Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Kathri Mariappan, the founder of Hippo Video, a B2B SaaS company. Kathri, with a rich background in engineering and over 16 years of experience in product management at Zoho, shares his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the pivotal moments that shaped his approach to building and marketing products. This blog post delves into the key themes and insights from the episode, offering actionable advice for entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Kathri emphasizes that a go-to-market (GTM) strategy is much more than just sales and marketing. It begins where product development ends. Once a product is ready, the focus shifts to effectively communicating the problem it solves, the positioning message, and understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). These foundational elements are crucial for successful sales and marketing efforts.

Kathri’s journey with Hippo Video exemplifies the power of clarity, focus, and continuous learning to achieve business success.

Brought to you by: stratyve.com

Listen to the podcast here:

Narrow Your ICP for GTM Growth: Tactics with Hippo Video CEO Kathri Mariappan

Signature Question: How do you view and define Go To Market?

Yeah. so go to market. it’s not only sales and marketing to me. It starts where the product ends, right? So once the product is ready.

So how do you get to the market? How do you talk about what is the problem you’re trying to solve? How we are trying to solve. What is the positioning message? how we are building the ICP, understanding the ICP. Those are the key things that come before the sales and marketing. Right? So once you are fixing all of these, then the sales and marketing becomes much more focused and much easier. So I say the GTM starts from where the product ends.

Yeah. No, definitely. And it’s good you and important that it started with the ICP. What that pain point is because it’s an ocean in itself, right? And it’s an ongoing journey. ICP how you position, how you talk about that, Whether the message is resonating or not, the pricing, the offers, plus also the go-to-market aspects, which is okay now that you have a strong hypothesis on which segment and the persona and how are you going to structure the marketing motion? How are you going to structure the sales and customer success and so on?

Yes, yes, yes, it’s it’s very important to, actually fix those parts of it.

Then, I would call the bamboo shoots. Right. So there are the icebergs. So there are a lot of things inside. What you see outside is only sales and marketing. But there is a huge thing you need to fix for your team to be successful.

Yeah. For sure. I’m sure we’ll dive into a lot of these, sub-branches in our conversation going forward. So taking a big picture, just stepping, back a bit, why don’t you share with the listeners your career journey what really led you to start Hippo, and what you do today?

Yes. So, I’m an engineer by education, but, I’ve been a product builder all along in my career. I was with Zoho for more than 16 years, and my co-founders are also. So we were good friends at Zoho, working between 2000 and 2016, where I was building the HR suite of products. The Zoho People and the Zoho Recruit, kind of products took it to million-dollar revenues. And while my other two founders were primarily into, tech, then into product, one of them had some patents in, DB research, all of this.

So we came together and thought, okay, why can’t we start an organization where we felt the need for videos is the important aspect? So in 2016 itself, we felt, that videos are an important aspect of any communication or any engagement when it comes to business. So that’s where we started off with Hippo Video, primarily into LMS. Then we pivoted into marketing. Now we are focusing more on sales and marketing together. As an AI, we have reinvented ourselves this year. And the uptick is really good. So it’s been a very long journey. but a roller coaster, one, of course, in entrepreneurship was that. Yeah. And, we have been enjoying this journey for quite a long.

Very cool. you did mention, I mean, we’ll definitely deep dive into Hippo and what you do and who you sell to and all those. But before that, you said you spent a lot of time at Zoho, and you started your career as an engineer. So talk to us about that transition from engineering to product management.

Yeah. so I started off as an engineer, but by, I would say cross as what you call, sheer, coincidence, I went into pre-sales engineering, so I was building some POCs for, bigger customers to help them understand how, the product, that we were trying to sell could meet their needs. So that is where I was introduced to this product concept, right? how do you solutions for your customers? Before that, it was only engineering, right? You understand only the code. That is some, prod given. You just work with it. But that pre-sales engineering actually gave me that exposure into how do you solution for your customer. So you have some vanilla products. How do you solve it for the customer’s pain? Solve it. really? Well. So that gave me a lot of, enthusiasm. That product is the way forward. Then I moved into training, where I saw that.

I mean, that was a very important point that you hit over there. So you said you were in engineering, but then you transitioned into pre-sales, and that’s where you got the whole product concept and how to solve and structure it.

Right. But what led you to a pre-sales? Was it like a natural, hey, no one is doing this job at Zoho? That’s where I have to do it. Or what led you to that transition?

Okay. that’s why I said, coincidence or like, my boss Girish, was, founder of FreshBooks, was, asked to form a team on the pre-sales because that was a new team that we, he brought out. So we were my other co-founder, myself, and a couple of other people were picked from different teams to join that team, given the different backgrounds within AD. And then it was called. So that’s how we were picked and, brought into that team. So that’s how the journey started.

Cool. Yeah. That’s good. So you were picked by the founder to be part of the pre-sales, and that’s when you went into the whole sales discovery. The POCs paid pilots and eventually. Yes, getting into the Negotiation and sales office.

Yes yes yes yes, that’s how it all started.

But it’s been a very good journey. because, I would say anyone, at Zoho, via, they have a culture where any new engineer also joins. They will be put into the support team, basically to understand what the customer is asking, and what the prospect is asking. So it’s kind of outside in. So you have to get it. So we were primarily focused on the outside aspect of it. Right? The POC is the quick pivot finding the quicker value and giving feedback to the product team. It was a very good one and a half years. they are building those quick POC demos. So it gave me a lot of ground to learn.

Yeah. And then it sounds like it was actually a natural transition for you because in pre-sales you are giving feedback to the product and then it was a natural transition progression to hey, why don’t I become the product manager? Why? And shaping the requirements for the roadmap and things like that. Is that how it went? Right?

So in between I had a very good stint in training.

So I was, in the pre-sales, kind of a bridge between the product and listening, to customers. But in training, I was, asked to train the customers, also asking them what the product is, how they can. So that also brought me good exposure to that thinking as well. So it was previously how do I, stitch my product for that solution? Now, when I started training, they asked a lot of questions, and all of these, started making me think how a solution should be built itself. So that transition was very important, I would say.

So can you give an example? I mean, you bring it up intuitively, I get it, even the listeners would get it. But just give an example. So when you were doing training and when the customers were asking about a specific problem or a feature in Zoho CRM, that led you to how to build and prioritize a feature and how to message a message. Also, can you give a concrete example? So so it.

Was it the pre-era of CRM? We had a product called a webinar. So that is where I was doing the training. So it’s it’s an API product you may call it but it has a lot of endpoints where you can plug in, and make it work in the telecom world. So when we were actually meeting the customers, we really understood how the stack is there, how they are actually solving their end-user problems, and how our product is going to enable them and seamlessly provide those solutions. 

That understanding is what we were missing kind of domain knowledge back into the system. We were building it as a stack, but there is always this connection to the end customer, right? Not our immediate customer, but the end consumer. So that point of view actually brought in a lot of feedback into the system. How, say, performance metrics should be built as an important aspect because that is where the lag is going to happen. So a lot of feedback, we were able to give it back to the product teams.

Understood. Got it. So as you’re doing training, that leads you to your next role, which is product management.

Yes. Yes.

Got it. And then somehow, magically. Yeah. Do you want to share something about that? Product management.

So the product management aspect of it, that’s when the Zoho started, was started. So, so we, I was part of a development management team as well. and then I was moved into the Zoho, fold, which was actually formed then. So there, they asked us to build different things, and understand What are the different problems in the market. How do you solve it from a Zoho SaaS perspective? So I picked the promise as one of the solutions we should go after, and it was very interesting to learn through that process right from scratch. How do you build a thesis? How do you build? This is how you want to solve the problem. Of course, there were a lot of iterations. We never had the first step.

Right? but it gave us a lot of understanding of how to do discovery, how to do customer calls, and how to understand their pain. going to a lot of conferences, learning it from there. So that was a huge, journey of building it from scratch. Right? I was not from a background. Right. So, how do you understand what is what are the key things you should do? Once we entered in, I understood it was not a simple lake or something. It’s a huge, huge ocean in itself. Right. So that’s a huge learning.

Yeah. So whose decision was it? Or the business case or the champion behind pursuing HMMs in the first place? Was it you or Girish or a combination of the leadership team?

So it’s a combination of the leadership team. And one thing at Zoho is you will always be given a free hand to understand the market from a very different perspective. So the recruitment part was one thing I believe we should build. So I brought in that, case study to the management, and they were really interested to see how this could solve it alongside, the people, what we call the head terms.

So that was not a mandate from the management. But once you started talking to people, you understood there is an adjacent problem that needs to be solved, which is recruitment. So that’s how I started building the Zoho Recruit as well.

So I’m trying to connect the dots here. So Zoho is primarily CRM. And then what led you to that edge and problems around recruitment and HMMs? I’m trying to connect the dots.

Okay, so Zoho has around 40 different products for the business. So CRM is one of it. Yeah. So that is an office suite that is a financial suite. Then that is this entire suite. So all that started at the same time, and Zoho CRM is our flagship product.

Got it. So it’s almost like an ERP.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. For the small and medium business. Correct.

Got it. So end to end for all the different functionality users.

Yeah, exactly.

So HR, finance, sales, marketing, yes.

Everything campaigns, everything was there.

And you had the no code, low code, everything put together. It was there. And now they are selling it as one single package called Zoho One if I’m right. Previously we were selling it as different products for the same customers or different customers, but now they have kind of merged it all together.

Okay, so that was a good education for me or course correction for me into understanding Zoho and Pigeon Hole into only a CRM versus an ERP. Yeah. So you identified the adjacent problem, which is a recruiting economist. So how did it go about the discovery and the thesis?

Yeah. so it was more of, okay, a couple of calls when we went to the mass, etc.. There were a couple of customers from the staffing industry. So they were trying to do workforce management of their remote employees then, okay. Because people would have been deployed to different customers. They wanted to track it. And so one of them was.

This time frame.

Know that, what I’m talking about is the 2007 eight time period.

Oh, wow.

Okay. Way before. Yeah.

Way before. Way before. So there we were talking. So they came up with the problem of, more attrition, more people to be hired, but they were finding it very tough and how they are trying to solve it now with spreadsheets, all of these things. That’s when I went and understood the recruitment market. There was a biggie called Bullhorn. Even now, it’s there. So we understood what they are trying to build for the enterprises, and how it can be scaled down for the SMBs and the middle market. what are the key things we need to do? So it was an iterative process. Build it along with the customer. That’s what we started off with.

Understood. Then, there is the 0 to 1 journey for HMMs. How long did it take, like from idea conception to customer discovery to beta to actual pipeline and then revenue?

So I would say, the product building itself was around 18 months. Then we had a good long journey to build it together into the 0 to 1 journey.

Yeah. So it was like two and a half to three years.

Totally got it. And what was the run rate when you left Zoho?

So that’s a private organization. I’m not supposed to disclose that, but. But it was multi-million dollar.

Okay. Fair enough. So that’s where now extending and extrapolating. So that gave you the confidence to run and become a founder. Is that yes? Yes yes okay. Yeah. So the transition is about to Hippo.

Yeah.

Yeah. So

At Zoho when we, when I was building the site and the recruitment product, one key, another adjacent problem we saw everywhere is the onboarding. Like, you have the recruitment, then you have the autonomous to manage the talent, all of these skills, etc.. But there is a there was a bigger gap of onboarding the employee into the system, training them, skilling them to the needs. Right. That was a gap. So that gap when only we were discussing. So that’s where we started a hippo.

With the videos and centerpiece. We always believe training is an important aspect where video could play and very, very important engagement role. So we started off with the video as the centerpiece for the elements, and we started building around it. so that’s where this whole journey started off. We started off as an LMS, and we built it for one and a half years with quizzing products, tooling, surveys. All of these together on the videos was a new thing. We started building that.

Yeah, actually, we are going a bit too fast. There are a lot of important nuances around the emotional journey because as an employee, you are pretty much quote-unquote in a comfort zone. But then what is that moment like when you decided to pursue a founder path? What are the struggles and how did you convince yourself and your family to do that?

So, entrepreneurship was always a dream for us. Anyone? the three founders, how we want to do it one day, we need to do it.

So that was there, but it was on the back of the mind, etc.. Yeah, a couple of triggers happened. One of the important triggers was, of course, fresh work, starting, starting fresh ones, and doing well. So it was a good inspiration for us. Then we had charge be coming out and doing so. That gave us confidence. You could also come out and build. So that was the inspiration aspect of it. And as for and.

This was during the time frame of build in India, but sell to the world. That was all the movement that was going on. Yes.

Yeah. 2015 and 2015 is. Yeah. 14 and 15 where we were discussing all of these. So that is where we felt, okay, we, we, we can build the confidence by these inspiration. What to build was okay. Extending my autonomous journey. In the recruitment journey, we found that is a path we can pick it up. But the convincing part it involved like we were in the midlife, right? So I was 40 then, so I had two kids.

So how do you manage your children’s education, their future. So there was a lot of convincing to do within the family to help them understand this could be a better angle towards it, where the passion meets the economy. Economical value adds that. Yeah, so that took some time. Help them understand how other people are doing it, how we can safeguard ourselves. that was the most important part, I would say, for any entrepreneur to take care like I have a two year to three year, independence. I would say so that their family does not depend on you for that 2 to 3 years. So if we could build that, then that becomes a, peace of mind for you to run into this entrepreneurship journey.

Fair enough. And then how was the fundraising journey like for you?

So it was really tough then. Okay. in fact, we were rejected by a lot of, x when we went ahead with the Ms., thesis because that time, unfortunately, elements were all failing. The education market was failing in 20 1415.

Yeah. So there were not bigger takers. So what we did was we spawned a smaller product out of that with video alone as the key aspect, not just focused on autonomous or, learning management, but a vanilla video product that can do anything for anyone. with respect to video creation. So, thanks to my guidance from my, on a mentor as well. So we were confident. Okay, let’s launch that in product and see what what is uptake? So once we did that, we found that, videos could be a larger part of it and horizontal platform rather than an vertical focused one. And that opened doors for, funding, I should say.

And how long was this iteration in the pivot? I mean, these are like massive pivots. I mean, massive in the sense you are still a small team so you can afford to do all these things. Was it like across like a couple of months, weeks.

So we worked in 2016 and we launched this pivot in 2017 or so.

So it was like 12 to 14 months. So we built the LMS for the first nine months. Then we launched it took some initial traction like around 11 to 12 months, then two months. We did this pivot, I would say.

Understood. Did you raise angel funding by then or it was just.

No, no, it was it was bootstrapped then. Yeah. Once we launched this vanilla video product. Then only we went for funding.

Understood. Okay. And did you have customers by then? Paying customers?

We had our small SMEs from, very different parts of the world. Yes, we did have, but they were paying very smaller amount because, that video product was kind of, a record yourself. They called the screens, played back, send it across emails. Those were the use cases. We were, focused, attacking them. So. Okay.

So similar to what? Lume. I mean, Lume became famous around that.

Lume. Yeah. Lume came at that same time period, and we were chugging along with them, for the initial, 8 to 9 months.

But they took the free route, we went the, payment or into the SMEs. So that was the divergence, I would say. They were like a free product for the first three years or so. Right? Yeah.

Cool. And so now we are in the time frame of what, 2017, 18? 19?

Yes. The 18 and 19, I would say.

Okay. And, yeah, yeah. Talk to us about the journey of Hippo and. Yeah, fundraising is everything.

Yes. So once we started, building this as a vanilla horizontal product, one natural, distraction was too many feature requests, too many ISPs coming into the system, like, there was education, there were marketing, there were salespeople, there were, support people. there were, freelancers. YouTubers. Yeah, a lot of them were using our product like, we had around, 1 million or 1.5 million downloads of our extension itself in that period.

And how do we get the word out? I mean, that’s a big number.

So Chrome extension, the Chrome extension helped us, become a very good distribution channel.

Understood. Okay.

So it was it was, that period where Chrome extension became an important aspect of any B2B system or B2B ecosystem. So that became a very good distribution channel. We had like around 1000, 2500 signups per day itself, but for our product.

But how did users learn about the existence of Hippo? I mean, yes, so good to have a Chrome.

I would, I would attribute all to the chrome and some part of SEO, but Chrome extension. we did a very good SEO approach there for the screen recorder, for the webcam recorder. All of this album was there. So we were there and we was there. So we three were actually vying for the top spot there. Got it. So so one week we’ll be there, one week will be there. So it was kind of running around. But that game is a lot of traffic.

Understood. Yeah. So having a Chrome extension plugin helped build that.

I mean it was an inbuilt organic distribution channel for you guys.

Yes, yes. And naturally it brought in its own distractions. Right. So we had lot many feature requests somewhere asking for education. So we built something for Chromebooks. We built a integration into their Google schools or something. We started building that. Then there were something, hey, how do I bring in my hosting all of these other things for the marketing? So we started building the player. So it was distraction. Of course, I should say that one one and half years, we were busy, building so many things. Right. But it did not turn out into revenue because we were spread across.

Was it intentional? I mean, I say intentional was because you were at a seed funded, seed funding stage around that time. And your primary goal, if I were to guess, would have been traction usage versus revenue.

Yeah. Yeah. So, even in that. Right, we should have focused. So, in hindsight looking back, we should have focused on one particular market.

We should not have a very diverse, feature set. loon did a good job there. The focus immediately went into B2B, but B2C can use it. But they were not building anything for the B2C world, right? But we were across education, B2C, and B2B. So that kind of, made us busy. We were building a lot of things, but we were not able to convert that into revenue. So that was a bigger, lag there. So in 2019 or so, we started understanding, you know, this is not the way forward. We should focus on one particular segment of it, be it marketing or sales into the B2B. so that’s where we started shifting ourselves towards something called ICP. We never understood that as an ICP. We believe we should focus on one particular segment. So that was the shift. We did it in 2019 when we kind of moved only into sales and marketing and left the other things for just free. We will not build anything. So that was a hard learning, I should say.

Understood. So I’m more out of curiosity. I would assume at that stage you’d have a set of advisors and your investors being a sounding board. So was that an appropriate channel? Was it helpful or did you get the feedback from them, but then you decided not to go down that path? What was that conflict or dynamic like?

So the conflict was of course alone. Okay, so Loop was the free version of it, but we had a paid version, so we had a lot of discussions to understand whether we should stay free. Yeah. Or move for revenue. so that was a very hard discussion we had and, in hindsight, we should have remained free because we were at 300, 400 K downloads. They were at like 700 K, 800 K downloads. Then now they are at 20 million, right? So that’s how they have grown. But we took a pivot there. We said no we will focus on revenue. So that I think now yes we could have made a different decision. But it is what it is.

Right that point of time, we decide, how do you scale? So we one important thing, right. one biggest learning there was Lumos confidently going into the free. Okay. We were wondering what was their end point. We we were never told about this traction story. You can build it later. That kind of story was never there in the Indian market then. marketing. So had we known about it, there is a path towards it where you can monetize a little later based on adoption and understanding. Yeah. Like what we did. we could have gone that path. But all we were taught is like we should go the revenue path, be SMB or mid-market, start making some revenue. That’s what we were learning in the Indian market. Right. Got it. So that that exposure to the new terms, new way of business models was not available to us. So the aware about business models was a clean, lag we had, I would say wonderful.

Actually, that’s a good transition into the next segment.

We’re already talking about that, right? Clearly, you’re seeing a lot of ups and downs throughout your go-to-market journey, and you’ve already shared a lot of nuggets. But if you were to pick a story, a deep dive into both a success story and a failure story. Let’s say, I’ll leave it to you whether you want to start with a failure story or a success story. But let’s deep dive into one scenario now.

Yeah, I’ll continue with this failure story of this business model. Right? Yeah. So that brought in a lot of, would you say, financial stress within the organization we had to build at the same time the revenues were what we are getting were meager. So that decision of GTM was a big failure on our part, I should say. And in fact, we had one person, in our team who was very prominent, about whom we said we should go ahead with that, but we were not able to hear to that because we we could not envision how that business model is going to make money later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So business model is a key aspect of GTM, right? That’s where you align yourself with how you want to do it. Yeah. Right. So we took the other business model. So that actually struck us badly because of Lumos scaling. But we were kind of stuck there. We dropped all the other aspects of it. And we started focusing on, the sales and marketing aspect of it. that brought in a huge gap in how Lume became the B2B. So even lumens become a verb there right now. Correct. So, we were actually, and hand with them, but somewhere we felt, no, we should not go that way. So. Right. I would say that was a big mistake as far as the business model is concerned because that would have driven us into a very different GTM model. Right. how do you work on, the free networking effect? They were very good at networking effects. Yeah. So they had like, after you record five videos, you have to bring in someone to record the sixth video.

They had a lot of networking effects built into it. We thought, okay, that’s not the way to do it. So the business model determines how you want to do the GTM. Yeah. So that was a big failure as far as the success is concerned. Again, I would pick the same, story that I left, right, right where we pivoted into sales and marketing. We started focusing more and more on sales, and dropped the marketing. So that focus of ICP gave us that, good uptick when the, Covid hit. So that two, two and a half years were a good journey for us, where we were able to double down ourselves into the sales, the sales, ICP, especially the SDR and the EAS. So that brought us a lot of focus for us on what we want to build inside the product that reflected on our GTM, that reflected on our GTM notion of SEO, or how you want to onboard your influencers. So that actually channeled all our energy towards one single.

Yeah.

So how.

Did you it had to?

You raise a very important point. I mean, people keep talking about all the accomplished founders and business builders. They always say to start with a niche because riches are in the niches. And narrow your ICP. Go down narrow first, but too narrow. You need to go broad because you don’t know which of your ISPs and which of your offers will find traction. You don’t know that part. So how did you narrow it down to sales? I mean, what led you to narrow it down to sales? Like what is that thought process like?

Yeah. So there were two important things I would say. Right. so when you said you ought to go broader to become narrow, right? So that is a boon and a bane, I would say, for a horizontal product like us, say, if you have picked a very vertical focus product, then you know what you want to build from day one. Yeah, but you know, you are very horizontal in nature.

You have to try 3 or 4 things parallel. Should I build it for marketing? Should I build it for sales or within sales itself? Should it be for a software-oriented industry or any other industry? So that kind of becomes a bane in what to build, and how to iterate quickly. Bonus you had multiple options, right? You could survive if one market fails the other market. So that is the boon part of it. That’s all we have been surveying for eight years, right? Yes. So it’s a boon and a bane. that so you ought to be very careful when you are building horizontal product. I would say even then you have to pick a niche quickly. So that part we lagged hugely. He took it took like three years to settle down into sales. Right. So that’s a huge lag there. So that’s a key takeaway for me, as an entrepreneur. And I believe that should be passed on to the other people who believe we should be very arrogant in nature. No, don’t go for it.

It could be harassment later. But pick a niche, build it, then prove revenue. Then whatever. Financing. If you want financing or bootstrap whatever you are, then you can expand into other areas. Right. So so that’s a good learning there. Now how did we settle on sales? It was a very interesting thing. It was purely based on data. So we as I said right. We had 800 signups per day or 1500 signups on the weekdays, all of these. So we started digging into the data, how people are using it, and who are they. 

Can we identify them? We do not have tools like Clearbit, etc. then. So we did our own research. We took the data. We went and understood, some calls when somebody asked for customer support, we go on a call, understood what kind of videos they were recording. Why are they recording? Yeah. One interesting thing that came up was Doctor Outreach. 

So that’s where we kind of double down into that particular niche of serving the market for the IT and the internet software companies.

And this also coincided with Covid around that. Yes. Yeah.

So we launched our sales product on 20 19th November in Salesforce. Dreamforce.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then five months of COVID hit April. So we doubled down on that.

Understood. So 2020 through for the next one, 2 or 3 years.

I would say two and a half years. Yeah. Two. And I would say it was a good journey. But 23 of course, you know, all the financing dropped off the market had a big hit. Even now, it has not come up with the orders coming in. So that transition was a different story. I’ll come back to you later. But these two years, it was a very good journey because once we picked the ICP, we understood how to reach out to them, what content to write, and how to onboard influencers. Influencers played an important role in our initial uptake into that journey, because we had a video as a biggie there, so it had a lot of integrations, all of this, so we had to crack through that.

So initially once we fixed the ECP, it became very laser-focused for us to build that quick GTM motion, be it building round tables or etc. It was it was clearly laid out. Of course, there were multiple experiments within that. GTM how do you want to go a mid-market or above mid-market or SMB? Those were the journeys we had. We had some experience. But within that segment, within that, ICP understood.

And then so you’re focusing on SDR and ESE as your ICP, and then you’re constantly getting data as to, okay, which geographies, which industries, whether small, medium or mid-market was enterprise. And so eventually, I mean big takeaways. And this is what I want to reinforce to the listeners as well. Right? When we talk about go to market. Even when we started this recording, we always said go to market is constantly evolving. That’s number one. It’s a living entity and it goes back to ICP. And even knowing your ICP is a constant journey.

You also brought up an important point, which is once you nail your ICP and your focus that will determine and drive your content, your overall go-to-market, your different channels like the influencers that you mentioned, and even your pricing.

Yes, yes, it made a lot of difference for us. It brought in a lot of clarity from top to bottom. The previous 1 or 2 years, we were kind of always in flux. That actually plays a very detrimental role for the organization itself. But the clarity brings in a lot of motion, a lot of, momentum. So I would say focus on that. ICP will bring in a lot of clarity downstream, even to the product. So I would say that’s the key aspect of it. You fix on one ICP, it may fail or it may win, but at least you know the clarity. Then you can decide. You can have some set milestones, then you can switch to the other ICP. If this is not working, fixing one ICP is the best way forward.

Yeah, and what are the typical use cases? And when SDR, an alias, used Hippo like was it pre-sales for sales?

So it was kind of the cold. Outreach is the important use case people were using it for. And photo ops got it for the outreach, bringing them to meetings. All of this and the EAS were using it more of like, a bottom-of-the-funnel engagement of sharing documents, shouting demos, all of these. So a year where kind of cold outreach follow-ups, all of these. They were using it. And the key is they’re using it in the bottom of the funnel of sending out contact documents as a video or, sending demos, all of these custom demos. All of these, they were doing it.

Got it. So what what were your ISPs like? The stress and ease. Why did they love your product versus alternatives like Loom and Vineyard?

Yeah. So, there are a couple of interesting things, right? And the ICB also it also includes industry, right?

At one point in time when we took the data, there were a total of 120 industries that were using out. Right. There were product companies that were in our industry. There were thousands of them using it. There were hundreds. There were even tens. But you had like 120 industries. So we had to narrow it down to the top 2 or 3. And typically it was professional services and internet software companies all of these. So we kind of focused on that and the insurance or the financial segment alone. So once we decided on that, then we took the customer journey with them. Understood what they were trying to achieve with it. So one example, I would say the sales page, as we call it, the videos earlier. All right. Even everyone, including Zoom. Everyone. we used to send the video, on a page with nothing there. So we call it the video page. But once we started talking to the SDR, everything, the video page was a segue from the email to some page.

Right. And people don’t come back. So they have to stay there. They have to watch under it. So that became a good canvas for them to be branded, and sell whatever other things they need to send collateral. So that brought in a huge approach. So in fact, we were the first or second to build those sales pages in the video market itself. Nice. So everybody followed that. So that was a good learning. So once we built that it became a sticky point for the end customers. Right. So they can learn everything about that outreach from there. So yeah they don’t have to go back to the email. There were a lot of drops. When people switch back to emails they don’t switch. Right. So those were our learnings. So this ICP brought in that confidence to dig deeper into their workflows rather than not stick at the top of the workflow load. Can you build it across their engagement points? Yeah. So we built in LinkedIn web ground sorry web backgrounds.

All of these came because when we were talking to them these were the pain points. This is what I first do. This is what I can do. So can I build the video journey through their workflows itself? Right. And we integrate it into HubSpot Salesforce outreach so people can create videos from there. So we were again the first of it. We did deeper integration. So that’s why I said that brought out a lot of clarity for us.

Yeah, yeah.

You also bring up another important point, which is the whole I mean, it doesn’t depend if you, I mean, it doesn’t really matter if you want to call it a job to be done framework or whatever you want to call it. But at the end of the day, for this SDR a, in the different day-to-day tasks, which of those are you really simplifying or adding value?

Yes, yes. So one key thing I would like to bring in as an anecdote, not as a GTM, is understanding these frameworks would have always been helpful to us.

So we were doing it and then learning how this is what they call it. Yeah, but it should have been the other way around. I felt so right. So we should know what is gdb we should know what is GTM perspective of what is upstream and downstream. So those kinds of things we were kind of doing a trial and error versus understanding that this is how you should do things, right? So. So, that that yeah, that’s a hard learning we had. Yeah.

And of course, and of course, I mean, for mature organizations, they do these quarterly or annual workshops, our, off-sites. And that’s where a lot of these things, they bring in consultants like me, like for example, I am going to help like an enterprise level, a company in early, like next year, like in February, March timeframe to help them plan their 2025 growth motion. Right. And that’s where I’m going to bring in and educate them around. These are different best practices. These are different frameworks.

And the output of that would be the blueprint they’ll go and execute for the next 3 or 4 quarters.

Yes.

So that is the big missing point I would say. So we were never there about the challenger model. Mid-pack model. Those were all hindsight when we started doing them, we understood these are the things we should look at. Then fine-tune it. Actually, we should have adopted it earlier. Yeah, of course, they are not perfect, but at least it gives you a guideline, right? How to do it structurally correct. We were not very structured. So that was a bigger lag there.

Understood. So how is Hippo and where are you guys right now? I mean looks like you are in another iteration of your go-to-market journey so you can spend a couple of minutes just talking about that.

Yes.

So, one important aspect we found in the 22 and 23 journey was adoption. So though we were the best-fit product for that ICP, the adoption rate was less than 50%.

Assume an edge. A team of 100 have bought our product. Less than 4050 people only were using the product. So people were still really, camera shy or they did not have the time, or it took longer time for them to be perfect on the video and send it across. It became a very big adoption problem. So we brought in templates. We brought in some lip sync AI in 2022 itself. We brought in that are trying to solve this problem. So all of this where they’re trying to connect that need. But the boom of AI, clearly, helped us overcome this barrier to the creation of videos. so that was a re-inventing part for us. So we had the downstream of it hosting, personalization, and interactivity. The creation was always, hit or miss. We created templates. We had some, smaller lip sync models, but all of these, it was not making a cut. But with the Genii now we have brought in text to video. We have brought in avatars. Your custom avatars.

We are the only ones we have, walking, talking avatars, moving authors. So that brought in a huge, transition on how we perceived this video adoption itself. So this year, we kind of reinvented ourselves as an AI video platform, focusing on creation, hosting, and personalization as a holistic platform. And we are solving it. And here again, that’s a good learning where we found the physical world companies. 

I would say the companies that sell physical products or services were quick to adopt this AI, along with the delivery models and the personalization, like your hospitality, which includes your travel, your restaurants, and your hotels. then you had automotive, manufacturing, and real estate. All of these are our core ISPs. Now, we do have the software companies use our product, in that, what do you call the SDR motion, etc? But these companies are lapping it up. like anything for us. and say, hey, this is solving my biggest problem of showcasing my physical product, physical services. So that’s a good journey.

And it’s a good reinvention. We have done.

So. So talk to us about one use case or one example of like you mentioned hospitality industry. So how are they using your newest incarnation of the Hippo AI product?

Yeah.

So again it’s a learning right. it’s a wonderful learning. We had a couple of, hospitality companies who manage like 8000 hotels, use our product again in that cold outreach. But when we went on a call, there was one interesting, nugget they left. What was? It was 50% of, bigger hotels comes, revenue comes from, what do they call it as mice, meeting, convention events, basically group bookings, right, for conferences, etc.. Yeah. In that sales cycle is where they were trying to include videos like putting the GM space and sending an invite, mail, etc. but a couple of things they were struggling with one, the virtual tours of their hotels, which is an important aspect in any meeting booking event. And the proposals were these. And so those two came to us saying, hey, these are key, pain points.

We are now stuck with text or PDFs etc. Yeah. And they were not engaging. They were very cumbersome to create. So we have now automated all of those into videos. So all your virtual tools are very automated. Now you have ten meeting rooms. Now this particular group wants typical types of meeting rooms then creating virtual tours about those meeting rooms and that just in facilities were done in minutes now. Yeah. So that was one bigger use case. We call it mice and Smurf in the hospitality industry. That is their core focus area, the B2B. Then you have the B2C like welcoming videos, talking about the things to do in that particular place once you go to that, city. So those kind of things also, we do it on the B2C. So these two are the important aspects of hospitality.

Very interesting. Yeah. I’m eager to see how this journey plays out and bring you and the team more success for sure in the very near future. Yeah. Yes. So being respectful and mindful of the time, we are now entering the last phase of this conversation and it’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 15 minutes.

Yeah.

Time just flew.

Yes.

So yes it was good.

Discussing it is always a good sign. so going back again, big picture who are like the couple of people who played an influential role in your career and mentoring.

Of course. the biggest mentors, the Zoe entity as such. Yeah, right. There are multiple people there who, have already kind of molded us, into who we are. And of course, my mentor. so and then you have other peers and friends, right? The peer community. So I would say the SAS Boomi community is a good, learning ground that they were able to understand, like whatever I told. Right. The frameworks I did not learn through all of this. I learned it from them. So there were a lot of sessions going on. So that became and we had a surge, which was Sequoia, the community. So those things so I would say the founder community is a good learning ground.

Very good.

And then if you were to turn back the clock and go back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self on day one of your go-to-market journey?

I would say foremost fix the ICP, fix the positioning.

What do you want to solve it? That’s a yeah.

Yeah for sure. And that’s a good way to end. I would add one more thing, which is to always keep in mind and be aware that go to market is a constantly evolving journey. I mean, it’s never fixed, never perfect. Even though you said fix, you go with that and then constantly.

You can iterate later, you can iterate later. Don’t go without anything like who you want to solve, what problem you want to solve, how much they’re going to pay, how long they are going to use it, and what is the stickiness of the product. If you don’t understand a particular niche, then you are lost. You may fail in your first attempt, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment saying these are the things I should correct when you actually take the next ICP. But without that ICP you are spread across. So absolutely I would.

Want to know how a Customer-Centric Approach Transform Your Go-to-Market Strategy?

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Vijay converses with Ryan Vong, a seasoned expert in marketing operations and entrepreneurship. Ryan shares his extensive experience, from founding Digital Pi to his current venture, Helix, and offers valuable insights into the intricacies of go-to-market (GTM) strategies. This blog post will break down the key themes and actionable advice from the episode, providing a comprehensive guide for listeners and readers looking to enhance their GTM efforts.

Key Takeaways:

• The Role of Revenue Operations (RevOps): Ryan describes RevOps as a crucial element for removing roadblocks to revenue, facilitating alignment among sales, marketing, and customer success teams. 
• GTM Holistic Approach: GTM strategies are not just about marketing; they involve a coordinated effort across multiple departments.
• Four Ps of Marketing: Always consider product, place, price, and promotion in your GTM plans.

This episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast provides valuable insights into the complexities of GTM strategies, the significance of clean customer data, and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives innovation in the B2B space. Ryan Vong’s experiences and lessons learned offer actionable takeaways for listeners looking to enhance their own GTM efforts.

Listen to the podcast here:

The Role of RevOps Data in Go-to-Market Success with Ryan Vong (Two-times Founder)

The most important thing when and how I start every podcast is with this question, which is how do you view and define go to market?

Okay, okay. You’re starting with a very broad, you know, a very broad question. Yes. but I’ll keep it concise and I can probably pontificate a little bit longer, but really, to me, go to market is the strategy and the tactical plans to bring a product or service to the market. So it is by definition really simple. And yet there are many, many pieces to it. you know, it can include, you know, I think back in, in the, you know, I’m a marketing person.

So I think back to when we were learning the four PS of marketing. Right. It’s essentially that in a different formulaic way, right? You still have the old product place, price, and promotion ideas, but Go to Market encapsulates the tactical plans of doing that. And it could include working across many more domains that we didn’t have. Like, you know, how do you support the product later? How do you know, what are what are the things that you work with finance or ops on and things that are sort of cross-departments?

Right. No, totally. I like the way you framed it. it’s funny, right? I mean, there are frameworks that are out there that have been tried and tested, and it still holds true to this day over decades, which is the four-piece. And, it’s clear that the key that I believe in, and what it should always start with is the person, but more so the problem set associated with the person. Right? As a marketing leader, I can have multiple problem sets.

I can have a problem set around ops. I can have a problem set around product marketing. I can have a problem set around, content marketing. I mean, you get the picture.

Yes, yes.

So yeah. So definitely the person and the problem associated with it and something else that I’ve noticed, I’m sure you must have seen this, which is the person and problem set will vary depending on the confines of the company and the market. And that’s where the whole ICP comes into play. Yeah.

And I think even within your own competitive environment, even if you have two companies doing the same thing. Yeah. Or selling to the same folks. Yeah. The constraints within the organization are different. So you can go to market motions and different your relationships with your suppliers, and channel partners, they’re all different. Right. Because it’s not the same company. And those constraints really, you know, when it comes down to go to market, you have to think through, you know, strategically and tactically how do I execute this.

Yeah. And those constraints change the narrative for both companies, even if they essentially sell to the same audience.

Yeah, completely. I mean, in my own personal journey over the last decade, if even if I just scope it down to the last decade, my understanding of go to market has evolved greatly. So as an example, as a product marketer, my view of go to market back in those days was around, hey, I need to take a product to market, which is just the launch and launch checklist. That is very nice. Now that I look back. In my understanding, back then it was a very naive understanding. What is now encompasses a lot more. It goes way beyond launch. It starts where before the idea conception stage. It involves different functions including marketing, product, customer services, and sales of course. Right. And it always keeps changing.

Yeah. I mean I think about just what you described there, right? If we think about just launch activities, what’s post-launch, you know, customer success was not a was not a thing you thought about back then.

When you’re thinking about launching anything, it’s but now it’s a really big component on how you support your customers post-launch. So the go-to-market strategies are, you know, they are the sort of the consistent refinement of those things all the time. and I think it’s that’s why so much focus has been put on there. And there are, you know, within the go-to-market, you know, there are so many different groups and functions that need to be part of it. Yeah. so it is definitely it’s funny how it’s these, it’s just go to market, but there’s so much to that. And that’s what I find very interesting.

Yeah. Very cool. All right. Now let’s take a step back over to your career journey. So if you can share with our listeners your career journey and what led you to what you’re doing today.

Sure, sure. Now, like like I started with the the background, but funny enough, like, I actually originally thought I was going to be an engineer, and so I thought that was the thing.

But I really got involved in marketing early on. we’re talking 98 around that time frame. So when, when a small little company like Google was first launched and you still had Yahoo, it was the big player. You had all those things. I started getting involved really in search marketing and that was the a big, you know, thing back then. and, you know, that led to a whole lot of interactive digital marketing and led into, you know, quite a few functions in marketing. 

And then in the last ten years, I have been spending a lot of time around marketing, operations, revenue, operations, growth marketing, like around those functions. Because I started a company ten years ago called Digital Pi that, focuses solely on the Adobe ecosystem. We did marketing automation consulting, and, you know, where we were, what the kind of work we did was really in the nexus of all of these things. So all the tools, the systems, you know, all the marketing plans. They all come together for like some level of tactical execution and activation of these plants.

Right. The products, the tools, and the service we provided enabled that because all the best plans can’t do anything, you can’t do anything with it unless you have a way to distribute and reach the customer. So, you know, the last ten years were focused solely on that. I had a really successful, exit out of that. And we were acquired by Markel, which was a Dentsu agency.  You know, and really, in that period of time when I was there, it really allowed me to even, you know, really focus on, like, the entire go-to-market because some of the, you know, the, the, the, the clients we had were much larger. they had much more sophisticated, things going on. 

Some healthcare companies had hundreds of products that had a market, and there were a lot of things that just, you know, opened up my eyes to how difficult this problem can be. And yet, you know, it really helped help with the appreciation of the different emotions that are involved in getting something out to a market.

Yeah. Totally cool. I know you had a good exit with Digital Pi. Congratulations to you and the team on that. But just curious. I mean, what led you to go down the path of entrepreneurship and opening and finding or starting digital pie in the first place?

Wow. You know, I think at the time I was, you know, working on a lot of startups. So, you know, in the Bay area, you’re around lots of startups. and I had, you know, taken a big interest in technology. I went and built out a lot of marketing automation sort of procedures, processes, and platforms. So the entire sort of engine that helped run it. I really enjoyed that. And I figured it was time at some point to just take a, take a chance to work for myself to really further my sort of domain expertise in this, and see more clients because, I mean, the trade-off is you work for a company and you learn a lot about the company in the specific ways.

But when you start to see multiple use cases, right, it really breaks the depth of your knowledge. And I really enjoyed that process. So I started on, you know, taking on clients. And at some point, it was just apparent that I needed to bring more people on. you know, and it just kind of it kind of grew from there. and, and that’s sort of, you know, in a blink of an eye, it’s like ten years. That’s how that’s how that kind of fell, you know, or that’s how that ended up. So yeah.

Now very cool. I like the way you framed it. I never somehow thought about it, but I like the way you framed it, which is when you’re an employee working for a company, you are more involved in the workings of the company a whole lot more. Not to say that you won’t focus on the product and the market and the person you are solving for, but if it’s a ratio and if you need to put a number, it’s typically like 70, 30, 70 on the company side and 30 on the market product side or person side versus when you start something on your own, and especially the point which you emphasize, Ryan, which is around you want to get deeper into a specific problem set, looking at different ways the use cases are thought of or implemented or the challenges.

That’s it’s and it’s interesting because once you turn into, you know, your and you have your own company, right? Go to market becomes near and dear to you. Yeah. Because now all of the things that you’re, you know, are coming to you like, right? You have to make decisions on that. and so it’s really interesting. It’s beyond marketing now. I mean, you have a lot of other functions that are under your peripheral, you know, that are under your sort of guidance. And that’s really helpful If you really want to learn more. Like, there’s no better way to learn more than start your own thing. I can, I can tell you probably learn things you don’t never want to learn. But that’s that is the journey.

Yeah. That comes with the fun stuff. And that’s how I was how I would see it as well. Right. Being a founder myself, you get to deal with things that you wouldn’t typically look into because you are the owner of each and every problem and scenario that occurs in your company.

Shifting gears. So had you started Digital Pi, you grew it up to a certain point, and then you had a good exit selling it to the market. And then you are now again going down the path of being a second-time founder. Okay, Felix, tell us more about that.

I guess I like paying and I guess that’s probably. Well, Yeah, shortly. it’s it’s a funny story, but shortly after I exited and sold, and then we finished our earnout period. my wife had asked me to, you know, consider staying home for a few years and just taking a break because of all the previous years. yeah. and, you know, I, we took the summer off. We did, you did the usual things, right? You do lots of travel and whatnot. And, you know, fortunately, I have, you know, I have children and younger children still. our schedules are incredibly tied to their school schedules. Yeah. So, you know, whether you want to travel for six months or not, it’s not up to you whether you want to sleep in or not.

It’s not up to you. Right. So that’s true. You know, so for for that reason, I was like, you know, the let’s let’s, you know, let’s take the summer off. Let’s reconsider. and afterward, you know, I really decided that I really liked what I did. I found entrepreneurship, I found building, you know, to be equal. You know, I wouldn’t say equal. I’d say frustrating. And yet the rewards are so much better, so much higher. You learn so much about yourself. You learn so much about your, you know, the community of people you work with. there’s so much in that entire process. And then you also find other like-minded folks who are like, I can see why you would do I could, I could already tell you, you’re going to do this again. Even as much as you say you won’t because there’s a there’s a certain element of just, you know, I’d say it’s just a certain zest for that like that.

There’s a, there’s a, there’s a drive there. Right. And you can’t stop somebody from that. So I enjoyed it. So now we started I started helix probably going to be about a year now. the one thing I, you know, wanted to focus on this time was actually around customer data. I think that I’ll, I’ll, I’ll call it a little bit of tangent. I think the one thing we did in the nexus of all of the work in rev ops and growth ops was you’re starting to see a concept of, you know, how difficult it is to have a modern data stack, right? So many tools get brought into your environment that essentially interconnect with each other, and share data with each other, but there’s nothing to manage. All of that. And data becomes really important at this point because there is a shred of truth in every one of those systems around your customers. But there’s no single one that manages one sort of golden record of a customer. Right? The way, the way you used to think about.

MDM. Yeah. So I thought this was a really, really interesting problem to solve. I also look that I being big, you know, or language models being a big thing, right, that you’re building on top of your data set. And I remember looking at you know, clients and their data and it’s like 60% of it is wrong. They’re talking about building AI on top of it. And I said well how would you be comfortable if you’re getting, you know only 40% accuracy on it? It’s like whoa whoa whoa. Why what. That doesn’t that’s not good. I’m like yeah, but that’s that’s your data. And your AI is only as good as the data that you put on top. You know, whatever you’re pulling out. And there’s a lot of governance, you know, things that need to happen, a lot of security around what the AI should access, what it should display. So I think that the whole field right now is growing and is really interesting and continues to be.

But then you get down to the fundamental building blocks of what all this means is, like you still need a really solid sort of data strategy. You know, for a marketer, customer data is huge, right? Correct. The biggest driver of growth is to understand the customer. So we focused on that. That’s the whole sort of mission that Helix is on. You know, part of the reason I named the company helix is because it’s the DNA of the, of the data, you know. I thought anyway yeah. As a marketer, you know my brain goes that way.

No that’s good. I love the fact and I also love the fact that how you’re emphasizing, the need to have clean. And, I’m looking for the right word, clean, and relevant data. I don’t know if it’s relevant, but it will in turn, for the AI model, the foundation model to produce more trustworthy results. Yeah. Key and currency for that?

Yeah. Accurate. Precise. You know, persistent data.

And I think the problem is it’s persistence has been the thing that is missing. A lot of these tools like things are out of date so quickly. On every update, there’s something out of date. And that data isn’t persisted across all the applications that use that same data. Yeah. Like your address changing in one place should be changed in every place that has your identity associated with it. Yeah. Right. But that’s not always the case because all these things aren’t connected. And so things are again out of sync. And I think even the worst cases are trying to ask someone if they’re still a current customer and not getting the same answers. That’s kind of scary. Like, yeah, you know, are you charging this? Are you, you know, is this person still paying like these customers? Is this client still paying? Like, you’ve got to know these things right. And sometimes I don’t know. I understand the complexity of keeping up with those things, especially if you have like a SaaS business.

Right? That is pretty ephemeral, like whether it’s whether somebody’s buying and not buying the following month or whatever, their models are. Right. And these things are getting again, they’re complicated, but yet they’re important problems to solve.

Yeah. So I know it’s been only a few months since you launched Helix officially. I mean, a stage where you have paying customers yet or are you still in the discovery design customer phase?

We do have, paying customers. luckily, and, you know, I would say that we’re in a good place. You know, a lot of the concepts, ideas that we were incubating. all we’ve had to do was refine some of it, the approaches. Yeah. But it hasn’t been a, you know, full reboot on what we had originally thought. Yeah. you know, and I think a lot of it is just like, you know, the first part of Go to Market is like really thinking about, like the messaging and the positioning of. Yeah, like because we are an agency and we do services.

You know, our first, you know, when I first came out with this, I kept talking about data challenges. and that became apparent that everyone agreed to it. Yeah, but no one can fund it. and I said, well, why is this? You know, it took me a while to really figure this out. And they said, well, everybody agrees with you that, you know, bad data is not good for the company and that you needed to clean it. But it is everybody’s problem because everybody puts input data. Now, the problem with it is then who sets the budget for it. Because then it would be everybody’s, you know, budget and there’s no such thing. Yeah. and again, you know, learning, you know, even if I’ve done this before, you know, I don’t know this. Right? So I’m like, wow, that’s the terrible go-to-market. You know, the message is like you have bad data and we can fix it. But it’s like, who are you talking to?

Yeah, the ICP right?

That’s the person and the problem. Who are you speaking to and what?

Goes right back to that. Yeah. and I think refining those things to be very specific to our audience, I mean, we target, you know, revenue ops. Right? So the people that are in charge of revenue and there’s a, there’s a really solid reason for why this is important, right? Like simple things like, let’s just say, you know, you have an ABM strategy in there and you don’t have the right data for whoever you’ve identified in the ABM. Right. It’s like lead-to-account matching, like simple tactical things that cause issues in your revenue or just routing, you know, opportunities to the right area.

In this case, even the campaign performance, I mean, that very atomic level.

Yeah. Down to the very like, you know, down to that level of detail without, you know, sometimes it’s like, wow, I didn’t have this one.

I don’t know, there’s one field that wasn’t filled out, but the rest of it is good. And you’re not contacting this person.

Correct.

You missed out on an opportunity. It’s like wait, why? Because some rule sets, you know, are set in a certain way and it’s like, wow, that’s not good, right? So there are things that are, you know, yes, it’s missing and therefore it’s not going anywhere. And then there’s two, you know, the wrong information is going to the wrong people and then it doesn’t get followed up. Yep. 

There’s a whole series of things there that happen in that way. And these are all like, you know, essentially when I think about it like from a revenue op, you know, function like optimizing those things that keep. Yeah. And so again, it goes back to we didn’t really think about talking about data from that perspective at first. And now we are spending more time on it. Let me understand the use cases and let me explain how this, you know, enables or helps the use case.

And I think that we are still obviously building a lot more of that to inform our, you know, our messaging, how we go to market with it, you know, who we go to market with it. Like, do we need agency partners to, you know, tie us together or companies that really do a lot of, I don’t know, campaigning, you know, sort of activation type work, but they don’t have a data infrastructure? 

Right. Like so those help us figure out where we should position and where we should be, because what happens in the end if we find out that we’re best being an agency behind an agency, right, then I would partner with a bunch of different agencies. But like, it’s like those things that we need to find out. And we’re still working through a lot of these sorts of ideas.

I’d say no, really cool stuff. I love the fact, in terms of how you are really conveying the lessons and your day-to-day iterations of your ICP, of your problem statement, of your messaging.

Again, it all goes back to the fundamentals of go-to-market, and go-to-market constantly changes. I think that’s the main message for the listeners here. And yeah. Yeah.

And I think big or small, I think it’s you know, the closer you are to the customer’s use cases. Yeah. And even the language they use, the better. Correct. You know, I find that we, we, you know, we’re guilty of this in marketing. It’s like we tend to create terms or use terms that we think are, I don’t know, invented here. And this is awesome. But that’s not how somebody’s describing a problem to you. And you, you’re you’re seeing it in a different way. It might be the same. You could have the best solution, but you’re saying it in a way they wouldn’t understand it. Okay. Yeah.

One of the things. Sorry. Go ahead.

No, no. Go ahead.

Yeah. So one of the things you’re totally spot on on that.

Right. And one of the techniques that I’m testing out and it’s still early days is I list out a few problem statements and here are my observations. And when I speak with the ICP I would say does this resonate? Is this what you see in your environment?

Yeah.

Right. And then I just ask that question and I shut up, I just don’t talk, I let them speak and they open up. Do you know what all these resonate or points two and three resonate? And you know what? I’ll add a couple more to that.

Yeah, yeah. No, I did that. I did that for my goodness over the course of nine months so far. Yeah, I’m still doing that by the way. Yes. You know we changed some positioning and we had some ideas probably two months ago. And it took some time to find some of my, you know, the ICP folks that, that, that run this on a daily basis. I’m like, does this make sense to you? Like when I talk about, I don’t know, we were like, you know, lead to revenue.

And they’re like, yeah, I know it’s it’s too broad, right? But it’s like, you know, we were about to like get all behind it, right? The whole thing changed our lives. All that good stuff. you know, but I tested on a few people that, like, it doesn’t make sense in our organization. Maybe it makes sense, bro. They’re just trying to be nice. Like, I’m like, how do you? How would you describe this problem? Right.

Exactly.

Yeah. So it’s great. It’s great. We are again, I think it’s awesome to just continue to stay up to date and listen to how people describe. Right? Yeah.

The problem and another technique that I’m using or testing out is after they describe the problem. And if I see that it’s resonating with them, I then follow up with the question, which is how do you build a business case within your organization?

Yeah.

And then I just shut up and listen to what?

Yeah.

Yeah, I, I do I do appreciate the folks that, you know lean in to help with that. I have found and again maybe it’s just the folks I’m you know talking to like lately it’s more of a, would you go this way or that way to build a business case. And I kind of give them an option just because it’s so hard to get the time to talk to them. Yeah. You know, and then I’m, I feel like I’m adding extra work by asking them to sort of think through an abstraction of how they would present it. And so I say, would it help if I did this or this? And it gives, it gives it better momentum I think. but again I, you know there are folks who would love to just sit down and you know, advise and help with that. And I appreciate that. I don’t get a lot of those by the way. I just get a lot more like people who want me to like, and present something, and then they give me an opinion.

Yeah, it’s. Probably easier.

But it makes sense. It’s easier.

It’s a lot easier for sure.

All right.

Now this is good I mean the conversation is definitely starting with the more technical and insightful lessons that we can share with the listeners. Let’s get even more specific. As you and I know we have seen this, which is go to market is not always up to the right. You’ll have go-to-market success stories and go-to-market failure stories are lessons. So if you can share either from your current experience, I think you’ve been sharing it with Aelix. But if you go back to your time in Digital Pie and if you can share a success and a failure story, either for Digital Pie or for one of your customers, that’d be a good segue into our next section.

Yeah, I can definitely. And I’ll have to preface that it’s probably from my current viewpoint in the world, which is all centered around data, you know because I think about how would I how would my business today solve some of the things I saw in the past? So I think about it from that perspective.

One story I think I share in different ways that come to mind was, you know, we worked with a company on social security software. but they didn’t sell directly. It was through resellers. And some of the, the things that they were struggling with, you know, was really on the renewal side. So they find that there was probably a good 40 to 50% drop every year at the annual review. and I think they had a, their go to market was really what we, we talked about earlier like it was to launch to acquire customers. 

But then the follow through, the rest of it was the post-sale, the like, the support, the everything that happened afterward was missing in in their entire like there wasn’t even like a real thought because they were selling through resellers for thinking the resellers should handle some of these, you know, problems. And I think we asked I said, so who’s the expert in this software? You are the reseller. And they’re like, what do you mean that you know?

Well, the resellers know they have their list, they have the audience, but they’re never going to be able to answer some of the questions, you know? Right. You don’t have a team training their team. They don’t have support staff. They don’t have any of these folks, to help with this renewal. And as successful as their campaigns were to acquire losing half of that after the year, it was terrible.

They had a huge leaky bucket.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was terrible, you know, and again, I think if you think about, you know, what we would have thought about a long time ago, we’ve been like, hey, marketing is super successful. What do you mean? Like, look at what we’ve done, right, right. And then you look at the other side of it, which is, oh my gosh, like, we can’t any of these people. The churn is huge, right? 50% is not a small number. And this is a, I don’t know, multiple multiple millions I mean, talking 100, $200 million.

Yeah. You know, a company that’s doing this right. I’m like, this is a lot. So we started to really, you know, I would say a lot of it was because, again, there were gaps in the go-to-market for sure, and there were gaps in their data set like they didn’t know the customer, their resellers, and customers. And there was no way to get them help. Right? Because the systems weren’t tied together. Like there’s no way to funnel it back to the corporate, you know, the company who has experts to help, you know, because they positioned their experts to help the resellers, which is fine. But it’s again, it’s a sale through model. 

Right? So that didn’t really help. I think that was, you know, one of those, like, scenarios where, you know, we did put some things in place that I think eventually held we, you know, as manual as it was back then, we at least finally were able to get like visibility and who the end customers have suggested some sort of preemptive way to not communicate to them on the day of renewal versus, hey, you know, have you thought about doing it three months before? And, you know, just to get a sense of, you know, what’s going to happen? And then, you need to have these, you know, this end users information or get your resellers to send this message out, right, so that they can if there’s trouble, they know about it right before it happens.

So I thought that was, that that ended up being successful. But I think it was like, again, to your question, that was that started off pretty, you know, it was lacking. I’d say. and in the end, it turned out to be much better. Okay. No, not that the entire problem was solved. It was just, you know, having a way to think about it. we did see, like, the renewal rates come up because they were preempted. They actually moved it back to like six months, like halfway through. Then they had a better proper onboarding process to get people successful right away. So there was there was like a lot of those changes that they had to make. Right. which I thought was interesting that they did, you know, these were sort of, you know, things you would think today are important. Yeah. But I’m talking maybe ten years ago they were sort of not. Yeah. Which is, which is, you know, I don’t know.

You know. Yeah.

You actually encapsulate it so correctly, which is I mean, that’s the essence of this podcast and the message which is when you think about go to market, it’s not just top of the funnel and getting to a sale or buy decision. It’s beyond that and how you keep the customers happy. And not to say that these customers or these people are looking at it from the wrong intention. It’s just the constraints of the resources and so much to do and only so much bandwidth or money and budget. Yeah.

And yeah. And I think, you know a tech was a lot different then. Right. I mean ten years ago there were a lot of tools that would integrate, you know, some of this information together. So I can see why, you know, the conditions were there. Again, we go back to like you have a you could have planned all this out. And if there was no ability to do it, you can right. The constraints of the company.

So totally. So that’s a good market success story. And do you have like a go-to-market failure story or a lesson?

You know, I think that was a failure story that I sort of thought through. In the end, it ended up being successful. Okay. And these were typically brought in when there were issues. I think we started getting a reputation for I, As you know, the saving the read accounts. Yeah, that’s the way it turned. and I think we, you know, I have to say, our team always did a great job in being able to turn around something that was, you know, provided a lot of value, which was really a testament to our team and the company we built. Right. They were not just looking at it from a, you know, a very sort of focused lens on this is all we do. And, if we needed experts in different ways of looking at this problem, we did bring them in and that helped.

Yeah. Right. because our services agency, we were not a product company where the only thing we knew was our product. That’s the difference. So I would say yeah I mean it was success. It was a failure turned into a success. I have probably lots of those similar stories where they started off, you know, in that same way. Yeah.

Very cool. And then just a quick note on or if you can touch upon like how the exit and the purchase and sale to Michael happen at digital buy. If you can share some insight like how you positioned or did they approach you, was it inbound or how did that happen?

We actually, knew that this was eventually the route we were going to go. So the first thing is the intention was that already. I personally did not want to turn our company into a lifestyle company where, you know, it funded a great lifestyle, but no one else benefited. I wanted a company where everyone who worked there benefited in some way.

I also knew that our agency was bound by the things we did, which might not allow the team to grow the skill sets they wanted to grow. Yeah, right. And, you know, from sort of like from that concluding conclusion, I’m like, you know what? Let’s make it intentional that in, you know, if we were to plan and exit, what would it take? we grew our business. 

We got on the Inc 5002 times in a row. we just kept our, you know, our, our growth numbers pretty, pretty high. Yeah. and it helped with solving real problems for customers. and then at some point, you know, when you start making your way into the, the, the, the awareness of some of these agencies who are looking to build out, you know, the services we were, we started getting approached and I think, it was rightly it was by design we need we knew we had to work on who we were, what we represented to the market, and why we were so valuable to any agency.

You know, and what made us different? Right. What is your what is the one thing that you guys do really well? and that you can say that this is who we are and why we are so good at what we do. Right? We created a, you know, although we’re a services agency, we created a product, you know, the product helped our consulting work. Yeah. We were able to develop that. We also developed a framework for how you deploy certain things on the Adobe platform, like it was, you know, the gold standard we actually identified.

 And we said this is the way it should be done. We put that on the map. at that point, we had, you know, suitors, and we had some great conversations. The reason I decided to go with Merkel in the end was their mission and ours aligned perfectly. their goal was to create the largest B2B agency in the world. Nice. A very simple mission, right? It’s a very simple statement, but the mission.

But not easy for sure. Yeah.

And I think that I was drawn to that. I think, you know, you know, the way I thought about it, if we can associate and be successful in this mission, everyone in our company benefits from it, right? Yeah, right. To be the best at something. It’s amazing. Right. And I think all of the things that come from it, you know, on the monetary reward rewards all the career growth, all of those things would come naturally. and so that was really the driver for the decision. Yeah.

Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. That was unplanned but thought it would be beneficial for the listeners as well just to showcase or show the thought process of how a founder thinks about an exit and what steps need to be taken. That’s helpful. So if we were to summarize like 1 to 2, go to market skills that you’re known for, for example, either your peers or your industry or customers.

When they think about, hey, you know, we have this XYZ problem and we need to talk to Ryan, what would that be?

I think it’s still like fundamentally in you know, I would put it in the, the still back in this revenue ops, you know, lens of the world. Yeah. We’re really good at identifying the roadblocks to revenue in a tactical sense. Right. If you have demand Gen if you have, you know, sales operations, if you have a market, you have all these groups, but then how do you work them all together to, to to really get you the clearest line of sight to revenue, removing every hurdle between its path. Like we are really good at that. Like whether it’s a data issue, whether it’s a process issue, whether you don’t have something, whether it’s, you know, you’re saying the wrong like we really are, I don’t know, in the years sort of refined that skill set because we were working so closely with where the sort of the engine of all of this came together.

Right. you know, because I think there’s definitely there is an, a company I think that doesn’t have like a, a good idea of how they should go to market or a plan, a strategy like that. That’s fundamental. Like it’s there. I think the problem comes in when you need to execute that plan, lots of holes start to appear there. And you know, we’re not a company that will help you build a go-to-market strategy. But we can look at your go-to-market strategy and say, these are the things we need to do to make sure that that revenue is optimized. That path has not been obstructed in any way. Whether it’s like your system, you don’t have the right people to do whatever it is. Right? and we’ve done a lot of those things and it’s, it’s just a, it’s just that area, where we like to focus on.

Very cool. I love the fact that how you emphasize the tactical and the execution piece, because strategy, it’s super hard to get strategy, but more often than not, really good people have strategy in mind.

But then when it comes to execution and tactics, especially around like in your case, LiveOps, which is the people, the tech stack, and the system and process.

Yeah, all game is a whole different ball game. And it is its detailed work. It is necessary and it’s, it’s and I think it’s just a lot of times it’s, it’s siloed within the groups. You know, they’re functionally, you know, I get I get, you know, odd things where it’s like we have everything in our Salesforce instance. I’m like, okay, but I can only touch the leads. I can’t touch the contacts. I’m like, what I like. It’s like, what? Yeah, you think you.

Have everything, but you cannot touch it. You can only touch a subset.

Yeah. So I say it’s these things like let’s work together on like really unblocking like do you need access to this? Yes, but I can’t touch it. You know who defined that rule, right? Like what happened in the past that created this, right? Like there’s always some genesis.

Like somebody messed up something and they put a really hard rule in this thing. And I said, guys, this is like, this data is owned by you. And in order for you to do this work, you need X, right? Like, let’s rethink this part. So I think you know again it it always falls down when it comes down to how do I get this moving? how do I and, you know, a lot of the I think it’s, you know, acceptable to say I have a strategy. Now let’s go execute. And, you know, like it’s supposed to happen right away. Right? It’s part of the strategy is to think how long it takes to do these things. Correct. Yeah. Right.

And other specific tech stack technologies that you specialize in, you or your team specialize in, like Salesforce, Marketo, or others.

Yeah. I mean, like for us We focus on, you know, B2B less common and B2B is. Salesforce, HubSpot, HubSpot, Marketo.

You know, we’re now a reseller for, we’re actually a, an agency partner for a company called synchrony, which I really, I really encourage everyone to look at because, like I said, you know, ten years doing 400 different implementations and thinking about the modern data stack and the number of tools that are in there, and each one having a piece of data that needs to be, you know, sort of consistent and persistent. That alone solves so many problems and that, you know, there’s a lot more that that does. But fundamentally, I, I need we needed a data platform that allows us to Asynchronously connect all this data quickly and actually have it persistent throughout all the applications. This was like I needed this problem solved. And then when we sort of found the software and, you know, through relationships, I’m like, that’s actually the problem I’ve been trying to describe when it comes to data. So we set up so quickly to become, you know, a partner to deploy it.

I think like I think it’s, it’s the for us, it was the missing element because of where we were. We work right in that middle. Right. So it was really important to have a data platform.

Very cool. Switching gears and switching topics to a different context or totally over here. Clearly an expert in DevOps. So what are the 1 2, or 3 things that you do to stay on top of the trends and what’s happening in the real world?

Well, I think that I’m part of a few communities, you know, marketing pros or marketing ops professionals. is a it’s a really diverse community of mops, rev ops, and sales ops leaders. you know, there are some individuals in there. you know, I’m part of the CMO Alliance. Like, I listen to a lot of these, you know, and it’s I don’t have a particular person in mind besides, like, maybe Scott Brinker or somebody, you know, who there’s a lot of, like, you know, sort of vision type things.

And then, you know, you have Gartner putting out, you know, content. there are obviously a lot of those out there. But I like again, on the tactical level, I mean, these communities that people will post very specific problems. And the way they describe it is like, you know when you’re reading the Gartner paper, it’s like 1000 levels up, and then this person is describing this problem this way, right? And I tend to hone in on those messages. So I followed those and I read a lot on the modern data, you know, blogs, about how, you know, there’s a whole concept of, you know, data platforms or, you know, data first platforms, which is a different spin, newer than, you know, modern data stack. It’s like a data-first stack and what that shape looks like. And how do you set up governance for it? And so I like those that are really interesting. you know, there’s those are really interesting, you know, blogs to read.

I also follow certain companies, like as Scale. They talk a lot about this, which is great. And obviously synchrony puts out quite a bit on their autonomous, data platform. So, you know, it’s like a lot of these things are newer. I tend to look for, I don’t know, like really clear-cut tactical use cases and problems. Right. And so when, when, when I see sort of, I don’t know, fluffier material out there, I’m like, I’ll read it conceptually. Like I kind of get it, but I’m looking for like, hey, we did this and we had this problem and this is how we fixed it, you know, and I don’t know. So to me that comes a lot more through the community.

Yeah. No, I hear you I mean communities are great sources of people literally opening up their minds about the problems that they’re facing today for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well just to be respectful of your time, the final question for you, Ryan, is if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Are you talking about like a year ago, you know?

Which one we’re talking about?

Yeah, exactly. No. Day one of a go-to-market journey ever since you went down this path of DevOps. Yeah. Like, what is that point at that time?

I think I would have done a little bit more, you know, validating the sort of ideas that I had. I got so excited. I just started a company the minute I got back from vacation. I’m like, this is what people want. This is what you know. And I thought, you know, I thought because I, you know, we did 400 different implementations. Like, I would know the answers, right? I was, Am I really wrong? Right. Like it was like and I think I would if I had taken the time to really talk to the ICP. You know, like. Like what we spent a lot of time talking about, like, what did you think about this? And like, really, really get to know describe a little bit more carefully than I did instead of all the excitement.

Right. That would have helped. And, you know, I say that because, again, as a founder, the minute you start something, you’re burning cash. Yeah, right. And Any of you have no projects and you’re burning cash. That’s not a good way to go. Now, if you’re a little bit more careful about it and you did it, you would have to make fewer adjustments. I think that would have that. I would have told myself, hey, talk to a few more folks, at least have a number, and then you get a certain level of comfortability with what you’re trying to do and then dive head in. Right. You know. Yeah.

Yeah. It is what it is.

I mean it goes back to our entire go-to-market discussion. Right. How we started this podcast, which is again go to market constantly shifts. And for you as a successful founder with an exit, you had to go back and learn. And again start fresh from scratch and talk to your ISPs.

It goes back to those fundamentals again. And not to say again, I’m not trying to be a preacher. I myself am guilty of making those mistakes. I’ve been there, done that. I’m still doing that.

Yeah, we all are. You know, and I think these discussions are great. You know, I think, it helps remind others who might be in a similar situation. Absolutely. I think it also is like, you know, we made a pretty good sized pivot, you know, like within the first few months, as I’m finding things aren’t working. and it’s okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, it really is. It’s it’s it’s like you’re not stuck on your strategy forever.

You know? Yeah.

So I think that’s important to to really give yourself a little bit of grace when it’s not going right.

Yeah. Excellent. That’s a great way to end the podcast.

Growing your startup is not as easy as it sounds. 

In this episode, Canberk Beker, former corporate lawyer, founder, and now, Head of Growth at HockeyStack, shares the pivotal moments and strategies that shaped his success. 

Learn how to switch from a broad approach to a specialized product focus, the importance of understanding your Addressable Market, and Ideal Customer Profile for effective brand positioning, and his unique approach to decision-making by balancing data and intuition.

Join us in this episode to learn how to go from idea to scaling!

Tell us more about how you think about go to market like what is in your viewpoint and your perspective approach of how you view and define go to market.

So I think go to market should be considered like a baking polish. When you think of baking powder alone, it means that you cannot eat it, you cannot drink it. Basically, it is nothing. But if you combine it with the right ingredients, like egg with millet with foot flour, you can bake a great cake and go to market, I think this needs to be considered all together with product sales, and marketing. And if you don’t consciously go to market with other elements, and if you think go to market buy stuff is alone. I think that’s a huge mistake. So for me go to market is the combination of the harmony of sales, marketing, and product working together. 

Oh, I love your analogy. You talked about baking. And yes, baking. I mean, all the ingredients by itself don’t mean much or may not mean much. But when it comes together in the right formula right here, the right mix, and the right ingredients, you get a lovely cake, banana bread, or anything that for that matter, right? So I like that I’m gonna agree with you that it’s all of these things working in harmony. And that end product is the beautiful side effect of a go-to-market motion.

Definitely. And in my next analogy, I will be using banana bread. This is way better than normal cake.

Yeah, the reason why is banana bread is my son is into baking. He’s like he’s actually 14 years old. And he’s into baking. And folks come in his banana bread baking ability. So that’s what came to mind when he said baking. analogy. Right? Pretty good. So with that, let’s step back, big picture. Walk us through your career journey and growth and what caused you to go down this path in the first place.

I think it was mostly a coincidence. To be fair, I was a lawyer. I was a corporate lawyer. And I was working with startups actually. And I was doing all of this due diligence stuff, all of this financial stuff. And it was just boring. I hate my life. And while I was working with startup people, I was like I was seeing them and I was like, okay, these people are having fun. These people actually love what they do. And I thought to myself, Okay, I’m still in my early 20s. Let me actually quit lawyering and find myself a job. And obviously, it was not easy. Like maybe I sent like over 100 applications, and I didn’t even get one response. And I was applying for all of these entry-level positions. I was applying for all of these unpaid internship positions, but there was nothing. And then I met with someone who was actually a management consultant in McKinsey. And he recently left his job there and joined a company called Cleanzy as the head of growth and he was the king, a sidekick. To be fair, like, literally he was just looking for someone who would be helping him. And he said, Do you want a job? I said, Yeah, sure, why not? And he was hired as gross. ticket back then.

I made it for my guest to share the entire story. But this is really interesting, a lawyer who got really bored with his last job, I get that. And you met someone from McKinsey. And what is the context? I mean, what is the conversation outreach like?

So one of the law firms that I was working with, I had a colleague, and her boyfriend was working at McKinsey. And then she introduced me to him while he was a consultant, and it was just, you know, hello, and Hello, yeah. Then a year later, I was speaking with her again, since we were both lawyers. And I told her about how unhappy I was and how I was looking for a new job. And she was like, you know, what, my boyfriend now is working in this company. And he’s actually looking to hire someone else. Okay, can we meet? We met again, and he was like, okay, but you need to have an interview. And I had an interview with the founders. And it was like a seed stage startup, you know, like 20 people and the founder basically is doing entity everything. And the startup itself was like Uber for the clinic, a b2c company, basically, matching people with cleaners. Yeah. And literally, I had no knowledge about startups, I had no knowledge about anything. So we hit the interview. And it was the worst interview in my entire life. Like, I did not know any of the answers. He was asking me how to grow a company, he was just gonna have to expand, expand to a new country, and I was just boosting. But after that, they were like, do you really want the job? Sad, I do really want the job. And the salary. It was like, 3x, lower than what I wasn’t making as a lawyer. But I said, you know, what if I’m not going to take the chance right now when I’m gonna take the chance? And that’s how I ended up being a growth hacker. And almost, I almost had no idea what growth hacker meant. Then I read a couple of books before I started the company, which was built scaling by Reed Hoffman, and lean startup, the 101 Startup. And actually, those books were really helpful for me to understand, okay, what I was going into, and then I basically applied that mindset to my entire life.

Very, very cool. Yeah, I mean, so many thought processes and so many questions come to my mind, right? I mean, kudos to you to be almost sure that you definitely want to get out of the legal profession, that’s one thing. But that’s relatively the easier decision compared to okay, if not law, what else? And then you gravitated towards growth. And you had the audacity and humility to take a low-paying job going down the pay scale? Because you believe in that path? 

It was definitely like the it was more like, I knew what I didn’t want to do. But I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I was like, Okay, I might be good at it. But also, there’s a high chance that I might not be. But I hate to take the chance. And I’m so glad that I did.

Right. And and really lucky that your first startup gig actually panned out? Well, I mean, you were there for one year, three months. So what are the learning curves? Or what were you doing there in that role?

Basically, everything. And that’s actually what I loved about startups. And that’s what I loved about growth because writing about the term, the traditional work, so you could end up doing everything. And as I said, it was a cleaning company, and writing about the cleaning company structure, there’s always a problem. You will let someone in and everyone has a different idea of what is perfect cleaning. Sure. And there an the people who clean the houses, they always think they do a good job. It is not like Uber like you can say okay, normally it takes five minutes, but if he’s there in 20 minutes, it means that, okay, he’s been slow. But including, it was very subjective. And, like, we were dealing with customers and cleaners were like, okay, the good job that we were dealing with cleaners and customers were like, it was a really awful clinic. And on the back end, we were building all of his perfect workflows, like perfect email automation, and perfect marketing campaigns. But at the end of the day, I realized even even if what we do, it’s not it depends on people. And I was like, Okay, maybe b2c is not my cup of tea. Like I wanted to build products. I wanted to be in software, not a b2b, or b2c self-service industry, but that yours was like a really intensive university degree. I was able to work with the product team, I was able to work with the marketing team, and I was able to work with the customer success team. And like some sometimes I was dealing with customers on the phone sometimes I was actually working with the product team in order to implement new features. And after that extensive time, I knew what I needed, I wanted to be in the startup industry, and I knew I wanted to be doing growth. But also I knew that I would like to be in software, and I would like to be in b2b.

Nice, again, putting yourself out there and then getting, because you can hypothesize as much as you want. Again, as you said earlier, you know what you don’t want, but you sort of kind of feel that maybe this is the path, you went and took the growth job in a b2c. But then you’ve got the feedback. I mean, that was the data and feedback to you saying that okay, I like the growth part, but I don’t like the b2c part of it.

Definitely, like I would like to deal with comprehensive here, I would like to deal with the bigger picture, not every individual

Got it. And then so you went into Hobbico, and deep crawl so, so explain the transition and the growth.

So after cleansing, I actually found the product manager. So after clean zip, I want to co-fund my own startup. And back then I was actually learning programming, I was learning Java, and I really wanted to be at my own product. But obviously, I also needed money to keep my life green and also keep learning programming. So I found a contract job, it was a three-month contract, and I was going to be the product manager of a b2b company, we’re Kindle. So they hit the idea. They hit programmers, and they only needed a product manager to basically create the workflows for the website and create the whole journey. So for three months, I did that. And after three months, I actually met with someone who happened to be my co-founder at Mowico, and he was the technical person. And I was a technical person wants to be a person. And we started building the product. And it was going to be in no code, mobile commerce builders, which would be integrated with Shopify apps for E-commerce and basically no cost mobile commerce. Yeah, we built the MVP. And by the time we launched MVP, COVID happened. And actually, for us, COVID was the good news. Because with COVID, e-commerce, the demand for E-commerce got skyrocketed, right? 

With e-commerce, the demand for mobile commerce got crocodile, everyone, every company needed a mobile app. And, you know, six months, we hit like, 1000 customers. And after a year, the company actually grew from 2 people to 20 people. And we thought, okay, it is time to get to the season. And the reason for that was okay, the product was going well, but the competitors and we had competence in the US back then I was still in Turkey and the amount of money we were making, was basically not enough to compete with our competition in the US. So we needed VCs that, but then actually a VC firm wants to acquire the US. And for me, I never wanted to be acquired, like, I never wanted my company to be acquired, but the money was good. And my co-founder actually wanted that. So I said okay, if you are buying, I am not going to be a burden, but I will be cashing out, and I did cash out, okay. It took like, a year and a half like the whole journey took a year and a half from me,

That’s really, a year and a half seeing all these things. I mean, seeing an idea to MVP to traction to getting funded. That’s like Blitzscaling.

Honestly, and again, I don’t want to say this a lot, often, but COVID really helped us like it was ended product, it wouldn’t be that fast. But with COVID like it was a natural demand, we didn’t create that demand, we didn’t actually need we didn’t need to educate the audience than now. Like, the most important thing I’m trying to do in my current company is to create is to create the demand to educate the audience. But in that case, the audience was already there. already captured the demand that existed. 

Yep. Fair enough. So just on that note, add more Wiko. So was that product idea yours OR the co-founders? 

It’s me it was mine.

Oh, okay. Very cool. And then you had the co-founder, who was more on the technical side of things, building, and coding.

Yeah. And at the same time, I was trying to learn how to build how to program but obviously, he was the one with more knowledge. But I will say after like maybe 6-7 months, it is I was able to understand what was going on in the court.

Yeah, no, fair enough. And how did you find the customers or how did the customers find you? The initial set?

It was Shopify like the Shopify app store, and like rebated could bid on keywords on the Shopify store like similar to app store optimization.

You were an app on the Shopify platform? 

Yeah. 

Understood. Very cool. And then after that, you went to deep crawl. 

Yep that time, I realized that, okay, I need to leave the country like I want to be in a better tech landscape. And I thought the UK would be a really good option. And I also realized that with Mowico, I was a co-founder. Before that, I was doing growth. And I really, back then missed being an individual contributor. So I said, Okay, let’s go back to basics. And back, then they were looking for demand generation managers. So I said, Okay, you know, what, I haven’t done marketing like I have done growth, I have done partial marketing, but I have never actually focused on the acquisition side. Okay, let me now focus on the top of the funnel, it took like, six to seven months, but they understood what I was trying to build. And they understood that I didn’t only want to perfect the top of the funnel, but I wanted to perfect the whole journey. So I was promoted to head of growth after like eight months. And I started dealing with the whole journey from the acquisition to adoption to retention referral site, which was really good, like, and I realized, if a company is like, it was ideal size 100 people, and I was able to do everything, but also that there were enough people to help me out. Like, I wasn’t getting burnout, but also I was able to see everything. And after a year and a half at Deepcrawl, There was no full offer from Cognism, and I want to have the cycle. So with Cognism, it was 1 to 50 employees then became 50 – 100 employees. Movico it was 1 to 15, 1 to 10 employees then 10 to 15. Right? We didn’t grow when it was 50-100 then became 100 to 200. Now imagine Cognism was trying to 500 I was like, Okay, I want to have this circle. So I joined that. And it was like 2500 companies, then it grew to 500 to 1000 people. And it was also performed to see the whole journey because, in other companies, I sowed the seed stage Series A, B, and at Cognism, I sold three C and D. And I was okay. Now I think I saw the whole journey. And at that point, I realized, Okay, do I want to see 1000 to 5000? And I said, No, that’s not my cup of tea. And actually, in Cognism, I realized, you know what, I need to be in a small company because I need to build I have the hands-on experience. Hence, I joined the HockeyStack once again, to the beginning of the circle. And now I will be working in a company that has 10 to 50 employees. And I’m starting from the seed stage again, once again. 

Very cool. And what is your responsibility going to be at HockeyStack? 

Similar to the whole journey from acquisition, activation, adoption, and retention referrals. Because, again, I feel like, if we focus on one part, then we are missing the halogen. Like for me, we need to consider the whole journey as a whole. And you cannot skip that part by like, okay, most of the corporate companies most of the enterprise companies will have a different opinion. But for me, I would like to have eyes on the complete journey. Because I feel like if I don’t understand the whole journey, I can not create the perfect scenario. And I always want to create the perfect scenario. 

Yeah, very cool. And then something also that stands out for me. Canberk is the selection of the startups. I mean, he gets wanting to work in startups is one thing. But more often than not startups within the first six months or even 12 months things go either, personally for you, because you’re not a good fit for the role. Or the company’s situation is not going well. Right. But in your case, you had almost like, I wouldn’t say homeruns, but definitely, singles, doubles consistently, really good ones. So what was the secret? Was there a formula or how did you land? These kinds of roles?

So I think, okay, in your question, there were two parts. The first part was okay, the startup might go south. Also, you might not be a good fit, or I will start with the letter. I think so. I think it was my law background. Like, I always appreciated what I had in startups because I really hated my career. So even if I didn’t like the job, even if I didn’t like that company, or even if I didn’t like some aspects of the company, I stayed because I knew where I was coming from, and I always appreciated what I had. And in terms of casual fit, sometimes it wasn’t the best. Sometimes I hit really messy problems, but I was like, okay, it is still better than being a lawyer. So it was more like appreciation, appreciation of what I had and what I was doing before. But in terms of the companies, I always tried to work in a company that I believed in their product. Like with Deepcrawl, I believed in technical issues, especially for enterprise companies. And like, when I looked at the product, I was okay, I can sell this product, like I always told myself, can I sell this product, because in order to sell that product, I need to believe in that product and with difficult I was okay, I can sell this product. And it was actually a challenge for me because I knew that I was going to be selling this product, and creating the strategy for the growth of technical SEO people, which I had no experience with before. And after technical issues, I was more confident and Cognism and had a much broader perspective and much broader, personal like damage-linked marketing, sales, CSM revenue operations, and people at the same time. But again, I looked at the website, I was like, I can’t sell this product. And as soon as I was confident in myself about selling the product, I said, Okay, I want to join this company. And he was saying, at HockeyStack, I was using their product for over two years, and I love the product. And at the time, I was okay, if I love the product, I want to be in that product. 

Got it. I think the last point that you mentioned is critical, which is if you’re in like a growth, demand gen kind of a role, or even sales for that matter. The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of the user buyer of the product and see if you love the product. Right? I think that’s a very critical point. So when you actually go into these websites, like during the interview, or before taking the offer, but you actually go into the website, trying out the product yourself and doing a competitor analysis, what is that process like?

I exactly like, this because when I work in a company, I actually give my 110% – 120%. And in order to do that, I actually need to believe in the product otherwise, I just cannot work. And during the process, like with deep crawl and with Deepcrawl, the process was different. So a headhunter approached me. And when they gave me the name of the company, I said, Okay, give me a couple of days because I want to actually look for the company. Then I found the competitors, I found Landscape and Twitter back then I had no idea what technical SEO was, I only knew SEMrush and Screaming Frog. And apparently, they were like the SMB solutions. But in a couple of days, I realized, okay, there’s an enterprise part of it, these enterprise companies actually are willing to pay good money for this product. And this product solves these problems. And then I called back the headhunter and said, Okay, I would like to continue having interviews. With Cognism, it was a bit different, because Cognism had a really good branding strategy. And they were on my LinkedIn every day. And I really appreciated the way they did marketing, I really appreciated the transparency because all of their team had been posting on LinkedIn every day, about their views on the experiments. And I was okay. Apparently, this company supports experimentation and culture, this company and encourages that. And I said, Okay, I want to join, and then they had an opening, I said, Okay, I just sent a message to the CMO. I have been following you for a long time. And I really appreciate what you do. And I would like to have a call with you. 

Nice. 

And back then I already knew the product. So I was like, this is your product. I know your product. I know, these are your personas. And these are how you should be serving your strategy. This is how you should be creating your strategy. And she was like, Okay, this is my calendar. Link, please. Can you book a call with me?

Nice, very cool. Very cool. This is I mean, we can go on and on. And we have a lot of other topics to cover. But thanks for sharing your career journey the transition points what led you to the next role and so on. Right, really important, especially for the listeners who are still early or mid-stage in their careers. The reason why I went down this rabbit hole Canberk is to give a formula or a playbook for those who are actually figuring out how to make the right transitions. So thank you. So you did mention that you’re joining HockeyStack as a full-time growth lead. So congratulations on taking that role. Yes, starting soon. You made me aware of that earlier. So talk to us about what is HockeyStack and who are your customers. Who do you serve?

So HockeyStack is a marketing attribution platform and actually a revenue platform in which b2b companies can collect their ad platforms, they can collect their CRM, they can collect other products that they might be using, like direct qualified, or like snowflake, Tableau, and HockeyStack, firstly, merges all of that data. So you can see the total return and spend of each platform on the campaign level on the ad level on the group level, you can see the whole customer journey like for example, if you’re running LinkedIn ads, you mostly rely on people who click on your ad. However, cookies can show you from the first impression. So even if they don’t click on that, if they saw your ad, the HockeyStack basically merges that from the first impression to the close one. So you can understand the exact return on investment of each of your ad creative each of your ad content. Apart from that, it shows the influence of marketing advantage, like, Okay, we have this advantage, every marketer claims that advantages are influenced by marketing, but you cannot prove it with HockeyStack, you can actually prove what was the art punk deals journey before they become an art band. Like if they had been seeing NS if they had been clicking in as if they had been visiting the website if they did, what the ACT what actions they had been taking. So actually, it is helping marketing teams to have discussions with their finance teams, because now marketing teams don’t only see what is the impact of inbound, but they can see their impact in outbound. Apart from that, it can do forecasting, for example, you can create different choices like I want to increase my LinkedIn budget by 5%, what will be the increment incremental impact of this in the next three months, it shows you because the data are focused, the HockeyStack algorithm is basically trained on your own data. So they have this machine learning system. So by looking at your historical trends, it actually gives you recommendations and gives you about what you can do or what you shouldn’t be doing. And again, like I had been using HockeyStack for over 3 years and 2 of my companies. And when I stopped using it, there were three people like 3 co-founders, and now the company is like 11 people, still a small company, they just got a seed round. And last year there was they were in the Y Combinator batch. So it is just starting. And I feel like it was a really nice time to join the company. Also they actually built the product with my recommendations, like Cognism was one of the biggest customers and I was the power user. So each time I wanted the product, they were like, okay, yeah, we deliver it. And now it feels like it is my product. And again, it has been the product that I used the most during my tenure at Cognism. And now I feel like since I know so much about the product since I have been a user of this product for so long. I think I can perfect the whole growth journey. And I’m joining them as the head of growth and I will basically be funding the whole growth function there. 

Very cool.Yeah.

Yeah, so thanks for sharing your overall career story career journey as well as how and why you joined HockeyStack. And now something another segment that the listeners love is more around go-to-market success, and the go-to-market failure story given your varied head of growth and demand gen rolls, so why don’t you share with us a success and failure story, I’ll let you pick which one you want to start with. 

First, let me start with the failure. And it comes from Mowico. And when I was telling about the story, I told him, it was a Shopify app. But obviously, it didn’t start as a Shopify app. Like every funder, we were like, Okay, we want to build the perfect product, we want to build a product, that would work with every ecommerce platform with every integration. So we try to build a really proper open source platform, which would be connected with Shopify Magento, all of the cost customize e-commerce platforms, and all Bosch. If you build for everyone that you don’t build for anyone, like the product, it was not working there. There have always been delays. It was slow, it was not loading. And even for MVP, like Paul Graham has this quote that I really love. If you are proud of your MVP, it means that you ship too late. It is correct. But in our case, it wasn’t even an MVP. It was just a random product that does anything fast. But it was different doing anything that we wanted. Yeah. So we said, okay, let’s focus on one thing, where most of our users will be Shopify, then Okay, let’s try to build a Shopify app, rather than an app for every other company. It took us like 2 and a half months to understand what was wrong, because we really wanted to build a product that would work with everything. But then we realized it Okay, in our target market, 8% of the potential customers were actually using Shopify. And we knew that as a two-people company, we will never be able to sell companies with like, 10,000 employees. So even though they had customers, the platforms, they would never be our ICP. So, we steered the direction, and we focused on Shopify, but it was actually a failure because we basically wasted two and a half months, trying to be something impossible. And in terms of success, I think it was with deep crawl. So when I joined, it was a technical SEO platform, and the product was built for technical issues. But then we realized, okay, the technical SEO landscape, literally every single landscape, like on LinkedIn, they’re, like 8000 people, right? Compared, if you look at, I don’t know, marketing managers, they’re like, 2 million, 3 million marketing managers. And since the target addressable market was low, at some point, we knew that we would be eating trucks. And we needed to have different stakeholders. Also, it was an enterprise product, it’s your people didn’t, most of them didn’t have the authority to buy a product, which was like 50k, they always had to include the CMOS, and they always had to include the people who would actually sign off the bill. But also, a technical issue product didn’t sound like a tool that would be interest of CMO or VP of marketing. So we need to find a way to differentiate it. And we were discussing it with the product team, we were discussing with the sales team, how we can create a different product. And then we came up with a solution. What if we, like the product was going to need some improvements? But we realized that those improvements, were going to take like maybe a couple of months, and it is definitely a time that we could wait. And after adding a couple of new features. We presented the product as a website health tool instead of a technical SEO tool, which would not only be crawling your web pages, but it would be crawling all of your images on your website, it will be crawling all of your website speed all of the technical side of it. But apart from SEO, it will also show the health of the website like how your website can be faster how your website can be, can be performing better. And we actually rebranded Deepcrawl into Lumar and actually called the podcast. Deepcrawl was the company that I joined and I don’t I just’m not good at with new names. I still call it Facebook and I don’t call it meta. Yeah. So we basically changed the whole GTM motion by basically adding a couple of new features to the product changing the name and starting, showcasing it as a website health product. And with that, actually, our target addressable market increased so fast and so big. And we were actually able to start having conversations with the director of marketing, and VP of marketing. And if it was a technical stupid product, they would be like, Okay, I’m going to invite my SEO manager. But when we said website health, then they knew that they had to invite other people, like the number of stakeholders got bigger, the product marketing people started to join, the content managers started to join, which will also eventually increase our ACV. So it was actually a really successful GTM motion for us. 

Very cool. I mean, oh, my God, there are so many lessons in both the stories that you shared there, Canberk, both in the failure story and the success story. But one common pattern or common theme is the ICP, the ICP the TAM, right? In the case of your first, in Mowico, I forgot the molecule, right? So in that you are going to broad, if you’re everything for everyone, essentially, you’re not serving anyone Simple, right and different laccase, you narrowed your ICP, and you said you only focus on the Shopify platform users and for Shopify, and even within that you narrow that further, it’s not for the large companies, it’s for the smaller within Shopify. And we look at Deepcrawl and Lumar, the newly branded version, the way you approach and the way you articulated, where if you just position yourself as a technical SEO, problem-solving product, it’s very narrow, your time is narrow, you’re just talking about, like the SEO teams, and the SEO manager at the most, versus repositioning and saying, Hey, we are all about how to make your website more healthier, more functioning, and productive for you. For you, the go-to-market team, and the marketing team, mainly. Now you’re expanding your ICP, you’re expanding how you should be pursued in the market. So, when I’m hearing all these things, all the key nuggets of product marketing come to my mind, which is you talk about the positioning and messaging, you talk about customer insights. You talk about audience insights, you talk about sales enablement, if you have a sales team, right, and you talk about a new product launch, or a new, in this case, it’s a rebranding, it’s technically a product with a much bigger agenda. And then there’s a new market launch in your earlier company does all versus knowledge, just focus on Shopify? And I can go on and on. But all the things you share are so many, master the product marketing and go to market overall.

And today, this thing I really love about working in small companies, because as soon as I realized that, I was not able to do that if Cognism, I knew that it was time to go, like you could do it in a company with 100 employees, you could do it in a company, 20 employees, but you cannot do it with a company with 700 employees. It is just too big for that. 

Alright now, for sure. And then. So who led the decision or the discussion around rebranding and expanding the TAM?

So back then it was my CMO. And I because we kept discussing like, okay, apparently the product is for SEOs. And the CRO has been really successful with SEO people. But my CMO, she always had this enterprise idea, like before she joined the CRO was actually if PRC had a big motion. And most of the customers were actually some big customers, they would just start using it. But my CMO actually, basically turned that motion off and focused on the SRG motion and focus on the enterprise side. But as you focus more and more there, we realized, okay, this is not going to be sustainable, because, okay, we want to sell 50k product. SEO people love us, but they don’t have daughters. But again, we were like, Let’s reverse engineer this situation. If me, as a head of growth. So about technical SEO, would they engage with it? No, I would think they want to target it to me. What would make me engage would be evoked from like just a growth, similar to growth growth is a really vague term and you can actually make out everything you can say I’m doing product, you can say I’m doing marketing, and we were like, Okay, well, what would be that vague term for marketing? People? It is a website, every marketer is responsible for their website. Okay, how we can combine what the court is doing right now with the website okay Deepcrawl growth website, is the SEO part but can two more, and then we start discussing this with the product people what we can do like what what you can do it easily, like we don’t want to. We don’t want you to work on a product roadmap for three years, what is the possible thing, what is the easiest thing that you can do, but that will also help us to not be an SEO product anymore? It was basically reverse engineering the actual product, okay, we are crawling the website, but not on now, not only we are going to be crawling the website, but we are also going to be measuring the website speed, and we are also going to be measuring all of the problems on their site, it was already in the product, though, it was only a couple of new costs to be added. And it was only like a couple of different sections to be added to the code. So once we, we were sure about it, and that time, the CTO earlier, he came up with all of this idea like, he basically plotted the whole idea into this. And once the CTO, the CTO, basically created the journey and created the ideal use cases, we were like, okay, then this means that we can call it a website health tool. And then there was no category like, the category didn’t exist. So we said, okay, website health. Is it vague enough? Yes. But Do people understand what it does? They do, it is not like, okay, so vague that nobody will own it. It is vague enough that everyone will understand. And now you can just go to the CMO or the head of growth and say, Okay, if your website doesn’t convert, then your conversion rate will increase like that, why your website might not convert your website speed, your bounce rate. And if your website is like two seconds slower, it means that you are going to lose this amount of customers. And especially again, our customers are enterprise our customers were especially customer-facing enterprise companies like b2c companies like Nike, like Adidas, and they really needed to perfect their sales. And actually, I hate the approach I use the approach that I use in Mowico, like in Mowico. Also, my customers were e-commerce platforms. So like I knew how bounce rate was important for them and how much our conversion increased the conversion was important for them. So we basically use the approach that I hit the molecule for like SMB companies, but we applied it for enterprise. But the thing is, it was the same for every company, at the end of the day, they want to maximize sales. And in order to maximize their sales, they had to perfect their website in Mowico, they had to perfect their mobile commerce platform. It was difficult, they had to perfect their website, but they had to perfect their sales platforms.

Right. Now, this is really cool. So I thank you for sharing that thought process and how you guys pivoted. But clearly, the internal thought process was not magically reflected in market understanding, and the demand creation shift and the demand capture shift. So I would assume, and there’s a very safe assumption that content brand and product marketing aspects will be played a big role. So walk us through how and if you are the CMO, shaped and come up with the content strategy, the brand strategy, and the product marketing strategy for these.

It was more like a test download. Like, As again, there was no category, we had no idea what kind of content we had to be creating. So similar to our thought process in the beginning, we reverse-engineered, okay, we want to be seen as a website help platform. So what would you expect from a website that had a platform to three points? Okay, I would expect it to be doing that it to be doing good. And it to be doing that? Right there? Okay. Who would you be targeting? If you were websites had platforms, demand managers? And if you were talking to chat managers, how would you target them? Okay. It will help you with your landing pages, it will help you with your demo submissions. Perfect. This is for b2b. For b2c who would you be targeting these two micro-managers, performance managers? And what would be saying that if your website is not good, then all of your ad spend will be for nothing? Okay, you might have the perfect ad on Google, and you might have the perfect PPC campaign. But if they don’t comment on your website, then you are unsuccessful, therefore you need to pay attention to the website help. So we basically try to find all of the pain points for contact people. The pain point was okay, you might be creating the perfect ebook, you might be creating the perfect content. But if people coming to your website don’t read, it doesn’t really matter. So you need to understand how your website is working. So it was more like okay, what they do, what can be their problem, and how we can solve their problem with the product. 

Yeah, so that’s the audience to pain points mapping which translated to the messaging, but all that messaging has to translate to content and campaigns.

Yeah, so basically, we tested like, for the content, we said, okay, website health, and what website health means for firstly for us, what does website helped mean for us? Then? What does website health might mean, for a digital marketing manager for a b2b manager for a b2c manager? Then after understanding what it meant, and what could it mean for other people we were able to create content but for that we first needed to understand then once we understood that, it was easy to create the product marketing material, it was easy to educate the salespeople, it was easy to create all of the sales materials because then we knew what we want to do. And we knew what might be useful for our personnel.

Yeah, and what kind of content and go-to-market channels did you use for this let’s start with content ebooks, videos, blogs, white papers, and podcasts.

We started with ebooks and ebooks are about demand jet engines, we created this concept of demand engine, and how to perfect your demand engine, it started with okay, you can have all the perfect campaigns, you can have all of the page structure. But in order for the dimension engine to work, it was about okay, your website so is a digital marketer. They will download an ebook about the imagination. Okay, they will, okay, I want to learn about too much change and it will start with classical ebook content. Okay, digital marketing this list is but the second part of the book will include something they they didn’t know. Okay, digital marketing brings you up until here. But in order for it to bring revenue you need to pay attention to so it was an educational piece for digital marketers, then, we also created some videos that were more like what would be happening before and after. Like if your website health is below that number. And above that number. It was the educational videos but the thing that we did, and the thing that worked the best was the URL-based marketing. I call them the UBM. So for us, we knew that the ideal customer would have at least 1 million years. And again, Shopify would be a perfect example. Actually, Shopify was a perfect ABM champion. And I was like, Okay, I’m familiar with Shopify, and I was like, I want to promote Shopify. And this time, I want to make Shopify my customers. So we create all of these websites, and then we create that list like commerce with more than 1 million euros. Then we created, ABM campaigns in which we actually did create the product actually analyzed their website and website health, and campaigns were like, hey, Shopify, we actually enlarged your website and your health score is 85.

And you have microsites and landing pages just for those accounts. 

Yes. And it was more like you are 75. But you know what? So if you want to understand why you’re scoring 985 Let’s have a call. Or with Nike, it was like, you have 75 I did not sell 77. Reebok hasn’t it? Yeah. And we can help you to get 8-5. Let’s show you how very cool it was at the actual point like that a BM motion. The UBM motion, as you might call, it was the actual educational piece and it actually helped the company to close so many enterprise deals. 

Very cool. Very, I mean, this is actually a showing the product in action, and directly pointing out the pain points. And by the way, do you know, it’s not just pointing out the problems, but we can actually help you solve those problems with this product?

Yeah, and the thing I love the most WAR iable to use the product in my marketing.

Right.

And like now, this is what we are doing at HockeyStack as well. We are creating this ABM campaign in which actually HockeyStack analyzes the active campaigns of potential companies. And once they click on that, they see their own dashboard. They see all of their lives, they see what their this might be bringing, right like using your product in your own marketing. I think one of the most powerful and one of the most beautiful things that you can do.

No, for sure. And how long did it take? So for example, let’s go into ebooks that he created plus the UBM campaigns, like from idea ideation to actually putting it out there. How long did it take and who were the people involved? Like what skill sets?

for ebooks, I think it was a couple of weeks. The first thing was okay, we need an ebook, but what if we can do and again, it was reverse engineering. It needs to be catchy enough so that people would download right, but also it needs to be able to show what we Like it cannot be on our digital marketing. But if it is only about website health, nobody would pay attention to the current. So that ideation process took like maybe a couple of weeks. But once the ideation process was over, it took a couple of days to create the demo, because we already created all of the previous ideas. 

During the ideation you just listed, okay, this is what the content should be and should not be, and go into this depth, you’re then handed over to like a content lead or someone. 

Yeah. With UBM, it took 2 days. So I was talking with my CMO and we were like, Okay, what is our ICP? Yeah, and okay, now we can go to Marketing Leaders. Yes, on the personal level, we know the ICP, but what about on the company level, we cannot just say our ICP is 10,000 plus employees, our ICP is URL. And with the MQL, we were able to count the yellow numbers. Again, it was a B2B channels product. So we basically did 100 companies, 100 companies, and then we basically reverse-engineered their number of years. And among the 100 companies, I said, I’m going to stop them. I’m going to work on the content. I’m going to deep crawl to analyze. And I just said to my designer, can you please create content in a day? She did nice. And then I basically went to the landing because we already had landing pages. So I made the changes on landing pages, and I personalized landing pages. And that was it. Like it literally took two maybe two and a half days? Because I really believed in that strategy. And after I believed it, I was like, Okay, I need to launch it now. Like if you believe it, you have to launch now. 

Yeah, very cool. Very, very cool. So switching gears, thank you for sharing all those tactics and details. And this is a goldmine for people who are listening. I mean, for all the listeners out there. I mean, key points that came out for me if I had to summarize is if you have a product and you believe in the product, put that product in use and use it in your campaigns. That’s number one. Second is, when you’re thinking about the pain points, you’re thinking about ICP, start creating content. And ebooks and videos you mentioned were critical in those as well. Right? And those really stand out for me. 

Like, if it was my current if it was turned on back, instead of ebooks, I would create, I get content because I get content is actually more education, like people actually can find that content when they are making websites search. Or you can just create a traffic ad and they can come and like they can read your content, even if it’s not giving you an email. And now like if I was doing it now, I would make it on gated. But back then it was gated.

Now fair enough. And this there’s a whole debate. I mean, you can go into a rabbit hole just talking about gated versus gated, but I’m a big believer in gated as well. But the key to making that work is your content has to be really high quality. Yeah. And it has to be consistent. It’s not like you just put one content out there and hope it works. Exactly. Yeah, for sure. So what are the different resources that you lean on in terms of like ideation, or, like, clearly all these ideas come to you? But there might be a process maybe by design or not that you’re leaning on either community, podcasts, or books or you just go for walks or friends.

It is a podcast like I listen to a startup podcast. I like to hear about different journeys, like different founder journeys. And this Week in Startups is one of those podcasts with Jason. And I do listen, to the podcast with refined labs, I do listen, to exit five podcasts. And I try to watch every TV series about startups. Like we crashed, Silicon Valley. Super pumped, all like, even though they’re like Hollywood kind of TV series. It gives you an idea. Like it gives you an idea of how you can port your product. And sometimes all you need is that veered inspiration. Because I feel like startups are like, like jazz music, you have to improvise. Like the classical music is about following a certain pattern. But it is like enterprise companies, they cannot do jazz, they need to do classical music. But the startup is just you need to improvise. But in order to improvise, you need to be getting influenced by other jazz people. And in that case, I get influenced by other startup founders. 

Very cool. I love the way you keep using analogies and metaphors. Making an article about music is really cool. So I mean, for my own selfish reasons as well, like, how did you How do you learn about these podcasts? What made you go to like all these different podcasts in the first place?

I think just I heard it from other podcasts, like, from one case, one podcast to other podcasts? Because with me, like, yeah, probably either on Twitter, I’m trying to follow every tech person on Twitter. Because I feel like, like, I don’t have the formal background, I don’t have the tech education. I don’t I don’t have that. Like, I have been here for the last five years, almost six years now. And I still feel like I’m a new person. So I’m trying to understand I’m trying to get to know everyone in the industry. So I try to follow everyone I listen to every bit of the thing that I find out about the YouTube algorithm, the YouTube algorithm is amazing. And probably I might have all of these podcasts or YouTube recommendations.

Got it. Yeah. Okay, cool. I mean, this is for my own podcast growth ideas. That’s the reason why I asked. But, yeah, really cool. One final question for you. Canberk is, if you were to go back in time, and turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self on day one of your go-to-market, not the lawyer journey, but the current market journey?

Always believe in data? If you see something in data and if someone says no, that’s not correct. Yeah, always believe in data, if there is no data, but if you have a gut feeling, it listens differently. Listen to your gut.