Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, which you already know is home of the ambitious upstart.
I was speaking all day at a conference here in San Francisco a few months ago. In the short break that I had over lunch, I ran into Patrick Ambron, who told me, “Andrew, so much has happened since I taught a course on Mixergy about how to build and protect your reputation online. I said, “Oh, yeah? What happened?” Well, actually, he started going into his revenues. You’ll hear in a moment what he said to me specifically. I stopped him right there and I said, “You got to let me interview you on Mixergy about how you did all that.” That’s what we’re doing here today.
Patrick Ambron is the founder of Brand Yourself, “A company that helps you look great when employers, clients and even dates Google you.” I love that tag line. I invited him here to talk about how he built it up. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick: Hey. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Andrew: Just to give people a sense of the dramatic rise in revenue, where were you before and where are you now on a monthly basis? Then we’ll talk later on about how you did it.
Patrick: Sure. As we talked about, in the last 12 months, for example, we’ve just really grown in every possible way. We were still team smolting [SP], about five of us. The guys had been around for a while. About 12 months ago we were at a $300,000 yearly run rate. We were growing, trying, and we had worked really hard to get there. Flash forward 12 months later.
Andrew: By the way, that’s $25,000 a month. That’s not bad.
Patrick: No, but like I said, we had worked really hard to get there.
Andrew: Yep.
Patrick: We’ll talk about how, but then 12 months later we’re at over a $3 million run rate. Instead of five people, we were over 50 people and we’re not slowing down. We really finally figured out how to, I guess, turn on the gas in a way. It’s been very interesting. We’ve learned a lot to get there. You graduate to a whole new set of problems. It’s been quite a ride.
Andrew: In about 12 months, you multiplied your sales by 10, from $25,000 a month $25,000, to a quarter million a month. That’s where you guys were, and that’s where we’re going to talk about, how you got from there to here. Why don’t we just touch on how you even started the company? It was because of a problem that your friend Pete had. What was the problem?
Patrick: My co-founder Pete, when we were in college, he couldn’t get an internship because he had been mistaken for a criminal with the same name. That’s when we looked into it and we realized it was actually a pretty big industry. Some very big players. Very well, deeply backed companies, [??] reputation management that help you do this. The issue was they were all service based at their core. Pete, for his situation, couldn’t get a [??] for under $25,000. That’s when we realized the industry is catering to a very small portion of the market, really wealthy people who have money to fix a specific problem.
We thought there were millions of people like Pete who have a problem and could never afford that or even more people who just want to look better. They want to make sure you find their portfolio and their work, not that there’s not necessarily anything bad about them, and that doesn’t justify working with a service provider. Our idea was we could breach [SP] the bigger market by creating a web-based platform that helps people do it themselves, almost like using TurboTax instead of paying an accountant.
That’s what we originally came to the market as. We had a free product and paid features that walks you through this process yourself. It’s still cheap, 100 bucks a year. That’s what we had launched in March of 2012. Then, we’ll talk about it more, we’ve built services and stuff on top of that as we’ve grown.
Andrew: Let’s let this unfold as the story goes on.
Patrick: Sure.
Andrew: What happened with Pete was he went to get an internship, someone would type in his name. I’ve got his name here. It’s Kissler [SP], right? Pete Kissler. I’m pronouncing, right?
Patrick: Yup.
Andrew: You type in his name and, boom, this other guy would come on in an orange jumpsuit. I’ve got a picture of it here on my other screen. It looks really bad for Pete. Anyone who Googles him suddenly thinks, “Maybe this guy used to be a criminal and he’s trying to reform himself. If we hire him, we’re taking on a big potential problem.” I could see why he didn’t get the job. ,
You then decided, “Let’s build a company around it.” The first version of what you were going to build was what?
Patrick: The first version of it?
Andrew: Yeah. When you said, “Hey, you know what, Pete shouldn’t have to spend $25,000 to fix this because he doesn’t have it. People like Pete shouldn’t have to spend $25,000, but we can build version infinity or the future version of Brand Yourself. We have to start somewhere.” What’s the first thing that you started building?
Patrick: Pete and I started building a platform. I’m going to give you background, too. Pete and I knew each other because we were both really in to design, basic web design. I knew a lot about SEO, search engine optimization. We’d never built software before. We just started doing it. What we’d built was, the first version we built was so awful, and we tried to do too much. What we did first is we interpreted the mission too broadly. We tried to build something that had too many features because we said …
Andrew: I remember this. I was talking at the time about having you come on to Mixergy. You were at first excited because you had a vision of where this thing was going. Then you started to back away, I think, from our conversation by email saying, “Andrew, we can’t talk right now.” I am now understanding it’s because the product was getting too big, and then you had to scale it back and come up with the version that I eventually saw.
When you’re talking about all these features, what are some of them? Give me a sense of some features that when you look back on in retrospect they feel like complete bloatware you needed to pull back.
Patrick: The problem is we interpreted the idea as “Put your best foot forward on the Web.” Yes, that’s your Google results, right? It should be … we had to tell you who to follow. We had features that were like, “Oh, Andrew, you’re in technology. You should follow these people.” We were doing things like Clout was doing before they were doing it, but because it was one of the million things we were doing and never got as good as they got, [??].
Andrew: How in your mind at the time was telling me who to follow going to help me protect my reputation?
Patrick: We figured there had to be a proactive part. We said, “You need to have a really good online presence, which means you should be active on Twitter. Here’s the blogs you should read. Here’s what you should blog about.
Andrew: Ah.
Patrick: We had a feature that said, “Hey, I’m an accountant.” It says, “Okay, [??] sent to you, and you should write an article about this.” You would just click on it, and it would open up to a blog post where you could just [??] about an article about accounting. We were basically trying to use a software that would show you how to be basically, for lack of a better term, what would be like a social media [??]. How to blog, who to follow.
Andrew: I get what you’re saying. You’re saying to yourself, “Hey, look, there are tons of Andrew Warners online.” I’ve noticed that too. Why does this one Andrew Warner, the one who does interviews on Mixergy, keep showing up in search results when people search for the name “Andrew Warner?” Well, it’s because he publishes a lot, and he follows the right people, and the right people follow him back, and he reads the right articles. Because of all that, he becomes the go-to person that Google lists five, 10, 15 times before they list anyone else. We need to make everyone who comes to us, hires us or uses our software into an Andrew Warner. That means following. That means helping them publish.
You were building all this yourselves with no outside funding?
Patrick: [??]
Andrew: Wow, okay. When you finally got the product together, how did you know this wasn’t what you should be launching?
Patrick: I think what happened, we did have … people could sign up for it. We were signing up some people, but we weren’t converting the [??] very well. The issue, you hit upon it, which was you’re [??] because this will help you show the good … we removed ourselves from the original problem we wanted to solve, which is “I know I’m being looked up online. I want to just make sure that it’s positive, relevant and accurate.”
Andrew: Yup.
Patrick: We were moving away … we were deluding ourselves. People would come to us and we could tell. They were confused about what they should even be doing. “Wait, so how do I look in Google?” What’s this? It was just such a diluted … there were so many features. [??] it’s better to be the standout best at one specific thing than be pretty good at 100 things. People would come to us and not know exactly what they were supposed to do and how it was going to help them and even realize the problem they were trying to solve with us.
Andrew: From what I remember, I used it, and I was confused by that first version, but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to look stupid. I didn’t want to look like someone who didn’t get it. It’s a challenge to get feedback from people because they don’t want to admit what they don’t know. As Eric Reese [SP] told me in his first Mixergy interview, you don’t believe that what they’re saying is universally true. You believe that when someone gives you, if they finally do give you negative feedback, it must be wrong with them. I think he said as a joke, “Throw this person out and bring me another one who knows what they’re talking about.”
What I’m wondering from you is how did you get the feedback from users in a way that allowed you to say, “They are right; I am wrong; I need to adjust”?
Patrick: It’s interesting. It’s a mixture of [??] general data. You might not tell me in person because you know me that the product, you don’t really get it and you’re not sure what to use it for, but guess what? When you’re signing in, you’ve got 1,000 people using it or something. The data just shows you, people aren’t using any of these features, and they’re leaving, and they’re not coming back. Data is important, but people think it’s too important. Data just tells you a pattern, right?
Andrew: The point is people are coming and they’re leaving.
Patrick: They’re leaving, and they’re not really coming back. They’re poking around and they don’t come back. Next, you need qualitative stuff. We really took [??] such a proponent of usability testing. You need three people, three people who don’t know anything. You sit them in a room and you basically say, here’s the situation Ryan, or whatever it is, right.
You heard about a product that helps you improve your search results, because your issue is you want to push something off the first date. You hear about it, you come in and you just watch [??]. There’s no wrong answers. I want you to just use this product. Speak out loud, you can’t do anything wrong, don’t think that. You just watch people use it, all right. Okay, so they say, I guess what I’m doing here, and you’ll just hear people are misinterpreting something.
Andrew: Yep.
Patrick: Or they’re not understanding something. We are religious even til this day about having three usability tests like that are worse more than anything for product problems.
Andrew: You sit three people down who’ve never seen the product before.
Patrick: Yep.
Andrew: In the beginning, when you did this, Patrick. Before you got funding, before you had all of this revenue, before you had all these resources. How did you find your first three people, and how did you watch them?
Patrick: The first three people are just like three people we knew, like hey… We tried to make it like not very close friends, like acquaintances. And then we mixed it up, but the point is a could be anybody. We used Craigslist one time just to see if it was different. A couple of times we just used like friends. People who worked in the same…
We were working in like a very cheap office in Syracuse, and there were other people there, we’re like a you want to do us a favor. The point is it doesn’t really matter, because as long as they’ve never used the product, and you’ve made it so they’re not going to be afraid. You set it up in a way where you’re not saying you do like it or not. You say, there’s no wrong here, were just trying to think, we want to see you use it.
Andrew: I did this great interview with Eric Stephens about how he does this process. That’s what he was doing for multiple companies. Most recently for Etsy, anyone who hasn’t heard should just type in Eric Stephens, with a P-H. Eric Stephens into the search bar on Mixergy and go listen to that interview. All right, so I get it. Finally you’re seeing people use it, and you’re finally understanding this is too much. When you go and build the second version, what do you decide is going to be in it?
Patrick: That was when we really realize we needed to focus on the core problem which is. We’re going to help you show up in Google with stuff that’s [??]. Like you said, you want to look great when employers look you up. So we really focused on making that process very understandable. The process simply is, if you want to look good in Google you need to have good content that can be ranked, you have to make sure it’s optimized so its search engine friendly. And you’ve got to make sure it’s active.
Andrew: Okay, so optimized, and that it’s actively updated. What then do you do with that knowledge to create your first product?
Patrick: So we basically just created a product that [??] there’s only a few things but it does it well. Let’s first see how you’re currently looking [??] score based on how positive, negative or just irrelevant your first page of Google is, and that’s just for you to track your own progress.
Andrew: They search their name, they type in their name and then you show them here’s how you showing up right now. What’s going on is…
Patrick: And then that’s almost like a report card for yourself. It says, okay, you basically ask what you want showing up. And you can submit any data, it could be a personal website, it can be your LinkedIn profile, it could be an article you wrote. We have a bunch of recommendations for example so if you don’t have a LinkedIn or if your designer you don’t have a Dribble, it’s like you should be on this. This is a good positive thing that you should have. And then I saw for [??] that says, okay, your LinkedIn ranks 15 for your name, it’s on the second page. But there are 12 things you can do that you haven’t that will make it more search engine friendly.
It’s very specific to what you submitted, so it’s like, okay for example LinkedIn, you’re using a nickname. Your URL hasn’t been optimized, Google really likes that. You didn’t even fill out half the section, the more content you have on a page about yourself the better it is.
Andrew: … analyze that.
Patrick: The software does it, and it basically…
Andrew: The first version didn’t do that, did it?
Patrick: No.
Andrew: No, I guess that first version was the bloated version that we talked about. Version 2.0 did it do that? Did it analyze people’s LinkedIn profiles?
Patrick: It analyzed anything you submitted to it. So you don’t have to submit a LinkedIn profile. If you submit something saying I want this to showing up for me in Google. We’ll tell you where it ranks, and what you can do to help it rank higher.
Andrew: I see, I didn’t realize at the time you were even able to do that.
Patrick: Oh yeah. And then it gives you [??] over time, hey Patrick your LinkedIn fell off the first page, but here’s something you can do. Hey, not linking to it from your website, that helps. Or you haven’t updated it with a status update or a blog post, go to that, that will help, it’s getting stagnant. Whatever it is we can do to help you. It’s just an easy management system for you to just… You need a few good properties. You need to make sure they’re structured well, and need to keep them active and that’s your best bet of getting these things to break above whatever it is you don’t want, whether that’s something negative or irrelevant or somebody else with your name. And then we have other cool features like…almost all the users do build a profile with us…
Andrew: And that was available from the beginning.
Patrick: Yes.
Andrew: Why did you want them to build a profile on your site from the beginning when you knew that LinkedIn was going to rate higher, that Dribble was going to rank higher. Why did you want them to have a profile on BrandYourself.com?
Patrick: Well we don’t…right now it’s very…it’s not so much as something…you don’t have to do it. We do it for two reasons. One is, for a lot of people with that issue, they don’t…they don’t have a lot of stuff to begin with and it takes two seconds to build, they look really, really nice and their really well optimized, for example, mine ranks much higher than my wife Debbie. So when she said no to the positive saying that you control, that’s up there, that we could feel the content pretty easily, that looks nice, it’s a nice little page for yourself. And then secondly, a real cool thing, for example, my first result and I can go…when I look now we can give you cool alerts. Like if someone “looks” you…if someone Google’s you they can click on that result. We can tell you, hey someone from; let’s say you just had an interview; someone from J.P. Morgan just looked you up, [??] Brand yourself and found you.
Andrew: I see. The way you can tell that is by looking at the IP address.
Patrick: And what we’ve done is build a database and we’re not just saying someone from New York, New York. We advanced it so you can [??] from a major university or major company we can match it. I’ve [??] we’re dealing with business where you get lots…the average person for getting one once in a while. I mean it’s usually someone important. So we individualize every single digit as much as possible so you can be like this…
Andrew: So you can be like, I just did a meeting with Citibank. Hey, someone from Citibank just Googled me or I’m about to take a meeting with them and someone from Citibank Googled me, found my page and looked at it.
Patrick: Yes. I remember for example, just to say how contextually, we were working for a while…we brought in for a little while someone I knew to help with some of the design elements with PETNA used to look at what we were doing and he said this was cool so he when to the product and he said, Why not use web serve? We’re only in Burlington, Vermont so I can visit family or something. He didn’t actually live there. And he went out that night and he ended up meeting someone and it went well. And the next day got to alert and he said someone from Burlington just looked up your name, and he said oh, that was girl. What I tell her? What are my Google results? So it was kind of a funny thing. People realize oh yes someone looked…it reinforces the fact that people are inevitably going to look you up. Have you ever see when people go to a bar and you can tell if someone’s on the first date. Someone walks away. You’ll see that person like…who is this guy. And the point is it’s not just about getting rid of negative results. All those do exist. Don’t tell talk about.
Andrew: Let me just break it down step by step to understand how you went from idea to where you are today, a company that’s doing so well.
Patrick: Sure.
Andrew: So you know reconfigure your product. Basically starting from scratch. You allow people to see you have a rank on Google search results so they understand where their base line is. Then you give them advice for what to do on the greater Internet like adjusting your link your LinkedIn profile or creating a Dribble profile and you let them create a profile on your account. Bata-bing, Bata-boom, simple easy to understand, it’s time to take this out and get new customers. Where do you get customers in a world where there are so many options? What did you guys do? Buy ads, did you do SEO? What did you do?
Patrick: No, most of it was just…we fell through two channels, word of mouth and occasional [??]. As of now, that’s been the two main drivers.
Andrew: But when you were starting out, word of mouth couldn’t have been enough. You can get enough people to pay attention and go create an account.
Patrick: I wrote an article that did pretty well I think right about…it was in our first month of launching and it’s called how we got 60,000 users in 60 hours. Unexpectedly.
Andrew: Okay. Break it down. What did you do there?
Patrick: So for that, that was kind of interesting. When we did a launch, we got an all right [??] in a few places and then that brought a few thousand people, which was good. It’s a good start with a successful launch. And then something happened, basically, we released the feature that is called “Who’s Googling you feature”.
Andrew: Okay.
Patrick: At the end of our first month, we released about five or six new things. That was one of the one of several features that thought, this one is kind of interesting because I think people really care about this. So I went and I pitched it Mashable and basically said, “Hey, here is something interesting, a lot of people we found are…now they go on interviews, they don’t know how it went. We have a feature that can tell you if that person looks you up”. I gave that to Susan Story [SP] and she wrote about it and it went…we learned a few things…that was a feature that was the number one shared story on Mashable for two days. It was right up there in the featured section. Then all tech crones helping to impose, all these other places started picking up and we were signing up a thousand people an hour for three days.
Andrew: Because of that post on Mashable?
Patrick: And the results, a couple things happened, Mashable picked up and other places picked it up because it was doing so well Mashable.
Andrew: Gotcha.
Patrick: Then I said the [??] recurrent, we found out that for example… Then people were tweeting because we did put some viral loops, it’s not an inherited viral product but you can share your search forum. You can get your [??] we had all these other people writing [??] about it and people sharing it. So it created this snowball effect and we’re suddenly [??].
Andrew: The feature that Mashable featured is the one where your users could see who searched for them and what keywords they used in Google when they were searching for them.
Patrick: And where they came from, right.
Andrew: Where they came from, Twitter vs. Google, that kind of thing?
Patrick: No, but also where they work. If they worked at Citibank or they were at Syracuse University.
Andrew: Yes. I see. Yes, So I’m looking at the screen chat from that article right now. There’s a column for location and you can see Ogilvy & Mather, New York, New York. There’s a source, Google with the keywords Jim Armstrong Portfolio and a date, one day ago and the same thing for Saatchi & Saatchi, Twitter, four days ago. That’s the kind of thing that got them excited enough to write and other people excited enough to create an account and then from there it was covered by others. And when you say you have viral loop, what more did you have? You said that Google score, what else helped you create a viral loop?
Patrick: Like I said, people will only share a good experience, right? So there’s a few things, we let people brag about their accomplishments or recommend new services. So, I’m reading some Tweets that I’m looking at that came. One is, “I just got search floor, I got an A-, can you beat that?” And an added link to the thing. Another one says, “Had a job interview two days ago and got a hit on my BrandYourself from an employer that night and I got the job”. These are actual Tweets people were sending out.
Andrew: Did they write it themselves or did your software do it for them?
Patrick: The second one was written herself.
Andrew: Okay.
Patrick: The first one is…you can just click “share” and it says, I got this, can you beat that?
Andrew: Okay.
Patrick: We tried to make a kind of competition. Another thing people will share is like when something goes up like Hey my…we’ll give them an alert like, Hey you just updated your LinkedIn profile…your LinkedIn profile just went up eight positions. It now a 90% chance, more likely, someone will find it and they will tweet that out. “I just improved my LinkedIn by X amount, check it out”. So stuff like that. We try to empower people to brag…and the second thing is, we have a very good alert system. We tell people if something happens and we really…the most under rated marketing channels is customer service. And what we found out is…we used try to say, hey, you get a free month of premium if you share it. That never worked. What did work is when we just asked, hey, if you’re having a good experience tell someone about it, tell five people about it. You give someone a task like that, that’s when people go sharing it all the time.
Andrew: I see, without incentive, you just say, “If you had a good experience please tell people.”
Patrick: Do us a favor. It made it funny and email just says, we spent our whole marketing budget on coffee or something. And people they…I think it’s different for every product. But to break down that, we learned a few things from that launch when we got those 60 hours. The first was promote one feature at a time and make sure it’s something people care about. Like I said, we released so many things but if I had a pitch that included everything, it would have boring, it would have been hard to read. So instead, I did the one I thought people cared the most about. Like BrandYourself can now tell you what specific companies or employers Google you. Just that, there’s a very short and sweat pitch. Like ditching everything else and focus on one element the story kind of wrote itself and then it was something people shared about.
Second, pitch the right publication to make your announcement. Mashable makes a lot of since, it seems like a lot of people are marketers who use our product or whatever. And then we focused the story on specific people, not your company or product. I didn’t say, hey, you spend all night building this feature, you should write about it. It was a story. I said, “Hey, this guy, I think I used a story of someone we knew was looking for a job that…he went on a job interview, then he noticed someone looked him up and it went quite well so he went and followed up and that was the story that the writers could understand…
Andrew: I see. Instead of pitching a feature, you pitch a problem that someone had and how your feature helps with that problem. Kind of like…go ahead.
Patrick: Yes, and she wrote the article in the same way which is just a more interesting way to think about something. It was focused on the story and the usefulness not like the company or the feature itself.
Andrew: Gotcha. That makes sense. What else?
Patrick: We did something that…why I think if we had gotten so many people because if you ask me we got a lot of customers. The easiest way to get users or customers is to make sure that you’re capitalizing on everybody who sees you. We focus so much on our sign up flow and optimization. When you have a free product like ours that goes in the [??] so I guess someone wants to sign up and try it.
For traffic 8% in the industry is considered pretty damn good. We, for those $60 we have 13% of people who saw any of those things. We had 181,000 visits, 60,000 signups. That’s 30%. If we had settled for 8% that’s 40,000 less signups. And what we did, we spent months perfecting it, making sure it was the easier signup before we started. We tweaked the language until the value proposition was absolutely clear. Again, that’s what I was talking about. The usability test was like . . . You know, just starting up. was everything clear?
What’s happening next, we treat the first two steps . . . Actually we didn’t overwhelm people with too much upfront. We treat the navigation to give them the right amount of information to make a decision without overloading them. We really sat down and said, “If someone is interested in this and they click, we want to make sure they get all the way through.
Andrew: So there’s really no question about what the site is, no question about where they should click, no question about what data they should enter once they click.
Patrick: Yeah and, again, like I said, there’s a 30% conversion rate. We worked our asses off of that and. like I said, if we had settled for 8% to be considered the top of the industry we would have had 20,000 users instead of 60,000 from that push.
Andrew: Now, Patrick, the first version that people were able to sign up for was free with a paid upsell.
Patrick: Yes.
Andrew: And the paid version gave them what?
Patrick: So the process that I described to you before which is the way the product worked you can submit things, build them and submit them or we’ll analyze them and track it and give you steps and make sure they’re optimized. For every user you can do three things on your website or LinkedIn or whatever it is which is perfect for the average person who is just trying to look better.
If you want to do unlimited stuff, then you have a lot to track or promote. Then maybe vary something, then it’s about a hundred bucks a year and you get all of the features too. Your brand and profile maybe shows at number one. You get a custom domain for that instead of [??] And also you get more information, like you see more of LinkedIn. You only see the last three people who looked you up. You can see unlimited data if you’re . . . It’s just small things that push the right people over to click.
Andrew: Okay. And so that was going okay for you. That’s what got you to $25,000 a month, right?
Patrick: Yeah.
Andrew: Let me also say that you guys were really good at getting articles written about you. I don’t want to under emphasize that. There was a Life Hacker article that really featured you nicely. I’m looking at where you’re getting traffic today. You’re still getting traffic today from Mashable, from Productcon, from Ink, from Huffington Post, from AdWeek, right?
I still see that you guys are good at getting your stuff explained to the media. That’s great. What made you say, “We need to adjust this great, very well working product.”
Patrick: Well, there was just a lot of . . . It was just naturally happening. So what was happening we thought we were doing really good at hitting the young professional, a piece of the world. I want to put my best performance forward, and I want a product that helps me do that. We saw that we were casting a really wide shadow. We were signing up a lot of people through the free product. People trying it out. And when we started getting a lot of people who generally fit into our competitor’s category, right?
They’re high profile people in their field, whether business or politics or entertainment, people who do well. They’re a little bit higher profile and/or they have a specific issue, right? Once we get into it, I have a pretty big issue, and they were coming to us. And what was happening because with our competitors they gave us a shitload of money up front. Don’t worry about what we do. We need the money to . . . I’m not sure how they hear about us, from an article or the press. They sign up, oh, this is great. They have such a good experience out of this. It works, the customer’s [??] great, but can you do this for me?
Andrew: I see. I’m a politician, I’m not a software guy. I don’t even want to spend time tweeting for myself and you over a brand tell me I have to protect my own reputation for myself. Do it for me, take my money.
Patrick: You’re jumping into LinkedIn [??]. I don’t want to do it. I get it. I understand it now. I understand it was an educational product. I understand you need to get something removed. I understand you don’t understand how this product works. I’m not going to do it.
Andrew: How did you find out that people were feeling this way?
Patrick: We have our number. You can call it. We have our number. We were always very good at customer support. They would just call us. They would be like, “Hey, guys.” It used to be my phone number. We definitely hired a whole customer support. We have people whose only job is to answer the phone. The original purpose of that was to just support problems, like we want someone. We wanted to make sure that people got the most out of the product because we had learned that if you start using the product and you have at least get over that hump of understanding it because it’s still a complicated thing, SEO, right? You would end up becoming a customer. So we just had a phone line, you could call our number, we had a support guy who answers the phone. We encouraged people to call.
Our e-mails, we check in with people, you literally just get an e-mail that just goes out a day like 9:00. I’m [??], just making sure you didn’t have any questions. My job is to make sure you understand the product, let me know if you want to jump on a call. We just encourage people to contact us, and through that we were just getting a bunch of people saying can you do this for me.
At first we were really resistant because [??] software, I don’t want to make build that stuff, that’s what our competitors do. We even went to the point of we even met with our competitors, all the big guys they were paying $10,000 for a customer, because they have this heavy acquisition model. We’ve got the best leads, these are people who are self-selected. We went out there, they wanted the leads, but when you saw what they were doing, they did such a crappy job with the service. We were never comfortable with giving it to them so we kind of had to make a decision. Do we want to do it, instead of giving it to our competitors and turning these people away [??] do it ourselves.
And I realized after I stopped just blindly thinking I didn’t want to do any sort of service. I was like we can actually do a much better job, a much more effective job, a much more higher-quality job at still a much lower price because our product naturally lowers our costs for acquisition. We don’t have all those costs.
Andrew: you don’t have to pay 10,000 bucks per new customer the way others do. Because they’re coming into you as a free product, so you don’t have to charge $20,000 per customer the way they might.
Patrick: Exactly. And the technology generally makes it so much more efficient anyway. So I was like we can do a much better job. So then we started deciding maybe we should experiment with offering what we called the concierge service. So [??] the business model we cast a really wide net of here for the free product, and we’ve gotten really, really good at pushing people towards either paid features or paid services depending on what they need.
And why we get really good at it because we literally like harass you to call us. Call us please, tell us what you need, and just explain it, all you need is our paid feature, pay us a hundred bucks a year, use a good strategy, call us if you need help. Or maybe you do need the concierge service, we started experimenting with that.
Andrew: By the way I’m looking at… I typed in one of your competitors name and the word costs just get a sense of what the cost is. I didn’t realize they were charging 25,000, and I don’t think they do. I think 25 is on the high-end, but here’s what came up instead of their page with their price list, you can do it yourself.
Type in your competitor’s name with the word cost. And here’s the first result that came up. They have an exorbitant fee of $5000 to “blast any negative content off the Internet.” however, all they do is provide additional webpages with noise that clutter the Internet. their work does not impact search engine and search engine optimization. Sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing, all create suggested searches that’s include negative content and this company does nothing to address it, and so on. So, interesting that I couldn’t even come up with the price list for them because they hide it and because they’re not managing their own search results.
Patrick: Here’s the issue they superficially change the way they talk about their pricing because of us. Twenty-five thousand is not on the high-end. They have these bait and switches, what they’ll say is well it’s only $5000, per month, but maybe you only need a month which is crazy.
You can’t do anything in a month, they’ll trick you. If you really break it down their whole cost model they’re going to have to charge you a minimum of 5000, and you can’t fix something with someone willing to excited about when pay what do you think they’re going to fix in anything less than a year.
Andrew: I see, and that’s what you are excited about when we talked at Launch Fest, that conference that I mentioned at the top of the interview. you said Andrew, we finally decided to do a concierge service. This was a few months ago, it’s taking off and now is even further ahead. You guys charge on a monthly basis.
Patrick: We do.
Andrew: You do. Why monthly as opposed to annual?
Patrick: Well, they’re year contracts.
Andrew: I see.
Patrick: So you can get a discount if you pay it all up front or you pay us monthly. The reason is, so the average contract is about $5000 a year. The way we say it the 12th of what our competitors will charge you, because yes were doing it per month but at least we tell them, this is a long-term thing. Anyone telling you that they can get this done in a month or two you’re going to be out of money.
And we say will put our money where our mouth is, said we won’t charge all at once m will spread across 12 months if you want but you have to contractually be on for 12 months just so you know. It’s important because…
Andrew: Why charge so much, Patrick, if really all you’re saying that people needed help with was creating a LinkedIn profile, because they didn’t want to do it. Creating a Dribble account if they don’t want to do that. Actually I don’t imagine people who need a dribble account and are really worthy of one are creating it. But I get how it’s true for the other services. It doesn’t seem like it’s that much, couldn’t someone just hire a kid from high school and say, look create all these accounts for me?
Patrick: Yeah, the issue is just the people who are going to concierge is are generally someone is who has an issue, right. There’s something on the first page they don’t like.
Andrew: I see.
Patrick: It usually ranges from it’s like I’m a well-known professional. My college buddies came into town for alumni weekend. I don’t know, the next thing I know I’m getting cuffed for drunk and disorderly. Everything was dropped, but there’s a mug shot on me. It was stupid, it’s the very first thing. This is so embarrassing.
Andrew: So what do you do about that?
Patrick: It’s the same process, [??] Concierge is. You can just create LinkedIn, a dribble website and say now it’s done. You’re going to have to put a lot of work into this. You’re going to really have to make this more relevant, which means every month. [??] build all the properties right, and maybe Andrew, let’s say, Andrew what happened. Andrew you have to fire someone on your team because they were really doing a bad job. You know what they did they went in and wrote an article all about you on their blog that said Andrews a piece of sh**.
You’re like what do I do. You’re a regular guy, all right, Andrew. We’re going to have to build a lot of stuff first. I’m going to build you two websites. One all about your work at Mixergy, another site all about your philanthropy. One of them about your passion for whatever, New York sports. They all have to be really unique right. Because if they are the same and they’re not really valuable Google is going to know that. Google is pretty smart now.
Second I’m going to build you all the profiles you [??] I’m going to fix the ones you have. That’s a good start, but month-over-month they’re not going to all out rank that Tumbler page about that person, or whatever, the Huffington Post tell all. So what we’re going to need to do is every month your rep is adding, I’m adding new blog posts to this site. I’m adding more presentations. I’m putting videos up on your YouTube. I’m actually creating content.
Andrew: How does a rep at your company, at Brand Yourself put up a YouTube video for me?
Patrick: Because we [??] the properties and we have access to all of your stuff.
Andrew: Oh, so it’s not necessarily with me in the video, it’s…
Patrick: Oh no. I mean we might… For example the slideshow or the video. We might say, all right Andrew let me get with your client. We have this guy was like a big finance guy right. So we have a whole thing about finance like personal wealth management. They made a presentation about it right. Made a really good PowerPoint presentation, what you should do with your first $10,000 you ever saved. It’s a great presentation, you put it up on slide share, then we may make a video about that. Like, let’s turn this into a video, I’ll put that on your YouTube page.
Andrew: Who creates the original presentation that thing gets re-purposed so many times?
Patrick: The rep.
Andrew: Oh, so the rep created from scratch. I see, so you basically hiring a content creation company in addition to a reputation management company. That’s why you don’t want a high school kid to start.
Patrick: And the issue is, with our competitors back in the day, you used to be able to, and this is where and you kind of read about that result is. Hey we just outsourced. What they’ll do is outsource it to someone in the Philippines to build Andrew 100 profiles. It’s the same bio written over and over again.
The problem is Google is so good now, especially in the last two years that nobody [??] nobody is seeing sh**y content, it’s not going to [??]. It has to actually be good. So we hire people, our whole company is filled with people who are really good and say Andrew, I’m going to talk to you, I’m going to figure out how to position you. I’m going to write really good content for you. I’m going to make sure it’s structured. Your hiring expertise for someone to write content, that’s what we tell people.
Every sales call, if you thinking about calling Concierge, we tell them don’t let anybody including us tell you that you can’t do this yourself. Here’s exactly what we’re going to do, here’s what your rep is going to…
Andrew: … Mixergy course where you taught everyone exactly what to do if they wanted to do it themselves.
Patrick: Oh yeah, and you know what? Use our product to make it easier to manage. It’s 100 bucks a year, it’s a no-brainer. But, in your case and this is why people use Concierge is, if you’re really going to do it, you’re going to have to put a lot of work into this. You’re going to have to update these things every single month with very good content. Things that people will share, things that actually make sense, and that’s what you can pay us to do. We’re the best at it, and we’re not going to overcharge you. So that’s what you’re paying for. If you don’t want to pay for that that’s great, do-it-yourself, will literally write this down for you. We’ll e-mail it to you, you can do it yourself, use our product, call us if you have any issues.
Andrew: you know what I like about the way you speak is. I don’t know if anyone in the audience noticed it but there are few times where you wanted to explain something, and you pause for a second trying to come up with a specific example from one of your users and if you couldn’t do it on the fly you’d come up with a hypothetical, but you always want to keep including examples. Which makes things so much easier for people to understand. You told April Dykeman in the pre-interview. You know your advantage as a company and you build on that to become even more unique. What does that mean?
Patrick: So that is what I said like we resisted to trying this, but the advantages we had I was like. I was like, these people do want it, they want a service. Our advantage is I realized that because of our product which our competitors don’t have, the product is a huge customer file for this service. I go. “No one else has that.” I go, “Because of that we can keep things cheaper and hire quality.” That means I don’t have to outsource the contact creation. I can hire these people in. So that is maybe we should build our products and build on top of it.
The fact that we don’t have to make lots and lots of money to get someone to us means we don’t have those costs. So we really did all these incentives, saying, “We really did have all these advantages. We really did want to hit our competitors where it hurts. We really did want to do what they do but cheaper and better because of those advantages.”
So our product is still refocusing every day to make sure we get people into the door and really, really educated on what it is that we offer, and then we, like I said, you can’t walk into any of our competitors and see . . . we have over 50 people and all they’re good at is talking to people and figuring out how to have really good sites and have really good blog posts, making really good presentations, make really good videos on behalf of people and we’re able to do that and no one else is. So we’re taking advantage of that.
Andrew: I understand how this works. This is something that I saw that I can’t figure out. I’m going to one of my fan’s About Me page. It’s About.Me/BradMills. On the bottom is a series of links, Facebook, Twitter, SlightlySocial.com, et cetera. And then below that it’s BradMills.BrandYourself.com. But when I click on BradMills.BrandYourself.com I get taken right back to the same About Me Page.
Patrick: It seems like you just put the wrong link in there.
Andrew: It seems like a few people have done that. Did you guys hear automatically this is it and SkypeChat will pop it over to you so you can . . .
Patrick: Yeah, I’m looking at it.
Andrew: And can he even redirect? Let me see if I hyperlink . . .No, if I hyperlink it really is. If you even go to BradMills.BrandYourself.com as far as I can tell you’re automatically redirected to back to About.Me/BradMills> How can you even do that with your service?
Patrick: That’s a very good question actually.
Andrew: And I have a handful of other people who do that and you know what? I wonder what’s going on is you guys get a lot of traffic from About Me. I wonder if About Me is automatically redirecting your traffic back to them to keep you from taking their traffic.
Patrick: Yeah, this is actually . . . I’m glad you brought this up.
Andrew: Did I just send you another person? Let me see. Tom, I accidentally sent you the same person. I thought maybe you guys have some kind of partnership with them.
Patrick: No, nothing official. We do have, like I said, a lot of people who signed up . . .
Andrew: I can’t within the interview. It’s hard for me to do it, but if you go to another guy About.Me/Eviloto. By the time this is up this could be changed.
Patrick: Yeah. I see it.
Andrew: Right? So it’s not you guys doing it. You do get a lot of traffic from About Me because you create About Me pages for people and you link to them.
Patrick: Yeah.
Andrew: And they link back to you.
Patrick: Yeah. this is really interesting. I’m not 100% sure why that’s happened.
Andrew: Do I have my understanding right? Oh look at that. Even Tviotolo.BrandYourself.com shows a 404 error.
Patrick: I’m seeing his BrandYourself profile too though.
Andrew: Maybe I have it typed in wrong. So what are you guys doing with About Me?
Patrick: Nothing, nothing official.
Andrew: I see you have a bunch of traffic.
Patrick: And we recommend a lot of people, like one of our recommended things is the software or on the concierge level regardless because it’s the same concept is I need more content. Well, we said, “Yeah, we haven’t build that About Me yet. It’s about About Me. So we said a lot of people . . .
Andrew: Do you automatically create About Me pages for people?
Patrick: What do you mean by automatic?
Andrew: I mean, does your software do it or does a human being do it?
Patrick: No, we’re very against conceptually other than using our software. Other than using our software, you have to build it. We’ll help you analyze it, tell you what’s wrong with it, and what could be better about it. But we don’t do that because . . .
Andrew: You want me to sit and type it in. Gotcha. Okay.
Patrick: . . . because if you start entering the territory of auto building profiles Google hates it, and they get really smart at telling it, like the thing is it’s not about creating content. If you use the same bio and put it into About Me link. Google realizes there’s no reason. Think about it from a user’s perspective, Andrew. If you’re looking for me, why do you need to find five places that are all the same exact information, right? That’s not so. You can bring it in. So that’s when the software and the service really emphasize why you need that touch.
If they’re not independently valuable because they’re about a different part of you and they’re not going to wreck, especially if they’re going to have to beat up on you while you’re there.
Andrew: I see. I didn’t realize that. Okay, what about this other thing? It seems like people use your site to link to the Oscars, to link to watching the movie Frozen online. Which then gives you more traffic when people type in a search like watch Frozen or watch the movie 300 they end up with a brandyourself.com page which links out the content that shouldn’t, so you’re not hosting it, but you’re still getting a Google bump for that.
Patrick: Yeah, that happens, but like I said it’s kind of like anything, so we have a lot of people using Brand Yourself, so people use it in different ways. It’s kind of like people use it for stuff like that and sometimes we’ll get traffic from it, but that’s all. All you could do with us is it just allows you to build a profile and fill out information. We can’t monitor what everybody is doing with the profile.
Andrew: Okay. I got that from just looking at search queries that are going to your site. There’s brand yourself, of course, brand yourself is two words, of course. There’s watch Frozen online, there’s watch 300 Rise of an Empire online free, 300 Rise of an Empire Megashare, watch Frozen online free, watch Endless Love online, Frozen has got to be really big, Dr. Steve Bradshaw global health policy that’s in there too, Endless Love
Megashare.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s interesting because…
Andrew: Wolf of Wall Street, Megashare.
Patrick: This is actually a good example of what I would call what is called garbage traffic. For example, people started using our profiles, because they rank so well, to do stuff like this and the issue is we started seeing like spikes in traffic that just don’t convert because someone that is going to watch Frozen online wasn’t looking to help their search results. You know?
Andrew: I see, and you do seem to kill those pages actually from what I see. When I click on…
Patrick: Yeah, we do our best to kill those when we find them. The easiest way to find them if they slip through our cracks is like you said, if we see a spike in traffic from something weird we try to, because again, it’s just bad business in the sense of, someone that is trying to watch Frozen online [laughter] isn’t trying to sign up for Brand Yourself so it’s like [??] traffic, but what you’re seeing is just our profiles rank really well for people. People figured that out and said well maybe it’ll rank really high so they’ll sell a link to, you know what I mean, and so people use them for them for things they’re not supposed to use them for sometimes.
And, you know, they’re against our terms of service, but as you see they slip through the cracks. Because they are so effective at ranking people are using them for that stuff.
Andrew: So then they use it to get traffic for whatever it is that they are doing and I see, for example, I did a search since Megashare seems to have sent you a bunch of traffic as a keyword. I did a search for Megashare site: Brandyourself.com and I came up with watch 21 Jump Street, Huntress Punjabi and Rise of an Empire and when I clicked on all three of those not one of them was still up. You guys killed them.
Patrick: Yeah, we try to remove them as soon as we find them.
Andrew: Though at the very top of the page there’s still that bar that says this is Brand Yourself profile it’s automatically optimized to show up in Google, click here to create your own profile. So that’s one of the ways that you guys are viral. If someone creates a page, this is one way that you get their viewers to consider to create a page for themselves too.
Patrick: Oh yeah. We have, and if you’re a paid member that banner goes away so it’s another feature.
Andrew: I see. Okay.
Patrick: Yeah. We get tons off signups from that. Like I said if you find the little viral loops that you think you can have and it’s really high quality traffic. People that come from those sign up at like 45% rate. So it’s a bunch of places sending a little bit of traffic each. So, that helps a lot.
Andrew: What about this, on the bottom of Brandyourself.com I see want to become a partner? You’ll be in great company and you’re showing me the University of Rochester, xxx University, John Hopkins University, Syracuse University, and others. What are these partnerships about?
Patrick: So, the university ones, for example, I’m trying to pull up the page myself, the universities definitely pay for premium subscriptions for their students. Some of them do it for graduated kids. It’s basically, it’s not enough to have them go to career services and work on their interview skills and make sure their resumes are professional. They need to clean up their online act, so they buy them on behalf of those and those are most of our partnerships. We had thought for a while that partnerships were going to be a good way for us to reach people, but we really just focus on our direct.
Aside from those universities, we thought in the beginning that there would be affiliates of people, but we’ve learned that it’s better when we just do it ourselves.
Andrew: I really thought that, that would have been a huge thing for you guys too. If you got schools on board and they were paying for all their students that would be good. Job boards, and then you also say affiliates can sign up too, but that’s not working that well for you.
Patrick: Yeah and what we’ve learned is the problem with college kids is college kids just don’t give a shit. Like we get it, I can talk to a group of college kids and it’s like yeah, that makes sense, but anyway I’ve got to finish my paper and then I’ve got to go get drunk at night and then I got a final. And you know frogs in a pond see frogs in a pond. You take that same kid a year out of school and he’s on LinkedIn. So college just really isn’t the best market for us because even, you know, we’ll probably pursue it again in the future. Like all those deals come to us, but even you see it’s like not a lot of kids utilize it as you think because again, you talk to them like yep, that makes sense. But until they’re out in the job market they realize they’re getting looked up and they’re finally caring about it, then all of the sudden they’re really, really active on it. We found that like young professional or just professionally minded people and most college kids are just not professionally minded yet.
Andrew: That makes sense. I think most of your people are- where is it. Similar web said that you send more traffic to LinkedIn.com than any other website including to Google and Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr.
Patrick: And what software are you using right now?
Andrew: Oh, I’m using a bunch of different things. Similar web, I’ve got the pro version of it, which is fantastic for seeing key words. I’m using WhatRunsWhere to see your ads, but you don’t seem to be buying that many ads.
Patrick: We just do retargeting. We don’t actively buy ads, we just retarget.
Andrew: Is a retarget ad that you’re running what happens in Vegas stays in Google- protect yourself today?
Patrick: It could be.
Andrew: That’s one of the copies. That’s really cool. All right yeah, so I guess it looks like my research is pretty decent, huh? I get a lot of guests actually who at the end of an interview say, “Wait a minute. Hang on a second, what did you do?”
Patrick: Yeah, I want to talk to you afterwards. I was like you’re getting really interesting data. I’d love to know what you’re using.
Andrew: Oh yeah, I’d love to show it to you. All right, why don’t I end with one more question, but before I do, I want to tell people that there are a couple of things that they can do if they want to follow up. First of all, I love doing these interviews and one of the things I started doing this year is teaching others how to do interviews on a site that by the time this interview is up will be up and available for you. It’s called interviewyourheros.com where there’s a community there were somebody asked me, how do you do your research? And I broke down my whole process where I find out how they buy these other domains that- actually, here’s something Patrick that I did a search on and I found this company that was really quiet and seemed like they were all really nicey-nice with their competition. I did a search and they own their competitor’s name with the name sucks.com at the end of it. So as much as they want to come across as really nice, they own their competitors hate site.
Patrick: It’s a smart move. I mean maybe even if you’re not using, you know…
Andrew: Totally. I’m not putting them down and that’s why I’m not even going to reveal their name but I’ll say that the research helps me do a better interview. So does doing pre-interviews, so does knowing the structure of the story and how to find guests, how to find guest’s email addresses, all that we teach at InterviewYourHeroes. I’ve got a handful of people that are already in there and I’m working with them directly. If you want to learn a little bit about how to do interviews, check out interviewyourheros.com. Also, Patrick did a course here on Mixergy where he talks about how to protect your reputation. If you’re a premium member, I urge you to take a look at it. It’s at MixergyPremium.com. Go check it out. And if you’re not, you should sign up for MixergyPremium. We have so many interviews and courses that are now just available for Premium members. Go to MixergyPremium.com. I guarantee you’ll love it. All right, finally question and then offline I’ll answer anything you want, but actually, do you want to just ask online about this or would you rather ask offline?
Patrick: I don’t mind asking online.
Andrew: Where I get my stuff?
Patrick: Yeah.
Andrew: Here are the big things that work for me: WhatRunsWhere to see what ads people are buying, Pro.Similarweb.com to get a sense of where your traffic is coming from and where the traffic is going. There is a site that just stopped working that I need to find a replacement for that allows me to see based on your email address that you register your domain, what other domains you use and if not that, also based on the IP address. Those are the big ones.
Patrick: Wow, yeah. I mean, I think the similar web one is really interesting.
Andrew: SimilarWeb is fantastic. I would love for them to just add one more thing for me and I should talk to them about that. They even show you where people go on your competitor’s sites. From what I understand, people go to SimilarWeb to see which affiliates their competition are using as a way of kind of picking off the top affiliates. But the only feature that I don’t have turned on is the popular pages, which allows me to see where deep within your site you’re getting the most activity. For most people, it’s not their home page, it’s some landing page that they secretly send traffic to. I can’t see that. I do see subdomains, for example. Anyway, all kinds of cool stuff there. Alright, final question is this. Actually, I should say thank you to Noam Schwartz [SP] for introducing me to all the features of SimilarWeb and how it works, and how I can find all kinds of data. He sold his company to SimilarWeb and he came here to my office and he said, let me teach you how to do some deep research.
Andrew: What about this? Eric Ries’s book, “Lean Startup,” talks about starting out with a concierge minimum viable product. You told April in the pre-interview, you know what? Doing a concierge service at first wouldn’t have been as effective as starting off with software and then creating the concierge service. Why is that?
Patrick: Well, what we wouldn’t have been able to do, like I said, we wouldn’t be able to have the concierge service because we would have to charge what our competitors are charging. Because we’d have to get the customers. The product is great. I mean, it makes money. And we have lots and lots and lots of people using that but what it did was we were grabbing so many people in the market and because of that very reason, we were able to do something better than anyone else in the market because the cost requisition was non-existent, whereas it’s the biggest cost our competitors have, which allows us to provide the service at a much higher quality. So we wouldn’t have been able to do that. We would have been just like any other reputation shop, which means we constantly figure out how to cut costs, get customers, cut costs, get customers, cut costs, get customers.
For us, we get to say, hey, Andrew, you don’t need concierge because it’s not magic, go do it yourself for a hundred bucks. It also allows them their grant [??], because we’re not sell, sell, sell. Like our sales guides, we don’t even call them sales guides because if someone calls in half the time we tell them, you just don’t understand enough. It would be stupid for you to pay us 300 bucks a month. I say, all you need to do is this. Or we can say, alright, this is what we’re going to do. You probably should [??], it’s going to be a lot of work. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s going to take. We can be honest and we can do a really good job, and that’s because our product brings people in which allows us to get the people and it makes us more efficient, and it allows us to have an alternative, whereas I don’t need you to pay me $25,000 because I’m profitable if you just pay me a hundred bucks, as long as you’re doing what you need to do.
Andrew: That makes sense, right? I didn’t realize how big a component of the product of the business plan is customer acquisition costs. And [??] software that reduces that dramatically and you can do everything else at a more efficient, in a much more competitive way. All right, Patrick, this has been a great interview. I’m so glad that we ran into each other. I’ve got to thank Jason Calacanis for reconnecting us and for everyone who’s out there, if you got anything of value find a way to say thank you to Patrick. I always suggest that that’s a good way to get connected with a guest, to start off by saying thank you, and I’m going to do it right now. Patrick of brandyourself.com, thanks so much for doing this interview.
Patrick: Thank you so much for having me. I always have a great time.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye, guys!
