Growing two bootstrapped startups by being a good online citizen with Jesse Hanley (Bento and TalentTree)

In this episode, Jesse Hanley (Bento and TalentTree) talks about:

  • Building startups to solve his own problems as an agency owner and a marketer
  • How bootstrapping is not inferior to having external funding
  • Relying on personal network and Twitter to grow both his startups
  • Focusing on being a good online neighbour and building personal relationships with all his clients
  • Building a B2B SaaS product successfully while completely bootstrapped
  • How de-risking his businesses and learning how to turn capital into cashflow helped him remain bootstrapped
  • Not fussing over perfection and instead focusing on putting your work out there for people to see and give feedback
  • Enjoying the journey of business building rather than being overly focused on just long term KPI’s
  • Friendship as a metric of success

Podcast information:

About the guest

Jesse Hanley is the founder of Bento and TalentTree. He started his entrepreneurship journey as a marketing consultant and then started TalentTree as a way to solve his own needs for great content writing. Bento is a marketing automation SaaS business that he started because he could not find a great alternative in the market.

Find him here:
Twitter: @jessethanley

 

Books, tools, people, frameworks mentioned in this episode:

Jesse Hanley 0:00
people follow people for advice. And they also want to buy off other people versus brands. When I bought Basecamp for a company, and we’re paid every single month for the last maybe five or six years, it’s because I like DHHS stuff and Jason freed I’ve like read his books and all that I’m too bored him, I’m too bored and I followed you I like want to eat at that restaurant. I don’t want to eat at Asana. I want to eat. Like, you know, all those other tools I just want to eat at Basecamp.

Ricky Willianto 0:28
That was Jesse Hanley, the founder of Bento. Talking about Basecamp’s founders DHH and Jason Fried, and why being a good online citizen pays off. Jesse built both his startups on the back of having a positive social media presence and developing great personal relationships with all of his clients. In this episode of growth multiplier, he talks about the importance of a high quality client base his journey with bootstrapping, and why is chosen to build calm but steady businesses. My name is Ricky Willianto, co founder of Ravenry and the host of the Growth Multiplier podcast. Through this podcast, I hope to uncover the pathways startups and companies have taken in their journey of growth, share some stories from the trenches, and hopefully identify patterns and hacks that can be replicated by businesses in Asia and the rest of the world. I hope you enjoy the show.

Hey, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us today. A quick intro about Jesse. Jesse is a serial entrepreneur who’s known for two companies is what on TalentTree and Bento. And he’s an experienced marketer with a penchant to building his own solutions that solve his own pain points. And he started a company called TalentTree a while ago to help people find quality content writers. And in the process, he’s also built another company in parallel called Bento a marketing automation platform. Currently, he is living in Japan. And he’s found a way as well to build a business around, you know, remote teams all around the world. So thanks so much for joining us, Jesse.

Jesse Hanley 1:56
Hey, Ricky, it’s fun to be on here.

Ricky Willianto 1:59
Yeah, before we get going, I think it’s unfair if it’s only me, who’s introduced yourself. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re working on right now?

Jesse Hanley 2:08
Yeah, sure, I always find this a little bit tricky where to start, but I can kind of go through my day to day. And I think that’s generally helpful to like, kind of explain the stuff that I’m kind of focused on this year. So most days, I kind of wake up and I talk to customers on the venture side. So within two, we run a marketing automation and tracking tool, kind of similar to customer IO, or drip, so people can send emails and SMS. But we’ve also got chat, and pretty advanced tracking, people use it to verify the ad campaigns and blog attribution and that kind of stuff. So I spent a fair bit of time helping customers there. I also do a lot of the code on the Bento side, which is fun. And that business started originally, kind of like what you mentioned, solving my own problems. So bento initially started as a way that I could like personalise websites for consulting clients that I was working with. And then over time, I just kind of kept adding features hide, some developers got them to add more features. And the tools kind of come a really long way. And now he’s getting a lot of my focus. So that’s that side of things. And then in the afternoons when other team in Eastern Europe, pops online, I generally talk and sync with them will get a pretty large team, or based in Macedonia got a couple of people in like Croatia and Serbia, but majority of the teams in Macedonia. And yeah, that business is super unique, and now kind of runs fully by itself. I really just check in and do sales. And just to clarify

Ricky Willianto 3:28
that is that is talent tree. Yeah.

Jesse Hanley 3:30
Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. So talent tree, like you mentioned was also started because I kind of had a need. So talent tree originally was actually a way that I could help my friends build up their writing teams. So while I was running my agency, I also had a lot of affiliate sites and publishing sites. And I would deploy my kind of writers on my projects, my friends would say that and they would go cool, like, seems like you got your head on together. And you know how to like run teams, I keep buying kind of one off pieces. Like I would like to get someone full time in my company. And what I would do is I go, I will like, I reckon I can find somebody Macedonia for you. And so we would ask around, we would hire I would, I would then hide them from my friends. But then my friends would kind of like, not do a fantastic job at it. They weren’t really good project managers, and they weren’t really good at kind of just keeping everything going. And so I was like, well just pay me a little bit extra. And my management team will look after you. And then over the past two years, yeah, that business has blown up. So it’s now outside of my friend and my personal network. And we’ve now got a hardener over like, maybe 40 ish writers that are writing kind of like full time for clients. And so yeah, it’s it’s good fun. It’s a it’s a killer business. And again, yeah, it’s mostly run by Anastasia and Anna, and I just sell and make them hire more writers. It’s kind of a fun business.

Ricky Willianto 4:54
That’s awesome. Tell us a bit about like how you built the business into a remote business. I think both of your businesses better Intel entry are relying on remote teams. Right? Tell us a little bit about how you got into, like, you know, tapping into these resources and these talents.

Jesse Hanley 5:08
Yeah. So early on prior to going kind of my own route I worked in the supplement industry in Australia is very much like a, you know, in person business. I went to the office, we’re based in Canberra, in Australia. And towards the end of kind of my career that I negotiated, remote agreement, I’d read the four hour workweek, like a lot of people have. And I just kind of like got the bug. And so I went to my boss, and I was like, hey, like, I would like to work remotely. And he’s like, What are you talking about? Like, it doesn’t make any sense. And I was like, No, no, I like I can pull it off, like, let me show you. So I packed my bags, and I flew to Thailand. And then cutting a long origin story short, I basically kept travelling, I picked up all the clients and kind of just started remote first. And then as I was kind of adding consulting clients on, it started to look more like an agency. I had a guy in New York that was working for me, I had someone in the Netherlands working for me. But the margins weren’t necessarily strong in those regions. And so I started looking at other regions, I had been burned previously by hiring in places like India and in the Philippines. So I just wanted to try something new. So I try to Eastern Europe. And yeah, my first two employees that are still with me today, and then kind of scaled that up. So the company is kind of like ever since because I was travelling so much. It was remote first in the beginning, and it just felt natural to me. We just, I enjoyed talking online, I enjoyed doing everything async I like the idea that I could write something in my evening, go to sleep, wake up and have like a conclusion to that loop that I just created. That stuff was that stuff was nice. And I always thought was an advantage. And the team that I’ve hired have tend to have personalities that have suited that so Anastasia Anna, like, they don’t really want to talk to me. Like, then like, we love talking to each other. But it’s not generally as productive as like what we can do in async. Like, generally, Anastasia will write me like a long form message. And then I’ll just read it and then be like, Alright, this is what we’re doing ABC and then we’ll just get on with it. And so that communication styles also work good. And then on the development side for bento, one of my main devs coloured he’s in Bangkok. He’s a French guy. And he, yeah, he’s, he loves it, too. He loves Bangkok, his girlfriend’s there, he loves the food there, the cost of living like I pay him a pretty reasonable salary, and the cost of living in Bangkok is very affordable. So he’s pocketing a lot of money. And yeah, we just talk on slack and occasionally get on coal screenshare. But I didn’t think the person would be like, advantageous to either of the companies. And if anything would probably be like, a massive distraction. So yeah, I don’t know, ask the question. bit long winded? No, no,

Ricky Willianto 7:47
no, you did it. Yeah. No, I don’t think I can see your perspective. Because we at Ravenry are very reliant on remote teams. We’ve built teams all around the world. So we do see a huge benefits in asynchronous communication. I think sometimes it does get a little bit winded by having back to back meetings. So having a chance for people to process information in separate time zones and getting them to come up with a decision, you know, without us being in the same room as them definitely is a game changer, I would say. And it’s just getting easier nowadays to do that.

Jesse Hanley 8:16
Yeah, yeah. And also, like, it does take some people, I think some time, like, we have a couple of clients that I think are really, you know, they they do need a lot of meetings to get going. And there’s almost like training that has to go on to get people to be async first, and even like little behavioural things, right? Like, you know, if you message someone don’t just write Hey, smiley face, like, you know, actually, right? Hey, smiley face, and then asked your questions, then the person when they get that can respond, instead of being anxious about what the question was replying, playing that kind of game. So this little bit of training that goes on on the client side, because not everyone works like us. But yeah, kind of using good tools like Basecamp, mainly Basecamp has actually been really useful for us, and has been good because the tool kind of encourages asynchronous communication first, and like long form StG and, and all that kind of stuff. And I think that’s, that’s super helpful. I think tools like slack and all that can be useful, but can also be overwhelming. Like we use slack for bento, but we use Basecamp for the agency. And I’m very happy that we do that. Or you know, with the Ravenry you’ve got your platform. And I think that’s probably better for content, writing and producing that kind of stuff versus trying to get that done on slack like creators kind of need time to breathe to actually develop their best work. And if you don’t provide them with that headspace, they’ll just kind of create trash will be overwhelmed.

Ricky Willianto 9:42
Yeah, I mean, like we are very, very much inspired by Basecamp as well. I think they are like the philosophers of hard working and asynchronous communication. So I’m glad you mentioned that company. We tried Basecamp at Ravenry and we’re using Slack right now. So we’ve tried both and yeah, I think like it, it really depends on what kind of culture you want to build in the In the company, and also the kind of people you have, right. So again, like, I’m glad to hear that you’ve kind of like managed to make it work with, you know, both tools in two different two very different contexts. So, I understand that you started talent tree as kind of like a consulting agency business. And somehow you’ve managed to turn this into kind of like an engine that call it runs almost on its own. And you’ve been able to grow it pretty healthily as well. Tell us a bit about that transition, you know, like from, you know, a solo, you know, solopreneur, or kind of trying to run everything and get everything done and recruiting these people and managing them to kind of like building this. How, how big is the talent tree team right now? How many writers do you have?

Jesse Hanley 10:37
40 plus 40? Yeah,

Ricky Willianto 10:38
how do you get there? How do you get there? And how have you managed certainly skill internally the processes and also like your, from a sales perspective, as well? How have you managed to grow the business?

Jesse Hanley 10:47
Yeah, so it’s, it’s a long Yeah, so it’s, it’s a bit of a long story, but I kind of like summarise the the journey through it. So I think like most people, like when you do leave full time employment, I had a bit of money saved up. And I think the easiest route to just keep cash flow going. Whilst I was travelling as an employed person, I my expenses were pretty high, I was getting paid, very high salary for a young lad. And I was living in hotels and stuff and knowing like, I didn’t want that to stop. So I was like, okay, cool way to get cash in the doors to consult, because I can charge a retainer. And so even with like four or five retainer clients, you know, it’s providing like anywhere from eight to 12 grand a month, you know, just do marketing stuff, and helping brands, ecommerce brands, SAS companies, that’s how I started. And then you get to the point where you’re like, Okay, I’m stressed, I need some more help. So then you hire like an assistant. And then that assistant goes to an assistant Plus, you know, another person, maybe someone running ads. So someone, right doing your SEO, so I’m wondering the ads, and then before you know it, you kind of have a full service agency. I push that to the point where I think it was around like, maybe 30 to 40 K, a month. And it was very stressful. And I was also going like, Where are my margins, because like I was, salaries are expensive. And I was not finding like I had a lot of cash flow, but I wasn’t having a lot of profit. And I was like, there’s something wrong here. And then when I took the other agency owners, they kind of also had the same issue. They were like, I don’t know where my money’s going. But it’s all coming in. But I don’t know where it’s going. And then when you lose a large client, the cash flow dips, and then you actually go, oh, wow, like, I just have lean margins. And so I got to a critical point where I was like, Alright, how do I restructure the company in a way that I can move forward and have a profitable business, and that business ended up looking like talent tree, and it was a lot of conversations, a lot of going into, like, you know, my old man for advice, just trying to work out, like, what is the business that I want to build? And what’s a business that will be a good vehicle for where I want to go. And the things that I knew was true was I wanted a software company, I wanted a physical company. So like a co working space that I actually want to open in Japan, and I wanted to continue running my publishing websites, but the agency was too draining for me to focus on any of these other businesses. And so yeah, things had to change. So I ended up doing a luxury structure, which included finding my employees, new jobs, so I found every employee a new job, let them go and then built from the ground up again, with how many

Ricky Willianto 13:26
how many people do you have at that point in time?

Jesse Hanley 13:29
I don’t know, like six or seven, maybe. And at the time, I was super emotional man. Because the first time I had to do like layoffs, right, so I didn’t really know how to do it and very stressful. You know, I can look back on that as a big growth man, but at the time, yeah. credibly. tiring, and and? Yeah, not great. So after that was done there, then yeah, started again, and just kept focus. Like, you know, we just did one thing, we hired full time writers in Macedonia, or Eastern Europe, for affiliates, and eecom, and SAS businesses, you know, who just got them to basically run these companies, blogs, and, you know, for a good price, and it worked. And a lot of people apparently need that. A lot of people want that. So it was it’s been it’s been a good business. It’s very different. Not many people offer it, because it you know, there’s different types. There’s full marketplaces, as partial marketplaces. And then there’s us, which is one step before full time internal hire. So yeah, yeah, it’s been a it’s been a journey.

Ricky Willianto 14:30
And and how I’ve been able to grow this business, it’s a 40 people team right now, how long did it take you to get to this point?

Jesse Hanley 14:36
Like, a year and a half?

Ricky Willianto 14:38
Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty impressive. So what are some of the strategies or key things that you put in place to help you like scale so quickly?

Jesse Hanley 14:45
Yeah. So one is I de risk so something that I did that was smart was I actually bought internet assets from the cash flow from the agency. And what that meant was I didn’t have to take a dime from the you know, agency 2.0 talent tree, so I bought it have internet assets that would basically pay my rent, and pay for food and pay for travel and all that kind of stuff. So you can go to websites like Empire Flippers. And if any international online web broker deals, so me reaching out to websites and buying them, but you can go to those marketplaces and buy their sites. But I think it’s a good idea that if you have cash flow, grab a portion of that, and invest in buying websites, because it means that if you lose all your clients, your team can work. And this is true with bento. Sorry, with talent tree, if we lose clients and talent tree, they can work on my sites, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a good idea to de risk by some assets, and just keep them under your portfolio.

Ricky Willianto 15:44
And then the rest of maybe, maybe explain explain to us because maybe not a lot of people is familiar with this concept. Right? So how do you like use this as a way to make sure that you have cash flow, you have like, a safety net, essentially?

Jesse Hanley 15:56
Yeah, sure. So you can go on these marketplaces like Empire Flippers, you can go to Effie International, you can just reach out to businesses, and see if they’re willing to sell. And if they are willing to sell, you know, you’re gonna pay a multiple upfront, and that could be the equivalent of spending 30 Grand to 40 grand to get a site that is paying $1,000 or $2,000 a month, it’s probably going to be lower on the end, like sites are getting more valuable. But at the time, I actually bought a site that was doing $1,000 a month for 15,000. And so when you stack a few of those on top, it’s like, you’ve covered rent, you’ve covered food, you’ve covered all your bases. So then you’re like, Alright, what I have to lose, if everything goes to the crapper, then I’m okay. So yep, that’s, that means it’s not actually more, the strategy is pretty simple. It’s like find assets that are returning, it could be Amazon affiliate sites, they could be normal affiliate sites, they could be AdSense sites, it doesn’t really matter, but they’re out there. And people are willing to step away. And there’s a lot of people that have assets that they’ve actually got much larger websites. So they’re willing to get rid of that smaller one, so they can grab that cash and put it into their bigger ones. And so there’s an opportunity that Yeah, did you have a rule in terms in the context of talent tree in terms of like, the kind of cash flow you’re hoping for from all of this to balance the risk, you’re taking the talent tree? No, it was more of that if I mean, at the time, it was like I was living in Thailand and, and stuff. So my cost was so low that I covered it really quickly with a couple of assets. I mean, you know, earning three to five grand a month, from internet assets. In Thailand, you find like, you don’t have to really worry. You can live in a nice hotel, you can eat great food, you can hang out with friends, you can you know, do trips, unless I had savings in the bank. So that’s kind of what you’re optimising. Therefore, because then it means Alright, cool. I’m doing this new endeavour, I’m okay to go lean for a little bit. And it turns out, I didn’t have to, but I just think it’s good thought process to to de risk early. So then you can go into these endeavours really confidently. And that’s also been true with bento, like bento has cost a lot to build. Like, it’s an email marketing and marketing automation suite. Right. And so like, I don’t even know how many, maybe like a few 100,000 to build the tool. And it’s just expensive to do that. And so it’s nice when I can take money out of the agency to pay for development for the product was not having to worry about you know, rent and all that kind of stuff, or, or even burning my savings, I can just take money from a cash flowing asset agency talent tree and put that into software, which just takes a while to grow.

Ricky Willianto 18:33
Yeah. And just just to be clear, I think both this these two businesses are both bootstrapped, right.

Jesse Hanley 18:39
Yeah, I haven’t taken a dime from anyone.

Ricky Willianto 18:42
So I love to get into bento. But I want to go back to talent tree a little bit. So you’ve kind of started by like de risking and purchasing all this internal assets will help you convert capital into cash flow. What do you do next to help you scale the business and generate revenue from talent tree itself? Like what are some of the channels you’ve built? What are some strategies you’ve put in place?

Jesse Hanley 19:00
Yeah, so if you like, even with the numbers, right, the amount of clients aren’t huge, but that we don’t have like any churn, which is a kind of a big thing. So once we do a placement, people don’t leave and like what I was telling you before we did the call, it’s like, our biggest issue is finding more quality writers and being able to like make those placements. So yeah, that it’s it’s a slow, it’s actually pretty slow growing business. And the only way that I can grow it is through my personal network. Like I can’t actually really go massively broad because if I go really broad, I’m not a marketplace. So I can’t just like pull a market to make those placements that basically full time hires so my avenues always been Twitter and in person, so our best clients I’ve met face to face with our conferences, so like the DC BKK in Bangkok, or Chiang Mai SEO conference, or, you know, my friends in the UK, like, there’s this Many conferences over there are so many of those relationships and their friendships that I made like four or five years ago that my clients now they become clients in the last like year or so. And I’ve had friends that they’re like, what are you working on? Like I just saw, you know, Tom post about that he’s using your service I didn’t even know you ran that, like so a lot of is just trying to do like a good service. And then having word of mouth kickin, and then having friends refer friends, which is kind of a quality filter as well, which is quite nice. And then yeah, on Twitter. I just kind of post what I’m working on. I keep it pretty simple. And a lot of affiliates and market is following me. And so when they have a need, they reach out.

Ricky Willianto 20:40
How do you start like building this initial audience in the first

Jesse Hanley 20:43
place? This less like an audience, right? It’s more like friends, like so many people. I think a lot of people if you do at Jesse Hanley in a Twitter search and then typing Cole Loftus, you’ll see a lot of people that have been like, I just got on a call with Jesse, I just chatted to Jesse. And like, a lot of people that follow me, if they reach out to my DMS, I try and get them on a call. And I try and talk to them. Because those relationships are valuable, and you don’t know when you know you’re going to be travelling around and maybe be able to go hang out with them, or you don’t know if they might have a project in one or two years, that is a perfect match for the services that you offer. So I try and bring a lot of my online relationships offline. To Yeah, just just kind of, yes, there’s nothing like really growth hacky or kind of fast going on, it’s kind of just being like a good neighbour. In the neighbourhood. Places like a good neighbour, on Twitter,

Ricky Willianto 21:38
it’s really hard to find a good neighbour on Twitter, I was just about to say,

Jesse Hanley 21:41
Yeah, no, I mean, so I think and also, like, I don’t post negative stuff on there, I’m generally pretty positive, or, you know, writing stuff that I’m hacking on, I just keep things pretty light. I think people, people enjoy that, you know, I post photos of my dog and stuff. And that’s it. That’s interesting. Like, you know, I’ve got a sheep, and I live in Japan. So there’s, there’s something like, interesting there. And so I think people see that, and then they come and follow. But there’s no hard cells, there’s no big pitches, there’s no typical marketing stuff, it’s generally just trying to be like a nice guy on the internet. And hopefully, people find that approachable and they reach out. And they do like, says it’s, it’s not going into these places, like aggressive for, for growth, and it’s also a quality of followers as well. So I know a lot of people with quite large audiences on these platforms. And the amount of deals and clients that I’ve actually extracted kind of far outweighs those much larger audiences. It’s also kind of like the depth quality of the people that are following you, that you attract. It’s really important. I’ve got one relationship that I made and introduced on Twitter. And the two people that I entered on there did a $1.5 million deal transaction of it was like an internet asset sale. Oh. And that was just me, like, knowing these two people know, one guy was in a certain space, and the other guy was like, looking for sites in that space, and then didn’t enter on Twitter. And they landed that deal, right. And the birth got insanely small followings. But one of those guys pocketed 1.5 million from just being present on there. You know, so very nice. Yeah. It’s, it’s like, it’s hard to quantify the value of of a lot of this. And I think the same is true on like Facebook and Facebook groups, and maybe LinkedIn, maybe? Probably not. Yeah, it’s just, yeah, I don’t have answered the question about how that kind of work. No,

Ricky Willianto 23:38
no, no, I didn’t know that was interesting. I think like, a lot of people look at this tools as like, you know, a growth hacking tool. I think often times, like, people are just so focused on like the KPIs and the results that it deliberately and I think, like, you’re taking a very different approach. This is like the, I guess, the column company approached, you know, like, you know, you’re profitable. I think that’s kind of nice thing about a bootstrap company, as well, you know, you’re profitable, you’re not in a rush to get anywhere, you know, you’ll survive. And I think, like, you get to focus a bit more on being that nice guy on the internet, whereas everyone else is just trying to be like, controversial or, you know, just trying to get like to make some noise, you know, and to get some following.

Jesse Hanley 24:14
Yeah, I don’t have someone knocking down my throat, saying, hey, like, go grow your following. You need more customers. I’ve just invested in you. Yeah. And it’s kind of like, trying to work out what you’re optimising for, like, I think, for me, you know, towards the end of last year, we just moved to a house in South Japan. And that was a big change. And, like, now, I’m trying to do my like life optimising stuff, you know, so it’s like, get a nice house, get my office set up plan for trips. You know, we’re like thinking about kids. Maybe there’s a lot of this type of stuff. But I think it’s like, more more important to focus on like, just work and growth at all costs. And I think that that reflects in the companies that you build because if you optimise for, you know, good, fun life, then I think you’d be businesses will kind of reflect that as well. I often think about like, Chef This is a weird tangent, but we watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay’s helden was going like Hell’s Kitchen or something that Hell’s Kitchen. The one way or the kitchens aren’t

Ricky Willianto 25:10
great, but a lot of its way comes in, and I do, like kitchen makeover? I don’t know. Yeah, there’s

Jesse Hanley 25:16
been watching a lot of the British versions of that. And yeah, it’s just funny. Like, I just find there’s a lot of similarities between restaurants and online businesses, bizarrely, you know, a lot of them, it’s just like, you know, get the the general manager out of the kitchen, make sure things are properly delegated, all that kind of stuff. But also, the restaurants that you want to go to are the ones that feel have a great atmosphere, a calm run by nice owners, like the restaurants we watch the showing you like, Yeah, I would like to go to that one. I think the same is true with bento and talent tree like and I hope that reflects in the way that we present ourselves, I hope that reflects in how people see us as well.

Ricky Willianto 25:56
And are they just getting more and more important, I think that nowadays is a huge differentiator, there’s definitely a lot to say about building the right culture led into, you know, like, an embody that into your company. Great,

Jesse Hanley 26:07
great. And also people buy off people now. Like, there is a bit of a cult of personality that’s going on. And people do follow people, people follow people for advice, and they also want to buy off other people versus brands. And so I did you know, when I bought Basecamp for our company, and we’re paid every single month for the last maybe five or six years, it’s because I, you know, I use Ruby on Rails, and I like DHH stuff. He’s the creator of it. There’s just so much and Jason freed I’ve like read his books and all that there’s just so much that goes into that product selection. And I’m sure they’re actually better tools for the job, but I’m too bored in I’m too bored, and I follow you I like want to eat at that restaurant. I don’t want to eat at Asana, I want to eat, like, you know, all those other tools. I just want to base camps. And I’m happy getting what I keep getting from them, which is like a nice chicken parmesan or whatever.

Ricky Willianto 27:03
Exactly. Yeah, we just we just want them to win. We want to root for them, you know?

Jesse Hanley 27:07
Yeah. Which is bizarre because they’re a corporation, right? Their Corporation. It’s weird to root for corporations, but you do you know, because they’re people, corporations are people and that you want to support good people, you want to support good people with good values. And so I think, pulling this all the way back to how do you grow a business? I think, I think people do smell that out, leads and all that out, friends that out. And if they know that you’re building a business with good values, and they trust buying services off you and then it means when you promote yourself online a little bit, that could just be putting your company in your bio, when it comes time for them to buy that product or that category, they put you ahead of the competition because your face they enjoy your face, and they’re willing to buy. And so I think that’s honestly how people follow me for a bit. They go, oh, Jesse does bento, it’s a marketing automation. And when it comes time for them to set up marketing automation for their business they buy from me anyway, I’ll end my rant on that. But that’s

Ricky Willianto 28:07
no, no, I don’t like I really, I feel like we can easily like to get into talking about like life hack and like, you know, culture and value from at this juncture. But before we get into that, I really want to just pause and you know, also kind of talk about bento a little bit because bento is a very different business, right? It is a SaaS business, I think you’ve you’ve built it bootstrap, looking at like the trajectory of your, I guess, journey. SaaS product, like bento is very different, you know, from what you’ve done before. Tell us a bit about like how you got into this.

Jesse Hanley 28:38
Yeah, sure. So I’ve always wanted to build SaaS, my old man actually was a rather large software company in Australia. And so like, it’s kind of always been inside me to pursue software. And so for me, like that route was different. So I want to I think in the early days, like, I just wanted to build stuff. So I self taught myself Ruby on Rails, when I was consulting for other clients, just to like hack small stuff, you know, you build a to do list app, you build a journal app, and then you build, you know, built like a Bitly clone and stuff, you know, you just build these simple things. And over time, you just get a little bit more advanced to like, I remember building a survey tool, and I bought a Rank Tracker, like I built a Rank Tracker for Google. That was good fun, you just kind of keep adding these projects, and you keep getting experience. And then one day, like I kind of had this like very large, you know, vision for a tool, which was kind of like, wouldn’t it be great to kind of have like a, an all in one where I could track everything my visitors did, including my anonymous visitors so I could verify my ad reporting and then message them based on you know, what they’re doing. And a lot of the other tools could could do that to an extent. But a lot of them have like weird limitations, you know, so like, with klaviyo and drip and all that the sessions starts when you get the email, but I like wanted to do more than that. Like I wanted to personalise the website before they got the email, right. And I wanted to do more before the opt in before the email anyway. So yeah, I just, I just started building this with a developer called Andrew Cova. I basically hired him to start on the project. And the first version was a personalization tool that had all the tracking, so we could track anything anyone did. And then personalise the website based on their history and all that kind of stuff. So you know, and then I deployed that straightaway on my clients websites. So an equivalent would be like, based on the pages that they view, update the top bar message, super simple, right? So if someone visits the car, update the top bar to be like, thanks for checking out on car, he has a $10 coupon, yourself, just that kind of stuff. So

Ricky Willianto 30:50
let me pause here. I just want to clarify, when you say plug ins website, does that mean that you’re working with specific clients on a consulting consulting basis, and you’re helping them plan implementing this tool? Okay, cool. And, and like, I think that also to give people a bit of context, at which point in time, like, you know, in terms of timeline that you start building into

Jesse Hanley 31:11
two and a half years ago, maybe three, maybe three? And if and if it wasn’t, if it was, so it was clients, but it was also like, old clients. Right? So you know, if I had an econ client, I would try and bring them on. And the thing is, is like the personalization tool, wasn’t totally right. Like, I found personalization, I was like, almost too early to it, because it’s hard to prove, like the value of personalization and, and all that so, but but I knew it was powerful. And so I just kind of like kept pulling that thread. So we got to the stage where people like, Well, you’ve got all this great debt data coming in, it’d be great if I could email those people. And so then we built broadcasts, and then the next one’s like, well, I want to send someone a welcome sequence, and then you build sequences. And Ben has just been like an evolution of that. And yeah, and then now we’re where we’re at now,

Ricky Willianto 32:04
which is all of that all of that light bulb moments where you’re like, Oh, I need this. Oh, wait, I wanted I want to connect to build that. What’s that can like inspired by, you know, what your clients trying to solve? Or is it also can like what you are trying to solve? Because you are running a few things as well, at that point?

Jesse Hanley 32:19
Yeah, mostly, mostly clients, but also, me having exposure to like, I’ve been doing kind of ecommerce marketing since I left school, so I didn’t go to university or anything. I just started working. And so on the on the econ marketing side, you know, been doing I, I was doing a weekly mailer, and I was building the welcome sequences, and I was doing the abandoned carts. And when I moved to consulting, I was just doing that for other people. And so a lot of what I was trying to build was stuff that I could use myself. And it took a very long time, it took a few years before bento got up to the kind of, like, where my taste in tooling matched what I built, because, yeah, building stuff without and especially in the early days, it’s it’s difficult to, to do this stuff. And so yeah, it took a while and but now it’s like, I can sell bento against any of our competitors. And know that will do a fantastic job and, and in a lot of ways, come ahead, in even comparison, but took a very long time took two years for that to kind of flourish and and actually become a thing.

Ricky Willianto 33:29
It is it is quite a competitive like space. How have you been able to stand out? I mean, I’ve read like your Twitter followers have been totally raving about Ben. So people are comparing you with MailChimp and saying oh benzo is better. Like, tell us a bit about how you got to this point, you know, where you’re getting users to adopt it being compared to you know, larger players has been around for a long time and they still stand out, you know?

Jesse Hanley 33:54
Yes, there’s a few parts there. So one, the stuff that applied for talent tree just applies to to bento. So if you if you’re a good internet citizen, and people know what you’re working on, then when it comes time for them to buy, like no one impulsively buys marketing automation or tracking software, like no, no one does that they come to a moment in their life where they need to check off to do and the to do would be like, set up automation for my business or start sending a welcome sequence. And then they move into the headspace of product categories and trying to go Okay, I need a marketing automation tool. Alright, what I know off the top of my head, all right, I know drip. I know. ConvertKit I know MailChimp. I know ento because I’ve stumbled upon it. And it’s in my in my head, right? I know it exists. And then they go and they research and they go compare. If they’re more more risky, or they’ve seen something that they like they will bet on us and then they will move over to us. The interesting thing with choosing in a large market like email marketing and marketing automation, is that the markets huge right like you have massive players but cutting out a very small Part of that pie is incredibly easy and not hard to do, right? Like yesterday, I met someone in person that someone in our city and I got them onto bento and maybe like 30 minutes to an hour, you know, fully migrated from another platform. And that’s like 300 Mr. month basically added to us. And so yeah, it’s not it’s not too tricky. I’d like rather be in a in a competitive dance market where I can cut out a little bit of the pie and pull my friends and pull people from competitors, then trying to craft a new market, which is kind of like how I started in the personalization space.

Ricky Willianto 35:37
What kind of customers are you currently working with? mostly for bento? Is it like the large corporates Are you working with like the kind of like

Jesse Hanley 35:43
medium businesses? A lot of them are self funded? A lot of them? Yeah, but we’ve got like medium and large businesses so good, a large car rental company using us. We’ve got a massive zoo in Wichita that uses just it’s all over the place. Because at the end of the day, it’s like bentos, there’s like a word in Japanese called Kamikaze, which is like, you know, the chef basically chooses for you and so bento, you can kind of choose how you use the tool. It’s like if you want live chat, and you want to send people automated messages as they’re browsing the website, totally kosher, go for it. If you just want a weekly broadcast, you can, if you want to set up, you know, let’s say you’re running a course and you want to send emails based on course progression and all that kind of stuff, you can do that. If you just want to track your Facebook ads, you can do that. It’s just like bento becomes which it makes it a challenge on onboarding. But mostly it does mean that people like will come for one tool, and then they’ll they’ll continue expanding. And then they kind of like entrenched and they won’t leave because they’re using two or three different products. And it’s hard to justify replacing us for two to three different tools, then connect them with Zapier and all that kind of stuff. So yeah.

Ricky Willianto 36:57
So with bento, you’ve been able to leverage oversold, ran through social media, and also through your relationship with clients? Are you doing anything else beyond those to help you, I guess, like acquire more customers. Because this is a SaaS product and inherently requires certain volume of users, we need to be able to make it profitable, right?

Jesse Hanley 37:19
I mean, does it because like, I, you know, with with dental, I got server costs, and I have email sending costs, and then that’s it, and then everything else is profit. And those costs have come down considerably, even as we’ve grown, just because, you know, I’ve learnt more about performance. And we’ve spent a lot of cycles on performance. So things are much more kind of cost efficient than they used to be. If you’re a bootstrapped and you run a b2b business, then, yeah, it’s not like you don’t need volume to make it because like, I think I tweeted this morning, like some guy sent me a DM He’s like, left MailChimp often nine years to come to. And people stay on these types of businesses. So you don’t need volume to make it. You just need enough to be profitable. And we are so it’s because you know, someone could could spend 1000s of dollars on bento a month, because they got a large email list, right? Whereas if you’re, I think you’re right, if you’re in b2c, and you’re, you’re or you’re on a commission basis, or your store, then you do need those, like regular hits of income. But yeah, and b2b SaaS, where people like I, every time I log into my dashboard, customers are expanding because they’re growing their list. And so revenues increased, even if I don’t add any new customers for the month. So that’s, that’s an interesting place to be. And so I do think, other than market selection, business selection really matters in SAS, which is, what are the unit economics? How can you make them work? Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, on the, on your point, if I had a personalization business, or even just an analytics business, would probably be horrible. I would not enjoy it. But email marketing, just because a subscription rises with contacts in your account. And it makes it nice, because customers are always expanding with us, which is super different to a lot of other business models. So yeah, we don’t necessarily need volume, we actually need quality clients who don’t abuse our platform.

Ricky Willianto 39:25
But it does a really good point. I think like your business is all about growing together with the clients, right? So if your clients are growing, they can afford to pay you more if you’re adding value to them. And what’s interesting as all your unit economics is interesting, because for a lot of b2b SaaS companies, the acquisition cost is super high. Right? Like they have to have sales people going out there knocking on doors, converting people west for you, I think like you’ve been able to tap into this, like, accumulated network of people who trust you through different distances and interactions you had in the past with them, right?

Jesse Hanley 39:56
Yeah, yeah. And moving forward like that strategy is gonna expand so like with us, because I LTV is pretty decent. We we do want to invest in paid strategy. But first we’re building the assets for that before we move into paid spend. So my kind of my general feel is is trying to nail the positioning first nail the positioning nail the assets. And for us the assets is like free training, free courses, you know, great landing pages and great demos, and then driving people to that just so they can become aware again, people don’t impulsively buy into. And they also don’t impulsively hire writers. But what they do do is when they discover a product, they put it in a category in their brain, and it sits there until it comes time for them to buy. And your job as a marketer is basically to if you’re in a product like ours, it’s not like an app instal business and it’s not like an impulsive business like Econ, your job is to position yourself correctly against your competitors so that you sit in the mind of a user until it comes time to buy plus remain present in their mind constantly. And that could be retargeting that could be a whole bunch of different things, but basically be persistent. So they don’t forget about you. Especially if you’re new and you’re not a brand and other people aren’t chatting all the time about you like if you think about stripe, there’s not a single moment that I’m on social media where I don’t hear about stripe, right? I just hear all the time. And if I go to a deaf community, I hear about stripe and like, if I’m looking at payment processes, like Who am I thinking about? stripe? Maybe Braintree maybe but probably rare. So then I go with stripe. That’s kind of how it works, I think.

Ricky Willianto 41:38
And that’s kind of your your growing bento as well. Like how do you decouple that then because so far you’ve been quite like big on, like relying on you know, your own personal channel, your own social media, you know, your past past relationship? How do you like see yourself? I guess I separate that a little bit. And can like, you know, try to build a good channel that is, you know, paid that is organic as well. Yeah,

Jesse Hanley 42:02
so I think on the paid side free opt ins to high quality courses and training, I think will be critical for us. So providing an advanced courses on email marketing, so not just the basic email marketing stuff, but advanced stuff. So how to want an IP, like why IPS are important for emails, how to batch your sounds, how to warm up new domains, like all that kind of stuff, teaching an advanced courses that people can take, and then they get to know me, they get to know the company, they get to learn and they get to kind of improve their careers. And then at that point, that kind of got some buying, right, because they’ve they’ve just become smarter at whatever we’ve taught them. Even on the marketing attribution side. That’s a course that I want to teach, which is how you track ads correctly and properly. Like a lot of people don’t really know, and they trust Facebook’s numbers, and they trust Google Analytics, but they never actually verify them. And so walking someone through in a 32, and one hour course on, on how to do that, I think is critical to building relationships with new people. And you put paid traffic behind that to essentially Yeah, to essentially get more eyeballs on it. And then people can watch it for free. They can opt in if they want or they cannot. And then they’ve just gone. Okay, cool. I’ve just digested some great material that I put out, I want to now try the product sign up for a free trial, they use it, I think it’s great, and they don’t use anything else. So I think that that feels like a good natural next step to us. But plus, that content will also live on Google. Because we can transcribe all the videos and get them indexed. So when someone searches for, you know, how do cookies work with ads, just the massive longtail stuff that there may be a video that’s transcribed that kind of answers that query. So that’s how that business I want to drive it forward. Because there’s not so much competition in our space in that area on the on the straight advertising stuff, MailChimp. And a lot of our competitors, like AdWords is out of the picture for us. Because we’re small, just there’s too much beating going on. It’s too expensive for a bootstrap company. General social media ads, I think are only good. If there’s a clear free call to action for a bootstrap company. You just got to give a lot of value. Yeah, like I see MailChimp and other brands running very broad ads. And I think it’s good for reminding people that MailChimp exists but it’s not very good for like value. Yeah,

Ricky Willianto 44:14
I see that. I see that you’ve experimented with a couple of a couple of these things that you mentioned as well I see this a new as a course section as well on bento now.com. How is it How is it performed so far?

Jesse Hanley 44:25
I mean, it’s not necessarily like there’s like a coming soon option, I think on on that page. So a lot of the time is something that I do that a lot of other marketers don’t do is i’m happy just to throw out pages even if they’re not complete or done just to just to get general vibes. I’ll even throw out landing pages with like broken videos on them. Right and just wait for people to respond when people do and then and then I go film them. So yeah, I think I think it’s fine just to test stuff and just see how it goes and and then just try from that.

Ricky Willianto 44:56
Because that’s how you test if it matters enough for those people right? Yeah, they bother coming back to you and say, Hey, by the way, this thing is broken. Can

Jesse Hanley 45:04
you like, get to this? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s the right way to do it. But as a bootstrapper, who’s like, you know, very lean on resources, I can’t deploy, you know, a dedicated marketer, right? And landing pages, like I’m answering customers, I’m shipping code, I’m shipping bug fixes. I’m trying to launch landing pages, it’s a lot of stuff in the early days. And so sometimes you just got to, you know, rather than pay to live and broken and not live at all.

Ricky Willianto 45:31
So I think at this point, would love to call like, you know, get your quick thoughts about where you’re taking bento. You know, you’ve been working on this for two and a half years now, you know, this quite a bit of like cult following, you know, for Benton for you. Where is it going?

Jesse Hanley 45:46
Yeah, so for me, I, I try and keep things less, I get a lot of anxiety if I think too far forward in the future. So I try and keep things pretty simple. I just want to keep working on this every single day, and keep trying to help the lives of the marketers that I work with on a daily basis. So getting them to be to my cats currently trying to open our blinds. So So yeah, so for me, it’s just trying to help marketers be better at their jobs. So teaching them with training and teaching them with courses, I don’t really think I’ve actually too much control in the kind of future other than just kind of putting in hard work and just following that kind of vision. So yeah, I just kind of want to log in every day, help my friends helped my marketers, marketing customers, do some training, do some teaching, and then build great software. And I think all the software thing, we’ve done a phenomenal job. And we’ll continue doing that. And a lot of the improvements happen just from working with customers and, and seeing how that goes. And I mean, bento has been a multi year journey of like, just that, right? Like, where he where we are, because that’s the approach that we’re taking wake up in the morning, people send me tickets, and they say, hey, this doesn’t make sense. UX wise, I shipped the fix that day. And then you just kind of do that until the company dies. And directionally, that’s worked really, really well for us, where were our mission, the revenue numbers, but we’re healthy, we’re profitable, things are good. So I’m happy, just keep going at the clip that we’re growing. And I think in a few years, yeah, it would be a good amount. I think for me, I’d like to hire a full time CS person. But at the same point, I also try and automate a lot of support tickets. If I get a support ticket, I try and work out right, how can I make that feature? less hard, easier, more implicit in the UI automated with an email onboarding and stuff and, and a lot of the times are like, Oh, I need a CS person with a few hours. Have I been able to kind of not need that person after I’ve done that work? So finding efficiencies, I think is really important.

Ricky Willianto 47:41
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s not a lot of people and voices out there who’s telling, especially founders, right, who is always content with where they are, I think there’s always kind of this next big milestone they’re trying to get to, you know, he’s always like, like, it’s always a constant hike, you know, like, and they don’t enjoy the hike. I think you had a few people who have spoken to was actually like, I enjoy the process. I wake up every day and do this, and this is what I signed up for, I think, like, then it’ll be a lot more voices out there to show people that it can be done this way. You know, it doesn’t have to be like, Oh, it’s like, you know, checkpoint one, checkpoint two, and anything in between is torture. I think a lot of people don’t have, I guess, like someone to look, look up to listen to about how to collect build business that way that is more enjoyable.

Jesse Hanley 48:22
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, a lot of people got into business for a reason, right? And then they may have set goals. And like I did, I wrote like a, you know, spreadsheet of the stuff that I wanted to achieve. And like he thought in three or four years, like, you know, the dollar amount, the business, all that kind of stuff. So it’s like, I can either read you that exercise, but I’m like, where I want it to be, you know, so it’s, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s a little bit of like, I think philosophy at this point where it’s kind of like, you know, I’ve had a couple conversations this like, just because you pursue, like, you know, $100 million company or a $1 billion company, which, like some of my friends are doing doesn’t actually mean you’ll get any faster than the bootstrap guy. So, you know, and a lot of the time, you’re not actually in control of that fate. Have you picked the right market? You pick the right product? Do you have a product with like negative churn, like an email marketing space, or the web hosting space? They’re kind of competitive levers you can pull on? Do you have competitors that are actually just smarter and better and stronger and faster than you? That’s often true? You know? Do you know how to lead a company? Do you know how to project manage, there’s all like this nuance, right? Yeah. Which is more an indicator of success, then then your long term goals. So I think just focusing on a direction and a set of momentum is enough. And the rest you just like to wake up to the best work that I can and then go to sleep and just keep doing that every day. And and you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Everyone’s fine. If they do that. I think they have a complicated too much. Yeah.

Ricky Willianto 49:52
Thanks so much for that Jesse. And we’re running out of time. all good things must come to an end. But we always end this call with a quick fire round. So I just I have five questions for you. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay, first one is what is the one metric that you care most about now? for your business a friendships generated from the company.

Jesse Hanley 50:11
So the people that I talk to regularly on a on a regular basis? Yeah.

Ricky Willianto 50:16
Okay. What is the one software you slept by base camp

Jesse Hanley 50:19
and better ideas better a lot like myself. So yeah, I don’t care that

Ricky Willianto 50:25
you’re about to convert me by the way.

Jesse Hanley 50:28
Did you want to switch over from whatever you’re using? For sure.

Ricky Willianto 50:31
For sure I’m using I’m using the yellow monkey

Jesse Hanley 50:35
know what that is? We’ll get rid of it.

Ricky Willianto 50:36
Okay, next thing is what’s your favourite go to resources to come like find ideas for growth?

Jesse Hanley 50:44
Oh, the growth one’s interesting, a lot less. So like, Oh, god, my career. Okay, this has to be a little bit long form. But earlier in my career, I did a lot of content. Now, I think I care a little bit less about like, I don’t read blog is something where I’d like haven’t read blog posts, which I used to do all the time, and maybe two or three years. And that could be directly correlated to like, just working really hard and like not having the brain space to read and, and do courses and stuff. But I found like the occasional Osgoode when it’s come up on my radar, but yeah, I’m kind of like less and less looking at business resources and growth and stuff. Because I know I know the tactics. I know the strategies. It’s, I think more of an art of like, how to apply them and, and all that, but Twitter’s good. I think if you curate a good list of people that you follow, naturally, the best content will surface to the top. So it’s kind of like you gotta you gotta work out who’s producing good stuff. And then who who’s just retweeting whatever link, just unfollow those people. And if anything, unfollow everyone, and then just pick the best of the best, and then just love them stuff is great content to leave. That’s generally good. So

Ricky Willianto 51:51
what’s what’s a good content for, you know, great content for you to you know, to dive headlong into? Yeah, I

Jesse Hanley 51:58
mean, web at web on Twitter. He’s really good. So web Smith, he writes about e commerce and does unform essays on that. I think he’s great. And then like, just fine web, you’ll be exposed to a lot of e commerce people that are writing great stuff. Yeah, there’s a lot of handles that I could I could probably list out, I guess, at

Ricky Willianto 52:16
the end of this call will just ask you for your Twitter handle, and we’ll find out for ourselves.

Jesse Hanley 52:21
I mean, like, I try and engage with a lot of these people as well. Right. And you, people, if they follow me, they’ll see that and yeah, but I think you got to curate it tightly on people that you really appreciate. Try and find like, don’t go for the really large accounts, generally the best tweets from people with like, five K to 10 k followers, like around that range. And then yeah, just just curious, but I think doing the works more important than digesting the growth hacks now. Yeah, yeah.

Ricky Willianto 52:48
So like, two more questions, who are all who is the one growth role model that you have right now?

Jesse Hanley 52:58
Hmm. If you have to choose growth role model,

Ricky Willianto 53:04
or any role model in terms of like business building,

Jesse Hanley 53:07
not growth. Good. I think that’s good. I used to really like it’s Sean Ellis, is that guy? Yeah. I used to really appreciate his stuff early on. That was very like tacky stuff. I did. I did enjoy that more recently. Yeah, I think I’ve just I followed like a few business owners. Like, let’s say, Rob walling from drip that’s more entrepreneur, but still, like, you know, hear any story about how he grew drip. I think it’s quite aspirational. Yeah, and then, and then a lot of the stuff that I listen to now, which is kind of, I guess, like aspirational content. It’s like podcasts where it’s talking with two founders talking about what they’re building. So one of them’s with a guy called Ben Orenstein from tuple. And Derek reima. From savvy cow, like I listen to them talk every week and you know, that medium sized businesses but great stories, and I like hearing how they’re building those companies. So yeah, I’m enjoying following people that my growth role models of people that are like building companies, and then just talking about how they’re doing it every day. I really like Toby from Shopify, and I like everything fi does. And bentos core is heavily inspired by a lot of the libraries that Shopify produces and all that kind of stuff, the code libraries and, and all that so a lot of respect for those guys.

Ricky Willianto 54:25
Awesome. That’s That’s a lot of role models. I have to start looking at looking them up one by one. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, what’s the best way to reach you?

Jesse Hanley 54:37
Twitter, so Jessie J s s e. t for Thomas Hanley. So pretty simple. And then we’ve got at bento b n to on Twitter. Those two handles if you DM me, I’ll get back to you the same day. And then yeah, like email or whatever. You can find them through the websites. I’m pretty responsive and yeah, people just want help online marketing or they want help on strategy. stuff I got a pretty deep SEO background so I can mostly help people with anything SEO related for free just hit me up and I’m happy to announce

Ricky Willianto 55:08
awesome. Hey, thanks so much Jesse for this. It’s it’s really nice to hear a completely different way of building business and I hope this helped people like you talking about it and you open. Cool man,

Jesse Hanley 55:19
this is a lot of fun. Thanks, Ricky.

Ricky Willianto 55:21
Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Check out other episodes to hear more growth stories and hacks from experts who have been there. You can find our show on iTunes, Spotify, or via our website www.att.com slash growth multiplier. See you next time.

About Growth Multiplier

The pursuit of growth is never-ending for any business – from a small startup all the way to a large global corporation. The Growth Multiplier podcast examines pathways, strategies, and hacks companies have explored and tested in their efforts to scale up their businesses. 

In each episode, host Ricky Willianto – co-founder of Ravenry – speaks with CEO’s, growth hackers, product managers, and marketers all around Asia to find nuggets of wisdom and insights from their journey multiplying growth. 

Ricky and his guests discuss viral marketing, community building, pricing strategies, channel development, and also company culture and people. Growth Multiplier explores not only replicable successes, but also phenomenal failures that we all can learn from.

Growth Multiplier is produced by the team behind Ravenry.
www.theravenry.com

Other Growth Multiplier episodes

Building a mental health startup in Asia with Joan Low (ThoughtFull)

In this episode, Irzan Raditya talks about how he’s built Kata.ai into a leading B2B SaaS Startup in Indonesia. He talks about the importance of being laser focused on your vision, why he favors collaboration over competition in a market that relies on personal relationship, and why he thinks distribution trumps product market fit.

Ethical and sustainable design with Sebastian Mueller (MING Labs)

In this episode, Irzan Raditya talks about how he’s built Kata.ai into a leading B2B SaaS Startup in Indonesia. He talks about the importance of being laser focused on your vision, why he favors collaboration over competition in a market that relies on personal relationship, and why he thinks distribution trumps product market fit.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more interesting insights!

Send us your feedback!