Increasing Client Value with Productized Services With Andy Cabasso

All right, welcome back to the Agency Journey podcast. This is Gray McKenzie from Zen Pilot, and this week I've got the distinct pleasure of bringing on Andy Cavasso from. He is a co founder of a company called Postaga and has a super cool story. So I'm super excited to dig into it. Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Gray, thanks for having me. Yeah, Excited to be here.

Yeah. Among other things, in your intro occasionally. And I was tempted to read it, but I usually go with a short version first. Former Guinness World Record holder. What's the story?

So I've started using that because it gets people asking questions like, well, tell me the story and is it a good one? No, it's the simplest thing that anyone could probably possibly do to win a Guinness World Record. I got the like framed thing back there. Years ago, Reddit did a big secret Santa where you could get matched up with someone around the world and you would send them a small gift for the holidays. And because it was the largest secret Santa that ever took place, you won a Guinness World Record. And at the end of it, all the participants could ask for basically a certificate. And so I'm like, this is like, this fulfilled a childhood dream that I had ever since I was in elementary school reading those really cool Guinness Books and seeing all these amazing things that people were doing. And yeah, check that off the bucket list. Any other acrobatic feats or things like that or collections that wasn't going to happen for me. So this one worked. But then, of course, the following year, Reddit did another Secret Santa and broke the record. And so now I am, sadly, a former Guinness World Record holder.

That's awesome. Well, it's a slightly more exclusive club, though, than the Time Person of the year in 2006, which was you. I still occasionally see that on someone's profile somewhere. And for a while that joke was kind of tired. And now it's been tired enough that I'm kind of like, okay, that's making.

Me chuckle right now. There are enough people who have forgotten about that. And it's like, oh, wait, Time Person of the Year. Oh, yeah, with the mirror. And that's clever.

So you've got, you got an awesome story. And I've already know you've shared your story a number of times on podcasts of building and exiting an agency, coming from a legal background. But now with Postaga, you call it an all in one platform for cold email outreach. So you've got the software play, which I'm excited to hear the story of and also you've got a services component to it as well right now. But why don't you. Maybe just by way of intro, can you walk us through what postaga is and how you got here?

Sure. So in simplest terms, postaga is a tool that helps you do cold email outreach to connect with other people who don't necessarily know who you are. For purposes of everything from sales lead generation to PR to link building, there are a variety of use cases. It's used by people from salespeople to marketers to PR professionals. And it kind of came about really because of specifically like the link building use case, which was back in the day I ran a digital marketing agency and we were noticing that to be able to rank better in Google, you needed more high quality relevant links pointing to your website. And the way to get good quality, real links to your website isn't by just publishing content and waiting and hoping other people link to it, but by doing outreach to other relevant websites to pitch them to either link to your content or have you write a guest, let you write a guest post for them. So then you get a link back to your site. But we weren't really seeing any great scalable ways to do this, especially for an agency. What we were seeing was a lot of disjointed tools out there. There were tools for prospecting to find good websites, there are tools for finding emails and then tools for sending email sequences. But we really weren't seeing anything that was built and geared towards us as people who are interested in link building. And so we built postaga, which is the all in one platform for that. It does everything from finding relevant outreach opportunities based on whatever your goals are, to finding the right people's contact info, to then sending personalized email sequences to them and managing that all in a CRM. So that's the, the backstory on the, the product and how it got to.

Being what are with that initial, initial use case of link building. I know you've done a lot of podcast outreach and kind of promoted that use case for postaga too, which I think is a really good tool. And then obviously you get normal cold email to go sell stuff. And you know, there's any number of other iterations too. What do you see as the most common use case for postaga right now? Not necessarily what it's best suited for, but what are people actually for? Primarily.

I'd say there's a decent mix, but probably the most common use case right now is for link building. We're seeing more and more People in sales using it and also in pr. But I guess, like, big picture, there are a lot of people in digital marketing and a lot more people in sales. And so as people in the sales community are finding out about us, we're getting more visibility that way. And while, like, I've seen, like, very, very effective PR outreach campaigns, I think there's just a smaller community of people in pr.

Yeah, I wanted to go to this at some point. I'm going to ask it now because this is one of the things I'm most curious about. I've followed Rob Walling and in our Volsat and the microconf community for a while, and now they've got a fund called Tiny Seed where they're investing in mostly bootstrapped companies. Bootstrapped are mostly bootstrapped, I think. And you joined. What cohort were you in? So just last 2021 spring.

Yeah, it was the spring 2021 cohort.

Okay. What prompted, like, I would just love to hear the story of that. Like, what prompted you to go there and then what was that? The experience of applying and going through that process.

Yeah, so initially, it wasn't really on our radar. We were, you know, we were following the microconf community. I really like their kind of vision and ethos of, you know, being geared towards founders that are looking to have your businesses bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped. My last agency, we didn't raise any money. And after we exited and our agency got acquired, we used some of the proceeds of that to start this next venture. And so it had. We'd been bootstrapped and we didn't really have any plans to raise any, like, venture funding or anything like that. And then we kind of came across the accelerator as they were opening up their applications for the spring batch. And we were particularly interested in not like it's an accelerator and kind of about the program is they provide some funding, like, not like a Series A or anything like dramatic like that, like millions of dollars or anything like that, but a small amount of funding. But also they've got their. Their community, their mentors, and that was really the aspect that we were most interested in. We've been listening to podcasts like Rob's startups for the rest of us and following Micro Comp and really appreciating their insights. And our thought process was if they can help us avoid some of the common pitfalls that we may not be aware of that we don't know in terms of building a SaaS business, that would be absolutely worth worth whatever equity stake that they take. And so, yeah, like when you're building a new business, things take time. And with my agency in the first go round, like we got to an exit that we were happy with. But certainly along the way we learned a lot, we tried many different things, did a lot of ab testing and we didn't know what we didn't know. And so, yeah, we found out the hard way that certain strategies and tactics didn't work for growth or processes or operations or things like that. And coming into this SaaS business and.

With Postaga Reach, what let's just say, and is it all as you're doing cold outreach right now, is it primarily link building? Is it scaled down to one specific type of cold outreach?

So it's kind of everything. And we have like a variety of different types of businesses that are, that are using this service. There are some software SaaS businesses that are using the done for you service to get like press and visibility like that. We're doing specifically just doing outreach to get them guest spots on other podcasts. There are SaaS businesses that are trying to do link building. And so we're doing, you know, link building, guest posting outreach and stuff like that for them. There are other agencies that are using our service that we're doing outreach for, either them or for their clients. And I'd say like, probably two of the biggest segments of our, you know, done for you customers are either other agencies or, or software businesses. And it's, it's a very wide range of stuff that we're doing for them, whether it, whether it's link building or press outreach or sales lead generation. And also it's gotten, gotten more popular more recently is doing affiliate outreach. So for businesses that are products, whether it's like E commerce or you know, they have their own, or if they're like SaaS businesses, we can find potential partners, people who would be good affiliates to recommend their products.

Yeah, what you mentioned kind of rolling out as a productized service with all those different types. How do you like, is it standard pricing? Yeah, you get three packages to choose from. Here's what they look like here. Like, how do you, how do you measure and manage that side of running a product as service?

Yeah. And then like the most important thing with any productized service is being able to make it consistent, fix scope. Um, and at the like early days I was trying to think, well, what, what's the most like consistent way that we could do this? Because if we're, if we're doing like link Building. Let's say I could acquire a link for a client where the link is like a, a Dr. DA of 60 versus a DRDA of 30. And if, if you look online there are places where you could buy links and they, their price range is really the metric that they use is domain authority or domain rating, which, which are, if you don't know those are metrics that hrefs and moz have to kind of qualify the authority rating of any given website. And the higher authority they have, the more impactful generally speaking, the link will be for helping you rank. And so you could, you could charge based on, based on those metrics if it's link building. But also if you're, if we're doing multiple kinds of outreach, if we're doing outreach for podcasts, some podcasts have more or less listenership. If we're doing sales lead generation, an enterprise customer could be worth a lot more than a small business customer. Things like that. And so I didn't want to be in the space of having to like negotiate basically every single lead. Even if we had a price list for leads and things like that. I could see getting into a lot of debate over quality of certain leads with clients or them asking to remove that from the list and stuff like that. So that was just didn't seem very scalable to me, at least not for us at this time. So because of that we did come in a completely like fixed scope pricing. Like you play, you pay a flat fee and then your deliverables are like we set, we'll set like a target for the amount of leads that we're going to be able to generate for you across the channels that you're looking for.

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So it's not a per link or. No cumulative doctor There are plenty of.

Like link building services where that's what they do and, and you can go to their websites. You could sign up and you pay X dollars and you get a link from a site that, where the main thing that they care about is domain rating. But it doesn't really tell you about like is the context that you got the link in super relevant? Like it like you may get a link thrown into a. Technically it's a, you know, Dr. 60 website, but the website itself is not really content wise geared towards what your content is. And so is that super helpful? Yeah.

So because you've got a lot of experience and we've had some people talk like briefly about link building in the past we had Josh Elkin from Linkflow. Awesome link Building agency on the podcast, sharing his story. But we're really not going into the process. And I thought maybe one thing that would be fun for us to do together as we, as we get closer to wrapping up is just kind of walk through what, what are you seeing work best in terms of link building? And I, I think that's there's an opportunity there a, for agencies in some cases to use it for themselves, but certainly to augment the work that they're doing for clients as well. So when you look at link building, like what are the components of doing link building? Well and any, any secret Andy tips that you've got for the audience on this one.

So I guess for agencies in particular, like the real key here is well, what can you do that is scalable and reliable? And if your clients are in a variety of different types of businesses and you're going to be doing outreach for, for them, you're not, you're going to need to, you know, be doing unique prospecting for all of them and outreach and stuff like that. So what I guess in terms of like what I've seen other agencies do and like the ones that have the most success generally, I guess big picture, the outreach is a numbers game. The more people you reach out to, the more opportunities you're going to have. And depending on what level of sort of personalization you do with the emails can definitely impact that. But if, if you're doing outreach for the first time, kind of the most common response that you're going to get. I think the most common responses that we've seen are that like whether you're asking for a link or a guest post because the more high traffic, high authority sites, they get pitched all the time and they've, they realize, oh wow, I have something that people want, they will ask for money. And the question is like, all right, well do I, do I pay for a link here? And I will, I not going to make a moral judgment on it. I, I know that like Google for example says, you know, any sort of quote unquote link scheme violates our terms of service. I think as a practical matter in a competitive space, people are doing it and your competitors are doing it. So that's something to be mindful of if you're looking for, you know, do outreach and not pay for any links, opportunities or things like that. The really the most most important things are that your content like that what you're offering is something of value to the other site. Now I will say that the stuff like kind of the Outreach that I've had the most success with is pitching content that's like statistics or data that these websites that you're reaching out to can cite to. So for example, if you create, and if you create like an infographic, so even if it's not your original data, if you're creating an infographic, this piece of content, that's a great thing for a website to want to just add to their existing article and provide as a resource to their audience. The most common kind of pitches that I get every day and I see people doing are like the equivalent of, hey, I just came across your article and it's great. And I wanted to, I think I've got this article that's relevant, but you didn't really cover. And I want to see if you can drop in a link to my article, which would provide great value for your readers. And like, it might great. But like, these websites get pitched this a variation of that same pitch constantly. And so you really, really need to stand out in the inbox. And so whether, whether it's having like objectively really unique content that's a value add for them for their site, or, or you know, they're going to, they're going to reply and say, pay me and you pay them something, or you get an or. I've been doing some AB testing, for example, with like doing personalized images and things like that in pitch emails. And those tend to get a better response rate. But also one thing that I've found that works well is humor. So many, so many, so many cold emails are pretty generic. And like, if you operated a website long enough, you've gotten the same kind of cold email pitches over and over again. Dear sir, I would love to do business with you. Here is what we are offering stuff like that and to the point where like, you see it, you see the email preview for a blip, you delete or archive it right away because you, you know that there's not going to be any value for you in it. But if you can kind of disrupt that mental muscle memory, if you will, so that they're skimming their inbox, they see an email from someone they don't know and they see the preview or they open the email, you get them to pause and say, well, what the heck is this? Then it makes it more likely that now that they've taken this pause, they'll read the rest of your email and maybe even respond to you. So that kind of thinking about tacking, tackling it differently can absolutely help you and have A bigger impact.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Any favorite jokes, any favorite openers right now?

So my. I, I've had mixed success with this one to the point where someone. This was months back, but I, I had my phone number in the email signature and this guy called me with a real thick New Jersey accent, is like, hey, this Andrew. And I'm like, yeah, hi, who's this? And he's like, who's this? You tell me. You've been emailing me pictures of your cat all week. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. So, like, what. I. Well, in the email sequence, what I was doing was I had. It's like a very striking picture of me just sitting at a table next to my cat and we are both staring at the camera lens. And if you, like, open this email and if you see that image, you can be like, what the heck is this? But, like, I've done what I needed to do. I've disrupted their flow. But I've also hopefully demonstrated that I am a real human, adult person and with some personality. And to make it more likely, hopefully that they'll get back to me, I've had on a few occasions people reply to me, hey, I'm not interested, but can you just let the email sequence keep going? So I want to see where this is going next. And like, so, like, one of the jokes that I've used repeatedly is if I don't know, if I don't have like a contact name at this website, I say, hey, I wanted to make sure this is getting to the right person. I've heard, I've heard that there are people working here that are actually cats stacked on top of each other disguised as humans. And it's silly, it's inoffensive. So, yeah, like, I mean, the, the humor angle can be tough if you, like, if you think you're funny. I don't, I don't think I'm funny, but I can be sarcastic. And like, so, like, often, like, I'll do like, just like a very punny sort of joke opener. Like, one, one that is I've been doing pretty frequently lately is like, I have two quick questions for you. One, are there. One, did you hear what the. Why the marketer was afraid of trampolines? And two, are there any collaboration opportunities for us here? And then I, I'm like, before I get to that first one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then at the end, I'm like, by the way, the marketer who was afraid of trampolines, they were Afraid of high bounce rates, but yep, classic. And yeah, if you've got an email like that, that probably came from our platform and possibly, possibly me.

Yeah, that's funny. Oh, man. Um, I think the, the point of like, you gotta stand out and get their attention first makes a lot of sense. That goes for, goes for most platforms and definitely applies in cold email.

The, like, the, the challenge is like, there are a few ways to stand out that I've seen people do. Either, either you spend a lot of time doing research on every individual prospect, which absolutely can have a big impact. The more, the more time you spend, the better. Like, I've had people reach out, cold reach out to me saying, I saw your podcast with Gray when you're talking about link building. I thought it was so interesting when you mentioned this humor thing that was so cool. And I'm like, okay, wow. That person, to do that had to have listened to the episode and find something to say about it. So they're like, all right, that took more than a few minutes. So I'm going to be more curious to see what they have to say. But I've also seen people have openers like, hey, I saw that you went to this college, Go Tigers. Or whatever. And I'm like, all right, I know that, like, is there some time that's involved in this? I don't know, maybe. I don't know if you're even, maybe using software that just scraped my LinkedIn to see what college I went to or whatever. I don't know. It just seems like there's not really a lot any connection of that to the pitch. So you can, you know, the more personalized you can be, the better. But if, if you're trying to do at like a very large scale, um, I think just content wise, a humor angle or, or something in where the copy is different than what you'd normally see is going to have a big impact to your, you know, reply rates and things like that. One resource that I maybe want to give a shout out to is there's a site called Charm Offensive. Guy's name is John Buchan. And his like, pitch was. His pitch is basically, I got really drunk one night and then sent a cold email to someone. And then in the morning I got a reply that they were. Thought it was so hilarious and they wanted to set up a meeting. And now I've scheduled meetings with Fortune 500 companies by using variants of this. And it was. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And he offers like templates and ideas and things like that. And I, I've definitely really absorbed that material and like, for me, that, that's been super, super helpful personally.

Yeah.

So I recommend checking that out too.

Last question for you. Looking forward, a product roadmap next six to 12 months. What's the next evolution or what are the, what are the things you're most excited about for postdoc? Is it the services side scaling that, is it specific things on the software side?

Well, it's kind of growth all around. The services side has been growing like crazy in the last year since we first started doing it. And I'm excited as we kind of scale that up in terms of the software side. As we're getting more users who are sending in super high volumes and agencies that are doing that for their clients, we want to better perfect the like the ultimate goal here with doing cold outreach is you want your wins, you want your leads, whether they're, you know, whether they're links or podcasts or sales leads or things like that. And so it's. Maybe it's a bit technical and not sexy, but like I care very much about email deliverability, making sure that your emails go to people's inboxes and it's not like necessarily anything that anyone's like touting as like a selling feature of email sending software or anything like that. But like if, if it, if you have from one platform to another a difference of 5 or 10% with email deliverability, that's a huge impact considering you're, you might be spending the same amount of effort to find like, find these leads and reach out to them and like big picture time horizon. The more data that we, as we have more and more users and collecting more and more data, it's like I'm excited to see like if you have a particular contact that you want to reach out to, we might be able to know from historical data what's the likelihood that this person responds to you? What might their ask be if they, if they have a response? Kind of things like that. And so yeah, as, as we do more and more outreach, we, we can, we can build a database to know really like what the outcomes are likely to be. And so we can help you do outreach more effectively is what it comes down to.

That's awesome. Well, good for you guys. It's been awesome digging into the journey together and to watch you guys grow. For folks who want to learn more, obviously postaga.com, p o s t a g a dot com is there anywhere else you'd point people, Andy.

Yeah. Besides checking out Postaga at our site, you can also check out, we have a Facebook group called Grow Together SEO. That's facebook.com group Grow Together SEO. And it's all about cold outreach, link building, digital marketing, all of that. And it's a good community. A lot of people who are new to cold outreach getting advice on campaigns, more experienced people talking about strategies that have worked well for them, and it's a good place to get some ideas.

That's awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming on, Andy. Thanks for your time today.

Yeah, thanks, Greg. This has been fun.