SurveyMonkey Acquired Their Last Business. Now They’re Back to Grow Vocal Video- G&C Interview

02/17/23 • 59 min

We're trying something new. Many of our clients have really interesting backgrounds and stories, so we decided to interview them.

In this podcast, we interview the Vocal Video team to learn where they got the idea for Vocal Video, learnings from their experience selling their past company TechValidate to SurveyMonkey, how their past experiences informed their marketing strategy, why they chose SEO/content marketing as a channel, how they launched their product and more...

Please let us know what you think of this format.

We're trying something new. Many of our clients have really interesting backgrounds and stories, so we decided to interview them.

Please let us know what you think of this format.

Previous Episode

The ROI of SEO

There are many people that don't know how to calculate the ROI of SEO. In particular, they don't understand a key principle of SEO's ROI: it gets better as time passes. Why? Because unlike paid channels where you need to spend more for every extra click you get, in SEO you start accumulating or stacking pages ranking at the top of Google search results, while your spend doesn't increase.

So as you do SEO for longer, you get more traffic and more leads for the same monthly cost, yielding you better and better ROI.

In this podcast, we discuss this in depth, using examples and graphs (if you'd like to see them, find our video on Youtube).

We aren't making the argument that SEO is better than other channels, just that you need to think about it differently. With other channels, you may see a fast ROI, but leads get more expensive overtime and you need to continue to invest more into it, and with SEO, it takes longer to get an ROI but costs come down dramatically overtime.

SEO works well when you have an existing channel that is driving leads already and you can build this simultaneously over the long term.

Next Episode

How This Bootstrapped Help Desk Software has Lasted over 10 Years Against VC Backed Competitors

In our latest episode, we interview founder Ian Landsman about how he started the help desk software Helpspot back in the early 2000s and how he's lasted 15+ years against funded big name players like Zendesk, HelpScout, and more.

We get into the details about what he did in the early days to launch his company, why he never really had a focus on marketing until recently, and we share some of the rankings that we've been able to generate for their business in an extremely competitive category.

Sections:
0:00 Intro
1:13 The founding story of Helpspot
5:26 Funny story about software development
7:49 Laravel
8:48 How Helpspot was funded
9:35 Pre-SaaS
11:56 How Helpspot launched
12:56 Early SEO
15:39 Enter the competitors- Zendesk, etc.
18:27 Team size
20:29 Why Helpspot never invested in marketing
25:26 Difference between VC funded and bootstrapped help desk software
29:15 Did you ever think about selling your business?
31:43 Marketing and positioning
35:23 Why invest in SEO
40:37 Results from G&C
47:10 Attribution of leads to SEO/Content
53:52 Helpspot 2023 and beyond