400% Growth in 3 Years: How We Built a High-Powered SaaS Content Marketplace with Verblio CEO

It is a pleasure. Thanks so much for having us, Caitlin. So I'm Steve Pocross. I'm CEO of Verblio. We are based in Denver, Colorado. I am from Denver and back here, but I spent about 20 years in between living mostly in the Bay Area doing startup stuff and nonprofit stuff. And I do a lot of Colorado type of things with my two sons who are 9 and 13.

And hi everyone, I'm Zoe Treason, Senior Director of Operations at Verblio. I've been at Verblio 4 years now and have been in Boulder, Colorado for the last 6 years. Before moving to Colorado, I was based in New York City working mostly in film production. And besides growing awesome startups, I love trail running and I love working my way through the endless stack of books on my bedside table.

Cool. So we are Verblio. We are a content creation marketplace platform. And so what we bring together is the power of a SaaS content creation platform platform with a marketplace of 3,000 highly curated writers. And with that, we do pretty cool things. And so our main focus is how do we create high-scale quality premium content at every— for every niche to fuel the modern marketing engine. And so some examples of things that we can do when we put together that marketplace with that content creation platform is we produced 80,000 pieces of unique content last year. We did that for 9 different types of content. We wrote over 1,000 of those pieces were reviewed by lawyers, and we somehow wrote 100 blog posts about Kim Kardashian as well. So what we're here to talk to you about is how do you go from pretty stagnant growth to incredible 400% growth over a short period of time? And so this is a real chart of our monthly recurring revenue that started shortly before I came on board. So I inherited the company at the end of 2016 from two amazing co-founders who built a $2 million plus revenue company. And we're figuring out the next act. And that's what brought me on board. So our challenge was, how do we do this in an incredibly competitive red ocean space? How do we do it while being bootstrapped, meaning we're investing our resources behind the curve instead of in front? So we have to be pretty fickle with our choices. And how do we do it running a pretty complex business? And SaaS plus marketplace is dollar for dollar the most complicated business I have ever run. And so we do that by thinking differently about 3 different areas. And so best practices basically means you're going to be copying someone. So you want to learn from the best that you can, find any framework you can, but think differently. How are you going to add your own secret take on it, your, your own different twist? And so we thought about marketing, product, and then our people and culture in pretty unique ways that we think are transferable and that other companies can hopefully learn from. And so we started with two key prioritization questions. Anyone coming into a new business is going to take it from scratch. You're going to evaluate every piece, your internal resources, your external opportunities. And we broke these down into two key areas. Originally, this was a longer presentation, which is why we have so many more slides. And so we are going to skip most of the first prioritization, and Zoe is going to take the rest of it once we get to Phase 2. Very quickly. So those two key prioritization questions that we focused on the most were: how do we prioritize our resources, either product versus sales and marketing, which is a core question of every company. It becomes particularly true if you can make one big bet of where you're going to stand out. And the second is the classic management framework of people, processes, and technology. Which one is the tool that you're going to focus most on to save your problems or to solve your problems? We focused big on people, which I don't think is in itself that unique, but the way we went about it and brought it to life, we think is really important and intentional, and something that we hope other companies do too. So between sales and product innovation, I'm just going to quickly go over— this is the piece that we're going to spend less time on. Two pieces that I think are critical is one, planting a flag for what's your niche, what is going to be your target market. We started much broader at SMBs in general, and then we focused on digital agencies, which was a very hard decision to make, but it enabled us to build the our entire product towards that one market and also our whole brand to speak to one market, and that really enabled us to grow quicker. And the second was, as a marketplace, to think about our writers and our network of freelancers as our product, as our service. How are we going to provide premium service to them so that we have access to the best talent to pass on to our clients? The last thing is you can't actually invest in your product as much as you'd like to unless you're still growing and you're finding additional revenue sources. So the 3 key areas that we focused on was how do you get the most bang for your buck out of marketing? And I think 3 of those overlooked areas are content and SEO, because it really does come from how much effort you put into it and it becomes an annuity. Expansion revenue, which I think is the most overlooked opportunity in all of marketing to drive revenue quickly. And then pricing, which I think is the least understood of all categories. Uh, the number 1 piece of advice I got while we were looking at pricing was if less than 10% of your clients that are leaving you don't put pricing as the reason, then your price is too low. I found that really helpful and it really helped jumpstart our company and give us a lot more resources to focus on the writers and the product. So back to our key story, two prioritizations. One is sales or product and the other people, processes, or technology. Zoe's going to take the second half, but first I'm going to set this up by saying, um, This is one of my other favorite charts. So if you remember, the chart when I started was way to the left and there was a lot of flat growth in between. If you're taking over a company or a product or a business division and somebody already has the perfect product that's going to jumpstart you immediately, then you are in a really good position. But generally you're going to have to figure these things out. And so the moment that our inflection point hits and we take it and go up to the right in hockey stick fashion, I don't think it's symbolically wrong to say it's the moment that we chose to bring Zoe on board. Zoe told you that she is— she was a film major who was studying business for the first time. She now runs more people than anybody else in our company, including a team of over 15 people, 30 contractors plus. She has hired more people at this company than I have. She's created more strategy in our operations and built our product than I have. And the way we found her is we really took a non-traditional path of just based on pure intelligence, drive, curiosity, and the fact that everybody who talked to her wanted to work with her more was really the key factor of us hiring and targeting Zoe as opposed to the classic hiring criteria that most startups, I think, look for. And with no further ado, this is Zoe.

Hi. Wow, Steve, very flattering intro. Thanks so much. Yeah, so as Steve mentioned, I came from a film background. I went to film school. I worked in production in New York City, and I was pretty committed to the dream of being, well, a middling director of unknown indie films. But then I met Steve, and he really has a way of selling an opportunity to be so unique, so special, so fun that it's pretty impossible to say no. I think there are a lot of people on the team that can resonate with that moment. And that's the thing. Great people make things happen. And that's how I felt about Steve and the team that he had assembled at Verblio. That these were great people who would do amazing things together. And since then, I've had the opportunity to build my own team, which has taught me so much about the power of having a stellar group of people working alongside you. So prioritizing people over your product and processes, it's a really tough call to make, but we feel that people are your product, they are your processes. So you have to start here and get it right. And our strategy was to put people first in every aspect of the business. And I know that every company says that, and I'm hoping in the next few minutes just to demonstrate what putting people first really means, a couple tactical ways to go about that, and how it jump-started our growth. So for time's sake, just going to focus on 3 key areas where we relied on really awesome people, starting with hiring. So a people-first strategy, you know, begins with your hires, but bringing that to life is especially hard when you don't have VC dollars to spend. So when you look for people who only have the right experience, they are often way out of your range. Even if you can afford them, you usually have to compromise on other aspects like culture, and it doesn't leave a lot of room for magic. So our big competitive advantage was how we thought about hiring differently by looking for something that most companies just weren't and allowing us to find and retain rock stars without any compromise. So what's the secret? Oops, one back, Steve.

Thanks.

So it's hiring for traits over previous experience. The qualities that we really value can be gained through all sorts of different experiences. You know, for me it was filmmaking. We have bartenders, stage performers, we even had two philologists on our team when we first began, which was awesome. But I think the traits that we're interested in, like energy, scrappiness, curiosity, yield people who can use that energy and enthusiasm to motivate, you know, their teams, inspire our clients, and whose constant curiosity compels them to continually iterate and improve on our products and processes. And that's what you truly need at a bootstrap company in a red ocean space. As well, um, previous experience, it also comes with its own risk. It might not be close enough domain experience to your industry or your specific niche, which means that you're paying this really high price without the value of the experience you truly need. So how do you get people with certain traits to apply? For us, we infused our recruitment strategy with personality, fun, and creativity. Um, but basically your hiring strategy should reflect the traits that you yourself are interested in with new team members. So I couldn't help myself, I pulled a few quotes from our most recent job descriptions. I really love the We're looking for someone who eats complexity for breakfast and beauty for dinner. Like, what is that? It's amazing. I want to work here. But when we started being ourselves in our job descriptions, hiring got a lot easier and a lot more fun for us. And it brought us the right candidates. I can't tell you the number of times that I have talked to candidates who tell me, I love your job description, and I have to work here. And that kind of passion is what we're really looking for in our team members. So I was lucky enough to have a team of totally verbose weirdos who could write awesome job descriptions until the cows came home. But if you don't have that team in place yet, use your marketing resources on your job descriptions. As well, another tip for us at least was we love cover letters, which can sound really old-fashioned, but I don't really mean the stuffy "to whom it may concern" ones. Compelling cover letters allow us to find wacky creative storytellers to join our ranks, which is the kind of people we're looking for. Cool. So our next category is on culture and how a strong vibrant culture nurtures employee engagement. So at a bootstrap company moving a mile a minute, you need really passionate engaged people to drive growth. Um, but how do you get people engaged? Our answer was to build a culture that is just too dang fun not to stay up late at night slacking each other. But how do you go about building a culture that creates a really fun, dynamic workplace that's strong enough to infuse your brand with personality and that energizes and creates loyalty with your users? Well, that brings us to our second guiding principle, which is— yep— comprehensive investment in your employees is the bedrock of employee engagement. So what I mean by comprehensive investment is that you invest in both the personal aspect of your employees and the more traditionally professional aspect. So on the personal side, you know, it comes down to infusing your work tools with your core traits. Quirkiness is really important to us. We strive to inspire a really quirky culture through having a fun Slack universe with a lot of fun Slack channels, which you saw on the last slide, quirky Slack names. And we encourage deep collaboration through offsites that are focused not just on how to meet our business goals, but on getting to know your team members, their preferences, how they like to work, and what really drives them. And then on the professional side, we make professional investment come to life through a really high ratio of one-on-one meetings with our direct reports each week. So I spend about 15 to 20% of my time with my one-on-ones— or sorry, with my direct team in one-on-ones. So in addition to that, we've also sacrificed a whole nother headcount just so we can have an executive coach work with many of our employees on personal growth plans, which helps them really feel that investment, helps them gain new skills so that they're ready to take on more opportunities at Verblio. So it's definitely expensive. It's time-consuming to invest so much in a team, but we really deeply believe that resources devoted to employee engagement have a really high ROI for us. All right. So, last category for today is around how expanding that people-first philosophy can go way beyond your staff and have a huge impact on your actual product. So, there are a lot of different components of a business that rely on amazing people, and those people aren't always going to be in your— your employees. So how do you help make those people the best versions of themselves? Next slide. So our final guiding principle here is to connect with your users as if they're part of your brand family. So for us, the two key stakeholder categories that can write our success or failure as a company are our writers and our customers. So our writers are our product. We invest in them in a lot of similar ways as we do our Verblio employees. We include some of our most critical writers in our equity pool. So like our employees, um, they are tied to our growth and success as well. We regularly evaluate their pay and make increases that are going to show them value and that ensure we can retain them at Verblio and not risk losing them to other platforms or even professions. Uh, and then we do a lot of fun stuff with them, which can be really underrated. So we send them swag when they hit Verblio milestones. We send out cards when they hit personal milestones, like buying a home or having a kid. So a lot of different ways to engage with our writers. And then on the other side of our platform, we have our customers, you know, who are our literal business. We need inspired, engaged customers. So similarly to writers, we try to engage with them in all sorts of different ways. Our fun, quirky brand is just as much of a recruitment and retention tool to our customers as it is our employees. So we ensure that every aspect of their experience, from email copy to platform UI, really reflects our values and our Verblio traits. And then, unlike many SaaS platforms, we've lovingly embraced professional services and have found this to be a really big growth driver for us. It means that our much-bragged-about employees get to work one-on-one with our clients, using their energy, their resourcefulness, their personalities to bring our brand to life and engage customers like nothing else quite can. So, what's the result of all of this? Well, people are a virtuous cycle. Quirky, fun employees inspire new Verblions, who in turn inspire awesome products and processes, that evangelize our users, who then evangelize new users. And what it means from the kind of nuts and bolts perspective of the business, it means that we consistently bring on amazing overachievers. Our turnover is insanely low. We break records in our employee engagement surveys. We get to actually love coming to work every day. And the ratio of time spent moving the business forward versus dealing with people issues was really, really high. So this whole thing is a flywheel. Fun, quirky people being themselves are a magnet for others. They create truly entertaining content, a vivacious brand, and we win and keep talented writers and engage clients through that good people effect. And there's this, probably the most tangible effect of all of this, crazy, fun, exhilarating, exhausting growth. Whoo! That was a whirlwind. That's what we have today. We're super excited to answer any questions that you guys may have.

Zoe, Steve, thank you so much. That was great. Great to hear some little tips and tactics. I've dropped in some questions from the audience here in the chat. If you want to pull them up, you can really answer them in any order you'd like.

Got it. Wow, that's a lot of questions. My favorite hiring question. So I think there's something that— there's the classic verbalio hiring question. For me, I love asking about what's the most random class that you became passionate about in undergrad that you didn't think you would. And to me, it shows— it's a very quirky way of seeing if somebody can be deeply curious and passionate outside of the area they're interested in. Because to find a great employee, you're going to have to find somebody who's curious about so many different things, who's going to be relating patterns that they find in other areas and bringing them as solutions, just like the best practice of Nobel Prize winners. And you can also see if their eyes light up when they start thinking about something that's off their target question. Zoe, do you have a favorite?

You know, one of my favorite ones is just tell me about yourself. It is so hard. It's really open-ended, and it's a great way to find people who are great at telling stories, even if their path has not been, like, super linear in their resume.

And then, what triggers do you look for to indicate financially you're in a good place to hire, especially as a bootstrap company? That is a very astute question. For me, it is a feeling as the CEO when it doesn't give me complete heart palpitations at night. I'm more excited about the opportunity than I am worried about seeing the impact on our P&L until we get there.

And then we have this one. How do you know if engagement with employees or writers is working? Not an easy question to answer in one quick sentence. We have a lot of different things. Look at. As mentioned, we have employee engagement surveys that go out, I think, each month, which help us really pinpoint where people are super engaged and where we have room for improvement. Again, we have one-on-ones weekly with our direct reports. We are always asking, um, how they're doing, where they're struggling, um, where they need support. This is another great way to see how your engagement is working, um, with your employees. And then kind of on the writer side, looking at how much work they're picking up, uh, looking at the work they picked up when they first came on board to where they are now, and if our resources and our job search function is working really well, that they're having success on the platform. Um, so a big metric there is kind of around writer production, um, in terms of how, how well they're engaging.

Caitlin, how are we doing for time? Answer more or stop immediately?

Yeah, you guys got a few more minutes. So I'd say maybe 2 or 3 questions depending on how quickly you can answer.

Cool. How about I do number 1 and you can do number 2 if you want. By specializing for a target market customer, did you have to pay the price later to pivot and expand or was the market big enough? Digital agencies was plenty big enough and I think it was, we're really luxurious to do so. I've definitely been in businesses before where you had to really stop talking to a target market you would have liked to have kept and to make a harder decision. Target digital agencies also had a nice umbrella effect that because they were speaking for so many digital agents or so many SMBs, and that's where SMBs went for their guidance on marketing, it actually— we could still talk to the end SMBs, which are still about a third of our business, while making a harder strategic choice to focusing our brand and our product.

Uh, one last question that came in: any nifty advice about building strong remote culture via Slack? Uh, oh man, we have a lot of things that we've done via Slack. Uh, I think just have a ton of channels that people can participate in that aren't just work-related. You know, we talk about our dogs, we talk about what we're reading, we argue about what we're watching and what's good and why. Also being able to have some happy hours that are like really focused. We play a fun game when employees actually move on, which is Jeopardy, and all the questions are based on kind of that person and their experience and their personality, and it's a really great way to kind of bond with your employees. So, I don't know, Steve, any other kind of—

Yeah, I think there's like one other key thing that we do, which is that the executives have to be on the Slack channels. This cannot It is the same as like PTO, like used to be when we talked about how do you get your, your people to go on vacation? Well, you have to go on vacation. You have to show that this is a really important thing. If you are saying goofy things about your life and you're in all the channels too, it makes everyone feel like, you know, this is what we do at the company to be a ver— what I— what we call a vivacious verblion, which is our cultural value.

Maybe time for one more question. We just had a couple last-minute ones float through that I just sent you guys. When do you hire when you can't afford top dollar, or maybe if you guys have any clever tips around, you know, hiring on a budget?

Sure. So, I mean, this is one of the absolute keys to our success. We had to do this. Almost every, every person who's come to our company has had options to work for more elsewhere. And so we had to make it more fun, more fulfilling. And we think that people are motivated by a lot of things. And I think that having passion in your business, so having a bigger cause, creating great freelancer opportunities, we want to create the best freelancer opportunities for writers out there. It's a really big mission and it's really inspiring. Having agency and the ability to influence every opinion. I have one-on-ones with everyone in the company. I think Zoe almost has one-on-ones with everyone in the company too. It's really empowering. Your voice is heard. We will make changes if you see something. And the last is that we structure a bootstrap company to give equity as well. And we track how valuable that equity is and make it a core part of the package. And then we give the gift of time, which is that we have every last Friday off, as we have given the entire company for the last year as a COVID mental health day. And we might just continue that, but we have unlimited PTO. And we really trust our people that we tell them that if you're not out there doing great things in your personal life, it's hard to be there. And it helps us attract talent for less that have different priorities than the dollars.

Absolutely.

Love that. I think that's a great way to end. And I mean, that's so important. So Steve, Zoe, thank you so much for sharing some of your tips and your insights. I really appreciate your time. Thanks everyone for joining us. We've got a couple more sessions going on this afternoon. Be sure to check out the networking and we have another session about to kick off at the top of the hour. So thank you both again and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for having us. Thanks to everyone for coming.