Matt Reveals Insider Tips on Social Ad Effectiveness You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else

Posted by Anant January 16, 2023

As the founder of Driftrock, a social ads data analysis platform, Matt knows an insane amount about how to use use social ads effectively. In this interview he gives us insights that you are not going to hear anywhere else.

TOPIC MATT WHEELER COVERS

→ The use of data to power social media campaigns

→ Drift Rock, a company that helps marketers make more money from social ads

→ Harnessing the power of data from the internet to improve the targeting and relevance of campaigns

→ Tools are focused on taking data and turning them into insights

→ Drift Rock provides insights and automation for social media campaigns

→ Uses signals from around the web to optimize targeting

→ Provides better visualization of data and additional insights beyond Facebook

→ Aggregates data from campaigns and provides cost per acquisition and conversion rates for demographics and creatives

→ Uses image recognition to match images and provide cost per acquisition for better experimentation and optimization

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

Drift Rock

Matt’s LinkedIn Profile

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Bronson: Welcome to another episode of Growth Hacker TV. I’m Bronson Taylor and today I have Matt Wheeler with us. Matt, thanks for coming on the program.

Matt: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Bronson: Yeah, for sure. So, Matt, for the people that don’t know, you are the CEO and founder of Drift Rock, which is a way, as you say, to make more money from social ads. So already that’s a pretty good hook because that’s what that’s what I want to do is make more money from social ads. And you guys also recently raised $1,000,000. I think the news just came out this month or last month. So start by telling us a little bit about Drift Rock, kind of at a high level, what does it do?

Matt: So then the thing that we’re really interested in is the is is kind of there’s this huge rich data layer on the on the Internet now. And we want to we want to harness the power of these different different data and the Internet and help marketers use that to power their social media campaigns. So to put that in context, it could be things like, you know, you could run one run ads based on the weather. So if it’s raining in London, which it does all the time, you can run runs and that’s targeting maybe a taxi company or or travel, you know, people trying to escape the country, all these different things. Or you can take your existing customer data, you could use that to power. Let’s take the best customers we’ve got from our existing set and let’s use that to, to, to find new ones through Facebook, look like audiences or whatever that might be. So we’re kind of harnessing this, this, this, this data layer around the Internet now to do to do better marketing, to reach people with content they actually want to see when they want to see it. And so yeah, so our tools are really focused around that kind of stuff.

Bronson: Yeah. So kind of in the simplest terms, you seems like you take data and turn them into insights. Is that a fair analysis?

Matt: Yeah, it’s insights and automation as well. So. So you can you can use signals from around the web, like you can say weather and you can say, right, let’s activate this campaign now. Or you could. Or you can take it. Take insights from that data, from your Facebook ads that you’re running now. Use that to do better experimentation. So if it’s Facebook analysis, you could say, right, which of the which of the targeting groups are working best in campaigns that steamroll that? Let’s do less of that. So it’s it’s about using these mistakes to really get insights or automate your campaigns to get a better a better way.

Bronson: Yeah, that makes sense. And now tell me if I’m wrong. So I get a lot of insights from Facebook already. Let’s say when I’m running ads, there’s a lot of data there to kind of work with. Israel is different because it’s just different data. You can pull in beyond what they give you. Or how did you really differentiate from kind of basic Facebook power editor kind of stuff, you know?

Matt: So, I mean, one of the things is I’m we kind of I guess there’s kind of two big problems with solving, which is one is really quickly which parts are working, which ones are not, which Facebook isn’t very good thing. So really simple, you know, better visualization that data but also then taking adding an extra layer of insights on top of that. So you can be running campaigns targeting, you know, 21 to 65 year olds or little demographics, all that stuff. And we’ll use Facebook data breakdown stuff to pull that up, pull that data out and say, you know, for all the campaigns across, almost a 35 to 40 year old females are working better than males or 40 to 45 year old males are looking better, the females, whatever it might be. And then you can use that to then do the next round of experiments with your campaigns. Okay.

Bronson: Now, normally on Facebook, to do that, you would have two ads running, one for this age group, one for that age group. And then you can compare the conversion rates, compare the click the rates. But you’re actually grabbing that data from one ad that’s been running, which saves me a lot of time and probably a lot of money also. Right?

Matt: Yeah. So, I mean, face to face because of data better. And so you can pull that data and what we’re doing is aggregating all of that that that data breakdown stuff from your from each campaign and we’re adding a cost per a conversion rate, all that stuff. So we’re saying, you know, across all the all these this group of campaigns or this or this one campaign was the cost per acquisition for the different demographic breakdowns within that campaign. And we do the same for for creative as well. So we can say so we use we can we can pull all the data from the ads, take all the images out of that stuff. We use image recognition to match up. This image is the same as this image and then we can actually give you a cost per acquisition for each of the images across all your campaigns. And so what that you know, if you’re doing lots of different experiments all the time, what you want to know is these these kind of images are working best. These images are working really badly. Let’s take these out and put more of these things in. Yeah. So how do you evolve that experimentation? Yeah.

Bronson: So it seems like this really isn’t a product for a newbie. This is kind of a product for someone who’s a pro, who’s looking for more insights, more visualizations, just able to run quicker in the direction they’re already going. Is that fair?

Matt: It’s a bit of both. Like what we want to do is we want to add we don’t just have to be statisticians to use the product. We want to just say, you know, connect this. Let’s give you some insights that you can action today and get a better life from your campaigns. So we’re writing a letter to it, which is a kind of auto audit tool. So we’ll say, you know, this ad sets impression share has dropped in the last day and we’ll actually just tell you that you don’t need to search through this for. This to us to get our deicer out. And, you know, that’s great for that’s great for promo purposes because you can almost semi-automated your marketing from that. But also with that, with that suggestion, we’re going to have a bunch of education there. So why does it matter that your impression share is dropping and what can you do to make to solve that problem? So that’s that’s kind of a common problem when faced we should add the K so so we have a bunch of ideas in there to help people. The newbies kind of take that data and do something interesting with it. And the pros can use that for their for their campaigns. Yeah.

Bronson: Gotcha. So if I go to your partner now, if I kind of log in to a Facebook connect, it can just pull my ad data and start giving me those kind of insights. I don’t have to, like, set it up, take an hour and plug a bunch of things together. It just rips the data and figures out what I need to do.

Matt: Yes, we wanted to build a tool that, you know, if you you shouldn’t need to do ad creation through our platform. We want it to be literally connected up. And we can start we can start getting insights for you. So see, you know, if you’re if you’re using powered, it’s from Facebook or another piece of software to you activation. It will work nicely alongside that and yeah, absolutely.

Bronson: We start the interview, I said this, but I’ll say it again for your sake. Now I’m going to start using this. I want to try it. I haven’t used it yet. I’m not a current customer. I hadn’t heard of it really until, you know, till I was researching for the interview. And it’s exactly what I want right now. So if the promise holds, if it works, I want to use this thing because it’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for right now with my own Facebook ads. So I want to give it a go and see what happens. So if you kind of look at the big picture because you’ve seen a lot with just social ads, you’ve seen a lot with Facebook and Twitter as well. What are some of the big kind of themed insights that you have? Like these kinds of things generally work, these kinds of things generally don’t. And I know it’s always about testing for your particular product. I mean, that’s that’s the answer, obviously. But what insights do you have as the CEO of this kind of company that I just don’t have access to, you know?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I to be honest, you kind of you kind of know that with the experimentation. I mean, like, you know, if you can experiment faster and better than anyone else, then then you get out of your competition. And that’s where you get the real the ruins. But I mean, you know, there’s things that we pick up along the way, like, you know, this, if you’re if you haven’t tried custom audiences and lookalikes on Facebook, then then you’re wasting money. You know, we have we have we have an e-commerce client who, you know, we initially set up a lookalike ad for that stuff. You know, back in October last year, we’ve done six months of optimization, trying different targeting, and we still can’t beat the performance of that campaign. So, you know, if you’re not doing that and then get on that and you know, there’s some the news feed as the page post link ads, the Facebooks, you know, Facebook and Twitter are both realizing, you know, where the way to scale their advertising right now is through is through helping helping marketers drive stuff off site. And so now there’s, you know, there’s page post link cards, which you’ve got calls to action in the, you know, if you put an ad rich image, good a good proposition that you can drive people offsite for a good price. On Twitter, they just released website cards. So same deal. You know, you’ve got it. You’ve got an image call to action. It’s much more enticing for people to take off site. So and so people are getting people making this stuff work. It’s like, you know, this this direct response performance marketing that’s not a you know, that’s not just something that was now it’s working really well for Facebook and Twitter as well.

Bronson: Yeah, and that’s great. So let me ask you, you know, you mentioned the newsfeed has actually have some specific questions about kind of Facebook and Twitter. And this is just my question. So if other people find value, so be it. But these are things I’m wondering right now. So I’m running a lot of Facebook ads. I’m running a lot in the newsfeed because I just get more clicks in the newsfeed because I’m trying to get volume, in a sense. And the problem is they’re charging me for every click. They’re charging me for comments, they’re charging me for likes. I don’t want to pay for comments. I don’t want to pay for likes. That’s what I’m not going for those things. I’m going for direct website clicks and so I’ll put in a bid of $0.80, but I’m paying a dollar 20 per website click. Am I doing something wrong? I mean, is there, is there any way to get around that and just pay for what I want? And maybe it’s a newbie mistake. I don’t know.

Matt: Well, so I mean, the I guess the there’s a kind of a mindset which I like to, to, to talk about and something that I kind of realized a few years back, which is that so all the auction sites, whether that’s AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, all they care about is optimizing for CPM. So how much they want to make the most money possible per thousand impressions. And so all that works and stuff revolves around that. So when you start thinking that in that way, what you realize is actually, you know, you they want to they want to create ads. They’re engagement is going to get lots of clicks for. So you need to have that. You need to have that stuff to be honest. Like, you know, you get a really high quality score on Facebook ads if you get loads of comments and if you get loads of clicks and likes and stuff, even if, you know, it’s not maybe your objective that you want, but it’s, it’s actually in the if you try and stay away from that stuff too much, what you end up with is, is higher prices per click because your quality scores going down, your prices are going up. So you need a bit of that. But also. The way to funnel that into a conversion that you actually care about. So you know you’re not going to pay. You’re not going to pay for a click on on on an image or a like and under. Click on on your link use page for pay for engagement. So, so that’s, you know, so that’s one thing. So what you want to do is, you know, it’s okay to get the comments. In fact, it’s great to get comments. You get you get incredibly you know, you got really low, low customer acquisition and you start getting lots of comments on ads. But you also want to drive them into the thing that you care about. So, you know, make, you know, your image could have something that says click here. And if you tell people.

Bronson: To try that, actually, it’s funny last night, I mean, my brother were talking about doing that.

Matt: Give it a go. Like, you know, it works. If you in general, if you tell people to do something on social, they tend to do it. If you if you say please retweet their retweets it more often than not. Yeah.

Bronson: So, you know, try that. I’m going to call to action in the image and just make it obvious. Like, I want you to click here, not blow it and all that stuff. Yeah. And what’s funny is, though, I think this other thing is happening. I think you’re right. My quality score is high because of all the comments and the thumbs up and all those things. But at some point, I don’t know where it is, but around 100 or 200 comments or 100 or 200 thumbs up. Now people start doing it just because so many people have done it and they’re not even looking at it. They’re literally just thumbing it up. And I can just see all my numbers go down. So by the time I got a thousand thumbs up, I have to stop running the ad because my quality scores through the roof. But everyone’s engaging in the exact wrong thing and nobody’s coming to the website. Right. So that’s.

Matt: Really interesting. I have not had that yet.

Bronson: Yeah. So there’s a weird balance. I think there’s some kind of there’s some sort of curve there of at some point there’s a high quality score and at some point you got to just stop running the ad because an hour by just social proving it and doing it because they think they’re supposed to, you know.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, that sounds like there’s a lot of reasons why your ads discount Facebook and that could be because people have seen it too much and they start clicking across it. Or like you said, maybe that’s that’s an that’s a good problem to have in a way. You get so many comments that people are starting to do that. That’s the thing. But, you know, and at that point, the you know, what you want to do is just know that it’s happening. And if you know that it’s happening, you can you can at that point, you want to get an ad down and get one up as quick as possible. And so, you know, that’s that’s the kind of insight that we want to get people in an open book or should an artist also.

Bronson: And that’s the kind of stuff would be great because right now I’ve got Facebook Open all day long and. Yeah, and you said your website is it’s responsive, it’s made for mobile. I am having to manage Facebook ads from my iPhone right now and it’s like torture. I mean, it is almost torture. I got to go into Chrome and request the desktop site and then zoom in and I changed my, you know, bid and change whatever is running and it’s a mess. So anything that’s mobile that helps me manage Facebook ads, that’d be awesome, even if you just give me insights from it. So let me ask you about the other thing, the other kind of social ad, which is Twitter. In my mind, I guess it was only to. Right. Is there any other real platforms going on right now for social ads?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn is massive. And if you if so, if you’re in the B2B space, you’re targeting people based on job growth. You know, LinkedIn is really hot still, so, you know, it’s great for Legion, that kind of stuff. So I don’t I don’t rule that one out, but I mean, and so, you know, for most most people, Twitter and Facebook are delivering the volumes right now and they’re working well.

Bronson: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier in Twitter the the website cards and I don’t know much about those, so we’ll get to that in a second. But I have heard a lot about the lead gen cards and it seems like a few months ago that’s what everybody was talking about. And now I’m not reading articles about it anymore. I’m not hearing people talk about it and maybe just I’m in the wrong circles. Is it a big deal or is it not a big deal? Like the Legion cards? Like, what do you think about those? Where do you land on that?

Matt: So, I mean, so what Twitter is doing, I think, touched early as well. They realize that direct response is a really important part of their product offerings. And so, you know, website cards, lead gen cards, and they’re all they’re all based around delivering real conversions for advertisers and Legion cards. If you use them in the right way, they are awesome. And you can get really good quality, very high quality leads for a decent price. But it’s, you know, they that they’re fairly, you know, a lot of steps to set one up. And I think a lot of the mistakes that people make you know the check up a totally for that for those who don’t know it’s basically an extension to the 140 characters where, you know you’ve got a big call to action button on that tweet, click that the email address that you signed up to try to get sent to the advertiser. So that’s the you know, it’s, it’s an awesome concept. You can do great and campaigns from it. But the mistake most people are making is that that that goes into a a bucket on Twitter. You can download the CSP and maybe you get back in touch with them two days later. But, you know, it’s like any leads and if you don’t respond quickly, then it’s a useless lead. It’s pointless. So, you know, without, without being to personal another product, we’ve got to, you know. Yeah. So that, you know, we can connect up as an end point to those lead cards and then send back an almost response email to that, to that customer in real time. And at that point you can start doing some really interesting stuff like, you know, click here to download this e-book or this whitepaper or. Well, click here to get in touch with SLC. And at that point you can survive. I can email at that point, whether with the e-book or with a note saying you will be in touch shortly and then fire that off to the sales team in real time. So, you know, I think, you know, if if you just use generating leads for the sake of it and not a not kind of conversion down the funnel is useless. So I think, you know, and there’s a lot of there is a lot of steps to set one of these up and there’s a lot of experimentation to get it to work. You know, you need to be optimizing the tweak copy to tweak the the lead cut image and the and the call to action and stuff like that. So there’s a few moving parts, but if you get that right, it’s already it’s been really profitable for all of the companies that we’ve been working with.

Bronson: Yeah. Now, tell me about the website cards. I really don’t know much about them. So what is the website card as opposed to the Legion card or some of the other ones?

Matt: So it’s basically a bit like a bit like a page press link out on Facebook. So you’ve got what it’s done is it’s extended that tweet with the 140 character tweet with an image which you can, you know, like you said, you can click here thing and are there any other sensors make a logo. I collect enticing and it’s extra real estate for your ad and a call to action that says read more and you can click through and that and that’s all about driving people offsite and you know Twitter is saying that, you know, the click through rates from those those ads of say a much higher you getting a lower CPC for the for the stuff you’re doing so you know I I wouldn’t be surprised if in a totally cards and website cards not the not the last card extensions you’ll see on Twitter as they start to kind of help people and deliver to the richer experiences within those tweets.

Bronson: Yeah. Do you have any insights on which is maybe better right now, the Legion or the website cards? Is there one that’s just still a little bit ahead because of maybe the ecosystem around it or because what we know about how to harness the power of it? Or are they just it depends on who’s using them.

Matt: Yeah, I think I mean I mean, the website cards are, you know, there’s a little trick you can do a few and Twitter search box if you type in cards dot Twitter you get to see all the tweets containing Twitter cards. So you get to see all the people advertised using Twitter cards and all the different ideas that day. And so, you know, in that you can, you know, if you do that search now, you’ll definitely see more website cards, Nebo Legion cards. There’s one check on Legion cards when you when you click on that lead, if you’re on if you’re on the Twitter app, if you’re on mobile, you you generate the Legion email, just go through to advertise and then you get redirected through to a website landing page and the choice and you can set that up in the in the campaigns. And so what’s quite cool about that is you kind of doing almost a combination of the two. So you’re getting a nice big call to action from the Legion card, but you’re also getting them through to your website. So if you if you target, you know, mobile only and any and you put in that put in that redirect, you can start delivering people off site and getting at the same time.

Bronson: So paying for one kind of engagement, though. Right. And actually kind of getting both out of it is actually.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And then you’ve got a chance to follow up again with something, you know, another and another response, an email or so that’s valuable. Exactly. Exactly.

Bronson: That’s great. I like what you said, too, about the time. I don’t think we realize sometimes that when you sign up for something right then is when I want to get emailed about it because I’m in the mode, I’m in the mood to think about it and do more whatever. And you know, a few days goes by, I’m a different person. Like I know about that prior to care about sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So blown up when they’re, you know, ready is really important. All right. So let me ask you some questions about kind of just advertising in general, right? It seems like the more I learn about growth and I’ve done, you know, 130 something these episodes now maybe 140. And even though a lot of them. Right. And the more episodes I’ve done, the more I’ve learned about growth, the more convinced I am that for every, you know, one company that does really well with inbound marketing or some channel like that, there’s ten companies you’ve never heard of. They’re just crushing it with paid advertising because it just seems like these companies that are not on the radar because by, you know, kind of by definition an inbound company is on the radar that, you know, they’re putting out content, you’re hearing about them, all those things. But there’s all these little companies are like, Wait, how much revenue are you doing? Why don’t I know about you? How are you getting your customers? Oh, you’re buying like in my. Is that correct? I mean, is paid acquisition just this like untold hero of growth on the Internet that we’re not as enamored with as we should be?

Matt: Yeah, I guess so. Like, for me, I’m biased. I like paid advertising for me is where I feel comfortable. I’ve been doing that for for the last ten years. But, you know, I think what’s what’s happening is them, you know, so it’s a, you know, what’s what’s the best thing about paid out to speed? You know, you can you can fire up a campaign. You can get results in within the next 10 minutes, an hour. You can start seeing whether it’s working. You know, you can use that to test businesses. You can use it to test, you know, sending jets, landing pages and getting conversions for that. But also, I think what people underestimate is that, you know, you know, all the all the kind of content Marxism by marketers, they are always talking about, you know, you know, if you create great content and it’s shareable and you put these this. This goes, how can this guy that can get you get get the big numbers? It’s true if you have an enormous if you have an audience already. And and what’s what I see more and more is that people are you know, it doesn’t a paid ad campaign doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, buy my products, you know, get you know, hazardous. You know it can mean here’s a great piece of content I think you going to love and and you can get that content out to more people faster three paid us you can do you know if you if you’re doing a content marketing strategy you can test five different headlines with different page post ads or or promoted tweets and you can test which works, use that for you and then then use that afterwards for your organic campaign. It just gives you much more reach, much faster. And like the you know what’s it’s also about paid is that your if you spend a dollar and you’re getting more than a dollar back, that is unlimited amount of money you can you’d want to spend on that. And so the scale is huge. And so yeah, I think paid is, is becoming more and more crucial to, to, to the digital marketing game. And there’s a lot of people making a lot of money from it.

Bronson: No, absolutely. And, you know, the thing is, is like with paid, there’s volume is I mean, there’s a lot of traffic from Google searches and Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter like they that’s where all the eyeballs in the whole world are. And so they have the volume. I mean, when you get to where you want to spend thousands of dollars a day on ads, I mean, you got a few choices. You don’t have 20 choices. You know, an inbound. It’s hard to spend as much for the volume you want once you get to a certain level. We’re paid, you know, there’s still a plateau, but it seems like it’s further off in the distance that you really can grow something big, you know, if you know how to do it. So it’s just an idea that’s been a roller in my head. I mean, I love inbound. I do inbound. I mean, it’s huge, you know, but I’m becoming I’m drinking more the Kool-Aid for for pay. I think the more the time goes on. So, you know, we’ll see how it shakes out.

Matt: Yeah, definitely.

Bronson: No, that’s fun. I so let’s talk about the kind of growth adrift Iraq itself. What can you disclose to kind of give me an idea of, you know, where the company grown? I mean, you raised a million bucks, so obviously you had some numbers that the investors liked. So how have you guys grown so far?

Matt: So we have we’re pretty open about numbers at the moment. Mr. Small. We we do. So we’ve got about 1500 mark to sign up to the platform, either to existing tools or tools that that we’ve got in close beta. And, you know, that growth come from, from, you know, the kind of channels we’ve been talking about. You know, we’d be crazy not to be using paid channels for an acquisition if we building the tools for it. So yeah, so we do, we do Facebook ads which is, you know, I never thought and B2B, we were already well on Facebook it does it works awesome. We’re getting great space from that Twitter ad, same thing and LinkedIn and then, you know, you know, we’re not, you know, inbound and content marketing is a huge part of our strategy as well. We’ve got, you know, our blog is all about really practical advice that you can take and you can just action straight away. That’s working really well for us. I think people appreciate the kind of, you know, do this, do this, and it’ll work and try it out. And so, you know, so inbound marketing comes in marketing and then strategic partnerships as well. So working with big influencers, you have you have people following them for Facebook ads advice. We’re working with them to kind of firm. If they love our product, then hopefully they’ll talk about it. So yeah. So yeah, for you.

Bronson: Guys so far, the strategic partnerships or is it in the works or is actually kind of already had fruit from it.

Matt: A little bit. We’ve had a lot of action so far. I think we’re kind of if the products are still early on. So we kind of, I guess nurturing relationships right now. And then hopefully when we when we release an out now on just what we can, we can go with a big splash and get it get out there quicker.

Bronson: Now I would say definitely put energy in those areas. I mean I’ve been surprised by how much they’ve helped me. Yeah. And I thought, you know, all these other channels matter to them, but a few partnerships and all of a sudden your numbers go really far up but to the right. So yeah.

Matt: I kind of like that stuff.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s great. All right. So kind of looking back, you know, how long have you been doing Draft Rock for? How long has it been now?

Matt: So we know August, August last year we started went full time on it. All right um oh yeah yeah when you the game but but you know I guess we’ve been the same the same team has been doing, you know, socialites and paid search ads for many years. And so we kind of I guess it’s the the product of the last ten years of her career.

Bronson: It started off but you know it’s been ten years in the making her thing. Yeah so kind of looking back since August will say what’s maybe the best decision and the worst decision you’ve made as you’ve tried to grow the company? Because I’m sure there’s a you know, there’s a handful of decisions on both camps that just really worked out and really didn’t. What are some of the insights there so far since August?

Matt: Yeah. So I mean, I guess the two, you know, we’ve seen it where it starts that we’re kind of, you know, I guess I’m trying to find put a market fit. And so both of these both these kind of come out of that. But, you know, I guess the best thing we did was we’re we’re building something that we’re incredibly passionate about. Everyone on our team, you know, has a passion for data, has a passion for for for digital media and what that can do for companies, how it can help, you know, get an idea find. An audience. And you can probably tell from some from this that, you know, this is something that I, I think about all the time. And, you know, when when you do when you when you have a passion like that and I think you you’re building a product around that. Then, you know, this this conversation is, is great user acquisition for us. And so every time I go from stage to speak or whatever it might be, you know, I’m acquiring customers, I’m doing customer development, all that stuff. So I think, you know, that’s something we got really right with Jeff Rock. Is that the team? The team around the product really, really cared about it and are passionate about making it work. And I think that’s that’s a pretty maybe it’s an obvious answer, but.

Bronson: The answer is the right answer. You know.

Matt: Think I mean, previous to that, we, um, I was part of a fund that we were creating multiple startups at scale. So we were coming up with any old idea and seeing if we’d get it to market. And we would test it very quickly with digital marketing and all that stuff. And I think like the audience that really worked or when you had an entrepreneur who is absolutely passionate about that, that, that topic area. So, you know, you’re not just, you know, just driving the numbers, but also you’re you’re adding your own your own brand and your own personality to that product as well.

Bronson: Yeah. All right. So what’s something you would’ve done differently since August?

Matt: So, yeah, I guess so. We made a you know, we made we made a bit of a mistake early on. I think like one of the things that, you know, everyone’s read the Lean Startup book and all that stuff. And, you know, one of the things we did was go right. That’s the way to validate whether we should build. One of the apps on Jeff Rock is to check a landing page, start with a value proposition. We run a bunch of paid traffic through it really quickly and figure out what our customer acquisition is for those customers. And then we’ll get some nice customers. We’ll talk to them, that kind of stuff. Mm hmm. And we did this early for, like, one of one of our products, which was a the other concept was an an all in one dashboard for marketing across all the different social and AdWords and and all different channels. And you know, when you have that conversation with someone, every single person you talk to goes, Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah. And they literally ripping our hands off to get hold of this product. And same with the landing page test. You know, we’ve got an amazing, amazing CPA and stuff. And then we realize, I think like there’s a there’s a great quote by Jay Lincoln from SAS that writes Ancestor on Call. And he said, You know, with SAS, it’s not a you know, you’re not looking for a minimum viable product. You’re looking for a minimum sellable product. And and so, you know, you’ve got we we were checking for a landing page test and everyone was saying, yeah, I would love to get that product and we’re signing up. And so we were like, Right, let’s do three months development time on this product. So we built this thing, put it in front of people, and then realized pretty, pretty, pretty soon on that, you know, in order to get to replace Excel, which is a good way of briefing your marketing data together, we’d have to do, you know, nine months, 12 months of development, and we’d have to make it ultra customizable and all this stuff. And so we just kind of I think we went with it. We sold. We were we were trying to solve a problem people have. But you know what? We were what we want, what we weren’t doing is a solution that actually added enough value for people to to make a switch. And so now if we changed our product strategy to being more like, you know, we’ll we’ll do that initial landing page test, but then we’ll use those customers and work with them while we’re building out the products with them, get them using it literally a week after we start building it. And then it shapes the product, it changes it. And so and then at some point you get this tipping point where people start, you know, they can’t live without your product anymore. And at that point, then you can you can scale it up and you can open up to people. But yeah, just just kind of landing page numbers was a big mistake for us.

Bronson: Yeah. Now that’s a massive insight right there. It’s not about minimum viable product. It’s about a minimum sellable product. And for SAS especially, that’s a huge distinction. That’s an important distinction. And I hope people really think about what you just said because sometimes, like, you know, you take a mousetrap, you take away one component. It doesn’t work at all. Like you have to have the certain right number of components for it to function at even 1%. And sometimes SAS is like that. There’s a level where it doesn’t work until it works 100%, and you just have to really know what your business is because sometimes the landing page is all you need. Sometimes you need a whole lot more. So that’s awesome. All right. So this has been awesome. Last question. What’s the best advice you have for any startup that’s trying to grow?

Matt: So I think I mentioned it earlier as well. I mean, for me, you know, it’s great. You’ve got to experiment. You’ve got to put on your lab coat and get in a scientist mindset and start experimenting with everything you do. Like, you know, we I was I was part of previous to Jfrog, part of a company called Food in London. And, you know, we scaled the company from from three employees to 500, 200 million in revenue because we got better at doing AdWords than anyone else. I mean, and that was true experimentation and that was through testing, that was through technology. And I know now you’ve got these you’ve got these new platforms that, you know, Twitter is relatively new still as an ad platform. And if you if you, you know, they’ve just launched website cause you should be on that straight away testing experimenting and you know if you get on that sooner that sooner than other people in that how to make make that work better than other people then the auction model just just just works in your favor and you know, it’s not just. Not just acquisition for your company, you could completely transform it. And if you keep doing that experiments and experimentation and methodology throughout throughout the company, as you’re growing it, you can see enormous, enormous growth curves in your acquisition, not just paid everything, logistics to experiment constantly.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s awesome advice to end on. As soon as the interview is over, I want to run some Twitter website cards and then tomorrow, some time prior to going to sign up for Jfrog and see what kind of data you got for me. So I’m going to take your advice as quick as I can here. But again, Matt, thank you so much for coming on Growth.

Matt: A.V. My pleasure. Jay Swanson.

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