Thinkific has risen to become the top searched course platform since their CEO Greg Smith last appeared on the show and today he joins us again to share some amazing updates. Our conversation with Greg covers the story of Thinkific’s evolution, and the company’s best practices for marketing, hiring, subscriptions, and corporate culture. We dive right in hearing Greg’s story about his college how-to blog for passing the LSAT that he morphed into an online course with the help of his software developer brother. Next up, Greg gives us a bunch of metrics about the company’s gross revenue currently, how much the average course creator would pay and earn using Thinkific, and which types of courses tend to scale. He also touches on some of the company’s strategies around getting course creators prepared to put their best foot forward and create packageable content that adds meaning to consumers for growing their own businesses. Our interview then moves onto the topic of hiring and staff, and we hear Greg’s thoughts on delegation, headhunting, keeping vision aligned, and how to involve late cofounders from an ownership perspective. Thinkific stands as a great example of a company that scaled fast through a great team and business model so make sure you don’t miss this one.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
[00:21] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast!
[00:26] Opening comments on Greg’s company Thinkific, the top searched course platform.
[01:16] How Greg’s LSAT college blog morphed into his first online course.
[02:56] Metrics on Greg’s course: its price, continuing amazing monthly sales, etc.
[03:36] How people are finding Greg’s course: YouTube and Google SEO converts.
[04:39] The way thatThinkific makes money from a freemium option upwards.
[05:27] Further metrics on Thinkific: 110 plus staff and 14 million ROI plus.
[06:42] What course creators make on Thinkific: from 5000 to tens of millions of dollars.
[08:00] Percentages of people who run courses on Thinkific that continue to scale.
[08:42] Three milestones for a course creator that bode well for future success.
[09:26] How the infrastructure trains course creators to make and market courses.
[11:40] What qualifies as a valid reason to run a course.
[12:50] Contributors to Greg’s success: a good team, paid ads, and refining focus.
[14:14] What Thinkific is doing to manifest its corporate culture: investing in people.
[17:43] How online course searches and Thinkific’s business focus bodes for their future.
[21:40] What people who run cheap courses on Thinkific do to market on low budgets.
[23:00] Greg’s biggest challenges in the last three years: knowing what to delegate.
[23:50] Why Greg only focuses on team building and strategy now.
[24:15] How well people that Greg hires do in tasks he thought he was good at.
[25:10] Going beyond workplace gimmicks to build a corporate culture.
[25:48] Whether a total hands-off leadership approach is really the best one.
[26:50] Greg’s approach to keeping staff on track by helping them articulate the mission.
[27:37] Employees who ended up merging into cofounder positions at Thinkific.
[28:35] Strategies for adding cofounders and equity along the way.
[29:30] Specifics of arrangements for how much equity to give cofounders.
[31:27] Greg’s must read books, favorite business tool, and companies he follows.
In a world that seems almost fully-focussed on online and digital marketing, it may come as a surprise to some that physical means are still used to grow companies and for them to become known. PostcardMania is a very successful company in this line of work, using direct mail marketing to help their clients get the word out on their offers. They are a really great example of how older techniques and styles of marketing can still work in a contemporary context. The company was founded 21 years ago by Joy Gendusa, who we are so happy to welcome to the show today. They mostly serve small businesses and are up to about 60 million in revenue this year! Their pricing model is competitive but not comparatively cheap, and Joy explains how she pegs this. We talk about the history of the company and the organic growth that Joy has experienced over the last decades. She opens up about her target audience and the ways that have provided her with the biggest opportunities to scale and grow her team. Joy credits a lot of her success to her team, believing she leads a group of superheroes! We discuss their company culture, important practices and some of the perks and facilities at the office. So for all of this great stuff and to learn about a slightly different model for marketing, be sure to listen in!
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
[00:31] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast!
[01:05] Joy’s journey with PostcardMania and her learning curve with marketing.
[03:11] The client-base for the company and the services they offer to them.
[04:52] Some of the important numbers from PostcardMania and how much mail they send.
[06:36] The fee-structure at PostcardMania and the ways in which they make money.
[07:46] The areas in which the company experiences the most growth and best results.
[09:39] Struggles over the years; leading the ship through rough waters.
[12:28] Joy’s thoughts on CEOs’ groups, a bad experience she had and her love for her team.
[14:48] Growing and evolving with the company; Joy’s philosophy towards progress.
[51:52] PostcardMania’s company culture and the unique perks that Joy offers her employees.
[16:42] Monday meetings and the agenda for these weekly events at the company.
[18:06] Entrepreneurship and marriage; the benefits of a personal partnership with overlap.
[19:40] Joy’s growth practices; books, conversations, and pivoting.
[20:42] A selection of a favorite business book and tool of Joy’s.
[21:23] Why Joy is not really following any particular companies or founders currently.
Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Matthew Woodward, SEO expert and owner of a successful SEO blog.
Tune in to hear Matthew analyze Google’s algorithm, how his blog gets 60,000 visits a month and how he was able to more than double his click-through rate using his Google search ranking strategy.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate review and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast!
[01:35] Have a pen and paper handy for this episode!
[01:51] Right now, Matthew is most well-known for his SEO blog.
[02:05] He has been building websites since he was 12.
[03:15] On one of his blogs, he published an income report every month.
[03:40] For anyone looking to grow a business from the ground up, that blog is a great resource.
[05:45] People digest income reports, but don’t always think of the work that went into creating the income.
[07:40] Matthew’s net worth is such that he no longer has financial concerns.
[08:09] He has an annual income of seven figures.
[08:40] SEO is now about a convergence of skills.
[10:35] If you are building out a site, you must take pride in your creation.
[12:15] As of 2017, he was getting about 60,000 visits per month.
[15:00] Matthew runs experiments to track results, as should everyone.
[16:08] By removing the featured snippet, one person was able to increase his click-through rate.
[16:25] Read Google’s guidelines and make sure you are following the rules. As long as you use it safely, it will contribute to the user experience.
[16:56] Matthew himself has seen his click-through rate go from 3% to 8%.
[17:46] Matthew thinks people who identify as either black or white hat SEO, you are an idiot.
[18:40] Link building is against Google’s guidelines, so anything in the realm is technically black hat.
[20:15] Right now, the guidelines are easy to abuse.
[21:34] Everyone cries about getting penalized, but everyone is also abusing the system.
[22:00] Google is currently winning the voice-assistant game.
[23:17] Matthew encourages people to do out-of-the-box experiments.
[24:10] One new tool that Matthew likes is Surfer SEO.
[25:35] Matthew recommends the book Think and Grow Rich.
[26:28] Matthew likes to absorb information from as many sources as he can.
[27:40] Not every niche and website is the same, so what may work for one, may not work for another. There is no “typical” in SEO.
Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Bill Widmer, an SEO expert and a serial entrepreneur.
Tune in to hear how Bill has turned his casual blog for family and friends into a 6-figure blog site, how his site is able to get 300,000 visits a month and what current SEO trends are working.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:20] Bill considers himself lucky in that his business partner is also his life partner.
[01:35] Bill’s first job was selling Cutco knives door-to-door.
[02:08] That job made him realize he liked being his own boss and setting his own hours.
[02:45] He was surprised to find that people were willing to pay for content.
[03:45] His website “The Wandering RV” receives 300,000 visits per month.
[04:45] Bill and his fiancee lived in an RV for months and the site started as a way to keep friends and family updated.
[05:25] They are currently looking to cut back on ads, as they feel there are too many.
[05:41] Per year, the site makes low six figures.
[07:40] If you create a study around a given keyword that is getting a lot of traffic, you can get a lot of really easy PR links and mentions.
[09:15] Bill and his team spend a good deal of time on link building.
[10:21] Bill doesn’t think word counts should be the same for every article you write.
[10:40] He bases his word count on the top three results for that same topic or keyword.
[12:35] Latent Semantic Indexing is a fancy way to say related or synonymous keywords.
[12:50] Go to LSIGraph.com and plug in the keyword for which you would like to rank; LSIGraph will spit out other related keywords you can use.
[13:10] This helps Google figure out what your post is about.
[16:20] Bill doesn’t have a consistent publishing schedule.
[16:38] On average, it can be 2-3 posts a month (though some months Bill’s company doesn’t post at all).
[18:07] Talk to your network to find good writers or find articles in your sphere and figure out who wrote them.
[19:54] Bill’s company got most of their traffic through content creation and link building.
[20:51] A lot of the trends aren’t new: create great content, build links, etc.
[21:25] Matthew Woodward figured out how to get your FAQ to show up with your search results.
[21:46] It takes up more real estate and will force more views and clicks.
[23:35] Two tools that Bill loves are Ahrefs and SEMRush.
[24:42] Bill loves the SEO blogs by Ryan Stewart and Matthew Woodward.
[25:28] Bill recommends the book How Life Works by Andrew Matthews.
Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Tero Isokauppila, founder of Four Sigmatic, a company that aims to make medicinal mushrooms a more heavily researched and accessible commodity.
Tune in to hear how Four Sigmatic became one of Amazon’s best-selling coffees, which platform is their key to promotion and why you might want to turn to mushroom coffee.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:35] Tero is originally from Finland and is a 13th gen family farmer.
[02:54] Within the first five years of Four Sigmatic, there were a lot of ups and downs.
[03:24] There are smaller competitors that have entered the market, but they are the premier wellness company that makes mushroom coffee.
[04:20] Most wellness companies in their space are either woo-woo or very technical. Four Sigmatic likes to think they are a mix of both.
[06:00] They have one of the best-selling coffee on Amazon.
[06:21] They took an omni-channel approach in terms of sales.
[06:32] They are an eight-figure business.
[07:37] Tero’s goal is to have all Americans drinking mushrooms.
[10:32] Tero wrote a book called, Healing Mushrooms.
[11:05] This planet wouldn’t operate without fungi.
[12:15] Mushrooms are prebiotic and can help with gut health.
[15:35] Four Sigmatic makes instant and ground coffee.
[15:50] Tero believes that you can’t even taste the mushrooms.
[17:01] The product requires a lot of education, because it sounds weird initially.
[17:20] Podcasts have been key to promoting the product.
[20:10] Some podcasts promise a download count.
[20:25] They usually estimate conservatively, so they don’t risk not delivering.
[22:35] Tero finds that food trends have a hype cycle.
[22:54] Seaweed and kelp are some of the best wild foods you can get.
[23:12] Health tracking is going through the second wave right now.
[25:15] Eric says to be careful with CBD, but it made him feel high, even though there isn’t THC in the product.
[28:15] A polymath is someone who is interested or knowledgeable about a number of subjects.
[29:03] The idea that the higher you are in the organization, the less you should be doing, is untrue. Everyone should always be both thinking and doing.
[30:10] Tero took his farming knowledge and turned it into a business.
[30:32] Joe Rogan is a good example of a polymath.
[31:22] One new tool Tero feels has added value to his life is Spotify playlists.
[33:05] One book Tero recommends is Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite and other books by Paul Arden.
Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Tim Soulo, the CMO and Product Advisor for Ahrefs.
Tune in to hear why Ahrefs depends on content marketing to sell its product, how they came to have more backlinks than their competitors and how this keyword ranking company does its SEO.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:45] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[02:15] Tim says if you want to ramp up the search traffic you get from Google, you need Ahrefs.
[02:50] Ahrefs will help give you valuable SEO insights.
[05:30] Ahrefs is a subscription service.
[05:40] The lowest plan is $99/month, then $179/month, $399/month, and finally $999/month.
[06:05] Ahrefs doesn’t want to become an enterprise business.
[07:10] The VC game can sometimes feel like a ponzi scheme.
[09:00] Tim joined Ahrefs four years ago.
[09:15] He was essentially the only marketer on the team.
[10:00] Growth at the company has been stable.
[11:45] Tim doesn’t need to be crafty, he just needs to let people know how awesome Ahrefs is. It’s a simple, but effective tactic.
[14:35] Ahrefs has a database of “bad” content, not just the good content.
[15:52] In terms of marketing, Ahrefs does a lot of SEO.
[16:15] They focus on keywords related to their industry and cover relevant topics.
[18:40] Ahrefs has a score rubric for content and keywords.
[19:20] This helps them prioritize the best topics.
[21:55] Tim cared less about monthly output, than he did about quality.
[25:05] Tim gets emails from people who read the Ahrefs blog and were convinced to buy into the service.
[25:30] Whenever people do the trial, they make sure to survey those people.
[27:50] Their studies work like nothing else when it comes to attracting backlinks.
[27:55] However, the studies don’t bring in a lot of traffic.
[29:02] One research study could take up to 1.5 months.
[31:22] The Ahrefs org chart is flat: they don’t have fixed positions or managers.
[31:45] Employees are allowed to do whatever excites them (within reason).
[34:45] Even though they have an article that ranks in the bottom of the top five, they are happy because the content is solid.
[36:00] Ahrefs produces more backlinks than their rivals.
[38:25] A tool that has added value to Tim’s life is Notion; it’s an easy way to organize the marketing department all in one place.
Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Mikael Lauharanta, Co-Founder and COO of Smarp, a leading employment engagement and advocacy platform.
Tune in to hear how Smarp went from a social media consulting business to its current business model, how they help employees engage better with both internal and external communication, and how they increased their reach significantly through content marketing and SEO.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:43] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:31] Mikael is originally from Finland and founded Smarp straight out of University.
[01:43] Smarp now has 60 employees and offices around the world.
[02:21] They want to be the primary place where employees find and share professional content (a content hub of internal knowledge sharing).
[03:06] This is a place for employees to customize the information they receive.
[04:30] They work for a lot of large companies in the public and private sector.
[05:06] The cost depends on the number of employees you have.
[05:18] It starts at the rate of $10/user/month.
[06:47] Originally, Smarp was a social media consulting business.
[07:06] They have since pivoted into their current business model.
[09:30] Mikael and his partner failed several times and learned a lot from their mistakes.
[11:25] Employee advocacy has taken off and they are getting a lot of traffic because of it.
[12:21] Their main keywords besides employee advocacy are: knowledge sharing, digital workplace, employee engagement, and employee communication.
[14:17] Customer retention rates are solid.
[16:56] If Smarp is able to talk to potential clients on the phone or via email, it’s easy to convince them that their service is useful and necessary.
[18:10] Through content marketing and SEO, they have increased their reach significantly.
[19:16] Smarp does a lot of podcasts and interviews, which helps spread the word about their business.
[20:45] They have gamified their service a bit: people can earn points for certain actions, which will get them on the leaderboard.
[21:01] Giving recognition internally and externally is important.
[21:41] Mikael finds that the new Citi-Bike-like system in Helsinki has been beneficial.
[22:04] Smarp recently changed to the Salesforce CRM.
[22:20] They love to use Slack for internal communication.
[23:03] Mikael recommends reading fiction.
[23:26] He has been reading John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut more recently.
[23:41] Mikael recommends people read blogs about the GDPR regulation changes.
[23:56] Hubspot’s CEO’s blog on medium is a good read.
[24:02] Mikael enjoys listening to The Profit Well podcast.
Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Kevin Indig, the SEO Manager at Atlassian, which is responsible for a lot of great sites, apps and tools, including Trello.
Tune in to hear Kevin spill the secrets to effectively optimize your blog posts, discuss growth strategies using various SEO tools, and share how he uses Google Features to reverse engineer what the user intent is.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[01:06] Before we jump into today’s interview, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:55] Today will be more about SEO and Growth Marketing.
[02:10] Kevin runs SEO at Atlassian, but he also serves as a mentor at a German accelerator.
[02:50] He started his career in growth marketing in SEO, on the tech side of things.
[03:10] Eventually, he got into enterprise consulting.
[03:45] Working in Silicon Valley opened him up to more SEO and growth marketing opportunities.
[04:20] His biggest success involved scaling up the Ebay and improving user experience.
[04:52] He did something similar for Pinterest.
[06:50] Right now the big buzz is around content.
[07:00] What’s often overlooked are the technical aspects.
[07:15] Look at your log files to understand how Google crawls your site.
[07:40] When you write an article you should link to other articles as well, but you can go deeper.
[08:01] Topic clusters are sets of pages that revolve around the same content and all link to each other.
[09:10] Create a map from the logs/links to quantify your efforts with topic clusters.
[09:30] Kevin uses Screaming Frog to crawl his site.
[12:20] Atlassian is constantly adding new articles and content. It’s important to keep the site fresh.
[13:10] Kevin makes sure their topic clusters are constantly up to date, especially when it comes to technical topics.
[14:22] Keeping content fresh can run into the thousands, because of the various factors, including man power, that play into creating fresh content.
[14:56] Kevin thinks the ROI is underestimated.
[15:55] Some of the pages rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords, which is hard to predict when you are starting out.
[17:15] Along the user journey, people discover the topicc cluster, don’t immediately sign up, but come back some time later and convert.
[19:20] Atlassian updates their articles quite often.
[19:33] They use Google Search Console and see how they rank and for which keywords.
[19:51] The impressions gives you an idea of what else Google has tried to rank your page for.
[21:25] Tracking competitors can get exhausting.
[21:35] Atlassian has a set of core keywords they refer to often.
[21:51] They try to prioritize tracking impressions for these keywords.
[22:30] How do you know when the query you rank for needs to be freshened up a bit?
[22:45] Look at Google Features to reverse engineer what the user intent is.
[23:35] Take your keywords and put them in something like SEMRush.
[24:15] Atlassian tries to track keywords and freshen content on a weekly basis.
[26:25] Kevin consumes a lot of content about data analysis, design thinking, engineering thinking. He spends his time focusing on growth marketing.
[26:46] Growth marketing is a very data-driven discipline.
[27:02] Kevin loves Ben Thompsons tech blog.
[27:28] He also reads Casey Winter, Justin Briggs, and others.
[27:52] Google “Tech Bound” to find Kevin’s newsletter.
[28:08] Kevin recommends the book Zero to One.
[28:57] Kevin likes thel Chrome and Firefox developer consoles.
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Hey, everyone! In today’s episode I share the mic with David DuPont, CEO of TeamSnap, an app that helps teams and groups manage their activities and members.
Tune in to hear David share how he went from working in the oil industry in Africa to creating TeamSnap, how they raised $47.3 million but why they don’t expect to raise any more, and how they gained their initial customers by making a product – and not a marketing strategy – that people engage with.
[00:37]Before we begin, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[02:09]David explains the mission of TeamSnap.
[03:12] TeamSnap is an integrated set of software services that comprise applications, services, and native mobile apps.
[04:02] A typical thing that TeamSnap makes easy is organizing practices and getting the notifications out to the team members.
[04:45] Simply change a calendar event and everyone is notified.
[05:55] TeamSnap helps to streamline communications.
[06:28] 5% of their 20 million users are not in sports-related activities (boy scouts, motorcycle clubs, etc.).
[07:03] 1.5 million teams and small groups using their service.
[07:57] TeamSnap is in 177 countries and 40% of business is outside the U.S.
[08:35] They have raised $47.3 million and don’t expect to raise any more.
[09:37] They make money through subscriptions, fees with any money collected, and advertising/commerce.
[11:07] They gained their initial customers through creating a solution, self-testing, and passing it on to friends and family.
[12:02] Good SEO helped, as well, because people were looking for this type of product.
[12:30] They also got a bump from tech publications.
[13:15] Eventually, they could predict their business based on sports seasons.
[14:00] After noticing a spike in Calgary, they sent an email out and they discovered soccer moms were admins for Calgary-based hockey associations.
[14:36] These users drove their business into popularity.
[15:30] The people who are psyched about your product (the early adopters) are the ones who help your service become more popular and successful.
[16:55] TeamSnap has evolved since starting in 2009.
[18:42] David believes marketing is important, but that people don’t engage with marketing, they engage with your product.
[19:12] Half the founders live in Portland, while David lives in Boulder.
[19:55] They all decided to work remotely.
[20:30] “If you do it right, you end up with a more loyal workforce.” -David on remote working
[21:37] Remote work is function-specific and individual-specific.
[22:30] Marketers tend to be more visual people, so it would make sense that they couldn’t always work remotely.
[22:44] Even though they are remote workers, TeamSnap has company summits every six months.
[24:00] Entry level sales benefit from a bullpen-like environment.
[24:30] TeamSnap goes out of its way to level the playing field for all members of its company.
[25:10] Even if a majority of people are in one place, it worked out better to have everyone on an individual computer for conference calls.
[27:02] The summit serves to strengthen relationships and get everyone on the same page.
[28:33] More recently, they tend to have tracks they focus on during the conference, which allows people to follow those topics from session to session.
[29:18] They are always looking to see what they can do better the next year.
[31:40] David recommends the book, The Startup of You, which is a good read for everyone, not just entrepreneurs. He also recommends The Lean Startup and Shoe Dog.
Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Shan Sinha, founder and CEO of Highfive, a company that sells a video conferencing hardware/software bundle.
Tune in to hear Shan discuss his tech journey from Microsoft to Highfive, how much he sold his business DocVerse to Google for (who turned it into Google Drive), the difficulties of buildinga hardware/software company, and what they did to grow their YoY revenue by 170% from last year to this year.
[00:40]Before we begin, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:33] Shan has been in tech startups for his entire career.
[01:56] He left Microsoft to start DocVerse.
[02:05] Google then acquired the company and it was turned into Google Drive.
[02:28] He then worked for Google Enterprise Apps for a few years.
[02:46] Then he stumbled upon the idea for Highfive, which Shan deemed a remarkable opportunity.
[03:05] Highfive has been around for five years and is continuously growing (they now have 2,000 customers).
[03:35] They grew by 170% over the last year.
[03:45] They are a hardware/software company that operates like a SaaS-based business.
[03:50] The company handles over 150,000 meetings per month.
[04:33] The purchase price of DocVerse was around $25 million.
[05:20] It’s easier to build a hardware company today than it was 10-15 years ago, but it is still incredibly hard.
[05:46] When it comes to B2B SaaS, there aren’t too many examples to rely on.
[06:28] Shan and his partners set out to solve a problem: getting people dialed in to a remote meeting.
[07:01] When Shan and his team set out to solve the problem, they realized the normal meeting today required flexibility in the way everyone connected to a remote meeting.
[07:28] Some people will be in a conference room, others will need to join via a laptop, others will need to dial in via mobile phone.
[08:03] They realized the only way to solve the problem was to build purpose-filled hardware and software that people could use remotely.
[08:16] It turns out this issue is happening in many other aspects of our daily lives (hardware and software working in conjunction).
[08:48] Shan realized putting hardware and software together was the best course of action.
[09:11] To start a hardware company, adopt the mindset that it will be a hard road.
[09:30] Also, realize that you will need a lot of capital.
[10:35] Surround yourself with people who have experience creating successful hardware companies.
[11:04] Above all else, hire the “right” people.
[11:55] This requires a lot of networking and word-of-mouth.
[12:55] Shan had a contract manufacturing partner lined up, but they dropped out when Apple gave them a contract.
[13:29] Within 24 hrs, they landed a contract with another manufacturing partner.
[14:30] Shan thinks there is a difference between networking for networking’s sake and networking with an endgame.
[15:22] The answers are never readily available, so you have to actively seek them out.
[16:09] Figuring out the pricing structure was part of innovating the hardware/software.
[16:27] Highfive spent two years in R&D.
[16:50] The original plan was to sell the hardware in the typical way, but to sell the software on the basis of the number of users per number of months.
[17:56] It took them a while to figure out their pricing structure.
[18:01] They figured out a pricing model that bundled their hardware and software together; then they charge you based on a per room, per month basis (with that comes an unlimited software user license).
[18:42] Highfive now has a few different packages that they offer that cater to a variety of offices.
[19:13] Shan believes this makes conference calls truly collaborative.
[19:43] Competitors like WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Zoom will have a free option with limited capabilities, a cost for each software user license, and a per month charge.
[20:45] These competitors also charge for minutes used by people calling in.
[21:10] Basically, the competitors are nickel-and-diming everyone.
[21:47] When the iPod came out, Apple sold it based on how many songs you could store vs. the actual Megabytes, which was an effective marketing strategy.
[23:04] Highfive’s biggest challenge has been figuring out solutions to completely new and untested problems.
[23:33] There were very few examples of companies packaging hardware and software.
[24:11] They have reached the point where they have figured out their product and their business model.
[24:23] Now, they have to figure out how to take it to the next level and continue to grow their business.
[25:34] The goal was to make Highfive easy to use, deploy, and sell.
[26:01] Highfive tries to offer deals to gain new customers.
[26:30] They are anchored in the thesis that the product should be the thing that drives customer reactions and responses.
[26:43] All their marketing is done online and they try to take advantage of SEO.
[27:32] Shan thinks it’s important to create a consistent picture that stitches all your variables together in a single model and then work with your team to determine which variables you are going to optimize.
[29:24] The “tool” that has proven effective was simply paying attention to the payback on acquisition costs.
[31:11] Shan believes the thing that measures a company’s efficacy is tied to the payback on costs.
[32:11] Shan recommends Founders at Work and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Tune in to hear why Ahrefs depends on content marketing to sell its product, how they came to have more backlinks than their competitors and how this keyword ranking company does its SEO.
