Why You Should Encourage Customers to "Abuse" Your Product

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. I'm here today with Tom Winter, which is an incredible name for someone who's Polish. ‘cause it doesn't sound Polish at all. So maybe there's a backstory there. Tom is the co-founder and chief growth officer at SEO Wind, a company that uses data to build SEO optimized content effortlessly.

Sean Weisbrot: He also has experience in helping SaaS companies expand globally, which is an essential part of the conversation we're gonna be having today. So thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Tom. I appreciate it. why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about SEO Wind and how you got to this point in your career. And we'll go from there.

Tom Winter: Thanks a lot, Sean. Thank you for the invite. I'm happy to be here and share some thoughts on my side. so I'm basically in love with B2B SaaS tools and the potential that they can scale across the globe, without any problems. marketer and salesperson by heart growth hacker, by nature.

Tom Winter: About 15 years ago, I started a content marketing agency, and I've helped many customers for a couple of years. Then I co-founded Desker, which is one of the best tools to test developer skills. I helped, I helped to build it from zero to paying customers in over 85 countries. Not right now. It's probably over 100 countries that we have paying customers in.

Tom Winter: And I decided to take all my SEO knowledge and build a SaaS tool to drive organic traffic through a data-driven approach. SE one SEO Wind helps to make SEO results scalable and predictable at the same time. When I have time, I try to advise startups on how to grow globally. I especially love to remove barriers that they think they have and empower them to.

Tom Winter: Scale up across the globe. And this is basically what I do and this is my background.

Sean Weisbrot: You call yourself a Chief growth officer. What's the difference between that and a Chief Executive Officer?

Tom Winter: My focus is purely on growth, so a combination of marketing and sales, scales, skills, I love to actually think about marketing, and sales as two things working together because in my opinion, these are not two separate departments.

Tom Winter: These are people that are driving growth together. And this is where I excel, where the CEO is a rather a person that drives the vision of the company, helps to. Connect all the dots in the whole company, I can focus only on growth.

Sean Weisbrot: So it sounds like you put marketing and sales together as one department.

Tom Winter: Exactly. That. Like I'm a little bit a technical person with a combination, as I mentioned, like of marketing and sales team. So I can deliver a lot of things and test out on my own. Of course developers don't like what I do, because my code looks really, really bad. It's enough for a POC to test it out if it actually works, to deliver it within a day or even a couple of hours.

Tom Winter: Test it out, see if that's a value for the customer, and then the developer can take it over and rebuild it from scratch because we've now proven that it works so we can actually build it.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, there's a lot of tools out there now that don't require any sort of code. That, like for example, Zapier, where you can just plug and play APIs between a spreadsheet and you could build out a business intelligence dashboard using Zapier and other applications within a few days.

Sean Weisbrot: And then you go, okay, I've basically built a multimillion dollar system now. You know, you can go and build it yourself if you really want to, but otherwise we can just use it here.I find it really fascinating how. These tools are making it much easier for marketing teams and sales teams and product teams, and customer service teams, really, anyone, any, any department can benefit from these tools.

Sean Weisbrot: Why did you choose to focus on SEO specifically for this company?

Tom Winter: This is something that I did for, I think, for the last 15 years. I helped out many companies, to build organic traffic, something that is predictable from their side and how they can build, scale it, in a predictable way. so I have a lot of frameworks that I use on a daily basis, and I felt like, okay.

Tom Winter: Let's see if we can automate the same things that we're doing on a daily basis and help out different companies. Let's put it into a SaaS framework and see if they can actually get similar results. using the similar frameworks that we use, like by just using Excel Sheet araf Sr. And all other tools that they're out there.

Tom Winter: But it took a while. It took a lot of time to. Implement it. So we thought, let's automate it. Let's use a little bit of machine learning data and let's do it. And regarding what you said earlier about A POC that you can just assemble things like put things together.even though there is a term in, in development code, it basically means like gluing two things together just to come up with a new thing.

Tom Winter: Of course, like you don't have to rebuild things from scratch. You don't have to reinvent. It's not about doing r and d, like 99% of the market. It's not r and d. It's just like gluing different things together and developing something new. And this is something that I see in many startups.

Tom Winter: Just don't know how to do, how to do a proper POC that you can sell something that doesn't exist or that like, it doesn't look under the hood as it should be.

Tom Winter: and this is the problem that I see all the time. We should be ashamed of things that we show to the public if we're not ashamed. That means that, as somebody said, I think it's from zero to one. If we're not ashamed, that means we basically launched too late.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that was Reid Hoffman. What is the benefit of SEO for a SaaS brand?

Tom Winter: Not only for SaaS brands, but as a SaaS product? For sure. SEO is bringing organic traffic, so. The traffic that we call free traffic, it's not actually free because if you would pay with ads for the same traffic, for the same keywords, you would pay a lot of money.

Tom Winter: So if you can build organic traffic, and get it for free, that means you don't have to invest money in that and you can monetize this traffic if the problem that I can see is building organic traffic. Really hard. and many companies don't see a way to scale it if they don't have the competence inside the company.

Tom Winter: They don't know how to do it. They don't know how to employ content writers, for example. What these content writers should do. And what we saw is that if you're data driven, you can actually make it scalable because you have to go with a certain pattern. To build content on your website to build organic traffic.

Tom Winter: I will actually tell a story that I had liked, because I'm really a creative person. I love to create different things and I always think I'm like the most creative person in the room, but the problem is that I. If I really excel with my creation, like regarding organic traffic, I develop something totally different than the market likes.

Tom Winter: Even if I think it's the best thing in the world and then I launch it and then I see zero organic traffic, that means I was wrong. and Google was right, like because Google didn't think that I built something that was okay. And. Always when you're trying to build anything, either it's a product or you are actually creating content that drives organic traffic.

Tom Winter: Market is always right, so when the rubber hits the road. This is the moment that you see if you were right or if you were wrong. So I love to actually test out things as soon as possible just to see was I right or were I wrong? Like was it wrong? So this way we wanted to create a tool that will make it predictable.

Tom Winter: 'cause we know that SEO, like Google, owns 85 or 90% of the search market. Like there's only Google and, and nothing else. So if you type in something into Google and Google shows you certain results in the search search engine ranking, search engine. Then basically this is the intention. Like go Google just caught the intention that what you wrote in, in, in the search engine and showed you something that they predict will be the best answer.

Tom Winter: They always want to give you the best possible answer. This is their job. This is like how they work. So what we wanted to see is exactly to understand what Google shows there and help to build. Brief for an article for a certain type of content that will best fulfill the best answer, the questions that people can have.

Tom Winter: So, based on S results, we are actually bringing the topics, and checking for the topics that you should add to your articles, to your content. This way, based on data, we're predicting what's expected from the market, not to make mistakes.

Sean Weisbrot: So there's something that you mentioned about speed. You said you like to test things as fast as possible. From what little I know of SEO. Doesn't it take like weeks or months to see a benefit from SEO specifically once you've made some sort of change in the website based on the rankings and, and the organic traffic?

Tom Winter: Yes. It takes weeks, months. Couple of months sometimes, like many of them, but to see if you have any traction, it's easy to even check it with Google Search Console. So for example, if you write a new article on a certain topic and you can see that Google already ranks you on 90 something positions, that means you're getting there. Like nobody will go to the ninth or 10th page of Google. and nobody will click it. But that means you're getting. Like some traction in Google.

Tom Winter: Now you can be better. So if you can see that you have more and more visibility, in Google, no clicks, I mean visibility. So four, fifth, sixth page of Google, that means you're getting some traction. And this is something that you can see really quickly in just a week or two, because Google crawls your page all the time.

Sean Weisbrot: How would you suggest a SaaS brand that wants to. Get started with SEO, because my assumption is there, there may be some sort of local SEO going on when they wanna expand globally, so we'll move towards that. So I'm, I'm trying to prime you and the audience for like, that, that, evolution in a, a brand's thinking and, and all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: So let's start at like, you know, if you wanna get started right now as a SaaS brand with seo o let's say you have a website, but. You don't know anything about SEO and you wanna start applying SEO, how do you get involved?

Tom Winter: So first of all, like you have to think about your market. Like, let's start with, are you B2B, B2C or maybe enterprise sales?

Tom Winter: So you exactly know who you are targeting, your content, say, if you will define it. and most of the SaaS like to have. an idea who might be their customers. you can actually start defining what exactly they're looking for. I would start with some like 10, maybe 20 keywords that you can start with.

Tom Winter: That might be the keywords that people are looking for, for youraudience to find products or similar things connected to your products. Around you and then start writing the content. And the really, like, the key word that I would say is the intention. So if you have certain keywords that you think are good, check it in Google.

Tom Winter: If you put these keywords into Google, you'll define exactly if, if people, if people are thinking about the keyword the same way you do. I've made these mistakes many times that I thought a keyword meant something. It meant something totally different. so for example, we can say Independence Day.

Tom Winter: What do you think? What is it? It's a movie, so

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah,

Tom Winter: exactly. This is a,

Sean Weisbrot: As an American, it's a movie. It's a

Tom Winter: movie. It's not like that. Not a date, like nothing. If you check it in Google, actually this is quite a funny thing because if you check independence in Google, most of the year you will see a movie and just once like a couple of days in the year, Google will show you actually the holiday.

Tom Winter: So you have to check the intention of the keyword, just to understand exactly. Are you focusing on it? So for example, I had a customer that had a tool connected to the office, like something connected to the office and they thought like, oh, I, we will go like with a keyword that is office something.

Tom Winter: Unfortunately it was a series. so you have to understand exactly what Google thinks on the other side because what you think, okay, that's cool, but like Google is always right. They have the data. Once you have these starting points, like, these primary keywords, you can start defining like actually a long list of secondary keywords.

Tom Winter: This is a long, long list. I wouldsay a couple of hundred, maybe a thousand of keywords, but, but the starting point is always. Like the first keyword, like the primary list of keywords that you, you start with. Once you have it, probably start creating content. You can drive, like a mix of content is best. I would say articles are just one way of doing content.

Tom Winter: But you can basically use the same content on LinkedIn. You can use it for videos. You can deliver content in so many different ways and redistribute, redistribute it like in different ways. Basically even sometimes the same content, so you don't have to write it from scratch every time. But if you will do it constantly, and if you will drive it this way, you will bring organic traffic to your website.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay, so let's take a little leap forward here. Let's assume you have a website, you know your keywords, you've got content going, your brand, you know you're getting revenue and you want to think about. You know, the next country that you want to move into, because hopefully you, you haven't just said, I'm going to launch a product that the whole world is going to use from the start, because chances are no, you, you can launch it that way, but inevitably you're gonna end up having a specific region find your product, right?

Sean Weisbrot: So, for example, with my own podcast, when I look at my results, typically the largest number of people listening to my podcast come from the US but also from Singapore. I know exactly why that is. It's because I promote heavily in Singapore because my startup is based in Singapore and I've done a lot of work in the startup ecosystem in Singapore.

Sean Weisbrot: So you know, I know where my people are coming from. Now, does that mean I don't want people from Europe? Like, no, I'm talking to you. You're from Poland. Of course, I want people from Europe. I want people from Africa. I want people from all over. But I haven't put the effort into promoting in those regions, and therefore I don't have that response.

Sean Weisbrot: So with that caveat, If you're a brand with a product, revenue, whatever, and you're looking to expand, how do you position your website or your content with SEO and how do you think about that so that you can target those outside of paid ads? Right? Because again, your goal is organic.

Tom Winter: First of all, you have to think if your tool is language specific or not. This is like the basic thing. If it's language specific, then probably the. Solution would be like, have content for each language. That's the easiest way. And probably as you're, as we're doing a podcast here, probably meet people within the region, more people within the region, then. Assumption is that you will gain more traffic from certain regions.

Tom Winter: So one trick, for example, that I'm using, is like I'm creating most of my content in English, like I know a couple of languages, but like English is the language that I use the most. So when I'm creating content, I'm using a little bit of technology to rewrite the content in different languages.

Tom Winter: So basically I'm using Deep l as a tool, to rewrite everything that I write on my blog and translate it into languages that I'm interested in. This way Google starts to understand my website, like it's in a couple of different languages. It's scalable, like it's just adding a little bit of money to DL to translate it into different languages.

Tom Winter: so this is the easiest way, but like you have to understand that it's rewritten or using machine learning. so it'll not be perfect. But some of the tools that I worked with are not language specific. So, for example, like the tool that I co-founded, which was Deaf Square, is a tool to test developer skills.

Tom Winter: Like programming is basically in English, it doesn't matter, like which country are you in? It's in English. So all the countries, it doesn't matter if it was Spain, Singapore, France, or whichever country they used the tool in English, which was. Very helpful from our perspective because we didn't have to translate it anyhow.

Tom Winter: We of course connected with many people, so you have to think about it, organic traffic is not free traffic, free traffic. You also have to use, outreach and invite people, do some webinars to some different things. if you just spray and pray your content, like this is what you'll get. so probably getting additional backlinks from certain countries will help you out to drive traffic and show you your post in different countries.

Tom Winter: Also, when it comes to specific languages, Google tries to evaluate what kind of language you have set up in your browser. So that's another thing that you have to think about on your customer side. So, if. Somebody has set up like the, the browser language to Spanish, probably more of Spanish content will show up in Google because just. 'cause of the setup of the browser. So that's why I would use, for example, automatic translation of the website, because then if the same article is translated into five languages, Google will just choose the proper language and show up. Like with the article in the proper language, you just need to set up a couple of technical things on your website to have h. which is a link for Google to understand exactly which pages in which language. And if they see the same article in a different language, they know exactly which one to match to, to, to it.

Sean Weisbrot: I have to say I do find that frustrating, that specific feature because for example, you know, when I'm in Portugal, I'll have global websites that'll force the website into Portuguese for me, even though my browser is set to English and.

Sean Weisbrot: I have to either go to their, the bottom of their page to like manually change the language, or I have to go to the, the, top bar and, and remove like the p the pt, dash, br whatever and, and replace it with ENUS so that I'm forcing it into the US English version, which can be frustrating. You mentioned this thing called Deep L. Do you have A U-R-L for this? Is there some, some way that I can put it in the episode links? Just because I, I'm curious for myself. I.

Tom Winter: Yeah. Deep l.com and they have API access. If you're using, for example, WordPress, it's really easy to connect it to WordPress. There's like, one plugin that you have to install and then like access API,

Sean Weisbrot: from Deep L. Now I know that there's also a WordPress plugin for multi-language.

Tom Winter: Yeah, there are many of them. So that you. So you can build your website in multiple languages, but not every company uses WordPress.

Tom Winter: For me, WordPress is a love and hate relationship. I really love it for the speed that I can develop things there.

Tom Winter: because like most of the things that are already there, I can test out many solutions and like to connect them to each other. Better or worse, but it works. but at the same time, WordPress is so heavy and the speed, like I can, it's just like a huge tool. I don't need 95% of WordPress. it can do so many things, but it's just too heavy.

Tom Winter: but you can optimize it. Like that's why I say it's a love hate relationship. Still, I would prefer to use it than not to use it because of the way it works and how fast I can implement things.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's refocus on using SEO for globalization and content. So as we've already kind of described. You normally take a few weeks to a few months to see a benefit from implementing something related to SEO and content in your website. So if you're planning a campaign to expand into a new country, a new region, how soon before you actually do your marketing push? Should you be preparing your SEO based content in this other language and publishing it? So that you can actually have the benefit if you do paid ads, or an, or an organic campaign, to be able to maximize that benefit so you're not just blowing money for no reason.

Tom Winter: Okay? Like from my perspective, I'm a fan of, I. Not putting anything into a drawer, so not preparing too long for certain actions. definitely what I would start with because I would talk to people. I would talk to people from certain regions. I would try to outreach to potential customers using even LinkedIn just to understand the language that they're using, the pains that they have, the.

Tom Winter: because each region thinks a little bit differently. so if you understand exactly what the region might think, the more you talk to the people, the better you will understand. I remember we talked last week that you lived in different places across the globe and you. For that reason, you better understand these specific regions of the world, which makes a lot of sense because you connect with many people, you talkto many people, and that's why you can understand them better.

Tom Winter: And it's the same with marketing and sales. You have to understand. Certain regions. But going back to your question, I would start with putting KPIs, on a piece of paper, and my hypothesis. I always try to start with a hypothesis just to understand better if I am reaching a goal or I'm not reaching a goal.

Tom Winter: because if you have a hypothesis in the beginning and what kind of things you have to do, so kind of OKRs. If you know what you planned for, then you can actually decide if you succeeded or not. If you are waiting like three months to actually define these things, then I always like, in this, in this situation, I will always say like, no, it's succeeded because I want to feel good.

Tom Winter: So if you define the hypothesis in the beginning, you plan out what you have to do to actually reach your goal. Then. You will actually understand if you succeeded or not. so I would start putting content out as soon as possible. I would define a schedule that we want to put out the content. So for example, twice a week, I would define additional things that I would do around it.

Tom Winter: So for example, contact specific. People go to podcasts, outreach to specific personas, on LinkedIn, but I would define it in the beginning. This way we can actually understand if we reach the goal, or not. There is like a. a funny thing about riding dead horses, like there's a lot of ways of riding dead horses, especially in business.

Tom Winter: so we can find like many ways of riding dead horses, but this is exactly it. If you don't know that you're riding a dead horse. Like, you will continue or just stop something just before you succeed. So, I wouldn't, I, I, I would stick to the plan. Whatever happens, I would stick to the plan that I had.

Sean Weisbrot: Would you write this content in English and then just target deep L so that it starts to translate into Spanish or Portuguese, whatever. as soon as possible so that the content is there. Or would you rewrite it in this other language and then republish it on another post page, for example.

Tom Winter: It'll still be a different post page, like using the, but I would find the simplest way possible, like I'm a lazy person. I'm I, I, and I really love it. because being lazy makes me find ways to achieve goals in a faster way, or at least prove that it works or it doesn't work. Like, when I know if something works, then I can scale it up.

Tom Winter: I can make it predictable. I can put more money on that. But if I'm developing something for half a year just to know if it works or if it doesn't in a year's time. That's not the best idea because you are putting, like, you're gambling, you're putting a year of your time and you don't know what will be the result.

Tom Winter: So like if you can get some information a lot faster, like any indicators, I like to also, like when I have my hypothesis, I like to also add something that I call leap of faith metrics.

Tom Winter: So for example. For me, leap of faith metrics, like of course my metric, my main OPR would be sales, like I want money in my bank account, but if I only count on selling, that would make the process take half a year.

Tom Winter: So what are the leap of faith metrics? So some kind of metrics that indicate that I'm closer to selling, but I can watch them like a day from now, maybe two days. For me, for example, it can be just setting up meetings with people, because if somebody can pay me with their time for a meeting, like that means they, they want to actually learn more.

Tom Winter: And that happens a lot faster than actual sales. So setting up certain goals, like if you, if you do a POC, do a POC that you can launch within a couple of days and then set up goals that will show you that you're closer to your goal. But they're not the actual goals that you're looking for, because these will take a lot of time to actually understand them.

Tom Winter: so I would do the fastest POC possible. If you don't have language skills on board, use Dal. Why not? If you do have the language skills like German, French, Spanish. Set up like some, some different articles in this language.

Sean Weisbrot: What happens when you have a SAS brand that the product is only in English, but they're pushing out contents and other languages to get customers to use them? Because, for example, if I were to promote content in Mandarin to mainland China, they don't speak English, they're gonna not be able to use my product.

Tom Winter: You have an answer that makes no sense.

Sean Weisbrot: But then there's also other countries like in Europe where a Spanish person may wanna read that article in Spanish, but they could still use your product in English

Tom Winter: as, as I mentioned before, like if your product is language specific. You don't have the skills on board, for example, with China, but China has a lot more technical problems. I, I don't know if, even if it's possible in most cases to launch a product in China because you will be blocked by different things. But looking at different countries, if you, if you are. Product is language specific.

Tom Winter: You have to have these languages, like these skills onboard in your company. But for example, I like Ker, we knew that Ker was testing developer skills and testing developer skills was always in English because programming is in English. That was a barrier, but we could translate the articles into different languages and people didn't even have a problem with getting into the system, which was in English.

Tom Winter: And we never translated it by default. We never translated it into Polish because it wouldn't make any sense. so like if the tool is not language specific, nobody has a problem with that. And this is one of the barriers that actually people think that might be a problem. Just talk to the customers, like they will tell you out loud, like, if this is a blocker or it's not.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there a reason to build a product that's language specific?

Tom Winter: Yeah, there are a lot of reasons, like, because there's many niches that need the language specific product. so like there's a huge need. Like I think most of the market would be language specific. So for example, with SEO Wind, we know that results need to be language specific. Now we are talking to the customers to see if actually the tool itself has to be language specific. We don't know. Like we will talk to them and see if we need to translate it or not, but looking at anything connected to sales, for example, if you are going into sales, if you have a product in SaaS that it goes to sales and somebody as an end user doesn't know English because they're in Poland, they're in France, they're in in Czech Republic, and they will use your tool on daily basis and there's no need for them to know English.

Tom Winter: This is a language specific tool. They will use it in a certain language and you have to translate it. You have to help them out with all the documents and help and so on, so they know how to use your tool. So like, just think about if your tool is language specific or not.

Sean Weisbrot: Here's a free business idea for anyone who's listening. Build a tool that helps you automatically on the fly, change the language of the app. People are using it. So for example, you're saying deep L you can have deep L scan your website and change the content based on the language of the B browser. The person's on. Well, why can't a web app have that function? Why isn't there a tool that that no codes, the, the language that the user's using it on,

Tom Winter: we're still not there with ai. Like, because the whole idea behind AI and writing, using ai, Is that what they need to understand? AI needs to understand the context and the intention of a person. And it's not always easy to translate.

Tom Winter: As I mentioned with Independence Day, that's AI translating what we write into Google search, into content that possibly answers the question. And the same thing goes with translation. Sometimes it's not that easy to translate. Like small pieces of data, into. Something different. Like I, I, I played around a lot with AI and writing and translations.

Tom Winter: That was just fun. I like to break things and just to see how it works. and for example, one of the AI models that is very famous for writing skills is g PT Free. And there's like, you have to set up a temperature, so. The creativity of GPT free answers that you have. Like if you set it up, to basically answer your question with the highest probability, and you ask GPT free, what's the most common pet at home?

Tom Winter: It'll answer all the time, like a dog. Every single time. But like if you set the temperature like to be creative, of the answers, then it starts to make things up. Like it starts to become creative and it can give you an answer like a dolphin. so this is exactly what you have to play, play with, when translating something into a different language.

Tom Winter: Should the algorithm be creative or not? And what's the temperature, the, the perfect temperature to get the perfect result. So I also, for example, played around with using AI for writing. Articles. Why not? Like, let's try to write an article using AI, AI and GPT-3. The problem is that it started to get too creative.

Tom Winter: It went like it was really perfect with writing short, like a description of something, maybe a paragraph or maybe too, but when I forced it to write a big block post. It's still not there, I would say. So the method that, for example, I used is kind of something that is called the Cyborg method. So a combination of a person and a computer writing together.

Tom Winter: so I can write with GPT for free, an article, but like we have to simultaneously work on an article. and one plus one doesn't equal two. it equals more than two. Like when I write an article using gyp t free, I try to add my brain power into what I exactly want to write about. but at the same time, GPT free, for example, enhances my skills.

Tom Winter: Writing skills. Like I wouldn't be able to write in such a way that helps me out. But still, that's me writing with the help of ai. AI is still not there either. Perfectly translate everything. We need a little, a little bit of human power to actually have a look at that.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. As you were saying that, I was thinking about the translation process and how not only would there be a concern about how well, or how correctly does the translation tool translate the web app on the fly based on the brand's playfulness and their own culture. But depending on the language it translates into, it could potentially break the ui.

Tom Winter: It can, like for example, like I worked a lot with Arabic languages, where like even if you translate one page to like a different one, yeah. For example, the length of words like in Arabic when you. First of all, you go right from right to left, not left to right.

Tom Winter: So like everything on the page is not just like reverting the page, it's much more difficult than that. But for example, arra-like words in Arabic are shorter. And also the fonts render a bit smaller. So it breaks everything on the page.

Sean Weisbrot: It seems like we still have a lot of work to do for a tool that can translate. In a way that also adjusts so it doesn't break the ui. And yeah, it's, that could be a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar tool, but it would probably cost a billion dollars to build

Tom Winter: Probably. Yes. That's why, like rewriting articles, and translating articles, I take into consideration that some of these things that I like are translated.

Tom Winter: Will not be translated in a perfect way. Like, okay, that's fine for me, like I'm okay with that.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything that we haven't touched upon that you think is important you want to add?

Tom Winter: Purely scaling the business, like the most important part is actually to get traction in some kind of a way that you can scale your business and then you can make it predictable.

Tom Winter: The problem that I see with many startup founders is that they want to outsource everything that they can. Before they make it predictable and it'll just not work out. Like if you find an agency that will do certain things. For you, they will not, probably not bring you the results that you want. So sometimes having the skills inside, I, I'm not saying that you can't outsource things, but like if you're starting a startup and you're starting to bring organic traffic, in most cases it'll work better if you have the skills inside.

Tom Winter: and you're able to make it predictable. Once you have it predictable, find a way to scale it up. That's not a problem. It's the same thing with sales, like if you think that you can outsource sales to an outside agency that will outreach and contact your customers and everything for you. It'll just not work out.

Tom Winter: And I know it's, it's not fun in the beginning, especially, like, but you have to do it on your own. Like you have to listen to your customers. you have to find predictable ways of doing things. Another thing is that because I like to work with a lot of startups, I can see that many of them like to try to find false barriers or obstacles, or false assumptions, like something that doesn't exist.

Tom Winter: And they like to say, I will not outreach to this person because they will never respond. So then I'm asking, did you try. No. So why are you saying that? Like, and the number of the false assumptions that they have, like on anything about anything is tremendous. Like me, I don't know why people are doing this to themselves.

Tom Winter: like just remove the barriers, like let the people answer. if you think, for example, with pricing, like, I had, that was a funny story with one of my salespeople. I talked to my salesperson and he said, like, this customer needs a discount. So like. I askedhim, why? And he said, no, no. Like they need a discount.

Tom Winter: Otherwise, like they don't have a budget. They will not buy it. Like, okay, so what did the customer say? Oh no, I haven't talked to them yet. like, don't build all these barriers like before you talk to people, like people, some, some of them, they don't need a discount, for example, when you're thinking about price, like.

Tom Winter: Talk, ask. Don't be afraid of that.

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm in a situation right now where I'm trying to promote a consulting service and part of it is like Series A round startups, right? They've recently just raised an A round and the other side is the VCs who invested in them. So one person might think, well, I should just target the startup founder, right?

Sean Weisbrot: 'cause they're the ones that need the help. But I took a step back and I said, yeah, but I could promote to a thousand startups, or I could promote to 20 VCs who invested in a thousand startups, or I could message both of them. So I chose to do an outreach campaign that focuses on both of them, because why not?

Sean Weisbrot: It doesn't cost me any extra little bit of extra time. But, you know, making a connection with one VC with the right message could potentially give me multiple clients. Whereas reaching out to those same number of clients where I'm not being introduced by the vc, like I feel like being introduced by the VC gives it a much higher chance of success because the VC's like, yo, I'm, I've, I've given you a ton of money.

Sean Weisbrot: I've given you millions of dollars. You need this guy to help you to grow. You know, so I. I, I am making an assumption that I think it'll be easier to convince the VCs to support us than to convince the founders to hire us. But I'm, I'm removing the potential for failure by targeting both at the same time anyways and seeing what happens.

Tom Winter: Yeah, yeah. Just like reducing the risk. Like let's try both of them. Like, let's see if, where, where I will find traction. And once I have traction I can put more money on that. because like you proved that something works or it doesn't, and basically what you're doing, it's a game of numbers. so like how many people you will contact, like.

Tom Winter: It's kind of luck, but you're helping luck because the number of contacts that you'll do will help you out with actually reaching your goal.

Sean Weisbrot: Of course. And thankfully we have like a really cool, SaaS report about ways that SaaS companies at the A rounds fail. Like how they fail, why they fail, and how you can kind of limit that failure. So we think that'll be a good hook to get people to actually respond.

Tom Winter: Okay. Can you give me a glimpse of the support? Why did they fail?

Sean Weisbrot: One of them is bloat. Companies when they raise millions of dollars, oftentimes the founders have never had experience managing seven or eight figures in their bank account.

Sean Weisbrot: So they don't really know how to budget properly. They don't really know how to plan for their workforce expansion. And they end up getting roped into, you know, hiring a bunch of people they don't need, and, you know, getting a bunch of software that they probably don't need and paying too much for the software.

Sean Weisbrot: And so a lot of them die because they just don't spend properly. And so we talk about that. Another is, you know, these companies fail to really monetize properly and, and scale to become profitable because what they're doing is competing with other brands for functions and features, and it's really a race to zero for their pricing, rather than how can we extract the most value from our platform in a way that users actually want it.

Sean Weisbrot: That way we can, we can increase how much we charge, not decrease how much we charge. And so a lot of companies, their marketing is, is incorrect. And where it's really this race to zero and they fail to differentiate themselves and their pricing strategy supports that in a negative way. And those are just a few of the reasons why they fail.

Tom Winter: Yeah, when you said about it, I, I love to say like, when I'm looking at the pricing of a startup, I love to say like, encourage abuse instead of limiting the usage. and I actually mean that because like, if you, if the person on the other side will see the value out of the tool, I. And will abuse your tool.

Tom Winter: That means they're using the tool like the more they will use it, then probably your profits will grow. But just coming up with the idea that you have to encourage it, and make the person on the other side feel that they can use it as much as possible makes a huge difference.

Sean Weisbrot: Yes. So for example, one of them. Companies that are competitors to my startup nerve are Slack, and the way that I looked at Slack's strategy was they're basically tying your hands and forcing you to give them $5 per user per month in order to get access to your full history. As far as I'm concerned, that's a bad strategy because people are not paying for your service because they like you.

Sean Weisbrot: They're paying because they're pissed and they want their history. They're trying to run a company and you're holding their history from them. It's, it's, it's, it's like ransom. You're forcing them to pay ransom. So I thought that was a bad strategy. So the strategy we were gonna come up with, or part of the strategy we've come up with was we're gonna let you have your entire history for free.

Sean Weisbrot: All users, every, every workspace, they all get it for free. Why? Well, we can steal a large number of people that are pissed at Slack. So we, if we encourage the abuse of that system, as you said, then they're more likely to be willing to switch and then start to charge them for when we have a USP above and beyond what Slack could offer. Which was our organizational system and our deep integrations with APIs and all that. So, you know, we look at it as we would rather charge for something that adds value to your life than charge you for ransom, which is what Slack did.

Sean Weisbrot: And so we thought there was a real opportunity there. We compete in that regard.

Tom Winter: That makes sense, like a lot of sense.