Episode 20 – How to scale a startup – with zero marketing budget

11/12/20 • -1 min

Hear the story of how the Riddle.com team grew Riddle to be a leader in the quiz marketing space – with no marketing budget, no sales team and without a dedicated support team. It’s all about having a killer product!

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling our successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Hey, Boris, welcome back for another episode of our Quiz Makers podcast. Thanks for coming along.

Boris 0:39
Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Mike 0:43
Great. And welcome to all the listeners out there.

When we started this podcast, we called it The Quiz Makers because that’s what Boris and I specialize in. That’s what riddle.com as a quiz maker does.

However, there’s also a story that we like to share about how you can grow and scale a startup.

Now obviously, every startup is different. But we also want to pass on some of the lessons that we’ve learned.

And so Boris, you and I were talking just this morning about some of the conversations you’ve had since you were mentioned as one of Entrepreneur.com’s “Top 20 tech founders in Europe to follow”. Could you brief the listeners on some of those conversations and kind of what’s come about come from?

Boris 1:32
Yes, one of the the key topics actually, when I talk to people, they want to know how to do do you make that list?

The honest answer is, I have no idea.

And then the next question is, “How did you manage to find all these cool customers? I’m seeing Riddle quizzes everywhere from the BBC to the NFL, Red Bull, all huge brand names.”

So they always ask, “What’s your sales tactic? How big is your sales team? How much you spend in marketing? Can you guys be profitable, and still get all these customers?”

That seems to be a common thread of what people are most interested in when we talk about Riddle.

Mike 2:14
Perfect. And this is one of the things I love so much about working at Riddle, the answer is also quite fun. What’s the answer you tell them?

Boris 2:25
Right – the answer is that the sales team is zero. We don’t have any sales guys, which is usually met with complete disbelief.

Then they’re like, well, then you and your co-founder, Mike – you’re probably all day on the phone and on LinkedIn, trying to get these customers. Honestly, how much time do you spend like a day trying to find new leads?

Mike 2:49
Oh, well, that’s also easy.

Zero.

Yeah, so generally, I will answer lots of questions on our support chat. Those will lead to product demos for people who are interested, but we have the luxury of people reach out to us and talk to us because they’re interested.

And that’s a totally different proposition versus calling, messaging, and pleading with people to try our product.

Boris 3:16
So that’s the simple answer to the question.

Next? “How much marketing budget do we spend to get inbound leads?” It’s the same answer.

As for the sales team question, we spend no money on ads.

Well, it’s actually that’s wrong. We dabble in a little bit of Google ads for about $5 or $10 a day. You know, mostly just to test some things out. But you can’t really attract any any meaningful traffic was that kind of ad spend. So we really don’t do anything.

Then obviously the next follow up question is “Well, what do you guys do, right?” “How do you get all these customers?” And I think it all starts – you have to have a good product. If you don’t have a product that people like, no tactic for sales or marketing are ever going to be long-lasting.

I guess if you’re an amazing marketer on social medi...

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Transcript

Hey, Boris, welcome back for another episode of our Quiz Makers podcast. Thanks for coming along.

Boris 0:39
Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Mike 0:43
Great. And welcome to all the listeners out there.

When we started this podcast, we called it The Quiz Makers because that’s what Boris and I specialize in. That’s what riddle.com as a quiz maker does.

However, there’s also a story that we like to share about how you can grow and scale a startup.

Now obviously, every startup is different. But we also want to pass on some of the lessons that we’ve learned.

Boris 1:32
Yes, one of the the key topics actually, when I talk to people, they want to know how to do do you make that list?

The honest answer is, I have no idea.

And then the next question is, “How did you manage to find all these cool customers? I’m seeing Riddle quizzes everywhere from the BBC to the NFL, Red Bull, all huge brand names.”

So they always ask, “What’s your sales tactic? How big is your sales team? How much you spend in marketing? Can you guys be profitable, and still get all these customers?”

That seems to be a common thread of what people are most interested in when we talk about Riddle.

Mike 2:14
Perfect. And this is one of the things I love so much about working at Riddle, the answer is also quite fun. What’s the answer you tell them?

Boris 2:25
Right – the answer is that the sales team is zero. We don’t have any sales guys, which is usually met with complete disbelief.

Mike 2:49
Oh, well, that’s also easy.

Zero.

And that’s a totally different proposition versus calling, messaging, and pleading with people to try our product.

Boris 3:16
So that’s the simple answer to the question.

Next? “How much marketing budget do we spend to get inbound leads?” It’s the same answer.

As for the sales team question, we spend no money on ads.

I guess if you’re an amazing marketer on social medi...

Previous Episode

Episode 19 – Steve Sarner – Amazon / Goodreads

Quiz marketing veteran Steve Sarner (VP of Ad Sales & Program Management @ Amazon’s Goodreads) shares his insights about why quizzes and ‘opt-in’ lead generation work so well together – especially in this era of increased privacy regulations, ‘banner blindness’, and ad blocking.

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PGRpdiBjbGFzcz0iYXN0LW9lbWJlZC1jb250YWluZXIgIiBzdHlsZT0iaGVpZ2h0OiAxMDAlOyI+PGlmcmFtZSB0aXRsZT0iU3RldmUgU2FybmVyIC0gQW1hem9uIC8gR29vZHJlYWRzIiB3aWR0aD0iMTIwMCIgaGVpZ2h0PSI2NzUiIHNyYz0iaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vZW1iZWQvLW1tcFdYSEJQWHc/ZmVhdHVyZT1vZW1iZWQiIGZyYW1lYm9yZGVyPSIwIiBhbGxvdz0iYWNjZWxlcm9tZXRlcjsgYXV0b3BsYXk7IGNsaXBib2FyZC13cml0ZTsgZW5jcnlwdGVkLW1lZGlhOyBneXJvc2NvcGU7IHBpY3R1cmUtaW4tcGljdHVyZSIgYWxsb3dmdWxsc2NyZWVuPjwvaWZyYW1lPjwvZGl2Pg==

Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to the Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling and successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Hi, there, welcome to this episode of the Quiz Makers. My name is Mike Hawkins. I’m one of the co founders of Riddle which is one of the major quiz makers on the market. And in this episode, I’m very proud to be chatting with Steve Sarner, VP of ad sales and program management. Is that right, Steve?

Steve 0:56
Pretty close, Mike.

Mike 0:58
I was stalking you on LinkedIn and that’s the current title I saw. So maybe I should have Steve introduce himself.

Steve 1:07
Right. Hi, everybody, Mike, thanks for having me on. I’m Steve Sarner, VP of sales and program management at Goodreads which is a subsidiary of Amazon – we are the world’s largest community of readers with 110 million members. Basically, we are the place to come to find and discover your next book, see what your friends are reading, and follow your favorite authors.

And it’s a great place to be during this time, where people are finding a lot of great content to to engage with. So it’s great to be on the Quiz Makers podcast.

Mike 1:43
Thank you. And I have to say, just in the interest of transparency, I am way too much a customer of Goodreads at Amazon. The number of times I get prompted, “Oh, hey, you’ve read this author” or “We think you might like”... then sure enough, I bought yet another book, especially now!

Steve 2:03
It is working.

Mike 2:04
Yeah, it is. So Steve, you and I worked together. And it feels like five years ago. But really, it was quite some time ago. I used to work with you at Tickle and then Monster.com.

Steve 2:16
Yeah, exactly. Those were fun times together, for sure. Mike. We did a lot. We invented a lot.

Mike 2:25

We did indeed. So the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast is that Tickle was one of the very first quiz online sites.

This is centuries in internet time, way back from 2001 to 2006 or so. And Tickle was one of the very first sites to do the “What type of dog are you?” and “What is your IQ” tests, things like that.

And after all, this is the Quiz Makers. So I wanted to catch up with you. What was your role in the use of quizzes for marketing?

Steve 2:57
Sure, exactly. Back let me go back a little bit before that – you may not know this, do you know where I was before I joined Tickle?

Mike 3:03
I do not.

Steve 3:04
I was at a company and a site that still exists today called Real Age, which was a health assessment site. So that was kind of my first introduction to quizzes.

I’d come out of the travel industry and joined the health interactive side as VP of marketing to help them grow their acquisition base. And you know, that was very much in line with the whole test quiz model.

In this case, it was actually health assessments, a number of them. And you know, I think one of the beautiful things about tests and quizzes is that you’re actually providing value for the person taking them. I’m a huge believer in advertising, ALL advertising, particularly digital advertising should be invited versus invasive – anywhere where we can add value to the user experience.

So when advertising feels like it’s part of the product, part of the experience, it’s just such a plus. And so Real Age, we were giving people some great, you know, health tips and advice, and then at Tickle, our IQ test and ‘What breed of dog were you?’... and we had hund...

Next Episode

Episode 21 – Laura Sagen – TheHairFuel.com

Discover how fast-growing Hair Fuel uses quizzes to find, segment, and convert new customers for their critically-acclaimed hair care products.

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between.

We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling a successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Okay, welcome, everyone – I’m really excited to have as our guest in this episode, Laura Sagen. Laura is just a bonafide, bonafide quiz geek – she is doing something really incredible with her business, which I will let her talk about, but she is the founder and CEO of The Hair Fuel.

So I’m going to toss it over to you, Laura.

Laura 1:00
Thanks, Mike. Super excited to be on your podcast. I mean, you and I’ve been in touch multiple times over the almost two years since I started using the software.

So a little bit about The Hair Fuel. It is an all-natural subscription-based hair growth mask that gets delivered every month at our customers’ doors. And like I said, it’s completely all natural safe for pregnant and and young mothers – it doesn’t have any sort of nasty, weird chemicals in it.

I often joke, it’s so safe that you can eat it. Don’t do it though – it tastes absolutely appalling. Because I know the ingredients, it’s definitely safe. And so, that’s basically the gist of it.

Mike 1:44
Perfect. Well, I have to ask, just for people who are just listening to us (vs. watching on YouTube), you’re not going to see my shiny dome, but I am somewhat follicly-challenged. So I’m guessing The Hair Fuel will have no value to me whatsoever.

Laura 1:58
Ah, but I think you’re wrong. It’s not that I think – it’s that I know. I think it can be a whole different podcast episode on that, but the logic is that our target audiences both male and female. As the first step, we decided to target females because this kind of notional self care and applying a mask on scalp is something that is a little bit more female-friendly. Females tend to be a little bit more friendly towards that entire notion. Males tend to expect just to pop a pill. But yes, it works both for for men and women is just for men because of androgens involved.

Mike 2:52
That’s fair enough. So actually, Laura, as you mentioned, you’ve been using Riddle (which is our quiz maker software) for about two years.

What was your marketing problem? What were you looking for and why did you find us? And hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed... how are we helping?

Laura 3:11
So how did we even come across the whole idea for quizzes? First, a little sidestep is that I came across quizzes with some sort of business coaching website. And it asked “What kind of enterpreneur or something are you?”

It was a such a good quiz. I don’t know what software they used. But it was a really, really good quiz.

Because the questions, they were interesting to answer, and then offered the value that I was getting afterward. So, the drip marketing was very valuable to me.

And also on the back of it, I was working on on launching The Hair Fuel at the time. I thought, “I’m willingly giving so much information to that business. And then I’m getting value back.”

So that was a very interesting proposition. Because I’m a strong believer of providing value for people first – if it is the right value, then people will come back, they will ask more questions, they might buy your product – or they might not. That’s not necessarily the point at the quiz stage.

And how I found Riddle specifically? You might have to thank your SEO person – because I googled for software, and found one of the review websites and it sounded pretty simple to implement – pretty straightforward. So I just decided to give it a go and you ...