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.