George Chasiotis: Organic Growth Acceleration For Your B2B Saas Company #175

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host Akhil Jabbar and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about organic growth acceleration for your B2B SaaS company. Today we have our guest George Cassiotis joining us. George is the managing director of Minucia, an organic growth acceleration agency for B2B SaaS companies. George started out as an independent marketing consultant, but then was then soon pulled down the path of creating an agency. In his free time, he imparts wisdom on LinkedIn or buries his head in psychology books to get down on the why of human behavior. So welcome, George. Super excited to have you on the show today.

Hey, Akeel, it's good to be here.

So I want to start with the basics. You know, we're talking about organic growth today, SEO, content marketing. We haven't talked much about that on the show, but I'd love to learn more. So let's start with basics. If I'm just launching my SaaS into the market, and I'm looking to use SEO or content marketing as my main channel of traffic, right? That's the one where we want to focus on. I'm sold on the idea that there's value in this channel. Where do I want to start at the very early stages in order to get the most traction? Am I writing on the blog? Am I just writing whatever I feel like on the topic? Am I creating comparison pages, feature pages, industry landing pages? Tell me, how do I structure that thought for the next couple months here?

Sure, that's a great question and a great way to kick off things. I would say that in general, exceptions apply, but in general, until a company gets to product-market fit, they shouldn't invest in SEO. They could invest in content, which is a completely different thing, but in general, we advise against SEO until you get to product-market fit. Why? I can share a couple of reasons why. You may pivot. You simply may pivot after 6 months and all your effort when it comes to SEO, guess what? It will go for nothing. Okay? You don't know yet at this point what the best use cases for your product are. And thus, what's the point of creating content around how to create a landing page if you are not sure that You know what, this is one of the use cases why people use my product. Or unfortunately, you may die. You may die. And as a company, you may not last to see the effect, the positive effects of SEO. Of course, as I mentioned, exceptions apply. Okay. And unless you have really deep pockets or you are a serial founder and entrepreneur who has, you know, a big VC behind them, I would advise against SEO. Now the question is, okay, you can't do SEO, what can you do? I would say that you can publish content that demonstrates the value of your product because every single visitor, regardless of how they came on the website, matters, and they have to be convinced about the value of your product. For example, through customer stories, case studies. This is something that you definitely have to do in the early stages of running your SaaS company. You have to share stories, both the good and the bad, so that people feel connected to you and your company. And another thing that you can do is that you can publish content that will help you establish trust. And you can definitely distribute that content through channels like LinkedIn, for example. And here, when we say content that can help you establish trust, we are thinking about thought leadership content. For example, opinion-based content or controversial content. Or studies. Okay. These are all things that you can do in the very early stages because quite frankly, they do not require a long-term investment that unfortunately you may not be able to see paying out.

Interesting. So you're not even tackling top of the funnel because your top of the funnel, your brand, your message of what you offer is changing. You're just working on case studies. the deliverables of what you've done, use cases, those kind of pieces of content. And then you're distributing opinions on social or even podcasts like this, right?

Yeah. And I would say you mentioned comparison pages and alternative pages, which unfortunately it's a completely different topic. It's a topic on its own. And unfortunately, like many other things, it has been widely abused by the B2B SaaS industry. But let's ask ourselves, how can you compare yourself or how can you present yourself as a viable alternative to an established business? You can't. At this point, you simply can't. Until you get to product-market fit, you should focus on other things content-wise and don't worry so much about SEO.

Would you say content in general? Would you also say part of link building? Like going out and building your authority in a space and getting a bunch of links and Would that be helpful at the early stages or no?

I would say I would separate the two. Like link building is an activity for me at least works as an amplifier. Okay. I have something that I want to amplify. For example, I have a feature page that is important to me and I want to try to get as much visibility and as many clicks for this feature page. Okay. You have to build some links from relevant websites. And so on and so forth. But guest posting and, you know, publishing a post on an industry publication, I would say, is a completely different thing. And you may do that in the context of trying to build authority or awareness. So I would say that I would separate the 2 activities. And I would say that everything that's focused on raising awareness, demonstrating the value of your product, demonstrating your expertise and the expertise of your early team is definitely in the right direction, but I wouldn't stress over, you know, link building or anything like that because at the moment, at this point, like we shouldn't be interested in that, okay? We shouldn't be interested in amplifying anything organic-wise because once again, like especially link building, it's not a cheap activity. You may do it and you may not last to see the results.

Makes sense. So I mean, that's early stage when you're just starting out. Now let's say you do have product-market fit or you're a later stage company, like you guys work with, you know, $10 million ARR companies or even bigger, right? Publicly traded companies or VC-backed SaaS companies. What are you guys doing? What's your strategy? Do you guys focus on at that point? Now you're like, I've got product-market fit, I really want to use this channel, you know, organic growth.

I would say that, you know, things change. And obviously, where you are at a later stage, the things that are interesting, the things that you should be invested in and that the activities that you should invest time and resources in are completely different. At that stage, I think, and we have seen from our experience working with such companies, that it's all about accelerating things. And in later stages, it's all about scalability. Okay, so what are the activities and what are the things that we should be doing in that stage? I would say that you should care about increasing your brand value. Okay, because let's face it, even if you do a tremendous job when it comes to organic search and getting organic visibility going one keyword after another, there is one thing that you cannot beat. And unfortunately, there are not so many studies out there around that. Let's say that you are in a category like email marketing and you are competing with Mailchimp and you are doing a tremendous job organic-wise. Okay. Chances are Mailchimp is going to get the click. Why? Because, you know, because it's Mailchimp. Okay. So at this point, I would say that one of the first things that you should do is try to increase the brand value, try to increase the understanding that people in the industry have about your brand, what you do, how you differentiate, and so on and so forth, which is not the traditional way companies think about SEO. They just think, okay, what are the keywords? Let's launch some feature pages. Let's do some comparison and alternative guides. And that's it. Let's call it a day. But you should start— your starting point is increasing your brand value. Then something that's extremely important, you have to make sure that you close what we call the topical authority gap. In order for you to be able to rank for the terms that are the most interesting to you and the most important to your brand, you have to build what we call topical authority. And at this stage, you have the resources, you have probably the knowledge, you have everything that you need in order to start closing the gap that you and your competitors have. Okay, so this is the second thing. The third thing is you have to try to close the information gap, meaning you don't have to just, you know, go on and start using an SEO keyword data provider such as Ahrefs. Full disclaimer, Ahrefs is the sponsor of our podcast, but I would mention it as an example either way and try to see, you know, what are the keywords that I'm missing? It's not so much about keywords as it is about information. What is the information that your website is missing compared to your competitors or compared to search competitors in the sense of websites that you are competing with, either you like it or not, on the SERPs? Okay. And last but not least, I would say that you have to Diversify your organic traffic sources. What does that mean? That we have seen in some cases companies in that stage that we are talking about, the majority of their traffic and the majority of their leads, let's say if leads is what they are interested in, comes from just one article. Okay.

Hmm.

This is not good because guess what? If you lose the rankings for this article, reports at the end of the month are not going to look good. Okay, so you have to diversify that and diversify the risk, I would say, of relying on just one article. Now, if we're talking about later stages, and if we're talking about, you know what, we want to scale things up and we want to accelerate and become the top player in our category, I would say that if that's the case, you also have to care about establishing processes that will allow you to scale things up without breaking as many things. So these are some activities, and I would say this is a kind of a mindset that a company at a later stage should have when it comes to organic search.

Got it. And if we're talking about specifically on creating content, and trying to rank, right? I mean, that's ultimately the goal of creating content, right? You want to rank and get traffic and, you know, branch out and diversify. How do you, you know, in your website you talk about we create top-notch content, and I want to hear, you know, how do you guys define top-notch content in 2022? Is it the length right here, you know, minimum 2,000 words? Is it, you know, the amount of facts and interesting, you know, keywords you stuff in? Is it keyword density? How do you guys look at top-notch content?

I will, before I answer the question, I will just say something about the length. The length of, you know, it has to be above 2,000 words. It's a misconception that unfortunately, like many other misconceptions in the world of content SEO, because of, I don't know, some correlation study that was published 5 years ago. Okay. And SEO professionals took that and I mean, we can see it in editorial guidelines from very serious companies, the content has to be above 2,000 words. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. If the answer can be given in 500 words or even less, that's totally fine. Okay. So that's a side note. But to answer your question, what we should do, first of all, you should give the answer to the searcher's query. In other words, you have to satisfy the search intent. As simple as that. You have to give them what brought them to your website in the first place. This is the first thing. Second, which is not something that most websites do, especially when it comes to SaaS, which is, we all can agree, moving towards commoditization, you have to do it in a way that's unique and stands out from the rest of the results that are out there. Okay. Because unfortunately what you see is that you see search engine results pages for terms that are related to B2B software companies that look, you know, like every other result out there. And this sea of, you know, seamlessness, I would say, This con-homogeneity is not something that, you know, if I'm going to do a page like every other page, I'm going to get the results that I crave for and I expect and I want. No, you have to do it in a unique way. Now, another thing, if we dive a bit deeper into things that you have to do, is to try to give the answer to the next question that the searcher may have while on that page. What does that mean? Let's say let's let's use an example, and let's say that someone came on your website searching for website launch checklist. Okay, and you offer a comprehensive guide on how to launch a website along with a Google Sheets template that works as a checklist. Now you have to think what else this person who came on your website may be looking for that's related to what. Actually brought them to your website in the first place? Well, they may be looking for things like best day to launch a website, uh, website launch announcement examples, uh, website launch announcement, uh, email, uh, or even coming soon, uh, landing page. Because, you know, I want to have a landing page until I get to that point. And you have to be in the position as the content creator, as the, as the person who drives the strategy to answer all these questions before they are even asked by the visitor. So in a nutshell, these are the things that you should be doing in order to have chances of ranking.

Okay. So let's say you've kind of figured out what the intent is. You're knowledgeable, obviously, that you're starting a business, you should have some background in knowing how to answer it effectively. You're putting in the answers, you're You're thinking about follow-up questions and you're also filling that in. But then your job, you know, as you as an SEO, you have another part of this, which is the technical side. And so let's talk a little bit about that. So, you know, John Mueller, he's the webmaster trend analyst at Google. You know, they have the secret of what kind of helps rank, the different factors that help rank on Google. The algorithm is always changing, right? We see that every few months they're releasing updates. So beyond the content, what are some of the most common ranking factors that are, you know, we should be thinking about, proven to work, and we should be aware of if we're starting to publish this content?

I would say that in general, and we all know that Google is very secretive and protective with what drives rankings. They are giving some hints now and there, here and there, but for the most part, I would say that we are entering the sphere of assumptions now. And we just try to understand and to assume that, you know what, this is a ranking factor. Now, based on our experience, I would say that things like topical authority that I mentioned earlier, it's extremely important. And we have seen it affect not only the rankings, the initial rankings that a page can have, but also how fast it can have those rankings. Okay. Search intent that I mentioned previously, it's extremely important as a ranking factor, let's say. User experience, which is, which, you know, I'm really, I really wonder how it goes, you know, so unnoticed in many cases. User experience is a is a huge driver when it comes to rankings. And I think that as we— as other ranking factors become more saturated, let's say, and more and more websites and brands are competing for the same factors, user experience will be one of the things that you can still compete for in a less crowded space. What else? Definitely content depth. On a page level, content breadth, both on a page level and on a domain website level. And last but not least, either we like it or not, backlinks. They still matter. And I'm not sure when and if this is going to stop ever, or whether or not they are going to become less important in the future. But backlinks matter. One thing that also matters that's kind of related to backlinks that also goes unnoticed is mentions, brand mentions, even if they are— even if they don't include a link. So for example, if your product is often mentioned in lists with the best product for this category, the best products for this category, or on a, you know, even on a sentence, on a passage level, you are mentioned as, you know, one of the best solutions for that category. I think that this matters. And as, you know, as time passes and Google gets a better understanding and sense of words, I think that it will matter increasingly and, you know, it will have a significant value moving forward.

And even if that link is a nofollow versus follow, do you see a big value difference in how you value that link?

Now obviously, you know, and this is obviously a debate I guess among many SEO professionals, but I would say that we can all understand that dofollow links have some value since we suppose that they, uh, pass on what's called link equity. Of course, we, we can't be sure about anything because we can't be sure really how Google, um, values the unfollow— uh, the nofollow, sorry, um, links. But I would say that, and this is a completely different discussion, but we are so obsessed about, you know, getting the link, uh, the dofollow link, and we forget in many cases the importance of what's increasingly important nowadays, which is digital PR, which kind of touches upon what I mentioned earlier, mentions and trying to— and I will give you an example here. We are an agency that helps B2B software companies. Okay. On our homepage, we never— we don't have even one mention of the term SaaS SEO agency. Okay, not even one. But because we have some backlinks and because we run a podcast that's called the SaaS SEO Show, well, guess what? We get visibility for such terms. We are not on page 1 because we haven't done something actively about it, but we have visibility for it. Rest assured that Google can make the associations as to what your website is all about. You just have to help it. And backlinks, they are not the only way to help Google make these associations.

Yeah. I mean, that was maybe years ago, right? I think 15, 20 years ago, you could just throw a bunch of links and things would rank, right? I mean, things have obviously changed with their algorithm. So let's talk hypothetical, right? If I have a, you know, let's say somebody listening in says, I have a very limited budget, but I do want to do SEO and I only want to focus on one area, right? Rather than I can create content and build a content team and do keyword research and focus down that route, or I can focus on link building. And let's say I want to focus on this for the next 2 quarters, so let's say next 6 months. Where would you suggest maybe investing that for the best ROI and why?

That's a very good question. But I would say that the answer heavily depends on what the budget is. Let's take 2 hypothetical scenarios. In the first scenario, you have Sorry?

I said, okay, let's do it. Let's fix this. Yeah.

So in the first scenario, we have a budget of, you know, $5K, which in some cases, you know, for some people it may be, you know, this is what I have. If you have a budget of $5K for the next 6 months, and also let's add in this scenario another factor that this is your last money. I would advise against SEO. Just, you know, don't do it. Invest this money in another channel, maybe a channel that offers instant gratification such as PPC, for example. Okay. Now let's take a second scenario, scenario, hypothetical scenario B. You have $50K. Okay. And you are also, you feel very comfortable investing this amount, it's not your last money. It's not that if I lose this money, I go out of business. And you are also okay with learning through that process. Okay? Because I would say that every investment, if anything, is a way to learn. Okay?

Mm-hmm.

So if that's the case, I would say 2 things. First of all, con creation. And second, content promotion. And in content promotion, by the way, I also include link building. So these are the 2 activities. But the thing is that most companies do and insist doing that in a very traditional way. So what would they do in a case like that? They would just open a keyword data provider, Ahrefs, once again, it's a sponsor of our podcast, full disclaimer, but I would still suggest them. They would open it, just try to find the keywords. Nothing wrong with that. But I mean, how can you expect people to link back to a piece of content that has nothing different or unique about it and it looks like every other result out there? Okay, so let's take things a bit further and let's assume that you are a CRM software. Okay. Well, guess what? CRM softwares exist for many, many years. It's one of the most saturated and more difficult categories to penetrate and to compete against all these big guys.

Yeah.

What can you do? I guess that most founders would say, you know, these quarters or for the next 2 quarters, we have to try to get visibility for the term CRM software. We are going to launch a feature page about it. And, you know, we are going to invest heavily in our efforts. It's never going to happen. Also, for reasons that we explained earlier, such as brand value and brand recognition, which rest assured plays a role. What you can do though, since you are going to invest in this process either way, is approach things a bit more creatively. For example, instead of just trying to go after keywords, you could take a more creative approach and, for example, create a piece of content that's a survey. Let's say, okay, you survey business owners who actively use CRM software for their business and you launch a piece of content that, let's say in this hypothetical scenario, Its title is 1,500 Business Owners Share Their Thoughts on CRM Software, and it doesn't look good. Okay. Now, this is something that could be amplified online on social media, for example. People, because it has data, could mention it, refer to it, and link back to it. And you could have potentially better chances of ultimately further down the line, way down the line, getting visibility for CRM software, which is the, you know, the ultimate goal. But once again, most companies choose to not take this creative approach because they think it's more difficult. Well, it's not more difficult, it's just different. And I would say that if anything, at least as I see it, it's more difficult to go the path that every Every other company takes.

Yeah, it sounds like you need to be a little bit more creative and be able to, willing to try different strategies rather than copying what's already working from the big guys. Right. I think that's another problem, right? Like we see is that people use copycat or spin-off content from some competitors. So they'll go to HubSpot and they'll spin one of these articles that are probably ranking. Why should we try to avoid that? One is like, yeah, because then you're just going to look like The same as everybody else. But, you know, second, what are some other problems if you go down that route?

I would say that obviously one thing is the one that you just mentioned. Another thing is that it's a loophole, okay? And it works until it becomes a real problem for Google, which by the way is well aware of it and sooner or later will do something about it. And so it works until it stops working, okay? As simple as that. So I would say that as a general comment, you should try to stay away from what's called correlation SEO or copycat content. You can call it however you like. What you can do about it with regards to content, you can add perspective. Okay, what do I mean by that? Let's give another example. Let's say that you're interested in the term types of marketing. If you go on and check this exact term now in Google, you will see that all pieces of content that rank in the top 10 are listicles with, you know, the X types of marketing. Now imagine if you create a piece of content that reads, we invested, I don't know, $5K, $10K in 4 types of marketing. Here's what we learned. Now, as a search engine user, I don't know about you, but this is the result I would click because I would like to know what these guys learned, you know, and regardless of the amount, it could be $2K, it could be, I don't know, whatever. I would really love to know what these guys learned through that process. And this is a way by adding perspective. It's a great way to differentiate yourself. in the SERPs and stay away from something that may work right now, but sooner or later, you know, it's not going to be as effective.

Makes sense. Yeah, that makes complete sense. And I love that approach. You know, so we talked a little bit about tools. You mentioned Ahrefs. I'm a big fan of it as well. So no issue there. I do recommend it. Is there any other favorite tools that you suggest to help make your life easier from keyword research, keyword tracking, Up until managing the entire SEO campaign?

Sure. So when it comes to— let's categorize them. Let's say keyword research, content creation, and performance monitoring, and even content promotion. So for keyword research, I would say Ahrefs. It has very, very good keyword data. Surfer SEO, especially for their content planner feature. SparkToro, which is a tool that we have started using like a few months ago to get a better understanding of our audience and, you know, try to better make the associations between our audience and, you know, were these people— what are the sources of information, what are the influencers, and so on and so forth for our audience. A great tool. And as the update their database data, become better and better. So definitely recommend that. But I would take a step back because unfortunately when it comes to keyword research specifically, the process starts without using like your biggest asset. You don't really need to start using an SEO software like Ahrefs. What you have to do is take a step back and start talking to your customers. There is no— this is the ultimate source of truth. These are the people who are going to tell you, these are the things that I'm looking for. These are the exact terms that I'm using when I'm looking for such a solution. These are the competitors I'm comparing you against. And these are the tools that I used to use before I switched over to your solution. So So I would say that you definitely have to add customer interviews as part of your keyword research process and understanding not of keywords, but, you know, how the journey works from start to finish. And here, Zoom, definitely Grain, which is a tool that can help you auto-transcribe your Zoom recordings. Typeform if you want to run customer service, definitely. And if you want to take things to an even deeper level, I would argue, and if you are an established business, I would say that you can analyze your reviews on websites like G2 and Capterra or GitHub using a tool like MonkeyLearn in order to identify patterns when it comes to what are the themes when it comes to why people are using your product? What are the main problems? What are the things that they highlight in the reviews? And so on and so forth. When it comes to con creation, Asana is the best for project management. Google Docs can do the work when it comes to creating the con actually. We use Slide as our knowledge base because especially if you want to scale things up, You need to make sure that either your writers, in-house writers, or the agencies or freelancers that are working with you have a knowledge base where they can refer to at all times to see how the process works. Okay. Clearscope for content optimization, Grammarly for plagiarism check, and so on. And then we use internally Mockflow for mocking things up for our designers and Loom for providing even more detailed briefs to our content writers. When it comes to performance monitoring, even though I'm not a big fan of performance monitoring, you know, I don't stress over rankings, but I would say that, you know, Ahrefs can do the job and Clearscope. They recently launched a new feature that allows you to monitor performance on a page level. That can work really well as well. And if you want to promote content now, full disclaimer, it is one of our clients, I would say Respona for email outreach and reaching out to websites and pitching backlinks and so on and so forth. So in a nutshell, these are the tools that we would recommend.

Thank you for this comprehensive list. That's super helpful. People can go out and build their own agency just from that stack right there. A big shout out to SparkToro though. We did have Rand Fishkin on the podcast last year. So if anybody who's listening hasn't checked out that podcast and are interested to learn more about SEO, we highly recommend you guys check out his podcast. So final question for you, George, in terms of on the SEO side when it comes to content, before we get into the more rapid fire personal questions. You know, one question and debate that people often have when they're creating content is like, you know, volume versus quality. What's your take on writing, you know, high volume of pages, articles, and just getting a bunch of content and hoping, you know, one sticks, and then you go back and start optimizing for those pages that are doing well and the ones that aren't, versus focusing on just shooting, you know, a few really high-quality long-form articles as part of your strategy? And then From there, what is the right amount of content we should be planning? Is it one massive guide per month or are you doing like 10 pieces per week, for example?

That's a very good question. And I would argue that in general, when it comes to getting results from organic search, publishing frequency or publishing velocity, you can hear people calling it both ways. is definitely important. It matters. Okay, we have seen that, yes, especially when we're talking about a website that is new, blank canvas, it definitely matters because you need to have a lot of content in order to perform. But I think that we shouldn't get into the comparison. It's not a fight against of volume against quality, I would say that it's not one or the other. If anything, a successful content SEO strategy needs to have a combination of volume and quantity content. And also, as I mentioned previously, I think that there is a misconception about content length. Many professionals even until this day seem to correlate length with quality, which, you know, it's not, it's simply not true. As I mentioned previously, in some cases, the answer to a particular question or query could be given in less than 500 words, while in others, you just, you know, you have to go a bit deeper than that. You know, you may have to create a 5,000-word guide. Okay. So in general, quality is totally subjective and query-specific. Now, the question as I see it is how can we maintain that and, you know, produce good content at scale? Because eventually, especially for most companies in the growth and scale phase, this is where everything ends up to. So to answer that, we have seen that some things and elements that help companies in this stage when it comes to maintaining quality at scale, quarterly or biannually planning. Obviously, there will be ad hoc topics, but you have to plan ahead. It's extremely important. You have to have extremely tight processes around con briefing. Okay. So, and obviously this will allow you to have a more junior person who will write the con. Okay, extremely tight processes around con briefing, uh, writers who are dedicated to specific, uh, topics or topical categories so that they develop themselves in these specific topics and topical categories. You also have to have extremely tight processes, uh, when it comes to editing. Uh, and last but not least, which is something that, you know, we, we are always surprised to see in companies, you have to have an easy and streamlined way of uploading the content once it's ready to the CMS. And as I mentioned, like, we are always surprised because we see this mostly with companies that have custom CMS. It's really a pain for them to upload the content.

Mm-hmm.

How can you scale things up if it takes you 3 hours to upload a single piece of content? You simply can't. So I would say that it all boils down to how can we maintain quality at scale? And these are some of the elements that we have seen with our clients and based on our experiences help companies do that. Nice.

Fantastic. That's super helpful. George, that was great. Lots of good knowledge there. A lot of knowledge bombs for people listening in on SEO. So now let's move to the next stage of the podcast, which we talked about, the rapid-fire questions. So ready to go?

Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right. What's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

It's running on the weekdays and reading on the weekends. Nice.

Reading and running. Love it. What's one piece of advice you wish you had known? And if you can go back, you would tell your 25-year-old self?

I would say, don't worry, everything is going to be all right.

Love it. Don't stress, just trust yourself. Yeah. What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow and manage Minusha? Meaning, what keeps you up at night these days?

Yeah, that's a great question. The thing is that we are in a hypergrowth phase at this moment, which means that the problem that we face are completely different than the problems that we had, say, 6 months ago. So at this point, the things that I'm mostly concerned about, first of all, people, how to acquire talent and retain talent, being able to support our clients' increasing needs, because in many cases, you know, we have clients where the engagement is X, And guess what? From the next month, for example, we want to make this 3x. So we have to be able to support that need. And another one, especially lately in the last months, as we were discussing also before we do the recording, we are being trusted by billion-dollar companies and public SaaS companies from the US. And this is a very big responsibility and not something that I take lightly. I want us to be able to return that trust and, you know, do the best that we can for our clients. And this applies not only for, you know, these big companies, for any client that trusts us, for that matter. Um, but I would say that with bigger companies come bigger responsibilities. Um, and so yeah, these are the 3 things I guess that keep me up at night.

Makes sense. Yeah, it's a good challenge to have. Um, who are— what are the best 3 resources? It can be books, uh, mentors, or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Great question. When it comes to books, I would say, uh, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, uh, Atomic Habits by James and Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. And when it comes to people/mentors, I would say, first of all, my wife. She's the driver of, you know, most successful decisions in my life, actually. My family, and especially my sister, my friends, my team, and also some partners that we have at Minucia, without whom, honestly, You know, I don't know. We we probably would have ended going out of business.

Nice. Yeah, those those are all great books and and all people you need around you to to to keep you going. Yeah. We'll add those links to those books in the show notes as well. People want to check out George. What does success mean to you today? Whether that's personally, business, financial life. There's no right answer.

Yeah, I I think you know the answer to this question changes as as we grow older, I guess. But at this point of my life, I'll quote something from Paulo Coelho with. regards to what success is, um, it is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace. At this point, you know, I'm trying to get there. I'm not there yet, but you know, this is what success is for me.

Yeah, that peace comes with knowing that you're, you're human and you've gone through the day. Yeah, you've got another day to live. This is great, George. Uh, love, love this podcast. It's been great chatting with you. Where can, uh, you know, people listening in, our audience, can touch with you, learn more about you and Minucia as well?

Sure. So first of all, you should visit our website at minucia.com, double T. Feel free to check out our blog posts. We have many interesting things coming up next, some studies specifically for SaaS companies, which is not something that many other, you know, agencies out there do. If you want to reach out to me personally, The best place to do that is on LinkedIn, Georgios Kasiotis. You should subscribe to our YouTube channel where we publish the video version of our weekly podcast, The SaaS CEO Show. And it would also mean a lot to me if you could take a look at Apple Podcasts, you know, leave a review for The SaaS CEO Show. feel free to subscribe and check out the content that we publish weekly with honestly the best minds in the industry. You will hear things that you don't hear anywhere else when it comes to content marketing and SEO specifically for SaaS companies.

Awesome. Awesome. We'll add those links to our show notes as well for people to check out and say hi to George. Thank you. Thank you once again, George. Much appreciate you jumping on today.

Thank you very much, Akeel. It was a Real pleasure.

Likewise.

Cheers.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants. We'll provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.