What is a piece of bad advice that you've heard and is usually disguised as useful?
Our next guest Mike Korba, CMO at User.com has an answer that's definitely worth hearing – especially if you're working in a startup.
In this episode we discuss:
- how industry-specific investment can be a superpower
- how it changes your company's approach to growth
- the full story behind the company's great domain name – It took one year of negotiation that started at 400k. Yes, you read that right.
Links >>
Upraw media: https://uprawmedia.com/
Episode highlights: https://uprawmedia.com/blog/scaling-user-com
If you are keen to know more about Upraw Media or be a Masters of SaaS guest speaker, visit uprawmedia.com or DM us on LinkedIn. We are also on Youtube if you'd like to put a face to the names and voices of the best in SaaS. Thanks for tuning in!
What is a piece of bad advice that you've heard and is usually disguised as useful?
Our next guest Mike Korba, CMO at User.com has an answer that's definitely worth hearing – especially if you're working in a startup.
In this episode we discuss:
- how industry-specific investment can be a superpower
- how it changes your company's approach to growth
- the full story behind the company's great domain name – It took one year of negotiation that started at 400k. Yes, you read that right.
Links >>
Upraw media: https://uprawmedia.com/
Episode highlights: https://uprawmedia.com/blog/scaling-user-com
If you are keen to know more about Upraw Media or be a Masters of SaaS guest speaker, visit uprawmedia.com or DM us on LinkedIn. We are also on Youtube if you'd like to put a face to the names and voices of the best in SaaS. Thanks for tuning in!
Hey guys, welcome to the masters of SaaS podcast brought to you by Upraw Media, a growth marketing agency for SaaS specialising in paid media, content and conversion rate optimisation. I'll be your host, Todd Chambers. I have the absolute pleasure of chatting with really smart people from the SaaS industry. The goal is to extract as much value as possible. What are their strategies, their tactics, their failures, funny stories, key learnings? All of this can then be used to help you grow and scale your own SaaS business. In this episode, I speak with Mike Korba, the chief Commercial Officer @ User.com, a marketing automation platform that touches many different departments: marketing, sales, and customer support, ultimately allowing you to convert every user into a happy customer. Mike joined User.com in 2016, approximately one year after its inception, not only as a team member, but as an investor, he put his own savings on the line. I was really interested to understand how they've been able to grow in such a fiercely competitive space up against companies like HubSpot, Pipe drive and Intercom to name a few. We dig into their growth and onboarding strategies, as well as funding and management techniques that Mike has deployed to help steer the ship. I'm sure you noticed the incredible domain User.com. Well, it took one year of negotiation which started at €400k. Yes, you just heard that right. If you listen to the full episode, you'll hear the story that led them to almost selling their cars and houses to help cover the cost. I loved Mike's openness, honesty and approach to growth and business. He clearly loves what he does, and that truly shines through in our conversation. So without further ado, let's jump into the episode. Mike, welcome to the podcast!
Mike Korba :Hello, Todd. Thank you for the invitation!
Todd Chambers :Yeah, absolutely! It's great to have you on this lovely day on a Friday. So, Mike maybe we can start off just with a basic introduction: who is Mike Korba? And what is what is User.com?
Mike Korba :Okay, so I'm one of the co-founders of User.com. Currently, I'm Chief Commercial Officer. So, like, I'm a bit of CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) but also whole customer success and customer support is also like my responsibility and I'm working closely with our sales team. I was the first sales guy at User.com so we are still working very closely. So I have like a responsibility for I believe, most free important departments in every SaaS company. Like sales, marketing and support, and User.com is a marketing automation platform, which is used by users from all three departments. We are working with marketing departments but we are also working with sales teams and the support teams. And in short, we are a CRM for online businesses. So we help turn every visitor into happy customer with many channels: live chat, email, chat, bots, web push notifications, all in one platform.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, I believe the company started in 2015, but you weren't there at the inception of the company. I think you joined maybe two or three years afterwards.
Mike Korba :Yeah, it's like - user engage, because it was the first name, was founded in 2015, but it was a side project. The main founder, CEO Greg Warzecha had main civil hub project but he needed a tool for engaging users on the website. And he tested a lot of chat solutions. He thought they were all bad, so because he is a developer he built by himself a one for doing it properly. It was growing as an internal side project. In 2016, some people, when they saw that technology, they said "Okay, if you will give me this technology, I can pay for it". So in 2016, we launched, like User Engage launched the SaaS website. I joined in September 2016 but on Product Hunt we launched in December 2016. So from the beginning I was the first sales guy, and the billing system wasn't working well, at the moment. I was selling software which you could use for free because you would have to go into payment by yourself. The application wasn't blocked in any way so I have like a very good - it wasn't easy task , but I achieved that. I invested in the company with my own money because we were bootstrapped for it long time. Currently, yeah, I'm responsible for marketing.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, you have a long background in marketing as well. So maybe you can just quickly give a summary of your professional experience and what led you to User.com?
Mike Korba :Yeah. So I was a customer of User Engage at that moment, because I was a CEO of a different startup. It didn't go well, like currently, I have to close this website. But before User.com, (I'm been with the company for almost four years) I was a CEO of a different startup. And before that, I was working in advertising agency (more than seven years) and before advertising agency, I was working on the client side so I was a specialist and PR specialist and marketing. I started as working in marketing as a PR guy from political marketing. But it was really, really long time ago, like, I'm working in this industry for I believe, more than 18 years, maybe 19. And more than 10 years, I'm specialising in online marketing. And for four years I'm focused only on marketing automation. So when I'm telling it it's, I feel old.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, after seven years in an advertising agency, I feel your pain.
Mike Korba :I was starting when like online marketing was like selling these banners only and building your website – it was like going digital transformation. Yes.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. Maybe we can talk about funding. I think you guys, had a – I forget what range you you've had, but you receive funding. Was there funding from the beginning of the company when it was User Engage or did that come later on?
Mike Korba :So the main CEO invested his own money. So he previously had a company, which was selling courses, so it was an educational company. And he sold his shares and invested in User Engage at that moment. So it was his money and we can say it was bootstrapped. Yeah, on some level I also took my savings dropped it into into the company. So we were for a long time, bootstrapped and at the end of 2018 we decided to take a round. It was on $2.3 million. So like a round but we didn't take it from a VC investors. We took money from like industry investor, a Polish company. They invest in SaaS companies related to like omni channel aspects. So they have like companies from email industry from SMS industry. Also, this is a part of Age 88 – big hosting company which has a lot of brands and receive at various potential for making some synergies with that. Yeah.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. Do you find that having an investor that has industry experience really helps you guys? Do they kind of bring additional insights to the table, or?
Mike Korba :I believe that they are teaching us build a business because they are much more experienced than us. So it is really great to have such investor from whom you can learn and with whom you can grow together. I believe that in terms of going global, they can learn from us because User Engage and User.com was global first so first paying customer was from US. Besides that, but we are 100% Polish company and main office and like almost all team lives in Poland, but we even don't have our website in Polish language. So we are going global from the first time so, some aspects we are learning from them and some aspects, we can share our knowledge into the group.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, understood. Maybe we can talk about User.com. The first time I came across your website and domain, I thought "Wow, what an incredible domain!" Maybe you can talk us through the story of how you transfered from User Engage to User.com.
Mike Korba :Yeah, we've started as a startup. So we started with a UserEngage.io. Yeah, this was the only domain which you could buy for a couple of bucks. Then, after some time, we invested in UserEngage.com, just to not be treated as a startup. It was I believe, also pretty, cool domain – UserEngage.com. But at some point, Greg, started negotiating to buying this domain from the owner, and this a funny story because we were negotiating more than one year with this domain, and when we started these negotiations, we didn't treat it as it will happen. Yeah. Because like, the price was so high without our reach. But when we started thinking to take this a round we thought that it can be a good investment in in brand because it's like four letters and .com. Everybody, remembers and like your reaction is popular. Yes. So okay, User.com I didn't know that. Yeah. So this is like our growth hacker. Okay, you don't see our camera recording but right now I have like a T-shirt with User.com on it. And it helps us It helps us a lot. The domain finally was bought or were for $150k so it wasn't cheap, but I believe it was a very fair price. We've started negotiation with €400k so like the last day we didn't have this cash on our bank account. We were finishing this financial round and talking with the owner of the domain so okay, we have to like sell our car to and so we are writing a contract. But we are thinking, "okay, if we won't get get these money from our investor, because you when you're taking money, if you don't see money on your bank account, everything can happen. So we would have to sell those cars because contract is signed, but everything happens smoothly we write a contract with our investor and then we finalise the buying of this domain.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, well done. I think it was a good investment.
Mike Korba :Yeah. Like, right now, I don't know if we have a return of the investment but like, looking on the long term, for sure. It was a very good investment.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, one of the things that struck me when I was on your website this morning – I was going through I was signing up with a tool and it does so much. It's it's really quite impressive. So it's collecting user data, you can customise events. You can then create unique kind of user experience so you can create chat flows, pop-ups. It has text messaging , it has phone calls, an email, it has a CRM, it has so much! Although that's obviously great, because you have so many amazing features, but you also find that maybe it's difficult to explain kind of concisely what User.com is?
Mike Korba :Yeah, it is like our curse, that we've built a monster. It's really like an email solution, chat solution, chat bot solution, web push solution, pop-up solution. Right now we are working on landing pages. So it will be also a landing page solution. It is a CRM, it is a call centre, as you said, it enabled you to create a knowledge base so simple Q&As. So many, many tools and this requires you to compete with many competitors. Our strategy is not to educate companies like "why you should use live chat solution" but rather like "maybe you should have like live chat solution and CRM in one tool because it provides you the value". We want to be a solution of the second choice, not the first choice because it's better when you have some experience and you're working with many technologies. It is cheaper from our clients perspective not to pay for different tools and gives you the value that you have only one user you are not matching like HubSpot contact with MailChimp subscriber with some user in intercom or like some record in one signal, but you have like a one point of view of the customer. You don't have have to integrate everything through I don't know like segment or Zapier. Everything can be in one place, but yeah, it is very hard to show our solution in this simple way. Yes. We are tallying that we are all-in-one solution. This is like a simple description. Or we are using names of our competitors like "we are HubSpot for online businesses". So this is our primary differentiator, but we are focusing on online businesses, especially for ecommerce and SaaS applications. Yeah, but this is a real struggle to easily describe what we do. We have this brand claim like "turn every visitor into happy customer" but it doesn't mean exactly what we are doing. So we are gathering all data about your users and cover all channels of communication and you can build all flows inside us.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. So the process, I would assume, then is to get people into maybe a demo where you can really show them the value of the tool. They really feel it, they see it, and then kind of guiding them through that process to make sure they get the value from it. So they stick around with you.
Mike Korba :Yeah, we have like different kinds of customers. Our pricing is segmenting our user base because we have a free version where we can't do the demo but we can send a video with a demo. On the personal plan, which starts with $49 it's also hard to sell it through like a real human who will you do a 1-1 demo. We are organising some webinars, we are sending them also videos, etc. but most of our customers are like business plans (it starts with 30 to 250 and grows with your user base) and yeah, both our customers who have private demo with our sales team which can describe and show what can be the value of our customers. Depending on your business (if you are an agency like yours) we can be used in one way but it you're an e commerce application, it can be the use the in a different way. We focus on the companies on the level of growth. We believe we are not hunting on elephants. Yeah, we prefer to hunt for deer and rabbits. Theres this famous infographic that shows how you can earn $1 million. You can hunt for flies - 1 million for $1, you can hand for mices - 10 to 100,000 for $10. Rabbits, deer - so the you have to hunt lower number of customers, but with the higher value and we are hunting for rabbits and mostly deer. We have a couple of companies who are elephants, so very big companies, but our marketing effort and sales team are not focused on it. Maybe we should, because we see that complex marketing automation implementation can be very expensive aspect on the companies, we have such customers, but our focus is on the companies who are growing. Yeah.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. Understood. You guys introduced a freemium model and I'd be interested to understand what the kind of hypothesis or the the strategy or the thinking behind that was. And then now it's being rolled out. What is your kind of feedback? Has that worked out as you'd expected?
Mike Korba :It's working. Our hypothesis was that we didn't think that three users will convert in paying once. We believed that if you are you looking for a free tool, you're looking for a free tool. We want to upsell them or like percentage of like upsell to paid version will be very, very low. So it's not Spotify that grows a large number for free users and then try to upsell them. We offer in the free version a specific aspect of our applications. We are offering a live chat, web push notification, knowledge, base, calendar and all of those four aspects are branded and used by our customers on the very website. So you see that this live chat is like powered by User.com This Web Push Notification is powered by User.com and this is a good source of traffic. "So oh! Cool! Live chat - lets check it! So this was our assumption and it is working, so it is great. We launched it I believe at the end of last year, so some time ago, and being honest, we hope that it will go organically by itself. And it was wrong assumption. If you offer your tool for free, still, you have to get this traffic to use those users for free because it requires from our perspective to remodel our sales model. When we were all trials, all test accounts was a paid versiom we could like transfer them directly to the sales people trying to like do a demo. Yeah. Right now we have this trick like pre-qualification team, which is reaching out to each customer via phone, checking, like manually checking who the company is and the pre qualification team decides: will it be a free user? And they are like, marking them properly and CRM and votes are going with, like low patch automatic communication, or should they be like a business? and the votes are like moved to a sales team. But at that moment, like sales team is working only on SQLs. I think that from one perspective, it didn't go so well as we expected - that it will, like grow organically. And it didn't. We are having many freemium customers, but we hoped it will be a higher number. But in terms of like remodelling our sales model like that people are like salespeople are reaching out only to an SQL, it is a good advantage, so we are pretty satisfied with with with this.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. What do you think about the kind of the high touch sales model work where you're having people -it's very kind of led, you have to guide them through it. Do you have goals internally to maybe move more towards product-led growth or how do you think about that?
Mike Korba :I think that our technology is very complicated and we are reaching out to people who don't have time. Marketers want everything working with like, magic button "I want real-time bidding so let's buy some tools who will do it for us!" or "I want to add product recommendation. Let's buy a tool where I will like, add my cart and everything will work." In terms of these processes like onboarding customers, CRM job, so like driving the sales through the sales funnel, it's not so easy and each company have to make those flows by themselves because some – for example from your industry, you're an agency. So there are different agencies. There are different agencies even specialised in PPC. So there are on the market agencies which are hitting that high number of customers with the very low profitable aspect. So like the average budget of the customer is like $1,000 monthly or something like that. So they have to automate all those processes On the other hand there are agencies who are spending $1 million monthly and they have to have a team or agency which will spend this budget in most effective way. It depends on the business (and not specific industry or in specific model) how this marketing automation tool can be used. I believe that segmenting your database and segmenting your users so that both are low patch and both are high touch can be achieved. You don't have to be shown as only for a corporation solution or "we are serving only big clients". We currently have like vote slice on the free mobile, but we are focusing on years and sometimes we have like a big customer so corporations which we've which we are working very closely, like "I'm getting dressed in my seat and driving to customer" and like this is totally different sales. In my opinion, many big companies are currently moving in the lower market in this aspect that they like, half year ago before COVID signing a contract for more than I don't know $5k monthly was like – you have to meet this person. Like face to face. Right now everything can be done in Zoom so I believe that flexibility is expanding and all companies are trying to like mix this low touch with with some personal touch. I do not know if I have answered properly to your question.
Todd Chambers :You answered it perfectly, thanks, Mike. You mentioned COVID-19 it's a really strange time in the world. We're actually based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I'm originally from the UK and I can see the disparity between those two countries: the Netherlands seems to be handling the situation quite well whereas the UK unfortunately is not doing so well. How has (because you guys are based in Poland, right?)How has COVID-19 affected the country and obviously User.com.
Mike Korba :In terms of affecting the country, we were locked down pretty fast – I believe one of the fastest lockdown in Europe or in the world, so the pandemia didn't stretch in our company, but in the UK it grow and it's going down. In our country it non stop growing or on the same level, but we didn't have this peak. In terms of affecting User.com, most of our company customers comes from outside Poland. Only like 30%, I believe is from Poland, where we are, like well known, but most of customers are global. And we were affected by the COVID-19. April and May were months where we've seen the biggest churn ever. Some of our companies said that their business is going down, theyhave to cut all those costs so "please like turn off my subscription". Our like strategy was "Okay, we understand that you're hurt so let's not turn off subscription but let's freeze it for three months or freeze it for four months just to like not delete this payment card" but besides that, many customers were like "sorry, now we have to cut everything". Some of them are like on the freeze mode still. And we will be like talking with them on what stage we are. But on the other hand, it months with the biggest new MRR so new sales. Without investing in marketing marketing efforts we've achieved the biggest new MRR growth. At the end of the day, we didn't grow as we expected, but we still have grown. I believe, like summarising this COVID-19, most of companies are currently looking for a cheaper alternative for HubSpot or Intercom and this is a good market for us. We see that many of customers like online car companies, SaaS companies are checking for billings and they are seeing that they are paying for Intercom too much or they are for too many technologies which can be used by one. I see that I'm paying for Intercom, Pipedrive and I'm paying for One signal. Yeah, so three different tools and I have to like coordinate with this data with some segment or Zapier and like, I can have it in there one tool and it will be much cheaper. So this is like one aspect of our growth. And the second one, I believe that many companies who were thinking about implementing the CRM or like marketing automation technologies were forced to do it. So okay, right now we have to be an online company because our customers won't come to our office, so we have to go online we have to pivot and we need such technology which can help us to manage our users and posts or like seconds three of our new customers.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, I think it's we're very lucky we work in the online world. So many companies out there, restaurants, small shops completely out of business overnight. And I think we're really lucky. And I'm personally really, really grateful that we can still run our businesses. Yeah, we did a similar thing. So instead of, you know, we have clients that are on agreements, instead of holding people to those agreements, I think the best thing is freeze those agreements, you know, build up the goodwill and you know, hope that those people come back when when things calm down.
Mike Korba :Exactly! We even went one step further. We sat down to our CRM, we've analysed company by company like each account manager was analysing very portfolio which companies can be affected, so they will like drop down or potentially churn. But also some of our companies will need like additional help from us because like, for example, we have such customer doc planner, which is a platform for scheduling remote visits patient with a doctor. So during the pandemia they grew very fast and they need additional help from our side to like manage this traffic because previously some processes can be handled manual and right now it should have to be automated. So sometimes this, like, help from our side was not focused on this freezing, but also like, how to handle this growing demand of all our services.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, that's nice been a little bit more kind of proactive. How has User.com internally managed COVID? Because it's really tricky - if you're like in an office, and then suddenly everybody's working remotely, how do you structure things and how to get the best out of your team during COVID-19?
Mike Korba :From day one, we were half remote. So I was working for three years from the main offices in Warsaw in Poland, but I was working remotely from Dublin. Yeah, at the half of last year, in September I moved to Warsaw to work closely with the team. Yes. So I even bought an apartment in Warsaw and currently I, I've moved to another city and I'm still working remotely. We had this privilege that part of our team: support team and sales team were working remotely for pre COVID times. So this shift wasn't such a big shift. The whole IT and product team were working like in one one place. So, like this agile sprints etc. We were afraid about it, how it will be managed from remote, but after almost three months, when we are looking on the on the numbers and we are looking on how our team as as the whole perform the effectiveness of people have grown. So it went well. In May we thought that we are when we will be going back we have to go back with whole our team, so that was our assumption, but many people like decided to go work from some villages or or get back to their private homes not in Warsaw. Couple weeks ago we've decided "so okay, right now the office is open, so you can get back to, to work from office, but if you want to stay remote, you can still work remotely" and only two people went back to the office or maybe free people. So we have a really big office for 80 people right now. And it's empty, so I don't know what will be the future but right now, I think that we will be a half remote team for a long time.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, sure. Just to go back a few steps: we were talking before the call and I guess you guys are still a startup, I mean, compared to some of the other really big competitors in this space like HubSpot, you mentioned, what channels have worked best for you in terms of growth when you're in such a highly competitive market? I mean, we run paid media for clients and I know in your space, you can see CPCs which are 40, 50, 60 $100 per click, how?
Mike Korba :I will reach out to you and you will tell "Oh, we can, like optimise to have it in like $10 not?" I was hoping but like, I can't do it. And maybe some other people like some other agencies can achieve those clicks on lower and lower CPC cases. But yeah, I believe that we are now to start up. We know a startup is looking for the repetitive scalable business model and we know our business model. Right now we are scaling our our business, so we rather a scale up than a startup. But yes, we have very big competitors like HubSpot, Salesforce, or even like a Pipedrive or Intercom Drift all are really big players. And of course, when you are growing online businesses, you can grow it in a couple of ways. Yeah. So so you can grow it with a PPC strategy. But as we said, it's very, very hard to like – we don't have this money, we are not VC backed so we don't want to spend money. We are after a round but like a bootstrap culture is like, strong with us. We don't want to spend money for growth. We have a privilege of having this investor that is like "you have to grow, sure, but grow wisely. Yeah, we want to have like customers for 10 years. Yes." So, of course we have some KPIs, we have to achieve that with the growth but the focus is to grow wisely and sometimes like make it in slower version than like Silicon Valley way. Like in three years, you have to triple my growth 10 times or something like that. But in terms of growing through CPC is like so hard, I could talk about it for hours. But if you're thinking about the different channels so "okay, so let's invest in content marketing!" but you have to be aware that we are competing with HubSpot.
Todd Chambers :and they are just the kings of content marketing. It's almost impossible.
Mike Korba :Content marketing is the thing that they invented. They have like tonnes of people writing about everything. So it's really really hard to do it properly. Being honest, we have some channels which are maybe not fully scalable, but it's working pretty good. So for example, Capterra and Getapp and both it's paid media but it can be like optimised in a very effective way. So capterra get up Yeah. And like most paid version, we are growing like organically. As I said like customers of our customers are a good source of our traffic and have our leads, like live chat on the other web installed on our website is a good traffic. We are experimenting with outbound sales, so so we are trying to do a cold reach out, but maybe not on a very high scale, but in more like I say it in intelligent way. And it's workin, it has a positive ROI. For example, we are reaching out to the companies who are using, I don't know, Intercom and like oh, but you're using Intercom and you're using HubSpot. Maybe it's a good thing to think to have it in one place. So like strategy of the second solution is working for us. I believe outbound, Capterra and referrals. Sometimes Quora works for us, like going in some discussions. It also went well, like investing in a good domain is also a good growth hack.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, sure! How do you protect your time, Mike? And I say that because when, as I'm sure the company has grown, the team has got much bigger. You have so much opportunity, often opportunities are or they're disguised as an opportunity where actually a lot of the time they can just be a distraction. How do you make sure that you really protect Your time and just focus on the things that matter most.
Mike Korba :I'm awful at that, like I'm not doing it properly. I believe that it should be managed in much better, better way. I've tried all the tactics: read get things done, read many books about how to delegate, how to manage people, how to be a manager not be responsible for each aspect. I'm learning it. When we were a group of five people and one was three developers, one the person responsible for support, one responsible for sales, it was much easier. Right now, I'm responsible still for the team who is our onboarding team but I have the advantage that I know how their work looks like because I was doing it, so I can share my my experience in it. I'm managing in some way our sales team because I know how it should be done. And like I can structure it in processes, so I know what works and what doesn't but like managing that team of like, two three people and managing...we are currently on the level that this year I hope we will grow our sales team. Right now. It's not a big team. It's like a team of four or five people. We hope to scale it for like 20-50 people in two for years. In terms of protecting your time I tried pomodoro, I've tried everything and still I like I'm not good at that. I have the advantage that I love my job. I really like talking with with marketing guys with with sales guys how to optimise how to organise processes related to marketing, sales and support activities and probably I should focus more on like writing it down and make it as a written down process or like, Ebook or something like that. But I don't like writing it down. Yeah. So I prefer to, like only talk about it. Right now we are organising it that way that if there is some article, I'm sitting down with my friend, and I'm talking what should be written in this article? Yeah, we are talking about one hour or something like that. How I would go in this specific subject, but the writing is done by the other people and like, I'm okay. It's good. It's good here. I have I wouldn't say that. Yes. So I'm like just making corrections and it can go live on some like, I don't know in some newspaper or in some magazine.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. We've also – it's really, really hard. We've tried all different things: we used to have a daily update on Slack: what were you working on yesterday, qhat are you working on todayl then we moved to a simple daily standup where we do a video call. Now we moved to a Monday kind of weekly goals - so these are the main things I'm trying to achieve this week. Then on a Friday, we're now doing also follow ups which we disguise - it's just an excuse to have beers and have a chat. But on a later Friday afternoon, we sit and we go through and we discuss how did we actually stack up against those goals. And it's really interesting to see even for me personally, what most people tend to do is set themselves a really, really high bar, and then you kind of end up cherry picking things that you probably enjoy doing. I think for me, where I find value is just choosing two – three things that like: these are things I have to get done. And that's my number one priority. And if I get those things done on by Tuesday afternoon, great, then I can move on to the next things but it's it's so so difficult to protect your time.
Mike Korba :Yeah, like many strategy slides starting from the hardest task etc. I think that, as I said, I'm really bad at it. But being honest, I'm very selfish. Being from the beginning and like being a manager, I have like some people to help work my way. I really can do this cherry picking. I like to speak with people so so I can go on such podcasts, I love to be being called stage so I can go on conference and have some keynote. I love talking with customers so I can join some like first onboarding call or join a crucial call with on the sales process but I have people who are doing this hard part of it. So being selfish and doing what gives you the biggest satisfaction, what drives yo, I think I'm doing right.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. Yeah. It's also kind of playing to your strengths, isn't it? Because you're obviously a people person you like talking. And that's probably what it seems like that's where you're strongest. You're really good on podcasts. And we've also spoken at on the lightning rounds at SaaS stock. And if that's something you really, really enjoy, it's probably something that you're going to be really really good at. So there's also an element of – you probably should do the things that you really enjoy, as well. So that's understandable.
Mike Korba :Yeah, I was I was fighting with myself. I was trying to do more writing - to write more articles. But like when I write down those bullet points, and I've started writing, it takes me so much time and I was always not satisfied with this part of job so it's better to rely on people who are better in that than me. And yes, so good - analyse yourself: what do you are best in and like don't don't fight with yourself. It's a good idea to protect your time to be more effective. Yeah.
Todd Chambers :There's also a recurring thing that I've noticed you saying a few times. You said "you know, I'm managing the sales team, I'm managing the onboarding team, the marketing team. It's because you've done all of these things yourself. You've kind of learned how to do them, even the writing, maybe you didn't enjoy it, but you learn how to do the thing first, and then you delegate it to other people. So that's a really important lesson as well.
Mike Korba :Yeah, I have like a privilege that I have a really great team. So yeah, I am a manager. I don't have to like manage those people. I like point them in the right direction. And this is really, really great situation that I can like 'here you've made a mistake. I think that it would be a better way to like go with this that way." From my experience, it's better to focus on this thing or good to go with this thing, but I don't have to like manage in the old style. So like you have to do it. We have this procedure and like keep that procedure ongoing. We have such culture but we don't. You have to be like not an individualist but you have to organise your work by yourself. This is like one required aspect when we are hiring people. We can help you with everything, but you will have to be responsible for your own tasks and you will be held responsible also for organising your work. Of course we have Asana, we work on Gitlab. So there are some procedures but we are not sticking to it but okay. So, if we are doing the pre-qualification job in this like, step by step is not that pre-qualification manager will have to go with this procedure. His goal is to modify this process to be the most effective. We have like this aspect that and when I'm hiring, I'm telling it always but you have to think as yourself and I know that it can be not popular but if we are paying you X amount of dollars, and you're working eight hours a day, you have to be aware that for a company, you are a cost of like 200 $300 or something like that. When you will spend on some task item five hours, you have to be aware of it, it will be like it's really, really hard data driven and like I don't want to be like treated as like 100 capitalism but I'm trying to tell our people that if this will cost five hours of your time, and this is a cost of like, one 115 k $15,000 for the company, and you can delegate it through Fiverr or through a student and it will take you only like, one hour of managing it and like a couple of hours, let's do it! Don't be afraid of it, like make our work as effective as possible. Yeah. But don't go with these procedures or processes if they are needed. But if you can do something like in a better way, let's do it like in the next week week, let's try to do it that way. We will like check the KPIs, we will check the numbers. And when we will have the answer. Was it better or was it not better and we are going to do it in the old way. Yeah.
Todd Chambers :Yeah. Great. Well, Mike, I'm going to give you my last question, so I better make it a good one. My question is, what is some bad advice you often hear so instead of you maybe giving what you think is good advice, what do you think is some some bad advice?
Mike Korba :In terms of bad advice, like don't mix vodka with the beer. This is a bit...
Todd Chambers :Something common in Poland or?
Mike Korba :Yeah, no, like, I'm just joking. We both are specialised in SaaS companies. So we met on some SaaS conference and in terms of these online businesses and like subscription based companies, I believe that bad advice is like, "growth is the most important aspect." I believe that if you're running online businesses, you have to achieve growth on some some level. But if your NPS, for example (net promoter score) is lower than zero then you shouldn't scale. You should work on your product, you should work on your customer success, on your processes, and then you should scale. If you will scale with a shitty product or shitty service or like the KPIs will be matched. Yeah. So if you will spend a lot of money on CPC and like have a lot of sales team engaged, you will achieve your growth you will achieve your KPIs but you might not be ready for a growth stage. I believe that bad advice from especially VC - you have to grow. Growth is really really important. But sometimes it should be like a sustainable growth, like scaling, like spend this money because we will we need a second round. And one bad advice. Money will solve all the problems. Yeah. So it's not an advice but like money will solve the problems. No, money won't solve the problems - I'm talking about investment money. Money will make a new problems, which are you aren't aware of why you don't have this money. And still old problems won't be solved. So yeah, I hope that for those hard questions that the answer is good enough.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, they were great answers. And they were actually things I think a lot about as well because we deal with SaaS founders that have funding and they want to grow. I think one of the things you've got to think about if you're a SaaS founder and you're going to take funding, of course money is great because it allows you to be more risk adverse, but you need to think about do you really want that investor always being over your shoulder, putting the pressure on you forcing you to grow the company and often the growth is just so you can then get to the next round. And then they want you to grow to get to the next round. And do you really want to be part of this game? That's that's a really big decision that you need to think about.
Mike Korba :Yeah, we have like, this privilege with our investor. When we we've talked about HubSpot. HubSpot is like growing as mad, but like when you look on their numbers without those like VC backed money, they have to like still invest a lot to like grow. I believe that it is a good way for some people for some companies. My preference is like build a sustainable business with which you can grow. Maybe not so fast but like a business is not a sprint. It's a marathon. So this a better way, in my humble opinion.
Todd Chambers :Yeah, I could not agree more. I think that's a good way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for you know, Mike, it was really nice talk. Thanks for your insights.
Mike Korba :Thank you for invitation Todd, it was really pleasure to have this talk.
Todd Chambers :Where can people find you? Is there a particular place where people can reach out to you?
Mike Korba :Besides of this really good domain I have really easy email. So my email is mike@user.com.
Todd Chambers :I literally made the joke before I came on the podcast – how good your email was. Mike@user.com. What a great email!
Mike Korba :Yes. So if you want to talk about business and about marketing automation, you can drop me a line and I hope I will answer.
Todd Chambers :Thanks so much, Mike. Have a great day and I'll catch you soon!
Mike Korba :Have a great day. Bye bye!
Todd Chambers :Thanks for listening to the podcast guys. If you want to get links to any of the resources we discussed in the interview, head over to a uprawmedia.com/podcast. Until next time, take it easy!