We Create Problems relies on this powerful source of leads and so can you; with Abhishek Kaushik

Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going to Bangalore, India, where we've got Abhishek Kaushik, who is the CEO and founder of a company called WeCreateRooms. Abhi, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you.

It's fantastic to have you. Now, you have a company that is building a community. You've got plans for over a million on this community to help your business to grow. And I'd love for you to share a little bit about WeCreateProblems. And then let's talk about how and why you're building a community to build your business. So tell us about WeCreateProblems.

Great. So VCP, which is wecreateproblems.com, is a technical hiring software. We help talent acquisition leaders screen them by coding assignments, projects, and technical questions, interview them face-to-face, and onboard them in one click in your organization. So we sort of streamline their entire technical hiring process. And that's what our software does.

So when you started this business as students a little while ago, you didn't have the kind of clients, but now you've got people like Microsoft you've mentioned already, and some other blue-chip companies. Just tell us, how have you been building your own brand for WCP?

So we took a basic approach initially when we didn't have marketing funds. You know, so we asked our customer, hey, why did you trust us? What do you like in us? And if you like us, can you refer us to, you know, a couple of your other colleagues and references in the professional network? And that's how we got our second customer. So our second customer came from our first customer. Our third customer came from our second customer, right? And actually our fourth customer came from our first customer. I mean, so that's what I remember so far. And then most of our customers, you know, came through referral. And just last year ago, we started spending on our marketing through our marketing budgets. But then the initial approach was go to customer and ask for referrals to grow.

Okay. And that's plainly been very successful, but you've also, I think, built a community and you have your own podcast as well. So would you like to explain the strategy behind that? Because that's quite a big task to build a community rather than just plug into an existing.

Yep. We run our community, technical-hiring.com, which is a community of technical hiring leaders throughout the world. So the objective behind building this community was to educate most of the hiring leaders to learn technical hiring. So we engage most of the senior hiring leaders and share their knowledge and experience to the world, how great technical recruiters are hired. And our reason to build this community was to empower more people to learn technical hiring. And then this inspiration came to me, you know, from canva.com. So Canva empowered everybody on this planet to design. You no longer depend on a designer to publish. And that's where we think recruiters do not need to depend on hiring managers to hire engineers. So if you want to hire an engineer, you don't need to be an engineer or you don't need help from an engineer. You can learn how to hire engineers in simple, basic methods. So that's what technicalhiring.com envisions to do. And that's why we built this community. So to recognize this cause.

And why are you doing this? Is it because there aren't enough technical recruitment managers in the market, or you're just trying to save money? Because in effect, you're changing the way that business works for these large multinationals that are hiring. What's the business purpose behind that?

Yeah, great question, Jim. So, you know, if you look at today's data and then the findings that I have, roughly nearly 40% of the engineering hours, you know, of a company on average is spent on hiring engineers, not shipping product and not writing code. And that is a massive time, right? Because hiring manager and his team is interviewing people. They're, you know, they're sketching the plan for hiring new people in the company. When a company already have a recruitment team, right? But still recruiting team is mostly doing sourcing of talent, sourcing of candidates. They don't participate and they're not like serious decision maker in screening them and interviewing them. So that's where we want to break this status quo and we want to say, look, to hire engineers, 95% of the work can be done by recruiting teams and just the 5% of the work which hiring managers and engineers have to do to add on to their teams. And one is about the time, 40% that I said, nearly 39% of business revenues lost because engineers are involved in hiring engineers, right? So these are the 2 business reasons why we think the cause is very strong and should be highlighted.

So really it's a significant loss, isn't it? And presumably also when there's this dearth of talent, as the technology moves on to, for example, the metaverse. There must also be a challenge for the people internally to stay up to speed with all the technologies that their new hires would need to have. Is that another problem, Abhi, as well?

Yeah, of course it is a problem. And as technology progresses, Jim, what's going to happen is more and more engineering team is expected to try out new things, you know, put on their time and bandwidth on building and competing against different businesses. not like spending a large number of time just to hire new people or acquire new people, right? So we believe that engineering hiring can be liberated from engineers and, you know, be handed over to a recruiting team in a more open manner. So that's why we're building VCV at technicalhire.com.

Okay. That's wonderful. I can really see that you're liberating the flow of qualified candidates into the companies. What about this strategy you've had? You've talked about referrals. Once the company's got bigger and bigger, referrals may not last forever. Do you have a content strategy as well? I know that you have a podcast. So what else are you doing to spread the word? Because you're on a mission really, aren't you?

Yeah. So we do have content strategies. Well, now we are, you know, onto almost all the world's websites where our users and buyers hang out. We went to HackerNoon, we went to Hacker News, we went to all GitHubs and we went to, you know, almost Stack Overflow of the world. To understand what is the real problem in hiring engineers and who has what responsibilities. We collated all the problems on a simple Google Sheet and started writing, you know, the pain points. And around those pain points, we started drafting articles and we started interviewing people, how others solve it. We collated the solutions to the top pain points and started writing our first blogs. So our initial blogs were done by doing discovery of the problems and asking how they're solved. Because we were a very young team and then we started learning ourselves as well what technical hiring is. We did a lot of hard work to build our content strategy. And today I must tell you that we have massive subscribers on our blog community. And we have been writing, we have written more than 200 blogs so far, you know, about technical hiring and technical recruiting. So the idea is very simple, pick a problem and go through the solution fundamentally and through first principles, explain in a simple manner to our audience. And that's why we generate a lot of leads through our content. Almost today we're generating roughly 5 to 8, you know, MQLs every day through our content piece. So I consider that's a decent achievement, but we want to grow 5x on top of that now.

That is, and just help us, what's an MQL?

Sorry. 5 to 8 MQLs per day. What's an MQL? Marketing qualified lead.

Marketing qualified lead. Sorry, I probably should have known that, Abhi, but that's great for those listening. So marketing qualified lead. So you're getting a lot of leads. And are you also engaging in paid advertising and so on, Abhi, or is it all really a content-led strategy?

It's mostly content-led strategy right now. But just a couple of months back, we've started, you know, LinkedIn ads where we've given free eBooks to our audience. We've started giving white papers and eBooks to our community. We've started giving checklists, a lot of those collaterals which can help them in technical hiring. So we have doubled down on our spend on ads as well in the last 2-3 months.

That's really interesting, Avinash. What about a technology platform? Are you using one of the social media automation platforms or are you doing it all yourself? Can you give us some insight into what a technology company uses to manage its marketing content strategy?

Okay. Thank you. So we mostly went Effectual in building our entire marketing automation tool. So what we do is we've connected LinkedIn to our HubSpot and we are running on a starter plan on HubSpot. So we don't pay a lot to HubSpot as of now, but then we have have learned HubSpot and other tools integration pretty well. So we take input from our product through Intercom, which is again on a free or pretty much a discounted plan. And then we use HubSpot. We connected LinkedIn to HubSpot. So the moment somebody downloads an ebook or, you know, the LinkedIn team sends us a notification and that's how we engage with them through email campaign, through phone numbers, et cetera. So that's how we are currently acquiring leads and discovering about them.

That's wonderful. Well, it's simple, but the idea as an entrepreneur is to build these systems that are integrated, which sounds like you've done really well. Can I just ask you about the kind of questions that you're looking for? Because you mentioned that you go into like GitHub, for example, you're going into the verticals where your audience lives. What kind of questions are you looking for that become, if you like, the kernel of the articles you're writing on your blog, because I think it's a really key point that we should look for the pain in the market to respond to that. But that's a skillset not many people talk about, Abhi. So how are you doing that? Do you mind sharing a bit more?

Yeah, sure. So what is the initial shortcut that we did? We went to internet and figured out, hey, where our customers are dissatisfied from our competitors, right? And do they give a bad review to our competitors on Jitu.com or, you know, on other listing sites, do they give a bad review? So wherever they're giving a bad review because of certain reasons, find out the reasons why, you know, they're giving a bad review. What are, what was the problem that our competitors could not solve for our customers? And that's how we started, you know, picking up, building our topic clusters and built our most essential topics from that. And we got good traction. You know, we targeted to those companies and those people. Who actually wrote about those problems. And we say, hey, look, actually this problem was not solved by your previous vendor. Would you mind coming on a call and we will show you how we can solve this problem for you? So we went manually to one by one to each of them. That was a 1.5-year-ago story. And then what we did was we started understanding technology, industrial trends towards hiring, technical hiring. And we started understanding what is the process in a company and what is that one thing that a user needs, right? Otherwise, if he doesn't accomplish that, he will lose a job. So what is that user who is holding that position of acquiring talent will lose, you know, if he doesn't hit his number? And then we started going through his mind. So we started understanding his functional needs, social needs, and emotional needs, right? And then we started creating 3 categories of articles, you know, articles that can help solve his functional needs, social needs, and emotional needs. And it helped us So these were the 2 different strategies that we took. So the second one came later. The first one was just hitting on our competitors.

Abhi, that's brilliant. Wow. It's like a marketing masterclass here. So you've got the social, the emotional, and the functional needs. Can you give us maybe one example of each of those 3 that your avatar or your ideal customer is looking for? Can you maybe give us a couple of examples so we know what you're talking about?

Sure, sure. So for example, if a head of talent acquisition wants to hire engineers Then his functional needs would be that he wants to fill 15 engineers position by end of this quarter, right? So that's his functional objective. His social, you know, need is that somebody from his organization, either his boss or his share on LinkedIn, that this person actually achieved his number and should get a pat on the back, should be appreciated for the objective that he achieved, right? And emotional need is all about being happy. And not undergo into frustration, not go under stress while he's trying to achieve his functional needs. So that's where we say, look, you can hire being happy. You can sleep peacefully while we hire for you, right? So articles like these, you know, with VCP sleep better. And then we actually build a dashboard for them where we try to identify how they can sleep better while VCP is hiring for you great engineers, right? So we demonstrated with presentation and, you know, real metrics. And that really helped us. So these were the 3 examples for each of those, Jim.

I mean, I love that for a bunch of technical experts and whizzes like yourselves, you have such an intuitive grasp of the marketing process and the avatars and the customer journey. It's just inspiring. Can I ask, you're going to open offices in America and here in the UK. How are you overcoming some of the marketing challenges as you go away? Yeah.

We want to expand globally now, and we are in the process of expansion. You know, we're about to set up our offices in US, Santa Maria, and UK. And of course we are pretty much, you know, venture capital in India now. So while we're trying to expand, we're trying to hire new people in this demographic. So we want to hire new people in US, for example. As far as marketing is concerned, we again want to go effective. In marketing because we feel the customer acquisition, our true customer acquisition happens when, you know, a customer brings you customers. So we are relying a lot on our customers' trust to build our customer channel, but to scale, you know, at a faster rate, right? We have created 3 simple strategies in marketing. We are saying that, look, number one is positioning. Can we position ourselves in that industry well? Number 2 is lead generation. Can we know what kind of leads do we want? And number 3 is branding. You know, how are we going to brand ourselves in the world? So we think that, you know, better positioning leads to better leads and better leads leads to better brand, right? So this is the plan as of now to grow globally. And therefore we are working on our positioning. And when I say positioning, we are working on 2, again, 2 approaches in positioning. Textual positioning and visual positioning. Is our text content right? And is our visuals right? Are they related and interlinked? You know, because today we see either visuals or content. Similarly, lead gen. Are these paid leads or are these unpaid leads, right? Double down on that. And branding is all about, we believe branding is not what we talk about our customers or ourselves. Branding is what customers talk about us, right? So we are creating a branding strategy where We want a customer to share our story, you know, through their handles. We want our customers to share, you know, benefits of our tool on their handles. So we want to go effectively in marketing and go fundamentally. Let's see how it turns out.

Abhi, that's fantastic. Final question then. How do you get the customers to share on their handles about WeCreateProblems? Because you don't want them to be saying, hey, guess what? WeCreateProblems. You know, how do you get your customers to reshare? your content to build your brand using their platform?

So Jim, many of our customers actually have done in the past and we've learned how they do this. So happy to share a couple of examples. So, you know, customers want to be your friend first, right? They want to know a person. They want to work with people who they can actually feel like a friend. They feel like companion, feel like an expert that they can reach out to, you know, to solve their problems. And they should also share your You know, share their problems with them. So our strategy is very simple. We want to make friends in our customers' community first so that we get to know each other well, right? A good customer is a great customer when he's sharing your problems with you, you know, without even asking, right? And then that's how we're building relations with our customers. And these relations are done by 2 ways. People build the relation and product is building the relation. So we are adding emotions in product as well.

Right?

We are adding, and then we have a playbook for people to go out to the customers and build relationships. And we have product to go out to the customers. So when we build these relations, customers themselves feel that, wow, you know, these people and these products is helping us. And it's a matter of triggering them and reminding them, hey, can you write a review for us? And we ask them emotionally, we tell them, you know, it's been 18 months working with you and we have sweat, like 2,400 hours of work and blood and sweat for you. So we tell a story for the last 18 months, how we've achieved what they've achieved. And we sort of make a video, et cetera. And we tell them the real thing behind our hard work and then they share the story on their handles. So that's pretty much it.

Well, Abhi, sounds like everything you're doing very well considered. Love that you're also making a video for the client as well. Abhi, if people want to find out more about you as an entrepreneur, And also about WeCreateProblems, where can they come to find out?

So we are at wecreateproblems.com. The name is pretty simple to remember. If you search in Google, W-E-C-P-W-E-C-P, which stands for WeCreateProblems, you'll find our website. And there we are. There you go. Please visit us and check out and give us feedback and try out WCP.

Abhi, thank you so much for joining me from Bangalore. And of course, I'll put your contact details in the show. Thank you for joining me on this episode. Of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, sharing how you're building a great brand from Bangalore that's becoming a global honor to multinational companies. Thank you. Thank you, Jim.

It's wonderful talking to you, Jim. Thank you.

Great giving this to me. Jim James here in the UK, host of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.