Cracking the SEO Code: Nimonik's Strategy for Scaling SaaS Success

I was asking you about your sales motion and I remember you said, okay, 6 months you weren't able to— it just is what it is and procurement slowed it down. So how are you finding— is like, how are you getting the top of funnel awareness? What are you guys doing now at Mnemonic to drive awareness and bring net new eyeballs onto the platform and your offer?

Top of funnel, I'd say over the last 3 years we've invested a fair bit in SEO. So search engine optimization, brought in a consultant. We recently switched over to an in-house team. So search engine optimization is a big thing. I'd say search still drives the majority of our top of funnel. and then LinkedIn promotion on our page, reaching out to people on LinkedIn that have the right job title and, you know, right size of company and things of that nature. But I'd say that's basically it. It's, we don't do a lot of cold outreach. It's really mostly inbound and then handling that with our sales team. Uh, we do email marketing, webinars, things of that nature, mostly with this idea of driving inbound traffic that we then convert over time. We've tried cold calling, we've tried things of that nature. What we sell is not a product that drives improvements in other companies' bottom line. Like we're kind of selling what you would think of as insurance or like brushing your teeth. It's something that, you know, you need to do or, you know, you need to buy, but you're not particularly excited about it. It's viewed as a cost of doing business. It's like a vitamin. And so companies kind of want to minimize the cost. If they can avoid it, they want to avoid it. We're not selling you a new machine that's going to improve your production line. So it's a different type of sales process, one that can't really be rushed and one that cold calling doesn't really drive much. So we focus most on SEO.

You're not going to have somebody with immediate pain when you call them wanting to solve their preventative. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, given your success in enterprise, like, is there any advice you would give to other B2B SaaS founders that are trying to break into the market?

I think today it's harder than it was when I started. I think there's lots of data out there and different reports to support that. There's a lot of solutions out there, well-financed companies, you know, the startups, um, and B2B buyers, like the buyer side, clearly inundated with requests. I mean, even me myself as, as the the guy who runs this company, I don't know how many emails a week on LinkedIn trying to sell me some sort of new AI tool that's going to radically improve my life or something like that, or improve the company. So I think the market is much more crowded than it was. Cost per click is up. The CAC for most businesses is dramatically increased. But in certain segments, you know, that crowding has created a race to the bottom from a pricing point of view. Plus you have the ISO security issue, etc., etc. So I think the sales process today is, is more challenging than it was 10 or 15 years ago as a startup, like if you're starting with little to no brand. So in terms of advice, I'm a believer in a lean operation, keeping your costs under control and being there for the long term. Now obviously it depends if you've gone out and taken venture funding and you got to hit your targets, that is a whole different ballgame that I am not familiar with. So I can't give advice in that context, but in the context of bootstrapping, it's like cost control and then persistent and constantly iterating your product. We have this one story that I share with my colleagues is we call it the million-dollar blog post. And so when we come back to SEO, what happened in that context, we had been approached by a company in the US to offer some of our regulatory information into their platform. And through that conversation, they explained to us that there was a regulatory change that was happening that was forcing oil and gas midstream companies, midstream of the pipeline, it was forcing pipeline companies to put in place a robust compliance tool. This was a regulatory change that I wasn't aware of. And we researched it. We wrote a blog post. That blog post then drove inbound traffic from a couple companies that ended up buying our solution, and that led to other companies buying our solution and basically generated over $1 million in new ARR, that single blog post, which was based on one conversation with a company.

Timely problem. So there you found something where there was a time pressure and you become again a painkiller.

Yeah, painkiller, time pressure. And so I think kind of the lesson I drew from that is you gotta talk to a lot of people. Online research, polls, surveys will really not help help you that much. It's critical to be constantly talking to people in your industry, both on the buyer side, consultants, experts, and just trying to pick up those golden nuggets where it's like, oh, there's this pain point that I'm hearing about over and over again, and then working on that. So it's just a lot of conversations is kind of my thing, and not being closed to new ideas. You know, that blog post not only did it drive new business, but it also pushed the product in a direction we hadn't previously really considered. And I have a few other examples like that. So just talk to lots of people, in your space.

No, but the more, the more you're exposed to other real humans who are doing interesting things, the luckier.

People with experience, people who've been around the block. Later on in our journey, around 2019, we had overspent in the sense that we were spending too much money, and we had to do some downsizing and just fix a few things in the business. And at that time, we went out and hired a strategic consultant who had a lot of experience in our industry. He wasn't a tech person. He had no background in software. but he had worked in the environmental and compliance space for a long time and he provided really critical strategic advice, workshops, things of that nature. And I'd say that was worth its weight in gold. It really helped crystallize where we should position ourselves in the market, how we should talk to people, et cetera. I could go on for a while about that, but basically my advice would be seek experts who've been around the block a few times. I have conversations with them. Sometimes you have to pay them for their time. Sometimes they'll do it for free. You know, it depends, but Yeah, there's lots of nuggets of gold out there. You got to go look for them.

That's a common theme that I see in successful founders is basically buying future information instead of doing the painful, expensive R&D yourself. You can just go and find the answer.

I'm a big fan of learning from other people's mistakes. You know, in the startup world, there's always like, oh, it's okay to fail, learn from your failures or learn from your mistakes, iterate, do it again. That's a very, very expensive way to learn. It's the most expensive way because you lose time and time is the only real asset that you own, frankly, no matter how rich you are. And so if you can learn from other people's mistakes, why not? I mean, that seems much more efficient than trying to make the mistake yourself. So that's definitely an advice that I try to follow.

Do you see— you mentioned AI a moment ago, and that is the— we're in the hype wave of AI. We'll see what happens. But do you see that changing your sales process? Do you see that changing how you'll market your your product? Do you see an impact from AI given what you do, or do you feel that it's separated somehow?

No, AI is obviously peak hype or near the peak, and there's a lot of debate online around what will happen. But we're fundamentally, we're in sort of the information business. We sell regulatory data and engineering standards with the workflow tools to our customers. We've incorporated AI, we've built our own chatbot, we've done a few other things, we're working on agentic AI and other things. So we're taking it very seriously. As to how it will play out in the marketplace, that's a bigger question. I think my personal opinion is that AI is basically like super search. And when I talk about AI, we're talking about large language models specifically, and like the ChatGPTs of this world. I view it as they're extremely powerful search engines that can go into huge databases of information, collect information, reconstruct that information in answer to your question, or they can take certain action within an application or what have you. So I think for those types of use cases, the LLMs are extremely powerful, and our customers love our chatbot. I think AI has some fundamental limitations in the sense of projecting out beyond what's in the dataset. And so that's where people who want to push the envelope find opportunity. And hopefully this is somewhat coherent answer, but that's my take is I think they're like super search. If that hypothesis is correct, I think a lot of AI will sort of just become a standard feature on products. It can't be your core offering because it's not something that you can really put a moat around. The models are you know, basically available for every— they're owned by someone else, they're available, they're open source or they're low cost. You know, the data centers, you don't own the data, like you have no competitive advantage really. So it's just going to become like search. I mean, search is, uh, you expect to see search on most software, and I think you'll expect to see AI on most software. And I noticed even Google Workspace wasn't able to sell their Gemini product, so they've just packaged it in with the standard Workspace offering. And we're talking about Google.

I think they're charging me a dollar for Gemini or something.

It's like a dollar, but originally they were trying to charge like almost doubled a lot and we didn't buy it. We're on the workspace environment. And I think you see the same thing with like the Copilot and GitHub and all that. They're becoming premium features, small upgrades, but they're not the core product. That's my theory at least. We'll see what happens. You know, my guess is as good as anybody else's, obviously.

I'm always curious what will happen with Outreach. I see that since these chat tools have come up, there's so much more noise. Like it's easier for everyone to create more volume and 10 iterations of the same idea. So the noise has increased. I wonder if this keeps playing out, does that, is that going to make sales more important?

I think it'll potentially make, if you want to differentiate yourself in the sales world, when you have all these AI tools and bots that allow you to create content on demand, you might have to return to a more human type of approach. In-person conferences, in-person meetings, referrals, things of that nature, because the cold email or even like the voice stuff that you can do with AI now, it's once something becomes ubiquitous and free or nearly free, it has no value fundamentally, right? So I think there's that element too, and people have to revisit their sales strategy, taking into consideration that, you know, anybody can send out a billion messages that are modified and pull in the prospect's LinkedIn. And we get job applications on our HR thing that are clearly written by AI, and they're hilarious because we put keywords in the job application to like throw off the AI. And often we get these responses that like, hey, I'm applying for this position of, you know, software developer who goes to the bathroom really often or something like that. Because we've put it in the job ads. And we've had job candidates where we're doing the interview and very clearly they have ChatGPT open and they're searching for answers talking to them. So I think that things are changing, but at the end of the day, it's humans. Humans buy from humans, you know, humans are making products other humans are using. So you got to keep that in mind for everything you do, I think.

I agree, and I predict we're going to have more humaneness is going to be necessary to get deals over the line in B2B SaaS. One question I have for you is, you know, how has the product evolved since you started? It's been quite some time, um, that you've been building this, and can you give me an idea of how, you know, your concept of what people needed has morphed over these, these years?

The product has changed a lot since we started. When we started, it was the core was environmental regulations with fairly large amounts of analysis of those regulations that were written by experts. So think of it almost as like a textbook. And that's what we started with. The problem with that was twofold. One, people don't want to read a textbook. And two, it's very expensive to maintain that textbook because the regulations are changing so often. So we kind of had two driving factors to change the product. One was the cost side of maintenance. The other was like the consumer demand. So over time, we, we kind of reduced the amount of analysis and invested more in workflow tools and in, yeah, basically a toolkit to help manage the information. We also changed the pricing model and we then started expanding out of environmental compliance into other types of areas, so occupational health and safety. And today, you know, 16 years later, we cover a wide swath of regulations. So everything from like insurance companies that need to comply to insurance regulations, power transmission companies that need to comply to power transmission regulations. So basically, if you think of your universe of all the regulations out there in Ontario, Canada, just as an example, there's about 3,500 active, like enforced regulations right now. So a company in Ontario theoretically should look at all 3,500, figure out which ones apply to them. So we've expanded that box of coverage over the years and invested more and more in workflow tools to help people manage the information. And throughout this journey, in addition to like product, we're still getting feedback from the customers and we're finding them. I think there's a good Steve Jobs video out there where he talks about the mistake that so many companies make is they think that the idea is everything. And I know we talk about this in the startup community a lot. So you've got a great idea. You execute it, you make a billion dollars. That's just not how it works. You know, it's so much back and forth with the customer. Small adjustment here, small adjustment there. This doesn't work, yada yada yada. Remove things out of the app. So it's this constant adjustment that keeps going on. But I'd say workflow tools were a core thing. And then the other thing we did that I think is a bit maybe particular for a bootstrap company is we've done 5 acquisitions of other businesses.

I saw that Document Center and a few other—

yeah, Document Center was the most recent one, and we for prior to that. And so back in 2013, when we come back to the sales cycle sort of discussion, because the sales cycle is so long and painful, we said, okay, well, what are other ways we can grow? And one of the ideas was let's try and consolidate the various small players in the market or do acquisitions. And so we, we started down that path and we've done 5 acquisitions so far and we're working on some other ones. But basically, not only do you rapidly increase the number of clients you have, by acquiring another business. We also would intentionally take the best parts of those businesses and roll them into our product. So we do move all the clients onto our product. We have one brand, one, you know, marketing, everything, but we've taken bits and pieces from all these companies and created a bit of a Frankenstein, if you will. We've taken the bits and pieces that really worked well for those companies and added them into our platform. And so that was another way that we evolved the product a lot over the years. So you got this feedback, that is direct from the customer and then also indirect because it worked for these other companies. So therefore, you know, it should work for us. I'd say that's, you know, at a high level been the, the kind of the process. But again, it's a million small adjustments. It's not some magical idea and then, oh, boom, like we're off to this kind of deal.

Very insightful. Yeah. And before we wrap up, I'm curious, what's your vision for growth for the next few years? Like what gets you the most excited about Mnemonic's future?

I think as a bootstrap company, we've, and these 5 acquisitions, we've sort of started to hit an inflection point. We're kind of the the last man standing in our industry in the sense that all of our competitors have been acquired by private equity or by strategic buyers or publicly traded companies. We're the last man standing and our growth right now is going quite well. A lot of inbound. There's a lot of people looking for solutions provided by industry experts and not just by some huge entity or some private equity firm that's trying to maximize return. And we are going to continue to do acquisitions. We are also growing organically at a good pace so that, you know, I've always been in this for the long term. No intention to sell the business. We want to really just help engineers and compliance specialists improve their, their companies. And we don't think the problem is really going to go away anytime soon. There's going to be more regulations, more standards.

It's just going to get more complicated for sure.

Yeah, exactly. So growth is good. And I'd say it's like steady as she goes right now.

Jonathan, thank you so much for the conversation.

My pleasure. Thanks so much, Jean-Michel. It was a pleasure to meet you. And don't hesitate if anybody wants to reach out. After this podcast, don't hesitate to reach out via LinkedIn.

Where would be the best place to send people that are interested in Mnemonic after seeing this?

They can certainly visit our website mnemonic.com. I think my email address is up there on the about page, and you can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find, Jonathan Brun, and just shoot me a note. I'm in Montreal but traveling, so, you know, feel free to shoot me a note. For any young entrepreneurs that want to build a business, happy to have a coffee.

Perfect. Thank you.