know that provided a lot of value for them folks today. - Awesome, thanks for having me Rob. - Absolutely. (upbeat music)

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