📊 PLG, churn and SaaS Scaling with Jeff Coyle

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Pod with Jeff Boyle. Jeff is co founder at Market Muse. He's also chief Strategy officer there. He co founded Silver Bluff Brewing. So we're going to talk about his multiple startups. Jeff Coy Consulting. That one has been going on since the 2000s, so we may be lucky and talk about the dot com boom and bus that Jeff have witnessed and lived through. Going to talk about AI content mostly today, guys. It's going to be a fun one. Stay tuned. This one is presented to you by pod.com if you want to start or scale or monetize your own podcast, you can go to podpar.com I can help you start and scale your podcast and get you paid in the meanwhile. Jeff, welcome to the pods. Tell me a bit more about yourself and Market Muse.

Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Market Muse is a content intelligence platform that sets the standard for content quality. So for nearly a decade we've been giving teams information about how to prioritize their content plans, how to update content with quality in mind. And we build out. We built an automated platform using artificial intelligence for now about a decade and now we are continuing to innovate, provide more ways of teams to do automated clustering, prioritization and building things that nobody else has built before.

So what is good content nowadays? Is it spicy? Is it different? Is it creative? Is it visual, AKA multimedia? What can I do to have folks engage more with my LinkedIn content, for example?

Yeah, and we focus on content from a text perspective. So we're trying to give you information about what it means to be an expert on a topic. So we want to give teams more time to be able to come up with and spend more time being a storyteller, spend more time focusing on their LinkedIn driving activity, not so much on the content that's on their website, not so much questioning like do I have any blind spots? So when we're giving insights for a team, it may present an angle or it may present a hole in their existing coverage. They might not be appealing to a particular intent. And then you're taking that into your LinkedIn and driving awareness through, you know, the types of things that do well on LinkedIn and that would be more driving based on your network, based on your, you know, the, the virality that you're looking to explore, you know, the whether you are trying to shock somebody with that information. And so if you have that infrastructure, you have anything you can do with it cross channel. So we commonly have Teams that, you know, they live and die on social, on news, on discover, through any many mechanism. They also have the infrastructure on their site that tells the story that they are an expert on that topic so that they can win on the tip of the spear, that's discover or the tip of the spear, that's news. So work with, you know, large publishers who you can't just write one article about X, have it win. You need that entire, you know, that buyer journey or the learning journey covered. And so we help them get to that, you know, comprehensiveness level. How much do they need to keep publishing in order to maintain or grow? And what do they need to put themselves in a position so that they can win on their favorite channel, whether it's social, news or otherwise.

Right. Your platform looks more like website content, for example. What's the difference between, let's say you guys and semrush, for example?

So a semrush is going to be. It's basically a huge database, right? It's everything. And we have one too. We, we have, we also are data solutions provider. We have a huge database of keywords, huge database of search results. But where we're different is we're able to understand what, what it means to be an expert on a topic, whether we had that data or not. So we're able to understand if you truly knew everything there was to know about this topic, how would you cover it? Would you cover it with just a page? Would you need an entire, you know, 20,000 pages? What are the intents you need to cover? And then we're able to also read your site. So we read your existing site, we understand what you've covered, how much you've done it. Where have you done it? Well, thin content, really in depth content. Where have you been successful? Right. So when we cross reference the universe of all information with what you have, it gives us unique insights and allows us to prioritize that. So where a semrush is more along the lines of a big, you know, slicing and dicing of a database and you have to draw your own conclusions. They've come up with a few other, you know, things that are related to, you know, correlations. We're really trying to get to the bottom of what you currently are about, what you could be about. And then what has the world of information told us you should be about?

Right. What do you think is the future of search engines? I've never been an SEO guy myself, always preferred like paid ads. Is it because I love the quick results and I'm lacking of patience. Maybe. Maybe it's because I tried SEO and failed and failed and failed and didn't try hard enough. But it seems that nowadays Google is being overtaken by Mr. Chatgpt. I search for my answers now in Chatgpt, not in Google intend to get way better answers. And you know, GPT, it's quick, it's instant, and it gets to the point. Do you feel that ChatGPT will take over what Google is right now?

I think you have. And I see them as multiple, you know, currently I see them as multiple melee or multiple, you know, combats. Right. I love it all too. I've done paid my entire life. I've been doing this for 25 years. As scary as that sounds, I would. I was doing AdWords before there was an interface and you were sending in spreadsheets and paying, paying CPMs instead of per clicks. And the changes we're seeing are, are dramatic and we could go on years about that. People are going to change their behaviors, but people who are using LLM through a specific app or a specific, you know, web interface are going to be a very, very small percentage. You're going to find that there's going to be integrations that bring those outcomes to the surface. You started to see Google tip their toes in with a thing that they call the search generative experience, which was the top of a search result. It was being generated. How successful was that? Jury's still out. Bing's trying to do the same thing. I think that you're going to see co pilots interrupt search results. You're going to see new players come in. Apple, Yahoo, Yahoo. Is building a completely new thing right now. Apple will be introducing their solutions. It's all going to take pieces of the pie away from traditional search. Traditional search is going to just be one of many popular channels until the winner comes out. I think in the end we're going to have a hybrid of retrieval, augmented generation, delivering the same goals as search engines. But right now you've got a mixed bag. It's basically like having two different battles. It's like paid versus organic. Now it's paid versus generated versus organic. I like having more things to fight because that means I got things, more things to win.

Love that. And how is AI affecting the direction that your company is taking? When we started, you said that you've been at it for 10 years. Did the development of Chad GPT change anything in your strategy?

Oh, yeah, it was, you know, it made me bite my lip a lot because I had and my team had innovated in this field of natural language processing and generation for many years. It was basically, it was the basis of what we had done a very long time ago. And we actually launched a natural language generation product before GPT3 called First Draft. And it had the goal of building automated briefs and automated drafts for users. However, the technology was so early, the quality was great, but it took like five days to build a draft and nobody wanted to pay $100 and, and, and wait five days to get a page response from a thing. But we were doing it, we were doing it a long time ago. And so the fact that GPT3 brought ubiquitous knowledge to this and it was fast and amazing, we immediately pivoted to go back to our old research and re inject generative technology throughout our platform. So we're actually building, we've built it in Almost, we're like 90 there an entire content strategy AI platform right now. And it is a, there's some AI native, there's some elements of retrieval, augmented generation, which means basically you've got your own data sets over here, you got your own databases and you can get unique value out of hitting those unique databases that no one else can. So the key to my view of innovation is there's going to be these, you know, cornerstone large language models, then there's going to be people who are doing unique things with data that only they have. Right. And that's going to create a new wave of products that are, you know, proprietary and amazing. In our case, building a specific AI platform to tell you what to write is, you know, not something that everybody can do and that's what we're focused on.

Right. And as the CSO of Market Muse, like this year, what are your top three goals?

We are, we had a great goal of becoming profitable. You know, we're a venture based company and we succeeded that at that last year. Very successful number of years, a number of quarters and really getting our company to a point where we can convert our platform to completely self service and then launch our new generative AI platform that doesn't do exactly what you think it was doing. Everybody's very used to generative AI being the thing that helps you write well, we're building the generative AI that tells you what to write and that's a really unique opportunity. So we've got the best of both worlds where you can take it to the final. But there's a lot of companies who aren't comfortable letting the generative AI write for them. But having Them as a part of their team and strategy is something that all of those teams are comfortable with. They want that and that's what we're going to bring the, we're going to be the first to market with that because right now people are very lost in the mix there. They're only publishing, they're delivering AI that is like almost like offensive to a lot of companies who are writing and for publishers, they're afraid. I mean look at Sports Illustrated, look at a lot of these publishers, Red Ventures who you know, because they adopted these things without thinking about human, human in the loop concepts and without thinking about other metrics. They have, you know, they've, they've, they've risked their businesses and so what we're, we're providing a way of integrating AI without putting your business at risk.

So how many paid customers since now

Mark Amuse has, you know, about 200 so paid customers on our premium product, about 500ish of our, on our self service offerings and about, I think we have about 10,000 active free or non recurring revenue customers. And then yeah, so we've been around for about eight or nine years.

So around 500K MRR, something like that.

Not published as we're private. But yeah, I mean we're, we're, we're in that, we're. So how could you get to, in a zone?

Yeah, it's pretty good. How, how could you get to a million this year? Like what would it take to make a, a double, a 2x leap?

It's a great question. I think the only way we get there is to pivot the platform to be self service and PLG and then have a scalable unit that somebody can purchase that they want to consume. And that's where we're headed right now. So yeah, million would be a good day. We'll get on, we'll get back on the show and we'll call, we'll call that call. They call the level. Right?

Yeah, I'll try, I'll try the, the product myself and let you know about the, the experience. You know, because PLG is so hard. You need to be so obsessed with a seamless onboarding and almost immediately demonstrating value. And the company, yeah they have like hundreds of millions in funding so they have like a team of 25 just for the onboarding. So how, how do you get there and compete as a smaller but fierce competitor?

I think it's through having made so many mistakes with it and is really it. We, we've taken shots at it but we never went 100% in on that. And like you said, it's the, it's that time to value. It's the onboarding, it's the, you know, when you're selling to a team, PLG is even more complex because you have users and then you have buyers. Right. How do you create a solid experience for someone who was a writer or just an SEO? Right. And I'm an SEO, so I can say Justin SEO. Right. They're just trying to optimize content. Right. Or they're the content marketing leader. They all have to have a good unique experience. How do you do that? That's where we've really required that human onboarding, that human touch to be successful. When you're selling to a team, PLG is an extra special and you see examples of it all over the place, but it's very rarely done in a way that you and I can look at it and go, oh, that's clearly. PQL is right. A product qualified lead. You look at Slack when the team sends their, I forget what number it is, 8,000th message, right. Instantly a PQ. A product qualified lead. Right. So that's a very simple PQL in our case it's, you know, we, we haven't really had a strong signal, PQL signal of a strategy. But what we're going to be doing is delivering the value of strategy to everyone. And what we're looking for is someone who values making decisions and once we see that they value making the decision to pick the right content to create or update, that is how we've been able to intrinsically understand that somebody's ready, you know, to be a, you know, a revenue customer.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was never really bullish on, on Slack that always like dropped at the last minute or subscribe and then drop them for Microsoft Team, then go back to discord. And yeah, nowadays I don't have much employees as well, but yeah, they never really got me, you know, like as a customer so. And God knows that they had a great product. But then comes the competition, you know, I mean at the end of the day you, you send instant messages, you can have automations, you can have bots, but you're just in a, in a tough market with a bunch of competitors on your end. Is it in your plans to get more funding or just stay that way?

We probably will, yeah, we, we will at some point but we want to make sure that we're doing it from a place of strength and also, you know, with the understanding that we aren't earning any more money. We've made that decision, you know, we've gone through multiple venture rounds and so it's a, we don't want to raise money and then be burning money that isn't really specifically having an immediate return on investment. We've been through that rodeo. It's not going to be another, we're not going to take that step again. We have to stay competitive. We have to move so fast and we are resource constrained right now, so we're moving slower than we should. So we'll take money when it's going to allow us to move fast and break things a little bit more.

So how much page views do you generate on a daily basis? Like how much traffic is your own SEO pulling?

Oh gosh, we do a lot. We eat our own dog food. We are 100% inbound. So we, we don't buy any traffic and we have about 20 times the leads than we can service with our team. Then we, so we, we, yeah, we are very under resourced. We generate 3,000 plus surplus leads per month that we don't even hit. So we are the prototype of someone who needs to convert to plg.

How could you like fix that step of the pipeline and actually follow up with these people? Like automation or.

We, we've tried so many different things. Better email sequences, better follow up processes. Humans certainly would be an approach for qualification. We have automated AI qualification. We know what's qualified and what's not. We score, we do automated lead scoring with a machine learning model. It's very specific, we know what it is. So the options would be, you know, lower price points, simplified self service onboarding, you know, better time to value PLG fundamentals, to get more of them using our platform and knowing what they can buy. Right now I think where we are is they go in, they, they see the value but it's not really extremely clear what they should buy and whether they should buy it. And that's something that we're working on.

So what does it take?

Very, I'm very honest with, I know, I know where our, we know where a lot of our challenges are. We have a tough competitive landscape at that low level. There's a lot of products that look like ours. Right. But they don't do what we do and that becomes a little bit tough. You know, there's a lot of copycats. When we started we were the first people to deliver a brief in software and the first person to give this type of a editor experience. And now there's over 50 software products that deliver the editor experience with recommendations in the right rail.

What does it take to be a great cso?

I think it's passion. You got to really care about the problem you're solving and you have to be very aware of the industry, the market, what the market maturity currently is asking for. I like to look at market maturity as kind of like pure innovation growth maturity and saturation. And a lot of SAS co, SAS founders don't even understand what product mature market maturity is. So they're, they're building software in the middle of saturation when they should be building software into growth or maturity or making the decision to take the leap of something that's never been built before and rolling the dice right. You gotta know where you're building. And a lot of times you see teams and they're going out and they're building into saturation and that's scary. I mean, you are one of 50. And I always like to say being a good CEO means you're going to put out, you're going to know when you're saturated, you're going to know when you're mature and you're going to always be trying to be in growth or innovate based on your, the amount of money you have to spend. But the scary parts of, you know, where teams and I always recommend they get someone on their board that has market market awareness or product management experiences where I see them building right in the middle of saturation and it's like that's going to be a tough road. You are already, you don't have a prayer of being more than a utility or, you know, a few bucks a month at some sort of scale. Differentiation is going to be hard for you. So I think being a good CSO is passion and understanding product market maturity.

How do you balance strategy with execution, analytics and new conclusions to test out?

For a long time we focused on it. We were kind of inside our walls and we were just trying to get, you know, fix ourselves. And I think that's, that's even a mistake. You know, getting all your ducks in a row and you're not watching what's happening can be a problem. So I think that some of the steps that I'm taking that to balance innovation against execution would be recognizing that it's okay to not launch perfect stuff. It's okay to launch things that are going to be problematic. As long as you're doing it with your eyes open, you're make, make the conscious, you know, get the team unified on speculation. Get the team unified on innovation. And I think that that's when you, you know, you play to your appropriate market and your maturity. I think a lot of teams, they try to grow up too quick. When you grow up too quick, you end up, you know, taking way too long to do stuff. Right. If you don't, you know, if you don't work at IBM, you know, you shouldn't be waiting years between releases. Right. You shouldn't have 185 pages of documentation for that release. You should probably have one. And if anybody wants two, they can ask for two. Right. But you know, those are the types of things that I focus on. I, I want to ride the knife edge of, of innovation while still making sure everybody's on the same team. And it's hard. Keeps me up at night.

It is. And parallel to that you have a beer brand. How's that doing?

We are one of the fastest growing breweries in Georgia. We are, we won the US Open for our flagship in 2020 silver medal and then we won the World World cup last year for that same product and we just recently won beer of the year with our, with that same number one. So a lot of times at these competitions people will win awards with like some random beer they made. We actually win them with our best with our number one sellers. So it's fun. It's been a, a successful entity. We're a profitable brewery in 2024 which is very in 20, in 23, which is very rare. We have a killer tap room and, and we're continuing to grow. We just expanded across Georgia and we are doing amazing things with very little considering what we've been able to do with the team. There's very few self starter beer brands that have grown as fast as we have.

Very impressive to say the least. Dude, how do you manage your time and how do you decide where to input your energy?

Oh gosh, that's my worst enemy. I have two small children. I have a five and a seven year old. Have obviously things we've spoken about. I am, I am very guilty of not managing my time well. I've gotten better over the years. I know the percentages of my time and where it should spend. I'm really, really sensitive to those. I time boxed for years where I would actually time track aggressively to find my mistakes, find my errors. I would love to have support like a ea those types of things, but I'm, I'm very incompatible. My lifestyle and the way that I work is very uncompatible with those things. Incompatible with those things. So I, I struggle with that, and I still do. I, I struggle with perfection.

I, I wouldn't say that I struggle on my side. I call it like a chaotic flow, you know, I'm at ease with the fact that I'm doing a bunch of things and sometimes some will be in the red, you know, and then I balance out. Some would call it like running from one side to the other. To me, it has become natural. It's very impressive that you got like that, that you won these titles while running that company. Props to you for that. I'll, I'll have a taste, have a great team. Whenever I'm, I'm nearby. Till then, where can we find out more about you?

Jeff if you look@marketmuse.com look me up at Jeff Coyle at LinkedIn. Jeffrey underscore Coyle on the X Twitter. I answer everything where you can shoot me an email. Jeff Marketmuse.com if you're in Georgia, Silver Bluff, we're available lots of places and shoot me your feedback there. Jeffsilverbluff.com We've got a great social presence for that. So if you do like beer, some fun stuff to look at. And I appreciate this discussion. Always makes me think about that. Is this level of chaos good for me? It's good. Good to hear somebody who is embracing that and being okay with some of the suck that comes with it.

Well, thanks for coming today.

All right.