Podcast Episodes – The Quizmakers

Discover how fast-growing Hair Fuel uses quizzes to find, segment, and convert new customers for their critically-acclaimed hair care products.

Discover how fast-growing Hair Fuel uses quizzes to find, segment, and convert new customers for their critically-acclaimed hair care products.

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Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between.

We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling a successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Okay, welcome, everyone – I’m really excited to have as our guest in this episode, Laura Sagen. Laura is just a bonafide, bonafide quiz geek – she is doing something really incredible with her business, which I will let her talk about, but she is the founder and CEO of The Hair Fuel.

So I’m going to toss it over to you, Laura.

Laura 1:00
Thanks, Mike. Super excited to be on your podcast. I mean, you and I’ve been in touch multiple times over the almost two years since I started using the software.

So a little bit about The Hair Fuel. It is an all-natural subscription-based hair growth mask that gets delivered every month at our customers’ doors. And like I said, it’s completely all natural safe for pregnant and and young mothers – it doesn’t have any sort of nasty, weird chemicals in it.

I often joke, it’s so safe that you can eat it. Don’t do it though – it tastes absolutely appalling. Because I know the ingredients, it’s definitely safe. And so, that’s basically the gist of it.

Mike 1:44
Perfect. Well, I have to ask, just for people who are just listening to us (vs. watching on YouTube), you’re not going to see my shiny dome, but I am somewhat follicly-challenged. So I’m guessing The Hair Fuel will have no value to me whatsoever.

Laura 1:58
Ah, but I think you’re wrong. It’s not that I think – it’s that I know. I think it can be a whole different podcast episode on that, but the logic is that our target audiences both male and female. As the first step, we decided to target females because this kind of notional self care and applying a mask on scalp is something that is a little bit more female-friendly. Females tend to be a little bit more friendly towards that entire notion. Males tend to expect just to pop a pill. But yes, it works both for for men and women is just for men because of androgens involved.

Mike 2:52
That’s fair enough. So actually, Laura, as you mentioned, you’ve been using Riddle (which is our quiz maker software) for about two years.

What was your marketing problem? What were you looking for and why did you find us? And hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed… how are we helping?

Laura 3:11
So how did we even come across the whole idea for quizzes? First, a little sidestep is that I came across quizzes with some sort of business coaching website. And it asked “What kind of enterpreneur or something are you?”

It was a such a good quiz. I don’t know what software they used. But it was a really, really good quiz.

Because the questions, they were interesting to answer, and then offered the value that I was getting afterward. So, the drip marketing was very valuable to me.

And also on the back of it, I was working on on launching The Hair Fuel at the time. I thought, “I’m willingly giving so much information to that business. And then I’m getting value back.”

So that was a very interesting proposition. Because I’m a strong believer of providing value for people first – if it is the right value, then people will come back, they will ask more questions, they might buy your product – or they might not. That’s not necessarily the point at the quiz stage.

And how I found Riddle specifically? You might have to thank your SEO person – because I googled for software, and found one of the review websites and it sounded pretty simple to implement – pretty straightforward. So I just decided to give it a go and you know, almost two years since and we’re still using it.

Mike 4:51
Well, this is one of the things I’m so happy with about Riddle – just like yourself, starting with The Hair Fuel. I’m sure you’ve had customers from the very start, and it’s neat for us to see kind of the growth of, “Hey, we started with Riddle, when we were doing this.”

And then we’ve kept improving it, so to keep hearing all this feedback is wonderful. So I love it.

But you actually mentioned something really interesting. And it’s about that transparency, and about offering value as a business to potential customers. And they might never be customers.

But, you know, it’s that, “hey, take this quiz, fill in the form, and I’m going to give you information that is useful”. I really think especially with GDPR, and California’s CCPA, and all this privacy stuff coming out – being upfront, transparent and saying, “Hey, this is how I can help you and this is how you help me” is a really good marketing approach.

Laura 5:47
Yep, absolutely, I think. And that’s the kind of the change that we’re slowly observing is that brands and businesses, they tend to focus on providing value, providing content – that kind of leaves you on the cliffhanger. But I prefer “We’re going to give you the full story, the full solution to your problem. If you’re offering value and communicating your values as a business, your ethos as a business to the customer, and that aligns – then you get an ongoing relationship.

So it isn’t about making the sale, but finding the right people who really need your solution. And if there is a match, it’s a lot is a lot more organic – and way less pushy.

Mike 6:49
And also just, it’s less ‘icky’. You know, I like being ethical and transparent.

So we offer like, on our site, we offer a moneyback guarantee of 30 days, if you don’t like us – no problem.

You know, that’s not a big deal. We want people to commit to us – thinking “Hey, this is great on both sides. Let’s stick with this.” And it sounds like you guys have a similar ethos, which is really cool.

Laura 7:15
Yes, indeed. And you guys are dealing with software, while we deal with physical products.

But we do offer a money back guarantee period that people can return to us. And more often than not, we actually willingly refund even if it’s beyond a little beyond that period – we’re just say, “You know what, it’s fine. We understand. Sometimes it’s not a match, and that’s okay.”

Fortunately, we don’t need to do it very often. But as a company, we focus on bringing that value. And for some reason, if someone says, you know, “It doesn’t work for me, because of these reasons”, we try to understand what those reasons are, and then give advice give recommendation on the other options available for people.

So this might happen if someone’s let’s say allergic to specific ingredients, or they’re just being lazy, I think laziness is a big, big one. But it’s all about going beyond and not focusing just on your sale, but focusing on what can you do for the customer? How can you help them solve their problem?

Mike 8:32
Yes, and also it’s not about being transactional, it’s actually about “Let’s actually build a really good relationship”.

And actually, almost every grumpy customer, if you handle them correctly and you’re empathetic, they can turn into a big brand ambassador. We got some people who might have had bugs and the way we handled it, they said “Bugs are happen but you have my back – this is great.”

Cool. So a question for you. How did you find customers before you turn to Riddle and quiz marketing?

Laura 9:13
I’m excited to answer this. I love to answer. I actually we’ve been with Riddle – I started pretty much at the same time as I started working on the website.

It was like I said, two years ago – the concept and the company was still in its nascent phase when I thought, I wanted to prepare and give people value through quizzes.

It just seemed logical because not only we harvest the quiz data, then we can base whatever advice that we want to give to people when it comes to email marketing.

So even before we ever opened the web shop, the quiz was on the landing page. We had the quiz already and we already started learning about our customer – simple things, you know, like “What’s your age bracket?”, “What’s your main hair challenge?” – and things like that. So actually, Riddle was there at the very beginning.

Mike 10:17
We love that!

Laura 10:21
So then on the back of it, we then launched a blog and the content that we put in the box was based on the quiz results. We started diverting people to specific blog articles that are aligned with their specific hair challenges.

But yes, absolutely, Riddle and The Hair Fuel. Thank you guys.

Mike 10:45
Super cool. I cannot wait to tell our developers because they do all the hard work of actually making Riddle what it is.

And they love to hear stories – it takes their coding, and actually makes it real. So that’s really cool. That’s really awesome.

Okay, so we’ve been with you from the start, you have two plus years of quiz marketing experience.

What advice would you give to you know, small to medium businesses are like, “Okay, I get quizzes can get people to fit clicking, I can catch email addresses. But what makes it work?”

What’s some good advice you would give?

Laura 11:24
I know I’ve been banging on about this, but focus on value, because a quiz is such a playful way to understand your customer. Even if you’re just asking six questions, you measuring your customer quiz six different ways?

Some might say it’s not enough, but actually you already have that bit of understanding the customer.

Think about what what value can you provide? What is the knowledge that you are able to offer to your customer? How can you hold their hand through whatever challenge that they are experiencing?

And that roots itself in the research and the research that you’re able to put in as a brand or as a content producer. So it took me months to put together the first version of the quiz.

But I put a lot of research in – I don’t mean just all the fellow blogs out there that talk about hair care and hair growth. No, I was going into Google Scholar and reading a bunch… I think I might have a medical degree by now.

Read those actual scientific publication and make sure that your information that you give to your customers through the quiz.

Because of the nature of Riddle’s software, you need to know how much weight to give to each question. Just focus on bringing value and not just getting somebody’s email address.

Mike 12:54
That’s super cool. Because actually, when I was looking at your latest version of the quiz… you know, we often bang on about what makes a good quiz (well) a good quiz.

And there are some guidelines, and I was looking at your quiz. And I was like, “Man, she’s got it.”

You have six questions. That’s it.

You know, some people get really excited. Riddle’s quite easy, or any quiz making software, it’s quite easy to write a very long quiz.

But really, people have short attention.

Laura 13:30
Very short.

Mike 13:31
Exactly. Six questions. Bam, that was really awesome.

Then when you get to the lead form, between the last question and the results, yours is again very efficient, just three fields. That’s it.

You know, it’s tempting to ask, “Oh, well, what’s your age demographic? And what’s your postcode? And what’s this? And what’s that?”

Do that later, build that relationship later.

So yeah, you’re quizzes are brilliant. And then the last thing, which I thought was really cool, is that you don’t show the results in the Riddle unit itself, you actually send them by email. So that’s a huge value proposition – “Hey, fill this out, you will get detailed quiz results based on your quiz responses.”

Laura 14:15
That is the latest implementation that I personally feel incredibly excited about actually doing it through the email. Before we used to display the results on the page. And some people might still do this, and it works.

But the idea is when you build that relationship through email, you’re able to understand how the customer interacts with your content. You can see which email they click, how much time they spend on your website, etc.

So you see whether it’s a potential customer or not – and if you can build that relationship further.

When you display the results on your webpage, it may be quick, maybe easy, but we found that the quality of those submissions just weaker or suboptimal.

Mike 14:59

That’s a little more transactional versus actually someone clicking and trusting your email opens it up. They see “Oh, The Hair Fuel – they got something to say.”

Laura 15:07
Yeah. And we don’t take it for granted.

Obviously we see the data that we harvest. But also some of your listeners might be a bit tempted to start bombarding their potential customers with emails. But if someone doesn’t interact with your content, if someone you know, clicked on one email, and then they stopped interacting, just tag them on your email software as a cold lead and don’t bother them with your email.

It’s okay, it’s fine. If it’s not good customer, there will be many more.

Mike 15:41
Yes, very much. So, one of those things is that my cofounder and I handle most of the customer support for Riddle. A lot of times people will answer and we tend to be really fast. And some of the questions people ask us – we don’t support their needs and that’s okay.

You know, you have your strength as a business, you have your market – don’t try to think “everyone can use me!”.

With people, you really gonna hit the sweet spot. That’s really cool.

So, this is a surprise question. I just thought of it. But because we’ve been with you since the get go, have you heard any anecdotes or experiences from your customers who were like, “Wow, I found you through a quiz!”, and who liked that process?

Laura 16:27
You mean our potential customers that came through the quiz?

Mike 16:30
Yeah. So of people who might have found The Hair Fuel, they’re now happy customers. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a chat with them. But like, you know, some. So Wow, we love the quiz, then I love the results. And I love the products.

Laura 16:44
At least about 65 to 70% of the leads come from the quiz but the other sales that we have is actually organic.

So no, we’re a beauty product and that tends to be more paid marketing, but we focus on the value. So that’s the result. And a big chunk of that is actually coming through the quiz. Because what happens is that people submit through our every blog article, but only relevant once we encourage people to complete this hair quiz, the hair oil recommendation that we give to people.

And then obviously a number of this organic traffic convert, while some people just subscribe for the newsletter, it’s fine. And a bit more than half of them are actually coming through the quiz.

The feedback that we’re getting is that the information that we share is real. It’s useful. It shines through the language, it shines through the lens of the emails, you know, it’s not like a quick paragraph “Buy a product”.

No this is the information and this how you should approach it. So I wouldn’t say necessarily that someone was like, “Oh my god, I’m so excited about the quiz itself”.

But the value that we were able to provide is just so inherent to what we do- that’s one of the reasons for another one is actually your customer support, which I feel really grateful for.

It’s one of the reasons why I recommend Riddle to all – I have a lot of inquiries and people asking me, “What should I do if I want to launch a business? What should I do?”

My number one response is get a quiz, start, sell build, start building your email, email list subscribers.

And by the way, this is the link you should use. So that I think you should know that and I think you should know that I’m a big evangelist.

Oh, yeah, I’m mispronouncing that. But yes, absolutely. That helps.

Mike 18:39
This is awesome. Hey listeners, I love doing these podcasts. And I’m just beaming here because it’s wonderful to get the feedback. Also how we’re solving a problem for you, which is brilliant.

That’s super cool. Okay, so we try to keep these short, but we’re failing miserably. So we’ll try again. But as a business owner and as an entrepreneur, what is one of your failures, something you learned from?

Laura 19:10
So just like yourself, I’ve failed. Most days, it’s either I have not achieved the goal that I thought it was going to achieve.

I think I can tell you about the recent big failure that happened. Some people might challenge it as being a failure, but we sold out. So all our product sold out.

On one side, that’s great, your products are popular, it’s sold out. It’s not such great news if you’re in the middle of pandemic. And you’re just a fledgling startup.

So that was that was a logistics failure. And there are a number of moving ingredients to that, you know, you couldn’t exactly say like this thing that went wrong, we have to blame that – plus approaching failure from the blame perspective isn’t going to help you.

As an entrepreneur, the key thing that you mentioned here is that “What is the lesson?” Our biggest lessons from it was that we can survive this. Because what happened is that we relaunched to our email subscriber email list. That was instrumental – we decided to just go really heavy on our email, email list. And we sold out our presale campaign, and that was incredible because people were willing, people trusted our brand enough to pre-pay for the product that’s an affordable luxury type of product. So it’s not cheap.

They were willing to prepay for the product, and they were willing to wait for it. And our existing customers were also so incredibly understanding. And they were really grateful about the transparency that involved because, you know, we shared the videos, we shared the photos from the production line.

Every week, I would send an update to say we don’t know the exact date, but this is the estimate.

And as I was getting the updates from our manufacturers, that’s what I’ve been sharing with the guys – with our customers and our subscribers as well.

So it was a failure, like literally a failed supply chain failure.

And on the other hand, there was a big like, it was the biggest lesson of the second half of 2020. For sure.

Mike 21:28
Well, that’s fantastic. And I don’t know, I don’t speak Chinese for all of our listeners. But I did read somewhere where they said “Crisis in Mandarin means both crisis and opportunity”. I think it’s two different ways to use the same word.

Laura 21:43
I’ve heard that…

Mike 21:45
So you took a crisis and said, “You know, what, if I keep being really proactive, transparent.”

We did the same thing. We had server outages and back where we started, and were really upfront. “Hey, guys, this is what’s happening. We’re on it, we’re fixing it.”

It’s actually a chance to turn things around and say “Wow, you know, this company is worthy of my trust and worthy of my patronage”, which is really cool.

So congratulations. Okay, we’re gonna wrap things up because man, you are easy to talk to, but this podcast is running too long.

We always end this on a… I would say a negative but hopefully a funny note.

Okay, what is your biggest pet peeve? Your biggest annoyance… things that drive you crazy.

Laura 22:30
Okay, like I said another episode on things that drive me crazy.

I think laziness… laziness in in resolving your issues or laziness to try and find out the answer for yourself, or the lack of productivity.

I think that is my biggest pet peeve when I’m dealing with people. I really like seeing that there was some effort that people have put through to help themselves. And then on the base of that they also may be able find out and resolve the problem.

But at least that initial act, yes, it’s something that annoys me and unfortunately, is something that happens almost every day, if not every day.

Mike 23:19
I’m guessing from a TV perspective, Homer Simpson is probably not your favorite character!

Laura 23:28
You know, what a funny thing – I have never really followed the show. And I think that’s because of that. I mean, I’ve seen some of the episodes, but I think whenever I would look at him, it would just be such a frustrating experience.

It’s like you like, “Homer, your life could be so much better!”.

Mike 23:52
Fair enough. Well, I’m not surprised by this and I’m going to make you blush. But so for our listeners, Laura has three degrees. You can tell she’s a go getter and like how you started your business. And, you don’t (pardon my French) take any crap, which is awesome.

So, lovely having you on this on our podcast. Thank you so much for this and all your kind words about quizzes and Riddle in general.

Laura 24:19
I can’t believe all the leads we get from you though.

Mike 24:23
I can’t wait to tell our team. That’s amazing. So thank you so much.

Laura 24:29
Thank you and your team. I’m really grateful for that.

Mike 24:32
Well, I’m sure we’ll both be chatting on Riddle’s support chat going forward. So that’s awesome.

Laura 24:36
Yes, very likely. Looking forward to that.

Mike 24:40
Thank you Laura.

Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Quiz Makers. And don’t forget, check out Riddle.com – the quizmaker used by the BBC, Shopify and thousands of other companies worldwide. Our quizzes are fully accessible and they’re GDPR-compliant.

So try our free full-featured trial for 14 days – no pesky credit card required. And until next time, happy riddling.

Hear the story of how the Riddle.com team grew Riddle to be a leader in the quiz marketing space – with no marketing budget, no sales team and without a dedicated support team. It’s all about having a killer product!

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Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling our successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Hey, Boris, welcome back for another episode of our Quiz Makers podcast. Thanks for coming along.

Boris 0:39
Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Mike 0:43
Great. And welcome to all the listeners out there.

When we started this podcast, we called it The Quiz Makers because that’s what Boris and I specialize in. That’s what riddle.com as a quiz maker does.

However, there’s also a story that we like to share about how you can grow and scale a startup.

Now obviously, every startup is different. But we also want to pass on some of the lessons that we’ve learned.

And so Boris, you and I were talking just this morning about some of the conversations you’ve had since you were mentioned as one of Entrepreneur.com’s “Top 20 tech founders in Europe to follow”. Could you brief the listeners on some of those conversations and kind of what’s come about come from?

Boris 1:32
Yes, one of the the key topics actually, when I talk to people, they want to know how to do do you make that list?

The honest answer is, I have no idea.

And then the next question is, “How did you manage to find all these cool customers? I’m seeing Riddle quizzes everywhere from the BBC to the NFL, Red Bull, all huge brand names.”

So they always ask, “What’s your sales tactic? How big is your sales team? How much you spend in marketing? Can you guys be profitable, and still get all these customers?”

That seems to be a common thread of what people are most interested in when we talk about Riddle.

Mike 2:14
Perfect. And this is one of the things I love so much about working at Riddle, the answer is also quite fun. What’s the answer you tell them?

Boris 2:25
Right – the answer is that the sales team is zero. We don’t have any sales guys, which is usually met with complete disbelief.

Then they’re like, well, then you and your co-founder, Mike – you’re probably all day on the phone and on LinkedIn, trying to get these customers. Honestly, how much time do you spend like a day trying to find new leads?

Mike 2:49
Oh, well, that’s also easy.

Zero.

Yeah, so generally, I will answer lots of questions on our support chat. Those will lead to product demos for people who are interested, but we have the luxury of people reach out to us and talk to us because they’re interested.

And that’s a totally different proposition versus calling, messaging, and pleading with people to try our product.

Boris 3:16
So that’s the simple answer to the question.

Next? “How much marketing budget do we spend to get inbound leads?” It’s the same answer.

As for the sales team question, we spend no money on ads.

Well, it’s actually that’s wrong. We dabble in a little bit of Google ads for about $5 or $10 a day. You know, mostly just to test some things out. But you can’t really attract any any meaningful traffic was that kind of ad spend. So we really don’t do anything.

Then obviously the next follow up question is “Well, what do you guys do, right?” “How do you get all these customers?” And I think it all starts – you have to have a good product. If you don’t have a product that people like, no tactic for sales or marketing are ever going to be long-lasting.

I guess if you’re an amazing marketer on social media, or on TikTok, you could probably sell something crappy to a lot of people exactly once. And then you’d be done for.

Mike 4:26
Absolutely.

Boris 4:28
But for repeated success, you have to have a good product. (I’m actually thinking that we didn’t always have a good product.)

Mike 4:35
No, that’s very true.

Actually, I wanted to take that one step further. I would say not even just a good product. And this is going to sound slightly egotistical, but your product needs to be a great product. You need a product when people discover it, start to use it and love it so much – they want to spread the word about it.

For an average to good, people will just use it. That’s great but not enough.

But you really need that those brand evangelists, those brand ambassadors to really do that. And yeah, as you mentioned, like any startup, we made some missteps. We made some mistakes early on.

Boris 5:13
Yes, we used a lot of our initial funding rounds to build a product that we or our investors believed would be an amazing product. So we talked to a lot of people, who told us that our idea is amazing.

And we spent a lot of time and money building on our beliefs, launching something, and then realized in just seven days with heavy investment in marketing and sales people (we used to have salespeople) -returned, I think it was $10 or $12 in revenue.

Mike 5:48
Yeah, that was not one of our finer moments, was it?

Boris 5:51
No, that, that was fairly frustrating.

But you know, as a good team, we didn’t despair or fight over it, we just took action, which was to kill the idea and try something new.

And the new approach was to not listen to ourselves so much – or to our investors about what they wanted to see.

Instead, talk to the customers and ask them, you know, “What do you really want? What would you buy?”

And also asking them for their credit card and say, “Well, would you buy that now?”

You know, we had the basics of that, and we made it better over time. That’s become the Riddle you see today, which focuses on just the best tools to build quizzes, polls, personality tests out there. And building them was heavily informed by feedback from our most important customers.

You know, that’s probably the second thing that we do after finally arriving at a product that is really, really good. At least as good as everything else out there. (I would say better, but because it’s our company.)

The next thing is to listen to customers by talking to them on customer support. And you’re probably leading that effort, Mike. So we’ve already done an episode on customer support before but just give us a 30 second pitch.

Mike 7:19
Essentially, when we started, we tried several different approaches, we tried several different pricing models – freemium, offers, all sorts of things.

But what we kept hearing was that people kept asking questions – and wanting a certain subset of our features. And because of our backgrounds from work at Tickle.com and then a whole bunch of other quiz marketing startups, we thought “Look, let’s just focus on that.”

But a key part of this cycle is you’ve got to hear from your customers, especially early adopters. So Boris and I started using this really cool software called Intercom and answering all support messages. I’m sure many of our listeners have probably seen them on other web sites, there’s a little chat box windows that pop up. And normally a live person will say, “Hey, how can I help?”

The downside is that this approach does hurt your work life balance a little bit, because we’ll be answering messages from the pub, or I answered messages while hiking up in the Himalayas, where we actually had a WiFi or data connection. So I would answer messages really quickly. But by having a good product, and then being really active on customer support, you get the cycle of people who find us, we help them, they are happy, and they spread the word.

But we’re also learning about what they want and what they need.

So many of our requests on our roadmap, 80-90% of our features come from our customers. For example, “You guys should have a quiz timer so people have a set time limit on the quiz.”

And we built that.

“Hey, you guys should have a background color picker.” Or “You should have more flexibility for lead gen.”

Yes, yes, and yes – you’re absolutely right. And off we go to build them.

So that’s the whole cycle. Great product, really active customer support from the founders, devs, and engineers – get everybody involved with customers in less than 30 seconds.

Boris 9:23
If you’re listening to this and you’re starting a company – you might think “Oh, I always listen to my customers. I’ve been trying to build what they want, and it never works.”

That is true. In a lot of cases, you have to be careful who you listen to, and how much mass appeal some feature gets. So if you only have a very small set of customers and you build what they want, you may end up building something extremely niche and highly specialized.

You know, our job as founders of the company and managers is really to look at all the these requests, find a common ground, and bring all these requests down to what is absolutely necessary, what can we build really fast, that will give them 80% of what they asked for.

And probably never everything because the remaining 20% will take too much of your time, as usual.

Also, check who you are talking to, you know, there’s a big difference in types of users. In our case, are we’re talking to someone at the BBC, who is very familiar with using online formats, quizzes, interactive games, has done this all his life, usually talks to an audience of millions, and knows what he’s talking about? Or are we talking to a 14 year old kid who’s just trying to build something for his friends on Facebook.

If you treat all these requests equally, you’re going to end up with a crappy product. So don’t listen to all the customers – find out who you’re talking to… that’s the big, big takeaway here.

Mike 11:09
And there’s also the ‘squeaky wheel’ problem. You know, we have a wonderful, positive, encouraging community at Riddle, and they’re so appreciative, and we just love learning from each other.

However, when we started, especially in those early stages, there were a couple customers who were super particular, they needed highly specific features.

And they said, “This is so, so important!”

Boris – you and I took a step of considering “How popular among the whole community is this little feature that they think so important? How is it going to move the needle in sales and retention and all that?”

That’s what you have to stay focused on.

Boris 12:03
And the core job you, as a CEO or founder of a company is to look at all these distractions, because that’s what they are, right?

Everybody wants something, everything becomes important. And keep everybody on track and create traction of what’s important.

The only thing that’s important is something that serves the most users, something that has mass appeal, and that will generate money and new subscribers. That’s what you need to focus on.

Okay, to tie this all back. So you know, we said we have no sales team, we don’t spend on marketing, we just focus on really, really good customer support. We focus on word of mouth.

Is that working in? Yeah, you can look at our website, you can look at our customer showcase. You see all the amazing customers – we have some nice anecdotes, right?

Mike 13:02
Oh, yeah. This actually happens so often which is brilliant. It’s so encouraging.

We’re now really widely used in the NGO/nonprofit and non-governmental organizations space, they all talk to each other. So on support, we’ll hear “Oh, hey, I found you through . They said you should try them.”

My favorite one, though, has to be after we started a trial with the BBC Children’s division (CBBC). And they’re said “Hey, you know, your quiz software is really good for engaging our kids or children’s audience, right?”

Then after they started using us, one evening at 10 o’clock / 10:30pm my time in the UK, I got a message from this guy over in Chicago in the US. He said “Hey, I’m a British expat and I saw you on the BBC. I work with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. So we started chatting, and the Bulls started using us.

Now the NFL’s Chicago Bears and the Chicago Bulls, they talk to each other. And so the Bears started using it. And then the NFL saw what the Bears were doing and said, “Oh, hey, wow.” And so they signed up.

So that’s how we went from the BBC to the Bulls to the Bears and then the NFL.

These types of chains happen a lot.

And it all came about from – first, that really good product. But second was the fact that I quickly answered at 10:30 at night. Sure, I might have had a beer or two on a weeknight, but I got that last customer support message. So that’s the whole cycle.

Boris 14:40
And when you want that to happen, you need something that people that makes people talk about you.

You’re probably not going to go and talk to someone you know about “Oh, I’m using this new email feature”, you know, if it’s boring or whatever.

You may be talking about new music you discovered on Spotify that’s not on Apple Music – that gets someone to try out Spotify just for that one song that you rave about.

So it has to have nice talking points.

Now “I built this quiz” probably is not such a great talking point. But this is – “Hey, you know what, I’ve used this new software, I ran into an issue. And guess what, you know, it was 10 o’clock at night. I hit them up on chat, not expecting an answer. One of the founders came up, he’s this really funny guy, he was chatting to me from a pub, I think he had a beer or two. And he was able to solve my issue. How great is that?”

Now that’s a story that people tell. And if you look at our reviews on on Google and Capterra, a lot of these review sites, people say things like you expect like it’s a really good quiz builder, I generate a lot of leads, and opt in rates are amazing. But the the main topic – everybody starts to review is Riddle’s support is so amazing.

Mike 16:10
Yeah, that’s, that’s super encouraging. I would definitely go with that. And it’s, it is a distraction. And we have had to balance things – we’ve gotten our entire team involved just to keep things under control, because as a founder, you also maintain and balance your work life and energy.

If you’re answering messages at three in the morning for, let’s say, folks in Japan because of time zones, that’s probably not sustainable.

One other question, though. So oftentimes, as startups, you’ll have a fixed bucket of money from your founder and investors. And you’ll say, “Okay, well, we need a marketing strategy, we need a proper PR strategy.

How would you address using marketing, PR, and advertising to help grow your start up business?

Boris 17:04
And obviously, all depends on your product, right?

So if you have a product with a B2B focus, as we do, you probably only you talk to very specific people in an organization that need lead generation, and want to do lead generation through quizzes or need higher engagement through interactive formats.

It’s fairly expensive to reach them through banners and through traditional forms of advertising, that costs a lot of money.

So early on, we decided we have to reach them by word of mouth – we needed to get people talking about us. So that was our approach to support. And we needed really good SEO. So you know, we spend a lot of time writing articles.

And we also need mentions in other publications. So the only expense on marketing we have is we hired a PR agency. I’m happy to mention them. They’re Publicize.co.

Again, we took a very unusual approach. We didn’t hire an agency in London, as many would. We hired an agency from Medellin, Colombia.

I met the founder of that agency, Conrad Egusa, at South by Southwest. We were standing in line trying to get into a talk and just started chatting. And I just loved his approach. It was so close to what we were doing, you know, building a scrappy startup in an interesting location that no one thinks about, which was meeting and attracting top talent.

So you know, the people that work with us on our account, they’re expats. They’re Americans, they’re British people that moved there. They used to work in jobs at Google and other amazing companies but wanted to live in a sunny place.

(Not saying that England isn’t sunny, but probably not as warm as Columbia.)

Mike 18:51
Hey, we have at least three days of sunshine!

Boris 18:54
Yeah. So that was one approach. And that really worked for us. And we’re getting a lot of articles published, a lot of PR, but that is still our only marketing strategy where we spend money other than writing content.

Mike 19:13
And of course, doing podcasts like this.

Boris 19:15
Oh, yeah, I’m doing a podcast. That’s an experiment. We don’t know how that’s working out, right?

It’s hard to track – but if we’re still doing this in the year and you can still download episodes in a year… you can tell it’s been working.

Mike 19:29
Basically, to kind of wrap this episode up – because we do try and keep these short and punchy.

Essentially, you know, you need a killer product, it’s got to be really good. If people aren’t going to be wowed by your product, you are in trouble.

Invest in customer support, get your entire team to do it. Learn from your customers, but also keep that focus and not get distracted by every little request. Keep that general product train moving in the direction that’s going to move the needle for the widest percentage of paying customers.

And then be smart and strategic with your resources. Maybe paid marketing, at least in our case wasn’t required. But great SEO, investing in a good PR agency, but not on expensive retainers as a very effective use of our resources.

That’s the cycle. And that’s why we’re very flattered to have some of the people and customers that are using us.

Boris 20:28
Well, thank you for tuning in. I hope you learned something. Again, if you have follow up questions, want to know more details. We’re fairly open about everything we do, just hit us up on support chat on Riddle. Just ask for Boris and Mike, after all.

Mike 20:43
Oh, I’ve got to tell you, if you’re listening, we have a monthly competition, especially between Boris and I, on who answers the most chats – there is beer involved. So I’m going to be first to reply to you because I’m competitive and I like beer, as this podcast has already told you.

So yeah, I look forward to hearing that. Thanks a lot for us, and we’ll talk again soon.

Boris 21:03
Thanks, Mike.

Mike 21:06
Thanks again for listening to this episode of the quiz makers. And don’t forget, check out Riddle.com – the quiz maker used by the BBC, Shopify and thousands of other companies worldwide. Our quizzes are fully accessible and they’re GDPR-compliant. So try our free full-featured trial for 14 days – no pesky credit card required. And until next time, happy Riddling!

Hear the story of how the Riddle.com team managed to grow Riddle to be a leader in the quiz marketing space without a marketing budget and without a dedicated sales or support team.

Quiz marketing veteran Steve Sarner (VP of Ad Sales & Program Management @ Amazon's Goodreads) shares his insights about why quizzes and 'opt-in' lead generation work so well together - especially in this era of increased privacy regulations, 'banner blindness', and ad blocking.

Quiz marketing veteran Steve Sarner (VP of Ad Sales & Program Management @ Amazon’s Goodreads) shares his insights about why quizzes and ‘opt-in’ lead generation work so well together – especially in this era of increased privacy regulations, ‘banner blindness’, and ad blocking.

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to the Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling and successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Hi, there, welcome to this episode of the Quiz Makers. My name is Mike Hawkins. I’m one of the co founders of Riddle which is one of the major quiz makers on the market. And in this episode, I’m very proud to be chatting with Steve Sarner, VP of ad sales and program management. Is that right, Steve?

Steve 0:56
Pretty close, Mike.

Mike 0:58
I was stalking you on LinkedIn and that’s the current title I saw. So maybe I should have Steve introduce himself.

Steve 1:07
Right. Hi, everybody, Mike, thanks for having me on. I’m Steve Sarner, VP of sales and program management at Goodreads which is a subsidiary of Amazon – we are the world’s largest community of readers with 110 million members. Basically, we are the place to come to find and discover your next book, see what your friends are reading, and follow your favorite authors.

And it’s a great place to be during this time, where people are finding a lot of great content to to engage with. So it’s great to be on the Quiz Makers podcast.

Mike 1:43
Thank you. And I have to say, just in the interest of transparency, I am way too much a customer of Goodreads at Amazon. The number of times I get prompted, “Oh, hey, you’ve read this author” or “We think you might like”… then sure enough, I bought yet another book, especially now!

Steve 2:03
It is working.

Mike 2:04
Yeah, it is. So Steve, you and I worked together. And it feels like five years ago. But really, it was quite some time ago. I used to work with you at Tickle and then Monster.com.

Steve 2:16
Yeah, exactly. Those were fun times together, for sure. Mike. We did a lot. We invented a lot.

Mike 2:25

We did indeed. So the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast is that Tickle was one of the very first quiz online sites.

This is centuries in internet time, way back from 2001 to 2006 or so. And Tickle was one of the very first sites to do the “What type of dog are you?” and “What is your IQ” tests, things like that.

And after all, this is the Quiz Makers. So I wanted to catch up with you. What was your role in the use of quizzes for marketing?

Steve 2:57
Sure, exactly. Back let me go back a little bit before that – you may not know this, do you know where I was before I joined Tickle?

Mike 3:03
I do not.

Steve 3:04
I was at a company and a site that still exists today called Real Age, which was a health assessment site. So that was kind of my first introduction to quizzes.

I’d come out of the travel industry and joined the health interactive side as VP of marketing to help them grow their acquisition base. And you know, that was very much in line with the whole test quiz model.

In this case, it was actually health assessments, a number of them. And you know, I think one of the beautiful things about tests and quizzes is that you’re actually providing value for the person taking them. I’m a huge believer in advertising, ALL advertising, particularly digital advertising should be invited versus invasive – anywhere where we can add value to the user experience.

So when advertising feels like it’s part of the product, part of the experience, it’s just such a plus. And so Real Age, we were giving people some great, you know, health tips and advice, and then at Tickle, our IQ test and ‘What breed of dog were you?’… and we had hundreds of them.

But at Real Age, it was an actual assessment that figured out your current ‘health’ age. Depending on you know, your lifestyle and your choices, you could be a lot younger or a lot older than what your real age was.

So that was my first entry into the whole power of interactive content. And it’s interesting that was well before HIPAA and all kinds of medical privacy and stuff which now is becoming even a bigger issue and concern across all digital marketing. So we were an early pioneer in those areas.

Mike 4:50
Along those lines, you mentioned HIPAA. But now you’ve also got the EU GDPR, you’ve got California’s CCPA. Canada has one as well, right? This level of privacy regulation, where advertisers have to be increasingly transparent about the data collecting and then giving users the chance to opt out.

With that in mind, do you see quizzes and interactive content growing in importance as a different avenue marketers can use to reach their customers?

Steve 5:34
Oh, yeah, without a doubt, marketers are gonna have to rethink a lot of things that have been built over the past 20 years.

With cookies and retargeting and first party, second party, third party data. All of these things are being disrupted not only by government regulation, but by major changes such as Apple with iOS 14 (making users opt-in to have their device identifiers collected), there’s multitude of factors coming up that are changing the landscape of how things have been done, especially over the last 10 years.

And it’s going to be very disruptive to a lot of businesses.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the infographic that shows the all the different middlemen in between a consumer and an advertiser – from the ad agency to all the different layers of ad tech and data brokers, and so on and so forth? All of those things are potentially becoming completely irrelevant very, very soon.

So people are going to have to start doing things like quizzes and assessments and offering value – they’re going to be prepared for things that are going to be very different than what’s currently out there.

Mike 6:44
Now, you mentioned Apple, I mean, in one of our last episodes, we had Maor Sadra. And he heads up kind of an ad tech company called Incrmntal basically designed to bring transparency to all those ad brokers and things like that. But he talked about how there’s so much ad fraud. There’s so much just deviousness going on in the adtech space.

He feels that with quizzes and interactive marketing, where you attract someone’s attention, then give them the chance to opt in like “hey, do you want to get some more information?”, where the user chooses and then they get they get the results. He saw that was as a clear win for marketers.

Steve 7:28
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, being transparent, forthright and really disclosing what you’re doing with the information, and then all the privacy and security mechanisms that you need to have as well to protect that data.

At Amazon, we have our leadership principles – I’ve been there for nearly five years now. And I have really learned to appreciate and believe in them. Customer obsession is the number one, but earnest trust is one of the key things and and that trust is very, very precious.

So that’s similar to doing quizzes and tests, doing them right, and not doing anything devious and nefarious with that, but actually giving value.

And a good experience for someone is a fantastic mechanism to really engage your customers, learn more about them, and then allow you to be able to offer them more of what they’re looking for.

Mike 8:35
Yes, perfect. So many people who are listening to this podcast and a lot of the community at Riddle, they tend to be more of the small to medium businesses, like coaches, consultants, and a lot of health advocates asking their audience “Hey, you know, are you depressed?” or “Are you anxious?”. They’re using personality tests to drive people to that side of it.

So with that idea of transparency and trust, balanced with effectiveness, what advice would you try to give to a marketer saying, “Look, I’ve heard about these quizzes… that Steve Sarner guy sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. How should we get started?”

Steve 9:19
You know, one of the one of the best things to do is just learn a little bit about it. There’s certainly plenty of content I’m sure on your site (I believe you even have a book on Goodreads if I’m not mistaken) that gives somebody a really great foundation on on how on how to approach a quiz. And you know, there’s so many different levels of them too. I mean, they can just be fun and entertaining, which is great, or it can be really serious.

If you are an expert and you’re able to to give some solid advice, maybe its finance, its health, its mental health, its parenting. Just like there’s a book for every subject, there’s pretty much a quiz for every researcher too.

So if you are a small business and you have a niche where you’re expert in it, there’s no reason why you couldn’t develop something around your expertise.

And, the beauty of the internet and digital is, in the past, it used to be impossible to find the hundred thousand people around the world that might be a good customer for specifically looking for what you offer.

But now with digital, and with a well done quiz that goes viral and is searchable in search engines… now you can reach anybody just about anywhere with your content. And it’s a fabulous way to build your business for your customers.

Mike 10:44
Yes, it’s very interesting now that you have the long tail to target. Especially with the cost of production for marketing dropping.

For example, back at Tickle, we didn’t have the tools that let people create their own quizzes, people had to come to us. And then our team would make the quizzes.

Now these tools, and you can extend this concept to what’s happening with making your own website or running your own digital advertising, these tools are becoming so inexpensive that you can hit that little niche you mentioned – at a minimal cost – and still have a profitable business.

Steve 11:16
Right, exactly. And they’re looking for the information – they’re looking for you. So put out your expertise in a way that again offers prospects value, and they will come.

You know, you make a really great point. I mean, we were at Tickle going on 20 years ago, possibly.

Mike 11:37
Let’s not talk about that…

Steve 11:39
Yeah, exactly. You know, it was a completely different world. Now you can get a beautiful, custom-looking website up in a matter of hours. And you know, with tools like yours, you can have a really high quality quiz that used to take us weeks to write, develop, program, and design. It can be done in minutes with your product…

Mike 12:07
The record on our site is 47 seconds for a very short little quiz. A reporter was interviewing me and challenged me when I said you can make a quiz in under a minute. She said, “Wait, I don’t believe you.”

So I recorded myself with a clock. And she said, “Wow, fair enough!”

Steve 12:24
Yeah, the tools are amazing. And you know the technology allows you to do so much more, so much faster now. And so much more customized.

Mike 12:50
Well, it’s interesting, because of you coming from Goodreads… one of the the mantras of writing a book is that you should focus on what you know, right? Write about what you know.

And I feel for small to medium businesses, don’t go into a niche because you think that’s a good market opportunity – instead find that small community where there is going to be a community out there for you. You might not be the next Google. But there are going to be communities who want to know what you can know and can offer. So, in that regard books and quizzes are kind of similar.

Steve 13:24
They really are and again, it all comes down to people looking for knowledge or looking to improve something, learn about something, or simply be entertained. And books and quizzes both do that.

Mike 13:37
Fair enough. So we like to keep these podcasts very short and punchy. Unlike books where you can’t last for hours, we try to keep it on 10 minutes. So for our last question, this has nothing to do with quizzes, but I like to ask all of our guests this.

Okay, brace yourself. And this has nothing to do with marketing. Just what is your biggest pet peeve?

Steve 14:03
Well, I’m gonna give you a couple if that’s okay.

Mike 14:07
Wow, bring it on.

Steve 14:09
My immediate biggest pet peeve is I’m grounded. I can’t travel and go to visit people like yourself or clients – and see people in person. I mean, without a doubt, I’m looking forward for this world to get back a little bit of normalcy and be able to get back on the road again.

But I am actually going to take this pet peeve question back to marketing. And that is when this whole COVID pandemic started, watching all these large brands simply take like a cookie cutter approach to put somber piano music against emotional pictures and tell you that “We’re there for you” – yet offer no value really. I mean, I probably saw dozens of them. And I couldn’t tell you what the brand were. But they are almost all identical. So I just thought that was really just following the flock. And for those brands that didn’t go there, I salute you.

Mike 15:17
Yes, I mean, you could say the same thing about Black Lives Matter. You know, there’s the people and companies who say “We support Black Lives Matter.” But hold on, as a corporation, you look back to 20, 30 years and A) you have a bad track record. And B) what are you doing right now to support this? And so yes, that cookie cutter approach drives me crazy as well.

Steve 15:39
Right. All right. Mike – it’s been great catching up!

Mike 15:42
Indeed, thank you so much for your time, Steve. Like you. I can’t wait to be traveling again.

For our listeners. Steve travels probably about 80% of his time. So he’s always gallivanting around to interesting place. So this must be a new type of environment and experience.

Steve 15:59
Of both of us you, you’ve worked around the world literally. So you’ve got me beat by a long shot!

Mike 16:05
Hopefully we can meet up in San Francisco over a beer soon.

Steve 16:10
Sounds great. Better yet. I’ll meet you in the UK. Perfect. We’ll see Boris in Germany.

Mike 16:14
We’ll have a proper pint. All right, thanks so much, Steve.

Steve 16:18
Cheers. Thanks, Mike.

Mike 16:25
Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Quiz Makers. And don’t forget, check out Riddle.com – we’re the quiz maker used by the BBC, Shopify and thousands of other companies worldwide. Our quizzes are fully accessible and they’re GDPR-compliant.

Try our free full featured trial for 14 days – no pesky credit card required. And until next time, happy Riddling!

Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

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Find out more about Serial Marketers and join the Slack community here.

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story… the highs (and the lows!) of scaling his successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Boris 0:34
Hello, and welcome to The Quiz Makers podcast. Our guest today is David Berkovitz. David was the former CMO of MRY, a huge marketing agency and has now moved to running his own company – Serial Marketers. Hello, David, thanks for joining us in the podcast!

David 0:52
Thanks for having me Boris. It’s great to be here.

Boris 0:55
David, the first question that I’ve actually always wanted to ask you and never gotten around to somehow.

Just how did you decide to move from being a big corporate CMO? You know, that’s a very well respected job at a huge company to being self employed. That’s a huge step.

David 1:14
Yeah, it’s a it’s a big step. And and some of it wasn’t entirely the plan.

Look life within Pubicis was a wonderful experience. So with the team and MRY, they’re kept shifting, like the organization, kept drifting considerably within Publicis. And so ultimately, they needed to step back from what they were marketing and kind of retrench. And then as I was taking some time off, there were just a lot of the companies I was initially talking to on the tech and product side.

Then I thought – let’s start doing some consulting… then in that four year span I’ve gone in and out of some of these in-house roles, but all of them have been a lot scrappier; it’s been fun being in the this building mode. And really, across the board, I’ve just been just been attracted to these entrepreneurial roles.

So that part has stayed fairly consistent. And a lot of it is even at MRY. We didn’t have a CMO before I joined, right so there was still room to just create things and build. It’s really appealing to track it, you know, going over to that startup front and having those as most of my clients day to day.

Boris 2:46
So but instead of going the usual route where you got to know a lot of people in your previous roles and you then set up consulting gigs.

You went a slightly different route as well. You started with a small Slack channel, I guess to keep in touch with people – which has now grown into a huge and thriving community of well over 1000 members.

Tell me about how that how that ideas started to build that community and how you manage to grow with that fast.

David 3:18
Well, the idea started pretty much the day I left MRY. It’s all very connected because I was I was going to be speaking at an event and after that transition, I wanted a company name associated with. (There’s a bigger sort of back story on the company name itself serial marketer.)

Once I decided on that, I thought, “Well wait, a lot of people identify as serial marketers. No one uses that term. Then I Googled it – and saw, right, barely any search results associated with it so there’s something thing to it.

And then I got to this point where I wrapped up this engagement with StoryHunter, this video production marketplace and in July of 2018, I started the community with a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I thought slack was the right place to try this then, like “Slack for business professionals”.

It was still very unusual for those outside of the startup community to have a Slack account. But it seemed like it was in that right place and something that you can customize a lot more than the Google, Facebook and then LinkedIn groups.

I just started posts connected to Google Forms and got some idea for this community, which is ways to share things like jobs, events and news updates. And who wants to give this up, right?

I didn’t know exactly what it would be. And right away, I got 100 people filling out that form. So like the initial early adopters, and I’d estimate about half of them actually went and created an account. Then it was just a matter of it’s fun.

Now it’s nearly 1500 members. And it feels like it happened both very slowly and very quickly.

Because it’s not one of those things where it’s like, “Put this thing on product and tell everyone you know.”

I’ve seen some communities that are like, very aggressive of having the community name on everyone’s LinkedIn profiles just to have that viral effect. And six months in, where the people join in, we’re much more likely to…from being my first or second degree of connections, some of its come from my third degree.

That to me was a really exciting pivot when I saw that people I didn’t know were giving this a shot.

Boris 6:18
Now, I say we tried to copy the Serial Marketers Slack community at Riddle in try to build a real quiz maker community. It completely failed.

And I think we failed for one one reason – we couldn’t figure out why people should join. So when you mentioned there’s a lot of communities that pop up on Product Hunt and they get lots of members, people register, but they never log in, they never contribute.

I think I’ve been a member of at least 10 or 20 of these. But Serial Marketer, I check every day. From your point of view, what do you think? What did you do differently than all these communities that makes your community really work. It actually really, really works.

David 7:07
Well, thanks.

You know, I mean, it’s gratifying to hear because because like you said, my initial goal once it was actually sustaining itself after the first few months, then my initial goal for the community was very simple. Don’t die, right?

And if it did die, by the way, that was okay. It was good experiment.

Then there were some nice little milestones along the way, like when I realized I could take a week off on vacation and the community would still be there when I got back. And actually, one of the reasons I hesitated to launch a community is because look, I’m in marketing. I know a lot of people were awareof communities and other related endeavors as their vanity project.

I did not want this to be the David Berkowitz community. And I want to be something where, like, say, I got involved with something else that was just going to take up all mine. I could basically hand this over to some other folks and say, “Can you just run with this?”

Now it’s at the point where I even know who those people are in the community who I could do that too if I needed to and it and have some confidence that a year from now, we’d actually thrive more, right?

A lot of it benefited from that organic build of you know, finding those right members is and i and i gotta say, some of it is what was the most unpredictable thing that I you know, where like, you’ve got like the luck and skill parts of any degree of success. And so for me, the luck part came overwhelmingly from the people who I call the ‘capitalists of the community’ – there are people who some I knew fairly well like Valaria Maltoni.

She is a wonderful writer who I’ve been on the speaking circuit with – I’ve known her for a very long time. She never was like my closest friend in the industry; she’s based out in Philly so not like the person I’d have a beer with day to day but she was someone I knew fairly well – so it wasn’t surprising that she’d be as active and just enthusiastic as she was.

There are people like Weston Woodward and Chris Gorges, Shira Abel, and like Peggy Anne Salz who I met in Germany.

I knew her before but sat down with her in the DEMEXCO press room, then I went back to my hotel room and I created an actual roadmap and a media kit. And I put together all this stuff because Peggy is so organized, so enthusiastic, and has so many ideas per minute – she’s just off the charts.

But a lot of it has just been gradually just benefiting from people like that – learning from them and trying to find that right balance of being involved day to day promoting it. I come across people who I’m connected to who I’ve known a long time, and who don’t know that this community exists. Whenever I hear that it means I have not been promoting it too much.

So it’s a lot of that balance. And it’s tough because I also never know to the extent that I should be like, you know, the main user of the community. Yeah. Figuring that balance between being the person running it and being a member – it’s tricky.

Boris 10:59
So in The end, it’s not so much to content. It’s the initial people that people you get in that make all the difference

David 11:06
Yeah, there are things I could have done better for instance, having a very concrete purpose. I’ve got more to flesh out. And I have some FAQ pages that are more hidden – I could have put them front and center in terms of like, “who should be a member and who shouldn’t”, what the community’s purpose and mission – stuff like that.

And a lot of it is like, “Gget good people together who’ve either been in marketing a while or just really excited about it.”

I have a few of these main use cases like I’m all for people. A lot of times, people refer a friend, especially when someone someone’s on the job market and not surprisingly, that is fueled a lot of the member growth over the past six months. But then a lot of those people get those jobs and pay it forward or just keep staying an active member and resource in the community.

So it builds from there right? There’s so much that I could have been more aggressive with like determined product market fit – all these great ideas from the startup world that I didn’t do very well, because I’m like, “Yeah, I still kind of want to see what happens, right?”

And I do have a form on the front door where people can request access, and I let in at any given time, like 90 to 95%. And when I don’t, it’s really because I have no idea why this person would want to join or there are a few of those red flags on their LinkedIn like this is probably some kind of spammer who’s just going to take and not give to the community.

Even then I’ve I haven’t had a single person who I didn’t let in later come back to me and say, “Come on, I should be here.”

Boris 13:31
And you kept the community entirely of spammers. I don’t think I saw one piece of spam. That’s good.

Now, one last question on the community that a lot of people probably wonder about. You just started this as a project. You wanted to see where it goes, but it’s a lot of work, right?

So you should get paid for it.

Do you have any regrets of not charging your members from the get go?

I know you’ve recently started with a paid add-on to the community.

Now thinking back, do you think it would have been better to get 500 paying members initially instead of 1500 free?

What’s your thought in retrospect on paying?

David 14:14
Well, some of it is, “What’s your purpose?”

Is it supposed to be a revenue stream? Is there value in the community as far as a a marketing channel for what you’re doing?

Look like when I started this, this was just a way to bring some people together. And for a long time, it was more top of mind but the day to day work on the community was really minimal. Like I haven’t had spammers and trolls in there. I haven’t had to deal with like a lot of the worst aspects of it.

I wouldn’t create a whole content calendar for myself. I wasn’t very aggressive, maybe to a fault in social media and promoting what’s going on in the community.

So there are 1500 people registered for this community who are perhaps a little more likely to pick up the phone, if I call them because this community exists – that’s an incredible value. And with charging for it, it got to the point with the roadmap that I was talking about, there’s so much I wanted to do – that I didn’t feel like I should be the only one investing in this.

It got to the point where I thought that there are things coming up that I want to pay for. And once I can figure out that disproportionate value, I went ahead and rolled with it.

Now, as far as what I’d recommend others do… It’s very different, right? It’s because everything I’ve read says going a freemium approach is the toughest way to go about it – either go all in and find sponsors or just like you know, foot the bill and make this a free community… or charge from day one, make it very clear just what the price is going to be and then you won’t have anyone join it who’s not planning on paying. (And many of them – even if they stop using it, they’re gonna pay for the rest of their lives and just kind of forget about it or something like that.)

So I think there are smarter ways to go about this.

But launching this as a project and seeing what happened like is very fitting for me, it’s fitting for my brand also to a fault to leave money on the table and to think about just value first. I generally try not to cash in on something; almost waiting as long as I possibly could to go and and charge.

So it’s a tougher way to go about it.

But I still think for this community that has a little bit of this iconic classic feel to it – we’re not running this like a heavy handed top-down approach like “Shout this thing from the mountaintops – this community is the next big thing ever!”

It’s really the most low key bunch of marketers I think you could find anywhere.

And to that end, the one advice I would give someone else is at some point, you’ve got to learn as much as you can – throw it all out, throw out everything you might have learned during this episode here, and then just do what works for you.

And yeah, and that might not mean it works, but like then you can at least give it your best shot.

Boris 18:00
Awesome advice. Thank you, Dave. And to everyone listening to wrap this up. I want to pick up two points about the freemium model.

I agree, we tried that at Riddle six or seven years ago when we started; we went to freemium.

It just doesn’t work.

That would be my advice to other startup founders out there. People who join something and are not paying – getting them to pay is the hardest thing in the world. So either go all free and find other ways to monetize or go all paid would be my advice.

As far as the community and being on the show, thank you so much, David, for your time.

I’ve become a paying member of Serial Marketers for one single reason – to thank you for the work you’ve done, because I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Serial Marketer.

Every question I put in there about marketing I get answers for and if I help other people, they are eternally grateful and thankful, I’ve met so many great people.

So for any of our listeners, if you’re marketer – check out Serial Marketers. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Join the community. If you give David a good enough reason why you should be there, he will let you in.

Well, thank you, David, for being on the show – it was wonderful to have you here.

David 19:14
And thanks so much. Yeah, I just really appreciate all the work you’re doing and thanks for being part of the community. Thank you.

Mike 19:27
Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Quiz Makers.

And don’t forget, check out Riddle.com – the quiz maker used by the BBC, Shopify, and thousands of other companies worldwide. Our quizzes are fully accessible and GDPR-compliant. Try our free full featured trial for 14 days with no pesky credit card required.

All right, until next time… Happy Riddling!

Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

Marketing maestro Merilyn Beretta shares how her quiz marketing funnel has generated a jaw-dropping 86% opt-in rate for her ‘Lead Your Day’ online learning academy. It demonstrates how a great product matched up with an insightful quiz helped grow her revenue by 500% – boom!

Check out her website at https://merilyn.com.

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Mike 0:02
Welcome, everybody to this episode of “The Quiz Makers” podcast. And I am really flattered and honored to have as our guest today, Merilyn (I’m going mispronounce your name, but it’s just a cool name that I have to try it) Beretta.

You’re a happy customer of riddle and obviously really big into quizzes and marketing. And, frankly, you do so much in the entrepreneurial space, I think it’s better just to let you introduce yourself.

Merilyn 0:33
Sure. And as you can tell by my Australian accent, I’m not Italian… I married into an Italian family years ago. And yes, those guys are listening and it’s spelt like the gun. Guys think that’s really cool, but girls have no idea. They think it’s a ham, which is actually a ham brand.

Anyway, so back to the question. Yes, I have a personal brand – I’m a coach and a trainer. As an educator at heart, I have an education and coaching business for women entrepreneurs.

Mike 1:09
Fantastic and when did you start the business? And then it kind of a segue, how did that get you into quiz marketing?

Merilyn 1:16
Well, interesting enough, I did years and years decades and decades in corporate and various roles.

Then I moved home after living in England for many years – and I moved home to Australia. I was still self employed with number of clients but more of a consulting role doing different things from brand architecture to strategic director, marketing… I was a bit of a sort of a Jill of all trades.

So when I had in my heart to start my own brand, I always wanted to teach online and reach a wider audience. In the past, I was that sort of person that was thrown into businesses to sort of fix things? So when we started online with zero, literally zero audience, what do you do?

I actually started late – I was a little bit older and I only started just about just over three years ago. So not long at all. And I started with creating some online courses. And it’s interesting that I started right from the start with quizzes.

So I learned how to do quizzes, with customer segments, buckets and different categories, which was right up my alley, because for decades I have taught personality profiling.

I think it was the training and learning development person in me, but I’d always naturally categorize people – not to stereotype them, but to understand them.

Mike 2:57
Imagining which broad buckets they fell into…

Merilyn 3:00
Yes. And so I knew I wanted to start some sort of quiz because I thought that they were really cool and fun to do. I actually stumbled across the careers quiz that I’ve got now – I actually started with sort of a course on life direction.

I spent a lot of time doing surveys online and so I have hundreds of thousands of data points. And I actually discovered that the core motivation of what entrepreneurial direction to take fell into four buckets or categories.

So I looked at them and I thought, “Oh my gosh, they relate completely to the person to the broad personality types I’ve been teaching for decades!”.

So it morphed into what I’ve got now – which is my “Wow archetype”. I’m a bit tongue in cheek – I love being a little bit corny, but it’s memorable and everyone loves it. So my “Wow archetype” really focuses on the four core motives of different personalities.

I use it as an icebreaker but I also use it to actually target the different results. It really does work to categorize my people like that and we have a lot of fun with it.

Mike 4:19
With four archetypes or segments, that actually lends itself to personality tests because there are four broad areas that you can say “Here’s a broad area, I think you fall into…”

Merilyn 4:32
And what people love about mine is it’s easy to remember. You know, you’ve got Myers Briggs but you can never remember what you’re are – is it ENJFPQ or something like that? You never remember what you are yourself so I created this specifically for entrepreneurs. Even though I target women, men love it as well.

I focus on entrepreneurs because I found a lot of the personality profiles out there were written by corporate male middle management for other employees, so a lot of the questions were geared around that.

So I made something different that was people have just raved over. So yeah, it’s been a lot of fun and really successful, but I haven’t made the most of it yet. I still need to. It’s only been almost a year since it went live. And I switched to Riddle.com and it’s just taken off even more.

Mike 5:25
Well, we love to hear that!

Actually, that was one of the things we love doing at Riddle; both my co-founder Boris and I lead all the support – and one day, you and I got into this really good chat.

We saw what you’re doing and thought “Oh my God, we need to get you on this podcast!” because you share what you’ve learned.

The thing that really caught my attention – I loved the the business idea in terms of getting a broader range of entrepreneurs to think “Hey, I can do it too!” – which is brilliant. There’s so much of start up – I’m a white middle class dude with certain advantages, but your helping other people who might not even have that on the radar to consider that option… that’s, that’s really cool.

So you crafted a quiz – and I’m going to let you say the number because you’ve done a frankly ridiculous job of efficiency.

But I’m going to set the stage. So for all of our listeners, quizzes are brilliant for lead generation – that is probably why you’re listening to this podcast.

Now, average lead generation placements on the web, like those little pop ups that say, “Sign up for our newsletter” – they get around 2% opt-in rates, which is okay.

You know, quizzes in general get around 10%.

But for Riddle quizzes, the way we’ve designed our software architecture, we say anywhere from 25 to 35% is really good. And again, that’s 17-18 times better than the average.

Okay, Merylin. You’ve been running your quiz. What is your success rate for opt ins on your quiz?

Merilyn 6:57
Well, 86% percent. So of people that actually start the quiz 86% finish and fill in the form. For people who land on the page and view the quiz – 68%.

Mike 7:10
Yes. So both of those numbers are flat out phenomenal. So, people who just land on your site might not you know, 68% start and then finish.

If you’re driving traffic from ads, and they click on the ad, then 86% of all your quiz takers. So I guess from a revenue perspective, and this is still early days, but is this working out for you from an ROI perspective?

Merilyn 7:41
Well, absolutely. I mean, in the last I got 5X my income, like when I had my consultancy you know.

If you want to talk real numbers, I had my consultancy but make online income. I think the first year I made $25,000 or something, and that was from zero audience.

No one knew me and I wasn’t a celebrity. I think the second year, I got $123,000. So, and this year I’ve already beat that.

Mike 8:19
That’s with the pandemic and everything else!

Merilyn 8:22
Yes, that’s even with the pandemic. So the ads are performing phenomenally well. The click through rates are high plus the amount of shares and likes. It’s just really phenomenal. And it’s due to people feeling understood.

So I’m getting people emailing me saying, Oh, my gosh, you know, no one’s ever said that before. And there are a lot of people when you’re looking at starting a business, they say, “Look for what you’re passionate about!”

But not everyone resonates with that word. I found that it’s only sort of one of the four personalities that really resonates with that word. Whereas if you say to other people, “What what have you got a heart for?” Or especially, “What do you feel peaceful around?”

People go, “Oh, my goodness, that completely answered it for me. People have been telling me to go after what I’m passionate about. I can’t answer that question because I don’t actually feel strong passion. But I know what makes me feel peaceful.”

Or if there’s a vision maker, they might say “I don’t care about passion, but I know what I’ve got a vision for! Okay, so that’s very interesting.”

Mike 9:29
Yes. So in essence, this is for more for our listeners, but in a personality test, you’re asking a series of questions, and get a result based on your overall answers.

So how many questions is your quiz, Merilyn?

Merilyn 9:39
I think this 25 so it’s a little bit longer than normally normal, but it’s an actual fact I was using someone else before riddle, but I had less and now I’ve added more and I’m actually getting a high quality lead because of it.

Mike 9:55
So this is actually another lessons. So this is brilliant. I love these types of chats. So our general guidelines for people starting out is around six to 10 questions. But there’s always a caveat. And you did it, where if you find that dedicated audience who aren’t just looking for light and fluffy entertainment, but are like this is going to really make an impact on my life, they will put the time in and then by putting that time in there even that much more likely to fill in the lead. So yeah, 25 questions. I’m not surprised. We have seen upwards of 100 that might be a bit excessive.

Merilyn 10:32
Yeah, I but I’m really pleased, considering I have that many questions. And I’ve still got 86% who finished it? I’m pretty. I’m pretty pleased with it. Now I’m talking to you. I’m going flip. I need to do something on the back end of that. So yeah, I have to I have to sell something at the back of it or do something a little bit more constructive at the end, but it’s been a really busy year, as you can imagine, you know, it’s just trying to scale and take on new staff and deal with that. It’s just been phenomenal. And I just the amount of people who want to take the businesses online, because I do help people get online. So it’s just been a huge

Mike 11:11
full on know what I mean. So as a product guy, you’ve got obviously a good product, it’s fitting the right niche. So people are loving it, you now have a marketing channel to attract and get people excited about it. So yeah, if you’re doing everything, this is brilliant. So I’m going to just ask a couple of quick fire questions about the guy now. So we had 25 questions. Are they all text? Or did you use images in your questions?

Merilyn 11:37
They are all text. Unfortunately, I sat there and I thought I would love to put images on all these but it was really tricky to perhaps visualize some of the concepts. I do want to go though. I know you mentioned to put some maybe a picture at the front and things like that, which I do need to add to it. But no, it’s a boring written test.

Mike 11:59
No, no, but this The SWOT there are broad guidelines, but 86% is working don’t change anything. If it’s working cool. Okay, how many answer options per question? Full. See that perfect. That’s kind of what I figured. And I guess in your lead generation form, because again, this one of the weaknesses we see from many of our users, they’ll ask 10, 15 fields. What do you have? What do you ask? And what is your call to action on your lead form?

Merilyn 12:31
Oh, just first name, female. That’s it. So what I do is I give them a, so I send them at the end to four landing pages that I’ve set up depending on the photos. And what I love about riddle is it gives people that percentage of all four, whereas that’s what it was struggling before I wanted people to be able to see. And I haven’t I haven’t worked out the techie stuff of being able to transfer those four things onto their email that’s like, I probably need a coder or something, dude. That, but it’s, it’s got the four things there and then their top result they get. So basically it comes up with a landing page, it gives them a little brief paragraph where you are congratulating, you are a vision maker dedicated. If you would like to report it, just a one line, if you’d like to report, give me your name and email. And that’s it. Not much at all. It goes through and then they get a thank you page, which may on a video explaining a little bit more. And then they get this very substantial report that people are shocked at the quality about and then all I’ve got at the moment is a two email sequence there. It’s very and I direct them to my podcast. So yeah, yeah. Where I teach a little bit more on it. So yeah, it’s very, very simple, but it’s, it’s no pressure. I really wanted it to not be a speak sales thing. But you know, with the right offer on the right way of doing it, it definitely will work on the back end because it’s built up so much trust. When people feel that they’re, oh my gosh, you’ve got me. And I probably only have had a half a dozen in those thousands of leads that have sort of said, Oh, no, that’s, you know, that’s not me. I don’t like the questions, which is, you know, pretty good. That’s not No,

Mike 14:19
that’s actually amazing and the fact that so I am asking all these questions, but it’s working for you. It’s a nice kind of warm like cold to warm funnel exercise. Or just, hey, this is what I do. Yeah. Not not flogging a product. Oh, x now, you know this limited time off. Yeah. Yeah. is a really good for that. What would you what one piece of advice would you give to to someone else starting in the quiz marketing space?

Merilyn 14:46
Oh, very good question. What would I say?

It depends. Know what you want the quiz for because if it’s for really just entertainment or a bit of fun and that’s okay. But if you’re wanting to doing it for some, if you only do it for some serious segmentation. Know your audience like know who they are. And if you can give them some insight about themselves that they may not know, or you can highlight something that they love about themselves, and you pointed out, then even better. So what I’ve done with mine is, and this is what I don’t like about a lot of personality quizzes is they sort of said, this is you This is the hardwired and these are all your weaknesses, whereas I’ve pulled out a strength. And I’ve given hope to people saying, yes, you could be an entrepreneur with that personality. And so I’ve given them a sort of a positive spin on something that they’re probably expecting to be negative.

Mike 15:44
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s perfect, because we will always recommend that with our personality test of like, hey, that is the tone of the message is important. It’s not just a bit of encouragement, but you also say maybe like, oh, there are some things to be carried away. This personality, there’s really good at this business. But be careful because sometimes, yeah, so like Steve Jobs, for example, you know, visionary, but your manic attention to detail can be a distraction. So you drop it off and people go, Okay, one good tip we give to our listeners also is to not sound completely definitive on the results. So absolutely,

Merilyn 16:23
yes, yes. We think Can you maybe this? Yeah.

Mike 16:29
Okay. Well, thank you, Merilyn, this has been awesome. I could talk to you for hours and hours. We have a very critical, very important question to ask to end on. And it’s kind of a tradition here at the quiz makers. So the pandemic 2020 in general is a bit crazy. So along those lines, what is your one pet peeve and it could be business. It can be just life in general. What drives you up the wall?

Merilyn 17:01
I was going to be boring and say, you know, hard sell or selling to me before you even know me. Because in that industry that is kind of annoying. I also hate the word can I have more than one? I hate the word hustle. I hat the word skyrocket. I hate crush it, you know, and it’s like they’re great for guys. But for girls, we don’t we already know how to hustle. We’ve been working. We’ve been hustling since we were born. So it’s kind of like a false idea. There’s so there really gets my goat. But I would say – you’re gonna have to edit these long pause out. – I would say, I would say Marmite.

Mike 17:55
Wow. Controversial from an Australian

Merilyn 17:59
mine. All right. I love I have to be an Vegemite girl.

Mike 18:06
Wow. Okay for all of you Brits out here I apologize for the sheer offensiveness of like Marmite versus Vegemite is a classic classic debate for anyone who likes so yeasty spreads. Alright, so we’ve got business and now we’ve got Vegemite, Marmite. barilla isn’t an awesome we try and keep our podcast nice and short and punchy. This one got away from us just because you’re so interesting and has such it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. Continued Good luck on your quiz and your business.

Merilyn 18:40
Thank you. Thank you, Mike.

Marketing maestro Merilyn shares how her quiz marketing funnel has generated a jaw-dropping 86% opt-in rate for her 'Lead Your Day' online learning academy. It demonstrates how a great product matched up with an insightful quiz helped grow her revenue by 500% - boom!

Please make sure to visit Merylin at https://www.merilyn.com/