School of Startups

Neil Patel is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and analytics expert who specializes in SEO and digital marketing, he has co-founded several marketing & tech. companies including KissMetrics, Hello Bar, and Crazy Egg. He also now runs his own ad agency called Neil Patel Digital and a KW research tool, UberSuggest. Over the years he has helped big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, and HP to help them grow through his amazing marketing skills.

Among his many achievements, Neil has been recognized as a New York Times bestselling author, a top influencer by the Wall Street Journal, a Top 10 Marketer by Forbes, a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by former US president Barack Obama, a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations, and he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies according to Entrepreneur Magazine. Neil also runs a blog about marketing that has generated over 3 million visitors per month, he co-hosts his own podcast with Eric Siu, Marketing School, that has generated over 1 million listens per month and a YouTube channel about marketing that has over 10 million views.

In this interview, we cover:

- Digital Marketing trends - Risk & opportunities for SaaS founders & Marketers

- Ubersuggest Freemium to Customer conversion rate numbers

- The right time to make the switch to go from freemium to paid vs. Raise VC capital to keep fueling user growth

- Comparing keyword research tools in the market and where does Ubersuggest stands

- SEO Automation and AI

- Investing trends for 2020 and during COVID-19

- Key Metrics and Red Flags to look for when Investing

- Building a SaaS company VS Marketing Agency

- Real SEO experts and high-value products VS frauds/lower quality ones

- Where to focus your Marketing efforts and budget in 2020

- Focusing on Mid or Top of funnel content marketing?

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Links and mentions:

NPDigital

Get in touch with Neil:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/

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Einar Vollset is currently the Co-Founder and General Partner at Tinyseed, a remote-based startup accelerator designed for early stage, bootstrapped SaaS Founders which provides funding, community, guidance, advice and mentorship.

He is also the Managing Partner of Discretion Capital, a technology enabled Investment Bank focused on M&A, due diligence and strategic partnership development for tech & technology enabled services businesses.

Einar was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is a serial entrepreneur who founded many companies like ReMail which was acquired by Google in 2010, Octopus Mercantile, and AppAftercare, a company which was built from scratch, with zero outside funding, which was completely bootstrapped from zero revenue until acquisition in 2016.

Einar was also CEO at Left Coast R&D, and an advisor at Trigger.io and Biomeme.

In this interview we cover:

-Exiting to big corporations like Google

-How we manages his investment strategy during a crisis

-The importance of having a specific investment criteria and what he looks for in funding startups

-Initial traction and acceleration programs

-Benefits of Bootstrapping vs. VC funding of your startup

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Get in touch with Einar:

Einar's LinkedIn

Links and mentions:

Tinyseed

DiscretionCapital

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Jeff is an entrepreneur, team-builder, hustler & investor. He is the founder of Onboard.io which is a SaaS made specifically for customer implementation to automate, optimize & create the perfect journey for every customer and enabling companies to manage the perfect onboarding process.Jeff was previously the founder of Ambassador for over 9 years, a referral tracking, attribution, and management platform for businesses. Acq by West Corp. in late 2018.

He’s a lifelong entrepreneur, a 2011 NYC TechStar graduate, and is described as one of those rare founders you only read about in books because of his unmatchable drive to succeed.

In this interview we cover:

- Intro

- Right Time to Sell, Negotiation Tips & Emotional load when selling your business (selling Ambassador)

- Most Common Areas where you can Improve Onboarding for your SaaS Business & Why you Should Invest in Onboarding Practices

- Why the Customer Success Team should own the Onboarding Process

- How to Measure ROI on Customer Success

- Why you should personalize and Balance the Onboarding Process

- Proactive VS Reactive For Customer Success

- Why to Have a Customer Success Team from Day 1

- Tech Stack Recommendation & When to Expect Onboard.io

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Get in touch with Jeff:

Jeff's LinkedIn

Links & Mentions:

Onboard.io

Baran Ozbek

More About Akeel:

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Hani is Founder and CEO of Tradogram, an online purchasing system that helps businesses manage their purchasing process and control their business spending. Tradogram also offers advising and coaching for organizations on the implementation and development of a better procurement process.

Hani holds a degree in Financial Accounting and an MBA from Azusa University in California.

Prior to Tradogram, Hani was the manager at the Magdi Store Company, An importer and wholesaler of dry foods, and was also Partner and Managing Director at Madji Food Centre, where he was able to manage several large projects such as establishing a new factory, conduct business analysis, implementation, and configuration of a Sage ERP system. He played a major role in negotiating the deal and in planning the entire set up when the company was acquired by another large corporation.

Finally, Hani has more than 30 years of experience in business management including working in Wholesale supply, Food Processing, and Business Services.

In this interview we cover:

-Procurement process: Risks and challenges

-Making better decisions when managing your costs in your startup

-Growth channels that helped him build and grow Tradogram (hint: PLG)

-Better cost control frameworks

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Get in touch with Hani:

Hani's Email

Links and mentions:

Tradogram’s website

More About Akeel:

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Jeroen is the co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, a fast, powerful, and intuitive CRM for B2B SMBs focused on improving prospect relationships and sales. Salesflare has been featured on TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.com and has been named as one of the top CRMs on both Product Hunt and AppSumo.

Prior to Salesflare, Jeroen founded Doctura, a medical personal journal that worked with tech startups and healthcare companies with new ways of doing business by fusing modern technology. He worked as a PM and account manager for some of the leading health and life science companies in Europe, the US, and China. Some of his work and expertise was focused on multichannel promotion, diverse multichannel campaigns, mobile sales apps, multichannel mix assessments, strategic consulting projects, mobile strategy workshops to digital benchmarks, competitive analysis, innovation workshops, and many more.

In this interview we cover:

- Building a Sales Platform For Salesforce

- The Need For a New CRM Over the Other 600+ Options

- Why You Should Start Using a CRM

- What Analytics Data is Most Useful for Your SaaS Sales/Marketing Team

- Getting The First 100 Customers

- How to Effectively Take Advantage of Launching With ProductHunt & Appsumo

- Salesflare User Acquisition, Content Marketing Strategy & What hasn’t Worked

- The Founder Coffee Podcast

- Habits Over Goals For Self Improvement & Business Growth

- $1MM in External Funding & Next Milestones For Salesflare

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Get in touch with Jeroen:

Jeroen’s LinkedIn

Mentions:

6 foolproof ways to get your startup its first 100 customers

Founder Coffee Podcast

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How to Land Clients with Your Proposals and How to Launch a Spin-Off Product in A Competitive Market

Ruben is a specialist in Bootstrapping, marketing, User Experience, and software development, he is the founder of Bidsketch, a professional web app focused on designing, tracking, and customizing proposals in no time.

In the past, Ruben owned 9thSign, a small business specialized in web development and consulting, after that Ruben worked In Oasis Outsourcing as a Web development Manager, the largest privately-held PEO at the time, then Ruben decided to quit his job and founded Bidsketch where he’s been growing and improving since 2009.

In this interview we cover:

- Not a full-time StartUp

- Identifying your StartUp idea & problem to solve

- VC vs Bootstrapped

- Growth Strategies for Bidsketch

- Failures & how to use them as experience

- Key differences for winning or losing business proposals

- Conceiving Other ideas to integrate with your StartUp (Docsketch)

- Proposals for SMB’s vs Enterprise lead

- Trends in e-Signature Market during COVID-19

- Making Docsketch Competitive

- Growth Hacks

- Considering Merger or Acquisition

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Get in touch with Ruben:

Ruben's LinkedIn

Extends Logic

Links and mentions:

Bidsketch

Docsketch

More About Akeel:

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Dmytro Grechko is a self-taught Entrepreneur & Software Engineer who found his passion & borrowed his inspiration from the constant process of learning and meeting new people, his skills and interests range from emerging technologies and latest market trends to sports and music.

As a Founder and CEO of Deskree & Deskree Studio, he specializes on helping brick and mortar companies, digitalizes their operation and reinvents their business with the latest technologies, his personal goal is to help early-stage startups and entrepreneurs uncover their potential in new unique markets, and connect them with like-minded investors and the right people for the job.

In this interview we cover:

- After launch CTO for non-tech founders

- Deskree playbook on founder resource management

- Assessing the market viability for Startups

- Trends on innovation and automation solutions for startups

- The importance of branding design for startups

- Differences in the investment and startup ecosystem between Canada, Europe, and the US

- Focusing on the functional features, the problem that the solution aims to solve, and the solution that delivers the maximum value

- Deskree’s ideal profile of entrepreneurs to work with

- Dmytro’s top underrated digital tools for SaaS founders

- Raising a VC fund focused on teaching branding, sales, and development

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Get in touch with Dmytro:

Dmytro's LinkedIn

Dmytro's Email

Links and mentions:

Deskree Website

Webflow

Firebase Google

Intercom

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Mark is the Co-Founder & CEO of Speak on Podcasts, which is an Outbound Prospecting Coach at the Sales Impact Academy, CRO at Task Drive, a B2B SaaS Revenue Growth Consultant at Yello O & Mentor at Growth Mentor. By day Mark works with B2B companies to increase revenue by helping them with their Lead Generation and Data Enrichment strategies & by night he helps B2B SaaS companies scale revenue with their Sales & Marketing Automation and Customer Journey Optimisation.

Revenue Generation is Mark’s brain default state and his personal mantra is to give without expecting anything in return.

In this episode we cover:

- Mark’s Background (From Prospecting to B2B Revenue Growth)

- Channels for Building a Predictable and Scalable Outbound System

- How to Source Leads who are More Likely to Buy or Convert

- Key Metrics to Look at to Keep the Pipeline Flowing

- How to Invest on Acquiring the first & Right Customers

- How to Better Build the Customer Profile for Higher Success in Positive Responses

- If you Create Content, Customers Will Come?

- What’s the Story Behind Launching Speak on Podcasts?

- Why You, as a SaaS Founder or Marketer, Should Launch a Podcast

- How Should We Be Thinking About Lead Generation Through Podcasting as a Marketing Channel

- Mark’s Top Marketing/Sales Stack Tools

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Get in touch with Mark:

Mark’s LinkedIn

More About Akeel:

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Bhaskar Sarma is a full stack growth marketer who helps companies and leaders to get more qualified traffic to their site, increasing conversions on their website, converting more free trial users to paid customers and keeping them loyal, upsell and cross sell them and setting up a customized analytics stack which tracks users right through the entire customer cycle.

Bhaskar is experienced in many marketing channels including Conversion copywriting, SEO, Website/competitive audits, Email marketing, Case Studies, Whitepapers, Video and Webinar scripts, Onboarding design, Revenue optimization, Marketing automation and Sales funnel optimization.

Bhaskar was a Features writer at Digit, India’s largest tech magazine, and more recently he was a SaaS marketer and full stack growth hacker at Pixels and Clicks, where he wrote SEO web copy, whitepapers and case studies and also consulted clients on content marketing strategy. His niche and expertise is in the B2B space.

In this episode we cover:

-The importance of copywriting

-Writer’s block: what to do

-The persona development process (Jobs to be Done)

-Tools and strategies for copywriting

-Incorporating your brand’s voice

-Hiring copywriters: when and how to do so

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Get in touch with Bhaskar:

Twitter: @bhas

Bhaskar's LinkedIn

Bhaskar's Website

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Oren Greenberg is the founder of Kurve - a modular growth marketing consultancy with experience of helping FTSE 250s and funded startups to navigate the perilous waters of growth and marketing, his impressive track record of results include; managing over £10M marketing budgets, juggling paid search campaigns with over 13.7 million key phrases, organic traffic growth from 2.3M a month to 3.1M a month for a single client, scaling paid search delivery by 139% to 12,600 B2B clients.

Oren’s highly regarded digital strategy and commercial expertise have been instrumental in the growth of client brands including Investec Bank, Peakon, Wonga, Wink Bingo, Nutmeg, Funding Circle and he has been featured in The Telegraph, Social Media Examiner, Forbes, virgin entrepreneur, the guardian, and the HubSpot blog, and nonetheless, he’s also an instructor on Skillshare and Jolt.

In this episode we cover:

- How to communicate effectively and convince the board to invest in your marketing strategy

- Operating on the Wrong Channels & Spending the Money in the Wrong Places

- Best Framework and Channels for SaaS Businesses & Best Content Creation-Promotion Ratio

- Hiring an On-Demand Marketing Department

- What to Value about Seniority VS Young Talent

- How to Decide which Channels to Focus Budget for your B2B SaaS Company

- How to Go From 0 to 500 leads a day

- Don't lose 110+ Right Touch Point Strategy to increase your ROI

- Why Use Personalized Videos in your B2B outreach Efforts

- The Importance of Choosing the Right Tech Stack

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Get in touch with Oren:

Oren's LinkedIn

More About Akeel:

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