In this interview, Johnathan Grzybowski discusses the marketing channels that deliver the highest return on investment for his SaaS business, emphasizing content and SEO over paid advertising. He critiques inauthentic, brag‑heavy marketing and stresses the importance of sharing the real, often difficult, entrepreneurial process. Grzybowski outlines rapid early growth, hitting milestones months ahead of schedule and embarking on a hiring spree to meet demand. He explains how his distributed remote team operates, highlighting the critical role of clear communication through written memos, Loom videos, and local managers to avoid misunderstandings. Finally, he recounts a failed marketing experiment—a 15‑foot "Pengie Bot" vending‑machine installation—that generated little revenue, illustrating the value of learning from unsuccessful tactics.
Chapters
Did you have to rank, like, so, you know, content marketing, you know, doing podcasts, you know, SEO, and then now you're doing some ads. Would you say there's one channel that you say, you know, you're getting the highest kind of ROI and would suggest to our audience to focus on if they were to focus on one?
I think content. I think SEO. Uh, I mean, see, it's hard, right? So for us, um, we have, uh, like there's keywords that are out there that people are searching for.
Mm-hmm.
So like that makes sense for us. Um, but that might not make sense. Advertising might be easier for somebody else. So it just depends on, on how you obtain your customers. We, we, we don't talk to anybody. We, all of our stuff is done online. So, uh, they go onto our website, they sign up for our service, they pay us through credit card, and that's that. Um, so I— but to answer the question, I do find value in if you have a secret sauce in how you grew the business, then I think you should, you should tell other people about it. But don't lie, because a lot of people are like— I see ads all the time, these crappy ads. It's like, I drive a Lamborghini and and this is how I did it. And it's like, bro, you've never— you don't own that car. And I don't know about you, but like, I hate seeing people who promote themselves by their— by what they— by what they wear or by what they have. Um, I think entrepreneurship sucks, right? Like, I, I would never wish— I don't regret anything, right? But entrepreneurship sucks. It's hard. It is depressing. It is scary. And to promote that by bragging about what you have, I think it's just, that's not the way to do it.
It's not the reality of it, right? I mean, that's what people love. They love the end goal, but they don't love the process. And that's because the process is work.
And I'm in love with the process. I love the process. Like, that's, that's my— that's what gets me up every day.
Yeah, yeah, I'm the same. I mean, the results, it's like a little bit of a dopamine hit, but at the end of the day, it's like, I just want to keep doing it. And I think—
yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah. And what are you guys at in terms of, uh, users right now, or a month, like average or so?
Uh, I'm not able to share that just because of competitive nature, but, um, we were able to grow our business within The first 3 months— so this is being recorded in March— we've already obtained 2 milestones that we thought that we were going to get in June of 2021, and we achieved that in, in March. And then we're already on our way to the second milestone that we thought that we were going to end in November.
Wow.
We are on a crazy hiring spree right now, which is something that we're incredibly grateful for, and I hope that we're able to hire at the rate in which we're able to keep up with demand. So that's always going to be an issue. So, but that's the best answer that I can give you to give you an inclination of how well we're doing.
That's cool. Question, I guess, on management. So I think that's something now, you know, SaaS founders are facing remote teams, team based in, you know, project managers in the US, and then you have teams in, you know, so-called Philippines. Do you have project managers in the Philippines or, you know, office managers or Managing it, or are you able to effectively, you know, manage all that remotely?
We are able to manage that remotely, uh, and we do have managers that are over, uh, that are, that are in that country as well. Um, so the, the thing that I would speak to about that is communication is incredibly important. Going back to the idea of like using Loom, um, sometimes people, uh, do not learn the way that you learn. And so you need to be able to cover all of your bases, uh, going back to processes and procedures. What we usually do when we communicate a new idea is we write a memo that's a, you know, in the form of a Google Doc. And we attach a video associated with that to ensure that there's like zero confusion. Because when you work with people, especially managers, your first reaction is like, what the F, man? Like, why, why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing your job? And it's not that they're not doing their job. It's just, they might be confused with what, what you said versus what the reality is and how they interpreted it. So, um, to me, that's like critical, super critical to communicate as much as possible.
Um, and just on that point where you're saying, okay, you've got the Ferrari now, you know, you've got something that's growing really nicely, you know, you're not showing that off, but, you know, the process we're talking about is seeing what you had to go through to get to where you guys are today. And I think equally to talk about is, you know, what doesn't work in part of that process and what the struggle is. Can you share any failed experiments that you've maybe run on the marketing side and say have failed and you wouldn't do again?
There was— we were so happy and excited about this. We went to an event and we created what's called the Pengie Bot, which inevitably is now a part of something inside of Pengie. And where we created this giant robot that was about 15 feet tall and we like painted it and we put fur on it and it actually was a vending machine where you hit this button and then you— and then people were behind it basically like changing the scripts like, you know, please wait.
Mm-hmm.
And then eventually something came out at the bottom of it and it was like this random gift, right? So we spent probably $300 on stuff. So we bought lemons and limes and watermelons and we bought these really random-ass things like pool noodles and just really crazy stuff. And so you would see people walking around this event that had thousands of people in it and they had— one guy was carrying a watermelon around and so it created this huge mix of things. Of, of like, well, who— where'd you get that from? Like, how the hell— why are you carrying a watermelon? That is stupid. Why would you do that? And we probably spent 2 months in order to do this, to think about it, to execute it, to create it, maybe even longer, to be honest with you. And I think we obtained like 2 or 3 sales from it. So you're trying to like— so That amount of time that we spent on this one giant idea that we thought was going to be this huge money-making machine generated less than or around $1,000 worth of revenue. Would you go at the end of the day say that that's worth it? I'd probably say no, because imagine what you could do in 3 months' time in order to focus on other areas. And so the one rule that we came up with is never trade respect for attention, in which we— in which now it's a cornerstone and philosophy that we have in our company where we're never going to disrespect or we're never going to be cute in order to grab attention. Our decision-making process is more fine-tuned. We have an entire decision-making process flow where we try to do this new idea. It doesn't matter what idea it is. It could be marketing, it could be a new process, it could be a new feature inside of Pengi. Does this idea hit all of the measures in our decision-making tree? And if it doesn't, then we throw it out. It doesn't matter how good the idea is. If a customer comes up to us and says, hey, I have this really good idea in order to make the service better, we're going to put that up against our decision-making tree and say, okay, how many customers actually have this problem? Okay, one, throw it out, doesn't matter. Now, what we normally do is we'll, we'll take that, that, that feedback, and we'll write it down. And we'll say, we'll put it into a category. You know, Johnny said X, Sarah said Y. And then now, if we collect that data over time, and we see that in the span of a month, 15 people said that, okay, now it's actually a better time to go back to that. to that, to that thought process. So I think as a, as a human being, it's really easy to be— have this shiny object syndrome. But I think we do a really good job at just filtering that in order to make really smart decisions that make— that move the company forward.
