How Talking to Customers Grew My Business to
$70K/Month
Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?
Hi, my name is Josh Ho and I'm the founder and CEO of Referral Rock. I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, with my wife and two kids. I'm an engineer by trade but consider myself a full-stack entrepreneur (not sure if that's a thing). I lead product and marketing for Referral Rock but have also done my tours in sales and customer support.
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"full-stack entrepreneur" +1 for this term, lets start using it! I like to think of myself as full-stack entrepreneur with skills spanning multiple areas - product dev/mgmt, marketing, sales, support.
Love your story, so relatable to me. Congrats on all the success.
I have been exploring affiliate programs and it is such a crowded space with so many platforms - a time sync to just pick one. Checking out Referral rock now...
Thank you for the +1.
I wouldn't say we're a great match for affiliate programs, as we don't do recurring rewards. Not competing directly in the affiliate space is something we've been very intentional about.
What an inspiring story! I love how you prototyped the early version of Referral Rock by hacking together ASPX.
You mentioned that you “suffered the pain of trying to get consumers to pay for online services and swore never to do that again.” I’m curious, what did you mean by that, and what did you learn?
That was with the last startup UberNote. In it's hayday we had maybe 100k registered users.
We added a "premium" version of sorts with some more advanced features, but conversion rates were so low and painful. When talking to users we provided great value, but so did every other note app. A consumer's choice of note apps was so vast and at that time 2009-2010 it was hard to get consumers to take out their wallets.
Did the "build it and they will come"... and well they didn't come and pay like we hoped.
FWIW here are some more lessons from the UberNote saga: https://referralrock.com/blog/online-web-notes-ubernote-lessons-learned/
Thank you Josh! 🙏 that kind of market definitely seems pretty tough. Looking forward to reading more about the additional lessons you learned.
EDIT: I actually just remembered that I used to use UberNote a bunch! And 100k users is a lot! Still, sounds like you learned a lot from the experience and applied some of the lessons to ReferralRock for great benefit.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
@jlogic Hey Josh, can you give us more insight on how are you choosing your employees right now, after your bad experiences?
We have examples from big companies like AirBnb who spent five months before hiring their first employee. Is that your case too, taking things slow and easy while hiring? I'm very curious, especially because you're managing everything remotely.
This is our basic process
The whole process for a candidate takes about 2-3 weeks of calendar time.
At times we also do contractor projects before full time, but again depends on the role.
As I cited in the interview, most of the pain was having me learn what was truly the right person for the roles we were looking for.
We also leave postings up for positions we hope to have funds to hire for in the next few months.
For the right candidate that fits us, we have been known to try to grab them up.
Also, if we are on a hard push for a specific position to fill and aren't getting enough candidates through angel.co we'll post to a remote job board.
Lastly, I look for long term hires vs contractors and freelancers. I want them all on-board for the awesome journey!
I found this whole story super interesting. I love self-funded companies of any shape or size, but ones that scale by building good product and not being super pushy about have a special place in my heart.
Generally I'm against sales as a function, so this really stuck out to me:
"I learned that you can be an excellent salesperson by being honest and helpful; you don't have to be pushy or aggressive."
Now that's something I can get behind. Clearly it's working for y'all because you're growing, haven't had to raise, and you've built a fabulous team around the product. Really impressed.
I came here to comment that exact quote. It's so refreshing to see and backed by research. At my first startup I was told I'm not ruthless enough to be an entrepreneur. I really wish that sales myth would disappear. Seeing a post emphasizing empathy and relationship building is so awesome!
This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing, Josh!
Screen-sharing demos are huge for us as well. Training our customer success members on identifying customer goals has been a boon to retention.
You said a mistake you made when hiring was not being ready as a leader and manager. What steps or actions did you take to ensure you were ready? And I'm curious, what role did your first hire fill?
Thanks and cheers!
No prob @rjb
Mostly digging deep and acting in that role for much longer than I want to. Which led to me being able to know intimately what skills where required and that my expectations were reasonable.
Funny enough sometimes this process led to not making a hire at all. Where I discovered ways I could automate and make a better process to get things done in that area.
First hire for RR was in marketing and customer service. She's still with me today in marketing. But early on almost all of the roles were generalists that wore many hats as there are fires burning everywhere. ;)
Am I you three years ago? Your story sounds so similar to mine. Love all the insight, a lot of golden nuggets in there.
I've been on a sales/demo kick recently with my project and I'm also starting to like it way more than than I thought I would. Would love to pick your brain more. I'm in DC, let me take you out to lunch soon?
Sure love that!
Awesome read. Congrats on all the success this far Josh!
Congrats on the success and the revenue gains. That's awesome you decided to do screen-sharing support. I see many ads for chat bots and every ecommerce site seems to have some messenger but I find they are frustrating with delays. I believe screen-sharing support services are the next big thing.
Is your business model B2B because $200 seems a bit high if for B2C?
Thanks much!
I agree with you on the frustration with chatbots IMHO some of them aren't that much better than filling out a form or reading a FAQ. Screen sharing and zoom calls made a huge difference to bridging the gap and aligning with our customer's needs, but the higher price point of ours does allow us to not lose shirts on the time and effort involved.
You are correct that we are a B2B business model, selling to businesses. However, our customers sell to both businesses and consumers.
Can you elaborate how you use screen sharing to boost conversion? Do you provide some guide to your customer support staff and they reach out to leads or do you have the lead schedule an online seminar at their convenience?
We take demo requests on a form then route them to calendly links to schedule a 15 minute call.
The demo is extremely consultative so it gives us an opportunity to have a discussion about the customer's needs and how that maps to our product/service.
Without the human element, you'd be left to a static marketing page description without the understanding and insights of matching the customer.
“I believe that the passion and insights you provide as a founder can go a long way in the early days when your product is not entirely proven. I emphasize this to any founder and to make use of this opportunity if they can.”
GOLD!
Thanks Steveo!
Thank you for the interview! Interesting read. I especially liked the insight on doing calls and screenshares to help customers, instead of chat. Chat has always seemed to me to be best for the company, rather than the customer.
Oh, and: the link to wordofmouthuncovered forwards me to a spam site.
Thanks! When I click on the wordofmouthuncovered.com it's fine for me. What's reporting it as spam?
Interesting! Now it works. It briefly redirected me to a “you’ve won a free iphone” popup kind of site on a phishy domain where the back button doesn’t work anymore.
Found it in my browser history: http:// best2769 .greenyourday80 .agency/3764750364/?utm_campaign=bKMuT7EMVXU5Z6UvvSHONGlfu-yV43iC8T8uYixAFxs1&t=main9_412a18052d5b11e075e742fd&f=1
I added some spaces to not make it a link on this forum.
huh.... very odd. Not sure how that happened. the link is pretty direct. I can check our site and make sure nothing is phishy on wordofmouthuncovered
thanks
Yeah, it’s weird. I wasn’t on a sketchy wifi either, and this is on my iPhone, so I don’t think it’s malware on my part. Let’s hope it was a one-time thing.
And another thing: when I go to your site, scroll all the way down, add my email and press “uncover”, I just get “an error occured”. I also tried with my adblocker disabled, same result.
AH ok. I gotta find where we added that to the wordpress site. Just added a pop up widget/slider. Try that! Thanks
Seems to be working now. 😊