Andrew: Before we get started, have you seen articles like this on TechCrunch about companies that were launched by start-ups who joined The Founder Institute? Well, The Founder Institute is accepting applications right now and I want to encourage you to apply right now before it’s too late on FounderInstitute.com. The Founder Institute is a technology start-up accelerator, an entrepreneur training program that launches companies in 13 cities worldwide.
What do you get if you’re in the Founder Institute? Training, mentorship, help getting investors, and just about everything else you need to get a start-up launched properly. Go apply right now before it’s too late. FounderInstitute.com.
And do you remember Patrick Buckley, who I interviewed? He came up with an idea for an iPad case, and then he built a store to sell it, and in a few months he generated about a million dollars in sales. Well, the platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up a store on Shopify.com. Because Shopify’s stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to setup and manage your store. Shopify.com.
And do you remember when I interviewed Sara Sutton Fell? About how thousands of people pay for her job site? Look at the biggest point she made. She said she has a phone number on every page of her site, because, and here’s a stat; 95 percent of people who call end up buying.
Most people, though, don’t even call. But, seeing a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So try this. Go to Grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. And see what it does to your business. Grasshopper.com.
Here’s the program.
Hey everyone. It’s Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And by the way, I keep doing this. Home of the ambitious upstart, over and over again. I wonder if at this point people have just forgotten that I say it or just overlook it. Or maybe it has lost its meaning. So, let me clarify. This is for an audience of people who understand there are tons of other things they could be doing right now.
There are tons of other things that they could be listening to in their cars instead of downloading my MP3 or watching on TV instead of watching my video here. But they do it because they are so freaking ambitious that they’re willing to listen to a whole hour program looking for one bit of insight that will give them one little advantage to help them take their ideas just a bit further.
And they do that with me and a couple of other programs, and they read nonstop. All to just get that freaking advantage and there are few people in the world who are like that. And those people, that is my audience. I feel at home with those people. And that’s why I do these interviews. And instead of saying all that, as a shorthand, I just say, ‘Home of the ambitious upstart.’ Because we have found our home together here in these interviews.
Dmitry, this is a lot of pressure now that I’ve just put on you in this interview, right? You’ve got to feed them that.
Dmitry: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Big question for today’s interview is this. How do you get not just users, but passionate evangelists? Because my goal, and I’ve said this for a long time, my goal is for you guys not to just be another set of web entrepreneurs with users, but to almost create a religion. That people are so freaking passionate about, they are going to go and shake their friends until they go and get your religion and start joining your mission and start being a part of your business. Not just users, but evangelists. So, how do you do that?
Well, to learn the answer to that question, I invited Dmitry Dragilev. He is the marketing lead at ZURB. ZURB is a team of strategists who help grow businesses. They’ve helped Facebook, Yahoo, Reuters, and even BritneySpears.com. So, you know they are good.
[laughter]
In our pre-interview, I told Dmitry that we needed to kick the conversation off with a clear example of what my audience can do if they listen to this program. And Dmitry, first of all, welcome to Mixergy.
Dmitry: Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here.
Andrew: And, second, I’ve got a pile of notes here with examples from our pre-interview. Why don’t we start off with the example about Smashing Magazine. I think that will give people a little taste of what they could do if they listened to this hour or so long interview. So, what is Smashing Magazine, first of all?
Dmitry: It’s probably the number one publication for all design community out there.
Andrew: OK. And, so, how did you build a relationship with them? And then, later on, I’ll ask you what did you get out of that relationship. How did you build a relationship with them?
Dmitry: Sure. I didn’t know much about the design community, but I knew that this was a number one magazine. And so I read the magazine from the start to the bottom. I just read the whole blog and I reached out to the founder, Vitaly. And I’ve learned everything about this man. Where he sleeps, who is he sleeping with. What does he read? What does he eat during the day?
And I generally reached out to help him out with some content for the magazine. Because I saw that his numbers were climbing, but I saw some of the comments in the blog posts. People were not very happy about some of the blog content there. And, so, I wanted to give him some ideas for some of the articles and build a relationship with him.
There’s some common background that me and him have and I used that and I also reached out and said, ‘Hey, there’s some things that I wanted to show you that could help you.’
Andrew: OK. And you built up that relationship and what did you do after you had that relationship? Can you tell people about the articles that you wrote?
Dmitry: So we wrote five different articles for him and we keep putting them out. We try and do one every few months or so. And, we showcase some of the experiments that we create, as far as tutorials of helping people create better websites, plug-ins, how to perform a certain technique on CSS or jQuery.
After building such a relationship, again, I’d help him out by creating awesome content for him. And, we have our own tools and plug-ins that we’re writing about on Smashing Magazine. So, it’s a win-win there. And it just helps to build these types of relationships everywhere you go.
Andrew: And, did I have this right in my notes? You got the biggest traffic day ever to your website because of him?
Dmitry: Yeah. Well, certainly multiple times, we’ve had the traffic there as well as TechCrunch, the deconstruction we did there. That was probably one of the biggest ones as well. So…
Andrew: OK. Alright. So, we’re going to talk more about this. So, this is an example of, I thought, and the reason that I wanted to bring this up is, here you are, a guy who sees that somebody has a pile of users. Your idea is, how do I get some of those users to come over to my website. One of the first things that you do is, you offer him some help. You give him some ideas for other blog posts. You engage in his community.
The second thing you do is, you start writing blog posts for him. And, as a consequence, his audience started coming over to your websites. Saying, ‘Well, who is this who is writing at Smashing Magazine. Who is this who is putting this content out?’ And they end up on your website.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: So, the first thing I want to do in this interview is, I’m going to break it up into two parts. The first part is how do you do what you did, which is build a relationship with someone who has a big audience and get some of that audience over to your website.
In the second part of this interview, we’ll talk about how once you have that audience, once you have those people on the site, how do you make them into evangelists. Into people who really care, who are passionate, who want to tell other people about it.
So, you say this. One thing that I actually noticed that you said here is, let me see in my notes. ‘Be an assistant to your favorite blogger.’
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: How do you mean?
Dmitry: Well, you know, everybody has problems, right? Everybody out there is having issues. And there’s tons of bloggers and reporters that are just going through all this hard time trying to figure out an awesome story that is going to generate tons of traffic and is going to generate lots of users and it’s going to give them a lot of ad revenues. Or, they might get a promotion if they work at the New York Times, or something like that.
How do they stay on top of the latest news? How do they do that? Well, they talk to people all the time. Tipping people off on the latest information that you have about something, and that requires a lot of reading around, trying to find things all over the Internet.
But, giving them the latest story scoop on something is something that can help them succeed in what they do. Right? Creating something that helps them with their blog. For example, and now I think I am going out on another thing. Helping them create a better blog. Getting more ad revenues, for example, from the blog.
We did amazing deconstruction of TechCrunch. We’ve done deconstructions of many websites. An idea there is to help a website understand what they are doing wrong, right?
Andrew: What do you mean by deconstruction? Let’s explain that to people. Because I saw that your deconstruction of TechCrunch was on TechCrunch.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: And, we’ll talk about what the results were.
Dmitry: Basically, you capture the website and you put notes on it to tell the other person what needs to change or what needs to happen on the website for it to work better. And, we use our own product, Notable, here, to do it. You can use different products and you put notes on it and you give them suggestions.
For example, this needs to be moved to this portion of the site to get more ad dollars. Or, you are not getting enough clicks. You’ve got confusing calls to action, for example. Too much going on in that page. Squint your eyes, look at the page, what do you see? I see a lot of bright spots. Well, I’m confused. Things like that. When you provide these suggestions to a popular blog like TechCrunch, or [xx], or CNN.com.
All these sites, they want to improve their website. So, when you provide these suggestions to them, things like that can happen. Where TechCrunch actually published the deconstruction that we created. So, we call it deconstruction because we deconstruct the page.
Andrew: You take a screen shot, you start to talk about every element on the page. You analyze what is there, and you suggest what should be there.
Dmitry: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: OK. Alright. So, you did this. And, by the way, you are getting Skype chats as we are doing this interview, aren’t you?
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: Do not disturb. Tell those people that they should come back in about 45 minutes.
Dmitry: Alright.
Andrew: Once you are done giving my audience the advantage they need. Giving my audience value for listening to you for an hour. Do not disturb. And, if you are listening to Dmitry right now, and you are Skyping him to tell him that you are listening to him, maybe you could tell him afterwards that you listened to him. In the past. Instead of doing it while he is doing the interview and distracting him.
OK. So, you did that. TechCrunch posted an article about it, including your screen shot with all your suggestions. What happened to you? What happened to your business as a result of it?
Dmitry: We’ve gotten the most leads in the one day that we’ve ever had in our 12 year history, I think, or something like that.
Andrew: Just from one article on TechCrunch, you got more?
Dmitry: Just from that article. We are still getting leads from that one article. That article was out, I think, November 23rd, and now, it’s what? It’s the middle of summer. It’s almost the end of summer. We are still getting people writing in. ‘Hey, I saw that thing on TechCrunch. Put it away. I remember.’ And we are still getting traction from that article.
Andrew: OK.
Dmitry: So imagine how long that link will keep giving us back, now.
Andrew: So, how did you get them to even notice that you did this? Did you write that up? Did you take the screen shot, make some notes, and e-mail it to them? Did you put it on your blog? How did you do it?
Dmitry: We actually did it on our own for our own exercise. And we’ve done these for Twitter.com, and we did it for CNN and all these other sites. So, when we created the TechCrunch one, I sent it over to Robin. Just to say, ‘Hey, look at what we are doing.’ And, it was sort of an exchange of e-mails. We didn’t think that it would actually get published.
There was some talk on IM when we did the Twitter one. Because, that one got noticed on Facebook by one of the Twitter guys over there. [xx]. So, there was some talk back and forth from the TechCrunch guys. ‘Well, maybe.’ They saw some of our other deconstructions. Maybe they post something like that up. But, it is sort of a lot to ask, because it is sort of a self-critiquing thing. Where, if they post it up, ‘Look at how much we suck. We need to change all these things. What do you guys think?’
So, we had our doubts. But, nevertheless, we would post something like that on our own blog even. Again, it shows the value that you can provide other people.
Andrew: Alright. I could see how in this case it was helpful to them. You’re saying with other sites that you did this for, they didn’t really pay much attention?
Dmitry: Well, we didn’t really try to push it on them very much. This was a natural connection. I already knew Robin and we were talking back and forth, and I just showed it to them. Besides [xx] or, I think there was CNN, or Twitter, they are just such big sites. Where they would digest it, but they wouldn’t necessarily publish something like that.
Andrew: I see. OK. So, at the very least, what you are doing is, you’re flattering them and you are giving them some feedback and you are being of assistance to them. Even if you don’t get the pay off right away, you’ve built up a relationship. And the pay off will come in the future.
Dmitry: Yup.
Andrew: In this case, it happened very damn quickly. And you got a lot of results for it.
Dmitry: Yeah. Yup.
Andrew: What does it mean, by the way, that you have a lead? Did I ask that question already? Is that, somebody fills out a form, is that someone who calls you?
Dmitry: No, it’s somebody that e-mails us or gets started as [interference] . . .they become one of our clients, and we help them out with whatever they need help with as far as creating a product, growing it, and so forth.
Andrew: OK. Alright. Next thing you told me about, was, you said, learn everything about them. How do you do that?
Dmitry: I do this all the time. I love to learn where people started and where they are today. So, people that I usually want to reach out to are people that have accomplished something big in their career. Are very popular for some reason. And for me, reaching out to them, it’s everything.
Before I even start a conversation with a person, I will learn everything they have done up to that point. I will learn who they sleep with. I will learn what do they eat for their breakfast. What’s the latest Tweet tool they used. I want to know everything about this person because I am genuinely interested in connecting with this person.
And, I am not going to just pitch them on a story and end a relationship there. And this is for real. This is like marrying somebody. You are going to develop a relationship with this person. So, you better find out all of these things. Imagine you are going in a deal with a VC. You genuinely want to find out a lot of things about them. You go to coffee with them. You go here, you go there.
Here, you’ve got the Internet. And you have all of this information at LinkedIn, Twitter. All over the net. So you genuinely learn everything that you can about them. And then when you connect, you have all that background. And some of it might intersect with your own background. And that’s where the first ties can surface. And can prompt you to a conversation.
You don’t want to start a conversation off of being, ‘Hey, I see you write for the New York Times. This is a great article. Here’s my thing. This is what I do. Want to write about me? Mine is cool, too.’ You know? The guy has, like, 100 people doing the same thing. Why would he even bother? Unless he has heard about you somewhere and it is just not a good way to create a relationship.
Andrew: OK. Let me ask you this. Let me test you here. Pop quiz. What do you know about me? Who am I sleeping with? Do you know who I…
Dmitry: Well, there’s a lovely lady called Olivia and you guys are going to Washington D.C. I think you are leaving Argentina and you guys are not really, haven’t done Argentine tango? I don’t think so. You know, you moved to Argentina to sort of get away from everything and focus on getting these interviews going. You wanted to go to a place where there was no other ties. There’s different languages, right? You don’t speak Spanish. You don’t really need any . . .
Andrew: OK. Anthony [xx] is saying, ‘This guy is good.’ And you are good. You are starting to creep me out a little bit, here. [laughs] The answer to tango is, I don’t know how to tango, but I am not afraid to make it up. I’ll just go out there on the dance floor, hold up Olivia with as much confidence as I can muster on that dance floor with everyone else who is doing tango professionally. I’ll just go and make my own stuff up. What are they going to do?
Dmitry: [laughs]
Andrew: That’s pretty good. Alright, someone in the audience, Casey Allen, is saying, ‘Listen, Andrew, you did an interview recently with someone who said that TechCrunch exposure doesn’t necessarily send a lot of traffic.’ I hope I am reading this right, because I am reading it so quickly. Bottom line, what I found is that for some people it sends the right kind of traffic, and for other people, all it does is it sends over lookie-loos. People who are going to check out the company, figure out what they are up to, and see if they can copy them.
I think Noah Kagan, who you and I talked with . . .
Dmitry: Yeah. He mentioned . . .
Andrew: The guy runs AppSumo. He explained it best. What he ended up with at TechCrunch isn’t so much users and customers of his business, but people who wanted to do business development. So, you have a different audience. It’s not end users who are there, but people who you are going to do business with there. It seems like. And in your case, business is what you need. You are not looking for people to populate a website. You are not looking for people to try out your video chat app. You are looking for people to do business with.
Dmitry: You need to think about the type of people that are reading this blog. And you might want to test that on a smaller blog of that scale. So, find a smaller TechCrunch blog, which has a similar audience. And if you are really unsure whether the audience are going to react to the article the way you think you want them to react. Which is another thing you’ve got to think about.
Is what do you want them to do after they read that article. Whatever you wrote about, what do you want them to remember after that article?
Andrew: What do you want people to remember about you after doing this interview? You are not getting paid for this interview. You have spent not just an hour now doing this interview with me, but over half an hour doing the pre-interview. What do you hope to get out of this interview? Be open.
Dmitry: Just a marketing [xx] that is out there that loves to help people and wants to connect with as many people as possible. That’s all.
Andrew: For what? There is another motive here, right? Is it to establish another brand for yourself? Your own personal name? Is it to get more business for ZURB?
Dmitry: Yeah, I guess, in the meantime, the more people you connect with, the more opportunities you have to talk about what you do and what products you build. But, that’s the more opportunity you have to learn about what other people are doing and learn from them. Because it is a two way street. You are not just pitching people on what you are doing.
It’s more opportunities to learn from all these awesome people that are passionate about creating products. And that is what I love. I love creating products. And I love to learn from people as well. So, that’s why I moved down here to Silicon Valley from New Hampshire one day. Is to just meet as many people as I can and learn from them.
Andrew: Build relationships. I like that you said this earlier. OK. Now we’ve talked about how you’ve assisted people. You’ve learned everything you could about them. You’ve gotten to know them. Maybe you’ve got a post on their site. What I have found, and you and I talked about this before, is you’ll help somebody. They will be very appreciative in the moment. They’ll love it. They’ll be grateful. They’ll thank you, maybe publicly.
And then they’ve got other business to do. They have thousands of e-mails coming in a week over at TechCrunch. I get a couple of hundred everyday. Everyone in business has got lots of other distractions going on. A month later, they’ve forgotten you. What do you do? And then you can’t get anything, you are almost a stranger at that point. They have to go back to GMail and do a search on your name to figure out who you were and why they cared about you before they could respond to you.
So what do you do?
Dmitry: So every point of contact that you have with a person gets put away in his brain or her brain. So, what you are doing is, you are not actually just establishing a relationship to get an article out or to get a favor out. Or to help them out somehow with one thing and hope that they remember that one thing.
Because, like you said, they are not going to remember. You are actually going to genuinely establish a relationship with somebody that will pay off later on during the time. It is not going to just pay off by giving you traffic because this guy is going to write about you. It is going to pay off by you learning something from that person and that person learning something from you. So, it is a mutual relationship.
And that’s a genuine relationship. And you are going to keep reaching out to this person and helping them out in whatever they are doing. Whether it is an article that they keep writing, that you keep giving them feedback on, you keep correcting if there are typos on those articles. Whether it is something that they’re starting up later on, you read about them somewhere.
You follow that person just like you did before you reached out to that person. And you genuinely help them out in whatever they are doing at the time. You don’t just end it. . .
Andrew: That is a lot of freaking work. How do you do that without having it take up all of your day?
Dmitry: Well, it’s something that I want to do. I want that person to be happy. Because, I know that if that person is happy, then I can learn more from them. There is a benefit to me. If I keep friends with a blogger at Mashable, and I keep updating that relationship. We are constantly talking about new things. I’m always on the know at the latest thing that is going on. I can always bounce an idea off of somebody else.
That person can bounce an idea off of me. So, how you keep it going is just, I come to work, I need to know certain things. I need to know what that person is doing because I need to learn from them down the line. So, it is a lot of work, I guess. But, I don’t look at it as work. It’s more of just a buddy of mine that I am just chatting with or talking to or looking at what they are doing. I am learning something new everyday.
Andrew: What do you use to keep track of the people who you need to follow up with? Is there software that you use?
Dmitry: You know, I am a really big IM person, by the way. So, I usually add people on IM a lot. And, those are the people that are my friends that I maintain the relationships with. And the people that I need to reach out to for some reason, I actually have a list, like this.
Andrew: Uh-huh.
Dmitry: There is a bunch of scribbles on it. But, it is basically a list of people that I just want to reach out to. And, I cross them off as I reach out to them.
Andrew: Who else is on that list? You actually showed us a list for today. Who’s on your list of people who you need to follow up with?
Dmitry: I need to follow up with those guys at FastCompany. Because we are writing an article for those guys. And we might be doing a different article there. UX Magazine. I don’t know. [xx] Magazine.
Andrew: Who at the company does the writing? Because you guys have a lot going on. How can you write all of these blog posts and get them done right?
Dmitry: Seriously, man. Weekends, nights, I don’t know. We write a lot of the content ourselves, because we feel like we are teaching somebody to create a better product. And we have all this content and we have all these people that have tons of content. So, I interview them all the time. And I try to get it out of them. And I try to put it in a digestible form. If it was the actual publication that was writing it, not everything would come out the right way. There are times when we do interviews. Like, we just did Market Watch with the NPR people. Interviews over the phone work a little better. But, where do we find time? We just do. At night.
Andrew: How many articles do you write a week?
Dmitry: Oh, I am probably working on, well, we have our own blog going, so that is a lot of work. Because, we’ve published one article every two days on our blog. But, it is more of a Seth Godin type of a tip. ‘Hey, do this on our product.’ And then we do about two articles every week. The visuals, the refinements, probably keep me busy there. So, two or three articles. If you go to Zurb.com/news, I think. It’s the current stream of all the published material that we have put out. And, you could see, it’s two or three things a week, usually. We put out through other blogs.
Andrew: So, it’s just two on your blog a week? And two on other people’s blogs every week.
Dmitry: About there. I mean, sometimes we have more. We’ll submit three articles or so, but the turnaround time is usually a while. I mean, you submit something, you get feedback a week after that. Then you’ve got to submit again. The whole process just takes a while.
Andrew: And because you can’t know everything, what you do is, you do an interview with someone the way I am doing it with you. You pull out the best points from those interviews, and you send them off as a blog post. So, in other words, what I could do at the end of this interview is write this up and send this to Smashing Magazine. And say, ‘Hey, Smashing Magazine, I’ve got eight points for you about how to make people into evangelists.’
Dmitry: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew: More or less.
Dmitry: And it has to connect to the person and to what they are trying to do on that blog. It has to address his needs as well. So, you want to send it out as a connection to something that person has written or something like that.
Andrew: OK. You keep bringing up our fourth point here for this section, which is be a guest blogger. Do guest posts on other people’s websites. That’s kind of interesting. Why do guest posts instead of call them up and say, ‘Hey, we just did BritneySpears.com. We redid the website. Write about us.’ Or, ‘we just did work for Yahoo or Reuters or Facebook’ or any of the other people who I see on Zurb.com. Why not do that?
Dmitry: I mean, it’s an awesome story. ‘Oh, wow, you did the Britney Spears thing.’ But, it is just too pokey and who is going to learn anything from that? I mean, what are you going to remember? ‘Oh, they did Britney Spears. Cool.’ And that’s all they remember, right? Here’s a great example. I did the TechCrunch guest post. It is called Memory Inception and it is tips for you on how to plant a memory into your customer’s mind. Right?
So, this is specifically a tip for anybody who is creating a product. A post centered on how they can actually plant a memory into somebody’s mind and have them remember their product. So, I bring out different examples on there. How Skype does it. How Apple does it. How [xx].com [interference] and so forth. That will resonate with a person because they genuinely learn something from that blog post.
Whenever it is a guest post, it is much easier to do. Because, we have the knowledge. We want to teach somebody that knowledge. And, we can just write it up. And, if it is a coverage by somebody else, a third party about something that you’ve done, it’s genuinely more of a press release. ‘Look at ZURB doing the website for Britney Spears. They did these three cool things.’
Or a review of an app. ‘Oh, look at ZURB. The cool app called Notable. Here are the five things that Notable does.’ Great. I read it, and now I am on the to the next thing.
Three keys to land a memory in my customer’s mind? Oh, OK. Now I am learning something. This is something useful for me. I might remember this.
Andrew: And you intentionally used, as Mike B. in the audience pointed out, you intentionally used the word inception because of the movie that just came out.
Dmitry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, again, it connects with what’s coming out. People know Inception. It’s hot. People talk about it. I’ve actually only seen previews of it. I haven’t really seen the actual movie. [laughs]
Andrew: Alright. So, we’ve got four points. Fifth point is find a pain point. What’s the pain point? How do you find a pain point for people? TechCrunch seems to be living in heaven right now. They don’t have any pain, do they? You know, I seem to keep talking about TechCrunch. It’s impressive that you got in there. But, it’s not the only place that you’ve been. So, in general, how do you find pain points of these people who have the audience that you want?
Dmitry: Well, you research the person and you try to . . .
Andrew: Actually, before you answer that, I’ve got to ask you. There’s got to be a way to hit the do not disturb. Completely do not disturb on Skype. I see you are a real IM person. And I think what is happening is every time somebody logs in or does something, we end up hearing it in the background.
Dmitry: Oh, OK.
Andrew: So, somewhere in there, there is do not disturb. And that probably will take it off. And, if that doesn’t do it, we’ll find another way to do it. If we have to, we will wipe out all of your friends from Skype, just so you can start fresh, and I can not have the noise in the background.
Dmitry: OK.
Andrew: All podcasts, actually, I hear that Skype bubbly sound in the background.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: Because all podcasts are done by Skype.
Dmitry: Well, I tell them do not notify me.
Andrew: Right.
Dmitry: Hopefully, that will do it.
Andrew: We’ll find out.
Dmitry: OK.
Andrew: So, the pain point. You were saying, how do you find the pain point of these people?
Dmitry: Well, it’s funny, because everybody has a pain point. At some point. And, it depends on [xx]. So, if it is an owner of a blog or if it’s a writer of the New York Times, or if it’s a speaker. Everybody has different pain points. A blogger needs more users, more quality content. He needs to connect with those users through the content.
A speaker, they need awesome topics to talk about, which they probably have. But, they also need places to speak at. And then, a New York Times person, they are just not having a great time, thinking about being laid off. They really need great content. And, the traffic, I guess it helps them a lot, because it gets a lot of traction. But, most of all, they just need great content.
So, finding that pain point and understanding the other person is what is going to connect you with them. So, you just generally look at what they’ve done. You look at the comments on what they have written. You look at their Twitter stream. And you try to put yourself into the other person’s mindset. If you can find any information that validates some of the things that you think people have painful experience with or a question that a person asks on a Twitter or a comment that a person has made.
Something that verifies what you think their pain point is. Then, you have even more ammunition when you reach out. ‘Hey, look, I saw this question on here. I’d love to help you out with that.’ Or, ‘I see that in this interview, you mentioned a certain thing that you are worried about. Hey, let me address that for you.’
Again, you are connecting with that person on that question. On that pain point. Something that they need. And, of course, there are basic things that you know about blogs. They need great content and great visitors. So, feeding that to people and connecting through that is how you want to build a relationship.
Andrew: Alright. Do you know what my pain point is?
Dmitry: You need awesome speakers for your interviews, right? So, you need more quality content. You need to get more quality out of your talks. So, you want to break it down into these points and suggestions that demonstrate more value to your audience. And then, you’ve got more audience coming back. So, you need better stories, and you need a better way to dissect those stories so you get the most value out of them.
Andrew: You know what? You son of a b*tch, you nailed it exactly right. I need more guests here. And the people who deliver good guests to me, I love. And, I am willing to do whatever I can for. Noah Kagan, who introduced us, has introduced me to tons of people over the years. Somehow, he seems to know everybody. I need to do a whole interview on how he knows everybody. The founder of AppSumo. He introduced me to you, he introduced me to the founder of FourSquare. He introduced me to more people than I can think of right now.
And then you are right. The next step after that is once I get the interview, I want to make sure that I pull out the valuable points the way you and I are doing.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: And, finally, the big challenge that I still haven’t figured out the answer to is how do I take all these points that we are making and somehow sort them out. Is there some way for me to highlight the most important tips from this interview, for example. You and I are going to go through nine points that are clearly laid out. It’s not always that clear, what the nine big points are for an interview. How do I identify what those points are or how do I get them out there? And how do I do it in a way that doesn’t suck up more of my time? Because, I want to whip through these interviews. But, that’s a problem for another time. I thought I’d put it out there. Maybe someone in the audience has that answer. But you are good. You know what? I keep putting you on the spot, and I’m thinking, ‘Alright. If he doesn’t have the answer, I’ll rescue him.
Dmitry: [laughs]
Andrew: I don’t want him to look bad. But, let me ask the questions.
Dmitry: Actually, you know, blogging all of those points after our video goes up. Right underneath, listing those points, with examples next to them will just help reiterate those points. I know you do these little interviews where you put the little piece of paper with the point up there and talk about it. That’s great. But, if you put the actual points as bullet points and you put the examples next to them, it helps reiterate that when people come back to the site. They can scroll through that and remember that.
Andrew: No question. Between you and me, if I did that, it would be more valuable to people than the transcript which I pay for and put up on the website everyday. Than the MP3 or video or any of it. Because, frankly, I think that’s all people want. They want that quick point and they want to be able to move on. I can give that to them. So, I’m going to ask my audience. Maybe there’s a way that I can make it easier.
Dmitry: I got more speakers for you, too. I organized an event here which is all about teaching people how to create better products. And, we’ve had amazing speakers here at ZURB soapbox. So, I’d love to connect you with the designer at Netflix. All these guys at Firefox and so forth.
Andrew: Yeah, I saw that. What I am doing here by video, you do live in person.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s impressive. Where can people see that? ZURB soapbox?
Dmitry: ZurbSoapbox.com. And then you can listen to all the podcasts and you read all the actual summaries of them. That’s something that people love. Like I was saying, the summary.
Andrew: Alright. Actually, before we continue, let me say this. Going back to the idea of pulling out the points. I do think that’s what people want. They want the points. And I’d be able to grow my audience if I was able to just isolate the points. But, there’s some things that you can’t really bullet point out that you learn from an interview. That you learn from life. That just kind of somehow get lodged in your head when you are listening to these interviews. You hear someone’s story, and it doesn’t seem that important, but five years from now, you find yourself in a situation where that message stuck so deeply that it is there to rescue you.
And, I think that’s why, in fact, I know that’s why, even though it would be cheaper for me to just pull out the points and not do the video editing and all that.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s still important to do the video. And it’s still important to get the MP3s out there.
Dmitry: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
Andrew: Alright. So, now we talked about how to get people over to our sites. That lots of people can teach you. The SEO guys will spend all day and night teaching you how to get people over. We got the people over in a way that I think is more meaningful than search engine optimization. But, now, how do we make it even more useful and convert those people into evangelists?
We talked about four points in the pre-interview. First point was the personal response. How do you do it?
Dmitry: So, I worked at a company called Crossloop. And, the idea was that you have a helper marketplace. So, say you have a virus on your website or on your computer and you want somebody to fix it. You just go on the website, you find a helper, you pay them a little fee, and they log in remotely, screen share your computer, and then they fix it for you.
So, that was the community that they built. There was a screen sharing product and I was one of the marketers there. Probably the only marketer. It was the founder and me.
Andrew: How was that company by the way? I love the idea behind that business.
Dmitry: Oh, we launched in, like, 2006, I think, it was officially launched. And then, I joined 2007 when I came out here. And we were just closing our first venture capital funding. And then, they closed another round of funding later on about two years after that or a year and a half.
Andrew: How big a company are they?
Dmitry: There was only ten people, I think, or so.
Andrew: How many users?
Dmitry: Five million users now. Through the screen sharing tool. And the website, I don’t know what they have. A million? I don’t know. I’ve got to ask them.
Andrew: That’s a great idea. And, the idea, is it, if my mom has an issue, she and I could both log in to this website using this tool. I could fix her computer? Right?
Dmitry: Yeah. Well, it can work two ways. If it is just you and your mom, it’s free. You just screen share. Use the cross loop to screen share and ask your mom to accept your request and then you see. I did this with my grandfather all the time. My grandpa doesn’t know what the heck is going on anyway. He clicks random things all over the place. I can’t visualize anything that he is telling me. And, he is Russian. He doesn’t speak English at all. So, it helps me to visualize and have that screen sharing session going.
But, the site itself, if you don’t have anybody like your son or your granddaughter or grandson. Just log in. There’s helpers out there online that you can pay nine bucks or ten bucks, whatever. And they can help you. And they are rated. So, the idea was, coming back to personal response, we had these session surveys, we called them.
At the end of every screen sharing, we would just ask you, ‘How did you like the session?’ Good? Bad? And then the custom field. Usually people would say, ‘Liked it. Love it.’ And I’d get maybe, like, 500, 800 of these a day. Right? And it comes to my inbox and I made it a point to respond to every single one of them. And so, right now you are listening, you are thinking, ‘My God. I can’t respond personally to every. There are tools that do this.
But, what I did is I had about 15 different templates. They are all customized. And I would actually shoot off these templates, batches at a time to all the responses there. Once the responses come back, somebody would reply. ‘Whoa. I just said I liked it, and I got a response from this guy, Dmitry. Let me reply to this.’ So, then he replied. Right away, I would reply back and say, ‘Hey. Thank you for reaching out. I want to learn more about what you are doing with the tool. How are you using it in your work flow? I genuinely want to know.’ Because I want to know how to use it, so I can use this as a marketing opportunity.
Improve your product through talking to your customers. Everybody talks about this. But, personal touch right away, right after they used the tool, amazing. Just amazing response. And keeping those conversations going helps you. Just like with those bloggers. Use these guys as your bloggers, except these guys are going to be your little evangelists. They are going to be your little marketers. So, they are going to love the product so much that they are going to end up spreading the love all over.
Andrew: What tool did you use to talk to them to create those canned responses?
Dmitry: It was actually a hook into Outlook. And it was Outlook templates? I’ll send you the link. I don’t use Outlook anymore at Crossloop. If you use Gmail, there’s a canned response addition that you can add. That customized addition that you can create any canned responses you want there and use that.
There is tons of software out there to generate different types of canned. You’ve got to be careful. So, we actually have conversion e-mails that we do with our products as well.
And, you just want to make sure that you don’t offend anybody or you don’t make it sound too preachy. It’s as if you were writing it. It’s written more generically. But, you want to think about it very hard. You want to at least get five people to review your e-mail and actually test it on maybe at least five other people that are not in your company. Just your mom or somebody else. Send them that e-mail that you create, and make sure. Ask them what they feel about it. Say that you got it from somebody else and you don’t know what it is.
Andrew: You are saying, if it is going to be the 14 responses that you are going to use consistently make sure they are 14 good ones.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: My buddy Max Klein has a suggestion. He actually has a typo in his automated messages. Just a small typo. Something like the word, ‘the’, is misspelled.
Dmitry: Uh-huh.
Andrew: Just so people think that it’s genuine. Because, if it was an automated system, then it wouldn’t have the typo. Somebody would have cleared it up.
Dmitry: That’s a good one. Yeah.
Andrew: Maybe you want to make it perfect, but not too perfect. Alright, the next point. Delight instantly. How do you do that?
Dmitry: So, it is really hard to actually communicate value to the person for people all the time without showing all the barriers before it. So we create a product that is going to solve somebody’s problem. Then we’re going to put a log in on top of it. Then, we’re going to put another set up process where you enter your name. And then, all these things that come right before it that just make me want to leave now. One more question and I am out of here.
And I am not delighted during that process at all. So I am not engaging with your product at all. And, delighting the customer is really tough there. Because you want all these things so you can gather your info out. But, then what about the customer? So, what you want to do is, these barriers to entry is you need to move towards the end. So, bring out the value right away and give them a taste of it right away. You delight them right away with, ‘We have a great product.’
Example, Notable Bounce. I could probably talk about it a little later. But, Bounce is a simple product. It’s a way to capture your website and put notes on it. So is Notable. Same thing. You capture a website. You put notes on it. Then you share that with your team and you collaborate. You iterate through those notes and you create a better product.
The only difference is that Bounce doesn’t have a log-in. Notable has a log-in. Bounce, you don’t have to set anything up. You just come to the website, you just pan through your URL. You click ‘Grab screenshot.’ It takes the screenshot. Then you can put notes on it. You save it as a public URL and you share it with somebody else.
There is nothing that is standing in the way of delighting the user right there. There is no sign up, no log-ins, they don’t have to pay, they don’t have to put their credit cards in. Nothing. They just come in and engage with you. So, right away you are delighting the user and we found this concept tremendously powerful. Immediate engagement, and it just gets people going.
‘Wow. This is cool.’ They can see the value much faster.
Andrew: I see. We used to do that at Dale Carnegie and Associates. I went to Dale Carnegie where they teach how to win friends and influence people. And obviously, teaching people how to win friends and have influence is not something that you can do quickly. And people walk into the classroom very skeptically. So, the first thing the instructors do is they try to teach the students one thing that they can do really well.
It’s not everything and it’s not the best thing that they can teach them. But, they try to have one thing that they can teach them knowing that if the students get a breakthrough on day one, they are going to trust the program long enough to stick with it for the eight or ten or however many sessions they need. So, you are saying do the same thing.
Have that one step process to delight. Not the full registration, not the full experience. But one way that they could immediately see results and be happy.
Dmitry: Exactly.
Andrew: And then they will trust you enough to continue with you.
Dmitry: Nobody has time to sign up anymore. Say I recommend a service to you. Do you really want to sign up? I mean, I guess you will do it, because you are my friend.
Andrew: No, I won’t. I’ll say I’ll do it later.
Dmitry: Yeah. You’ll do it later. Here, you just come and click a button that will take you maybe, I timed it, it was like ten seconds. The whole process of creating the whole thing. And you see the value right away. You are going to go see what other products there are to do this.
Andrew: Alright. What about making it easy to spread? How do we do that?
Dmitry: Everybody talks about it. The social media. Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. And everybody is putting Twitter buttons all over there apps. Everything share this, share that. You need to think from the very core of your app. Whatever you are building, your product. Why somebody would actually want to share it. And build that into your core value of the app. So, it is hard. Not everything is sharable. I don’t always want to share everything I have.
If it is in the core of that, so, for example, Bounce. Again, I will use that as an example. Because it is just very easy to get feedback on the website. Everybody wants to know what is happening with their website. Where are they going wrong? What could be improved?
With Bounce, it is built into the actual tool. You can create a screenshot of your website. You put notes on it, and then you Tweet that out to ask [interference] if they agree with what you are saying about your site. Again, another tool that we are doing is Verify. That’s a test. So, now, they don’t even need to put notes on that screenshot.
They can Tweet out a test and say, ‘Flash that screen. Flash the screenshot of my website. Flash it in front of you.’ And ask, ‘What did you remember?’ In five seconds, what did you remember about my website? And then if you list five things, these are the five things that I can actually track through this tool called Verify. And I can see what people are saying. What people are remembering in five seconds.
So I can quickly get a gauge of what is going on with my site. This communicates value to me. I want to know what is going on with my site. So, this sharing mechanism is, I take a screenshot, I generate a URL, and this URL, whenever somebody clicks on it, can have a flash of my site and then afterwards provides a form for them to fill out what they remember on that site.
That is instantaneous value to the person using that. So, they would want to share with others to get others to respond and get value from it. And this is built into your core value of the app. Think about each person that is going to use your app is going to communicate your app too, through Twitter, through Facebook, through blogs.
Andrew: Let me see if I understand this. So, this program, what is it called?
Dmitry: There’s two. There is Bounce and there is Verify.
Andrew: So, Verify. What Verify does is it takes a screenshot of your home page, or any page on your site. It shows it to people for five seconds. And then it says what do you remember in the five seconds that you saw this site.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: The idea is to see, did you communicate the most important message about this website? Did you communicate, in fact, what the website does?
Dmitry: Exactly.
Andrew: Cool. And the reason you are saying that that is built to share is because anyone who uses it is going to send it out to their friends and their followers to get their feedback on the website.
Dmitry: Right. Because you want to know what other people remember from looking at your website for the first five seconds. So, it’s a natural sharing. You are not forcing anybody to share. This is natural, person to person.
Andrew: This is a great idea, by the way. What’s the website on that, on Verify?
Dmitry: It’s VerifyApp.com.
Andrew: VerifyApp.com, and Bounce is BounceApp.com.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: I am seeing the formula that you guys use.
Dmitry: Right. And so there was Notable, the tool that I talked about that took screenshots and you put notes on. We created Bounce which was a way easier version of it. No log-ins, all this stuff. Verify, there is more [xx]. This test that I talked about, the flash of your screen, remember what is on it. That is just one of them. There is actually six more tests.
What we are doing is, we are creating another small version of this Verify app called [??] and it, well I haven’t really talked about it at all. I probably shouldn’t talk about it too much. But, it’s going to be released pretty soon. And it is also a public version where it is free and all you do is you click a button, it takes a screenshot, and then you can create your memory tests and share that with others.
Andrew: I like this idea a lot. It’s something that I would use. Final point. We kind of talked about this a little bit earlier. But, our final point on making these users into evangelists is create a simple version of the product.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: And what you said was, pull out the most, actually, how do you do it? How do you create the simple version of the product?
Dmitry: Here it is. So, we have Notable, which is our flagship product. The tool, why did we create it? To help people collaborate on a website to improve websites. To give feedback on websites. How do you get feedback now? Well, you’ve got to take a screen shot. You’ve got to put notes on it. You’ve got to attach it to an e-mail. You’ve got to send it off. It’s just tough.
So we created this tool which takes a screenshot. You put notes on it. And it had all these other functionalities on it. And it could take SEO, it could take the code. It could take the copy. All these things were private, you can have sets. All of these features in it. Very feature heavy.
We took the core feature, the annotation feature out of it, and we created a whole new product out of it, called Bounce App. All you do is you come to BounceApp.com, you push a button. It captures the URL that you entered, then you put notes on it. You save it and thats it. After that, you can take that URL and you can shoot it over through e-mail, through IM, through whatever you want. Twitter.
And, that idea just came to us when we were looking at improving that annotation feature. And we just loved it and the response was tremendous from just creating Bounce alone. It’s just very easy to engage a person.
So, we are doing the exact same thing with this test tool. We have Verify, which has seven different tests. There is AB tests where you can have two screenshots at the same time up there. There is click tests where you can have people click on the point of the site where you register. There is all these different tests.
Just don’t have them log-in, don’t have them create a test. Just one simple test. The memory test. So we have [xx] which is a simple version of our paid version Verify. Again, no log-ins. All you have to do is you click a button that captures your screen shot of the site, and then you can generate. Then you click save, you’ve got your URL, you share it with other people. You get people taking that test.
So, again, boil it down to one feature. One core thing that you have and just show it to people. All these other add-ons are just things that people are going to want later on unless they love the core feature. But, the core value of the tool, just show it to people right away.
You’ve got to have two versions. Because one is a simple one to engage people, and one is the more complex one.
Andrew: Let me ask something. How do you lock people in, though, when you have that basic version? The reason that you want to get their e-mail address and get them to create a username and all those other things is so that you can get them to come back to the site and have a good experience in the future.
If you are creating a stripped down version of your product that doesn’t even get their e-mail address, aren’t you just counting on them to remember what your website is and remember why they cared about it? And remember that? Despite the fact that they have so much else going on in their lives instead of at least capturing the e-mail address so you have a way to nudge them and say, ‘Hey, you loved this before. Come on back and get it again.’
Dmitry: Yeah. We just rely on them to remember the awesomeness of this tool which is free and keep using it. And what you can do is you can just put your tool’s name into Twitter and see everybody who is using it everyday. So, you can keep track of people that way. They actually end up following you on Twitter through that handle there. And you just reply to them. You start conversations with people. You are not looking for e-mail addresses at that point. Because it is just a tool to get them hooked in. If they want more, there is another tool for that.
So, once they want more, that’s when you want to engage them on a tool. And, there’s more features in there. Here, you are just trying to get them to say, ‘Wow. That’s awesome.’ Face time. Wow. Look at the two videos. I remember that right away. So, it is all about the wow moments, the endings. How do you end something with a customer once they are delighted with that awesome first experience, they Tweet it out. I respond on Twitter to each of them.
Andrew: Alright. Let me sum this up before I talk about something that is a little bit off topic, but I am curious about. So, here we go.
Dmitry: Alright.
Andrew: Now, two parts to this interview. The first part was we talked about how to build relationships with the people who have the audience that you want. And, we have five points under that. First, be an assistant to your favorite blogger or whoever it is that you are trying to build a relationship with.
Next, learn everything you can about them. And, you guys all saw how Dmitry did it in an almost creepy way. He even knew about who I was sleeping with. Number three, build a relationship with that person. Just because you helped them once doesn’t mean they are going to be there in the future. They’ll forget about you. You want to stay and continue to build that relationship.
Number four, guest post. So, instead of asking someone to write about you, you write for them about a topic that they care about and their audience is interested in. Number five, find a pain point. And, we talked about different pain points, including what my pain points were. I challenged you to see if you knew them, and sure enough, you picked up on them.
That’s an incredible talent by the way.
Dmitry: [laughs]
Andrew: Alright. So, the second half of the interview is, now we’ve got this audience. We’ve got them coming in. What do you do to make them into more than just users? How do we make them into evangelists? And you gave us four points there.
Number one was the personal response. And you showed us how you can make everyone feel like they’ve got a personal response from you without driving yourself nuts writing an individual response to 800 people. We talked about some of the tools involved in doing that.
Number two, give them that instant delight. So, we talked about how if you have a complicated app, you want to make it a little less complicated so that people can have that quick burst of excitement for it.
Number three, make it easy to spread and in there we talked about how you build the reality into the product itself. And, number four is similar to that previous point. It’s create a simple version and make it into that intro product. So there they are.
Now, that I summed that up, you help Noah Kagan. I am fascinated by this guy, Noah Kagan. You help him. You are his mentor. You helped him figure out a way, we didn’t even get into the story, of how you helped him.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: But, my big question is why? Why did you help Noah Kagan increase his sales? Why did you help him build a better product? He’s not paying you.
Dmitry: No. I just saw AppSumo and we did this deal and I don’t even know how we made out. Because, it is still on the trial period now. So, I just saw a lot of things that he could improve, and I don’t know.
I like the guy. He’s got an awesome idea. He is also in the same, worked in a large company and came off and started doing something small. And, I really think there is something there. He has got a great idea. He is just not communicating value well on the site. There is issues with things that I just naturally wanted to build a relationship with him.
He could teach me. . .
Andrew: Did you ask him, well, let me explain what it is to the people who don’t know. AppSumo is a collection of web apps that you can buy at a deeply discounted price. So, he has now a collection of apps around him. Web analytics. Five incredible apps. Costs hundreds of dollars to buy them individually. For a limited time, you can buy them now for 25 bucks. 25 bucks is less than I paid for just one of the apps that he’s got in his package. That gives you a sense of what it is.
But, it’s a new product, and he hasn’t had enough conversions for some of the previous versions of this.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: He is iterating and getting it better and getting it better.
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: He came to you because he wanted to include one of your apps in one of his previous bundles.
Dmitry: Right.
Andrew: At what point did you help him? Did he say to you, ‘Hey, listen, Dmitry, what do you think I could do to increase conversions? Did he ask you for help or did you say, ‘I like this and I want to help you out.’
Dmitry: It was just natural. It was just, ‘Hey, we are in this together. We are doing this, and hey, this needs to change. And I got on IM with his girlfriend, who is his designer. I got her on IM and I’m telling her what needs to change and what needs. No. Things need to look a certain way and this needs to be moved up here. And then, you know, I’d get people here to get some traffic on there. What’s next? And ever since then we sort of just kept checking in. ‘Hey, what’s going on, how are you doing, what’s the next bundle going on? Hey, I want to know what the next bundle is. Hey, maybe there is a deal for me in there as well.’ But, I want to know, how is this going to go next?
Andrew: Why him? Most people would say, ‘Alright, fine. Take this app and deeply discount it. Good luck to you. If you do well, terrific, we’ll have more sales. If you don’t do well, we didn’t lose that much. See you later, I’ve got other things to do.’
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: What is it about him, do you think, that made you say, ‘I want to help this guy.’
Dmitry: Because I am going to help him and I am going to learn how to create an awesome product that I can use to build Notable or to build Verify. I can learn tons of lessons from running AppSumo and learning how we decrease the Bounce rate, learning how we increase the conversion rate. What things did we move on a site to improve the product there. I can use those lessons to help me create my product that is going to be better.
And then, everybody is going to be better off. He is going to be better off, am going to be better off. I am looking at this. . .
Andrew: So, by helping him, you find different ways to think about your own product . . .
Dmitry: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . that end up helping you.
Dmitry: Yeah. Exactly. Because I am struggling with the same things on my side. I’ve got to get more users to get Notable. I need more people using that.
Andrew: Isn’t Notable your app? Or is this an app that is run by ZURB?
Dmitry: ZURB. ZURB. Yeah. So, that’s one of our products. We are going to have way more products coming out. So, learning all of those things, it is valuable for me as well. So, that’s why I want to help him, communicate what I know. We can experiment. We will both learn something. And then the lessons learned will be shared between him and me. So, it’s just awesome. And the whole time, you start to build a friend as well.
Andrew: He told me, too, that he is doing this intentionally now. I think after you helped him out, he said, ‘This is interesting. I want to do this on a more formal basis.’ Have somebody who is really good at doing their business well come in and end dig into my business and give me feedback on what i’m doing. And he says that he will do the same for them.
How do you think that somebody can start a conversation like that and get that kind of help?
Dmitry: Like I was saying, you identify people’s pain points. Or, you find something that they are struggling with. I came to the site for the first time, AppSumo.com, I saw some things that really needed help. There was just some things that are blatantly obvious that needed help. And, I know that Noah is traveling, he is building his business. And, it is a big time commitment for him. He’s got his girlfriend working on it. But, there are just some things that needed to happen on that site that need to change.
So, I actually helped them understand some of those things and communicate what needs to happen. And that’s how, somebody you want to help. Identify the things they need help with and genuinely reach out and help them with those things.
And then, as the process continues, then, maybe they can help you with something and you sort of keep that going.
Andrew: Alright. That’s interesting, and it’s also interesting to see that he did something about it. He didn’t just say, ‘Thanks for the feedback. Goodbye.’ Or, ‘I’m doing my own thing,’ or, ‘I’m traveling. I don’t have enough time for this.’ I think it was [xx] Kawasaki who said, ‘Embrace you thunder lizards,’ when I interviewed him. These are the people who are the most passionate. They are willing to point out even flaws in your product.
And I said, ‘Come on. Don’t most people do it?’ And he said, ‘No. If you think about it, notice that it is easier and most people just turn away the people who are offering to help, who are their thunder lizards.’
So, it seems intuitive, but it is not. Uh, Jiffy Lou in the audience is saying ZURB needs to make it easier to find all these products that you talked about here today.
Dmitry: OK.
Andrew: it’s not easy to see. I didn’t even notice on the website that you guys were in all those products. That you guys were creating them.
Dmitry:Yeah. We are still, Notable is only one year old and we are still refining it, but, yeah. You’re right. Bring those out on our homepage. There is so much other stuff that we do.
Andrew: There you go. Jiffy Lou, now you’ve got a friend. You give him one or two more points and then he will give you points about how you can improve your business.
Dmitry: Yeah, let’s connect.
Andrew: Dmitry, how can people connect with you if they like this and they want to follow up?
Dmitry: They can reach me dmitry@zurb.com.
Andrew: dmitry@zurb.com
Dmitry: Or my Twitter handle is Dragilev. My last name. D-R-A-G-I-L-E-V.
Andrew: Dragilev. Alright. Dmitry, he is the marketing lead at ZURB. Thank you for doing the interview with me.
Dmitry: Thank you.
Andrew: And thank you all for watching. Come back to Mixergy. Give me feedback on this interview. Let me know what more you want to see here on Mixergy. I am looking forward to all your feedback and e-mail.
Thank you all. Thank you Dmitry. Bye.
Dmitry: Thanks.
