Learn from top SaaS marketers inside of the new SaaS Breakthrough Community​​​​  Facebook Group.  Join today:

DA: 02:48
Hello, hello and welcome to this episode of the SaaS breakthrough podcast with Antoine from Crisp. How are you doing today?

AG: 02:54
I'm very good David. Thanks for having me today. Really pleasure to be here.

DA: 02:59
Oh man, it's such an honor to have you guys. Interesting time for you all and have some really interesting questions about what's going on over there at Crisp. But before we jump into marketing initiatives, all the cool stuff that you're doing that you have been doing, why don't we take a step back, explain a little bit about what Crisp is, when it was founded, who the customers are and what you guys are doing uniquely in the market.

AG: 03:23
Sure. So Crisp has been founded in 2015 by Baptiste and Valerian, who are originally developers. Right now Crisp is focusing on SMBs and startups mainly, but we also work with fortune 500, but like there's no main commercial effort upon those companies. Our main market right now are SMBs and did you have like multiple goals but they don't have that much money off bridge to offer the best customer support. And this is where Crisp comes in fact, Crisp offer a great product with a simple UX that lets companies centralize all their communications into one platform and then we bring some more feature such as a chat bot, live chat, knowledge base and many other features that helps the companies and specifically SMBs to better support their customers and also their leads. Yeah, that's what we do at first.

DA: 04:26
Yeah, that's fantastic. And I think you guys have some very interesting competitors. We can talk about that later and kind of what you're doing to differentiate yourself. I think most of that is kind of the marketplace ICP. But before we do that, I want to know when did you actually join the Crisp team?

AG: 04:42
Well, at the beginning of the year, in fact, in the 2nd of January 2019 so yeah, it's almost a year I've been working with the team over here. Yeah, really excited. I was, yeah, lots of different actions to do and the market was something as you told that, you know, was, is really competitive. So that's why I came. That's one of the reason I came to Crisp was because of the intense competition there is on this market. Yeah.

DA: 05:11
Oh wow. I'd love to learn more about that. I know you've worked in a startup accelerator before, did a lot of growth initiatives. So when you're coming in, you have this competition, it makes you excited. What are you initially doing when you first come in?

AG: 05:24
Well, the first thing I would need is, to better understand the market in fact. So what I started to do as I didn't know the market was to build my personas. Right. So I divide it, I started to do interviews in fact, and I think, yesterday in the SaaS Breakthrough Summit, Pinja covered it really like greatly. It was really interesting to understand and to see, Oh, she was ending customers' interview. So if you guys are, haven't heard this one, you should well, I'll have a look at it. So yeah, as I told you, I divided my interviews, around two groups of people in fact, existing customers and leads and deep dive into those. Cause I think it's interesting as many companies do not take the time to do interviews and to set the personas as I. I did my interviews on five steps, right?

AG: 06:22
Discover, consider, compare and choose. In fact those steps are linked to the customer's life cycle. Give you a quick definition and discover is about the problem. Okay. The trigger that made them think, okay, I got a problem on this thing. Consider is about the way they use to find a solution to their problem and the way they found Crisp. And also a key question, which is what other tools did you try and why. Which can really help marketers to better understand all your leads and also customers through compare your solution and also better understand what you should improve on your product. Then compare is about understanding our solution and how to explain it to their teammates or their boss for example. And also, and then finally, sorry, choose is about the buying intent. Okay. So what made them choose Crisp over, some other competitors for example.

AG: 07:24
And I really had lots of great insights doing this course I didn't know the market, I didn't knew my customers. So one thing I discovered was that in fact we had a very high level of referral over developers and they really love the way Crisp was built. Our API, our script SDK and all those tests that help them to better integrate Crisp inside their own tools, which in fact was something I didn't think about earlier when I stepped into the company. And quick act we used to get more feedback and to get more meetings to was to use an email alias of our CEO. And yeah, I think it's a good advice also for your, for guys, for you guys listening to this podcast. Well, you'll see, how much people are happy and willing to chat with you when it seems like the CEO is willing to talk to you.

DA: 08:25
Are you using, like you're using an automated email to send that out with from the CEO? Are you doing like a personal video in that like, and then obviously you're following up with yourself, but are you just sending out like an initial email just saying, Hey, this is David, I'm the CEO of Demio. Thanks so much for trying Demio. We'd love to have a chat and then you're following up yourself?

AG: 08:46
That's right. Yeah. and then at the end we say, okay, there's three emails in fact. The third one is about well I'm sorry but this one, well, in fact I'm not available. David is not available, but Anthony will be happy to handle the call.

DA: 09:03
Got it. Yup. That makes sense. That's awesome. So you're going through this amazing, by the way, I love that framework that you have, this amazing kind of framework to understand not only the marketplace but value proposition of Crisp in that marketplace and then the buyer intent. Like why, why there was the buyer intent in the first place. So a really good framework to learn about the customers, the marketplace, and more product. I think you guys have a similar product like ours where the product can fit everyone. Like any company, we have the same thing. We have SMEs to the education companies, to consultants, to SaaS companies. When you have that large diversity in your marketplace, how do you as a new growth marketer coming into the team, you know, the person coming in who is going to be the head of marketing, how do you say, okay, this is going to be our key ICP. This is the one that we want to go after. How do you fine tune that when there's so many?

AG: 09:57
That's really an interesting question and I think it can bring lots of values for lots of people inside, like our market. And that's true. There are so many different ICPs to focus on. Like just to give you a quick heads up about who we are targeting. Well like getting CEOs because, well, working with startups, so these all CEOs that are taking decisions, we're also working with CTOs because, we have a product that fits well with their needs and we will also focusing CSM because, we are stepping into the market and growing in terms of companies that we're targeting. So those three people have three different behaviors. They are not hanging out if I can say this, on the same topic and on the same content. And also their behavior is completely different. So regarding your question, I think the most important part to be able to identify the, the main one and the most interesting one is by being able to analyze your data.

AG: 11:09
What we do at Crisp is that, systematically when there's a demo request that is done, we enrich the data through Clearbit. So that we are able to get the job role of the user and then we are able to fold these through the process and through the customer's life cycle. And then we are able to build a data upon those and saying, okay, on average, these kinds of user brings us that much value and that's how we are doing and being able to identify that developers are a very high value, for risk because they do lots of referral and they'll really sticky here with our product.

DA: 11:56
What tool are you using to analyze and review all that data?

AG: 11:59
We are using Amplitude.

DA: 12:02
Is that similar to like a MixPanel or like a...

AG: 12:05
Yeah, that's right. That's a MixPanel.

DA: 12:07
We've been struggling so much to set up MixPanel. So I'm always looking for alternatives because we want to get into that data analysis like you're talking about like understanding product utilization on that level. Again, like you guys, we have so many customer types. We're really, we know who our ICP is, but we still want to get more involved with that. So it's just, it's really interesting to hear that. And that's kind of your major focus coming in when you first start. Like you said, it's like learning about the market, learning about who's using the product, getting very specific on that ICP. It sounds like you guys are dialing in on that, but you're still learning as you go.

AG: 12:39
Ah, yeah, we'll still learning to be honest. We just moved from the free plan to the growth plan at Amplitude yesterday. So, we really started to deep, deep dive into customers' interaction, build the (inaudible) sets of users and being able to define key steps regarding onboarding, regarding, lifetime value and so on. So at the beginning we're doing this manually, but no, we feel the need to be able to automate this stuff because it's taking lots of time and Amplitude helps us a lot to do this.

DA: 13:13
That's fantastic. And so I want to circle back. You just mentioned something about the free plan. I know you guys started with a free model and it's been something that's helped you guys, early probably before you even got there, just continue to grow, make a splash in the marketplace. And you mentioned you just kinda changed in that free plan model. So what has that effect been by having that free plan? Is it just been like the, the main thing for growth over time?

AG: 13:39
Yes, sure. Well, just to give you a quick heads up about the story of the company, Valerian and Baptiste use to build up and throw tools, right? So they have that mindset about free things. Okay. Building communities and all that stuff. And I think this is something that really helped the company at the beginning. Being able to have that users coming into your product, using the product and sharing the feedback while being, well able to use the product for free, which is really great when you're starting a company, early on. And just to give you a, a quick well heads up about that, we recently, released a light back and search engine on the market through open source because there was no cost effective solution available on the market responding to our needs. As we do have a low, pricing plan and low pricing model, we can't fit with solutions like Algolia and the other product specifically adapted to a search engine.

AG: 14:46
So that's why we wanted something light, easy to integrate. And our CTO Valerian build it and it had, lots of, well, awareness because well, he'd had more than 6,000 (inaudible) up. So as you can see, open tools can also be a tool for your company to grow, upon the specific communities. And that's something really interesting that I, I haven't ever done before. So to, to give back to the, to your question and the free model, it has been really something that still is getting lots of traction as we offer a free plan. For example, on SEO, we rank on a free plugin for WordPress or for free chat plan plugin for Shopify and so on. And it brings us users naturally, organically, so that we're able to nurture them and make them, and make them feel like, okay, I need more then just two seats and a live chat and mobile hubs I may need some live chat triggers or I may need some private notes to collaborate with my teams and so on. And that's how, we start, the customer's life cycle with the free users.

DA: 16:02
Is that the primary focus or has that been the primary focus of growth, which is let's, you know, really utilize SEO to rank, you know, rank the free tool. So we're getting lead generation from SEO. I love the get hub idea. That's fantastic. Using open source networks and models and probably why you talk to so many, you know, engineering people, like you said, CTO is an ICP. wWhat other things have you been doing just to kind of leverage that free plan?

AG: 16:29
Yes. So, one of the first things that the team did was to build integrations, with Shopify, with WordPress, with PrestaShop and, some other well e-commerce tools for example, on which we knew that they were in need in fact. And so, we build some, live chat integrations so that the user were able to find us one day while looking for, the expression live chat plus Shopify or live chat plus PrestaShop or WordPress for example. And still this is a very interesting way of first growth.

DA: 17:11
Were you guys actively searching high search volume integrations and building the priority based on them?

AG: 17:19
No, not really. Yeah, not really in fact, I wasn't part of the team at the beginning when they built this, but I know they told me that there wasn't, and there weren't any like search based, they just knew that by building those and in fact, once again, this was something that was requested by the users. Okay. So they did it and in fact they doubled down on it. And recently when I came through the company, I worked on improving them, the listings inside those marketplaces. So this is something also that marketers should take more attention of is their capacity of their plugins to be seen on those marketplaces cause it can really impact the number of installed and, active users upon those marketplaces. For example Wordpress is a really big opportunity and for us being able to rework those. They gave us like, I think it's 80% plus conversion and 400 person plus just by rebuilding. Yeah. Just by rebuilding the, the content of your product page if I can, just by rebuilding, in fact, the content of the WordPress plugin.

DA: 18:45
That's a fantastic, you know, initiative that you did not only just building those marketplace listings but also going back and redoing them, understanding the optimizations there definitely just gave me a light bulb moment of things that we can optimize as well. So I love that. So in prior episodes I've had a lot of people talk about like utilizing free tools to generate a ton of traffic. I think Albacross was recently up and talking about this, they had like a free model. They brought in a ton of traffic, but what they recognized was a lot of that free traffic didn't convert into paid customers. And it was like a really hard model to build off of. How did you guys, and this was probably before you were there, cause I know there was already some paid levels, but how did the original team look to start converting those free plans into paid customers? What's the ascension model look like? Did that have to develop over time?

AG: 19:38
Yes. And in fact, lots of the companies and lots of the features of the companies have been built upon the strategy. I'm going to explain in fact, as I told you at the beginning, the live chat was free and still it is still free. But as you can see on every chat box, of any users that are using the ASIC plan, which is free under pro plan, which is the middle one. There is, a message at the bottom of the page saying we run on Crisp and it's also its benefit in two ways. In fact, it's benefit in terms of the awareness because people, want to know who he's this chat box from and also it's able to drive traffic but it also giving you backlinks. So it's regretful SEO too. So this is what you call it and what we call in fact gross loop.

AG: 20:31
You're leveraging the power of your product to grow. And the more you have people using your product, the more you have people coming to your, to your product and the more you are able to get visibility upon your product because you are, well (inaudible) because you are seen by Google as really efficient on those topics.

DA: 20:53
Almost like like a viral coefficient.

AG: 20:54
Yes, that's right. And it's the same for our knowledge base at the bottom of our knowledge base. There's that link and yeah. Lots of other things like this that have been built upon the strategies.

DA: 21:10
So that is an amazing way to just generate, I guess new customers coming in that brand awareness, all that stuff. Does that mean that you also had like specific items in your paid plans to maybe remove that feature as well? Like were there certain maybe features or functions that you started to show in the product as people, sorry, to activate that help them move to the next level or what did that look like?

AG: 21:34
That's right. Totally. In fact, our unlimited plan, which is, the Ice plan on Crisp, is not targeting the same group of people as the two that I talked about earlier. I think the free plan and the pro are more for entrepreneurs and freelancers and that kinds of....

DA: 21:56
Like a solopreneur, like small business. They're very, very small business.

AG: 21:59
Yeah, that's right. And, or for companies that do not feel the need to have like big stuff and lots of customers request. But unlimited one is more focused on like a level of companies if I can talk it like that and they feel, they feel the need to not show, okay, we are using a product from someone else. So that's why using the unlimited plan you can, as you said, remove the branding and also, enjoy lots of specific features such as a chatbot or a knowledge base. And other, other great tools.

DA: 22:41
When you were coming in, beginning of the year and you were looking at that Ascension model from free to pay, did you have any major suggestions or ideas to help increase that conversion?

AG: 22:52
Yes, in fact, we did something in that I haven't been able to measure yet, which is, the ability to show a video when a user is able to click on the, on the feature he's trying to get value from. So for example, using Crisp there is all the features available, right? But most of them are blurred. It means that if you want to access them, you have to upgrade your plan. And it's a great way, I think to improve awareness inside product that are very complex as you have David and has, we have at Crisp so that users are able to understand what they can do with the project, with the product. They can project themselves. And then, we can, we started to use videos. Yeah. We created our own YouTube studio. Yeah. It's really, yeah, it's really cheap. And we did it by ourselves. So by the way, I'm right now in it so that I can show you later on if you don't...

DA: 23:59
You'll have to send us a picture. We'll put it up on the resources.

AG: 24:03
Yes, that's right. And, I haven't been able to measure this yet but I think cause we released it like, at the beginning of October, but we are going to measure it over the next days so that with two months of data I think we can get enough interactions to understand and see if it impacts the best of users being able to well purchase the (inaudible) plan. Just as in fact we've been able to upgrade our plan on Amplitude. It's the perfect tool for us to be able to measure this specific intervention.

DA: 24:40
I think that's a fantastic idea. Something that I want to steal because I think the video is so cool cause you can have the personal touch of you saying hello, thanks for checking this out. Here's the value. You can explain the value of that feature and then showcase it. And so even if they have the curiosity to click on it now you have a better way to explain it. A lot of times, and I think this is how we have it. If you try to click on it, it's like, Oh, you have to upgrade to unlock this. But there's not the value proposition of what it will do for you when you do that.

AG: 25:08
Yes, that's right. And another, another way we, we are doing, well free true, true paying customers is for example from the free plan to the, to the medium one, we are limiting chat history to 30 days so that users are getting really sticky. So going to use our product over such a days, if they feel the need to look at past conversation over 30 days, well then they will, they will need to upgrade to medium plan because otherwise they will not be able to access the history. So there's two ways. In fact, we are able to increase the conversion rate over usage and over awareness also, I guess

DA: 25:54
I really love the idea of the chat history reminds me of Slack because I was on a free plan, free plan of Slack and that had like 5,000 messages saved and afterwards it was gone. And it was very, very frustrating and it was like, it wasn't a forced upgrade, but it was like, Hey, when I utilize it and it aligns with utilization, I want to increase that plan.

AG: 26:14
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely a great way to, to get things going the right way because this is something that you really need. In fact, you've been using the product as we, as the book, you know, as the book that has been written by Ryan Hoover and, Nir Eyal about Hooked. And you know, when you improve the way and getting triggers and being hooked on that product, then it's, is the perfect way for users to well, to be, to be engaged.

DA: 26:49
Exactly. Yeah. Very much aligned. And that's a great book. Yeah, great book and reference. So a lot of the growth so far been based on this free plan using SEO, using listings with integrations, get hub and really kind of the developer networks there with open source, you know, just, referral and virality. So those are great channels. You're growing through the free plan, bringing in a ton of customers, going through an Ascension model to paid plans and moving them through. Now that you guys have kind of conquered that platea, what other acquisition strategies have you guys started to explore?

AG: 27:26
Well over the year, I've been trying a lot with Quora, which is in my opinion, a really interesting tool in terms of visibility because it's totally part of the customer's life cycle. And, yeah, we did a lot of Quora marketing from yeah, this year and we had really interesting results. In my opinion repetition is the key for Quora. And if we, if we talk a bit about Quora, I guess, the more you write quality answers, the more you get views and click towards your website. In fact, thanks to, the, the last podcast I heard, I think it was Userpilot, I didn't use the tool find better questions. So thank you for showcasing such amazing, people in your podcast, David because I've been able to learn a lot.

DA: 28:21
Yeah, that was a good episode. That was a really good Quora like marketing idea. So, yeah, I would love to know like what are you guys doing as far as, writing messages? Are you trying to find good questions? Are you writing questions and answers, like what does that process look like?

AG: 28:36
Yes. First at the beginning I've been working by topics. Okay. Looking at, the topics where your product is efficient and is used also customer support, live chat, knowledge base and lots of those, categories that are linked to your product. Then there's also some interesting, competitor categories. So for example, we wrote loads on the questions comparing Drift and Crisp to Intercom for example. There was those questions. In fact, the great power of Quora is that it ranks really well on competitive terms that it would takes you so much time to get in that, you would like have the time to lose your mind. I think. Yeah, it's, that's one of the best tool we can use to simply access, I value traffic and I, competitive request with like no time or like just 20 to 30 minutes to write the answer.

AG: 29:42
And this is the best, the best thing I guess we can have using those tool. So we made a lot of work on Quora and I think I can give you some tips about what are the key steps to write the best answers. In my opinion first the content has to be unique and this is one of the most important thing. I think that Quora (inaudible) has been really improved over the past months or even years. And now content that isn't unique is not performing well. There's no way you can also copy and paste content. I don't know how, maybe through some older specific stuff that are inside the, the copy and paste, well is able to detect it. And then this doesn't give you the power it should give you, I think you should also have an image to your content. No, don't. And please don't use bullet points or, or be very precise and specific about your bullet point and please had some, tales about, what you're stating in your bullet point.

AG: 30:54
I think you shouldn't also spam and overstuff your answers with links towards your website or some other content because it won't give you, well a good mark to your answer. I've noticed that videos inside answers ranked better then with images or without anything. And something that worked really well for me was also to add links towards others answers that were related to the answer that I wrote so that users could keep on jumping from answers to answers. And I discovered that it was a great way to increase positioning between answers on a specific and a competitive answer.

DA: 31:41
That's amazing. I think that's super great insight. Question on the video, on the video itself, were you doing custom videos for that answer or are you linking to a video that maybe showcases some feature or function or uniqueness of your product?

AG: 31:56
That's a great question. I didn't do any, specific videos. I could have done so. And it's a great idea, David. So thank you. I should try it. I only pushed videos that I've already been existing. So, for example, we released a new version of our software, at the beginning of October. So I add those, this video inside my answers over the past days so that, yeah, it can add some more visibility to our release. And I think it, it worked. It worked very well.

DA: 32:29
That's a really good idea. I mean you guys have that YouTube studio now so you definitely could do some cool personal videos. I think it would just be like totally unique versus the canned answers that you see there. It's like you guys do have custom video for like, you know, probably highly trafficked Quora post or like a highly searched a good search term. And like you said, the great part about Quora is that it's being ranked automatically because of the platform. So if you answer and you're the top post, you're getting all that free traffic and free insight just on content that you're writing. So it's really an amazing platform. We probably gave up on it too soon. Probably should go back and review it. Like literally the past couple of podcasts, everyone had been talking about it. So for you listeners, definitely a place to investigate and play with.

DA: 33:13
And I know that advertising platform looks pretty awesome too because you can search for ads that list for specific keywords. If you're like looking at a post about live chat, you could have a Crisp ad like literally on that post, which is pretty cool.

AG: 33:27
Totally, totally. And this is one of the next step, I'm willing to do. I Have some trouble to set a meeting with the, with the teams at Quora, but as soon as I get the meeting, I'll be really happy to start to try some ads because I really feel like you, I think it's something really powerful that can bring lots of interesting traffic towards your answers and then towards your website too.

DA: 33:50
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I totally agree. So I want to end here. I mean, this is how, this has been a fantastic conversation, but I think this is a very interesting period for you guys right now. And I think it's because we're ending this year and one of your competitors is moving up market in this changing their pricing. So kind of an interesting point is like sometimes you have these larger marketplace shifts that help drive new traffic to you guys because they're searching for solutions and with you guys saying, Hey listen, we're for SMBs. I think you're going to be able to attract a lot of SMBs. What are you guys doing or how do you, how do companies, focus on attracting people that are searching for like a competitive solution when pricing is changing or packages are changing or things like this happen?

AG: 34:43
In fact, that's funny because it happens like every day, people are coming to us and saying, okay, I want to leave this company because like pricing isn't good or I want to leave this company because customer support isn't great enough. And there's different channels these, these users are spreading those voices. The first one I can see is Twitter. Twitter is so impressive when people aren't happy with their company and they say very out loud on Twitter. So we use Twitter a lot to step in the conversation, start to engage with them and say, okay, I've looked (inaudible) we are, we're not, we're not like, we're happy to have you and would love to show you what we got. So I think, yeah, that's the first one is the conversational experience that you can offer as being a small company. We want to be close to our customer. And this is something I guess really interests our users right now. Everyone is able to speak to our CEO. Everyone is able to speak to our CTO and it works really really well. The other one is to build alternative pages I guess. So we've been, we've, we've had these pages for over two years now and it's really interesting to see people are coming on it naturally and comparing us to this competitor. It's something that, you know, drives us lots of traffic and conversion. We're also doing a bit of AdWords on those so that we are able to increase the number of customers that we are getting from these requests. We are also going to build some others. It goes, we think that we do have lots of value to bring to customers that are, well paying for something that it could have cheaper working with us.

AG: 36:39
Yeah, AdWords is great way. SEO also, social networks and then I would say, but this is something that has been done organically. Our users, I've written articles saying why they have moved from this competitor to our own platform and this is something we're great. We've also had some, other companies that have written lots of comparative articles saying, okay, this is the definitive alternative. This is the ultimate alternative and, and so on. But we didn't like push those. It was totally organic and you know, sometimes as you said, this is the right time to be on that market so that you can leverage the power of some authors rising their prices and stuff to be able to, to get them organically.

DA: 37:35
That's a really, really helpful review. I love the Twitter idea. Something that I've been thinking about. I'm not a big social media user myself. So it's like it's hard for me to get over there to do those things, but I really think we're missing like a lot of opportunity cause people like you said, are very vocal like using social media to just personally reach out and be that company. So I think that's awesome. My question on your competitor like kind of page or like the alternative page, do you guys do more of like a generic like side-by-side draft comparison? Is it mostly text? Are you explaining value? Like how did you guys organize that alternative solution page?

AG: 38:11
Well, the one that we have right now is quite simple to be honest. We are just stating using the keywords because we need to, if you, if we want to fit with the Adwords that go reserve and also the, the Google organic algorithm and we're just stating, okay, we are this company. We think we are better because, and we also differentiate ourselves stating, okay, we do have also those features that this competitor doesn't have. Which is something interesting because this isn't a, because we are cheaper than we can not bring all values to the user. And this is something really interesting, I guess don't be afraid to compare yourself to some other big players cause you can totally find some way you can differentiate yourself. And then naturally we focus on the product, on the pricing, sorry and saying, okay, we have a fair policy. Just discover it and we do have a really good conversion rate, up on those pages. So that's why, we'll also trying and we'll do some other pages upon this model because we think it can bring value to the market.

DA: 39:27
I think it's a great initiative. One of the things that we initially started doing and some of our highly or most highly ranked pages are those alternative pages. People looking for other solutions. And just like looking, like you said at the keywords, we've definitely changed them over time and be more focused on like feature comparison and then explaining it. When we first launched them, it was literally like, here's who we are, here's what that platform is like, here's why we're different. We're just like text. But yeah, I think they're, they're great initiatives, highly recommended to people. And I think you guys are doing a great job. You're definitely going to pick up a lot of great customers with your amazing pricing and your solution. So it's an exciting time for you guys over there. And as we get close to the end here of 2019, what are some of the things you're most excited about from a marketing point of view looking forward? Are there changes in the industry happening? Are there new opportunities that you're looking at? What's going on?

AG: 40:17
Talking about our own company, there are lots of opportunities regarding SEO and this is something we didn't worked on a lot over the year and we just released some really great stuff. So I think 2020 is going to be big for us regarding SEO, regarding the overall market I think AI is going to be big, especially, especially in marketing. I think AI is going to be even big, especially in marketing. We recently, as I told did a deep dive into Amplitude analytics and found some really great insight that we're going to use over the next months to increase our onboarding and improve the way our users are starting to use our product. This is something we haven't talked about, but you know, onboarding is something really key if you want the users to be able to use your product the best way and enjoy and make the most out of your product.

AG: 41:21
So this is, yeah, one of the major things I guess in my opinion, over the next months, where the market is going. I also think content is something really interesting. We recently released a program that is called Unleash which is a program that is aimed at helping our customer better use our product. So we produced a ton of videos and webinars, to showcase our product and help them to better understand what they can do and what they can't so that they can well better project themselves. And we think that the better a user use a product, the better is going to like the software he's using.

DA: 42:27
I love that. I think education is a killer initiative. We did something like that this year. We launched a university to just talk more about, you know, understanding webinars in general and then we're going to be doing a webinars series. So I love that. I think that's a great initiative, especially if success for your free members means more upgrades and you're getting a ton of those free plan customers. Getting them, you know, set up for success. That is the metric that matters most because the more success they have, the more they're going to upgrade. So I love that. But it sounds like you have a lot of good stuff going on. 2020 is going to be an exciting year for you guys. Would love to have you back on next year to learn more about how that's gone, what's changed in the marketplace, all that kind of stuff. But based on time, what I want to do is I want to flip over to our lightning round questions. Five quick questions for you. Answer with the first best thought that comes to mind. You're ready to get started?

AG: 43:20
Yeah, sure.

DA: 43:21 Alright. You're going to do good. You got this man. What advice would you give for early stage SaaS companies starting marketing today?

AG: 43:30
I think I would tell them to be refocused on data. I think data can solve a lot of stuff and we really discovered it like this week, with Baptiste analyzing and using Amplitude and saying, okay, our onboarding is getting worse. In fact since 2018 and we didn't even notice it. So yeah, being data oriented is, I think in my opinion, one of the best way to improve the way you're building the product.

DA: 44:01
I love that. That's a great answer. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?

AG: 44:09
Definitively AI? For me, AI for marketing is one of the key to success over the next months or years I guess.

DA: 44:17
What is an example tool that you can use for AI?

AG: 44:21
Well, for example, we use Amplitude that is able to analyze the key steps or our high value customers and based on those we are able to predict what kind of user are signing up on our software at the same time and stating, okay, this is a high value customer, so we are going to push him one-to-one meeting because we know that this one is going to bring value a lot for our company.

DA: 44:49
That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I love that. What about a best educational resource you'd recommend for learning about marketing or growth?

AG: 44:57
Well, I've grown a lot thanks to Growth Tribe. Growth Tribe is a super great company. I think they're located in Netherlands and they, you know, lots of highly quality of content, especially videos. And they talk about tools. They talk about AI, they talk about lots of different stuff and yeah, I think it's really great. Great content.

DA: 45:22
I'll definitely link to that in the show notes. That sounds like an incredible asset company. I'll have to review it. Never heard of it. Never been on it, but I'll check it out. What about a favorite tool you can't live without?

AG: 45:32
Crisp. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Over the last days as I told you, and I think people who will be listening this will know that, I've been digging a lot in Amplitude Analytic over the last days and it's really, really great tool. It helps you to understand so much things about how your customers are behaving and what is the value they, they take. Sorry, what is the action they are doing in your product. What are the value they give to your company and all these exciting tools and stuff that you can do with this incredible software is, yeah, really, really, really great.

DA: 46:19
How hard was it to set up, cause we're still struggling with MixPanel?

AG: 46:23
I think it's quite simple, in my opinion, this is only Java script that you set, like, you know, being able to use Google tag manager and it's quite easy. You can set properties to, you have to set properties and inside like user profile is the same for even, you can have some attributes to an event and so you can, you know, segment the data that you're looking for. In my opinion, that wasn't a pain.

DA: 46:54
Awesome. That's super helpful. All right, last question for you today. Brand business or team that you admire today?

AG: 47:03
Wow, that's a tough question. In my opinion, the marketing that Drift is doing at the moment is one of the best on the market. This is, doing really great in terms of marketing and I really the, I'm really impressed by, the way they doing this stuff and how they are able to attract customers regarding their product.

DA: 47:28
I said this on the SaaS breakthrough Summit when Dan from Drift was doing his presentation, but they are definitely one of the highest, ranked companies from that question. That question alone. Most people say Drift. They are fantastic. And if you're not following them in marketing or growth, you definitely should be. But we'll wrap up there and just wanna say thank you so much for your time today for your transparency and honesty and all of the teachings that you gave to us. It was a fantastic episode and I appreciate your time.

AG: 47:59
Thank you so much, David for having me. I was really, really happy to share all the stuff and it would be a pleasure to come back in like a year to share where we've gone to.

DA: 48:08
Let's do that. Let's get you back next year. I would love to learn, you know, what's changed in 2020. But again, thank you so much. We'll let you go and have a great day.

AG: 48:16
Thank you. Bye. Bye.

DA: 48:17
How awesome was this episode? Antoine really brought it today and brought so much knowledge on all the different strategies that they're doing from the free model, how they're driving traffic to the different in product marketing ideas to Quora, which I think was really, really helpful. (...)