Why 99% of Content is TRASH (And What to do Instead) | Peep Laja (CXL, Wynter)

My guest today is Pep liia I know pep from back in the day when he was writing articles for his blog conversion Excel he was and probably still is one of the top people when it comes to website conversion optimization but today his focus is on winter a software that lets you test your messaging with your target audience this is quite an interesting field so we spent quite some time talking about it we also discussed if Blogging is dead in 2024 and how to launch and grow a successful digital marketing agency it was a great

chat and I can't wait to share it with you ladies and gentlemen my name is Tim solo and you're listening to hre's podcast hre's [Music] podcast thanks for coming to uh hre's podcast uh I I've actually known you for quite a while from the conversion Excel days right back in the day the domain Was conversion Excel and uh yeah this was maybe year I don't know 20 13 or something like that maybe even earlier so you you are one of the ogs of marketing blogging at least uh at least in my book yeah start 2011

I think yeah yeah yeah yeah so I guess my first question to you uh is pretty fun is blogging dead in 2023 sl24 what would you say uh I think for audience building it's not how it used to be 10 years ago 10 years ago you built an audience on a Blog but now I don't like for me personally there's not a single blog where I would go just to the blog and see what have they posted now like never yeah now like social media you know in my case mainly LinkedIn has taken over that

functionality so now blogging is like it's a link you share on social or it's you know it's for SEO I don't even think people are sharing their links on social because uh It's kind of right it's kind of common uh I don't know knowledge that uh whenever you post a link it gets less engagement because social networks demoted that's right well you can't yeah put a link in your post but you know somebody somebody might ask in a comments hey can you link to the full thing you know and then you know yeah so social

media has limits in terms of like the characters um how long your post can be and so if you're if you Want to write about something super nerdy detail you do need to link to something yeah that is true so so I feel that the the formats of how people are sharing content or maybe better to say sharing their ideas sharing their experience because I don't really like the word content it makes it kind of generic so it feels that people either go to social networks for shorter form things like I'm going to share this

quick idea in a LinkedIn post or Whatever or they would do something more substantial like a conference talk like for 30 minutes or maybe a course and it seems that yeah blogs in a way how you previously say you would subscribe to someone and you would get like read every single article like back in the day I was reading Moos blog all the time I would start my morning from checking what is happening Ono's blog uh but yeah not anymore so it feels like blogs are turning into C of resources is this what You feel

yeah totally it's like uh not exactly Wikipedia because most of it is still garbage but yeah it's like long form version of my LinkedIn post that's what a Blog is H yeah but but you said that uh blogs are still good for building an audience what do you mean they used to be they used to be I they used to be not anymore no I'm I mean that's how I bu Built My following like I started Conversion Excel as a Blog and I and I only turned it into a business once I had 100,000 monthly

uh visitors to the blog and most of this was direct traffic they weren't like Googling [ __ ] they were just what have I posted now and this Behavior I think has gone away uh and now if I wanted to build an audience today I would not start blogging because also you cannot rank for [ __ ] as a new blog like right like SEO the ones who studed link building back in 2002 those Are those guys you will never outrank them never you know it's pointless well uh at any point in time there are

new trends new search queries which it is still possible to rank for even with a new blog for example I just recently realized that uh it's been a while since all the AI craze and specific Ally AI in marketing or AI in SEO craze and we haven't published an article about this so if you search for something like uh how to use Ai and SEO Uh HFS wouldn't be there so it's still opportunity for uh smaller people who are more agile and faster to react uh to use SEO even for a new block well for

long ter uh longtail stuff or like yeah new like news jacking type of stuff probably but then hopspot will publish one of those mediocre listicles and will outrank you in a day you know with the most garbage article yeah like I I agree with you like the the the the content that we see In search is becoming very generic and it it almost feels that no matter which article you click would it be number one number two number three they're all kind of the same what is X why X is important like the benefits of

X the types of X and you're like come on yeah totally and all of that is written by you know like 500 a blog post type of a freelance writer who knows nothing about the topic she or he just Googled a bunch of other blog post and just you know before Content marketing was a thing idiots did not publish content like you wouldn't write en encyclopedia articles without knowing anything you know like now we have created P perverse incentives for any idiot to write about anything I mean and now now we are sitting in a

mountain of garbage and yet you're still running conversion Excel and new content is being created I believe that's right mhm right so tell me how does the content Production uh works for that blog right now actually how do approach it to make sure that yeah I'm sorry how do I approach it to make sure that it is not what we just described that it's better yeah actually right now we are in the process of Reinventing and rethinking of what it should be because the the very thing I was describing happened to us for the longest

time I prided um you know like cxl was like my My standard was it has to be the best in the world content for our Niche and in the beginning first years it was just me writing and then I had editors and then um who who wrote like in my team but I had always I read every single post and added comments and it was like strong editorial process but then I went ahead and started a new company on the site called winter and then I basically left the day-to- DAT to of cxl and we

did the the one of the worst Things a company can do to their blog is hire a Content agency and the content agency what they did was they were writing content that was fine you know it's everything is fine but fine me you know might as well be total [ __ ] you know like fine content will destroy you and it it it destroyed us really so two years of just fine content um has [ __ ] killed us uh really uh in terms of trust in terms of also organic traffic uh because we're we

Haven't been attracting new back links because the content is just fine and nobody links to just fine content uh needs to be like killer good um so that's kind of what happened now we're rethinking it uh CU we we see the errors of our ways uh and it's like oh well back in the day when we had high standards and then true experts were writing content that's when [ __ ] was working but the world has now also changed around us then and also my Business circumstances have changed uh because I'm not full-time cxl anymore

okay that is actually very similar to what has happened to H's blog uh because at a certain point we were also doing very well uh lots of people loved our content we were getting tons of shoutouts and then I personally because again in the beginning I was super involved in everything I also wrote quite a few articles I did research studies that Created a lot of backlinks and then uh I found Josh who is our head of content and we started hiring writers and we started uh to introduce workflows standard procedures etc etc and they

thought that if I create all these Frameworks and workflows and like tell people how to create that and then I can deach myself and the blog would keep uh running at the same Pace but it happened similar thing to what happened to you with an agency but for us it has Happened because we wanted to kind of template templae our content production process in a way so yeah now I'm getting back into it uh and uh yeah basically I'm I'm trying to put myself back into our content production process and hopefully uh people in the

industry will soon see changes that our content is getting better I wonder if you figured what you guys need to do to to turn the tide so to say MH yeah like my current uh idea for what to do about it is is Twofold like one you cannot have writers write expert content so it needs to be a true practitioner who does whatever you know for a living and they write the content I mean a writer can edit and you know like maybe make the story flow better but like the original idea needs to come

from practitioner which is how cxl blog used to be you know uh so that so that's one and and second is is is is an idea for a different type of content uh which is which is not like expert Content um it's a it's a unique format like a a curated content type of uh so like we started this um a newsletter called Fast marketing basically where we are finding marketing tactics that are working for somebody really well today and so when we're surfacing and curating this the stories uh and and the writer can do

that uh because we're it's it's somebody else's tactic we're just being a journalist and writing up what what Are they doing like observing it so I think it a writer can work great for that kind of a format because that's that's what journalism is yeah I completely agree with you about the the expert writing uh the content about the topic that's that's what actually that's how it's supposed to be and I remember that back in the day uh in in preco days uh when I was uh also doing some podcast interviews going to conferences and

Whenever I got asked how to create amazing content I came up with this kind of Catchphrase of the most qualified person I said that the content should be created by the most qualified person in your company who is the most qualified to talk about it uh should be creating this content uh this was our key to success and then I realized that I was the most qualified person for many topics because we write about marketing and SEO and we have people like Patrick Stocks who's an incredible technical SEO and you cannot beat him there but

for many topics uh in marketing I'm the most qualified person and I stopped doing this so the way I'm scaling myself is we have bi-weekly content Mastermind calls where I'm trying to push everyone I'm trying to stress test the ideas that uh the guys in our team are uh suggesting are pitching and I'm trying to come up with my own ideas and see if like if that makes sense basically I'm putting Myself back in in in the process and we'll see if that works uh correct me if I wrong but I think previously your domain

was conversion xl.com so it was like a long one and now it's C xl.com y mhm it's because we started other things so conversion Excel was a conversion optimization agency originally yeah and then I started also in 2014 I started a conference called and then it was conversion Excel live it was just a Mouthful and then in 2016 I added on like an e-learning business which we called conversion Excel Institute and like conversion Excel is already a really long word and so if you add other stuff and people themselves started saying cxl way before we

yeah uh and so that was kind of a signal for me where like oh we need to shorten it and so I bought cxl domcom domain from some Chinese company uh for I think we paid $42,000 which is a steal for a Three-letter domain yeah yeah but uh did what are some common acronyms for cxl that someone else could have used because it fit perfectly for you but who else could be in the market for it well I mean in slang it's also means cancel uh and also there's a medical uh terminology for some sort

of eye procedure like if you search cxl there's like forgot what it is but copal cross link it's some sort of a medical procedure and it's also something Manufacturing related like a Samsung makes cxl devices and ah okay so there is a little bit of market for for a domain like that mhm so today it seems that cxl decom the the way you monetize It Is by selling courses correct it's an e-learning business yeah we Spa off the agency into a separate brand it's called speo now and because like being an agency and e-learning two

in one um it just didn't work like your company cannot stand for more than one idea I Think or at least is not well the if you read the book 22 law immutable laws of marketing oh yeah yeah yeah the the law of line extension it doesn't work don't do it and I I I tried it and it also didn't work in my case and so we split the brands and so yeah cxl is a is a marketing education business tell me if anyone asked you this question before but what is the conversion rate of

conversion Exel uh I don't know is the answer also I don't think anybody's asked me that uh okay yeah so we are our our stuff is expensive you know like every in Udi everything is like $9 or something right yeah and and and also if you have like LinkedIn uh whatever membership LinkedIn learning gives you you know I I think it's free or very very cheap so there's no shortage of cheap content and uh and then you know strategies where to play and how to win and so our Strategy has always been we cannot compete

on volume because the only way to make money with $10 courses is volume and um and so we can't be win in that game and so since the beginning we we picked the strategy of being premium the best in our F you know Focus area and also charge accordingly then for it and so hence for any let's say luxury type of product the conversion rate is not as good as for a cheap product so conversion rate as a singular metric Without context is also meaningless let's add context I don't mind uh you have uh homepage

you probably have some landing pages where you funnel people or you have blog articles that are getting some consistent search traffic and probably you're trying to convert people from those so uh as conver optimization experts I wonder what are your conversions for the course about conversion Optimization that's a good question I mean I don't know this uh I don't know the answer I mean and we started as a conversion optimization agency but as I said in uh we split up so the agency is a separate brand now that has literally nothing to do with cxl

cxl has zero conversion optimization people today it's a media publishing house uh we're we're just producing content uh curating so we feature experts from SPO who are doing the cro work but in house There's nobody doing any conversion optimization you know as a full-time job and I don't I mean I haven't been logging into their analytics in years because also as I said I started a new company so how many people are working on cxl as of today o also a good question I think it's around maybe 15 15 okay okay interesting uh so basically

they take care of optimizing the the website for conversions into Courses yeah okay maybe maybe we should also have uh some of them on our podcast to talk about those things because it's very interesting to see like uh how you guys do it specific Ally because again uh we at HFS we don't care about our conversion numbers so kind of like you if you ask me how how your homepage converts I have no idea how your blog article convert I have no idea but at any point in time whenever we have resources uh and we

can go back to some Of our top performing articles and we can gauge are we promoting our product or are we featuring rather our product well enough in the context of this page that gets traffic and we can see areas of improvement we would just improve them without measuring like okay previously it was 2.5% now with like 2.7% so like either we have interesting ideas of how to improve those pages and we will just do them and move on or we Don't which makes uh measuring conversion uh not important basically MH yeah that makes sense

uh I think as a business you have to make decisions on like what is the reasonable allocation of resources um and if you're a giant Corporation and and uh an uplift measured uplift of two 0.2% in absolute conversion rate makes you a lot more money you're like Amazon yes it makes sense to allocate people there and Measure and do it and run experiments you know if you're a uh a brand that start only a couple of million in Revenue per year it does not make sense you know you need to work on bigger things rather

than this micro optimizations that's actually a very good point and I didn't really think about it but now that you say it it makes all the sense basically for any e-commerce website that has tons of Typical Pages product pages that all have more or less the same layout and no product photo some description some reviews buy now button some additional uh discounts or whatever yeah if you change something at scale for thousands of pages and in case of Amazon it's like what hundreds of thousands or maybe millions that super small uplifting conversion adds up to

an incredible sum of money but if we're even talking About uh affiliate websites where people just promote product yeah it also kind of makes sense because then you can also have kind of templated things you know when when those uh blogs at the top display like editor paks and things like that so this is kind of templated so it can probably be implemented at scale but for an average article at the blog or an average landing page that gets maybe like a few hundred visits per week or something probably optimizing for Conversion is not that

important no exactly basically it's a math question right and also it's not like you can 5x the conversions you know like it's not it's not in real I mean it's only possible if your Baseline is like the world's worst website it's like you're making every possible mistake you know like and now you you go to like average then you can have a huge jump but if you start at average you know your typical Shopify template is your starting point I mean that's already you know okay and so you won't 5x your conversion rate from there

I mean you can get a 10% bump here and there but then again what is that 10% relative impr Improvement worth in absolute dollars you know yeah let's dive quickly into the actual courses uh I have some experience myself back in the day I created course called blogging for business for HFS and uh it was a pretty interesting Journey because we first opened it like for a few weeks for Free then we closed it and it was a paid one and people were like buying it from time to time but we didn't really promote it

we also thought should we include it on our higher tier plans or should we include it to all our customers then Co hit and we opened it for free and like we got huge amount of people watching it for free and now it is available for everyone so yeah it was course is quite an interesting marketing tool I would say so if we were talking About SAS businesses creating a really useful course because I I put in quite a bit of work there I think in total it took me about a year to create start

to finish while I was obviously doing lots of other things and like building out this course and um as far as I know originally you were creating all courses for cxl by yourself that's correct yeah but then you started having uh guests like uh people who are creating courses for you again uh domain Experts I believe yep right uh what is the general arrange arrangement with those people for for example if a TRS wanted to bring someone to create a premium course what is the typical Arrangement that that you have with those people we pay

them money it's flat fee flat fee uh can you say what that flat fee is or does it depend on the person or like it depends on how famous the person is and how what is the ask in terms of like are we asking for one day Of time like filming time and you know prep you know um so I want to say it ranges from you know two2 to $15,000 something like this it's a typical range we started with a revenue share uh originally uh so you know I was the only instructor and then

when when we needed more instructors because like I ran out of things I know um then we did Revenue share but like Really what ended up happening was we were way too generous like our Revenue share that we offered was like way a lot so our early instructors made a [ __ ] ton of money and you know maybe undeservingly so because really we creating content is the easy part selling content is the hard part it's it's with any you know same goes for any SAS or e-commerce just putting a product out there that's the

easy part selling it that's the hard part so we had all The audience they did nothing for the audience so they just filmed the course and then we sold it to the people we already had and so it was kind of an unfair trade and then we were like well we're we could be making double the money if we had our payouts would be less so what's what's a what's a better model and so we we landed on a fixed fee because also if you do rev share on the instructor's part it's like well how

much will I make you know like because LinkedIn learning does that LinkedIn learning gives you Revenue cut and it's like a Spotify model you get 0.0000001 from every time somebody takes a course it's like well how much will I make you know like and it's it's very vague opay and the answer is they will make nothing um and so like well it's you know so it's rather than like we'll just give you this money and now now you know exactly how much you're going to make rather than a hope for Something you know in the

future and same for like Master Class you know like where the celebrities are teaching um you know their Hobbies um you know there is some rev share component but mostly it's flat flat fee you know like 50 to 150,000 they pay per course now that you say how much your early instructors uh got from publishing courses at your website I wish I was one of the your early instructors uh what did you want to ask Ah yeah you you mentioned that the the more famous the person essentially the more expensive it would be well which

generally makes sense because uh usually people who have larger audience have lots of other opportunities to explore so you have to get them interested with uh a reasonable sum of money but again in terms of promotion if someone is uh well known if someone has an audience then they should be able to promote their own course to their own audience So I wonder if this Arrangement also includes some kind of marketing push on their end or is it yeah I mean we have tried that over the years but really they they are not in motivated

to do that and as you pointed out if they already have a large audience they they can and and also mostly will uh do their own course and sell to their own audience so there's a conflict of interest here so for instance what we have also figured out Is that working with people who are Consultants is typically a bad deal for us because consult who are looking to monetize whatever they can will absolutely uh sell their own course and in fact like when we approach them to build a course uh the contracts language is like

we will own the recording that we produce but the IP of what you're teaching that's yours right like we don't own your knowledge and so we really Pay them for their time to create the course curriculum and now now they have it and they just re-record it on their their own and shell it on their own website and so that's what how we learned that actually working with Consultants as instructors is is not a great it's not a great strategic Avenue for us and so we've been more focused on in-house folks now uh who who

are much less likely to a have an audience and B um create a competitive course so so That gives us more unique content that is not available elsewhere and I'm of generalizing it's not always true in any case yeah and it seems that uh you've pivoted the educational business of cxl up Market uh so yeah there's some some quote or you mentioned somewhere previously that smaller businesses churned at a higher rate so you changed kind of the the entire positioning to attract bigger Businesses I wonder what changed in your strategy to land uh higher ticket

businesses for essentially the same product or have you changed the product somehow well we also so bigger businesses and smaller businesses have different problems so you know let's say let's take conversion optimization as a course so anybody would you know benefit from like some best practices and you know have a clear headline and you know like Visible call to action but you know like the basic stuff right any any solopreneur also needs those things however uh what what does a large company that runs also just does conversion optimization what do they need well they they

have experimentation as a process within the company there are hundreds of people are involved there's prioritization Frameworks there's collaboration there's strategic Insight there's data flows between teams It's all very organized its process and so our courses today if you go like uh to see EXL you know Advanced experimentation master classes and things we have is very much for companies that have a formal experimentation program and and so it just speaks to a different buyer and a solopreneur does not have any of that and doesn't need it so we so we also produce content for a

bigger business I mean some some things are Universal you Know let's say we'll take Facebook ads or meta ads you know like the basics are the same whether you're big or small only when you scale you know nuance comes um um so yeah so you did in fact change the product it's not just about changing copy changing pricing maybe introducing more tiers that you have like I don't know one workshop with someone from your company blah blah blah uh and even changing your I don't know advert Advertising strategy or your content but you actually now

have the courses which t Target uh companies with different needs as opposed to uh small businesses that's right also and and also like e e-learning as an industry is extremely high turn it's a high turn industry it's not just us and in fact our retention is you know the best in the industry however you take any e-learning business they have very high churn especially like compared to B2B SAS in B2B SAS and also of course Enterprise SAS versus S&B says very different churn rates whereas in Enterprise says if your churn is more than 1% a

year you're failing miserably no VC will put money if you're an S&B Focus to have 1% annual churn you were like we're killing it you know so it's it's it's you know it's sliding scale so it's very common that in in e-learning the subscription Churn it acts like consumer subscription like coffee Subscription which means that average subscriber remains there for three months it's the industry average is like three four months and they cancel it's very typical now of course if the buyer the the smaller the buyer and the less they pay the higher the turn

the more they pay the bigger the company the you know they're less price sensitive and so they don't turn easily and then also if it's a team subscription like multiple seats so if it's a single person Subscribing inevitably they will get busy they won't log in and consumer content and the [ __ ] am I paying for they can so if it's a 10 seats uh you know let's say six are not using it four are using it they're keeping it especially if they're not price sensitive like oh somebody's learning and getting better at the

job let's funded and so we have also a team Focus you team subscriptions and in fact our team subscriptions are now come with Unlimited seats because what we know is that the more seats they have the better the retention and so we're making more money on the long run even though upfront we make less money because typically everybody charges you per seat and so that's the so our take is a little different and also if you look at all these e e-learning companies everybody has figured out that like uh churn is high and just with

content you cannot Tackle it so you need other things on top so you know Pavilion which is like courses for B2B SAS marketing leaders like VPS and C C Level people uh they're they're focused all on community you come for the courses you stay for the community and the community is not like a slack group this is like real in-person chapters in in your local cities or all around us Salone dinners and the five conferences here and like strong membership push so if you cancel You also lose access to your real real life you know

network uh or take reforge reforge you know they have these artifacts and before artifacts they had some other thing that they were experimenting with so they they know or we take plural site which is like developer courses like learn JavaScript and stuff they have all these software tools now like kind of like GitHub Alternatives so you come learn coding and also you you you you Manage manage your kit repos there you know so if you just have courses you're going to have bad turn that's it what element do you have except for uh unlimited user

seats to to retain people do you have a community uh yeah I mean over the years we've tried with we tried many things um so like what we also have is like what we call playbooks is basically you have an outcome you want to achieve okay I want to uh recover lost SEO rankings you Know that's my outcome that I want and then we have a 10-step playbook for what to do about it you know what to follow these 10 steps that's more or less the way to go go about it um and so we

have thousands of these playbooks so uh so that was one initiative where pumped a lot of money and energy in as an idea that this could you know uh help uh it' help but only a little bit so overall the experiment was a fail uh and we we have now kind of abandoned it in the Sense that we're not producing new playbooks because it just wasn't worth the money like I think we put a couple of million in it uh and we'll never see the ROI on that money um and we have run different Community

experiments in terms of different platform forms see because we saw it on Facebook and then it's like and we let everybody into a group you know oh more more members more better you know like and no actually the more people you get there the shittier it Gets and in the end if you let all the idiots in more idiots will come and they will destroy a group and that's what really happened uh so Facebook group is just you know it's dead and we tried Circle doso uh Circle uh but yet a new place to look

L into was just a massive killer uh and um didn't really work for us uh it's not to say it won't work for other people because I I know multiple companies that have made it work for them and uh right now I mean We have a community that's when the the same login as you log in for courses but um it's not really not really great uh it's also due to the fact that it's been uh We've we've been under investing in it and it's also we're a small business as I said we're like you

know it's it's about 5 million year business and so not enough humans not enough money uh you gotta just choose carefully where you put your energy and focus on and you Can't do everything if you're you know if you're a big famous rich company like a refs you have money to do everything uh not quite not quite not not everything even even if you have money to do everything you don't necessarily have the right people to do those things MH so I'm sure you know like with what you have three businesses right now uh cxl

uh agency and winter so I'm sure you know the challenge of finding the right people to to close the Holes uh I wanted I wanted to share our experience with the community so we did have a Facebook group which was at a certain point pretty good even though we were letting in only people who purchas chase the subscription so we were like asking them for their HFS email and we were checking in our platform if they're paying customer or not and we were letting them in but then again I think one big uh failure on

Facebook's part is that they didn't give People who own those communities any control over members because if we if we could just delete people who don't have an active subscription it would help us so much to to to retain a tight KN Community with people who are more intentional about it because people might I know sign up for a $7 trial back when we had it uh get into our group then cancel their subscription and we cannot remove them from our group this this is what what happened to us as well The the group got

bloated and eventually we realized that we're not getting any traction with our posts because of just so many random people who don't interact with our posts so we had to stop it uh there's like the button called archive or something and right now we moved to that circle thing which you mentioned Circle doso or IO I don't remember we tried uh getting it off the ground for at least half a year I think we started in summer we tried this we Tried that uh it's not really taking off uh and then we went back to

the drawing board and we started thinking why do we need this community to start with as in why do we need kind of like a physical place for the community why cannot our community exist just like in in theory so to say like people who Ed the platform people yeah yeah yeah people who followed us on Twitter on LinkedIn people who follow I know me specifically or have this kind of podcast where we Can kind of in a way communicate with our audience we communicate with you but also uh communicate with our people so yeah

we're still figuring it out uh but yeah we figured it's just like not a priority for us it's not that our community would influence our churn as much as our product influences our churn so yeah but it was also an interesting challenge to uh to get the community off the ground uh cannot say we succeeded with it but uh it's still a journey Maybe we'll figure something uh down the road let's talk about agency uh speo am I pronouncing it correctly spirro mhm uh just a quick question where is the name coming from uh I

wanted a name that doesn't mean anything is easy to say and uh I think it's a derivative of um Latin word Sparrow which means hope oh okay cool I thought it it has something to do with a spear like you're throwing a spear at the Target or Something how much of your time and mind space does agency have compared to Winter and compared to cxl well I stepped out of running the agency in 2016 when I started what is today cxl the the e-learning business so I've been out of the day to-day for seven years

now and I'm I'm uh I'm a majority owner of the business and so my involvement is quarterly board meetings and then the guy who's running it Ben Le Bay like we Grab lunch like once a week you know so I don't do anything on a day today basis and haven't been doing for years that's that's quite cool how big is the agency though uh I think it's like 30 35 people something like this and uh how many clients approximately um I don't know I don't know in hundreds uh I don't I don't think so uh

speo is very up Market um so like it's typically A $20,000 a month retainer and So based on just that math alone it's it's not a mass Market um you know like a single customer is worth a lot of money per year you know here's a question that I'll probably be asking anyone who has started or used to run an agency so you just mentioned that you actually uh changed your focus from the agency to cxl to the educational part of it creating and selling courses MH uh Which is interesting I somehow thought that it

was the other way around you you worked on cxl you started selling courses and then you uh started working on the agency so that's interesting and basically the question that I'm now asking everyone with agency experience it seems that the the potential ceiling or like the the size to which you can grow an agency can be quite large and my example is Gary ve he famously owns an agency I Believe they do social media or something like that that it's called Viner media and he seems to be doing very well with that agency I wonder

like what kind of aspirations and goals you had back when you were involved in an agency and why did you decide to remove yourself why didn't you make your bet on making this agency like a huge I know hundred million doll business well I mean you always want to Be $100 million business but hoping will not equal results uh you know like your goal is like a dream uh it's very hard to grow an agency like most agencies will will will never get to 10 million in Revenue like 99% will never uh I mean probably

most will not even get to like two million um I mean they I started the agency because it was the easiest business to start uh you only need a laptop and you Need to know some stuff that's it right it's like the the the cheapest company you can start um and for us it was like we picked conversion optimization as our Niche um which in retrospect I mean it was had pluses and minuses like with as with any Niche is like well you're a big fish in a small pond so you can get dominant and

big and known in that space relatively quickly with relative ease and this is what happened like we became the top dog in our pond In a few years like it took very little time but that pond is small uh and so if you look at any um uh all these big agencies and you know like there are agencies also like you know doing you know hundreds of millions in eita you know like in profits like 200 million in profits these agencies exist and if you look at these big agencies what do they do they do

everything the only way to get big as an agency is to have a huge Tam and then You need uh to sell uh you need huge contract values with customers so you build their sites and then you build run their marketing automations obviously you run their ads you do their creatives and then you you do analytics and then the C so these all this allinone agencies are the the big agencies um if you're just a mono agency I mean like if you think about like I don't know too much about SEO agencies but if I

think about like the biggest SEO agency names that I know they're not too big you know like Siege media is like under 200 people and it's one of the big players um I mean there's been like in the during the co era there was a lot of these merges and Acquisitions of like private Equity funded brain Labs like bought up everybody and you know like these these things happened so but from what I you know word on the street is is that is not going too well I don't know Obviously um so why did I

step out was two reasons one was I had the feeling as an entrepreneur this ain't it this is not going to become a100 million company uh we were growing year over year but I you know it's like this is not it and second was I got tired of Consulting I had been before when studed the agency I had been a consultant for five years like a solo consultant and I think it comes with an expiration date like how many times can you explain the same [ __ ] All over again if you ask me what

a P value is like I will murder people I'm just done and so I burn I got burned out being a consultant obvious I would have just changed my role that I'm no longer involved but I was theame in conversion optimization customers like oh I want pep to be you know myc cons you know so it was it was hard um and so I wanted something else and I started the uh cour business because I wanted to do something else and we literally just Surveyed our email list asking hey what else would you buy if

we were to sell it to you and they said basically education I like all right let's try that and so uh at first I did like cohort based courses where the coaching programs I ran some coaching programs uh as a as a side hustle just to test it and it it went well and it sold well and then you know that was like kind of like did Genesis of it I like your Insight about uh what it What needs what an agency needs to do to grow is like to get high ticket customers and how

do you get high ticket customers you do everything everything for them so I guess essentially the challenge is uh operations basically you did like a lot of people you need a lot of people uh doing very specific things uh doing them well uh doing them fast and doing them cheap because basically uh as far as I understand agency makes money uh on the difference of like what Is the service cost you to produce versus what the client is paying you so you have to optimize all your processes to deliver those things to a client chip

and yet with with all the operations figured out if you if you can like do all the Sops all the workflows if you have all the like automations and apis you still need to get those High ticket customers somehow so there's still an element of uh customer acquisition of course if you're doing Your job well word of mouth and referrals will always kick in but if we're talking about multiple hundreds of millions of dollars I think something else should be happening and the reason why I'm bringing Gary v as an example because uh he obviously

has this massive personal brand massive a lot of people know about him he speaks at the biggest events in marketing and business so I would imagine that big Brands naturally want To work with him let's hire an agency let's hire Gary ve like he's the best let's hire and and that that is that is also why he probably can charge premium compared to any agency that is run by an unknown person no for sure I mean imagine like I don't know who his customers are but imagine it's companies with the size of like Nike or

Adidas right they're not going to be on a 5,000 a month retainer right like yeah the contract science is millions in per year So if you go up Market you can just charge way more money um obviously you need more people also to support all the things that are needed to deliver the services but it's just you will always make more money selling to bigger businesses also you can see the same stuff in like uh Tech startups any any startup that is relying on VC money will will move up Market over time because snbs High

churn low contract value big businesses low turn huge contract value Just way more money selling to bigger businesses everybody knows this so same with agencies yeah MH so with those million dooll agency contracts how important do you think is the founder brand for those agencies or if you send a bunch of salespeople with uh donuts and you just say that we have this large agency with thousands of people and we have like the some high tier clients already that's basically enough well I think a Founder brand is a Massive accelerant if you have it but

it's not necessary I mean a clear example uh is Chris Walker and refine Labs you like B2B demand gen where he he took he started his agency and it took it to like eight 18 million in Revenue in three years based on his LinkedIn posts alone like it's a power of a LinkedIn uh Power of LinkedIn and the founder brand if you have uh great original thought leadership content you know or Gary ve Is of course different level of you know he's a mainstream celebrity yeah but you don't even if you're not a mainstream celebrity

uh you can be a massive accelerant I mean even look at like non- agency businesses where where companies like Elon Musk and Tesla like visible founder moves the business forward I mean now it might be you know back firing today but you know but like who's the CEO of like Nissan or Chevrolet yeah who knows I mean not buying Chevrolet because of a visible CEO right but it it it was true for also Microsoft and Google and in apple visible founder made people buy the product more uh and like who's the CEO of Samsung like

I mean no idea um so so and that's also like it's not necessary like people still buy Samsung Samsung makes a lot lot of money nobody knows who works there um so I think if you have a Founder who is outspoken charismatic and has interesting things to say it can Really accelerate your business but it's you you don't have to yeah because it seems uh I I I've seen some very large agencies and I have no idea who's their founder I have never even heard of their like agency brand and yet they're doing multiple I

don't know dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year they employ thousands of people and they're basically doing well so yeah I guess I guess the founder brand it it probably helps a lot helps a Lot but it's still possible to do without it if you're if you're very sure operations and sales we get interest by like big agencies and private equities to you know like hey can we buy speo let's talk about like if you know where to acquire you so I have come come in contact with some huge agencies that I just

did not even know existed it's like oh you have you do like close to a billion dollars in Revenue like power digital and if you go to powerd Digital.com it's one of those you know cheesy stock photos websites you know like strategic Solutions it's like the the worst website in the world they're like you're making how much money you know yeah yeah it's crazy um winter h mhm first of all uh is it bootstrapped yes you bootstrapped it with your own money or do you have Partners I bootstrapped it from the profits of my other

two businesses Mainly cxl cxl is you know it's a historically profitable company uh and so yeah so first two years cxl paid every Bill uh until the business became um self- sustaining and I and I did uh do a small friends Angel round so like not institutional investors not like no VCS or private Equity it's like hey like Tim my friend do you want to put 5,000 in my new Venture and so I had a a bunch of people do Small Checks you know like I think minimum was 1,000 uh the largest was 50k but

on average it was like 5,000 per person you know so people who knew me friends and acquaintances put you know Angel Money MH how did you came up with the idea of that software I came up with that idea by classically solving my own pain you know at cxl we have like 100 plus courses each course has their own sales page you know and there's a bunch of sales copy and I was just writing sales Copy for one of the new courses and I'm like if the person I'm trying to sell this to reads this

do they find it interesting like do they like w oh W yes I want to sign up or are they like this is so boring like surely there's a way for me to know if they find it interesting or boring and I started to look for a tool that will tell me this and then I all all I found was other people with the same problem so that was the Genesis where I found an unsolved Problem and I had no idea how to solve it but I found a problem which is step on find an

unsolved problem uh and then also had I had become tired of e-learning by that time uh because e-learning has its own particular problems I mean High CH is one problem but there's also time to value is very long you know somebody buys a cars they take you know three months to finish something and then they Implement what they learn and then they Get a result this is like this a long [ __ ] time right uh and also it's called my personality I'm a starter like yeah and I have a failed SAS in my past

so I wanted to have another goal uh at a software business and so I jumped that opportunity I didn't know about the fail s what it was uh it was called train them uh it's like build your own course platform kind of like what thinkific or teachable or today how long did you work on it before it failed before you buried Years it was 2009 to 2011 ah okay so that was way way back then yeah it was basically uh a good idea too early in the market okay okay so uh winter basically what it

does is essentially I see it kind of like as a Marketplace which connects people who are working on some kind of copy or some kind of landing page or messaging with people who are kind of in the target market to kind kind of Target Persona correct And uh those people answer a bunch of question s review your work uh and then you can use those insights from these people to improve your messaging or kind of validate if what you're doing is correct or not so uh my question is where do you get the uh those

Target people so you did uh one of those how they called do you even resonate episodes yeah uh there was HFS uh obviously we saw it uh everyone saw it and uh I wonder who were the people who Were answering the survey mhm yeah you're absolutely right in the description it's a two-sided Marketplace behind the scenes it's not how we sell it because for a customer it's a seamless experience but behind the scenes there's a Marketplace there are two sides the demand side which is companies who pay s money and supply side which is people

with jobs essentially yeah so we are B2B focused um and and so all these people are they Have job titles that some B2B companies want to sell to you know they could be VP marketing at ah refs you know um so how do we get these people is is twofold uh we uh do uh targeted newsletter advertising so let's say we want more directors of procurement so okay so what are all these procurement newsletters out there we identify procurement newsletters and then we advertise inside newsletters so it's very targeted very Niche uh so That's that's

a great Avenue for us uh and second is massive cold outbound which is also very targeted so so we build uh you know uh basically tools like uh you know your your Zoom info atollo and all cognism for uh list building targeted list building and then you have mass massive cold email machine that can send you know a million emails a month uh to these people and the cold email of course Effectiveness is very low uh but so hence you you need to do Big volume and and the pitch is also very compe it's very

high converting pitch because the pitch is we want to give you money you know like we're not selling anything it's like hey Tim how would you like to make another you know 500 bucks a month to fund your hobbies you know your weed habit maybe or not in Singapore that much but so that was my uh next question to you like how do you get these people Interested uh so for example if someone is a an experienced SEO professional who we would potentially want to review uh our positioning of whatever product uh are they that

interested in money because what's interesting is that when I try to search in YouTube for winter review uh because like I didn't have time to sign up and like run experiments I just wanted to see other people using it and uh first of all there's quite an opportunity for you uh I think I might Not be the only one searching for reviews of your software on YouTube kind of to see people using it maybe they would use different keywords like winter walkth through or like winter features or something like that but what I saw is

a bunch of people uh kind of like something like survey master.com or something so there's there's a group of people who make money online by uh filling in different surveys and the guy was focusing on the fact that you pay Something like $10 to $200 per survey and he was just focusing on the fact that it's a nice way as you say to fund some Hobbies or something but nothing about kind of the professional side I think he was also a little bit uh unhappy about the fact that you had to enter your LinkedIn profile

because you guys like who are signing up and you don't just want like random survey professional survey fillers or something so he was UN happppy about that uh but Yes like my my my first idea when you said how do you make those people interested and you said we we we tell them we want to give you money I was thinking that it might not be a compelling enough reason for me but if you would say something you get to see some new products kind of before they enter the market and how those those companies

pach products as a marketer it would be interesting to me or like whatever whatever Niche like Procurement maybe people who are in procurement they are interested to see what other companies are doing on that front so maybe some kind of I don't know competitive intelligence thing could be a reasoning for them but you didn't right like they mainly do this because they curious it's interesting it's fun but they wouldn't do it for free that's like yeah yeah like people have other things they can do with their time it they do it because they like it

but Money also needs to be there and you're absolutely right they higher up in the hierarchy of the company they are the less money matters if you're you know second year in your job man you want the money you want the 50 bucks but if you're CMO you don't you're already rich you don't care about the money or not as much then you want other stuff you so absolutely right and the other thing you said that that that survey D this is a Big this is one of those adventures in business you never know what

problem you run into this is an interesting problem that we are dealing with so yes there's an there's an army of people on the internet that are making money by you know like make money online without make make money from without leaving your home industry and everybody wants to dream right like just do make money without doing anything and it's especially popular in development Countries you know like you're Pakistan and Bolivia and Somalia and and and so on and so forth so and there are these Instagram and Tik Tok and other influencers who are influencers

for these this audience who are and a lot of these influencers just can make money pitch and they say which says that you can make sort of money these these type of people hitting our webs every single month like if I would show you my my traffic for winter.com it was like a Three-year-old startup you're 300,000 a month traffic every month like yeah we're killing it is all this Serv is all this make money doing nothing people and so we are fighting an active war against them how of course they they will never get proved

on our platform because you know we validate everybody but it creates a workload that we have to deal with it's it at attention and resource drain for us you know like my my verification team so Really like also we have now outright banned most of the world like based on IP which're just discriminating against most of the world where you know like you try to Central African Republic tries to go to winter.com we block you based on your IP just because we could not deal with the amount of spam yeah and and and so the

internet is full of all these videos and we have you now thousands and thousands of backlinks to winter.com from all these make money Online websites you know that's that's one link building strategy that's right yeah uh how big is your panel as of today it's uh like 50,000 verified people today 50,000 verified people and it's it's mainly US Canada and um you know some some UK Europe too we haven't really ventured out of these CU cont to everything got a prioritize and 95% of our customers are us companies maybe 5% UK um and so we

cater to these markets Uh today and yeah we started out as a point solution for message testing like you said but today we've evoled to much more uh than message testing now actually the primary use case is uh ICP research I'm trying to sell to a certain group of people you know like my target maybe it's VPD Manion at SAS company 500 plus employees something like this and so they are doing uh like demand research essentially like what are the top pain points of my Target customers And like how to do solve this paint today

and where how do you what triggers you to go look for Solutions and where do you go to look for Solutions which channels you use besides the obvious schools and Linkedin things like that so companies build their go to market strategies on top of these insights so that's the the leading use case today I mean yes you can do message testing too plus user testing plus you know preference testing like this headline Versus that headline you can do all kinds of things but it's a two-sided Marketplace so we can facilitate any type of exchange also

we're doing sales demos now like hey who's your ICP we arrange a sales meeting basically so out of those 50,000 uh verified people do you have any kind of metric like active people who I don't know participate in your like participated in a survey in the well I I guess this cannot be it because maybe For some people you don't have surveys like for half a year so you don't even know they're active or not so I wonder like if you track if those people are even still there kind of that's true like uh this

participant churn is is a is a is a thing like uh and and some of some of it is like we spend money and effort to recruit the person and then you know because we have a customer requesting them and then you know maybe they participate in two surveys or Whatever and interviews and then nobody else requests them for many many months they kind of forget about us they move on with life and so this is a this is a problem you know like uh the marketplace business model is a has its own complexities it's

it's it's not an easy business model however all the easy businesses are already done you know only hard on left so it is what it is you also have this option of uh companies bringing their own panel mhm Does this mean that uh those people have to register in your software and you have to validate them through your regular process and then you'll be reaching out to them onwards or does it mean as a company I can bring my own panel but they would be exclusive to me and you won't have any other line of

communication with them apart from the things I do with them uh yeah so you invite them they exclusive to you after they fill out Your survey or whatever we give them an offer like hey would you like to do this more often and join so it's an op in offer if they don't op in they will never hear from us again okay that's that's a very cool solution that makes sense uh I wonder maybe it's a bit tricky question uh but it seems that if you have your own panel you can pull them and get

their opinions on stuff kind of with a Google form yeah I Understand that like if you if you want to send them to a landing page uh you have the UI that helps them see the landing page and answer questions about it but at the same time you could chop that landing page into screenshots and it still would kind of do the job so I wonder so I wonder how you pitch your software for those kinds of use cases for for example for someone like us because I would say uh pep we'll just like send

them a survey with a bunch of Screenshots with our messaging and that would be it what can you offer on top of it it's it's for free if you bring your own panel you pay nothing so that's that's it so it saves you the hassle of building your own system so because it's free okay and really we make money by giving access to our premium audiences so yeah nobody needs winter to do customer research with your own customers that's not what we're for yeah okay if you want To know what the the market out there

who's not using you right now and they might be using your competitor or something like what do they think that's what you use winter for that's how we make make money I didn't know that so I've known about winter I knew like what you kind of do generally but I didn't know that I can just use your software for free for our own panel that could make some things easier For us it's not that we do a lot of polling of our audience but at least I would keep that in mind and maybe consider for

some things I don't know yeah well do do you promote this enough do you promote this fact enough that people can just use you for free for their own audience we used to but you know like any anything anything that is a free offer uh you there's a there's a certain law of Numbers that needs to uh work for it to be useful so we thought it's going to be one of those things that you know people use winter and then you know we get a lot of free users that that dream never happened um

so that was one and second was that people underestimate how hard it is to recruit a panel so all these people who launch their own you know free message test and then sent the link to their email list and like hey please participate 95% plus never get it Get a full panel uh and uh and well you know if you use the paid panels it's like 24 hours boom we we guarantee like delivery full delivery and so Al so the first experience was they come and they actually never get full results so it was a

bad first experience for 95% uh and so we demoted it's still there the functionality but we we basically gave up on it it didn't serve our business interest but since we built The functionality still there but it's now we are no longer communicating it you know we have demoted it in the app the functionality because we know it's it's not doing what we hoped it would do for us uh this shows how easy it is to look Smart in oneway communication so if I were writing a post about you I would say oh they have

this free offering blah blah blah it's a nice way blah BL BL but you actually been there you try that and You know that this is not something that works so I mean there are a lot of businesses uh you know that dry a free the freemum thing like freemium is like a hot thing right but like if you look at keep keep formally infusion soft marketing automation for small businesses uh the founder told me that he invested like $2 million building the premium feature set and the upgrade from free to paid that dream just

never happened and they just gave up on it After many years and losing millions of dollars uh that now they don't have a free plan anymore so it's not just as like hey we'll add a free plan and now you know they will convert to paid and we'll we'll be rich you know it's actually very hard you need huge amount of numers yeah I also like your point that it's it's the bad first experience for them because it's not that easy to get your own panel to do those things it's actually very Interesting because again

on the surface it seems yeah okay like uh I I will sign up for free even if I don't end up bringing my panel uh you might uh I don't know nurture me with more messages and they already have an account so if I need something I can just go but yeah the fact that that you might have this bad experience and decide oh just doesn't work not for me and not come back so it's it's actually make makes more sense for you to have people use Your panel for their first experience because because the

speed of delivery of responses it's a wow factor yeah yeah we know it's going to be a wow experience also the response quality they're like wow like I thought doing customer research any research takes long time but but wow like it's really like set it up to today tomorrow it's done that that panel of yours uh is an interesting is asset it's yeah like you can essentially Do so many different things with it as long as you have quality people there and as as as long as those people are involved and responsive and correct me

if I'm wrong but I think that companies like Survey Monkey they have some something like that because I think you can do kind of surveys to some Target markets using their panels or something like that like what other companies have panels like that for example if you wanted to run research I don't know what What people in Texas usually buy their kids for Christmas what kind of toys well consumer research is extremely saturated commoditized to death everybody has it thousands of providers extremely cheap 50 cents per response you know like yeah so servy monkey all

these other ones it's EX in B2B now you come to nothing you either come to nothing or you go to a traditional market research agency that takes four months and you know $150,000 to do what we do in 24 hours uh or it's outright scam uh because in the beginning when we started we didn't want to uh build a a Marketplace business I wanted to just solve the problem so what I thought is I'm going to go to panel companies and through their API recruit participants and you know and then you know add my mark

up there and so they're all this panel companies with apis and they're very famous very big um and so we had a customer who wanted B2B SAS CMOS from certain size companies and so we ran multiple experiments with different vendors they said yes we can deliver B2B CMOS no problem and these people uh oh and also they said but no multiple Cho no open-ended questions only multiple choice I'm like where's the inside like no no we need we need them to type in free free format and so they fought very hard and like that's OD

why would you fight fight us on this and then they Allowed us like two questions or so in in the end and the the company the website was AI for organic traffic and then these B2B s CMOS were looking at it and they were like so what does organic food have to do with traffic on the streets meaning they did not know what the concept of organic traffic was uh these were not CMOS these were like Indian teenagers these were Egyptian you know like Housewives these were like stay-at-home Moms uh pretending to be B2B SAS

C CMOS because how how how it works on these panel companies they have consumer panels first and then they do a survey on top say Hey by the away if you know for another 50 cents fill out like what do you do for the living and then they can write whatever and and there you know so it's it's a fraud it's a scam and then now I've learned like everybody knows this uh that scam and fraud in this indust is rampant anybody who's a Professional Market researchers and has to do service with B2B audiences they

know what a scam it is so so then I learned okay hey we have to do our own audiences because we cannot use anybody else and uh and also now I realized that it's a mo it's it's the biggest asset because if you look at the functionality the softer side of winter of we have service I mean it's nothing special about being able to ask questions everybody has surveys so the Moe the the magic sauce is in the audience yeah it's it's definitely an incredible asset and uh the entire business model definitely makes it hard

for you to uh to grow it because you need to basically Market on both sides you need to attract people who would join your panel and you need to educate businesses on all those intricacies that I for example didn't know so takes quite a lot of Work yep and it's it's a hard it's a hard uh model but you know the easy ones have already been done so anything that is hard to do I I also kind of like because it's hard for competitors too it's hard for everybody do you see any uh legit copycats

sprawling now that you're getting more and more traction with winter not not the scammy types we already discussed types who want to make It easy actually no so I'm surprised like I thought I'm going to get two years of free reign and then they will come now it's end of year three for us it's a you know um so three years and today still no uh there are some that are very focused on a specific title you know so there's there's one company that does only Chief information security officers like a very Focused I mean

there's a lot of money in cyber security marketing so uh or there are alternative uh there's a platform called respondent where it's like uh you go and post a job like hey I'm looking for people who look like this and this and this I'm ready to pay this much money you know if you qualify and um but then it's like uh you have to look at submissions and who's qualifies I need to figure out how much to pay them incentivize them and so we do we handle All of that behind the scenes so they have

a different different delivery model it takes way longer you know like it to fill your surveys or interviews takes you know a week or two whereas we do it in a day and you know so it's a different different business model there uh they just uh provide participants we also provide the use case have you thought about Venture funding because you have uh a proven business model and you have This unique incredible asset and it seems that this asset basically just requires pumping money to grow because as you said you're advertising in newsletters and I'm

sure if you pump pump more money in advertising and educating people uh on like why they might be joining even besides making some quick bug here and there you can grow your panel and then as you already mentioned uh it's not only about surveys about landing pages but you can use and Again if the panel has skilled professionals kind of top tier uh employees and and top tier people from different companies uh the access to it should also cost uh significant amount of money so I would imagine V's would be interested to to kind of

take a gamble on this kind of thing so couple of things here so first when I started it I tried to raise money and uh you know I've been around the block a couple of times so getting those Meetings with VCS you know was not too hard like in fact I did more than 50 pitch but I was unsuccessful in the end to at raising money and the the key reason was that they thought the Tam is too small they thought it's too Niche for VC math to work you need to become a billion plus

every company needs to have the potential to be a billion plus company and they're like message testing is a point solution like how often do you do That and like I mean you know like so they didn't they didn't see it and in in r retrospect also they they were right because what I have also learned was message testing really like average company changes their website messaging once a year average company change redes their whole website like every three years or so these are averages and so these these two things are also when they use

winter we're redoing a messaging they come they do a Sprint you Know like they do five six test surveys or interviews all kind of stuff and then they do nothing uh for a year or if they redo the website same idea so it's kind of like a Project based usage it's not like they they they users every single week you know uh and so also AR with this Insight True Market Insight I learned it the hard way uh I I realized that the winter we are severely limiting our growth potential by remaining a point solution

so now if you go to Winter.com and we call ourselves now target market insights platform and there are lot more use cases there as I said surveys and interviews and all kinds of stuff now I think the Tam is big enough that I could raise money if I wanted to but now I mean I'm bootstrapped I'm growing we're growing 100% this year I can do it without the VC money and so it's it's like the math question now in my head where like I also love uh being My own boss I don't want anybody breathing

down my neck and not that you know you only give away 15% or so per investment round I would still retain a majority but you know I don't know so I'm I'm right now my plan is that I'm going to bootstrap to 10 million in Revenue which I hope to be there at like in like two years or maybe three um and then you know I'm in a much better power position uh for the in terms of like how much money I can um ask for how little And then also growth equity and private Equity

are only interested starting from like around 10 million in Revenue Mark so way more funding options become available and it's very it's very common way also for for Founders to get get rich is is this way where you boost up to 10 million and then you share sell off you know 30% or so uh for you know tens of millions of dollars and then you're made and you still retain a good chunk of your Company uh I think it's the most achievable way to wealth for for most entrepreneurs as opposed to be always you know

relying on the on the VC money and by the time you raise five rounds you've diluted down to 1% you know good plan uh what can I say uh let's talk about uh message testing mhm you mentioned that most companies do it uh very seldom I think we changed uh our own homepage design uh once in five years but we do smaller edits more Frequently but again not too frequently but MH we have uh recently released an interesting tool in HFS that is called uh page Explorer it's kind of uh archive.org where we save snapshots

of a page as we craw it and we can also see when there were some edits on a page we're we're going to develop this tool more because it is pretty interesting to to check what changed in the page and kind of on average I calculated that on your Homepage winter.com there's at least five changes per month some months were like 10 to 12 changes uh some months were without changes but almost every month there would be at least five changes here and there like a sentence here a sentence there some sometimes a block would

appear someone you you would change them and they counted uh just from July I counted one two three four five different headlines of your homepage so Right now it is target market insights platform for B2B SAU marketers and uh quick episode of do you even resonate from team solo uh for me that's quite an ambiguous thing so I don't understand what target market insights platform for B2B Sal Market is just too too convoluted wrapping up do you even resonate uh so another title was learn what your Target customers think about you that is much more

clear to me personally again this is this was a Subjective episode of uh what you even resonate and then was an interesting one get up to 73% more demos and signups through better messaging like very specific with a number with a promise um so and yeah you you seem to be changing not just heading but there is sub heading I saw kind of I don't know how to call it preading like a piece of text that goes before heading uh you tested like different description you tested different baling you tested Different bullet points like all

the time stuff is happening and I don't believe that you're tracking any conversions from like what happens when you change this messaging uh well uh what I do is I do message testing which is a form of qualitative research which is because somebody converting uh is is is a lag metric and but what what gets somebody to convert like the leading indicators so you can Predict conversion by relying on leading indicators like Clarity do do they get it relevance do they understand it's for them or do they think it's for them uh then you know

differentiation why this not versus the other thing uh or and then mainly the value do I want the value that they are promising to me you know uh and so if those things are let's say on a scale of 1 to five closer to five the likelihood to sign up will go up so I'm optimizing eating you know Drinking my own champagne running message test and getting like yes I get it I want it and all that stuff like so that's part of the testing the other part of the testing is I am changing my

own positioning you know like so the things that I was telling you I started as a points solution for message testing so that 73% headline was my the best one I came up with being a point solution sometime this September I realized okay we we we're going to need To become a platform over a point solution and I'm looking for ways how to I'm trying on different ways how to say it and what we're doing is also it's a kind of a category creation because what you can do with winter is not it's not a

common thing like we are the only one in the in in that available for this so this uh target market insights platform yeah it's not a thing yet but it could be a thing you know uh so I'm trying it on and then I'm seeing how this Resonates and affects my demo line uh pipeline so what I'm tracking mostly is how many demos I'm getting per week uh and then using this very language in demos testing it trying it on in sales conversations like does it resonate does it immediately you know is positioning like do

they kind of understand what to use it for or maybe it's like as you said it's so vague I don't get anything so then I would change it and try something Else so how is the target market insights platform for B2B SAU marketers is performing so far what do people say about it yeah um I think what is interesting is uh uh this headline goes up Market whereas uh the director level people who who's been my bread and butter they're they're less interested because they're more tactical like the message testing stuff worked really well with

them but these people who are creating Responsible for owning the goto Market strategy these people now care a lot more I mean I know now all the things that I need to do to make it even more uh make it better not just the line but like the rest of the pitch so a new version of the winter website is coming I think end of this week it's out um because yeah as me becoming a platform also my ICP is actually changing because somebody else cares more about the new value prop which is like get

insights From your target market all these large my average customers are like 100 million year company and those companies have teams who can execute really well what they're lacking is insights on what to do what should we do to to begin with um yeah work in progress and and yet how is it performing because in your software you have those scores how people uh rate something that is performing it is yeah so I mean we we bucket it in the like the um negative Mediocre good bucket so this is all in the good bucket uh

so so far I'm happy but but there are certain things where I know where the CL already suffers so I know what I need to do to improve it even even more so getting uh all great scores is not the goal with messaging it is cu that predicts yeah uh I mean sometimes uh sometimes like a mediocre score is okay if you're doing something new so for Instance you're you if you have a category creation play like you don't get what if target market insights but it's it's okay because I'm going to stay on message

for the next three years and in over time we will mean something like gong and revenue intelligence when they first rolled out Revenue intelligence people like what the [ __ ] is that well jargon now oh yeah we need a revenue intelligence tool what are we using for Revenue it's a common lingo now in B2B SAS companies everybody's doing Revenue intelligence it's a whole category like tens of tools doing this now so it's the same idea like some things like I'm okay that they don't get it today I'm I'm playing the long game here so

even if the score is not great I know it's not great and it's fine you know like I'm strategic about it because I could always go Pander to the masses and aim for like short-term gains you know so got to use your own judgment as Well this is exactly where I'm going because I don't see how your current uh headline would get better scores than your previous ones because they are much more I don't know eloquent straight straightforward catchy this one is kind of yeah it's more like a market enterpris ambiguous and yeah I I

get you you would probably change the panel of people who you ask about it you you cannot just ask the same people because you're targeting different people with Those things but still I think that headline is kind of more complicated and what you're saying makes sense because there's there are times where you want to be completely clear and uh you want everyone get it you want everyone to like it and there are times when you want to impose something on people mhm yeah it might not be as clear you might not like it but it

is what it is you'll have to figure it out if you want to use us in a way yeah that's right and then There is a better way to convey um what I want to convey there's a better uh headline out there and you know we'll get to it my point of view personal point of view is this that if you have a like a creative way to State a headline uh that like makes people curious or like oh tell me more yeah go for it but in the absence of a compelling creative headline you

need to just state what it is and and you aim you know basically Aim for clarity and yes in in my case the description of target market insights platform you know there's there's years of education now ahead of like what that is and why would you want that uh so I'm going to have to try on different different ways how what is the easiest way to explain the idea and so more iteration ahead I struggle to to find uh the right way to ask this question but it's it's Something along the lines of isn't five

changes of your homepage per month five to 10 changes a bit excessive it's it's almost like kind of like in that phrase you don't walk into the same river twice like every time you visit a winter homepage they they they promise they tell you something different they position themselves kind of different I mean these are not big changes you know uh sometimes it's also like I'm Trying I mean I'm also in sales calls right and then um in a in a call just I say something and I'm oh that flows much better and so I

go and just change it on the website too I mean it takes me a minute to change this one line um and and you I'm not like measuring every change I make and sometimes it might be just I'm changing a sentence or a subhead uh but I think it just flows better and then I'm also using it to Just try it on because like whatever is my website messaging I'm now also using it in in conversations just to try it on it kind of feels that the the goal of this exercise to uh to invite

people to review your homepage and give you feedback is to actually figure out something that would work for you for an extended period of time that you wouldn't come get to it you you wouldn't uh you wouldn't come back to it uh soon and won't waste time and just like keep It working for a while but if you keep changing it like like I said you changed your homepage five times uh since summer it kind of means that whenever you were doing this research and getting uh qualitative feedback from customers and you made a decision

which seemed like a good decision then uh a mon month later it no longer seemed like a good decision so does it mean that previous research was ineffective wasted no because the question changed or uh the strategy Changed so it's certain me for that period of time and we were a message setting tool from 21 to September 23 you know like messy shifting tool and that 73% headline we use it for a long as well uh but since then in September basically it was a strategic decision that we are going to change our positioning there's

also a new website coming you know and uh but like I'm Iterating towards it basically um so my business strategy has changed essentially which which means that we need to communicate differently to the market I not sure if you know this story but uh whenever we needed to redesign our homepage last time I actually hired three different copyrighting agencies have you heard that story I have I had a block post or something yeah yeah I had a video about it we had a blog post I think and and they told it a few times But

the the gist of it is uh I hired three different copyrighting agencies to work independently uh they all followed kind of the the same steps they interviewed our customers they interviewed me they they scoured Reddit review websites uh and in the end each of them came up with drastically different copy for our homepage it was kind of very subjective to to their preferences and their core competence like if one agency Was more into I don't know creative approaches like for example at at winter.com on the homepage you have the kind of live demo where you

can click around things right it's embedded into the homepage so they were offering something along those lines with some other like creative things another uh agency was more uh experienced in long form landing pages long form sales pages so this is what they offered us to just pump a lot of information to address all The potential customer concerns and such and another agency was more on the conservative side so they just like did some incremental improvements here and there without any drastic changes but in the end we had in our hands three super different uh

Pages even though everyone seemed to follow the the exact same blueprint on how to find your messaging how to find your positioning yada yada yada so that being said how scientific is the Process of uh f finding your messaging now the opposite of a good strategy is also a good strategy it's very important there there can be radically different ways and they achieve the same outcome uh so there's a lot of art involved in your personal preference and your your you know whatever whatever so the key thing is does the target audience find it clear

relevant compelling and differentiated and how You say those things there are thousands of variations that are possible so as long as they find a clear compelling relevant differentiated it's fine you know and then it's the style is a matter of personal preference brand you know how you want to come across and all these things when you did your uh episode of do you even resonate uh I first of all I wonder did you ever think that we will be discussing that with you on a podcast And I would be able to kind of what's the

word uh rebut like rather defend myself or like share some other interesting stories but I think it is fun so basically when you did this episode uh the homepage was basically the one that we made with those agencies and eventually we just uh took some bits and pieces and frankensteined the page out of what we liked and the headline was one suggested by one of the agencies that I quite Enjoyed you don't have to be an SEO Pro to rank higher and get more traffic and the thing is what was what was interesting because I

was just rewatching this episode today uh knowing that uh I'll I'll have this call with you and what's interesting is that you were comparing uh or like rather people were comparing uh our homepage versus SC rush and whenever they were writing their feedback in like some kind of open form uh question where they had to type Uh their Impressions and such what I've noticed and they think you didn't point it out in the video is that a lot of people who read our homepage were pointing it out I like the the fact that you don't

have to be an SEO Pro that's stuck with me you don't have to be SEO Pro it's very reassuring so quite a few of these people who submitted feedback they remembered it so basically the the name of the of your series do you even resonate that did resonate with them While where they when they were commenting on Russia's homepage they didn't say anything specific so they said oh kind of the the overall design seems more professional or kind of the layout seems more kind of straightforward so they didn't say anything specific they didn't say anything

that they remembered and that actually stood out for me so while while I I agree with quite a few things you pointed out they made sense we actually Uh changed them since so thank you for uh free uh feedback SLC consultation but I also think it is you don't necessarily have to be kind of uh you cannot appeal to everyone I I I I almost think that being memorable and appealing to to everyone or like even appealing to the majority cannot cannot work at the same time it's either one or the other yeah yeah yeah

yeah because you also want To uh so there's this concept of cognitive fluency like if I just get everything you know just it's very you know easy to understand normally you would want cognitive fluency however it's even better if you on purpose inject a little bit of cognitive disfluency which is like they pause and then they pay more attention so this is when you on purpose say something in a complicated way because it makes people Ponder and pause and pay more attention Um so up with and that's that's that's pieces art because it's it's it's

hard to there's no scientific formula to get to that and often I also like to um you know when it comes to like heads headlines or subheads or whatever this idea that I don't want you to get it I want you to ask how do you do that you know so again it creates more curiosity um leads to more questions in their mind another somewhat somewhat Counterintuitive thing that we kept thinking of when we were uh polishing the positioning of our own homepage so there's there's this conventional advice that you need to talk to a

lot of your users you need to identify what they love you love you for and you need to put it front and center on your homepage but with HFS here's the thing we started as uh a link research tool so we have a great uh Database of backlinks uh some people say that we are the industry gold standard for backlink data and when you talk to our customers a lot of people are mentioned this but at the same time in in the past at least eight years that I've been with the company we've developed the

product so much and we've expanded to so many extremely useful use cases and features that it would be almost doing people at this service to just put our Backlink data front and center in our kind of USP mhm it's almost as like if people in the market already know you for something what's the point of featuring it on your home page where you should probably start featuring something that you're not as well known because you want to push it and you want to expand what the market thinks about youh for sure I mean I think

you want both you want familiarity and you want novelty at the same time yeah and that's Classic product marketing yeah especially if you want to change the markets idea about you you want to focus on the new thing like a a classic example that comes to mind is not websites but it's it's an advertising is like Toyota Prius had a reputation that it's a slow car yeah and now they their uh ad campaign for the new latest preuse model is preuse it's fast now uh and the word emphasis on now they Acknowledge yes we were

slow but it's now it's fast so they were leading with the new idea while also acknowledging the past you know it's same thinking like novelty and familiarity so given that there's quite a bit of nuance in uh developing your positioning and messaging MH do you have a course about it well of course it's a B2B messaging course on Winter's website on Winter's website uh is it like something you upsell is it something That comes for free to every customer what's the deal it's free on the website yeah amazing amazing that's that's very cool uh and

this Segways nice us nicely uh into how do you do marketing for winter uh we don't have much time left but I think we can dig into like the most effective things and I think it's your quote you said uh the strategy let's just have the better product and win is no longer viable did you say something like this Uh I guess you're referring to to the importance of marketing say that quote again the strategy of let's just have the better product and win those in quotes is no longer viable oh I see yes uh

basically the idea that let's just focus on product and it will take care of the it itself uh I mean it used to be true the better product one but today in every category uh there's basically no functional difference between Competitors like everybody can do everything and it's it's it's hard to have an obviously better product like sem rushian ah refs like is is one obviously better like is one two times better no I mean it's it's it's so much overlap so hence you cannot win on functionality you need to win on other things like

messaging marketing brand all these things um how does how how do we do marketing so there's a lot of founder Le marketing so me being Active on social uh is a lot of it uh we do um self referred attribution or whatever you call it uh when they sign up we ask how do you hear about us and it's an open-ended field and I want to say 50% of signups we still get is is is uh me and they follow me on LinkedIn um um so that's that's a lot of it the second thing that

we do is we do you know basically webinars uh we we don't call them webinars workshops or you know Virtual events but essentially it's webinars twice a month uh and this is top of the funnel marketing where we talk about topics you know that interest our audience and we drive depending on the topic 500 to 1200 people uh per event to sign up uh and that's how we build our email list because uh our SEO you know is insignificant let's say uh to to be a viable uh Source but to build our email list we

use events and then Weekly Newsletter also drives a lot of business so it's kind of like just kind of a feedback loop and my best content from LinkedIn goes into the newsletter content uh and my best Twitter content goes on LinkedIn so I'm testing content on Twitter multiple times a day the best performing goes on LinkedIn and you know so that's most of it and of course we do some retargeting and you know like this kind of stuff but also uh mainly it's this main it's content on social or Emails then I guess the last

question would be about events because you are doing the uh spring which is inperson conference you're doing Winter Games is an online event uh you do webinars which is also a sort of event and I guess my question is uh like events on their own are not a marketing kind of Channel because you need to Market events to bring people to events so it's it's almost like an intermediary so you're you're not Promoting your product directly you're promoting some event people come to the event and then they learn about the product so I wonder what

what was working well for you on that regard why are you choosing to do those like in-person events or online events what what are you finding most effective or like how do you promote them to get fresh people to a funnel mhm I think where events uh come in is uh actual Relationship ship and perceptions now as a startup selling to big businesses you uh you have the perception problem of you're you know you're a small company uh and maybe people don't take it seriously but if you organize your own conferences you you appearing much

bigger than you are and so you look more serious more important people take you more seriously and then the people who Who come there you have quality face Toof face time with them and in B2B where it's long sales cycle and and word of mouth is goes a long way uh that's a strategy there where I build an actual human relationship and and uh and uh and they either buy me later or they become a source of Word of Mouth for me and word of mouth is I want to say half of our business uh

um and so I want people to know us know about us what do you what do you use us for and and like us And so events is a great way to achieve that b this has been great uh I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation thank you thank you Tim