THE Marketing Product for 2022: How Mutiny Decreases Ad Costs By 60%+ — Leveling Up with Eric Siu

You're listening to Leveling Up, where we'll show you how to win at the game of life and business. It's time to power up your skills through life gamification with your host, Eric Siu. All right everyone, today we've got a special interview with Jaleh, who is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, which is a no-code AI platform that helps marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue without engineers. So reason we're bringing Jaleh onto this podcast is because she's got a couple of interesting things to talk about in relation to strategy and tactics, but more importantly, she's got a really special product that can help a lot of different people. So Jaleh, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm good. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, thanks for being here. So yeah, if you can give us a little background on kind of what your story is and how it's led up to Mutiny, that would be great.

Yeah, absolutely. It's been in a way a 15-year journey of, of getting here. So I started as an engineer who became a marketer. So I was always very technical and analytical and interested in how technology can empower marketing. And then I was at VMware for a number of years in product marketing, where I worked really closely with the sales team, learning like, what does it take to actually close a deal? Like, how do you understand the customer? How do you adapt to their needs during that process? And then I went to Gusto, and I was there from like really early days to about 500 employees, and I led marketing and BD there. And at Gusto, we had a $500 average deal size, which meant that we didn't even have salespeople in the beginning, and we had to figure out how to bring all of that closing magic to our customers online. And we didn't really have a lot of really great technology that made that easy for us. So we built a dedicated growth engineering team and started doing the work bespoke and manually ourselves, connecting data, understanding where we had conversion challenges with different audiences and parts of the funnel, and then building a better experience for them and measuring it. And after doing that for a number of years, it became— a few light bulbs went off for me. Number one was that we could build a no-code version of what we were doing so that any marketer at any company could, without engineers, drive conversion and give their customers much better experiences. And number 2, that if we were powering these experiences across different companies and users, we could actually monitor the performance and use machine learning to extract best practices and benchmarks for our customers and guide them on how to actually drive conversion and personalization. And I guess third, I don't know, I might be alone on this one, but I think there is— martech has a lot to be desired today. I think it's really unmanageable and in a lot of ways growth engineering is trying to augment what marketing technology should be doing out of the box for marketers. And so the third selfish part of this was that over time our platform could start to displace a lot of the cobbled together marketing tech that marketers are just forced to work with today.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said. I mean, it's really special when someone comes from an engineering background and then learns marketing. Those are super rare. I forget, There's a couple of— I don't know. I don't know if Gil did that or some other people, but I think it's— you kind of understand the problems from both sides, but you take it with an engineering mindset. So with Mutiny, I think the question I'm going to ask, or I think probably other people are wondering, is how would this be different from maybe some other customer data platforms that are out there?

Yeah. So the easiest way to understand Mutiny is that we give customers everything that they need to drive personalization on their website. So a customer can come in within about 30 minutes, they can go through onboarding, activate all of our data integrations, they can set up their conversion tracking and add our script to their website. And now they're ready to be able to change their website for all of their different audiences. So over 100 different actionable tags, things like their industry, the number of the employees in the company, the role of the person that's visiting the site. There's a really robust sort of rich data layer that they can use to make changes. Unlike, you know, just a data platform where you then need engineers to actually make those changes, with Mutiny, they can use our visual editor to then go ahead and make the changes. And we have analytics attached to it. So when they launch the experience, they can see exactly what was the impact because we measure the performance in the people that the personalized experience versus the ones that saw the baseline within that segment. And so it's incredibly easy to use. You have everything that you need to get started. And so our customers are able to see really incredible results with very little time invested in the product. On average, we identify about 73% of visitors. For the customer, our average lift in personalization is 108%, and our customers are able to launch 15 experiences within the first 30 days. So that, those are just kind of like metrics that show you when a product is really easy to use and purpose-built, how much momentum it can give to the customer. And most folks spend, I would say, somewhere between like 5 to 10 hours per week of one person's time to essentially get results that typically they're spending an entire team trying to, you know, drive that type of additional incremental lead volume. More revenue within their marketing programs. The thing that I think makes Mutiny really, really magical on top of the ease of use is that we actually tell our customers what they should be doing to drive conversion and personalization. So for example, a customer of Mutiny can just go to our playbooks tab, and there they'll see a number of playbooks that we have curated for them based on their own audience size. So for For example, we might say to them, we might show a playbook to them that says healthcare is underperforming on your website by 50% relative to your other industries. If you were to deliver personalization to this audience and get results similar to what other Mutiny customers have done for this segment, we estimate that you would get, you know, X number of additional leads. And that benchmark data is coming from other customers that are delivering personalization to that exact same segment tag. And then on top of that, we now use AI to write the content of their— to change the content of their website for that healthcare audience. So they can just go straight into, let's say they wanna change their homepage and they can, you know, click on any element and we'll be able to show them, here's, here's 6 suggestions for how you should change your website headline to be more tailored for the healthcare audience. We also pull in examples from other companies that are using Mutiny that have granted us access to be able to pull their playbooks and share them inside of the Mutiny community. So there's a big feeling of, you know, usually with marketing technology, there's a lot of guesswork. Even if you bought the, the, the tool to achieve something, you typically don't know how to use it. Once you start using it, you typically don't really know how to measure the results. And with Mutiny, the magic is that we take that guesswork out of it. We tap into the broader community of users and try to make everybody a lot better at conversion and personalization right out of the gate. Cool.

So two questions, two follow-up questions. You kind of talked about the playbooks that you guys have on the site. So can you speak to the playbooks a little bit and then maybe speak to some customer wins as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So a playbook inside of Mutiny is a recommended experience for a particular segment, and we use the— a combination of the customer's own website data about their audience as well as aggregate performance data. And so we're able to essentially identify what are going to be the best opportunities for a particular customer. And so usually when people start with personalization, they might have a few ideas for what they wanna do, right? So they might say, hey, we're starting to move upmarket and we have been historically focused on self-serve. And now that we're moving upmarket, we want to use Mutiny to create unique experiences for our enterprise customers. And so they might come in and have a very specific idea. Like for example, they might want to change their call to action for enterprise to be request a demo instead of a free trial. They might want to change their pricing for enterprise customers. They might want to start to personalize their logos for enterprises so that when a large company comes to their site, they can tell that, hey, this company is being used by other large enterprises like themselves. But then they'll start to discover playbooks through Mutiny. So we might show them actually, instead of requesting a demo, you should— if, you know, if these are your target accounts, you can use Salesforce data to essentially, instead of putting them through a demo or, you know, some sort of a round robin, actually change the CTA to be the Calendly link of the rep that owns that account. And that will give you— get you even more conversions. So that's a really good example of the way in which we help our customers think even more outside of the box and learn from, you know, the wins that, you know, our broader community is having with these different audiences. To give you some examples of how customers are, are using Mutiny, typically we're used across two big use cases and there's sub-use cases within these, but usually customers will come to Mutiny because they have a big product, product-led growth motion. So we work with customers like Notion and Brax and Carta to drive inbound conversion. We also work with a lot of companies that are targeting ABM. And so this is companies like Segment and Snowflake and Algolia and ServiceTitan, who are looking to improve conversion for a few set of accounts that are really important to them. And so we have both an inbound motion as well as an outbound motion that can, that can help these customers. So to kind of walk through some examples on the inbound and product-led side, Notion uses Mutiny and they started with Mutiny initially because they were doing a lot of investments in paid ads. And as you know, Notion is, it replaces documents, you know, wikis, Trello boards, right? There's a lot of use cases for the product. And so when someone online Googles, you know, better wiki or something like that, What Notion's able to do is show and, you know, and add to that person. But then when they come to the landing page, the landing page actually adapts to the wiki use case so that it's a very clear message to the customer that was looking for the wiki use case. They don't have to be confused trying to understand all the different things. They can immediately realize, okay, wow, this company solves my problem. And then maybe when they get on the sales call with the Notion team, then, you know, they're able to show them that, hey, it's not just about wikis. We can actually solve all these other problems for you. But within that online flow where the customer's trying to make decisions very quickly, they're able to immediately hit the nail on the head. And something as simple as that, you know, increase their conversion by 60%, which means a reduction of 60% in the cost of advertising for all of those keywords. And these types of experiments were so successful that Notion then rolled out Mutiny to their entire sort of homepage. And now they're running experiments of, of, of all types. We have, you know, other really examples of really easy, quick wins for companies is, you know, Amplitude. They ran a very simple test where they simply changed the logos on their website based on the industry of the buyer. So if they're a B2C company like Nike, you know, they'll show logos that lines up with that. If it's a SaaS company or healthcare company, they'll change. And something as simple as that, 54% increase in qualified conversions for them. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times when people think about personalization, they think, oh, I have to hire 5 content writers and do all these different things. And the reality is, it's actually about headlines, CTA, logos, the things that you skim when you look at a landing page. And those things are actually relatively quick to change. Another really common use case for us is, is separating enterprise and self-serve. Pretty much every company, whether they start with enterprise or self-serve, serve, they eventually start to do the other one as well. And so using Mutiny to just separate those two groups and show them different experiences. One of our customers, Livestorm, they had a really great enterprise experience where, you know, large enterprise customers, they, they remove their pricing just because it ends up anchoring into their PLG pricing, which is not beneficial for the enterprise, and they also were able to show, hey, this is, you know, webinar software for enterprises, and that increased their conversions within enterprise by 200%. But also, by removing that pricing, it was also— they were also able to expand their deal sizes as their sales team was able to really control and drive those conversations versus dealing with like the website, you know, pricing that's for startups anchor an enterprise pricing conversation. On the outbound side, essentially Essentially what we do is we plug into Outreach and Salesforce and we're able to pull in specific, you know, contacts or target accounts that the sales team or the ABM marketing team has added and then create one-on-one personalized pages for all of those contacts or all of those companies. And so companies like Brax and Segment and, you know, a number of other ones are using that capability. So for instance, French, you know, Brex has done a lot of work with outbound where they were able to 3x the number of signups for the people that were seeing the one-on-one personalized pages. And in their case, they were showing their credit card with the name of the person on the card and, you know, like a customized offer for that, for that company. They were also, they also saw 60% more reply rates when they were sending those messages versus just a personalized email that the rep was receiving. Segment is also a really big user of our outbound functionality. They create, you know, thousands, I think at some point they had like almost like 100,000 personalized pages for, for mid-market and target accounts. And they were able to, you know, personalize that page to the industry. So if someone's, you know, from e-commerce, say Steve Madden, You know, they're able to speak to that e-commerce use case. And so they set up the personalization by industry, but then they're able to use Mutiny to just interpolate the contact and the account name to make that a one-on-one experience. So they're able to set these things up really, really quickly and move really fast. I was talking to an ABM manager who was they could support 10 accounts to do one-on-one personalization. And meanwhile, we had Rachel at Segment creating tens of thousands of these one-on-one pages, and then that their sales team could use, or that they could even automatically send out to these different contacts. So, as you know, with marketing, you have a million things to do, there's no time. And so being able to do these things really efficiently and at scale, really, really changes the, the experience. One of our customers at Qualtrics, you know, I was asking him about the impact that the outbound ABM product has had for them. And I loved his feedback, which was, you know, yes, we have increased our revenue generation by, you know, a really meaningful amount. But also, it's changed my relationship with the sales team, because I can now do something for them beyond just giving them a deck and an MQL, right? I can say, hey, like, I can create these these personalized experiences for you and, and actually partner with them to drive growth and conversion.

And so the point you made about kind of creating these experiences, like maybe 10,000 experiences or so, so is Mutiny actually creating these pages by itself?

So we work off of a baseline webpage. So you would start with a webpage. So let's say you have a, you have a landing page for ABM. A lot of people can use their pillar pages or their solution pages. And sometimes you can create just a net new page in Webflow or any of these landing page creator tools that's more tailored and sort of structured for one-on-one personalization. And then you would then grab that page and go into Mute.me and connect all of the contacts that you want to create one-on-ones one versions of that page for. And then Mutiny will then create all of those different versions. So they'll each have their own custom link, but it's all riding off of that underlying webpage. And, you know, this is essentially at Mutiny, you know, from when we were a really small company, we've used our own outbound product to drive our own growth.

Got it. Okay. That's great. Cool. I'm sure a bunch of people in the audience are wondering too, this sounds like it's really good, but like, it might sound too expensive. Like who's your ideal ideal— who's your ideal customer?

Our ideal customer is typically somebody with 50,000 monthly unique visitors. I also recommend, you know, being around that maybe like 40, 50 employee mark and at least like 2 people in marketing. If you have hired your first marketer and you don't have a CRM or an email marketing tool or something like that, I I recommend putting that in place and then implementing Mutiny where you have some semblance of traffic coming in. And once you hit about 50K MUVs and above, that's when the ROI really starts to make sense because you have a ton of traffic and you can now start to create all sorts of different experiences for them. That's for the inbound side. For outbound, you know, we started using our own outbound product when we we were 3 or 4 people. So there's really no limit to that. What you wanna have in place, I would say, before using Mutiny's outbound is you wanna have a commitment to having your list of accounts because we, we don't generate that data for you. You're, you're responsible for figuring out who do you wanna outbound to, and then you use Mutiny to create really high converting experiences for those people. So if you, You can have that database when you are 3 or 4 people in the company, or you can have that, you know, when you're, when you're further along.

Got it. I'm looking at the outbound page right now. So it seems like you connect with, like you mentioned, Salesforce Outreach and you can import like a CSV, I guess. Any plans for other future outbound integrations?

Yes, absolutely. I would say HubSpot is a, is a big one that's on our list for Q1.

Yes, please.

Yes, that's, that's our most highly requested one. And, you know, we have a, we have a long list of, long list of integrations that we want to do, but HubSpot is coming up.

Got it. Yeah. My take on this, all this, I mean, I've been talking about, you know, this other CDP for the last couple of years, but it just, we didn't have enough time to manage it and we kind of need something that will like kind of nudge us along and push us along. So this is kind of, you know, down my wheelhouse at least as a marketer. So Definitely recommend people checking out. We'll come back to that in a little bit, but two final questions from my side that are unrelated to Mutiny. What would be your favorite business book?

I actually listened to a lot of books on Audible and I go back to them and listen to them. I think, I can't remember the exact name, but the Pixar book, I think it's called Creativity. Creativity Inc. Creativity Inc. Yeah. I really enjoyed listening to their stories and and the journey of the company.

Yep. Awesome. Great book. And then what would be a favorite tool that is not called Mutiny HQ? Could be personal too. So it can be like an Oura Ring.

Gotcha. I was going to say on the, on the marketing side, we really like Madkudu. We also love Segment. We're really big fans of Segment. It's made our lives really, really easy and And a lot of customers also use that in a great way.

Awesome. Yeah, you must be good friends with Guillaume then. He's the one that really pushes mad kudu. Awesome. So Jaleh, this has been awesome. What is the best way for people to find you online and maybe learn more about Mutiny?

So you can go to our website and the best way to just try Mutiny is if you, if you click on See Mutiny on my website or just go to demo.mutinyhq.com. You'll be able to put in your own website URL and actually try using Mutiny on your site.

All right, awesome. Everyone make sure to go check it out, especially if you've got the requirements, right? 50,000 monthly unique visitors and ideally 2 people in marketing. It's a no-brainer to me. Go check it out. And Jaleh, thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you.

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