Interview with Nikola Velkovski, Co-founder & CEO of Howitzer
BLKNS Community
The leading private sales & marketing community for SaaS CEOs, Founders and investors
We hosted Nikola Velkovski for an AMA session on 5th July, 2pm EDT over our Slack community.
The best of Q&As from the AMA session is below:
Q: Fundraising vs Bootstrapping?
A: It really depends on you and your business. I'd advise against raising if you don't need it, a.k.a. if you are building a micro-SaaS or if you don't have a huge vision to turn your product into a huge company. We raised because our vision is to build the biggest all-in-one marketing tool that's based on platform outreach (the same thing we did with Reddit, but applied to the other community-based platforms as well). Another thing - the help and the mentorship you get from your VCs, is extremely valuable (talking from my P.O.V. - we learned a lot from them, and I'm really happy to have them as part of our company)
Q: What you can wish yourself 5-10 years ago?
A: My goal is to have a huge conglomerate of startups, and I'd like to be working on some of them turning them into companies. I'd love to run a huge company, but my passion for building startups is enormous, so probably I'll be still there mingling with 0-20 teams, building things that would influence industries?
Q: How we can utilize Reddit as a b2b lead generation tool?
A: Reddit is a gold mine, not only for B2B, but also for B2C. It offers you extremely good segmentation based on subreddits, and the audience is there because of VALUE - either sharing or seeking value. You cannot bullshit, and you cannot bluntly self-promote. If you bring VALUE to the value-seekers, you can easily turn them into your customers. That's exactly what we do with Howitzer. We have seen that this works best for early stage companies, that are in the idea validation phase or looking for ways to get their first 100-1000 customers.
Q: How to utilize Reddit as a marketing channel?
A: To utilize Reddit as a marketing channel you have to understand the platform, obey its rules and be respectful towards the Reddit ecosystem. This means, that if everyone is anonymous on Reddit, you have to respect that and try to blend in and not stand out. Think of Reddit as the opposite of LinkedIn.
The only proper way to utilize Reddit is by using a direct outreach, finding people who have problems that your product/service solves, and messaging them with your solution or starting a meaningful conversation with those people
Q: Reddit used to be an anonymous user-based platform where a user can post things without coming in public. But now platform wants users to build public profiles. Do you think there is a pattern here that the social media platform is trying to pivot towards?
A: Can't tell for sure, but know this Reddit has been around since forever, and they operate this way for a long time now. I'm not convinced that they will trade their core value for anything. If Reddit is not anonymous then what is Reddit? :D
Q: What challenges did you face in the earliest days of building a development/engineering team, and how you overcome those challenges?
A: When we started Howitzer's development (2 years ago), we were still students. The good thing was that previously we have started (and failed) multiple startups, building them from scratch, and we also had experience working in a startup, so establishing the initial MVP architecture and building the product wasn't a problem for us. We initially built Howitzer as an MVP (really fast, unscalable development, with monolith architecture), so after we started having more and more customers, the problems started. If I could go back and do it differently, probably I wouldn't, because launching really fast is something that's really important in this game. We rewrote the whole code, changed the architecture and had a lot of development debt, but it was the right thing to do. The bigger problem is building the dev team, and establishing the team communication.
One advice: getting juniors/mediors and training them is much more valuable, compared to taking seniors. The junior-mids are far more interested in working on a dynamic projects, coding for 12h+ (yep, we still sleep in the office when we have bugs), compared to the seniors (having families, being passive and significantly slower than junior-mids).
Q: What’s the motivation to build the project from scratch instead of joining a team and pushing the growth?
A: I always wanted to have my own startup, In fact, since 6th grade, I was always trying to build something, sale something, flip something. During my university years, I was always trying to come up with the next game changing software or social network or tool or whatever. I also worked briefly in a startup, and quit the day we launched Howitzer (and got our first 2 paying customers). So I'll I'm an idea person, and that's probably why I have my own business and don't work in a startup, and I'll say the motivation is that I love building products, and kind of love the process of building the company.PS: I don't have anything against joining and working for a startup, compared to starting your own. If I didn't have an idea at the moment and was unemployed, I'd definitely choose a startup, compared to grinding on a bad idea with not enough knowledge how to build it?
Q: Is there any way to recover banned reddit accounts?
A: Yes, there is. You need to write to the Reddit's admin team, and they'll decide if they'll unban the account. Or you can just use Howitzer (shameless plug :P ) - we don't require you to connect your own Reddit accounts. We do everything for you, completely in the background.
Q: ?Does reddit ban IP addresses as well?
A: Yes, they do.
Q: ?Can you share some insights on how to make organic viral posts?
A: It's not my expertise, as I failed with organic posting (that's why we created Howitzer). Reddit prohibits self-promotion, and posting about your product/service can easily get you banned. There are some experts in this field that have been offering this as a service, so you can easily approach them for this. One of them is?Ken Savage?(he's been giving us some tips for the Product Hunt launch, but I know that he also advises for getting viral Reddit posts). Feel free to mention me when you approach him! :)
Q: Is there any way to know the ip address has been banned across reddit?
A: I haven't found a way so far. Probably it's in their internal databases. If every new account you create is banned, probably you have an IP ban. Also, if you have a dynamic IP address, you are probably good to go, because it changes each day (depends on the internet provider).
领英推荐
Q: Does Reddit ban devices as well?
A: I don't think that anyone can get your MAC address (the devices have MAC address, and it's private). They probably detected a pattern, or (very unlikely) blocked a whole region. I've had all of my accounts getting banned multiple times, but probably they found a pattern to connect them somehow.
Q: What's the smartest way to use reddit to generate sales?
A: The best way to generate sales on Reddit is by starting conversations with the people who will benefit from your services. Blasting generic messages won't work because Reddit users are not used to getting promotional content in their inboxes. But asking for feedback on a certain topic on any particular interest in which your services belong, not only will bring leads/sales but you'll get a lot of constructive suggestions as well.
Q: What makes reddit different from other platforms like twitter? What needs to be done differently?
A:?It is anonymous, people tend to be more honest when their personal name is not at stake. But what we've seen is that when people are being honest they leave traces of their personality through the posts/comments.
Q: I saw some people on the product hunt react badly to a product about marketing on reddit. Some thinking it would generate spam. How to utilize the potential of reddit and not be obnoxious?
A: Yep, there were some people who were concerned about increasing the spam on Reddit. We totally get their concerns. Being Redditors ourselves, we don't want to destroy Reddit or make it a spammy place (like Discord is right now, because of the crypto/NFTs).
Like any tool, Howitzer can be used for good and bad things. Our goal is not to make a spam tool, make money (believe me, a lot of people are offering tens of thousands of dollars to blast thousands of messages per day) and leave - our goal is to unlock Reddit for the SMBs, and offer them an alternative way for customer acquisition. Reddit is a beautiful channel if you use it right. At Howitzer, we have a policy where we don't allow spamming on Reddit, and spamming is sending message that doesn't bring value or sending message to someone who's not seeking for that value.
Ways we fight against spam on Reddit with Howitzer:
Q: How does Reddit moderate (if it does) sending out DMs which seem repetitive (the same copy, just personalized a little bit). Are they able to detect that, or is there limit of DMs per day only because there’s a limited number of DMs you can send out from 1 account before being flagged for spam? Thanks so much if you perhaps know the answer!?
A: This is a question I cannot answer, because some of it's answers are the secret sauce of Howitzer. We have had a few competitors trying to do what we are doing, so we are really careful in answering some technical questions regarding how Reddit works and manages the things. Hope you'll understand!
Q: What is the best way to approach B2B marketing as a beginner? I have watched a ton of YouTube videos, but none of them had examples of what a good B2B marketing campaign looks like.
A: Companies don't have time to do anything, everyone wants to experiment but nobody has the time or the nerves to do that.
target a couple of companies you can be useful to spend some time creating templates of your vision for them and show them value for free. that is how you will get their attention for sure
Q: What B2B marketing strategies would you recommend for a graphics design agency?
A: Find promising start-ups with shitty design, do a couple of mockups for them for free and send them the results, sure it will take you some time but if they like what they see you'll have a stable partner that aligns with your vision
Q: What budget do you recommend working with in order to gain the first couple of clients? (I know this is very vague and up to each business and their product, but a dollar range would be helpful)
A: Take Howitzer's Basic plan for $59 you can reach 900 businesses on Reddit. I'll help you set up a proper campaign ;)
Q: Also have a question about using the reddit API. I have a staking rates comparator online and am a developer. I list 400 coins, 130 of them having a subreddit. I’ve automated the creation of one post in each subreddit for asking what is the best place to stake and what rate you could get. I got shadow banned. Do you have any idea why?
A: Nobody knows the true reason for shadowbanning (sometimes Reddit ban for no reason - it has happened a lot of times). I think that auto-posting can be considered as breaking of their ToS, especially if it's for self-promotion purposes (and especially if it's for crypto/NFT stuff). Also, check your rate limit, and how often were you doing this. It may have been detected as an aggrestive bot/automation activity.
Reddit monitor the API usage very closely, as far as I know.
Regarding the ban - only Reddit's admins can unban you (a human factor).
Good luck!
---
To join our Slack community, visit:?Blkns.co