Zero outbound, 90% SEO: how to grow without a sales team | Hiren Hasmukh @Teqtivity

Speaker A: Foreign. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Sauce Unbound. And today with me is Hiren. Welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hi, Anna. Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Sure, absolutely. You've got quite a story and, um, I can't wait to dig deeper, but maybe let's start with your background, how you started.

Speaker B: So I'm the founder and CEO of Techtivity, an IT asset management platform. Started the company around eight, nine years ago, and originally as a smart locker system similar to like an Amazon locker. And over time, we pivoted into what we currently have now, which is a SaaS software that helps enterprises, small business, all the way to enterprise, manage their IT assets, their hardware, their laptops, phones, tablets, anything that they have that's IT related. We come in and help manage that inventory.

Speaker A: Why this problem?

Speaker B: If we go back, take a step back to the original idea of the smart locker. That started from an issue that we saw from another company that I'm involved with, where engineers need mobile phones just for testing. They're developing apps, um, they're testing out on bugs that they're seeing or even just server load testing. So a lot of times these engineers need to grab a phone from it. They take it, they loan it out, give them back to it. Might not, might end up sitting in a desk somewhere. So the idea was to provide a smart locker where the engineer can loan out the phone themselves and then from there they get notified to return it. When that loaded, comes back up, they can just drop a bag off into the locker. That was the original concept. Yeah. Just saving time for everybody and making things more efficient and helping to track the actual inventory.

Speaker A: Okay, all right. The. All the stories that I had here on the podcast where a founder would go from, um, one type of business to SaaS every time they would tell me. But SaaS basically prints money 247 as

Speaker B: we were building out the locker. We also have a backend system that helps the IT team manage who's taking what when things need to be returned. And what we quickly realized was the problem wasn't the actual picking up and dropping off the item. It was who has what, where is it, and what are people doing with it. The software, uh, side of things helped to manage and answer those questions. And as we were marketing the locker, we're adding more features to the software. Just became a trend to where more people wanted the software and no features on the software. So we pivoted to a point where the software became our primary product and the hardware was our secondary. We still have the locker, but it's a secondary, ordinary product. It's an add on to what we have as the software.

Speaker A: Okay, sounds great. You guys are bootstrapped. And thank God you're not AI I guess because now everyone says you cannot survive as an AI company without VC money. But you chose, uh, Bootstrap Journey. So why that how you're doing it? And is it possible now to compete without this back end?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I believe it's possible to compete. I mean we're doing it. It chose to stay the bootstrap route for, you know, three reasons. Just flex, being able to pivot, make changes quickly and efficiently without having to have VCs or people that we also have to answer to on the other side of things. When I first started the company, the idea was to grow slowly, listen to our customers in terms of what they want, what they need, and provide a great product with really good customer support. The intention of growing slowly was to make sure that we could build on those two foundations of our products and support. And luckily we've been profitable. So not having to go out for additional funding or anything like that, it's just not been needed for us. And staying bootstrapped, it's been good, it's been positive for us. And I would say we're still able to compete with our larger competitors that are funded and a lot bigger than us. But for us, uh, our goal isn't to be the biggest company in our space. We want to be the best company for our customers.

Speaker A: Makes great sense. And to your point about customer support, as far as I know you're personally on slack with your customers and it sounds amazing. I mean, who doesn't want to talk to the founder, right? It feels great. It built this great trust in what you're doing. But is it sustainable?

Speaker B: Early on it was a necessity. I was really close to the support side of things. Implementation support, answering questions, things of that nature. But as we grew, as we brought more people on, I'm still in the channel. It's more to chat with customers here and there where I need to. And I don't really go in there to just like answer support questions or create tickets, just being there to listen. And I think a lot of our customers like that opportunity and it ties deeply in with our goal of providing really good support and customer support service to everybody we work with.

Speaker A: A bit more earlier stage founders who might be listening. When do you think this founder led support should stop? Just a, you know, hardcore?

Speaker B: Um, I think once you start drowning in questions and take it and as your Team starts being built. One thing I like to also do is show our team that we all care for our customers and what we're doing. So if I lead that by example, then the rest of the team will also follow. That's a high standard. So I think as a founder, I would say, you know, once you get to a point where you can bring on people to help customer support, that's what it's time to kind of take, take a step back and just be there to listen and peek in when you need to, but not be the day to day support agent with the customer.

Speaker A: I wonder, to be honest, which part of the business is hardware solve brings more questions.

Speaker B: It's more the software.

Speaker A: Okay. I think before we recorded we had a conversation about the fact that you guys, yeah, you listen to the customers and it ends up being a bit more work on what I feel for you because you'd basically give each customer, well, maybe not each customer, right, but some customers, bit of a different version of software. So you really try to customize the experience for your customers. How does it work? And again, is it sustainable? How difficult is it for you guys to just run all that?

Speaker B: So the idea of that came from it's not just it, but every department and every enterprise, they work a little differently. So with it, you'll never have the same philosophies from one company to another. We basically built a product that has all of the base features that any company would need to manage their assets, but then also give them the opportunity to request different workflows, customizations that will fit their needs. Instead of them trying to adapt to what we provide, we can adapt to what they need and make sure that they're running efficiently, their team's running efficiently, and all of their hardware is managed and tracked accordingly.

Speaker A: Do you work the same way? Because I'm just trying to wrap my head around how much work this could potentially be. How do you decide, okay, which customer actually gets that new feature or whatever they're requesting? What is the kind of prioritization roadmap?

Speaker B: Honestly, everybody has been getting features. We work very quickly and efficiently. We have a great engineering team on the back end that if a customer requested an integration today, we can probably get it done in the next two weeks. We don't have this long request list like most SaaS companies do that where things don't even get done. Our customers can request something. We try to get it done as quickly as possible and keep them happy. That's the biggest thing, right? For us, it's always the customer support. Another part of it is a lot of our competitors can't do what we do in terms of it. We can move quickly. We can give our customers what they need. Our competitors are stuck with this one platform. They charge for integration, they charge for certain features. For us, everything is open, it's available. We don't go back and penny pinch or add markups for specific requests or features.

Speaker A: Interesting, because I noticed this pattern a little bit. So whenever I have a conversation with a founder, with a tech founder especially, they're very happy to listen to the customers. And not to say that it's not important to talk to customers, but then whenever I have a person that is building, uh, something in customer success or customer support, they're like, yeah, okay, it's important. But bear in mind, your customers don't know anything. You know everything. And you need to show them where you're going, how you're working. Again, from the point of view of, uh, this is our roadmap and this is what you're requesting, how to maintain that balance.

Speaker B: We have separate teams on our engineering side that focus purely on, uh, improving, um, our products. So we do communicate with our customers. Hey, we have these new features coming out soon, new integrations, new product ideas. And then we have our other side of the team, which is focused on, um, the customer does request something, and sometimes that leads back into our main product. It could be a report or a feature that customer asks us for, and we feel like, you know, that's a really great idea. Let's add it to our base product. And those requests that we've been seeing come in have helped us improve, improve our product in a general fashion as well. So it works both ways, and it's been great for us.

Speaker A: Perfect. All right, well, I obviously want to ask you about your growth, because I think we discussed that word of mouth is now your main kind of lever. But it sounds amazing. Hey, we grow with the word of mouth. And then people are, uh, okay, do I ask, how does it work? Like, how do you put the words in the mouth? So how do you do that? How have you started this flywheel? And what does it mean for you?

Speaker B: It goes back to our original philosophy of, um, great product and great support, which has led to having happy customers. We haven't even had to go out and ask customers for referrals. They're referring us to other companies that are looking for a solution. One thing we know, especially in Silicon Valley, is that a lot of IT people, they all know each other, as you know, the big network of people. So when they are looking for new tools, especially in the IT space, they're asking their peers about what they're using. We've had great success with getting referrals that way. And also people who have moved jobs. An IT director in one company. We've actually got one customer who's worked in three different places and has used our products in all three. That's been great for us as well. So, yeah, it just goes back to the support and the product. If those two are working really well together, there is no reason for a customer to advocate for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. What do you still do for marketing? Um, or sales?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we do that. We get a lot of prospects coming in through our SEO. We work heavily on our SEO content and then also our pr. So we have a PR person that, uh, try to get media placements for us and we've had some success in that area as well. Little bit of AdWords, some LinkedIn ads reactive on our LinkedIn page. We are running some ads on there. But mainly our SEO has been the biggest driver, especially in the last six months.

Speaker A: Okay, that's interesting that you're saying this just to establish this new reality. Right. So is it SEO or is it A O? Because when you said pr, I've heard a lot of founders, and especially founders of AI tools that give you some visibility of how you perform in AI search engines. They say PR is gold for this. So I wonder how your initial investment in SEO and now investment in PR play together.

Speaker B: I would say if we go inbound, it's through SEO. Yeah, we definitely see some traffic coming in through the AI tools and through the aeo, um, work that we're doing. But it seems like right now I would say like 90% of our traffic is still through the SEO and the organic. If we're looking at just those two channels.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've been looking at it because, yes, we use all kinds of AI visibility trackers. It's fun to see the graphics fluctuate. I don't want to claim that I understand what it means, to be honest, because I don't do much work about our website with. We don't post too many articles this year, but, you know, it does change. But at the same time, I look at our own dashboard that we generate with actually one of the companies from the portfolio dash this. And it always tells me that roughly 95, 96% of people are coming to Southgroup via SEO, not AI search engines, which is fascinating because it's such a, uh, Huge hype. Were you guys changing anything in your SEO to still get these 5 to 10% coming from AI engines?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's more about the topics that we're writing about and how we're structuring the content, the headlines, even the title of the topic. What would somebody be searching for or researching within? Let's say chatgpt about it, asset management, or maybe going to type in a question or what are the best tools, things of that nature. So we kind of tailor our content to match what a person might have in their intentions when they come to searching and chatting with these bots, the AI tools. So that's what we're kind of looking at. And as we're adding more content, we are seeing the traffic come in, but it is, like I said, smaller amount than what we're expecting in the beginning. Yeah.

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Speaker B: We have zero outbound. Yeah, it's all inbound and referral. We're not doing any cold calling, no emails, nothing really at the moment.

Speaker A: But yeah, another thing that I want to touch a little bit quickly because I think you covered it before and it's security, because you know it very well that small companies always postpone security and compliance questions and, uh, until something happens. And unfortunately, it happened to you guys. So if maybe you could walk us, uh, through a little bit of that story and tell the founders that are listening how to avoid them.

Speaker B: We did have an incident. I would say it's been four years now. We had a threat actor come in and breach one of our backup servers. So they, you know, were able to get some data and. Which was unfortunate. It was leaked. The biggest lesson out of this was, like you mentioned, a lot of founders think they might be too small to be a target, which is not the case. I mean, we're a very small company in terms of the space that we're in. And you know we were targeted. These threat actors, they're hunting for any hole that they could find, really big or small. And it could be that the smaller ones are sometimes easier to get into. Maybe they're pulling out less data or affecting less customers. Customers. But at the end of the day, they're still able to catch you in a hole somewhere. So I personally would recommend, uh, investing in security. All having the right tools, systems in place, processes to make sure that you are secure in your security posture.

Speaker A: What would be the first steps to

Speaker B: really go through but setting up, um, an infosec plan, making sure that you have all of the right processes and tools that's related to your servers, your computers, even training your employees. It's a lot of things I think that would be like your first step really, to get things going and moving in terms of being stronger in your security.

Speaker A: Yeah. As an acquirer, we recommend doing some kind of due diligence on your own company. M like maybe every six months, every year. And tech due diligence is a big part. As far as I talk to founders, it's one of the most feared thing during the acquisition process. We actually have a piece about that. But yeah, just going through everything you have and everything you don't, I think would help so much already. Just understand where those little poles are where you can be reached. Yeah. Okay. Something else I wanted to talk to you about is culture. I think, uh, you told me last time we talked that basically your goal is to make sure the people who work for you are happy when they start the day, when they finish the day. And it's a beautiful goal. And I think every founder wants that. How do you implement it? How does it look like inside? And how do you measure success?

Speaker B: There's a few things that we do, like we trust our team members, whether they're engineers or they were working in growth or marketing. Trust them to do what they're doing. I don't like to micromanage or be over somebody's back about what they're working on. Making sure communication is going well with all team members, whether it's something small, something big, just being available and then just engaging with the team. If they're going through the motions or getting bored or if we see like a lot of bugs coming up, we might feel that there is an issue just making sure that, know, staying on top of things, but also at the same time giving people a little bit more freedom to work in their manner based on their personalities and without them getting burned out.

Speaker A: How big is the team we are

Speaker B: a team of, um, 25.

Speaker A: Okay, great. And what is the. Roughly the department sizes? Like how many are engineers?

Speaker B: Engineers. Um, we have 20 engineers.

Speaker A: Okay. All right. So it's heavily.

Speaker B: Heavily engineer focused.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Also, are you guys all remote?

Speaker B: Everybody's remote. Yeah.

Speaker A: All. Ah, right. Okay. Again, a question about culture because, yeah, I've talked to so many founders who preach remote and we're also fully remote. And it's amazing. Absolutely love it. Having an opportunity to travel and work and see places and no one really cares like where you are. Right. And what hours you work, if you work. And it works. But at the same time it does get lonely. Right. And the more you grow, the more I feel like actual, uh, control. It's counterintuitive. Right. But the more control you need to give this remote setup. How to make sure everyone thrives in remote without it being, you know, we're remote. You can get all the corporate bullshit right after rolling out of bed and without a commute.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, couple of things. So our engineering team, they're all based in India. Even though they're all remote, they're all in the same city. Every month we'll have a week where they work together because they love working together. They'll go to an office that we work with, that they can go there and work as a team. That helps with the culture. They've all become really good friends. Even though three weeks out of the month they're all at home working alone. And then even just on a day to day basis, I mean, we're all on slack, we're all chatting with each other, we're trying to make it, uh, make the culture positive for everybody. Right. So that way you're not getting bored, you're not going through these motions of loneliness and you'll feel positive at the end of the day.

Speaker A: So, yeah, that probably helps. I mean, being, being a week together with a team probably strengthens the bond. How do you measure success? Do you have, I don't know, pulse surveys, anything like this?

Speaker B: Um, we've done a survey once. Honestly, like some of our manager level folks communicate with them on a daily basis. If there is an issue or something, you know, somebody's having a problem, they'll bring it up with me, we'll discuss it and take whatever actions we need to. But I feel like since we work in a culture of, uh, trusting the people that the team and then trusting us, that kind of helps with making sure everybody's, you know, doing what they're doing. They're feeling Engaged and we're not having any kind of like negative experiences. That's where gauge the success of the team and how they're feeling.

Speaker A: Yeah, perfect. Kind of making a full circle back into the fact that you guys are bootstrapped. How do you in a way balance the fact that you're giving people autonomy so they can maybe experiment and do something that they feel is important for the company, but at the same time not maybe having huge budgets for those experiments. So how do you balance that? Okay, somebody wants to do this. We're not sure it's going to pay off because we're bootstrapped. How does it work?

Speaker B: We've done this a lot with our marketing and sales with going. Whether it's trying to do outbound or some events or sponsoring certain things. We kind of work in a way where just set a clear goal, clear intentions, priorities of what we're looking to do. And then from there we'll make these small bets and have fast learnings versus throwing a bunch of money at something and then trying to make it work. If it doesn't work early on, then we can always pivot, we can always change directions. We try to learn quickly wherever we can.

Speaker A: Probably AI helps now.

Speaker B: It does for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah. You want to build something? Okay, 15 minutes and you're ready and basically free. Yeah, I can totally feel that as a marketer, it's been fascinating. I just have a couple more questions for you. You seem super happy and the way you were describing the, and how you guys work, the culture, it sounds like obviously you're doing something right. What do you think has been so far your biggest win and the biggest failure and can be for a company but. Or for you personally?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say the biggest win would be just pivoting into what we have now from the early product idea and building a product that our customers are advocating for. It just shows validation that we're in the right direction in the industry that we're in. And that's, I would say, the thing that I'm most proud of, especially with the team that we have helping to build the company and the products. Another win, I would say that comes on the back of that is early on with one of our enterprise customers, we saved them just over $900,000 just from a couple of reports that we built related to their mobile phone usage. So that's another example of how we could come in and help a company not just their inventory, but also their spend and their costs and, and things of that nature. So that sounds great.

Speaker A: What about failure.

Speaker B: Failure. Um, I mean, the, the breach, I would say it was a failure for us on that part. But also I think early on, I think we spent too much time on the locker and trying to push that in a specific direction. If I look back at it, maybe we spent too much money and time in that before we did the pivot. Maybe we could have pivoted earlier. So I would say that maybe one of the smaller failures in terms of the company.

Speaker A: All right. I wonder, just going back to the breach and obviously you could come out of it stronger. You know what they say, people remember. And it's, uh, way more difficult, I think, to get back and to rebuild that trust. What were your steps like? How were you able to go back out there and say, okay, it's all taken care of and we're now better?

Speaker B: Yeah. We worked with forensics team to make sure that we were secure. And they provided a report for all of our current customers, all of our prospects, and there are even some customers prospects now that still ask about it. So there's a lot of detail and reports that we can provide. We're also sought to type, to audit it on an annual basis, which helps with our trust factor. So there's this things that we put in place that have kind of built up that trust again with our customers and future prospects.

Speaker A: Okay. Amazing. The last question is always about a hack. Anything that works for you or for the team that helps helps you run it, or something that works for the product.

Speaker B: My hack would be to just stay close to deployments and implementations early on. That'll kind of give you early feedback from your customers, direct feedback on the product, how things are going, support, and that'll help you kind of build up the company and, uh, what you're doing to get to it, to the next level.

Speaker A: All right, that's great. That's a very technical one. But I guess the early stages. Yeah, you have to really focus on how your product does what it's supposed to do. Yeah. We had a conversation yesterday with a colleague and he was talking about how customers don't really want the shiny thing because they were working on redesigning the tool. And, um, he realized that eventually the people that they're working with, their audience, they're all very technical and they just want this thing to work. So making it shinier. It's only for the team to feel better about themselves. Right. So it's not necessary for the customer. So it's such a fine balance on, um, how to provide good value but also feel good about what you're doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, most definitely.

Speaker A: All right, well, thank you so much hiring. It's been great talking to you. I think there are so many great learnings in this conversation. So thank you for sharing.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Hope to do it again.

Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Thank you. And, um, take care.

Speaker B: Yeah, you too.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. SaaS Unbound is brought to you by SaaS Group. We're a long term home for a great B2B SaaS. We buy, keep the team and brand DNA and help with the boring stuff like hiring and finance, so founders can truly focus on building great products. If you're a founder who'd like to be featured or explore an acquisition, reach out through the form on our website or email me at. Uh, Anna at SaaS Group.