Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…US History bingo card an algebra bingo card and how can I make it so that I it is as cheap as humanly possible to make a card that targets that exact thing and so he made a little CMS uh and he hired uh I think it was a stay-at-home mom who was looking to make a little bit of extra money while uh you know she was like working with a you know an infant in her lap or whatever and just said hey I'll pay you for every single page that you can make and so she would just sit there and just think of I think she actually was a former teacher so she would just think through like all the things that she would want at school I think he I forget the exact math but like call it you know it cost him like one or two dollars to make a landing page and he knew that for every landing page he made he would generate two or three sales so not much like the you know it's not like this is a highly profitable Endeavor but he would sell them for like 10 20 bucks a pop so if you think oh it costs two bucks to make the page and I can sell two of these all of a sudden it's like two bucks to make it and I make 40 bucks on the other side so like the math sort of makes like makes sense where you're like hey this is a like decent little setup and so we look at this and go oh that mechanism is actually quite interesting because it turns out when you're looking for Integrations it has the same phenomenon where it's like I want to connect you know Salesforce and maretto or I want to connect uh you know HubSpot and a Google sheet or whatever right lots of different permutations and combinations of of these things you know there's probably not that many people searching for any particular one but if you have a lot of these things there probably is a lot of people searching for the the category of these types of Integrations and so our entire strategy then became let's make sure that we have landing pages that are specifically targeting these things and then we need to keep adding more apps to the platform so that we can have more pages that folks come come looking for uh and so that ended up creating a very low customer acquisition cost because you would go search and this is organic search this is not paid search mind you um for these things you would find zappier in the you know front page of the listings You' click through you'd sign up for a free trial and you know as soon as you'd upgrade to paid like you know we basically get we're basically profitable from day one because we didn't really pay that much to acquire the customer all it cost was the amount to build the integration and that was like a relatively low upfront cost for us uh and so uh it definitely enabled a lot of interesting Dynamics in the business to to to help us scale to where we were your product and distribution were kind of the same or they just intertwined and worked so well I don't know if that if that's fair to say I think that's 100% true I I think like when a lot of folks think about like product Market fit they think of it as like an ordering thing where it's like oh first we need to make the product and we're going to make this product that works this really well and think about like product Market fit they think of it as like an ordering thing where it's like oh first we need to make the product and we're going to make this product that works this really well and then oh the product's great we've got a great product now we got to go figure out like how to go market this thing and then they're now they're trying to like bolted on and it turns out like I actually think product Market fit is actually one thing it's not a sequence of things you want your product and your goto Market to be sort of one fluid motion um and the best plg companies like this is how it works it's like sort of intertwined in the same way and that's why I'm always like you know I have Founders come up to where they're struggling it's like I've got a great product like the product's not the problem like I got to go figure out how to get distribution for this thing and I'm kind of like well are you sure like are you sure you've got a great product like because I'm hearing is like I actually kind of don't think you have a great like a product maybe maybe it's a Well engineered product or a well-designed product that that absolutely could be true but is it a product that anyon e cares about because if no one cares about it and you don't have distribution engine that shows that people care about it I think you might want to go back to the drawing board yeah yeah I was going to say do you just start over like you got to rebuild the product completely different yeah I mean sometimes you can sort of like take bits of it novel pieces of it and you know you can sort of quote unquote pivot into something that you know maybe it is a bit of a nugget that somebody cares about um a lot of this is like there's a lot of Art in it though like you're sort of going through the idea maze you're trying to like put things in front of customer figure out what they're reacting to what they like what they don't like I think the more working experience you have probably the easier this gets because you just have a better sense for like what problems exist and like what those potential Solutions can be and so it does help to like have some exposure to that particular thing you know for me with zappier it was like a problem I felt like I was working with the maretto API I knew what was painful about it and so I sort of felt like well I kind of could be like customer number one for this thing and and that helped like that's short circuits what you're building when you sort of know like your problem and if your problem is representative of a problem that others have that it's pretty helpful you said something that I thought was really interesting too you said you don't think the exact same growth Playbook that you use on zapier could work today can you kind of explain that because that's I mean I hear a lot of people they say oh you know this SEO strategy that zier used we're going to use it too to be clear I think you could use this like longtail thing like this a lot of folks do this right this is how Yelp works this is how Thumbtack works like most marketplaces work this way you know Airbnb and the like sort of have the same Dynamic where they're targeting a lot of folks do this right this is how Yelp works this is how Thumbtack works like most marketplaces work this way you know Airbnb and the like sort of have the same Dynamic where they're targeting these longtail keywords I think if you were to try and do it in any of those spaces I named like if you were trying to compete with zappier or compete with Yelp or compete with air Airbnb or compete with any of these folks you're going to have a tough time because those keyword categories are so crowded at this point in time whereas you know 10 years ago when we were doing this the keyword categories were not crowded at all there was nothing there like you you go search for the stuff you would find like these P Pace bin links and you know uh like really bad API documentation and all that sort of stuff versus if you do these searches today you see zapier and zapier lookalikes um all over the place that are sort of running this Playbook and so it's just really tough to do it in this particular space but if you have an idea IDE that is and you go do searches and you see that like hey there's nothing sort of in here like I actually do think it could work quite well um in in other categories you need to find new and underco competitive distribution channels and kind of relating back to what you said earlier about yeah combining the product and the distribution it's I mean I think it's nearly impossible it does not happen very often but it's almost like you go you go to the the fringes the edge of the internet new platforms or channels that are kind of emerging um I don't know what that is today maybe it's chat GPT chat GPT is probably a good one Tik Tok you know Discord like there's always something to these like emerging channels emerging platforms where there is usually like a you you can sort of get outsized returns because they probably you know like the the big players probably aren't playing enough there because they they can't make the math work they sort of look at it and they're like we don't know how to measure it we don't know how to do XYZ so like we're probably not going to invest whereas a small company can come in and be like I mean we can't measure it either but like kind of doesn't matter to us because we have no business so like if it works at all it's great for us so many companies are built off the back of this like you think of how many companies got built off the back of say like Facebook early on like Zinga like you know exists because you know the Facebook platform totally uh was there now after over a while um those opportunities start to disappear because the platform matures and every you know Facebook like has an advertising platform Google has an advertising platform they know exactly how much to charge you to like extract all the marginal utility out of that and so the you know Roi you get from working on those platforms like starts to stabilize and you don't get these like outsized returns uh on the more mature platforms but um yeah you can at times like you just sort of like you said you have to find the niche you have to find the nooks and crannies that you know just are underexplored underappreciated um…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.