Masters of SaaS
Masters of SaaS
How to stay close to your customers as a Founder – Chris Ronzio @ Trainual
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As a startup CEO, where do you spend most of your time as the company grows?
Common answer: in meetings;
Ideal answer: prioritising your customer base more
Chris Ronzio, CEO and founder of Trainual walks us through the lessons and key decisions that took the company from 0 to 5 Million ARR in just two and a half years.
By our standards, that's pretty impressive.
We also cover:
- how to approach unit economics as a SaaS startup
- the simple practice that helps him answer all the common messages he gets on his channels
- how to use customer feedback to drive your business
Links >>
Upraw media: https://uprawmedia.com/
Episode highlights: https://uprawmedia.com/blog/customers-trainual
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, theor tactics, theor 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 Chris Ronzio, the founder and CEO of Trainual - the leading onboarding, training and knowledge management platform. Chris was able to take Trainual your from zero to 5 million ARR in just two and a half years, and by my standards, that's pretty impressive. The episode's quite fast paced. We cover a lot of ground and interesting insights from their difficult first year, but how they pushed through it and found their primary traction channel in Facebook and Instagram ads; Strategically, and the key word here is strategically, getting into $300,000 of credit card debt, selling wedding gifts, and a bunch of other stuff to pay for ads that ultimately fueled the growth of the company. The importance of getting your paid media unit economics nailed down before you throw fuel on the fire, this is something I've spoken a lot about, so we definitely jammed on this, Trainual's funding rounds and considerations for founders looking to take funding, the importance of feedback and how he met the infamous Gary Vee in their headquarters in New York. Hope you enjoy the episode guys. let's jump straight to it! Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Ronzio:Thank you excited to be here!
Todd Chambers:Yeah, it's good to have you on! Maybe we can start off just by basic introduction: who is Chris?
Chris Ronzio:Sure! So Chris Ronzio - I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Trainual, so you think training manual smashed together is basically the playbook for business. All your policies, processes, procedures, roles, responsibilities in one place, online.
Todd Chambers:Nice. I actually love the name by the way. It's short, it's easy to spell. It's kind of descriptive as well. It's, was it was a challenge to come up with a name or?
Chris Ronzio:no, it was like where I took all the business buzzwords and tried to mash them together. And this was the only one that like sounded ok and had a domain available, so it was a pretty quick process.
Todd Chambers:Okay, nice. I think I procrastinated and took way, way too long to come up with a company name, which I don't even like anymore. But I think many people spend a long time coming up with a company name. So yeah, good. You were able to just...
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, it was quick. But some people think it's like, train y'all or train you all, so t's got that like subtle thing in there too, but I'll take it!
Todd Chambers:Cool. We were just talking about - I was listening to on the SaaS podcast with Omar Khan, and I was also a guest on the podcast, and the title of his, your episode was going from zero to 2 million ARR in 18 months. And we were just saying, it hasn't quite been 18 months. It was in May 2019. So how is the current performance of the company doing? Have you progressed since then?
Chris Ronzio:So I guess the updated headline would be zero to 5 million in 30 months or whatever, since two and a half years.
Todd Chambers:Nice! 5 million ARR. Congratulations! That's quite some achievement in such a small amount of time.
Chris Ronzio:Thank you. There's a there's a market need for it, I guess. So we've we've taken advantage.
Todd Chambers:For sure. And it's actually quite interesting time for us, we're a small company, we're just nine people. And we hired a couple of people over the last six weeks. And I find myself having the same conversations, like I would onboard someone I would allocate, you know, a morning to explain, you know, like, this is how you get coffee. This is you know, how you book holiday, this is how you do X, Y and Z. And it was like the third or fourth time I was having those conversations and it was like,"okay, Todd, we really do need to systematise" so I guess this is a huge problem. Do you find that this kind of a tipping point where you reach a certain company size that that's like our ideal customer profile? Like how do you think about that?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, it's right about where you are. So it depends on the company and what they're doing, but for some companies, it's five people for some it's 10, for some, it's 15. But that's kind of the sweet spot where you go from people and functional areas in the business, sort of dividing and conquering, to now you've got more people you're hiring and you're specialising in certain roles, and you need to formalise the the best practice the way to do things. So just like you said, you don't want to be repeating yourself over and over, especially if you're hiring more than a couple people a year. And so there's some function of how much you're growing, how many people you're bringing on. And there's some function of just like how the roles are changing in the business.
Todd Chambers: Big question:why did you build Trainual? How did the company come about?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so it's kind of been a long time coming along process of my own experience. So when I was in high school, I had a video production company that did live sporting events. And it started with just me, my friends at my high school and by the time I sold it, we had over 300 camera operators, and so we only over and over again would book events, we'd find crews, we train them to do the event, then they'd ship back the footage and we'd send out the videos. And so it was this repeatable process. But for every new event, every new city, we had to document how we did things. And we had to make sure that the crew showed up looking and feeling like us. And so it was something that at the time we did with, you know, email templates and docs and PDFs and laminated sheets and the equipment we shipped out, and then we moved into like, password-protected WordPress sites, and how do we do online training? So when I sold that business, that was my specialty. It was like systems and processes and SOPs, so I started consulting for some friends and their businesses, and I saw everybody kind of wants this systematised turnkey business, but there was no real platform that was designed to do this. It was like something people hack together. And so Trainual was an idea that was to be like designed for this. So first, it was just for my consulting clients. And then a few years into it spun it out into its own business.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, interesting. So you have the need, and then you went and built it out. So did you take funding? Did you kind of build on the side of the service business? Like, how did that manifest?
Chris Ronzio:Yes, so the first couple years of the product, there was no funding, there was, like I said, it was just for my consulting clients. I was charging $49 a month for it and I had built up like, you know,$1800 dollars a month in recurring revenue. So for me, that was massive, it was like mailbox money, it was paying my rent. And I thought, this is cool. I've got this proprietary thing. And then the turning point was I started having consulting clients referring it out or mentioning it in a blog post, or whatever. And there were strangers that wanted the tool but didn't want my consulting. And they said, you know, I'll pay for this, but I don't need your help, just like, let me sign up. And so I thought, wow, strangers will pay me for this, like, this could actually be something. And so I had five employees at the time. And we decided "let's just let's just go for it, let's take a swing at this!" And so it was like a pretty cold turkey process where we shut off the consulting, December 2017. We launched the product made it its own business, its own entity. And then we just started selling the SaaS product and giving away the consulting as like free marketing, free advice. That was the big shift. And so it's been a real fast ramp since then.
Todd Chambers:It feels like there's a transition of people that are in service business, like we're in the service business, and it's tough. Being the service business is tough. I mean, essentially, you're trying to scale time, which is really, really hard. And obviously, SaaS businesses are way more scalable. Was there this kind of moment where you thought yourself, hang on a minute, maybe if I'm looking towards the future, I should be looking more towards software and something that is a bit more scalable?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, I mean, you can look at services as like a really great income and a good lifestyle type thing, or you can look at it as paid R&D. And that's what I was looking at it, you know, it was like, we were working so closely with our
Todd Chambers:So you have the services business, you're five target customer. And then when I had a product that I thought could really scale, I knew their businesses inside and out. And so it really informed how we built the product. And the whole time we were getting paid by the customers to learn that instead of launching a new business where you know nothing about the customer and you spend your first couple years trying to burn through funding while you get up and running. people you decide "okay, cool! Let's go all in on this, this SaaS product". How did the employees take it, by the way? Were they kind of totally cool just transitioning their entire job roles?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, they were like. You know, a few of them were like, you know, "I never thought I'd work in tech or work for a software company. This is weird". I came in one day, I had redesigned the logo with 99 designs. And I came in with like, new t-shirts for everyone and sat everybody down. I was like, here's what we're gonna do. And they all they all bought in because the fallback was if this doesn't work, we'll just go back to consulting. It's not like that bigger risk. It's not that the other business wasn't working. The other business was doing great. And so it was kind of like a hiatus from client work to give this thing a real chance.
Todd Chambers:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not a developer. You're not technical, no?
Chris Ronzio:No, not technical, but part of the consulting work I was doing was helping people with their workflows. And so, you know, part of efficiency process consulting, was going into business, talking to everybody, interviewing them, and understanding how things moved through the chain. You know, how a job started, how they sold it, how they fulfilled it, how they, you know, maintain the customer relationship. And so part of what we started doing a few years before Trainual was having contract developers build little tools to fill in the gaps for a customer where it would just automate certain processes that they have. And so through that, I found myself wearing this like Product Manager hat, where as a consultant, I was understanding the problem. And then I would try to translate that to the developers. And that really set me up to be able to run, I think the the software when we wanted to build our own.
Todd Chambers:Nice, so you are five people, you fully transitioned to having this SaaS business, very small amounts of revenue, I assume you're pretty much burning cash at this point, covering people's salaries. So how did you start growing it? Like what are the initial things that you did to try and grow the company?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so those first six months were the hardest, I would say. It took us six months to get to $10k MRR. And just for some context, the consulting business had done about $200,000 in December before we made the switch. And so fortunately, we had built up like some saving some cash savings and we were able to fund this runway. You know, and, and, and be okay burning, but it took a while to build up sales. The couple big steps were, you know, month two, it was, month one was just announcing it. Telling everyone I knew, we had a launch party, invited everyone, we had a reporter there, we had a photographer there, try to make some fanfare around this thing. Month two, we launched it on Product Hunt. We set up an affiliate programme, I you know, I was I was just caught like hard selling and being an affiliate for us and trying to get people to post the link on Twitter and things like that. Month three was when we started experimenting with Facebook and so my brother and I, my brother's our CMO. We just started shooting videos in the office where I was talking about different business problems or scaling. He and I were walking down the street, and we were talking about just just challenges we had had. And those really resonated because they were pretty authentic and just totally raw. And so we were running Facebook ads and Instagram story ads. And we were just testing out the funnel. And once we felt like we were getting predictable sales, that's when we felt Okay, really investing in digital, which became the way that we scaled from, you know, 10 to 100. k.
Todd Chambers:Obviously, our businesses is ads. So one of the really cool things that I heard you talking about on the SaaS podcast was the unit economics. And actually on the episode I was speaking to Omar, we spoke about the six common mistakes that SaaS companies make running PPC ads. And the number one thing is getting the unit economics correct. So what most people do is they say, okay, cool, we have this product, we think that a good customer acquisition cost is, you know, 50, they just kind of put the hand in there. And they just make, you know, some kind of best case guess. You actually did the correct thing, which is where you reverse engineer from customer lifetime value. You said like, okay, we earn this from a client, we're willing to give up about this in customer acquisition cost, and so on. So maybe you can kind of explain how that played out.
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so like you said, you've got to reverse engineer your lifetime value. And at the beginning, that's kind of like a best guess. So you're still guessing, but instead of guessing the acquisition cost, you're guessing the lifetime value. And so we knew what we were charging per month, we knew how many customers were signing up in the first couple months. And we had a couple years of data of the customers I knew most closely that we're using it. And so we knew that if we found a good customer that they would be on for, you know, a year or two years, and we felt like that was a pretty safe bet to make. And so the acquisition cost, I had seen these ratios that were like, you know, CAC to LTV, you want to be like a three to one ratio. And so I thought, okay, let's just go with that. And so if someone's gonna pay us, you know, 1500 dollars over their lifetime of the product, then we can spend $500, to go acquire them, let's try to do that. And so in our first month, that we did digital ads, we started spending $100 a day on one ad so$3000 for the month, and we got five customers off Facebook that month, so $600 a piece, and it was like, okay, we're in the sweet spot! Like, let's increase that. And so little by little, we just started increasing our ad budget. So from $3000 a month to $5000 a month to $10,000 a month, and making sure that the the funnel still worked. And the math is actually getting better, because as we were training Facebook with our look-alike audience to say "here's a customer that actually signed up when through the trial paid, go find more customers like that" we saw our CAC was driving down and so instead of $600, it was you know, $450 and then it was$300. And when you get to that kind of, you know, two, three month payback, the beautiful thing about that was that I didn't even have to pay off my credit card balance for 60 days, so I could just totally exhaust my credit cards on Facebook ads, and then wait 60 days to pay it, and then just start the process over again. So during that time that that was, uh, you know, the second half of 2018 was like the"go deeply into debt" years in my life, but it was intentional. You know, I had a reason for it.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, you make you make a really, really good point. So obviously, the customer acquisition costs in the SaaS industry, I think it's a three to one ratio, right? So
we take a really simple example:let's say you're charging $100 a month. Most people stick around for 12 months your LTV is $1200. So basically that would say that your customer acquisition cost is $400, which is like, super simple. But I guess problem is, if you're spending $400 to acquire that customer on day one, and you're only charging$100 a month, like you said, the payback period is four months. So you get into this, like cash flow troph before you come out the other end. So tell maybe you can tell your story about your, your credit cards, and I think you, you leverage that as far as you could possibly go.
Chris Ronzio:Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I had had a business for a long time before then. So I had business cards, I had personal cards. And when I had this like epiphany of how the funnel worked, and how we could use the credit cards to just increase our RMR month, over month over month, I was like, let's go all in. You know, no reservations. And so first I went, you know, blew through my savings. And then it was, you know, all the business credit cards, and so wrote up those balances to, you know, $50,000 on this card and$20,000 on this card, and then the personal credit cards, started sending you those checks that you can like, you know, balance transfer checks and all this. So I started using those for payroll, things you couldn't put on credit cards, and and it was just steadily building this debt. So at the at the height, it was a little over $300,000 in credit card debt that it climbed to. But it got to the point where, you know, my my wife was like, calling me frantically from the grocery store, because all of the credit cards were declining, and she's like, embarrassed and there's a line behind her. And, you know, we have this this Vespa, this this motor scooter that I bought for our wedding. It was like she was on the back in her dress, rode away from the wedding into the sunset. And I like sold it on Craigslist for$2500 to just to like cover expenses. So it was that that phase where like, you know, I was walking around taking stuff out of closet selling it on eBay, just like how do we continue funding this? But it wasn't to fund burn, you know, it wasn't to try to validate something, it was to grow it. I think that's the big distinction. Because as our MRR was increasing month over month, you know, it went from 10, to 17, to 25 to 34 to 43 to 57, you know, and like, every month, it kept going up. As a SaaS company, you get valued based on your recurring revenue. And so if I someday wanted to raise funding, I knew that the further I can push this thing myself, the more of a company I'll be able to hold on to, which was really important for me. And so to me, it made no sense to go out and find investors that would put, you know, an angel investor that would put $50,000 or $100,000 into the business, if I could, you know, scramble and get those resources myself. I wanted to show that I was fully invested in this. So it in the end, it paid off. It was a good strategy, but it was definitely risky.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, for sure. You're like a full on Facebook addict. You were selling all your stuff on eBay, just to fund your Facebook addiction.
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Todd Chambers:So actually funding is an interesting question. So you mentioned funding there and I think equity is the most expensive way to fund your company, right? So what do you mind if I ask you? Do you have other shareholders? Have you ever taken funding? Or have you just bootstrap the whole thing?
Chris Ronzio:We have. Two times. So we bootstrapped that first year until American Express shut me off, and basically said, you know, like anybody that has an American Express charge card, they say, there's no limit. But there, there's definitely a limit, you know, you as you're charging that, that it just stops working one day. And so they sent an email and said, you know, we'd love you to continue using this, but you've got to pay off the balance, and then you can continue using it. And at that time, it was like, Well, I don't have $80,000 to pay off the balance. So fortunately, you know, as we were making this progress,I was networking and keeping people updated the whole way. And so that's I think, tip number one is that you want to start the fundraising work the process way before you need it. Like, in my, you know, in my business, my consulting business before, I was in masterminds and networking groups and things like that with people that were active investors. And so even in month one, when I had that launch party for Trainual, I had people that wanted to put money in. They were like, this looks cool. I want it, I want in. And so by not taking the money for that first year, when it came time that I needed it, it was just a couple of phone calls. And they were like, "now I can get in? Absolutely! Let's do it!" It was just working out the details. So that that first round of funding was just a convertible note financing that we did a year into the business. And so that lasted us another year where it just continued to buy ads and let us keep scaling. And then last November of 2019, we did a series A so that was our first institution around. The reason for that was, again, not because we needed it. We're fortunate, basically that this whole time that our our MRR covered our operating costs, so our only burn was the over and above ad spend to really fuel this aggressive growth. And so if, you know if ever we we needed to pump the brakes, we could just stop growing and be profitable. And so that was a good place to be in. But the reason to raise the series A money was we need to disproportionately invest in making an industry leading product. And we need to invest in expanding from our one or two marketing channels to eight marketing channels with the same kind of CAC. And we need to build a leadership team, because we have aspirations of getting to that next big company size. And so I think the decision to take funding is a really personal one, it comes down to what kind of company you want to build. And if you want to build a profitable lifestyle business, and maybe sell it for a massive amount, but you know, you're totally in control, and you have your own destiny, like that's one path. If you want to be a brand that is known around the world and you want to go on that ride, then that's that's a different path. And so that was just the decision we had to make.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, how has that been for you? So we spoke about 2 million ARR, Now you're at 5 million, you've taken funding, and I guess there's more pressure on you from the board to really scale this company and make it really well known worldwide? How does that look like today, when you're looking to grow the company? how do you kind of think about growth, given your situation?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so again, it comes down to the investors that you pick as well. So certain investors will have different expectations on the growth that they want to see. And when we were interviewing investors, spent a lot of time with them trying to understand that their trajectory was a good fit for for the one that we wanted. And so for us, it's not it's not about growth at all costs, it's about smart strategic growth. And so we are very efficient still with how we spend the money, but we you know, when when you raise money, you raise it at a certain valuation, and instantly your dollars of ownership in the business goes way down. Because you go from if the business is worth, say, $100 today, and you own 100% of it, and then you raise money, and now you own 60% of it, or 70% of it and the business is worth$100 plus whatever the new money they put in, but you only owe 64%, that number is almost always lower if you do that math. And so in order to make it a good deal for the founders, the team, you've got to do some back of the napkin math to say, well, in order for my 60% to be worth what my hundred percent was worth on the day before investment, we've got to grow our revenue to this mark. And that's kind of your minimum threshold, and we better grow at least to this amount, or this was a terrible deal, you know, that we took. And then it's usually some multiple above that, that you're expecting where the investors that came in, are hoping to get two or three or five or 10 times their money. So it's it's about having that conversation and making sure it's realistic.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like Facebook advertising and paid ads were a huge component of how you fueled the growth of the company back in the early days. How have you seen that paid advertising is still one of the biggest growth drivers or have you found/unlocked some other channels that work really well for you now?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, absolutely. Facebook and Instagram were our primary acquisition channel. So you know, early on, it was like 95% of our new signups came through there. And as we mature as a company and the word gets out, and you start to develop more, you know, referral traffic and organic traffic and SEO and reviews, then the number of organic signups that you get start to compete with those paid signups. And that's a healthy thing, I think, for the business. But we still see that if we increase our budget on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever, we see an instant bump in the signups because it is very much a direct response sign up for a trial kind of thing. And so that's still a very big part of how we get traffic. But now as a more mature business, we're investing in brand and we've got a whole video team. We've got four podcasts that we produce. We've got copywriters, we've got graphic designers. Those aren't necessary for just a direct response acquisition model, but they are necessary if you're trying to build a big brand that relies more heavily on organic.
Todd Chambers:What about, sorry to just kind of segue here I was thinking about like activation. Seems like you guys are really good on the acquisition and getting people to maybe you sign up for a free trial. But have you guys tested different ways to get people to activate kind of more of a human-led approach, like a product-led approach? Like have you tested different things?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so initially, it was all product-led because we didn't have any humans to lead them through that. So it was like sign up, totally do it yourself. There's no demos. There's no sales calls. There's no onboarding like, there's no one to one, we had one customer support rep for 3000 companies, you know, so we just didn't have the bandwidth to be proactive. Now that's entirely changed. So being kind of a leader in this SOPs and training, management onboarding, we have a almost a responsibility to help people get started with the product. And so we've we've really doubled down and building that team. So we've got a whole customer success, customer experience division now where we, you know, from from the their first entry point, we're teaching them like content design principles, we've got dozens of pre- built templates that are just plug and play to get started and they customised based on your company. We've got, you know, one to one, setup sessions for people, we give them credits in their account that they can cash in for, like consulting sessions. And so it's become more people-supported, even though it's still the foundation is product led for that do-it-yourselfer.
Todd Chambers:So do you mind if I ask how many people you have in the company?
Chris Ronzio:As of this recording 43.
Todd Chambers:That must have been some challenge. So, how do you structure the people in a way that kind of facilitates the best outcome for the company? Like yeah, do you have kind of quarterly objectives? Like how is the structure of the business? Yeah, anything you can share on that?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, I think, so early on, we were really nimble. We were those first five people for the first whole year. So we weren't hiring at all.The next person we added is for anyone, it's going to be the the area that is the weighs the heaviest on you. And so for us, it was inbound chat and demo requests and people that wanted to get on the phone or said, Can you send me some collateral. So we brought in kind of a catch-all sales account manager type person to handle those conversations. Even though the numbers didn't support that that was like a positive ROI. At the beginning, it's just like, who can take the most work off all of our plate you know? So then we started building out the product team. So we brought in a user experience designer, director of product more engineers, because you have to have a strong product. We did that sort of in tandem with building the the marketing team. So we don't have any kind of outbound sales, we're 100% inbound traffic. And so we decided we wanted to build like a marketing agency within Trainual where, you know, we could speak to the product and the need and the pain better than anyone. And so we built that as a core, you know, kind of like, core skill of ours. So we invested heavily in that. But hen it circles back to your support your customer success, you get all these customers, but if they're not getting activated in the tool, or they're not sticking around that long, now you've got a hole in the bucket to fix, and you should invest in that. And so it's it goes in waves, where now those things are, are kind of happening at the same time. But that was our approach.
Todd Chambers:Yeah. Where do you spend most of your time? Do you spend a lot of time on management? Or do you have someone that sits directly to you? I mean, you're doing this podcast right now, which is really cool. Like, what where do you spend most of your time?
Chris Ronzio:So most of my time is on on the strategy for the company, the vision for where we're heading, coaching - I have six direct reports, so coaching them, working with them on on their teams. And then just the content, the marketing side, because I think the closer I can be to the customer, and doing calls like this, doing calls with investors doing calls with partners, you know, I'm understanding the market the ecosystem more clearly every day. And then I translate that understanding into the vision that drives the rest of the departments. And so that's what, where I spend most of my time. And then we've got amazing leaders that at the top of each department that, you know, lead those initiatives.
Todd Chambers:It seems like you've learned really, really well, from you know, your own mistakes. How do you think other SaaS founders should approach customer feedback? You just mentioned that getting as close to the customer as possible, but let's let's take a more simple example. You know, a SaaS company that has limited traction, maybe a 510 K and MRR. How much time do you think they should really be investing in, you know, getting feedback and learning?
Chris Ronzio:Almost all of it. At five to 10 K, I was doing every demo, I was you know, I was physically going to the businesses that were in town that I could go to to watch them use the product. I was developing personal relationships so that even if they like hated the product, they wouldn't cancel and they were just hold on because they knew it was going to get better. You know, like that's really important at the early days. So I think you should spend all your time there and if someone had limited resources to grow, but still five to 10 K in MRR I would say like, there's got to be someone that's getting value. Who's getting the most value out of all your customers? Go figure out what they're doing, what's the pain point that you're solving for them? Why is it working so well for them and compare and contrast that to the people that are going out the back door. And so that's something we're constantly revisiting. And as we got bigger, we would look at all the review sites and basically just use the language customers put on the review sites, in our ads, and on our website, because they're, they're speaking the terms, you just need to be able to flip that around into sales copy. I think that was crucial for us to get past that point.
Todd Chambers:That's really, really nice advice. I love the, if you have enough reviews going through it and using the same terminology that your customers use, that's, that's really, really good advice, especially in our text. We spoke like, so important to get customer feedback, but one super critical and very, very hard thing in running any businesses hiring and getting, you know, really good people. So how has your How do you approach hiring and kind of has that changed as the business has grown?
Chris Ronzio:It's changed a lot. So initially, you know, the first five came through my consulting practice. And so that was they just kind of were, they didn't have a choice, they kind of came, came into this business. The next handful, you know, I didn't have too much experience in in hiring. And so there was a lot of trial and error. And we had people that didn't work out. But I think that the big lesson was making very fast decisions, like we hired one person and let them go on day three, because it was apparent that they weren't the right fit for the role. And so I think early on, you're trying to figure out what you need. And, and people can promise things in the hiring process. But if you're moving quickly, you're probably going to make mistakes. And it's okay. We got much more intentional about our hiring process in our second year. So our 13th hire was ahead of people, which I think is really early. But we knew that we were going to grow headcount. And we needed someone that all they did was focus on recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance and engagement, you know, and there's like this employee lifecycle, that you've got to take care of your people at every stage, you've got to attract the best people, you've got to screen them, you've got to test them, make sure that they have the skills that they say they have, you've got to run an amazing interview process and get your other team members to collaborate. And then you've got to treat people right with the right compensation, the right benefits, the right performance reviews, and so we built that out really early.
Todd Chambers:Yeah, to steal a word from Gary Vaynerchuk. And what you just said about acting fast, I think you said, hiring is guessing and firing is knowing, which is a nice segue on to Gary Vaynerchuk. And it's really funny because I was on your website, I think I got a remarketing ad of you doing one of your video ads, and you were talking about your experience meeting Gary Vaynerchuk. So maybe you could actually funnily enough, I think you were on one of the four DS daily digital deep dive. I think that's what he calls it. There.
Chris Ronzio:Every deep dive. Yeah, digital discovery and deep dive. Yeah,
Todd Chambers:yeah, he, I think I'd already seen you on that video. And then I saw the ad. So maybe, maybe you can explain how that came about
Chris Ronzio:It's like inception, like so many people saw that that the video because he posted it on his YouTube channel. And I had the the shirt on with our logo. And then he actually released this big deck of all these marketing tips on his birthday last year. And one of the screenshots was me and him sitting at the table at his thing. So it's like really cool exposure. But that was such a cool experience. So my brother, Jonathan, I mentioned is our CMO. And he's followed Gary for years. And so I've known about, you know, Gary Vee, and I've seen some of his stuff scrolling through through social, but never really followed him didn't listen to his podcast wasn't wasn't sure, like what he was all about. And so in the spring of last year, my brother started like, every day sending me you got to listen to this, you got to listen to this started listening to this guy. And the the, his content is, is so people first You know, there's like an empathy and a level of caring and and just authenticity that he has, that really resonated with me. And so I just started to love this guy. And, and the the four DS thing. I had a friend that went through that process. And, and so I knew what it was. And so my brother and I were brainstorming one day and we thought, you know, maybe if if maybe if we just fly to New York and we do his thing and we invest the money, then we we will be able to use some of that experience for marketing content. And so we justified it based on saying like, that's its content, its content, like if we can shoot some videos, and he'll give us a clip or something then And the cost of paying for that session will be more than paid for by the reduction in CAC on our ads. And so again, it was like a calculated bet. So we booked the session, we flew out to New York, sat in the office spend the whole day with his team got some great feedback from him, it happened to be on the day that they were launching the empathy wines as well. So we got invited to the the launch party for that, such a cool experience, but then our bet paid off. So him coaching us about our target market, turned into clips that we were able to put in our ads is just advice from him. And people love him. He's got a huge following. And so attaching your brand to some authority, like Gary, is a really smart thing to do.
Todd Chambers:Did that ad perform particularly well?
Chris Ronzio:Oh, yeah, it was like that, like millions of views. So so you know, and then everything kind of runs its course. But it opened our eyes to the fact that we can do that with other influencers and celebrities. So our newest ad is a few of the actors from the office, the American comedy show. And same thing, we've got, you know, five, 6 million views on that ad, because there's some there's some sense of authority that you attach, you know, the actors you might not know train you will you watch the ad now, you know, train, you'll, you know, there's like this, it's an easy one to step into selling something.
Todd Chambers:I think it's really, really good advice there as well leveraging other people's audiences. Like if you don't already have an audience, try and get you know, a guest podcast guest post or try and get a speaker on that podcast. You know, like, I assume you have a similar philosophy, because you're speaking to me right now, I guess, the power of leveraging other people's audiences? Yeah, is really, really valuable. Yeah. How do you approach culture? You mentioned that you had, I think you said the 13th hire you had like a head of people? Is that person also responsible for culture as well? Or is that something that kind of comes top down from you?
Chris Ronzio:it was, like two days ago on Instagram, and it said, "the best part about telling the truth is, you don't have to remember what you said." And I loved that quote, when I saw it. And, you know, I think it relates to this relates to culture, because if your culture is just the authentic representation of how things actually are, there's nothing really to do, you're just kind of fostering that and finding creative ways to continue to get it out among your people. But if you make it up, and it's this kind of manufactured thing, then your people don't buy into it. And so culture for me was just, you know, it's it's like, what do we believe in? What are the pillars of this business? What what type of environment? Would I want to be in in five years that we could start to lay the groundwork for today? And so are, you know, we've got some really cool core values and, you know, best places to work towards, and that stuff's really important to me.
Todd Chambers:Yeah. Nice. So to maybe talk about something a bit negative, but I think it's something that everyone is experiencing, we're in this, you know, worldwide pandemic and recording this now. It's August in 2020. We're based in Amsterdam, and you're based in the States, I believe you're you're in Boston right now, how is COVID affected you from from a business perspective? And how have you done things to combat that?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so fortunately, Trainual is a tool that empowers remote teams to share the ways they work. And so you know, that was just luck of the draw, I think that we are a tool that we were able to still grow and perform well financially during this time. And so the business metrics haven't been too impacted beyond the fact that, you know, subset of our customers are really struggling with their business. And so our initial reaction to this when it when it all happened was how do we take care of our customers? And how do we take care of our employees? And so you know, that that's what it was all about. So we went remote, midway through March, you know, fortunately, again, we use all all remote tools, we had a really flexible work from home and remote policy to begin with. So we were able to just flip the switch. And our first went, you know, thing went out to all of our employees, like how do we support you we understand this is a tough time, you might have spouses that are being furloughed or laid off, you might have kids that are home from school, and we need to accommodate that. So first and foremost, it was about supporting the team. And then early April, we put out a, I guess a mandate where any customer that couldn't pay their bill, it was okay. We would just like let them let them go. And so for a few months, we did that and this summer now we've started to see those subscriptions coming back. And what's amazing is that 84% of the people that took advantage of those free months, those free coupons have come back into even paying customers. And you know, you the support that the thanks that we got from the customers, I think just really deepened their, you know, their relationship with with us with our brand it they felt they felt supported. So that was really important to do. And we gave accounts away to nonprofits and to schools and people that needed them the most. So really, it's been more of a story of just being supportive, I think, then then necessarily changing any big strategy. I guess that the only other thing we did from a business standpoint, is we saw a 300% increase of traffic to our website, as people were scrambling to finish to figure this out. And so we lifted the requirement to put a credit card in to start a trial, because we felt that be the environment made more people want to try the product. And we finally had the the capacity, the bandwidth to follow up with those people and close them into paying customers. And so that was one thing we shifted.
Todd Chambers:How do you how do you protect your own time? So I'm sure you get so many opportunities, so many requests, so many people pulling you from pillar to post? How do you? Yeah, how do you protect your time and only work on the things that matter? Most?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so I have an amazing chief of staff who is my first employee and my consulting firm. She's been there since the beginning. And so we talk every day, she helps organise my schedule, she coordinates everything, and, and putting that that type of person in place is really crucial to being able to, to not say yes to everything. So that's been a huge help. The next thing is I've tried my best to repurpose content. So I get you know, I put my cell phone number out there, I get Instagram and LinkedIn direct messages all day, every day. And and as much as I can I try to send people recordings of me answering a question that I've gotten before. So so just, you know, kind of eating our own dog food, documenting the things that you don't want to be repeating. I do that with, with questions as well. And then it's, you know, you've got to have hard lines with with family time. So I've been married for 10 years, but with my wife for 17. I have two kids, a six year old two and a half year old. And so you've got to just shut it off sometimes. And so when when, when I really need to escape, I just give my phone to my wife. Just say like put this somewhere. I don't want to look at it. But But you know, try to be intentional about every day having time to play with the kids and do family dinner and hang out at night. And my wife and I have been religious about a weekly date night and and making that happen. So you just got to, you know, draw some lines and stick to them.
Todd Chambers:Yeah. Is there anybody in particular that you look up to and aspire to be more like?
Chris Ronzio:Oh, wow.
Todd Chambers:Tough question. Yeah.
Chris Ronzio:A lot of people...so, you know, recently I've been just reaching out to a bunch of different founders, b2b type founders. And so David Hauser at grasshopper Dan Martell, who's had clarity FM Clate Mask from Infusionsoft. There's so many great people that have that are a few steps ahead of the the path that I'm on. And I think if you know where you're trying to get to, it becomes easy to spot who those people are that have walked that path before. And so I've never been shy about reaching out to people that I want to build a relationship with. And you know, for me and this, like b2b SaaS, small business, that you know, that's that's a great criteria for finding some mentors, and I've had a bunch of them.
Todd Chambers:Cool. What about any passions outside of work? Is there anything that you're really into outside of work?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, I started doing triathlons. Last year, I did a half Iron man, which was huge accomplish. Training. Oh m gosh, it was like, it was one o those things that like I coul never imagine doing. So tha made me want to try it. Like I've done that since I was kid. I think anytime I'm like, could never imagine that. Lik when I was in seventh grade. played one year of football because I thought, I'm proud I've never played my whole life I'm too old to do it. It fel weird. I was like, I'll jus sign up. I'll try it and then got the crap kicked out of m and decided now I'm good wit that. And so this the Iron Ma was similar. It was a Like, can't imagine running that rac seems impossible. So let me jus sign up and will it happen? S yeah, and they are in Arizona, live near a lot of mountains And so I do a lot of trai running and biking and that sor of thing
Todd Chambers:Yeah, that's really nice. Okay, so last question. This is a little bit abstract and and never asked this question before, it just kind of came to my mind. But we'll see how it goes. Why? Why? Why do you do all of these things? Like why do you try and build a company? Why do you? Is there something inherently within you? That's kind of ambitious and kind of goal orientated? But yeah, why do you do all this stuff?
Chris Ronzio:Yes, there is. So. So for me, it's, you know, I, like I mentioned, I've had my own company since I was 14. And in all of the conferences I've been to, in books I've read and mastermind groups, I've went to, I've always looked up to these experts that are generations before me, you know, and the people that are writing the books that everyone buys, or speaking at the conferences, they're, they're not, they're not young, you know, kind of people like me, that are that are, you know, up and coming, people and so I realised, like, there's an opportunity to, to do what they've done for the next generation. And I really want to train people to make a difference for small growing businesses around the world, you know, to help people create the playbook for their companies so that they don't have to do it in this fragmented all over the place kind of way. And so it's that larger calling of of being, you know, being the guide through that is really motivating to me. So that's, that's, I think, what gets me up.
Todd Chambers:Cool. I got some really, really nice way to finish you've been really generous with your time and yeah, I really appreciate you doing this. So what can we do that cliche thing at the end of podcasts now Where Where? Where can people find you? or How can people follow you?
Chris Ronzio:You can find me on all the normal places. So LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, just search Chris Ron CO, and I'll come up. You can also text me if you want. If you're in the US. It's a 480-531-8411 I reply to everything just might take me a couple days. But yeah, I'd love to connect.
Todd Chambers:Thank you so much, Chris. Really appreciate you taking the time. Have a good day. You too. Take it easy. 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 our promedia.com forward slash podcast. Until next time, take it easy