Episode Transcript
Asia Orangio (00:00.27)
I do find that when I do them, the founder always reaches out. They're always like, like I just did one, like the user list one Benedict reached out and was like, my gosh, hey, it's been so long. Can you send me the link? We'd love to see it. And then he, and then he watched it literally an hour later, cause German, literally an hour later was like that you were so fair. That was really nice of you. my gosh. Thank you so much. We're definitely going to take this feedback and like implement it. And I'm, actually going to reply back and be like,
Kim Talarczyk (00:27.213)
Hmm.
Asia Orangio (00:29.474)
And if you need help, let me know. Or if you know friends who need help, let me know. You know where to find me. But anyway.
Kim Talarczyk (00:33.998)
Right.
So maybe that is good. You're planting good seeds.
Asia Orangio (00:41.516)
At first I was thinking, these are supposed to get distribution and they should, but now I'm kind of like, maybe I can use this to target either people who I originally was like, maybe wouldn't hire me, but maybe I can use it to work with people who would actually. When I think about early demand maven days, one of the best things I did was offer a free marketing consulting call for one hour. And I was like, my calendar is open, book calls with me.
Kim Talarczyk (00:57.102)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (01:09.102)
let's work through your toughest growth problems or marketing problems. And I got booked up, I forgot to put a limit, I got booked up overnight. was like my next two weeks were gone, but it was the best because then I had deals in my hand. Two or three of them became clients. I should do that again. Okay, I digress. So I was talking about false negatives and how channels can accidentally...
Kim Talarczyk (01:20.13)
Mm.
Kim Talarczyk (01:27.896)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (01:37.772)
throw a signal that says this won't work, it's not effective or efficient, but actually they are. But the reason why it's not working now is because you don't have other things in place to make that effective and efficient. Paid ads is a really good example of this. In fact, I think it's probably the most common example because a lot of companies do start with paid ads. They waste a lot of money and energy and time here not understanding what are the other things that they need to implement in order to make that successful.
And so they get frustrated, the ads don't work. And it's not that ads wouldn't work, it's more that it doesn't work for you right now based on where your business is at. And that's kind of where marketing channels can sometimes, especially if you're in the early days, can throw either a false positive or a false negative. I just described false positive, but we can...
we can go back to it or yeah, false positive. But basically a false positive in a marketing channel is when marketing, so like let's say you start ads or you start SEO and maybe you see some success, maybe you start seeing traffic in trials or signups or whatever it is, but maybe those folks don't become customers. And sometimes even,
Maybe the channel itself is okay, but there are certain types of campaigns that aren't as successful in the long term, but short term it looks like they might be. I actually have this direct experience working in my fractional CMO role where we are trying to really battle test ads. Yes, they're expensive. We have an LTV that we do think could support a successful, meaningful CAC here, but there are certain types of campaigns that are just not
cost effective and the reason why is because we get tons of trials from them but they don't ultimately become customers. So it gives a false positive that like if we had just looked at trials we'd be like hell yeah this is such a winner let's continue to spend more money but when you look at the actual trial to conversion rates specifically from those campaigns they don't necessarily perform better than some of our other channels in fact it's actually much worse.
Asia Orangio (04:00.43)
our activation rate has a particular range and these fall well below that, just normally like in our organic pipeline. So that is false positive versus false negative. And that brings us into our ultimate topic today, which is we kind of started rolling, but yeah, like is it possible to be too early into a marketing channel?
Kim Talarczyk (04:16.95)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (04:23.476)
Mm-hmm. Right. So what does that mean?
Asia Orangio (04:28.27)
Yeah, I think the answer ultimately is absolutely yes. Yes, it is very much possible to be too early into a marketing channel. So much so that there are some channels that we might write off because we don't think that they're valuable or, or it could, again, it could throw the false positive versus the false negative. But at the end of the day, it's something where
Kim Talarczyk (04:39.052)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (04:58.358)
you still need to, I was gonna say something around like.
The thing about these channels is, and really any channel, is most of them don't operate purely in isolation. Most of them do stack, meaning ads and SEO and email all speak to each other in some way. Like when you think about like a customer journey and the many different touch points that you can have, there is no single channel that is executed upon or experience in isolation of others. So the reality is that
while we say channel, it's really more like web and like just like a web of things. And ideally, when you evaluate a channel, you think about it in the context of your overarching program. And this is actually, this is new for me. This is actually even new for me, not necessarily like thinking about marketing in terms of programs rather than just channels.
Kim Talarczyk (05:49.581)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (05:59.139)
but also when you actually evaluate the performance that you're looking at the full program and not just the channel itself by itself. So for example, in my fractional CMO role, we have partnerships, we also have community, and we have what I'm calling our demand generation programs. So there are webinars that we run. also have a number of, we have our overarching user group community and then a number of sub-communities.
for specific segments that we have for customers. And when we look at partnerships, partnerships and DemandGen and community all work together. And when we evaluate partnerships, we wouldn't just look at partnerships on its own of attribution, for example, or even like how much revenue generated, et cetera, because technically it's blended. Like a lot of those partnerships run webinars for us, with us. Sometimes we run webinars for them.
Kim Talarczyk (06:53.102)
Hmm.
Asia Orangio (06:57.002)
And similarly, sometimes like community gets involved for various reasons. So when we evaluate like the performance of partnerships, we're not just looking at just partnerships, although that is interesting to see, but it wouldn't technically be fair because there are other things that play into that. Similarly, when I think about some of our demand generation programs, we have a webinar program. are numbers of ways that we promote them. One is through partnerships, second adds.
We don't get as much like search demand for webinars specifically, but the webinar content can become search oriented content. So there is a little bit of that. But then we distribute through email. We do republish on YouTube. It's like there are ways that we distribute. So when we look at the webinar program, we're not just looking at number of registrations for the webinar. We're looking at all the channels and things that is ultimately distributing that.
program in addition to attracting and converting the demand that is out there in the market today. So wouldn't be fair to evaluate it in isolation. It would make more sense to look at the full program. So that's why I would say while it is possible to be too early to a channel, we also have to remember that channels are never in isolation of each other. They always stack. And if you're evaluating a channel on its own, you might get
Kim Talarczyk (07:59.853)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (08:22.638)
an incomplete impression. It might not be a false impression, but it certainly would be incomplete if you didn't consider the other channels that it specifically connects to in some kind of way. So that customers are experiencing more than one channel for any given campaign or activity or program or whatever it is.
Kim Talarczyk (08:41.582)
So you're essentially saying for channels, if you were evaluating just the channel, whether it was good or bad or looked positive or negative, you really shouldn't take that at face value.
Asia Orangio (08:56.46)
Not at first. And I think this is where it gets tricky because I know for certain, for a fact that early stage technical founders really want absolutes. Engineering kind of is like that. Like you work in a lot of absolutes. Marketing is not necessarily in absolutes. Probably at all actually. Like there are certainly some, but not in the way I think that most people would think. I think it, think...
What needs to happen is, and this also is by way of understanding that attribution and the world of attribution is dramatically changing and shifting. And I would say 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we're not going to be thinking about attribution in the same way that we did as we are today or even 10 years ago. I think a lot of us still think about attribution in the way that we did today. The only channel that I would say is like truly measurable in terms of attribution is probably going to be ads.
possibly organic, but the thing, but the reality is that there are so many other channel touch points that happened before that last touch point. So someone clicks on an ad, but you don't know about the conversation that they had before that or the, the number of searches that they did before that, or the conference or the event that they went to before that, or all those things combined. The last thing that you saw,
Kim Talarczyk (10:05.005)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (10:22.946)
that was directly attributable at least was the ad click. So attribution, there's so much more to the story here. And even then it is, you there's the debate about first touch versus last touch versus blended. There's a number of other ways like to do like wild and crazy attribution. But what do you give the credit to? And historically, traditionally speaking, marketers give the credit to last touch.
but we like to know or understand what first touch is to kind of give us a sense for where to put our investments and also similarly like what will convert better or whatever. The reason why I mention attribution is because when we think about evaluating a channel, our inclination is to think about it from an attribution perspective rather than say in an influence perspective or in any of the other ways that we possibly could think about it and
I don't get me wrong. think that is part of what makes it tough because you want to be able look at the channel and measure it and be like, yep, this generated this many leads and this much revenue and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that would be awesome if we could reliably do that. But I think the reality is that it's so rarely ever just one channel. It's usually like three to five channels over X period of time. We have interviewed thousands of customers, I think, at this point, like of our clients and
Kim Talarczyk (11:44.248)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (11:47.161)
Consistently, I think there's never been a single time where it was just like a one channel done. It usually was several moments, several trigger moments over sometimes years, years, not like a month, but like they had thought about this like two years ago and then just didn't do anything about it because life hadn't lifed yet. And then something changes for them. And now all of sudden they're an active engaged prospect searching for something. And I say searching, but it could be
Kim Talarczyk (11:59.683)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (12:17.068)
They hear about it from someone else. The moment of needing to buy can change in an instant. And, and the channels that people, the, saying putting finger crossed on channels, but like, the journey that someone goes through is it's more than just one, it's several. And so again, what do you give the credit to? Like, like, like, where do you give the credit to? I think what's more interesting is honestly understanding what that web is for people. What are the most consistent patterns? Word of mouth search ads, like those are all like really common things.
Kim Talarczyk (12:34.104)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (12:42.85)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (12:47.138)
What are some of the maybe uncommon things? And then deciding and determining what do you have the best chance of entering and making a splash in without it breaking the bank. Depending on your LTV, ads may or may not be an option. And if it is an option, that is a very easy place to start and also burn money. Like it's really easy to waste money here. It's so easy, it actually hurts. I would not recommend doing this without
Kim Talarczyk (12:58.38)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (13:16.95)
an expert if you can afford it. I just wouldn't. The algorithms and the way that these platforms and channels have changed have changed so much over the years that like, not knocking at like AdEspresso or anything, but like you taking a course on ads from five years ago is just not gonna cut it. Like it's not, like you are going to need an expert or if you are going to learn it, you are going to need to probably give yourself like double the time.
Kim Talarczyk (13:20.226)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (13:44.055)
of really learning and mastering the channel, which if you don't have double the budget, then that's, you know, that's gonna be tough to do obviously. But when I think about like other channels, so ads is obviously like, that's the easiest thing to get started. One of the most expensive things to get started. SEO takes forever, partnerships are a completely different story based on like the type of partnerships and context or market context it is.
So lot of these channels are gonna take time. The question for me to everyone listening would be what makes the most sense for you based on your customer journey? And if you don't know your customer journey, we gotta start there, because you're kind of just guessing. And I really do mean you're probably guessing. But if you understand the customer journey, yeah, like what are the common patterns here and taking it from there?
Kim Talarczyk (14:37.624)
So if you don't know the customer journey, what does that look like to find that out?
Asia Orangio (14:42.092)
Yeah. So understanding the customer journey. mean, if you're listening to me, you've probably heard me say, you've got to talk to customers, not just customers, but also prospects. So it is worthwhile to not just talk to the people who already pay you money. Although that would be the ideal. And if you don't have that many customers, then you would be looking at prospects, audience members. You'd be shocked at what people remember about their journey. So ideally you talk to a set of, you know, it could just be 10,
10 customer interviews, ideally recent. So they've become customers in the last six months. Those people are going to be fresh. Like they're going to remember more. If you want to ensure that you get someone on the phone, you incentivize it. So you incentivize the interview and you're going to ask, I like to use jobs to be done. We obviously love jobs to be done. That's what we primarily use at Demand Maven, but it really doesn't have to be that intense. could be something as simple as how did you hear about
XYZ product, and then walk me through the journey of you realizing that you needed a solution, going out and getting it, and really dig deep into how long that took. The full story, you might discover that it actually took years. There was one project that we did, and I think it took the customer literally like two to five years to kind of realize that they had a problem and discover a number of competitors first, and then
and then the client's product. that is so, you'd be shocked how common that is. And then similarly, there's like what channels along the way, like how did they discover not just your product, but competitor products or even competitive solutions? Cause I know some people, you know, they're like, we don't have any direct competitors, but it's like, sure, there's nothing like exactly like you, but there's something that they're doing instead of using you. How did they discover that? So that's how you start thinking about.
Kim Talarczyk (16:22.318)
Hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (16:35.682)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (16:37.214)
what channels do you start to prioritize and plan for? And then again, from there, it's gonna be all about what kind of budget do you have? What timeline do you have? And then similarly, what do you think you could be most competitive inside of? SEO is still a thing. It is still very much a viable channel, even with AI. Even with AI, SEO is still king today.
AI search is not necessarily taking as much market share as people think it is. It just feels like it is because if you're in the tech world, you're kind of in a bubble. But when you look at the volume of searches, Google is still very much king. Google also technically informs these AI search engines. So all I to say, you're still looking at SEO. But if you're going to do SEO today, 15 years ago, it was a different story. Today, it's a different ballgame. So...
Kim Talarczyk (17:21.57)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (17:29.918)
What are the investments that you can make? Now there are some companies that we've worked with that have like killed it at SEO. Like there are several that come to mind. I don't want to name any names, but they get more than like hundred K views a month from search. But it's because they, it's one of those channels that builds up over time. Now the conversion rates from search, different story. That I think is a bigger challenge or a different challenge. But.
Kim Talarczyk (17:44.013)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (17:55.971)
the search volume that they're able to achieve is actually very impressive for some of these products. So I have to say, that's how I would approach it. That's how I would think about it, especially when you start thinking about doing customer research and figuring out what to do.
Kim Talarczyk (18:00.429)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (18:09.74)
Right.
Right. So that makes sense. I'm curious to jump back into that offering tree example. You were saying that ads were looking like they were working, but digging deeper, there were more trials that weren't converting to paid users. So what are the next steps there?
Asia Orangio (18:30.914)
Yeah. Yeah. So for context, I know we kind of just like jumped in, but, for, so I was talking earlier about false positives versus false negatives. And this it's interesting because we, we've been, we've been rigorously testing this channel. I would say for the last four to six months. That sounds right. Yeah. for the last four to six months, we've been very rigorously testing it.
Kim Talarczyk (18:53.678)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (18:59.902)
they have actually been investing in ads for, for like, I think a year, but it was, it was more in the last like four to six months that we've been like pretty deep in this and really understanding what are all the different levers that we can pull. Because the thing about any channel, and this is why false positives and false negatives are so common, but the thing about any channel is that there is usually a lot of nuance and there are many levers that you can pull and you've got to figure out what are the right levers that make sense.
for the budget that I have, for the customer that I'm trying to attract, for the stage of the cycle that they're in, yada yada. Now going back to this example, so I think your question was just like to expand more on like what happened there.
Kim Talarczyk (19:41.998)
Yeah, and like, so then how do you then troubleshoot it and because you're basically saying that it still could be viable to be doing those, those paid ads, or maybe not.
Asia Orangio (19:53.101)
Yeah. So for context, there's meta and Google and, like search ads and what we've been testing. and this is true for any ad channel, but you've got to test.
Not every possible journey, but the ones that you think are going to have the greatest impact. So for example, for search ads, that could be like that could be bidding on competitor based keywords. It could be, you know, more bottom of the funnel software related keywords. There are so many different options here. Like I would be remiss if I attempted to list all the options.
but all the basic ones, like you can probably guess, like there are certain types of keywords related to our software industry or like sub software section category. can't remember the name. think category is, is more accurate. there are keywords related to the different like customer segments that we target. there's also branded search and what we found is some of these work really well for us and meaning like they.
generate maybe not a ton of trials, they create customers, like real paying customers at the end of the day that we can see. And they specifically came from this channel program, et cetera. And even more specifically, this campaign. And I think that that is the level of detail that you do need to get into. It's not enough to write off the whole channel. You have to figure out what are the actual types of campaigns that make the most sense.
Kim Talarczyk (21:15.33)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (21:31.881)
And that I think is the nuance. but to compare it to some of the other campaigns, there are other campaigns, I won't say which, but there are other campaigns that we have just not seen like the return on. And ultimately for ads to be effective, you should ideally see a healthy buyback period within some amount of time. And I would say with as much optimization as we've been doing, we've not really seen that on the backend, not without big dramatic.
like huge swings. And what I mean by huge swings, I mean like, like maybe we need to present like a whole different brand to these people clicking through. Like our hypothesis at this point is for certain types of keyword searches, there just is a less qualified prospect, like an unqualified prospect clicking on that and coming through the pipeline is our hypothesis. Now, have we continued to battle test it? Yes. Like we have continued to test new ideas.
Kim Talarczyk (22:20.75)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (22:30.924)
The more that we do though, like the more that we experiment with this, the more that we validate that hypothesis. So it's kind of like, we're not experimenting for the sake of fulfilling a self prophecy that we've created ourselves. It's much more like, are we sure? Okay, yep, we've done another thing. Great, we've knocked it out. Like we've crossed that off the list. Is there anything else? And.
Kim Talarczyk (22:49.75)
Right.
Asia Orangio (22:54.334)
Like I said, the more that we do this, the more that we observe that there just are certain types of keywords that just do better for us based on what we're trying to accomplish. I won't get too in the weeds of the strategy here, but just because I want any competitors listening. But like you can look up any company's ad strategy for the most part. But there are some that are just like, man, like these are doing really well for us. But when I think about it, it ultimately comes down to
Kim Talarczyk (23:02.754)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (23:24.198)
What are the things that the other competitors maybe aren't paying as much attention to? And I think that could be a little bit of it. It could also, and this is what I think it probably more is related to, it's what's our ideal prospect actually typing in the search bar and making sure that when they see our ad, they click through that it is for them. that, I mean, that's basic marketing from ads, at least one on one. That's on the Google side. So the meta side has been fascinating.
Kim Talarczyk (23:38.861)
Hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (23:48.77)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (23:53.311)
We have found that, you know, Meta, I would say, is very generous with how it attributes trials and all those conversion points. Very generous. It will take credit for literally anything. Like if you like walked near an ad that it shows, it's like, that's us. Like it takes credit real quick. But what has been interesting is we've been playing a lot with like cost per lead. Now, lead generation is
Kim Talarczyk (24:03.694)
you
Asia Orangio (24:23.992)
controversial, I would say, in the SaaS marketing world because most of the time you want to be thinking about demand gen, sales ready leads. And I would say that is conventional wisdom. I don't disagree with that. That makes sense. What's been interesting though for us is lead gen actually has a place, I think, in our marketing strategy. What I mean by that is you hear, certainly you hear, don't waste your time on generating a bunch of leads that aren't sales ready. The thing about our market though is that it literally takes years before someone is
like I'm ready to buy. And it has to do with becoming an entrepreneur, deciding that you want to like level up in some way like related to your career. And in order for you to level up successfully, like you need a platform like what we offer. But that process can take literal years. So to me,
It's true. Like 95 % of the market is not going to be actually in market. And I dare say 99 % of the market is not going to be in market. But what's interesting to me is the lead gen piece of this, there's going to come a time where a portion of these people will be ready. And I would love to be in front of them when that happens. Like that, if that's the first touch point that they have. Now there is a small portion, like I said, cause you know, 90 % won't be ready, but the 1 % that is there is, there is a small portion of them that do.
Kim Talarczyk (25:41.004)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (25:49.113)
start a trial and then eventually become a customer. We're obviously looking to see like, there anything that we can do to maximize that? Like maybe our message needs to get in front of them a little bit more often. And you might be able to make the argument, Asia, that's still technically demand gen, that's fair. But what we found though with Meta is it does a really, really, really good job of lead gen for us. Like it just does. It just like, I don't know. Like when we promote some of our other programs and like,
marketing assets like lead magnets, things like that. Like it does such a good job of getting us email addresses that we can market to and remarket to. And I think that that I'm, I'm, it's certainly not a short term thing. Like, like this to me is longer. It's a little bit longer term. Like it just takes longer for people to be ready to buy, but I'm not mad about it. but TBD, like it's very possible that, and this is where again, we were talking about false positives and false negatives, at least with ads.
Kim Talarczyk (26:21.58)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (26:35.79)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (26:44.694)
you really won't know until months from now. Like you won't know actually how effective, and I think this is the part that frustrates me whenever people talk about marketing performance, especially when it comes to ads, because you do kind of have to wait it out. Like you kind of have to see, did those people become customers? Did they stay? That's the only way you're going to be able to fully evaluate a channel. And even then it's going to be tenuous because attribution is dramatically changing. But all that to say, even if you get the lead or the trial or the traffic,
did you get the customer and did the customer stay? That's the level of life cycle reporting that you have to take into consideration because we might discover that actually no meta sucks and it should be Google or maybe they both suck and it needs to be something else or it could also be, because again, we're only like four to six months into this, it could also be actually no, like.
you should be investing in both of these, they will pay off in a certain amount of time that will be worth it for you. And maybe you turn off these campaigns. And I think that this is actually more our likely scenario is I actually think it's more like for us at least, it's certain campaigns perform really well. The others don't, we can turn those off, save that cash, keep the others running and continue to build out the strategy from there, which is far more realistic, I think, giving the blanket statement of ads doesn't work for us.
Kim Talarczyk (27:46.03)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (28:09.866)
Are there, I will add the caveat, there certainly are businesses where that will not work. But I that's true for most channels. I think every channel is contextual. my gosh, I remembered the idea that I was gonna mention. my God, I remembered it. It just came to me. Okay, our next podcast topic should be why you can't take tactics from other SaaS companies and apply them to your business.
Kim Talarczyk (28:20.974)
What?
Kim Talarczyk (28:36.782)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (28:41.602)
Sorry listeners, just, I remembered, I was trying to remember what we were gonna talk about for one of our podcast episodes and I remembered. Yes, it's like a classic, like, why do we do this? But it happens and it happens all the time. And okay, we'll bookmark it for the next episode. We're gonna bookmark that one. It's such a good topic. I'm still like, why do we do this? And...
Kim Talarczyk (28:50.306)
That's a good one.
Kim Talarczyk (28:56.704)
It happens all the time. Yeah.
Asia Orangio (29:08.494)
You know, we all do it. Even I do it sometimes. I'm not perfect, but I just see this so often. Anyway, I was talking about context, but in the context of channels and like you have to really think about the context of the channel that you're investing in, bringing it back to that. But yeah, that's where I...
Kim Talarczyk (29:29.568)
Right. so and then back to our original topic, there's also, you know, looking at at the product and okay, if people are signing up for trials or generating whoever through certain channels, maybe there is an issue on the product side or something on the activation side, right? Like, so that would come into play, right?
Asia Orangio (29:54.018)
Yes.
Absolutely, I'm so glad you mentioned that. So this is an example of a false negative of like ads doesn't work for us. And I've heard that so many times. It's so funny, because normally I would be like, yeah, screw ads. No, I'm just kidding. sometimes, and I've seen this a lot too, ads has no issue generating demand, but can the product close it?
Kim Talarczyk (30:10.542)
you
Asia Orangio (30:25.272)
Like if your product led growth, PLG, your product needs to close deals. People don't think about product as being the salesperson. And that is the insight actually. Like if you're PLG, your product is the salesperson. It needs to make the best possible impression. needs, it doesn't, it should not over promise and under deliver. It should deliver on its promises. But your product ultimately is the first impression of, well, the website is actually the first impression technically, but anyway.
Kim Talarczyk (30:40.557)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (30:52.174)
The product is the real first experience someone has with your brand and with your, sorry, I should say really with the product. If it doesn't ultimately yield itself well to good healthy activation rates, it doesn't make sense to spend money on ads or any other channel for that matter. But is that the channel's fault? I don't think it is.
We got to go and look at, we got to look at product. I'll, we worked with a company earlier last year, I think, and I, I'll never forget, the founders were insistent that 15 % activation rate was normal and there was no one else was doing better, which meant like their friends weren't doing any better, which meant that it was impossible to do better on activation. Now,
To be fair, they do have a point. 15 % is the average activation rate across most indie-funded and bootstrapped companies. This is also most common for companies less than a million in ARR. So yes, that is certainly the average. It's also, think, technically the median. It's the most common number that you will see. But it's not because it's not possible to get better. It's just because most founders don't know how to do it.
And most of them assume that there is no process or there's no way to do this. We actually have an episode about how everything is figure out a bulletin sass. Like there's already a process pretty much for everything. It's just a matter of let's go find it and adapt it to us. But when we, after we worked with them and they implemented some of the changes, they were shook when it doubled, like completely and totally shook, couldn't believe it. They were like, wow, this is like there, they went through the process with us and
Kim Talarczyk (32:31.203)
Right.
Asia Orangio (32:47.054)
through that process, we literally doubled their activation rates. they were, but it's just so funny, because they were insistent that it could not be improved and we proved them wrong. They also proved themselves wrong though, to be fair. Like they really did the work. So I want to give them credit, obviously where it was due. It wasn't all us. It was also a good part of them as well. But that's the type of thing where it's like, if you know that your product doesn't activate as well, if it doesn't convert as much, especially as much as it
Kim Talarczyk (32:58.32)
Thank
Asia Orangio (33:16.878)
And I think most people don't think that they can get more than 30 % activation rate, but you absolutely can. You absolutely can. We've actually worked with companies that have like 60 to 80 % in some cases. But this is where ad spend won't be as effective. Like if you can imagine getting double the customers from a single channel, same amount of trials. That's infinitely more efficient growth than not.
Kim Talarczyk (33:42.936)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (33:43.821)
And I think this kind of comes down to what you care about, but do you care about sustainable growth or do you care about growth at all costs? And I think you kind of have to decide what camp you want to be in. If you care about sustainable growth, then yeah, like those types of conversion rates and things like that, like that's going to matter a lot for you. But we have to be careful though, because the channels that feed that pipeline, it's easy to kind of...
point back at the channel and be like, you're not efficient enough. But it's like, is it the channel or is it the sign up flow, the activation experience, all the other things after post click and post sign up. This was actually one of the things that we chatted about a lot when we were running ads and obviously we're still running ads now. when I look at offering trees ads, we don't have any issue with
Kim Talarczyk (34:21.047)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (34:39.842)
We don't, it was very clear, again, going back to like the campaign level, it was very clear that some campaigns had no issue generating the trials. They weren't converting, but we know that on average, like we convert X amount of like trials into customers. From ads specifically, it was much lower, like markedly lower. That gave us the hypothesis that maybe these are not,
the most quality leads. On the flip side, however, there are other campaigns though that like, it's pretty like, it's like, it's the same if not better as our normal like activation rates. And that gives us like a lot of positive feedback of like, okay, this campaign is working. And in some cases actually works better. Like there's one campaign in particular that actually does convert better currently than our just general blended
Kim Talarczyk (35:10.232)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (35:37.841)
like PLG funnel. And that's also a very positive sign for us, but, and we, but we can see, like we can visibly see the click through rates, the blah, blah. So all that to say, in some cases, the channel will have no issue generating demand for you. In some cases, some campaigns will do well with generating the customer and be efficient and be pretty comparable and other campaigns possibly won't in fact, and maybe won't be the best channel in that particular context.
Kim Talarczyk (35:39.106)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (36:07.352)
So that's kind of where like, we gotta be careful about writing off the whole channel. I think I mentioned earlier, you there are certainly some products where certain channels just don't make sense. But that's actually what sparked the next topic that we will cover in the next episode, which is why you can't copy a competitor strategy and why you can't just look at another SaaS company and just do what they're doing. Because it's all contextual. Every single piece of this is contextual. And if you can't see the context,
Kim Talarczyk (36:29.379)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (36:33.996)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (36:36.716)
it's gonna be really hard for you to figure out what lever to pull and also possibly force you to or encourage you to turn something off before you're actually ready to turn it off or vice versa. Invest in something before you're actually ready to.
Kim Talarczyk (36:49.866)
Right. I can't wait to talk more about that.
Asia Orangio (36:54.316)
Yeah, no, I know. It'll be a good one. The only thing I think we haven't touched on is...
How do know if you're too early? Like, I feel like we didn't really dig as much into that. Almost like,
Kim Talarczyk (37:04.855)
Mmm.
Right. Like too early to a specific channel. Like the company isn't established. what's the word I'm looking for? Like the SaaS company is too young.
Asia Orangio (37:11.607)
Yeah, like.
Asia Orangio (37:18.797)
Yeah.
You're right. It could be that.
So I've been taking the angle of...
Asia Orangio (37:34.319)
you know, how do you know if, can you be too early to a channel in the way of, it's either the false positive or the false negative, but there's also, like, the aspect of it of are you set up for the channel as well? So there's also, are you too early in that maybe you don't have a clear understanding of go-to-market, maybe you don't have a clear understanding of
Kim Talarczyk (37:51.448)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (38:03.518)
of actually product, even though you might be building the MVP and kind of thinking about early marketing channels, and that makes sense. But before you judge them, that might still be too early. And then similarly, I think it's also possible to be too early in the way of, strategically speaking, is this the right time to enter the channel based on where the business is at? So false positive, false negative aside,
Kim Talarczyk (38:29.484)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (38:32.77)
That's kind of like the outcome, I feel like. But when I think about some of the companies that we've worked with, and I won't name any names here, but there are a couple of companies that we've worked with where they just implemented a new program just way too soon. Like it was too early purely because the growth loops and like network effects of those particular programs aren't, they're just, they're not mature enough.
for that to really pay off. So there are a couple of things that come to mind. I'm trying think of really solid examples. There are certainly things like partnerships and communities. Sometimes those can be too early. In fact, think maybe a lot of the times they probably are. And there are cases where they might have been too late. I've seen companies get to scale.
Kim Talarczyk (39:04.416)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (39:20.748)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (39:30.83)
and then decide, oh, let's do a community. And they're so big that it kind of feels like unwieldy almost. But there are programs that it's too soon, but for a different reason. And it's not that it'll throw a false positive or false negative. It's more like it just won't reach the scale that you might hope it will. But because it's too soon, it's not.
Kim Talarczyk (39:36.29)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (39:56.875)
it won't be successful anyway, or if it is successful, it's marginal at best. So I think that that's another example as well. I think the same is true. actually outbound sales. So sales led programs, sometimes you can be too early to add sales led to your baseline. That's common. I've seen that before. Sales led meaning outbound. So you're doing like cold outbound or cold calling or
Kim Talarczyk (40:01.837)
Mm.
Kim Talarczyk (40:08.589)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (40:18.496)
And
Asia Orangio (40:24.782)
Sales is ultimately generating their own pipeline based on outreach. There is also the sales led motion, is more like marketing and sales are working together to generate demos. Sometimes you can be too early to create a sales led go to market motion because you don't have enough traction in the existing market channels, et cetera, for that to work extremely well.
Kim Talarczyk (40:51.373)
Hmm.
Asia Orangio (40:52.182)
But yeah, so I say sales led, but I do want to clarify because there's technically a number of ways that you can execute sales led. But cold outbound is one way that you can think about executing it. There is also sales and marketing working together. Usually we call this like more traditionally like demand generation and demand gen is responsible for generating like sales demos. And then they go through the sales pipeline. But sales sourced revenue is really what I should say. That can be too soon sometimes.
Kim Talarczyk (41:20.3)
Like the market isn't ready to be hearing that message.
Asia Orangio (41:24.142)
It's more like your business might not be mature enough to actually execute that well. Like that might be too soon. So I mean, I don't think the market really cares whether, you know, I think they're more like, how are you going to help me? So they're like, yeah, come through if you can help. But I think it's more like, you have the pillars in place for that to be successful and for that to work well?
Kim Talarczyk (41:29.998)
Got it, okay.
Kim Talarczyk (41:39.924)
Right. Right.
Kim Talarczyk (41:50.935)
Right. And maybe it's too soon jumping right into it and then saying, it didn't work for us. We're not going to do that. We're not going to have a sales led team or an outbound team. Just might have been too early. Yeah.
Asia Orangio (42:03.372)
Yep. We, we worked with a company, it was years ago now and they had this, they had this challenge and it was, gosh, they were, they were in the financial space and they immediately wanted to jump into like, like almost, it was almost like enterprise sales. Like they kind of wanted to jump into enterprise sales, but they really weren't quite ready. especially since they hadn't actually,
They hadn't actually created the system to even create their small to medium or mid-market. They were still figuring that part of the market out and then trying to add on enterprise sales without actually having the structure for it. So was too soon in that way, but not for the audience or the market itself. It was more like too soon for the business. So I do think that there are some of those examples too that exist out there where we're adding this on early, maybe too early.
Kim Talarczyk (42:39.745)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (42:50.477)
Right.
Asia Orangio (42:59.498)
in a way that it won't be successful. And I think that that's part of the issue, or a large part of the issue, I should say. But yeah, it can make it really challenging to make that perform. And that is kind of where you do get into like false positive versus false negative scenarios. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just it's not gonna work as big as it could if you had added this on later. So we do like to think about programs and channels as stacking and not.
Kim Talarczyk (43:04.814)
Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (43:22.328)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (43:27.84)
in isolation of each other, and I think that's part of the issue sometimes is most teams don't think about these things as stacking on top of each other and supporting each other as part of a cohesive ecosystem. They think about it like silos, and this is gonna work on its own and it's not gonna talk to anything else. We already talked about that earlier, but that is a really, it's a really common misconception about how it all works.
Kim Talarczyk (43:41.346)
Yes.
Kim Talarczyk (43:45.719)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (43:52.992)
Yes, like let's activate this channel or let's test it, see if it works. Yes, no. Next one. And there, it's a web, like you said.
Asia Orangio (43:58.54)
Yep. Yeah. Or like, let's stand up this department, test it, see if it works, next one. And then it's like, well, that would work if we had XYZ pieces in place. And even then, like, we might have some degree of fidelity here. Like, we might not be super high fidelity, but it would be higher fidelity if these other things were true. But.
Kim Talarczyk (44:05.59)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (44:12.386)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (44:25.314)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (44:26.498)
That's kind of where we get into timing of not just channels, but also programs.
Kim Talarczyk (44:34.072)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (44:36.558)
Cool. Is there anything that we missed?
Asia Orangio (44:43.982)
I feel like listeners are like, wait, you didn't talk about this. We're like, what does that mean? But no, yeah, I feel like this was a good baseline. But if anyone has any questions, please hit us up.
Kim Talarczyk (44:47.074)
Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (44:53.258)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Yeah. Thanks, Asia. Bye.
Asia Orangio (44:57.497)
Cool, all right, well thanks so much, Kim. All right, bye.
