How Wishpond Transforms Online Marketing for Small Businesses: Interview with CEO and Co-Founder, Ali Tajskandar

3, 2, 1.

This is founder Journey Back with another episode. Today we've got Ali Tajkandar, Toj Sikander.

Close enough.

Okay. I openly admit I cannot pronounce people's names. If you've listened, you can go back to all the different podcasts and see me butcher everybody's name.

My last name is also more difficult than most last names.

But Ali, thank you for joining us. You are the founder of a company called wishpond.

That's right.

Let's talk about wishpond. Let's talk about the sector. It's a marketing tech company. Want to talk about that? There's a few really important things that are happening in that industry right now, which is very relevant for our audience. But then we're going to wrap it back up to your journey of how you got to where you are today. Welcome. Please tell us about wishpond.

Thanks for having me. I mean, wishpahn has been a very interesting story for me. The best way to explain what wishpond does is to high level of it is we're marketing automation software, platform, all in one marketing platform for small businesses. But to think about and understand why we exist, think about when you talk to, let's say a chief marketing officer or a marketing professional, let's say chief marketing officer at a large company and you say, how are you acquiring customers right now? How do you market yourself online? There's not going to be a quick answer to that question from them. They're going to be like, well, I don't have time for it, or sit down, you know, let me take an hour to just scratch the surface. But if they did want to unwrap that, they would say something along the lines of there's 7, 8, 10 different tools that we use. There's a whole strategy with whole bunch of tactics that feed into each other. There's a framework, there's a foundation. We also use agencies. Sometimes we have our own programmers to integrate things together. And it's a very nuanced answer. Now contrast that to if I ask the same question from a small business owner, you know, five employees, 10 employees, something like that. And I said, how do you market yourself online? Their answer is going to be very different. Their answer is going to be most common answer is, oh, we're not really doing anything. We have a website and you know, basically word of mouth. Or the second answer might be, oh, back in the day we hired an agency and you know, someone said it's all about advertising and we paid a bunch of money. It didn't really work out that well. We canceled it. Then a few months later, people said, you know, it's SEO. So we hired this offshore SEO company. You know, they said, it's long term. So we, you know, waited four or five months. Nothing came out of it. So we canceled that. Then someone said, it's all about social media. So we got our secretary to start posting on Instagram. We did that for a few months and yeah, it was interesting, but we didn't get any business out of it, so we stopped doing it. And they're looking for silver bullets, right? Those two approaches are so different, right? Why are small business owners looking for a silver bullet? Because they're busy. They're busy running their own business. They're not marketing professionals. They don't have a lot of financial resources to be able to pay for all of these tools and put them together. And they're not copywriters, all those things. So that's a long way of, you know, saying what Wishbone does. What Wishbone does is we want to give level playing field and marketize online marketing for small businesses so that they can have the same power as a large company. So what we give them is we say, well, for you to effectively acquire customers online, you need a framework. And that framework, generally, that growth framework need to have a component of attracting new prospects, nurturing them, converting them and managing them and getting referrals. And it's a positive feedback loop that you need to follow. And our platform has everything you need for attracting, whether it's your website builder forms and pop ups and you know, different lead capture tools and welcome mats and you know, all of those things or contents and promotions, everything you need to attract leads. And then once you've attracted them, for the nurture part, we give you email marketing, SMS marketing campaigns, shopping cart abandonment campaigns and a CRM to manage them. And then also we give you a referral marketing campaign. So imagine if you were a gym and you were using Wishbone. You know, if I'm a member, I can refer you to become a member and you get one month free. I got, I get one month free. The ba the way basically Dropbox initially. So we have that as part of our platform as well. And not only that, at the end of the day, if we give all of this technology to a small business owner and say good luck, they're going to trip over themselves, there's too much. And also you don't know what the best practices are. So in the first month, as part of the onboarding, we Use our copywriters, our designers, our marketing professionals, and set everything up, including rebuilding your website on Wishbone if necessary. And then we hand it off to you, then you have the best chance of success and, you know, you can continue running it on your own. If or if you need us, you can come back to us as well.

So is it primarily targeted at the SME, the small medium enterprise?

That's right.

And so would it be fair to say that it really helps them grasp the ROI of their marketing efforts a lot more?

It helps them, first of all, have a marketing strategy online that is, that is cohesive and it works. But then also, yeah, have a way of really tracking what's working, what's not working. So for example, I could go to wishpond database and see Ray came to our website and checked out these, you know, the pricing page five times. And then he watched a video. Thirteen seconds later he stopped it. We sent him these emails. He opened this one. He comes from Vancouver. You know, these are all the things we know. So. And the transactions you've had with the company as well. So all of that you can see and take actions on it.

Because when you said earlier, the typical conversation you have with a small business around their marketing is like, oh, yeah, we tried SEO and they told us it's gonna take a long time. We waited four or five months and we saw nothing. It's because in their mind, they need to see instant gratification. I would say instant gratification, but they need to see that roi, like I'm putting this money in. I need to see sales, I need to see revenue coming in.

And you're absolutely right, because a lot of times they might actually have got results, but they just don't even know it because it' difficult to to measure that. Do I feel like my business is doing better than before or not?

Yeah, Unless there's like a immediate spike in revenue, they think it failed.

Right.

But that necessarily is a failure. It might be just better brand awareness and that conversion might come three months from now when someone needs that product.

That's right.

So the marketing sector is very interesting. It's a lifeblood of every company. You need to build marketing. You people need to know that your products and services are there available.

Right.

But the industry itself is going through major shifts. As you talked about. Like, first it was just having a website and then SEO and copy, and now it's social media and TikToks and everything else. And brand presence, social media sentiment. What is it that you really get excited about with what's happening in market right now.

I think, you know, one thing that you and I briefly touched on before we started the podcast was the role of first party data and how Apple, with their privacy policies, have limited the ability of certain advertising platforms to really show proper attribution and tracking. Right. I think one of the things that I see is obviously a lot.

Let's just take a step back.

Sure.

What exactly happened there? So Apple basically put out a new policy that essentially killed a lot of the marketing workflows and processes that hundreds if not thousands of companies around the world all already had in place is now defunct. It does not work. It's not showing the results.

Yeah. Especially around advertising because you can't actually necessarily track that customer anymore to then be able to say it came from this Facebook ad. And if you can't show that, then that will hit companies like Facebook and it hits also the advertiser's ability to know what's working and what's not working. So it's a big deal. I think what's interesting though is that, you know, we've seen this over the years. In the early days of Wishbone, we were very much Facebook centric and everything we had was a tab on your Facebook business page. And we went through that whole process of Facebook starting to deprioritize business posts and starting to almost kill those tabs. Right. And I've also seen a lot of businesses, retail businesses now get very dependent on Amazon as their distribution channel. We see more and more businesses want to be on social media and kind of make their business on social media. This is, I think, another example with, you know, Apple privacy policy and those changes that you need to ultimately own the customer relationship. And you can't be 100% at the mercy of those third parties. And if, you know, actually, I'll give you an example. One of our clients, you know, BU Foods, they came to us back in 2016, they sell vegan protein bars and they sold through retail distribution. But same problem that, you know, they were at the mercy of retail distribution and, you know, retailers, they said, we want to actually sell directly on our own website. And they understood really well that the key to that is to grow their subscriber list. They had 6,500 subscribers back then, email leads, and we, you know, through using Wishbone, and we help them to grow that to about 150,000. So that 150,000 is a engaged audience that you don't have to constantly advertise for. Right. You have that relationship with them, you have contact information. I think that's going to be, you know, pushing a lot of businesses to start, you know, kind of thinking about having their own independent presence as well.

Yeah, again, own the customer.

Right.

They're your customers. Stop being dependent on Instagram or what to be that channel. But how is it that Apple, obviously Apple's a massive company, but that one decision had a domino effect in the industry. So how is it that Apple was able to.

Because Apple benefits from that decision. Because ultimately they're trying to make everything better for the consumer. And by making that decision, they don't hurt at all because they don't really have an advertising marketplace, at least not meaningful, not like Facebook. So that is something that will hurt Google and Facebook and all that. But not Apple, to them is a, is a good thing. And I think ultimately it might be good thing for consumers anyway to.

Well, it's protecting your data.

It's protecting your data.

And, and we now know more and more data is critical in every single decision that we're making today, especially with these large language models and AI that's popping up. So what is the fix? How, how are small businesses addressing this? Obviously the big players have a lot more marketing dollars and budgets and people to, to address this. But what is the solution for the small players? Is wishpond a player here?

Wishpond is a great player for that. I mean, ultimately, small business owners, they're the ones in the driver's seat, right? But I think instead of, for example, let's say signing up for an SEO company and a referral marketing company and my website builder and landing page builder and SMS and CRM and all of those things, you can just use Wishbone. It's all in one, it's fully integrated. You see, the full lifecycle is cost effective, which is one of the most important things when you're thinking what a small business is and you can actually own that client relationship, all the leads, everything is yours. You can do whatever you wish with it. I think, I think that's one part of it. But obviously, you know, there's a lot more that the businesses also have to control themselves.

So I'm a tech geek, I'm an accountant, but I'm also a marketer. I love jumping into these type of conversations because it's all about storytelling, getting that narrative and getting your products and services out into people's hands.

Right.

What makes you so passionate about how did you get to where you are today as the CEO of this successful marketing company?

Thank you. Well, you might remember, you know, we started a while ago. We started back in 2009, 2010. And when we started, it was the time that Craigslist and Yelp and a lot of these local online businesses were starting to flourish.

The iPhone just came out.

Right, right. And.

But Facebook was very prominent.

Facebook was very prominent.

But still early days on your desktop. Right? Not. Not mobile.

That's when they were saying, future is mobile. Right now is present is mobile. Yeah. So back then, we actually started with a completely different incarnation of the business. And we said, you know what, it doesn't make sense that you can find a product from halfway across the globe, from China or wherever, and you don't know what the local retailer a couple of blocks away from you has in a store. So wouldn't it be cool if I could grab my phone or on my computer and say, I'm looking for a pair of sunglasses and I want it right now, because maybe I'm, you know, going on a trip or something. I don't want to wait for a delivery. And also back then, delivery wasn't as.

Fast as right now. You'll receive in four to six weeks, pay an extra $29.99.

How long you guys even do that? So it was all about local product search. And we said, okay, you can find this pair of sunglasses. And it would tell you what local retailer has in the store. And it says, listed for $300. And then you would be able to make a wish. Basically, that's your lead distributed to other leads to other retailers, that all I'm willing to pay for it is $200. Right. And that was the first version of the business. And the idea was good. Execution was very difficult. We integrated into seven different point of sale systems. We did a lot of crawling of data from, you know, different websites. And then we would have cases where, best case scenario, someone would go to the store, get that product, and we're not even part of it. So there was no attribution. Long story short, we failed miserably at that. Right. You know, the first four or five years of the business was that. But, you know, going back to your question of how did we arrive at wishpond? Was first we had an imaginary problem that we were solving, and the world was like, yeah, we don't care about that. But by working with these local retailers and trial and error, we started figuring out, oh, okay, it seems like they're kind of caring about Facebook now, and if only we can get their product inventory that now we have access to and put it on their Facebook page as a tab. They seem to like that we did that and okay, starting to warm up. And then immediately after the initial excitement wore off, they would say, well, but no one is finding it. So like oh, okay, if we do contests and promotions, you know, that would help. And then we did that started warming up as well. So evolutionary, we started pivoting into where the real pain point was and then expanding into the vision that I told you about right now. And we're way closer to reality on that right now. But that's not where we started. We just learned with actual interaction and, you know, collision with reality what the real pain points are.

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I think what got me to want to build wishpond was a few things. One was that my dad was an entrepreneur in construction business. But here in Canada, in Vancouver, sorry, in Tehran, and then later in Vancouver as Well, but more so in Tehran and growing up, that was the environment that we grew up with. And he always said, oh, you want to start your own business? You know, you want to start your own business? And so that was part of what I was modeling myself after. Right. So I think that was one part of the other thing that happened, very fortunately for me was that thankfully he got a personal computer when I was only 9 or 10. And that was back then, if you go back, I don't know, whatever year that would be. In 1991, 1990, at least in Iran, it wasn't commonplace for people to have a personal computer. And I just loved it. Right. You know, back then it was dos. It wasn't, you know, Windows or anything graphical even. Right. But I just as a kid being able to play around with this thing and make it do things, you know, what else can I do that would be so grown up and I can do it just alone myself. And I started really getting passionate about that. And as I invested more into that, obviously would get more encouragement and you know, recognition from others around me as well. And so that getting good at that and getting, you know, clarity on, I really like this and I seem to be good at it and I want to be an entrepreneur, kind of paved my way quite a bit. And then later on in Vancouver, I was involved with a number of tech startups as employees. One of them was Soundlogic, another one, Sound Software. Soundlogic was exited to Lucent Technologies and that's where I met my co founder, Hossein Malik. And Hossein, back then he was a CEO and I was a low level employee. He was, for some reason he liked me and he said, hey, whenever you want to start your own business, come to me first for investment. So years later, you know, having gone and done my own things and you know, got my MBA and you know, sorry, sfu, computer science and then later MBA and all that, then I did go back to him and he didn't immediately give me money because the initial ideas were pretty bad. Thankfully he didn't. But over time, you know, evolved and he introduced me to other people and we vetted some ideas and he finally said, okay, I'll invest. And that's where wishpunners started. And you know, I'm thankful that he also continued supporting through the hard times of the company.

Can we talk a little bit about growing up in Tehran? And like, obviously now people see what's happening in Iran and the sanctions and the political upheaval, but like some of the smartest People I've ever met in my life are Iranian.

Right.

And. And there's just this level of intellect and, and vision of building and, and changing the way the world functions. What was it like growing up in Tehran? Did you have that type of influence around you? Obviously your father's very entrepreneurial, but. Yeah. What was the other aspects of the ecosystem around you?

It was quite interesting because my dad was an entrepreneur and thankfully our socioeconomic condition was good. Not super high, but, you know, upper middle class, let's say they were. My parents were able to give me some opportunities that maybe normally I wouldn't get. Right. Like a computer or. The other one is one of my dad's close friends. He had a company that built software for the city of Tehran. So huge projects. And it was, I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was the representative of Sun Microsystems in Iran. Sun Microsystems in Iran, like that wasn't common again. Right. And because of that relationship, he was able to get me an internship there, free internship. But still I could soak that up in a way that if my dad didn't have that relationship, it would have been next to impossible. So that helped. I think there were a lot of opportunities there. It was just that social and political condition was kind of making a lot of things more difficult than they need to be. My dad, for example, his company was very successful there, but his level of stress was beyond your imagination. He would, for example, have this large university that he built. One of the projects, and the employer was actually the government. And someone within those conversations asked for a bribe, and my dad and the partner didn't pay it. And they said, okay, sue us, knowing that the judicial system there means that you're not going to see them in court for another 15 years. And with the inflation there, it meant that by the time they got the money, it was worth nothing. So some of those things were the reasons that, yeah, you know, this, this country is not supportive of entrepreneurs or, or humans in general.

There's a select few that always have their hand in the pot.

Right.

And that just makes it difficult for anybody else to go ahead.

But ultimately, I mean, it was an investment in our future more than anything else.

And so transitioning to Canada.

Right.

What was again, for you growing up, the stark difference between what you were experiencing in Iran and what you're experiencing here in Canada?

Well, when I got here, I was 16, so I was still in school. School environment was quite different. But to be honest with you, I think one thing that I found interesting was that the contrast was less than I imagined it to be. I actually expected the two worlds to be more different than they ended up being. At least how I proceeded in the first couple of months because I was kind of looking for those contracts.

You're expecting the mass.

Yeah, it's like more similar than I thought actually. But the other thing that I also noticed later on was how business friendly Canada and generally the western world are versus over there. Starting a business was very difficult. If an employment contract doesn't work, good luck trying to, you know, part ways with someone. You know, a lot of those things and you know, just, just a lot of, a lot of really things that, you know, you don't want to deal with.

So from growing up in Tehran to high school and, and being a, a tech geek and employee at a bunch of tech companies and now running Wishpawn, a public company.

Right.

What's that experience like? Like being a public company like you, you were more entrepreneurial, you had a lot more control over what you wanted to do growing up and then working in private companies, exits, building wishpawn. But now as a public company. Right, like you can't operate the same way that you did in all those other four stages of your life.

Yeah, so. So it's been very interesting. A large, large part of our growth and maturation has come in the past two and a half years as a public company. You know, we grew by more than three times in terms of our revenue from 7.9 million to 22, 23 million. Revenue run rate from 1700 customers to more than 4000. We made number of acquisitions, like you know, six acquisitions in this time frame. And the product became quite a bit stronger than it was, you know, two and a half years ago. But on a day to day basis. And in terms of how I feel inside, my stress level definitely has increased. Right. You know, as a private company, I've never been a calm, chill person, to be honest with you. So I've always had stress. But you know, if, if you don't grow this month or next month or the month after that, you get depressed about it and you get upset about it and if you have to get money from investors, you know, a lot of stress and anxiety from that. But it's still, it's more private right now. If we don't, you know, have a good quarter, it's a very public thing. I have to go and answer to a lot of investors and earnings call and you know, analyst and deal with a lot of repercussions of that. So it's it's more. Whatever you do is more visible and more amplified. And because of that, the stakes are higher and the stress is greater.

And obviously, last two years, we had Covid, you said last two years have been a lot of growth for you. Was that a factor?

Yes and no. Most of our growth comes from outbound sales, so we're mostly the drivers of that as opposed to just inbound. We're getting more interest. So, yeah, I don't think it's just that. But when Covid started, you know, early 2020, we had a lot of local businesses like travel and hospitality and fitness and spas and so forth. And we thought our business could be in a very, very bad shape. We also sold to E commerce and all that, but we took a hit in those spaces and then moved our focus to more e Commerce and B2E businesses that were still doing well. And the year in aggregate ended up being really good. Past two years? Yeah, there were some periods that were better than expected and some periods that were not. But I think our growth has been more predictable than just market trends, because.

I would assume that there's a lot more shift to online marketing and online sales and E commerce because everything moved away from brick and mortar.

I think one thing maybe I've noticed is that you need to have better salespeople. You're right. Because there was more organic shift to, you need to be online, you need to do this. And there's more money available. So it was also easier to. To. To close deals. Now everyone is more money conscious and, you know, like, do I need to do this? Do I not need to do that? We still have the same number of demos, but your salespeople need to be really sharp.

Speaking about being money conscious, we were talking before we started here, you guys had a very large office here.

Right.

You still employ a lot people, but you made the financial decision to shut that office down because nobody was there. It was Covid. And then work from home. And now what's that work from home experience like for you personally as somebody working from home or now managing people that are working from home?

Yeah, it's a very interesting topic we can talk about for hours. Coming into your office, I'm like, man, I miss this environment, entrepreneurial environment and being together. So. So definitely it's not without its problems. Yeah. After Covid, we first sent everyone home, as I think you were required to do. And then after some time, you could have people back, but no one really wanted to be back, and we didn't push anyone so we had. You had been to our office space, the whole floor, basically, or 11,000, 12,000 square feet, and two or three people were coming to the office. So we were paying $50,000 a month for two or three people. Then we decided to get out of the office lease, and the landlord said, we'll sue you. We talked to lawyers. They said, yes, they will win. So we're like, okay, all right, we'll wait until the lease expires. And the moment that the lease expired, we said, we're getting out of this. And part of the reason was that we were already having a lot of people working at Wish one that were remote across the. Prior to Covid. Even prior to Covid. And through Covid, then we started hiring some of the key core roles also internationally. Like our CTO was based out of Berlin, for example. So then it made even less sense to go back into one office space and, you know, pay all of that money. And we've had tremendous growth, as I mentioned. But certain things that I do miss are, you know, some of those serendipitous. Serendipitous, you know, interactions where you have an idea and then, you know, you just go knock on someone's door or, like, on their shoulder and talk about it for a couple of minutes and, you know, something cool comes out of it or you go for a walk or something. Those. I definitely miss Culture building is harder. People. You know, sometimes it feels like, you know, it's more mercenary culture than in a company culture because everyone feels independent and, you know, all of that as part of it. So. And, you know, the other thing that I've also seen is in very few cases, but it, it does happen. People who really cut, you know, terrible corners. You know, we've had cases that we've caught where someone had, like, three jobs at the same time. And, you know, or this is funny.

Like, some people say, oh, that's just like a rumor. That's like a.

No, we see it often, but it's reality.

Like, I, I, I know somebody as well that was working two or three different jobs at the same time. This person had. During. He told me that he had team meetings on, I think, Monday. So he had one laptop open with the camera on, mic off. Another laptop open with camera off, mic on.

Wow.

And then he also had a cell phone running. Another zoom meeting. Yeah. And he's like, no, they never know.

No, it's happening. Or, I mean, in certain roles, it's harder. But I, I do see sometimes people actually with it like, you Know, we had at least one case in sales where the person sometimes wouldn't let the prospect into the demo because probably they were busy on something else. And then they would say no, they canceled. And then, fortunately, we had the logs we could actually see and some of the other symptoms of, you know, not not turning on your camera and some of that as well. But, you know, I think is interesting, though, the net effect, I think, is a positive one. There are some of these things that you need to worry about. And I think increasingly the future will be one where you have to pass the agency back to the employees, both in terms of, like, you need to track them based on performance and incentivize them based on performance. So that, yeah, everyone is their own entrepreneur and they're doing the best work because it actually, you know, selfishly benefits them too. We're not quite there. I think most companies are not there, but I think that's going to be the future of remote work work.

And so what is the current structure? So you said that you've, You've. You did open up an office, right? But it's a small office and it's just you and your CEO.

Yeah, there's. There's a very small office. You know, a couple of desks, me and my COO just, you know, chatting and, you know, talking about things. And I, we go to it maybe two, maximum three times a week. The rest of the time, we actually work from home as well. And it just allows us to catch up on things and, you know, strategize and those kind of things. But other than that, no, everyone is working remotely from wherever they are.

This is just one of the headaches as a founder. You have to kind of take on and try to navigate that path. What is our work from home policy? What is our office structure? And how do we want to build the culture moving forward? But what are some of the other challenges or things, the topics that you wish other people talked about openly as founders and entrepreneurs when you were starting to help prepare you for what you're dealing with today?

I think one of the topics that we could have grown faster and become successful earlier if we had got good at marketing and sales earlier. And I think is one of the areas where a lot of entrepreneurs actually go wrong because they fail at that part, not because their product is not good. And what they say, if you build it, they'll come. It's not true. And 99.9% of the time, it's not that if you build it, they'll come. You have to go get their attention. And I remember in the early days of Wishbone, we had drunk the Kool Aid of mailchimp and some other companies that they say, you don't need sales. It's all about marketing. The world has changed. You don't want to interrupt people. You don't need to deal with sales and the headaches of personalities and, you know, this and that. People need to be able to come to their. Your website. You find them that way with content and education, and then they sign up and put in the credit card. That's all good and well, but there's limits to that. And a lot of times actually doesn't work, especially when you go, you know, enterprise sales and B2B sales. One of the conferences I went to, Jason Lemkin was there and I went to him and I asked. That was when I was starting to think maybe actually we do need to have a sales team at one sales team. And I went to him in passing. I'm like, hey, you know, big fan. Why should we do sales as opposed to just marketing? And his answer was, to grow faster. And then he walked away like, what a stupid question you just asked. And I'm like, yeah. The way he put it is actually so true. It is. You know, why am I having this ideological argument about marketing or sales or this and that? We have to get good at it. And I wasn't good at sales myself, so I had to get good at it and learn, you know, some books, like Predictable Revenue was an awesome book. And then do the demos myself and, you know, start really nailing it. And then, you know, years later from that. At that point, everything we sold was marketing. Now more than 90% of our sales is actually outbound sales. So getting comfortable with sales is a. Is a big one.

Kind of circles right back to the beginning of the conversation where a lot of the SMEs give up on marketing because they don't see the immediate results.

Right.

But it's a. It's a marrying of the two. Sales, marketing, distribution, all is really critical for your company actually grow.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Distribution is key. Distribution key is key.

Any other last bits of ice for our audience? Budding entrepreneurs, seasoned entrepreneurs.

I don't know if it's advice, but, you know, the only thing I would say is that if you're in the trenches and building something or working on something, I feel you is tough. And you know, the pain is constant. And, you know, the excitement is also constant. It comes and goes, the ups and downs. But if you think you're on the right path, you know, keep at it and get help from other people that can give you their guidance and mentorship, but it's part of the journey. Don't give up.

Don't give up. That's a great way to end the conversation. Thank you Ali for joining us and sharing your wisdom and experiences with our audience.

Thank you. It was great to chat with you.

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