Recap: #1 AMA session with Vladislav Podolyako, CEO & Founder of Belkins & Folderly
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Q: What rules did you follow when you expanded your staff as Belkins grew to 200 people?
A: This is the main thing with the Service business it either scales with automation or by increasing headcount because of growth. Since we grow x3-4 per year at Belkins we need to sustain this growth.
Q:?What lead acquisition sources do you find most effective in the first stage of a product’s lifecycle? And why?
A: Great question. We find out outbound most effective at the beginning since we were bootstraping and we needed to acquire our first customers. Especially email outreach where you identify your Ideal Customer Profile, making your outbound more targeted alongside with that we are started to build a blog for further inbound and SEO.
Q: What markets or niches do you find perspective for the next few years?
A: Good question. I think great ventures we can find at?Climate Tech, AI, Web3 (metaverse),?any kind of automations and no-code solutions.
Q: What does it take to build a successful saas product? There are tools like Slack, Atlassian, but as I see it, the majority of startups grow exponentially for the first 2-3 years, and then start to decline. What rules do you adhere to ensure long-term growth?
A: From my point of view. You should find the right product-market fit and in the end solve problems. Personally, I don’t like products for products - like mirror UI/UX improvements. To sustain long-term growth we are constantly improving and shaping our product per customer needs. It’s pretty simple but true. If you are seeing you are going on the wrong road you need to think about pivoting.
Like for instance, Slack did. Initially they planned to be a?Browser-based massively multiplayer online game called Glitch?now they are most popular corporate instant messaging platform. The reason for pivoting was:
“Glitch has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself.” The next best idea they had was to productize and market an internal communications tool that they had built to run Glitch.?Check the startups and companies that had successful pivotshttps://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivot
Q: Are all 200 people local or a % WFH? Thats a lot of people with marketing backgrounds in one place?
A: It’s 80% remote and 20% office. Belkins already an international company. We have people in multiple countries, not just in the US but in Canada, Europe, and Ukraine.Before Covid-19 strikes we were fully office based.
Q: What decisions have influenced Folderly’s rapid growth the most?
A: Key learnings from the growth we’ve achieved so far:
Q:?how did you even know that AI would help folderly since even in the SaaS world its considered a not too friendly technology that requires expertise - how did you know it would help and how did/do you measure that?
A: Good question. Thanks, Talking about Folderly and Email Deliverability. The industry is hard enough. There is a lot of manual work there starting from the analyzing and fixing of email infrastructure for successful email marketing can be a real pain in the ass. To doing that you need to dive deep into a variety of ESPs like Google Workspace, and Microsoft Exchange, technical stuff like DNS settings, limitations, email content, spam words, blacklists.
When we started to build Folderly we wanted to use and utilize new technologies and best practices since a lot of integrations with legacy solutions were involved. We decided to build an AI that helps us analyze and understand domain and mailbox health and the whole email infrastructure and, in the end, helps us and our clients face those problems.I’m totally agree with you that SaaS world is not-too-friendly that is why alongside with technology we are building educational part of the solution where we explaining how it works.
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Q:?What are the main metrics to keep an eye on for rapid saas growth?
A:
#1. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
#2. Churn Rate
#3. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
#4. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
#5. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Q: I have 3 Questions for you:
1. What advice will you give to a mid-level marketing executive to take his career to next level?
2.?What advice do you have for bootstrapped businesses on hiring??
3.?What should be the main metric of growth? Thanks again for the AMA session.
A: You are very welcome, Answering your questions.
Q: What are your top 3 tips in sales? can you share some details?
A: Pretty simple:
Value: Put a client at the center of focus. The aim of value is to understand and reinforce the reasons why what you offer is of use to the client. By finding out data such as the client’s weak spots, their strongholds, and what exactly it is they do, you are able to prepare an effective sales pitch and close clients.
Listen: Many might think that the Value process entails purely talking. It’s actually the total opposite; listening. The best SE is the one capable of listening to the client and deducing what exactly the client needs.
Quality: Focusing on quantity may be the wrong strategy. Better to focus on the quality of each email you send, each presentation you made, etc. You need to create a positive expression of yourself and your company and deliver value.
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