Latest / Unstuck Pod / Top Fans Fuel Loyalty (Akshay Madhani and Jamie Schneiderman)
Transcript
- Jamie: All right, let's start with this. for people who don't know you and for who don't know scroll mark, who, tell me about how you started, who you serve, what problem you're solving. Let's tell everybody about you and what you're doing. Akshay Madhani: Yeah, 100%. A bit about my background. I'm Akshay before I started Scrollmark. I worked at Facebook for a couple of years, worked on a couple of different things there. I worked on messaging, worked on feed ranking. Eventually, while I was on the Pages team, I realized that A lot of businesses want to reach their customers through organic social, but struggle to do that. I started Scrollmark to help businesses reach customers more effectively over social. What Scrollmark is, is that We are a marketing DM platform. We help you contact your customers over Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs. These social messaging platforms that are underutilized in the marketing space today, mostly serve consumer companies. skincare companies, apparel companies. More recently, We're releasing a product called Social GBT for influencers at large to help them see what content is most likely to go viral. know that most influencers who sell something on the side, they're depending on organic social as their primary form of marketing. knowing, Having some predictability around what content I should be producing to get the most clients is really helpful in building in growth into your business as a content creator or an influencer. Jamie: That's very cool. I get what you're trying to help with. are there different targets? there's different customers that you're going out? talking about the influencers now, Akshay Madhani: you're on, 100%. ⁓ the for, the enterprise platform, really we end targeting brands that have more than two to 300 employees, doing more than 10, 15 million dollars in revenue a year, usually a lot more than that. We work with brands that are at a public scale. then on the other side, Social GBT is at an extremely low price point and is really accessible to everyone. And one of the really nice things is that it can help us produce some leads for the enterprise platform very often, as well as just serving as an additional source of revenue for our business. Jamie: Very cool. I got it. So I'd love to know two things, I'd actually love to know what was the impetus to really get. I you said you saw that there was a need and opportunity, but maybe. Tell me more about the moment that you realize I really have to do this. I'm gonna go and launch it. I'm actually interested in two things. There's that and then of course the second part is, and now you've launched a second product, Social GPT. And I'd love to also understand how you got there, because it's a more recent occurrence. Akshay Madhani: ⁓ Yeah. when we first launched the company, the impetus for us launching, Facebook, you're a cog in a machine, especially back in those days, now these days, maybe headcount isn't as high as it used to be, but... I remember a year after I joined, I was there for longer than 60 % of the company or something. when you see something that, you're ⁓ my God, this company is growing fast, In terms of account. and my goal, at a big company at a company is just to like own a part of the product, somebody needs to be able to say, I need something this specific product. This is the guy I call, what that for me was this product called Fans. What it was that if you engage a lot with a specific on Facebook, a page on Facebook is not a person you or me, it's a business, the Washington Post or Nike, or there are celebrity pages, like Taylor ⁓ Swift. If you engage a lot with one of those pages as an individual, you would get a notification that was you're a top fan of Taylor Swift. Click here to claim your badge. The next time you comment on Taylor Swift's page, they'll be able to badge next to your name that says top fans. And this is a product that was about to be shut down. And I went to my boss and I was let me run with this for three months, please. There was some resistance. I finally won him over. Jamie: Hmm Akshay Madhani: Fast forward a year, there's six or seven people working on the product and I'm Mr. Top Fans. If you need something for this product, you call me. It's crazy. When you comment a ton on this page, you don't really get anything. It's not if you comment on Taylor's page and you become a Top Fan, you get some money or anything that. It's just a badge. People were deeply attached to this. We time spent, which is one of the hardest things to move at Facebook, and one of the most important metrics. When our pipelines broke and top fans badges were not issued, there would be ⁓ literal on these pages, blaming the being where is my top fan badge? Where did it go? I was damn, this is crazy. And was businesses should really utilize this. There are people who are really fans of businesses and want to be recognized as such. You don't really expect any monetary incentive. I know that there's loyalty programs that exist. And there's a lot more of this that can be done on social, which is already a place where marketing is moving. that's ⁓ we started the business. You around. We evolved. But that's where I was OK, I'm I'm helping these businesses get more clients, grow their brand value, and they don't even know about it. And they're trying to do the same thing. And I feel hey, we can start a business to help you do this really effectively. that was how Scrollmark started. Now, the new product, think one of the things we realized is that in the social, content is king. beginning point of all our messages is some engagement on content. what a journey on could look is that, let's say I make a post about a new product coming out. And somebody comments it. I can use that a trigger to message them and basically be hey, I saw your comment. By the way, Could I get your email? And then here's a 15 % off coupon for this product because clearly you've displayed interest, And that's really useful. But it's only useful if the content is good enough to get somebody to comment because if nobody comments, then you've set up the journey, you've done all that work, and nobody comes, And this is a classic problem with marketing in general, but especially organic marketing in almost any form. marketing is as old as time. I think what we realize is that, with AI today, We can start to analyze both your content also content in your niche that's working and tell you, hey, this is the content that you should be posting. Show you which one of your competitors' are doing well and also why they did well. Because the... the missing piece that a lot of people don't always understand. Translating that with AI, is something that ensures that you have predictability built into how many organic impressions can I generate, how much engagement can I generate, and then also how can I turn that engagement into customers? Because that's what everyone in the world is trying to do, whether it's a small business, whether it's a solopreneur or whether it's a large business of thousands. and thousands. Jamie: Okay. It's great. no, I love it. And I love how it makes so much sense in terms of the and where socials add and the ⁓ changes that happen rapidly. just crazy how fast it help me with this. what in how would you describe the stage that you're at on the business? some people talk about Revenue people talk about funding size of team where you describe where you're at that And then what were the things that got you from zero what you talked about getting started to where you are today? ⁓ Akshay Madhani: Right. No, 100%. ⁓ it's fun we're in two stages, Like as a company, we've raised $8 million. The enterprise business is doing well, it's growing. But we're starting this new product, which is very early on. we're in the infancy of that product. I get to see the early stage one more time, And, but at the same time also experience growing pains of going from seed stage to a Series A stage. And I can tell you that those problems are very problems. what got us from zero to that seed stage is very just hustle. It's, email everyone you can, find advisors, get advisors to work for you. make connections for client, handhold them as much as possible until you feel they are getting enough value from the product. It's very much just you got to brute force ⁓ it. It's painful and got to do things that don't scale. After that, think now what we're doing is setting up systems. hey, how do you set up? a knowledge base? How do you set up a sales and CS handoff process? How do you set up efficient reporting and SLAs for bugs? All these things that big companies already have that I had the time at Facebook, that you ⁓ have to define set up from scratch. Obviously, there's a lot of companies who have done this before and a lot of blueprints to follow, but you do have to make it your own. But I to say perfect is the enemy of good, or more importantly, perfect is the enemy of done, know, partially just hey, get something in place and come back in a month and evaluate how it's working and see what changes you can make, Because there's so many challenges to tackle. Jamie: For sure. OK, and in particular, let's talk a little bit about growth and growth has ⁓ come from. As you've at scale scaling over the last, call it 12 to 18 months, have been the biggest challenges that you've seen in terms of taking the business to the next level? ⁓ Akshay Madhani: for us, The biggest challenge is always lead gen and marketing. In a B2B business, having more conversations, conversations is everything. When you're doing consumer business, you do product research. in B2B, your sales calls are product research. Having more of those, whether or not they go well, is important for the lifeblood of the business. You understand what are the competitors they're using? Why do they those competitors? Even if they don't end up choosing you, that will tell you a lot about where, what needs to be built next. The way we tackle that right now is through an efficient referral system. Our clients are really happy with us. We try to incentivize them and push them to refer as many people as they can because found that marketers trust other marketers. ⁓ Jamie: Mm-hmm. Akshay Madhani: ads and LinkedIn is a huge part of this. And ultimately, think this is true of every business. Specific individuals have specific places they go to for their information. As you can imagine, people who work in social go to social for their information. So being good at social and growing our own social pages is something that we didn't focus on in the early parts of the business, but something we are focused on now. Jamie: Yeah, sure. Makes sense. That does make sense, you better show that you're doing that, that's great. OK. Well, that makes a lot of sense. in terms of the people that you're... you're out talking to people, And You talked about... Have as many conversations as possible, which makes the sense the world. it When you're looking at the challenge of that, is it more about how do I reach more people, which people I reach, what I say to them when I talk to them? In mind, is there one of those things that's standing out or a bit of everything or? Akshay Madhani: bit of everything, I mean, so in the ideal world, ⁓ if I wanted to 50 conversations this month, I would choose maybe 60 or 70 people. it's very easy to pull their emails and phone numbers this day and age. Just give them a call and be let's have a conversation. We know that that's not how the real world works, And don't blame them because I a ton of cold email. A lot of it is bad. They're talking about me if I'm an agency owner, which I'm clearly not. ⁓ They're most agencies struggle this. Are you also struggling with this? I'm well, the premise is wrong. And even when somebody reaches me with a good email, which happens very often. Many times I'm I'm not interested in having this conversation. selfishly, I I don't want to do it. And I know that these people are often more busy than I am. There's tons of marketing out there. They're all trying to reach the same people. it's really hard to get people in conversations. there's, There's two remedies to that, One is, as mentioned, go to people that they trust, there's a way referral is so powerful, Because, marketers trust other marketers. if one of my clients tells one of their friends who used work at this company, but left, but Hey, we're using Scrollmark now. And that's what it's doing for us. at least have a conversation with them. They're good people. if somebody said that to me, I'd be yeah, sure. Let's do it. that's point number one. point number two is to provide value early on, Rather than saying, Hey, what problems you have and how can I fix them? Just being Hey, here's this thing. It's free. Maybe it fixes one of your problems, And track their And if they use it, then email them back and be like, Hey, I saw you clicked on this or I saw you read through Jamie: and thing. Akshay Madhani: Has all you downloaded this? I more stuff this, but also my tool helps you do a lot of this other stuff can we talk? I think being a founder gives an appreciation for what good and bad outreach is, because the outreach that you are most likely to respond to. And I've bought a ton of software. Jamie: Yeah. Akshay Madhani: I don't know what affects my decision to buy software. Ultimately, the ⁓ biggest is need. It's very hard to manufacture need. ⁓ What you need to do is find out people in this ICP that you're targeting need and very directly answer why your product will help them meet that need. ⁓ Jamie: No, it's great. And if you could wave a magic wand about something that you've done in the 12 months, that you could change something, change a decision, change a way to look at it, especially around that, is there something that you would do, anything you would do differently? ⁓ Akshay Madhani: I mean, the things that we think we're going to do different, we want to do differently. We do differently, we make those adjustments on the fly, startups, you make, you make a decision in the morning and by night the decisions change. that can be sometimes bad, thrash is bad generally, but sometimes it's also good, If you're Hey, I made a decision. It was a wrong decision, it's better to know that early than know that late. Right. but one of the things, for example with social GPT that we do a ton of is going back to what I said previously is we don't want to make mistakes, we do a lot of research, we started building an initial product and we went and talked to not just the big companies that we're working with, but also solopreneurs, And found that, okay, there are some common threads of what everyone needs, what's one thing everyone cares about? They care a ton about. hooks, everyone who's serious about social knows that the hook of the video, the first three or four seconds really determines your success in the algorithm, If people watch it past three seconds, then you have a chance of them engaging. But if they don't, then you don't a chance of them engaging, you everyone's saying, okay, suggest me some hooks because I'm struggling with that, whether it's a big company, whether it's just one guy, ⁓ Another thing that everyone cares about is competitive research. want to know what, solo entrepreneurs may not call it competitive research, but it's the same thing. I want to know what are people doing who look like me, what's making them successful? I don't have the time to go and watch 50, 100 videos a day. tell me what separates the wheat from the chow. quickly, that's another thing we're working really hard and making possible. doing more of that and getting more structured and more detailed about, what did, did somebody say in this call? and, maybe not even what they said, but how they reacted with their body language, And what does tell about how much they really want and need? And what are the questions I'm asking that are really uncovering something that they didn't say before, that people before weren't saying? always thinking about that. We're always thinking about Jamie: Interesting. There's just so many things that are staying. look, ⁓ guys are pushing hard. you said, pushing all the time. Are there areas that feel it's It's heavier? It's more challenging? Or it getting easier? How you view that piece of things? Is it versus the beginning, but even Are there areas that are you're struggling with or it's all all rolling now. It's just a matter of more. Akshay Madhani: I mean, if there were not areas that we're struggling with, then obviously, we'd be having a different conversation, we're the thing that I always believe is that, more things done okay is better than a few things done perfect, right? we make decisions, we do what we can. And then if those decisions don't work out, then we say, okay, we're to scrap this ⁓ And that is the right way to operate. And not we do works out. We struggle a across all areas of the business, honestly. engineering, sales, Sometimes it's because we don't have enough process and sometimes it's because we have too much process. sometimes, because of situations outside of our control, Sometimes ⁓ we've done this before where went out and tried to sell a thing we was a problem, but wasn't really a problem, it was, when we went out, people said they're interested, but they weren't really that interested, We want to ask better questions to understand how interested people really are and validate early with the usage. some of those mistakes are unavoidable. But ultimately, if you try enough things, you will make forward progress. I'm proud to say we're doing that. Jamie: That's awesome. No, it's great. help me here. where can people find you ⁓ and follow what doing? Akshay Madhani: Yeah, of course. You can find us at on Instagram and TikTok, at gpt.social. You can find our website at squalemark.com. And ⁓ feel free to connect with me. name is Akshay Madhani on LinkedIn. Jamie: Thank you. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. I'll add some links into the description. And for everybody who's watching, thank you. And we'll see you in the next episode.