How Snippets AI Scaled to 5,000 Users Fast, SEO and Organic Growth Strategies with Alina Sprengele

Speaker A: Built to Scale with Reem Benjar. This is Built to Scale, a podcast for B2B founders who are playing the long game. I'm your host, Reem, and every week we are exploring the mechanics of sustainable growth with the founders and executives who are defining the industry. No fluff, no growth hacking gimmicks, just the blueprints for building a solid, scalable tech company. Welcome to the show. This episode is brought to you by Partner Propel. Hiring humans to do robot work is a waste of talent. Partner Propel transitions you to an AI first, marketing and sales company. We build the infrastructure that automates the grunt work. So your team focuses on one thing. Closing deal. Visit partnerpropel.com to get started. Today we have a special guest joining us, Alina Sprengelle at Snippers Snippets AI. Thank you so much, Alina, for joining us today.

Speaker B: Thank you for inviting me. Really happy to be here.

Speaker A: Awesome. I'm really happy to have you here today. Uh, so can you tell us more about Snippets AI and what you do there?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So my name is Alina. I'm coming from small country Latvia and we started to build Our company snippets AI 1 year ago and it was meant to be a, uh, prompt management tool where you can store like your prompts and reuse them later, especially if you are non technical person. And we were focusing mostly on founders and digital creators and also marketers. And actually we are now pivoting to SEO tool. So basically it's not only basic traditional SEO tool, but also geo, where you can rank yourself, rank your company, and you can do it just with one, um, button.

Speaker A: Amazing. I mean, we spoke on our prep call and I thought it was really interesting how you guys scaled your company. So excited to kind of dive in today. So can you tell me a little bit more about, you know, I know you just mentioned kind of what you started as. It's, you know, prompt management company. And is there a reason why you're pivoting towards an SEO tool? And can you just tell me a little bit more about what the reason behind the pivot was?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Actually, with snippets AI, we built it for one year, but we launched it around like four months ago. And, uh, we acquired organically more than 5,000, not the signups, but registered users, so around 70% of them are active. But we actually gave too much away freemium. So we didn't earn almost nothing, like very small amount of money. We understood one thing that we built Our product and uh, acquired people mostly organically. And we created, set up actually a good SEO for ourselves and mostly people which came from SEO organically to our website. They signed up and they started to pay because they were searching for this product and uh, they were interested to pay as well. And yeah, that's why we decided actually to pivot. So to be honest, we will keep Snippets AI as a brand still because it brings us, even though we stopped promoting it like two months ago, but still on monthly basis, we achieve around 10,000 monthly visitors organically still just from SEO and we attract around 700 new registrations. And as we understand how precisely correctly set up SEO, how to set up with one button backlinks and everything that will bring you in like reasonable traffic. We decided that we can share this with other founders as well because we have actually in our database More than 11,000 founders together because we participated also in Antlers residency in Baltic Impact accelerator in Latvia and in uh, startup house pre accelerator in Latvia. And we actually talked with many founders as well. They were struggling with uh, let's say connecting with SEO agencies. First of all, SEO agencies offer you like uh, amount of pricing around 2000, starting from €2,000 and up and they promise the result only starting from day 60 approximately. But we found a way how to get it already on next day or day after.

Speaker A: That's amazing. So I know when we had talked last time as well, you, you said you grew largely via LinkedIn and I did think that was incredible growth, especially with the number of users that you have. And doing this organically is impressive. So what has been your content approach and what do you feel has worked best when it comes to growing on LinkedIn?

Speaker B: Yeah, actually the best uh, performing content was like founder stories. I, from my personal account I posted a lot of events. We participated like with accelerators with incubators. But my co founder, he's more technical guy, so he built the whole infrastructure and he posted a lot of more in terms of prompting technical stuff. And actually he also took some ideas from already viral posts going on LinkedIn and he rephrased them and that's how in I think it was September or October, he achieved like half a million views on his LinkedIn not profile but post. And uh, yeah I remember this was like first month when we launched Snippets AI and our recent popped out because we had from this post like 300 uh, new registrations straight away.

Speaker A: That's amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, and sorry, I actually forgot to mention that to start if you are starting from zero, your LinkedIn account. It's good to build like a small group of your friends or colleagues like in WhatsApp or Telegram. And when you are posting uh, your posts, especially at the same time, just um, copy this link to your friends and that will boost a little bit your engagement as well and it will get like more reach.

Speaker A: I love this tip and I think what we call usually engagement pods so you have a group of people that are going and engaging. Um, um and I think this is probably underrated because I don't think most people will use that. But it is an easy way to kind of get started with just getting some engagement and then it happens organically from there. So love the tips. So what did you learn from launching Product Hunt? Uh the, the other company you've been working on?

Speaker B: Yeah, actually with Snippets AI this wasn't our first launch. We launched before we tried to develop some kind of productivity let me remind myself, like browser extensions. Yes. It was like two years ago and uh, we launched this product and we got organically also in um, Product Hunt in top seven, in top Tensory and we got the seventh place and that's really important to get actually in uh, that day's like top 10 because if you get there are getting promoted on um, Product Hunt newsletter and the reach could go potentially to 1 million subscribers of this new newsletter. And it's really important but with Snippets AI what we did, we launched in um, November, not this year, now previous year. And uh, we asked before like few days in advance to our like friends, ex colleagues, et cetera. Like we are preparing for a Product Hunt. Please help us and vote for us. And another thing what we did on uh 18th I think of November, we participated in slush in Helsinki and we were walking around this conference and we just went to those people we talked with and asked directly to register on Product Hunt and to vote for us. And actually that's how we got in top four. Unfortunately we had to compete with two Google products and one YC backed product. But still we uh, got into this newsletter like in top 10 of the day and uh, this Product Hunt lounge gave us around 49k monthly visitors in that month. And uh, we got like I think 15 new registrations in one week.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: So this was like, like a peak for us. Yeah, yeah, that's incredible.

Speaker A: And I. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker B: But only thing with the Product Hunt you can get like huge potential reach, et cetera. Like we got also invited to meetings with some Investors as well. But the only thing is that those are not like super competitive leads you are getting. Those are mostly researchers, searchers for new products. So yeah, don't think that you will get like a lot of like potential customers, but at least you are getting good visibility and some really good B2B offers as well.

Speaker A: That's great. Uh, that's a good story and uh, I'm sure it is a good like on the field way of getting some, some growth that probably most founders are not thinking about. So that's definitely a very good story. Thank you for sharing with us. So SEO is driving steady signups from what I understand. What did you do to make that specific channel work for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, we did um, classic SEO. So basically we are getting data from different LLMs, what people are searching in terms of prompt, um, management like sharing with team prompts, et cetera, et cetera. And based on that we are building our blogs and also we are building blogs and registering our company in different backlinks. So it gives us a good boost. And the more you are visible, the better ranking you're going to get actually. So that's why also we are planning to build this tool and we definitely don't want to focus only on classic traditional SEO, but more to AI generated like jio I think it's the name makes sense.

Speaker A: So I would love to understand a little bit more how you decide what to build next when you're running multiple startups. Because running one startup is already. It's a lot of work. You require focus and you know just uh, a lot of strategy but running multiple ones. I'd love to hear kind of your thought process when deciding what to build next.

Speaker B: Uh yeah, actually now after like hard learning we understood that you have to focus on startup tool which one can bring you in money. Actually if you are starting to get payments like not $5 as we gave also all or freemium as we gave to with snippets AI to our customers then you have to give the largest focus to exact this startup. And in terms of SEO, as I mentioned before, we are building this on our own story and we got like feedback from our other founders let's say. And also we are starting to test some closed, I wouldn't say even better but alpha, um, let's say pilots because we don't have a website even yet but uh, we have this tool on our end. And uh, another thing what we are focusing is trends because one like let's say small startup right now for us is going to be Real time avatar meant for founders. So you can pitch to this avatar because he can see you, he can hear you and he can interrupt you. So basically before going to investor, you can pitch to this avatar and he will give you tips, he will test your knowledge and he will help you to improve actually your knowledge before going to real investor. So yeah, this is another. Those two are actually we are focusing in on.

Speaker A: That's amazing. Awesome. And I think I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts on the last question here, which is with your paid customers being mostly in the US and in Canada, um, and you based in Latvia, Right. What have you learned about converting users into revenue essentially from a different geographic location?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, with Snipit CI we got like more than 45%, let's call them users from Canada and the US but all the paid users are coming only from the US and Canada. And from our side, what we understood, like people from the us, they are more open to new things, especially in AI because in Europe I believe people are a little bit still afraid from using too much AI because of this GDPR and data leaking, etc. Etc. And uh, I also currently I'm also like a mentor to government sector department in uh, Riga. And yeah, they are also, they're super afraid to leak this data. Ah, they are super strict with gdpr, et cetera. And uh, another problem, what's in Europe, most part of people, they think that they can use only ChatGPT for everything, but that's not true. You can't use ChatGPT for automation a little bit maybe somehow. Yeah, but yeah, people in Europe, they are still stuck in ChatGPT and also they want to treat it more as a friend. They don't want to use like real prompts, like uh, structured prompts, etc. They don't understand why they need actually to store those prompts and why they need to reuse those prompts and reuse the context you're feeding to LLM. In terms of the US customers users, it's much easier. They are coming mostly also from SEO and they understand what they're looking for and what they want to achieve with the store and that's why they are ready to pay.

Speaker A: And that makes sense. Right? I think this is a, uh, reflection of a lot of the conversations we've been having around adopting new technologies, especially with AI that you know, to be honest in the US is not really regulated yet. And you know, we know Europe is more inclined to make regulations, which is also a very good thing. But it's really interesting to see that being confirmed, uh, with how, you know your, your company has has grown over the years based on that openness to invest in tools like AI in Europe versus in the US or North America.

Speaker B: Yeah. And actually Europeans, they are asking straight away even you are like young startups, um, just starting startup. They are still asking straight away this SOC 2 certificate at least if you don't have it, it's super difficult going to B2B. You can more mostly attract more M B2C.

Speaker A: Interesting. And I think that's a good lesson maybe for also American or Canadian companies looking to expand in Europe. That's probably uh, a good thing to keep in mind as they plan their growth there because the reception might not be exactly the same as in North America because of everything you mentioned.

Speaker B: So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Speaker A: Well Alina, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. It was a pleasure having you. I love what you guys are are building. If anybod wants to connect with you or learn more about snippet AI, what would be the best way to do that?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. First of all, you're welcome to test it for free on um, our website gets snippets AI, but if you would love to connect with me, then just invite me on LinkedIn and yeah, that's it.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thanks Alina for coming to the podcast. For everybody else who's listening, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're giving us a, uh, follow, give us a review or share this episode with someone else who may benefit from hearing it. Thanks again Alina and thanks everybody for listening in and see you next time.

Speaker B: Thank you.