201 - Revolutionizing Marketing Analytics: Innovative Approach to Visualizing Customer Journeys with Funnelytics' Mikael Dia

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Raquel Díaz, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of a company called Funalytics., and I think this is the first time in over 200 episodes where I've actually used a product of somebody that I'm interviewing. And for those of you that don't know, Funnelitix is, allows you to visually see the data coming in from all of your different social media data, whether it's email or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever, pulls the data in using a whole bunch of API technology, and you can visually see how your marketing funnel goes through your funnel, through your sales pages, and into your conversions. And I had a guy in London introduce me to it a couple years ago. So it's really great to see the guy behind the, behind the, the system.

Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really cool. Always fun to see people who've used the product and to speak to them. So I appreciate you having me.

So let's start off with a little bit about your backstory, Mikael. Tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got into this.

Sure. Yeah. So I mean, I'm an entrepreneur at, I guess, at heart, and I'm a marketer from a skills set standpoint, even though I didn't go to school for marketing. I went to school for civil engineering to figure out how to build bridges and all that fun stuff. But at some point in my journey, I became kind of obsessed with this idea of how do you get a random person, a stranger to become a customer? For a product or service. And I started learning all sorts of things around this idea of, you know, converting these strangers into customers from affiliate marketing to SEO to pay-per-click ads to persuasion, copywriting, funnels, emails, just all of those little intricate pieces. And it kind of became this, this thing where it started off with, you know, having Imagine having like a 1,000-piece puzzle set and you flip it and put it on the table and you're like, okay, well, I'm not going to show you what the picture looks like. You just figure out how to build this puzzle. To me, slowly flipping all these pieces and connecting them and then, okay, I'm starting to understand how this, how this game works. And, and I, I ended up starting a few different businesses over the years, a Mandarin language school, a, an agency. I went into the nutrition space and coaching space. And helping grow a business where I was a partner in there and kind of all of that eventually led me to running Funnelitix, a software company. So there's a little background on me.

So Funnelitix, as I described, is a, I think you described it as a whiteboard where you can actually track, visually track the data that's being generated from all of your different, from marketing, from social media impressions and leads, to going into sales pages, to going to conversion pages, to actual sales conversions. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, I mean, the reason I started Funnel Analytics a while back was because when I was running my agency, what we would do is we would whiteboard that entire strategy that you kind of just mentioned, right? So all of your, your ads, your emails, your pages, you would kind of whiteboard this strategy to kind of explain it to a client, right? You would kind of say, okay, well, ads are going to go to this page and, and then they're going to put in their name and email and they're going to receive these 5 emails and it's going to go over here. And, and you kind of architect this little system or this funnel, as we call them. And the issue that we always faced was, okay, now how do I look at the performance of this strategy, this whiteboard at the end of the day? And you have to basically log into your Facebook ad account. You have to log into Google Analytics, you've got to build a couple spreadsheets, you got to try to tie it all together, even though none of it is really linear. So it just became really painful. It just became really hard. And the idea of Funnel-lytics came to me by just sitting here and saying, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could just like on a digital whiteboard map this entire strategy, all these little customer touchpoints and visualize it, but then click a button and overlay that data right there on top of that, that same map. That way I could visually see how are people flowing through this, and I could see the conversion rates and the numbers and the drop-offs, and I could, I could just look at this picture and be like, okay, this is the problem, this is what I need to fix in order to keep, you know, making more money or growing the business. So, uh, fundamentally, that is what FunnelX is. It's a digital whiteboard that allows you to map your customer journeys and and visualize the flow of those journeys.

So you've been, you've, how long has Funnelics been around?

So I founded the company in 2018 and in those first 2 years it was very much a prototype from 2018 to 2020. I was, you know, experimenting with a whole lot of stuff. We, we sold founding members licenses and we, we tried to figure out exactly what is this product? How do we even pull data? How do we stitch that data together? How do we even visualize it on a canvas? All sorts of stuff. Stuff. And as over the years we were able to kind of raise VC money and we were able to kind of build a much more robust product that we have today that actually scales and really pulls in data and visualizes it. And it's really, really cool.

What is it that gets you up in the morning these days to get you excited to go to work?

To be honest, the biggest thing for me is still very much product. I'm Through and through, even though, you know, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur, my skill set is the marketing side. What I love the most and the thing that actually like gets me the most excited is the innovation of what we're building at Funnelitix. It's just so cool. It's having this whiteboard that allows you to manipulate and look at data in a way that just doesn't exist is, is really, really exciting. So for me, the innovation aspect is what truly gets me up. It's not the money that we make, it's not the, you know, the customers of course because they give me feedback on what to build next. But yeah, the innovation is probably the coolest thing.

And what do you think, what do you think it's unique about you that you bring to the business that's made it so successful?

Interesting question. I don't think there's anything unique about me, to be honest. I think I just have a series of experiences that have kind of led to this, you know, like by education, I used to spend a lot of my time when I was working as an engineer and I only worked as an engineer for about 6 months and then I quit because I hated it so much. But when I was working as an engineer, I spent all my days doing AutoCAD drawings, you know, like basically diagramming roads and bridges. And so take that. Now I have a whiteboard that allows me to diagram customer journeys. Mix it with the fact that I spent all these years learning about, you know, marketing and funnels and all that stuff, my kind of knowledge and excitement for data and numbers, and I guess merge all of these things together and I get it. That's what happened.

I get it. It's the con— it's— I hadn't thought about the fact that you were spent some time, a lot of time learning how to use CAD/CAM. Yeah.

And, and AutoCAD.

And so it just now that makes perfect sense to me.

Yeah. It kind of all aligned, I guess.

Yeah.

You took that engineering background of putting pieces together, attach it to your marketing stuff, and you end up with Funnelitics.

There you go. I guess that's the, those series of experiences and things just let, and also, you know, I'm, I, I like taking risks. I like, innovating. I don't really care so much about, you know, the money aspect of things. Of course, it's always, you know, you— it's scorecard and you want to make sure you're growing and things are moving in the right direction. But ultimately, um, that innovation of just like, hey, you know what, we're building something pretty cool, you know, is, is exciting. So it wasn't without challenges. We can, I'm sure, dive into that. But yeah, I guess all those combinations is what led me to this point.

So throughout this whole process, I'm really curious about, this show is called Listening with Leaders for a reason. I teach deep listening skills and I'm always interested in interviewing successful people like yourself about the importance of listening. So talk to me about that a little bit. Interesting.

So from a listening standpoint, I mean, you know, it's, you realize at, at the beginning of FunnelLytics, I was actually very much just the, the person driving everything. And what was interesting about that is that it was all my ideas, all my mistakes, all of my strategies, all of my— basically me being the brute force of where are we going with this. And at some stage, as a leader and as your company grows, you have to start to realize that in order for this to grow, you have to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and can do better things than you. And ultimately, you have to sit back and listen to everything that they're saying. And it's how you learn. It's how you get better ideas. I think Jeff Bezos once said that, you know, he, he's always the last person to speak in the room after he's listened to everybody speak. And, and I've started to adopt that kind of mentality. Okay, I've got my you know, head of success who deals with customers every single day. I might think that I have the best idea of what we should build next for Funnel Analytics, but they have way more insights and way more, you know, experience from that standpoint. So listen, because once you listen, you get some, you get some input. And you know what, it reflects not just in work, but at home and, you know, in your marriage, if you You want a successful marriage, you better know how to listen as well. So it's, it's a little bit of both. So yeah, listening is super important in that way.

How many people, how many people do you have employed with Funnelitix now?

Now we're, we're a relatively small team. We're at 13 people, so it's nothing really, nothing big.

Yeah.

Wow.

I, I, that's kind of impressive that you built such an impressive pro— I mean, robust product with only 13 people.

Yeah, most of them are engineers and, uh, a lot of the growth has come from organic and organically, you know, you were told about Funnelitix through somebody. So we've been fortunate enough to not have to grow or spend a lot on kind of sales and the marketing side. We've spent all of our main money and our resources on engineering and building a robust product.

So in terms, I mean, I know you've got an engineering background yourself, so it probably a little easier, but engineers have a reputation for not being great listeners and not being, and not having really good strong people skills. What's been your experience?

It's interesting. It's interesting depending on the type of engineer that you get and where they're at in their career. So junior engineers do listen a lot because they want to learn as much as possible. Senior engineers who aren't necessarily at kind of a VP manager level, you're right, they don't listen at all. They, it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's actually really, really challenging to get them to kind of play within, within the ballpark. But also a lot of it comes down to empowering them too, right? So when you, you understand their core skill sets, and you understand where they truly thrive and how they thrive. So some of our engineers are extremely good at— they have a scope, they have a spec, they know exactly what needs to be built. They'll put their heads down and build it, right? But they'll follow what, what's being scoped out. While there's some engineers that it's the opposite. If you give them a spec, they get bored and they kind of want to go at it on their own and they want to figure out, okay, well, I'm going to approach it this way or I'm going to approach it that way, etc. So part of that is really understanding and having the right engineering manager who understands, who understands those engineers. So yeah, I mean, it comes down to the type of person at the end of the day.

So how do you— I mean, how do you— how have you learned to navigate that? I think you make a really— that's a great insight. How have you learned how to, how to listen to them and manage them appropriately depending upon what drives them.

What, what's interesting is you, you, if, if you're willing to pay attention and you don't approach things where it's my way or the highway, you start to realize and you start to pick up on, on the nuances of these people. So again, going back to the idea of listening, taking a step back, letting people talk, especially in a group environment, what you start to notice is there are some engineers who are a lot more vocal, even though they're awkward and they don't have the same interpersonal skills as— they're still much more vocal about their approach or their strategy and, hey, we should go about it this way. While there's some that are very subdued, they just sit back and listen. And then you look at their, you know, how they approach the, you know, their work, you see that some people are they only care about hitting their deadlines. They only care about building the product. So that's how I've approached it. I've worked with my VP of engineering to basically just get a sense of who are these people and, and how do they like to work and how do they like to contribute. The people who are more vocal, we give them a little bit more rein for free rein. We also started dividing our teams into, we kind of call them the precision team and the creative team. So basically we have our creative engineers and we have our precision engineers. And the difference is the creative engineers are the starters. They're the ones who love to kind of just, yeah, like solve problems and just build that thing. But then when it comes to like ironing out all the bugs and checking all the boxes, like they hate it, right? Like they don't want to do it. That's when things get broken and On the flip side, you got kind of the precision engineers who are the opposite. They don't want to figure out how to solve this particular problem, but once it's kind of going, it's like, how do I polish it? How do I make it really, really good? So, you know, for us, that's kind of how we divided our, our team, and it, it really works quite well because we get a new idea, I work with the creative team. It's interesting too, the dynamic between myself and my VP is, is I'm on the creative side. I'm not the creative engineer solution person, but I'm the one who comes up with the ideas along with, you know, our CS manager and all that. And then we, we throw it with our small team of, you know, our, our creative engineers. They're kind of the SEAL team. They go build some cool prototypes, clickable, it works and, and all that. But then, you know, it's not really production ready. And then we pass it on to the, my VP who's like, okay, this is how we're gonna approach it to— and it works quite well.

So another thing that, I mean, I was listening to you, I get the sense that sometimes in meetings, even though engineers don't like emotions, they get kind of emotional.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, they, they might even get assertive or angry, or— and the introverts, they all shudder back, right, and shut down. Totally. How do you manage that?

Yeah, look, I mean, anybody who builds something and when you give somebody ownership of something and you let them build it, they get protective over it, right? So they get protective of their approach to building it. They get protective of like their, their thought process around it. So for example, the amount of times where we built something and the engineer that built it either was no longer with us or something changed and it had to be moved on to somebody else. And they looked at it and they're like, no, no, we need to rebuild this. I need, I need to rebuild it from scratch because I can't, I can't handle or work with this, this code here. And it's like, well, okay, we just spent all this time and money and effort building it. It works. Now we just need to improve it. And you're saying we got to rebuild it, right? And it's part of just, you know, making sure that we have a collaborative, you know, environment and experience around how do we, how do we manage that? And credit to where credit is due, that's really my VP of engineering more so than me. I'm, I'm not the one who's in the weeds of like managing those day-to-day conversations. I leave it to him because he's significantly better at communicating that with them.

Good for him and good for you for knowing that. Yeah. Skill set.

Otherwise I would cause chaos. So it doesn't, doesn't help.

So where do you see the future for, for Funnelitix?

Yeah, I mean, we, we still have a very strong mission at Funnelitix of we really are in the business of trying to build the go-to command center for all the marketing teams in the world. We want to have a, a central command center that anybody who ultimately is visual, which I think is all of us, is at least 65% of us who aren't on the analytical kind of I love spreadsheets mindset, can come in and, and look at and plan and measure and optimize all of the, their marketing and their customer journeys and, and really what drives their growth of their business at the end of the day. So We're just continuing to build our product and continuing to bring in customers and building stuff that they love so that we can keep growing. That's really, it's really the focus.

One more question. I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Mikhail, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh man. I used to do a lot of like hip hop dancing and so that's completely random. I used to play— I was very, very sports-oriented, and it was all due to my sister. My sister loved to dance. So as a kid, I used to watch like hip-hop videos and try to mimic moves. And now you'd probably have to give me a few drinks before I bust a move on the dance floor. But yeah, that's something that most people don't know about me.

That's really cool. A great conversation, Miguel. I'm really honored. To meet the guy who founded Funnelics, which is, as I told you before, is a platform I've used and I'm super impressed with it. So thanks so much.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.

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