S4E17 – How to build a startup within a Corporate? Building Respona within Visme With Farzad Rashidi

In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran sits down with Farzad Rashidi, the co-founder and driving force behind Respona. Farzad reveals how Respona, a startup born within VisMe, a massive platform with 20 million users navigated the exciting journey of growing from an in-house tool to a thriving business.

Farzad shares the ups and downs of building a startup inside a big company, the critical role of SEO in their growth, and the valuable lessons learned from engaging directly with customers. Plus, he offers insider tips on how Respona uses AI to stay ahead and why focusing on the right audience is key to success.

Tune in for actionable tips and real-world advice from someone who’s turned a startup dream into a profitable reality.

Benefits of Working with VisMe

Building Respona with the support of VisMe had big advantages. It provided financial stability, so Farzad’s team didn’t have to worry about money and could focus on developing the product. However, this also meant there were high expectations and pressure to show results. Farzad stressed the importance of having a dedicated team and not spreading them too thin across different projects.

How SEO Helped Respona Grow

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, was key to Respona’s growth. Farzad explained that getting relevant backlinks and appearing in the right places online was very important. Although this process was slow and required a lot of effort, it eventually drove more traffic and sign-ups to Respona. Farzad also got involved in sales and onboarding, which helped him understand customers better and improve their marketing and product strategies.

The Need for Clear Focus

One big lesson Farzad learned was the importance of clear positioning. At first, Respona tried to reach a broad audience, which didn’t work well. By focusing on B2B SaaS companies and agencies, they achieved better results. Clear positioning helps any startup stand out in a competitive market.

Challenges During the Transition

Farzad talked about some tough times, especially during the move from beta to version 1.0. This period was stressful because of technical problems and unhappy customers. It showed the importance of careful planning and not rushing important changes. Despite these challenges, the team learned valuable lessons that helped shape Respona’s future.

The Future with AI

Farzad is excited about using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make Respona better. They already use AI to personalize emails and plan to add more advanced features. However, Farzad warned against using AI just as a marketing gimmick. It should be used to genuinely solve customer problems.

Conclusion

Farzad Rashidi’s journey with Respona teaches important lessons for anyone starting a business or working in SaaS. His experience shows the value of financial support, clear focus, and understanding customers. As Respona grows, it proves that perseverance, smart planning, and focusing on customer needs are key to building a successful startup.

Key Time Codes

• (00:00) – Onboarding Customers and Changing Affiliates
• (01:00) – Introduction to Farzad and Respona
• (01:52) – How Respona Was Born
• (04:56) – Respona’s Growth and Team
• (05:47) – Respona’s SaaS Features
• (07:09) – Farzad’s Career and Entrepreneurial Spirit
• (08:01) – Future Goals for Respona
• (08:47) – Motivations and Beta Challenges
• (10:51) – Startup Life Under VisMe
• (13:55) – Lessons from Tough Times
• (22:51) – Effective Growth Strategies
• (28:04) – AI and Affiliate Tips
• (32:36) – Farzad’s Tips for SaaS Success
• (39:34) – How to Connect with Farzad

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Farzad

My experience, at least onboarding customers that have a successful affiliate program, usually it’s that the traditional affiliates that used to drive a lot of signups were like coupon sites and discount sites, stuff like that would basically drive a lot of traffic. I think those are diminishing over time. The type of affiliates that are actually driving signups and customers are not traditional affiliates at all. We tried paid ads, couldn’t really scale as much. I tried cold outbound, not really a fit for us, the amount of resource that it would take. Seo has been the main driver. I think one thing was probably our positioning. We weren’t quite clear on what we were at the time because I always had this worry that average affiliate recruitment and link building was a very small market. So for us to be able to build a decent company, we had to cater to a larger audience.

[00:01:00.000] – Joran

In today’s episode, my guest is Farzad Rashidi . Farzad is the co founder lead innovator at Respona, and the story of Respona is a bit different than all the other startups and founders I have on my podcast so far. It is built from within a corporate, business VisMe, to be precise, an eight-figure business with 20 million users. VisMe is also where Farzad started his career while still being in college in 2017. He was the first marketing hire, and he built Respona to help with their outreach, which worked really well as they were receiving around 2 million visitors each month. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how have they been able to achieve these results and how have they been able to build a startup within a corporate. Welcome to the show, Farsat.

[00:01:42.150] – Farzad

Thank you so much for having me, Jorin. It’s a pleasure.

[00:01:44.360] – Joran

Let’s Dive right in, get to know you and get to know Respona. Let’s start with the letter. When did Respona get started?

[00:01:52.540] – Farzad

Yeah, to give you a little backstory there. For folks who haven’t heard of VisMe, it’s a platform. Folks can create presentations, infographics, and whatnot. A lot of people have heard of Canva. The way I would put it simply is that it’s a little bit more up-market version of that. But back in 2013, they actually started around the same time. So the founder, Payman, actually took a bootstrap route, and Canva went and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, hence the difference now. So you can see the trajectory. But my involvement with vizMe, it goes back in the day when I was in college, and I actually cold email Paymon, the founder, and I’d come across product, really liked it. So I was like, Hey, you guys need help with marketing? And didn’t have anybody then. It was like a team of a few engineers that just spin up a product. So I joined there. It was quite a challenging product to market because still to this day, I have a very affordable price tag. So there was like $20 a month or something at the time. So it wasn’t a type of cold sales, average type that you could go door to door, start selling.

[00:02:54.020] – Farzad

The economics wouldn’t make any sense. And also we tried paid ads, and every time we ever tried to scale, it never scaled. It was quite cheap at the time, even though we didn’t know it then. Cost for clicks were like a dollar and we were like, Oh my God, it’s so expensive. We envy those days now. But as far as the scale aspect was not there because the returns were quite diminishing. So you hit an ad that was working, you double the budget, conversions don’t double. So essentially, I hit a wall there, but it was good to get some initial customers in. So to build that acquisition engine and to to help us acquire customers for the long run. We landed on an SEO because we were a bootstrap company. We didn’t have a big budget, so we were like, Okay, let’s start writing some content. And guess what happened? You made? Absolutely not. It was crickets. For months, we started writing content, built landing pages, invest all this time and resources, and it was… There was nothing that was going on. What we eventually ended up figuring out was that a lot of this search engines, Google, the main one.

[00:04:02.050] – Farzad

The way they work is that they essentially put a lot of emphasis on how popular the site is. The way they measure credibility and popularity is in terms of how many other sites in your space are talking about you, mentioning you. Those are essentially what we call links or backlinks at the time. Now we call them more so in terms of getting product placements. Now, those type of links were easier said than done to get. When it comes to getting other to do something for you, something that’s entirely out of your control. We started reaching out to folks, deck-tipping a bunch of tools manually that were built initially for sales teams. The traffic started trickling in. We started getting some results. And the rest was just history. Then we decided to essentially build a little platform to help our team get a bit more efficient when it came to average, and that was the genesis of Respona.

[00:04:56.640] – Joran

Nice. We’re going to dive deeper into all the the stages you guys went through, but to get to know a little bit where you guys are right now. Can you share anything regarding your revenue, number of customers?

[00:05:08.800] – Farzad

Yeah. The respond we haven’t disclosed revenue just yet, but we’re a team of, I would say seven or eight team members, and it’s bootstrap profitable. So that’s good. And we’re growing, doubling it year over year. On the Visme side, my co founder is the founder of Visme. He has mentioned that Visme is doing eight figures in ARR. So I feel I’m confident that he wouldn’t mind me sharing that on the podcast. So they’re north of 10 million ARR. And yeah, both are bootstrap operations. Both are bootstrap operations, both are profitable.

[00:05:38.780] – Joran

And when you look at the revenue of Respona, is it all SaaS or is there also a service component to it?

[00:05:45.090] – Farzad

It’s all SaaS. We don’t do any services.

[00:05:47.700] – Joran

You already explained what Respona does or where it came from. If you would explain what it does today, how it shows.

[00:05:54.590] – Farzad

Yeah. Essentially what Respona does is helping you get the world advice your product. Say, for example, you have a tool like Reditus, and what do you do? You guys have an affiliate marketing platform. Nobody knows what it is or who you guys are. You start writing some content on your blog, but in order to establish yourself as a credible resource, there’s a few different types of outreach that you want to do to get the product out. One is getting yourself on listicles. Hey, any posts that have been published on, Hey, what are some of the best affiliate marketing tools, etc. Anybody’s mentioning, talking about your competitors, anybody’s has written a review on impact, for example, would be a potential candidate for you guys to reach out to. Essentially, putting yourself in positions where customers who are looking for a tool like yours will find you. Essentially, that as a buyer product has an impact on your domain authority because the more websites talk about you and feature you, more it sends a signal to this search engine. Respond is a platform that helps you identify these opportunities at scale and keep a tab on them, gets the contact info of the right people and also helps you contact them in a personalized manner to do this type of processes at scale and with very minimal time.

[00:07:09.320] – Farzad

Yeah.

[00:07:09.860] – Joran

I can say that we’re actually using Respona ourselves also to find and discover affiliates for some of our clients. It’s really nice that you can automate almost the entire flow. You just put in the people you are, the URLs you want to contact, they would find the contacts. From there, you can run a sequence on it, which is indeed super nice because you don’t have to keep an eye on it every day. Cool. I guess that’s a promo. Let’s talk about Farzad. Quickly, how old are you?

[00:07:36.410] – Farzad

I’m 26. I was actually having a debate with my mother whether I’m 26 or 27 today. We landed on 26. Nice.

[00:07:46.130] – Joran

You started at VisMe when still in college. Is this your first startup then?

[00:07:51.890] – Farzad

Yes. Respond is the first. Actually, we started working on Respond in my last year of college. Starting after, I basically started dedicating fully full-time to Respond.

[00:08:01.570] – Joran

Yeah. You’re a co-founder of Respond? Have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?

[00:08:05.430] – Farzad

Yeah. That’s an excellent question. Never been asked that before on a podcast. But yes, I always wanted to start my own business, and I think that probably the roots are in my childhood. My dad is a pharmacist, and pharmacists in my country, the way they work is that they run their own business. I’m Iranian originally. And since I was very young, saw them, my mom and my dad starting their own businesses and moving from one city to another. I always thought that’s how jobs worked. I just thought that this is the way that you make money is by starting a business. I didn’t know anything else existed. So that was rooted in me back in the day since I was a child. Nice.

[00:08:43.280] – Joran

When we look at Respona, is there an end goal defined?

[00:08:47.840] – Farzad

That’s an excellent question, too. Yeah, so many great questions, Yorin. Yeah, so we’ve thought about different ways. At the end of the day, what we’re looking to do is add the most value to our customers. Whether that be continuing to grow as a responder using the Visme playbook, essentially, to keep growing it profitably, bootstrap, and just keep reinvesting the company, or whether that be down the line, partner with another company that already has all of our customers and to plug it into their ecosystem. We’re open to that. I think we’re probably still a couple of years away from what that would make sense. At the moment, what we’re putting our entire focus on is just building the best class product and delighting our customers. That’s in the hindsight, I would say in the future, but not something that I would say. We’re not looking to do anything different than we are today in the foreseeable future.

[00:09:38.730] – Joran

Yeah, got you. I think it’s a really nice mission you have, right? But it doesn’t always keep you motivated day to day. What keeps How was that motivated?

[00:09:46.790] – Farzad

When I talk to my customers, and I’m quite involved with the sales and with the onboarding, the customer success still. When I see we just did a case of an agency, they’re like, Oh, I wish we found you guys years ago. We It didn’t exist back then, but thank you. That warms my heart because they were doing all this type of work manually, the ductive and different things, and that it completely changed the way they do. You guys are doing this for one or a few brands. An agency He’s doing this for dozens, not hundreds of customers, so it saves them a ton of time. Knowing that it’s actually making an impact, people are using it and getting value from it, enough motivation for us to keep going. I would say just having happy customers really is what keeps us going. And it wasn’t always the case. When we started as SaaS, it wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We had bugs, issues, things would break down and go down. And we had customers unhappy with us because they put their trust in us. We were in beta still back in the day. Fortunately, now we have an enterprise-grade, fully stable solution back in the day, it wasn’t always like this.

[00:10:51.170] – Farzad

But having reached this step where we feel very confident that a large enterprise company or larger agency, they could trust their whole business and average team to run all through average. Nice.

[00:11:03.720] – Joran

That’s what I always love about bootstrap companies. They take the motivation out of the clients and the client is getting value out of their tool. We already know, I guess, when Respona got started, ads were too expensive. You were trying things out with outbound. When you were building the early version of the SaaS, did you already know from the beginning it was going to be such a success?

[00:11:24.710] – Farzad

Absolutely not, no. Because the whole point of building Respona was, Hey, we’re going to build this for ourselves because we need it. And we looked at different solutions were in the market. And there’s a lot of sales tech tools. They’re built for outbound for sales, and they were great for that purpose. But nothing really that was worth their salt was built specifically for this type of marketing outbound outreach. The product was just built for ourselves. We’re like, Hey, we get other people to pay for it, then great. It was cherry on top of Sunday. We put it out in the market. We started getting some beta customers, and they started paying us. We’re like, Hey, this This actually has some value in it. They found a use in it. I’m sure market must be large enough. So we started investing more and built it. It came out of surprise at the beginning, but I would say we weren’t really keeping our hopes up too much from the get-go. We were reserved when it comes to our projections. We were like, Hey, if nobody needed it, we need it. We’re going to be our own customer.

[00:12:23.340] – Joran

I think that’s a really good place to start because you’re always the most critical as well. You want to get the most out of it. You want to automate your entire work. I think it’s really nice that you already had at least one client who was using it heavily, which was yourself.

[00:12:36.700] – Farzad

Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:38.290] – Joran

At what time did it became bigger than Visma? Because in the end, you started to use it for yourself. Then At one point, you think, Okay, can we charge for it? Are people willing to pay for it? Tell me about that moment. What happened where you guys were like, Hey, this is actually a lot more than just a tool for ourselves.

[00:12:55.250] – Farzad

When I had graduated from college and started working full-time, it was quite clear we had some paying customers and respondents showing really good potential. The product was working well for our team. They were very happy with it. We knew that we could get this far. But obviously, it was never going to work out as a side project. We needed at least one person on top of things. I was Director of Marketing at the time. So we essentially hired a replacement for myself, trained that person, put him in charge, and I started basically taking over and responding more seriously back in That’s when we actually released our beta version and started getting our paying customers the same year. And then starting 2020, that’s when we were all in, essentially, or myself and my little team that essentially spun off and start working on it full-time.

[00:13:47.650] – Joran

You did it on the umbrella of Ismail, right? There’s a lot of assumptions, I guess, I would say, at least on my side, building a startup within a corporate. You might have the funding, like it’s Bootstrap, of course, but you have at least the back of a bigger company. But tell me a little bit, what are the biggest benefits, but also the biggest challenges of building a startup within, let’s call it a corporate?

[00:14:10.230] – Farzad

Yeah. There’s pros and cons, just like anything. It is quite unusual to do this. So again, the way I convinced the founder of Visme to invest in this was for Visme. Hey, we need this. Let’s build it. See, this got legs to it later on. And the pro is that, which is probably one of the biggest words of any entrepreneur that’s bootstrap is, I never worried about making peril. There’s a period of time, obviously, as any bootstrap company, you are going to burn cash at some point at the very beginning. There’s server cost and you have engineers. So if you have raised any amount of money or even if you’re self-funding, it’s a finite amount of resource. But having been backed by a profitable growing company gives you that sense of peace of mind. Hey, obviously, it has to be within reason. We can’t just go out there and start throwing money out. But our team is taken care of, our basics are taken care of. And even though we have a raised traditional VC, so it’s not like we’re going to raise money and then spend it and then be at the mercy of investors to raise our next round.

[00:15:12.420] – Farzad

And if they don’t, then we die. It was never the case. So essentially, it still gave us that comfort of having some funding and also giving the same flexibility as being bootstrap where we don’t have a board, we don’t have formal structures so that we could essentially do what we needed to do. Obviously, some And one side to that, one is expectations. When you’re backed by another company in that, they’re investing you the show ROI and they’re investing in you. So you have to make sure that… Because when it’s your own business, you’re like, if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, I go do other things. But you don’t have that luxury when other people have trusted you with their livelihood and also resources. So I think aside from that, I’ve been very fortunate. So my partner, Paymon, has been extremely supportive and has also been quite hands-off when it comes to operations. I’ve had the luxury of being able to make our own decisions without having any bottlenecks or essentially meddling in the day-to-day. Obviously, we go to them for advice and we make the big decisions together when it comes to the day-to-day.

[00:16:15.660] – Farzad

We maintain our speed and pace to market by being able to make decisions, keep the team small, move forward quickly.

[00:16:22.850] – Joran

Was it also the case at the beginning where you already had your old little team which was fully on Respona and you They didn’t have to worry about, I guess, their, I don’t know how they call it, full-time job or their main responsibility at Visme. At one point, did they have to juggle?

[00:16:38.910] – Farzad

At the beginning, I did. It was just me, though. The other team we had, we just had one engineer while we were at Visme, and we found that just sharing engineers is never a good idea. That would not be optimal when it comes to their productivity. We actually had a dedicated person to respond, hired for our respondence purposes, always. But then when I came and joined full-time, then we started adding headcount. We started hiring another engineer and then started contracting designers and start investing more because then I was on top of things full-time. But we never really shared the resources in a way that we had used Visme employees, and now we had to go hire new team members. It was always separate teams.

[00:17:21.830] – Joran

I think that makes sense because then you can hire the people you want, and then you don’t have to worry about the people which are already in, which might not even like the project and you’re forcing them to do something they don’t like.

[00:17:33.560] – Reditus Ad

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Reditus, we just launched a second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreditus.com.

[00:17:54.130] – Joran

Let’s talk about, hopefully you can look back at it as a fun thing, a rock-button moments. It’s always in hindsight, it’s easier to talk about them. Everybody hits them at one point, either financially or personally. Can you talk about a rockbot for the moment for yourself and how did you get yourself out of it?

[00:18:11.820] – Farzad

I would say the most difficult time of the company where we thought that went, I was doubting, it was like 50/50, whether we were going to make it, was when we came out of beta. We had initially pieced the software together with duct tape. Our beta version was not designed to be a commercial product. It was supposed It was supposed to be an internal tool. It was ugly looking, it was not user friendly, and also from an infrastructure perspective and tech specs, it was not something that you would build on. It had to be rewritten. So once we had our beta out and then we started getting some customers, we were like, Hey, this is great. It’s showing promise. Then we hired more engineers, and I was on it full-time. We actually started hiring a professional designer, and then we started designing that whole thing, and then from the ground up, and then built the whole thing. But by the time that… But it was a completely separate product. I The 1.0 version was a separate infrastructure, separate products, different technology even. But then we had this challenge of having customers switch. We already had our first-hand customers and all that during the beta.

[00:19:14.420] – Farzad

Then we had also lower-tier plans. There were quite a few that were… We actually had, I think, quite a few customers, probably a few dozen customers. The challenge was switching them over from the beta to the 1.0. We built a migration tool that would migrate because when you have campaigns running at the same time, all these keys and stuff are already in the database. Being able to migrate that wasn’t that easy, especially that we made the dumb mistake of doing that migration the day before Our lead engineer was going to go on a sailing trip for seven days with no Internet access. Don’t ask me why. That was a dumb mistake. Looking back in retrospect, I’m like, Why? This made absolutely no sense. Because when you talk to engineers, they’re like, Oh, it’s fine. We just press button, it migrates, and it’s good to go. I could do that before I go, so we don’t have to delay it any longer because we had to push it back a few times. Long story short, we switched and all help broke loose. Essentially, nothing was working the way it should. Our customers were unhappy with us.

[00:20:21.810] – Farzad

Our support was blowing up. Our lead engineer was on a boat somewhere. We’d no Internet access. We had the one Other engineer, we had a senior engineer. Actually, we had three engineers, but there were two front ends and one back end left, and most of the issues were on the back end. There were times that I would just have to stop what I was doing at the office, and it was freezing cold in the winter. I would just walked downstairs and just go walk, took a few laps around the building just so I could clear my head and then come back up because I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s the amount of negativity that we had to deal with. And that went on for a few weeks until we patch things up and then our engineer came back. And then because of the amount of pressure we put on our guys, they were not motivated as well as they were before because they were like, Oh, this sucks. Our customer is unhappy. He’s getting the team morale back up. Anyway, I take full responsibility for it. It could have all been avoided by pushing. People always say, launch and push and release, and I get it.

[00:21:32.660] – Farzad

There’s a balance, though. Sometimes doing it too soon, it’s going to backfire, and that definitely did. So yeah, fun stuff.

[00:21:39.290] – Joran

Lesson here, launch fast, migrate slow.

[00:21:42.870] – Farzad

Exactly.

[00:21:44.470] – Joran

Nice. I think it’s definitely something a lot of companies go through where they have the first version. In the end, they rebuild things and you want to go fast. But if you don’t do things properly, then you can end up in your situation.

[00:21:58.240] – Farzad

Exactly.

[00:21:59.380] – Joran

Real For example, did all your clients have an annual plan? Did you have a lot of churn during that period?

[00:22:04.330] – Farzad

Yeah, we definitely had some churn, but it wasn’t as bad. It might have been more catastrophic in our heads than it actually was. Obviously, as I’m sure as a founder, you understand this that you’re like, nothing’s going well, nothing’s working well, but it’s not always zeros and ones. We definitely had customers that were upset and they eventually moved away. The vast majority of our customers stuck around and they understood because we had sold them a beta product they knew already that this was in beta. It wasn’t like we were hiding it. We had a beta tag on our logo in the product all over the place. It was quite clear to them in the fact that they had signed up that they knew that there was going to be some of their legs to work through. But again, it was abandoned. We had to rip up at some point, so it was going to be bad. But we essentially got through it, and then the rest is history.

[00:22:51.630] – Joran

Nice. The migration is definitely one good thing you guys have done to get to where you are today. Are there any other big things you guys have done to grow where Respone is today?

[00:23:02.350] – Farzad

So nothing that I would say was just being a bootstrap company. The things that we do have never been like something that’s extraordinary that you would say, Oh, no. We tried everything that within conventional business of a SaaS founder. So we tried paid ads, couldn’t really scale as much. Tried cold outbound, not really a fit for us, the amount of resources it would take. Seo has been the main driver. We had to change our content strategy, tweak it, obviously, because we were much… My initial mistake was that I was using the Visme playbook. I was like, Oh, let’s cast a wide net, because Visme, anybody can use it. Everyone needs to make presentations. It’s not the case for Responda. It’s a very small subset of our audience. It’s just B2B SaaS companies and agencies that work, they use it. Changing that approach to start targeting more bottom of the funnel, long and tail targeted. He was so that we reduced our traffic, but leads went up. Nothing extraordinary that would be like, Oh, we did this, and then we snapped our fingers, and then bam, customers started flooding in. No, it was a slow and painful and iterative process of figuring out go-to-market.

[00:24:17.290] – Farzad

One of the best things that happened to us that has been driving a lot of customers to us is getting ourselves listed in places where our customers are looking for it. When you want to come across a tool like Respona, there’s a few channels that you are like, Hey, I want to grow my affiliate program, or I want to recruit affiliates, or I want to build backlinks, increase my traffic. And yes, you can build your own content pieces, cater to that. But a lot of times, what’s a lot easier is to get yourself mentioned on pieces that have already been getting rankings and traffic and getting your product listed there. We got listed by like Backlinko’s blog and Semrush, and they all listed us in their best tools for link building. So that’s how a lot of our customers come across us during the research process. And also it helps our own dining pages to go up. So if you look up link building software, et cetera, that response is usually top three. Again, all of this took time. It wasn’t something that had to happen overnight. But also, those are harder to beat as a competitor.

[00:25:17.210] – Farzad

So it’s not something that you would, in a way, emote as well. Because anybody can just run ads or do outbound or stuff like that. But building some of those acquisition channels make it harder also for new market interest to gain an traction.

[00:25:31.200] – Joran

Yeah. You picked the slow and compounding channels. Takes time to grow it, but once it’s going, it will continue to basically drive traffic for you guys.

[00:25:41.020] – Farzad

Exactly.

[00:25:41.750] – Joran

Signups, paid clients. Getting yourself a list in the relevant articles, I probably won’t have to ask, but you have used Respona for it, most likely.

[00:25:50.520] – Farzad

Oh, yes. We’re a big power user, Respona ourselves. I’ll go on podcast once a week like this. We use Respona to find some podcast opportunities. Obviously, we monitor mentions of all of our competitors all over the web. We use our product quite extensively.

[00:26:07.290] – Joran

Nice. We already talked about your biggest failure, migrate before the lead developer goes on holiday. Is there anything you regret you didn’t do in this time now as a co founder?

[00:26:20.650] – Farzad

That’s an excellent question. I think one thing was probably our positioning. So we weren’t quite clear on what we were at the time because I always had this worry that average affiliate recruitment in LinkedIn was a very small market. So for us to be able to build a decent company, we had to cater to a larger audience. Big mistake. Should have definitely narrowed it down from the very get-go. Again, we haven’t actually figured that out and narrowed things down, but we were trying to be anything for everyone, and that usually never works out, especially as a bootstrap company that you have limited resources and you race against time. So that is definitely something that I regret. It’s getting our positioning clear from the get-go because we knew really what we were. It wasn’t like we were trying to figure it out. We were just trying to sell it to other segments of the market that were just not going to be as successful as our ICP.

[00:27:16.130] – Joran

You narrowed it back down. At one point, did you open it wider again, or are you still really narrow on- Quite narrow.

[00:27:25.630] – Farzad

We opened it up just a little bit because there are some tangent use cases for I want to look, for example, booking podcast interviews. Could consider it link building. It’s not really affiliate recruitment or recruiting affiliates versus link building. The same process, same average tactic, different use cases, but it’s usually done within the same company. If you are a SaaS company and you have an affiliate program, most likely you also have a blog and writing content, you want to build links, and most likely you want to get your founder on podcast as well. Those are within the same ICP. Still doesn’t really change the type of companies that we cater to.

[00:28:04.000] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. When we look at Respona, we now have all these new technologies, AI, machine learning. They’re not that new anymore nowadays. How do you guys leverage it within Respona?

[00:28:16.210] – Farzad

Yeah. I think it’s definitely something that is going to grow in prominence. I’m a big AI optimist. I think it’s a little overused in marketing material. I think AI is more of a back-end technology. You can’t just slap it the product and just expect people to care. Customers want to get things done. We use it quite extensively on the back end of Respona. For example, a big part of that has to do with email personalization. For example, you want to reach a podcast, and what Responda does is that it pulls the latest episode of the podcast, listens to it, transcribes it based on what they’ve talked about in the episode, would generate a personalized icebreaker based on what they’ve talked about in the episode. It improves email deliverability, gives you up to double the reply rates. There’s what we call AI-powered fields where you can give it custom instructions and have it do all sorts of cool things. Then we got a bunch of other things in the works, obviously, that we use it as needed. We usually take a feature that we want to get done and we’re like, Hey, our customers want to do X.

[00:29:18.670] – Farzad

Now we use whatever technology is necessary to make it work. We’re not necessarily taking the technology. We’re like, Okay, let’s go see where we can fit generative AI in our app. That’s usually not how we look at Yeah, it has to drive value in the-Exactly.

[00:29:32.590] – Joran

Yeah. That’s what I love to hear. You just don’t add it at the label. It’s actually driving value for the clients. Can I ask a question? Maybe mostly for our clients, you can use Respona also to recruit affiliates, right? When you look at B2B SaaS companies, how would you recruit affiliates for a SaaS? You can take the Respona example, of course, or the Respona approach.

[00:29:55.140] – Farzad

Yeah. Again, you’re the expert in affiliate marketing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but My experience, at least onboarding customers that have a successful affiliate program, usually it’s that the traditional affiliates that used to drive a lot of signups were like coupon sites and discount sites, stuff like that, would basically drive a lot of traffic. I think those are diminishing over time. The type of affiliates that are actually driving signups and customers are not traditional affiliates at all. They don’t even consider themselves affiliate marketers. There are other companies with overlapping audience or there are other websites that are in your space that have some other source of monetisation. So for example, take Respona and Reditus as an example. Like, Reditus is the perfect affiliate marketer for Respona. Why? Because Reditus has all of our target ICPs, right? So B2B SaaS, that’s our bread and butter. And the more your customers are recruiting affiliates and improving their affiliate program, the more Reditus wins. So it makes it a perfect synergy between our companies so that if any, it’s customers. The more customers who send us, the better off you are. And yes, you might get a kickback or not.

[00:31:11.090] – Farzad

Main reason why you’re doing this is because that you’re essentially helping your customers be more successful. That’s the reason why. Or the same goes for us. We want our customers who don’t have an affiliate program, have some an affiliate program built out because that creates a really nice incentive structure. So now when you’re reaching out to another prospect and you want to work together, you’re not asking them to do it out of the goodness of their heart. You can actually attract the conversions and the referrals and then have them actually be compensated for it. So these type of partnerships are the ones that really move the needle. And so when it comes to Respona, usually the way you could identify these opportunities is one, obviously, you start with the low hanging fruit of Listicals, competitor mentions. You could also, if you want to get a little bit more nerdy, we can identify your competitor’s top affiliates. So I know any affiliate program has a unique link structure. You can easily find them and you can reach out to them if they’re promoting products that are similar to or it’s not even the right competitors. You could see if they’re be interested in directing traffic to you.

[00:32:13.930] – Farzad

And usually what happens is you get a sense for it. You try a bunch of different strategies and one or two of them are going to stick and they’re going to work really well. So just double down on them and eliminated the strategies that don’t work. There’s no one-size-fit-all strategy that I found that works for every company, but Usually once they try a handful of these strategies, they tend to find one or two that work really well for them.

[00:32:36.270] – Joran

Yeah, and it’s the same with any general on the use, try them, test it, see what works, and then go from there. I definitely agree with the beginning you said, as in leverage companies who refer you where they can get value out of your tool or where people think they can get value out of your tool. Because we have been referring Respona quite a bit because we know if companies are going to use you guys, then we know they’re going to be more successful with their program, which is perfect for us, perfect for you guys, and perfect for the clients. It’s a real true win where are they going to get value out of the tool. Nice. Let’s dive a bit to the end. Real practical questions. What advice would you give another SaaS founder who’s just starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:33:18.430] – Farzad

I would say that one of the things that helped us really well at the very beginning was me being the person in charge of sales and onboarding. So Having that one-on-one approach of seeing the prospects, seeing which one of them saw the value signed up, and then what would happen after the sale. What would happen after the close? How would they use the system? And then what problems they would solve. So all of that info that I got are just talking to customers and me being the main person doing the sales and the customer success role helped us, one, shape our marketing strategy figuring out, because this is one of the first questions you ask me, How did you hear about this? And it’s very hard to do that in a forum. You want to see that person one-on-one. They tell you about it. So you could go and beef up those channels that they found you on. And two is building the roadmap based on their experience. I have our customers share their screen while we’re going through the onboarding. When I ask them to do something and they’re confused, they click around. It’s a very clear pattern We’re not aware of where we need to improve in terms of our UI.

[00:34:33.210] – Farzad

We are completely reconstructed our UI from scratch in our 2.0 version because of all the conversations that we’ve had with our customers. It makes it a lot simpler to use. That would probably more than you’re bargaining for. But yeah, that would be the one thing, the founder being involved in sales and customer success.

[00:34:52.100] – Joran

Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a while since I guess we had a call where we did a demo, but I think you actually had the other person share the screen, right? Oh, yeah. It’s not you sharing things, but actually you would have the other person open up their account and have them do things so you can learn from what they’re doing or how they’re even looking at your app.

[00:35:13.620] – Farzad

Yeah, so we do that on sales calls, too. You’re right. The benefit to that is that when the customers or the prospects, in that case, are getting to actually experience the product, it makes it very familiar to them. So that when they’re on their own doing their own testing, they know where everything exactly is. Another thing is also with Zoom fatigue, people are on calls all day and they lose their interest after five minutes. They’re checking their phone. I could just see their eyes wondering or kids running in the background, especially if they’re working from home. I could see that they have another monitor. But when they’re the ones sharing their screen, I have their whole attention for the entirety of the call. That’s also very helpful so that they’re actively involved and engaged in the call.

[00:36:00.460] – Joran

Nice. If we now support 10K monthly recurring revenue, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s growing to 10 million ARR? It’s a big step. I know you can chop it up, you can do how you want, but what advice would you give here?

[00:36:14.970] – Farzad

We haven’t reached that level yet at Respona, but I have seen it firsthand at Visme being involved as the first market they hire there. When it comes to growing that, I think the first million people take it a lot more. They think that this is going to be as hard from one million to 2 million, and it’s never the case. When it comes to your first million is the most difficult one, and then it gets gradually easier over time. From 9 million to 10 million is almost inevitable if you’ve built a healthy business. It differs what type of work that you do as a founder. And at the beginning, you’re way more involved in the product side of things, in the sales and marketing side of things. And then over time, as you start hiring people and you start delegating a lot of things, then you’re directing the, I would say, the trajectory of the company. Now you’re paying a lot more attention to the metrics and trying to deal a lot more with the data. And you’re not quite as hands-on with everything as you used to be, but it makes you do a lot more higher leverage activities where you can make a decision in a day that would define the trajectory of the company for the next few years, versus at the beginning when you’re doing demo calls, not every decision that you or things that you say are going to have that big of an impact.

[00:37:33.390] – Farzad

So that’s, again, something that I’m still going through myself. And so by no means I’m a know-it-all. I’m still learning and making a lot of mistakes. But that’s at least observing my co-founder Getting to that level. Another thing I found is also you’re never going to be happy with the progress. He’s as unhappy with everything that I am. Our level of stress and despair hasn’t changed. So that It makes me feel like, Okay, this is not going to go anywhere. It’s not like when you reach a milestone, you’re going to be, Oh, I had 10 million. I’m profitable. Everything’s growing so fast. You look at it from the outside, you’re like, Yeah, you should be on a boat somewhere. What are you doing here? But it couldn’t be far from reality. Yeah.

[00:38:17.340] – Joran

Nice. Love it. We’re going to wrap things up. I made a lot of notes. I’ll see if I can summarize this within 30 seconds. To start off, you can become a co founder when working at a corporate. Build a tool for yourself and then actually see if others can benefit from it as well outside your own company. Building a startup backed by a profitable business is great because the basics are being taken care of. You don’t have to worry about payroll. But then the downside is, expectations are going to be high and on value as a person, so be ready for that. Where we look more like Respona, like SEO needs help, so make sure you get relevant backlinks. Talking to customers as a founder keeps you motivated. If they get value, you will see that your energy rises as well. Don’t migrate your clients before your lead engineer goes on holiday without any internet. It’s not a good idea. Try different channels, see what is working for you. It can actually only be slow and compounding channels as Respona did. Make sure you narrow down your target audience and ideally leverage other companies to refer you as they see the value drive for them.

[00:39:22.750] – Joran

At the beginning, make sure you do sales and onboarding yourself to learn all the challenges, see what is working, and actually have the prospect sharing his screen so they can’t wander off during the call.

[00:39:32.770] – Farzad

Beautiful. That wraps it up nicely.

[00:39:34.990] – Joran

Nice. Thank you for coming on to the show. If you want to get in contact with you, Farzad, what is the best way?

[00:39:41.190] – Farzad

Sure. My email is farzal@respana. Com. That’s F-A-R-Z-A-D. Also, I’m on LinkedIn, Farzad Rachdi. Aren’t a ton of us out there, so I’m pretty easy to spot.

[00:39:53.720] – Joran

We’re going to make sure we add the link so people can’t even miss it at all. Thanks for coming on. For people listening, we’re going to add a poll to this podcast again, so make sure you answer that. If you haven’t given us a review yet, please do so. We can help other SaaS founders out there.Thanks.

[00:40:09.570] – Farzad

Again, Faizad.I appreciate you having me, Cioran. This was fun.

[00:40:13.450] – Joran

Cheers. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.