Leadferno: Getting Your First 20 Customers

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Aaron Weiche is CEO and co-founder of Leadferno, a software company that helps businesses turn more of their online visitors into customers by communicating with them via text messaging. Aaron was previously CEO and co-founder of the SaaS company GatherUp, which was acquired. In short:

1. One marketing channel doesn’t cut it anymore. You need a “tentacle” approach.

2. Startup founders should start to approach GTM by focusing on their strengths. If that’s writing, do content and figure out how to distribute it. If it’s networking, go network.

3. The golden rule of business nowadays is being easy to work with.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

JZ: How are things going with Leadferno?

AW: Our team size is eight, and we are working with over 120 logos. Growth has been steady. We're about two years in from our very first launch and paying customer. We’ve hit that stage where we have all the expected features and are just starting to get into that next layer of features that aren't necessarily expected from a messaging tool.

JZ: It sounds like you're thinking about the development of the company and where it goes next primarily in terms of product, and then marketing develops organically from there.

AW: Absolutely. We’re figuring out those differentiating angles on the product side, which is so important in a crowded market. Conversion is our big differentiator. If you want a tool that helps you foster more leads from your website, we're hands down the one our audience should be choosing.

Then, when you build out that feature set, you can push it further with your marketing.

JZ: What does the go-to-market team look like?

AW: All founder-led sales. As any founder would, I've relied on the staples of what I know I'm good at to start. For me, that’s content marketing, using my network, speaking, webinars, and a podcast circuit.

The biggest difference between when I was going to market with GatherUp, my last software company, and Leadferno is that you can no longer just do one channel very well. Now you need more of a tentacle approach where we're doing 8-10 different things, and we're evenly doing all of them because there isn't one that's emerging as the flywheel that's generating all the leads.

JZ: My impression is that there was a golden age of performance marketing where you’d crack the code on Facebook and get to $10 million a year in revenue just on that. Nowadays, you may do paid ads, but you also have to do content marketing and the slower stuff that's harder to measure but builds equity with your audience over time.

AW: Totally. I just last month started a podcast called Conversion Cast, which is focused on digital marketing and conversion. I'm having guests on to talk about their digital expertise in an area such as SEO, local SEO, or paid social analytics, and then I always include a few questions that have to do with conversion. Again, since conversion is our focus, those are the folks I'm putting on there.

JZ: What would you tell a founder in our industry, let's say martech, who has something like five to ten beta customers. How do they get out there and go from 10 to 50 customers?

AW: Play to your strengths because that's usually your path of least resistance. If you're great at writing, then doing content marketing and figuring out how to get good distribution with it is where you should go. If you're a great networker, then get after networking and relationships and use that.

The second thing is paying attention to your competitors — what are they doing that seems to be working, and also, what are they not doing? Where are spaces you could have a voice that they're not going?

JZ: You're at over 100 customers now. What are some of the trends you're seeing in your customers that are influencing how you go to market from here?

AW: There are two main characteristics. One is that they have web traffic. Our platform isn't going to increase your web traffic. We're not making the lake bigger, we’re going to help you catch more fish. Then, secondarily, someone who really values communication and is curious about how to get better at communication. You need someone who's curious and asking themselves, “How do I become easier to work with?”

JZ: So, one is a hard condition. If you have no web traffic, we're not going to help you. The other is more about fleshing out the persona. It's a mindset thing. A third factor that drives GTM is usually verticals. Are there certain verticals with which the product is resonating?

AW: Home services and professional services are the two leaders. If you can benefit by answering a few questions, building enough trust to possibly land a deal worth thousands of dollars to you, you definitely want to be testing the best ways possible to make communication easy for the customer. We’ve also seen a stronghold in legal because there's a number of things they can do to streamline the new case process.

JZ: Tons of companies invest in content, and they might even succeed at getting people to their website, but then they can't do anything once they're there. The best they do is including a one-sentence CTA inviting the reader to reach out. A text messaging solution makes sense in that scenario.

AW: I think the new golden rule of business is being easy to work with. That's the number one reason why I think text messaging is such a winner for businesses, especially small businesses, because it lowers the barrier to engaging and working with the business. Because of how agencies are built, many businesses spend 99.9% of their energy on traffic generation. They don't pay attention to whether they are converting as much of that traffic as possible. This focus on conversion also dovetails with the economic challenges we’ve been seeing. Marketing agency customers will increasingly be focused on conversion, not just reach.

JZ: This taps into a timeless business concept and marketing principle. It is not just that your product is good and it's going to help your customers. What drives growth and attention from a marketing standpoint is that your product and message are part of a bigger movement in business culture. I think generally, we see B2B marketing moving away from MQLs to revenue. The whole ecosystem is moving towards whether we are generating sales opportunities and whether those are converting. What you're doing is part of that chain as well — moving from traffic to leads.