How a Bug Skyrocketed Conversions & Led to 3 Million ARR – Cris Villar @Landbot

Todd Chambers
Todd Chambers here, hello!

Welcome to another episode of the Masters of SaaS podcast brought to you by Upraw Media, an agency that works exclusively with SaaS companies. We do PPC, Conversion Rate Optimization, measurement, messaging... A bunch of stuff to help SaaS companies scale and grow. On the podcast we speak with the top 1% in SaaS - smart people in the trenches building badass SaaS companies.

In this episode I speak with Cris Villar, Co-Founder and VP of Customer Success at Landbot, a product that transforms your website into a conversational experience to increase engagement and conversion rates. Landbot has grown to 54 people and more than 3 million ARR. We discuss the origin story of Landbot and how the product originated from bug, how they leveraged free platforms like Product Hunt multiple times to accelerate growth, the importance of positioning and how to approach it, mistakes made with outbound sales and why supporting is the new selling, and why Landbot are dedicating 70% of their resources in 2021 on activation - and why you probably should be too. It was a really fun conversation with Cris, so hope you guys enjoy - let's do it!

Hey Cris, welcome to the show.

Cris Villar
Nice to be here, Todd!

Todd Chambers
The pleasure is all mine. Yeah, so, let's start off with a basic introduction. Who is Cris?

Cris Villar
So, I'm one of the Co-Founders of Landbot and I'm currently also leading the Customer Success team.

Todd Chambers
Cool. So maybe you can tell us, for people that don't know, what is Landbot? Which customers are you serving? And anything you can help us understand?

Cris Villar
Yeah, yeah. So Landbot is a no code chatbot builder for lead generation, for companies that are trying to automate some of their lead generation scoring qualification and conversion processes and they want to do it fast, with no code or no technical resources needed. They can just create a Landbot and then deploy it on their website, instant messaging channels, etc. So it's really leaned towards marketing and product teams that are looking for a better conversion rate, or a better qualification on your leads that get on to the sales team. So it's all about that top of the funnel, where you capture leads, you qualify them, all automated. Yeah, cool.

Todd Chambers
And maybe you can just share for additional context the size of the company, revenue... Yeah, anything you're comfortable with.

Cris Villar
Yeah, absolutely. So we are 50ish right now, I think around 53 or 54. Big hiring plans for 2021. Currently, our revenue is a bit more than 3M. Yeah. And we got big plans, again, for for 2021. We basically need to double our headcount and our revenue, which is... Easy peasy!

Todd Chambers
If I had a penny for every time I heard that!

Cris Villar
Yeah, I mean, we're growing at a very steady but interesting rate, month after month. I think we got around 2,500 customers, more or less - paying customers, we got thousands of free tier users, we really believe in the power of premium models and how tools can really add value, even if you don't pay for them. Yeah, that's basically where we are.

Todd Chambers
You're based in Barcelona, right?

Cris Villar
We're based in Barcelona, but we got people working from different locations within Spain. Now we got some extra people working from Portugal, Taiwan from other countries, but I would say plus 90% of our team is in Spain, probably around 60% of them in Barcelona. But, right now, most of them are working on a remote schedule.

Todd Chambers
Yeah, I'm interested to dig in about how you manage the remote teams, just out of interest. I was thinking - why did you call the company Landbot?

Cris Villar
It's pretty pretty obvious if you think about it. So Landbot is all about conversions, it's all about lead generation. Originally, Landbot was a conversational website. So if you mix "landing" from landing page and "chatbot", you get Landbot. It works, it's intuitive, and yeah, we just went ahead with it.

Todd Chambers
Nice! And, originally (we were just talking about this before we started recording) there were five Co-Founders in the company. The company is almost five years old, approximately right?

Cris Villar
It's actually almost six years old, yeah.

Todd Chambers
And there were there were five of you originally, which is interesting in and of itself, like, five Co-Founders! I guess I'm interested to understand; how did the company start? Like what is the origin story of Landbot?

Cris Villar
For the origin story it's not actually Landbot.

Landbot was an experiment we launched in 2017. But originally we started out with company called Yexir (I mean, the product itself, everything is called Yexir here), and it was a B2C model. So, not a SaaS, not a PLG, nothing related to that. It was a B2C model where you had a phone number you could ask anything to, so it was a WhatsApp personal concierge. Yeah, it was just a phone number. You could ask for dinner, a gift travel tickets, whatever. Yeah, that was the very beginning.

So, back in 2015, there was this trend with conversational commerce. So, here in Europe, everybody was looking at China. And really, you know, being amazed about how evolved they were in terms of instant messaging, how WeChat was no longer an instant messaging channel but a platform, and we really believed back then that WhatsApp was going to follow the exact same path, and that everything was going to become way more conversational. So, you would start interacting with not only contacts, like friends and family, but also companies, all within WhatsApp. And that was like the first, you know, the thing we started to work on. And there were some similar models back in the day. So, there were some some big companies in the conversational commerce space. Our main differentiator was that we were delivering the service through WhatsApp. WhatsApp is huge in the Spanish market. That was our first and only market for the Yexir product, to be honest.

So, we had our CEO, Jiaqi Pan, who is Chinese, he was really into these conversational commerce trends, he used WeChat every single day, and he knew the potential of instant messaging. And we can all remember I mean, that graph, I don't really know, what's the source, but I think it's Business Insider, where you see that instant messaging is taken over social messaging. And I think at that exact point, I think it was like 2014, or something like that, many companies started realising how important instant messaging could become. And yeah, we thought that it would be a great way to start. "Let's connect people with companies as the middleman, and let's provide services products and add value to users through messaging and through WhatsApp, in this case.

Todd Chambers
So, just so I understand that product, then. So, you said you were kind of the middleman between people interacting using WhatsApp, but, like, just explain you said, "using a phone number".... Can you explain exactly what the service did?

Cris Villar
We had a landing page, and we would have a waitlist you could register on, and you would put your phone number and we would be inviting more and more users every week. So, when we invited you, we were basically a shared contact you could send messages to. So, it's just the WhatsApp conversation, "you're speaking with Dex here", and you start asking for things, like, we explain how the service works, you could order pretty much anything as long as it was legal! The most recurring orders were related to travel and food. So food delivery, so, we can think of Yexir as, again, yeah, that middleman, because instead of interacting with Amazon's interface, or global or delivery, we were basically in the middle. You don't really need to instal any app, you just get a phone number. So, it's super convenient. We remember your orders, you can say, "hey, remember that thing I order back in...?". You know, "dude, I want to repeat that", and we got your payment information. So, it's super flexible. It's super convenient for the end user. And yeah, that's basically how it works. Phone number, a lot of people behind that phone number, and you could ask anything to it and have it delivered to your door.

Todd Chambers
How did you end up with five Co-Founders? Was this just... I don't know. Did you work with these people before? Did you find them? And you found that they had really complementary skills? Like, how did that come about?

Cris Villar
Yeah, so, four out of the five original Co-Founders were part of Lanzadera, which is an acceleration programme from Valencia. I was the second batch in 2014. So, back in that year, all of us had their own companies. I was CEO of my own company, Jiaqi was the CEO of Play4Test and Fer, our Director of Product, and Tony, who back then was our Director of Technology, they were also in the same project.

So, in 2015, we had all shut down our companies and knew that it was a fit, definitely. And we just needed that extra marketing side of things. And that's when we found Fern, was our CMO. Yeah, that's how you make that big cake, right? Five Co-Founders, we got technology, we got executive leadership, which is key... I was more towards operations wit that B2C model, and then Product Marketing. So, we got everything, like, technology, product, marketing, executive and operations. It sounds like a lot, especially given that most of the time our team was, like, seven people and five Co-Founders! But still, I think each one of us played a huge role in developing the product - or the product we didn't even know we were going to develop. And we we started out with Yexir, but then it turned out to be super convenient to have all these different sides of the model covered.

Todd Chambers
So, you actually went into the accelerator all with your own businesses. Where did that original idea come from, and did you all close down your businesses just to go all in on this or...?

Cris Villar
It varied from from Co-Founder to Co-Founder. So, in my personal case, we shut down the company in early 2015. I think Jiaqi approximately at the same same time, the first quarter of 2015. So, you know, after a year or a couple of years with our previous companies, they all ended up, you know, well, this is not working out. And then we decided to just finalise with those projects. So, originally, the original group that started with this whole idea was actually Jiaqi and Fern. So, they were always our CEO and our CMO. And then they just started, yeah, I mean, pinging people they knew were available. They had somewhat interesting skills to join a team, and it just felt natural. And it just felt natural to you, know, reunite these five people to become Co-Founders in those early days.

Todd Chambers
Did you have did you put your own cash in? Did you just bootstrap it? Like, how were you... How were you paying your bills and getting by?

Cris Villar
So, for Yexir, we started in another incubator. which is Demium start-ups. Back in the day, they were only in Valencia, but I believe they are in more than 8 or 10 cities now. And we were super lucky, to be honest. Because with all this conversational commerce trend, we found one investor that was super interested in this trends, and he had fresh money from an exit. And he was like, "yeah, I mean, this Chinese guy, I mean, he needs to do great stuff in the conversation commerce space", and he believed in it. So, he believed in us as well.

So we raised our first serious... Even before the company was founded. So, we had to delay actually, the funding round to the company, I mean, to setting up the company. And then the thing, it took us probably, eight weeks since we started out with the project to get the the first funding round, if you want to call it like that. It was just a single person ticket. And it was around 50,000. So, yeah, 50,000, and we were like 23 years old back in the day. So that was a lot of money for us! And we're super lucky, to be honest, you know, every time we hear these stories about receiving this early funding... In our case, the key was finding that person who really relates to your business model, that really thinks it would be useful, for himself, in this case. And that, you know, will bet on you. I mean, we were, again, super lucky. I think it's not the most common stuff. We had no metrics we had no - well, we had some traction. We had some orders, but it was nothing big. He just believed in us. And he was like, "yes, let's let's try to make this work".

Todd Chambers
Seems like he made a good bet, it looks like it paid off!

Cris Villar
I believe it did, yeah.

Todd Chambers
So, you started off with this kind of conversational WhatsApp phone product. How did it go - kind of, what happened in those early days?

Cris Villar
Yeah, we ran this service for six to eight months, approximately. We handled over 4,000 orders or something like that, we made it to have a team of, I think it was 14 agents answering these conversations through the platform. And yeah, after six months, we had to make this top decision.

So, the business model is beautiful - conversational commerce, you get everything in your fingertips, you can order anything through WhatsApp, and it's beautiful. But the reality is that if we wanted to go ahead with that model, we needed to make two decisions; whether we started scaling the team, getting more and more agents (these other competitors I told you about they were already in the hundreds of agents and we were only like one, two, three, four), or we start adding a an artificial intelligence layer that would help us automate as much of the process as we could. The technology was not there for the artificial intelligence part, and the money was not there for the hiring part. And it turns out we had built a platform for ourselves to handle all these orders through instant messaging. And we knew that there were a lot of companies interested in providing these sort of services for their customers using WhatsApp. So, yeah, we had to make the decision whether we keep betting on this model, which means scaling the team or investing in having technology, or we pilot and we start selling the software.

So we become a SaaS company, we know nothing about subscription based models, we had to learn me what MRR means and, and everything... But it made sense, because there was a huge zone for advantage, which was the WhatsApp integration back at the time, when the API was not even available for the for the company. So, it was really, really, really interesting, and a lot of companies were reaching out, like, "hey, I really want this technology". So, it was a no-brainer for us.

So, let's bet on these model, it was super risky, because you need to, I mean, you had already people that supported your regional project, then, in the very, very early days. And you might have to explain yourself on why after all these six months you pivot from a B2C to B2B model, it's a huge change. But the core was there. I mean, it's still instant messaging, it's still conversational something. And I think we've always been true to that, to that principle, we think the world can definitely be more conversational. And it was a natural step to go from Yexir to the next adventure, which was Helloumi - that was the name of the SaaS company.

What was, like, the main one or two reasons why you decided like, "yeah, let's go all in on this B2B subscription"?

Number one, I have to say, was the product. So, we had such a great product, again, the interest from companies on the WhatsApp integrations was skyrocketing. You could say we could take any keyword search engine and you would notice that there was something huge happening there. And yeah, number two, I think it has to do with predictability. We were really concerned about how we were not really in control of the demand we could generate with Yexir. And we've seen the SaaS model as something way more predictable, which makes it way more attractive to investors. But, yeah, I would say that the advantage of this technology we had and the predictability of the model we could better control. But again, we had no idea what running a SaaS was.

Todd Chambers
it's really interesting, isn't it? Because building a SaaS companies is really, really hard, right? I mean, there's just a graveyard full of software companies... I guess I'm interested to understand how you got to product market fit. I mean, you're not even a year in, and you've already pivoted, it seems like a really, really big decision. And today you're over 3M ARR. So, kind of, what did you guys do next? You made this decision, like, okay, we didn't really know anything about, you know, B2B software and subscription, like, what was even the next step? Was it to, like, to build something and to build a website?

Cris Villar
Yeah, so we, basically, we had to build a website, we had to build the product page, the pricing page, like, all these basics for any SaaS product. So I think that, you know, in the early days, we had a handful of leads that we knew beforehand, they were interested in the technology. And that was a very initial traction. So I would say three, four companies approached us and we were like, "hey, we wanted to, we want to test this technology, would you offer it to us". I think we would even have to create our own login access, it was not really automated, because, you know, we tend to underestimate how complex it is to have something that's truly self-service. And then you just get new customers, I mean, to get from zero to there, it's super complex.

So, at the beginning, it was all about us creating the login accounts, handling payments through Stripe, like directly through Stripe, no really, pricing, or subscription engine. Yeah, so, there were these initial four or five customers really interested in the integration, since it was really powerful. And again, since not many providers would offer it, we've managed to charge a significant amount for that. So, that started adding to our recurring revenue. So, on one hand, it's about building everything around the product, especially the website, the pricing page, the product page, social media, so everybody can, you know, look for help me and understand what we do. And then getting these first sets of customers, which most of them came from word of mouth or direct contact. And then we would, you know, we had very creative ways of finding new customers. Because it was so related to WhatsApp that you could just go to Google Images, and look for "WhatsApp me", for example, and you will find banners from websites of companies using WhatsApp, like, the WhatsApp application, to talk to their customers. We would reach out and say, "hey, you want to have multi-agent, you want to have metrics, you want to have this and that", and they would just, you know, keep signing in. And that was the early days. So, first customers from direct contacts, and then just some creative outbound strategies.

Todd Chambers
Okay, so, you tried a bunch of different things to get traction in the beginning, like, you said, you have to hustle, right? You have to try these creative ways to to get new customers. But was there, in those early days, one or two moves that you can remember, like Product Hunt, or you know, any of these different channels? Was there, like, one or two things that you know, really cranked the dial and you saw, like, a big increase in new customers?

Cris Villar
So, yeah, we we had to wait until the next year. 2015 we started out with Yexir, early 2016, we pivoted to the SaaS business model. And it wasn't until 2017 when we release Landbot. So, I would say that, since we didn't pivot to B2B SaaS model until 2017, we never really made it to, you know, find the product market fit. Our traction was there, but it was nothing spectacular. We were not growing... Probably at a double digit, but we're talking about three figures ARR, you know. I think it was it was a really tough a year and a half, there were a lot of things surrounding the WhatsApp integration and technology that were making it super hard for us to launch. I think we can take it back to the launch of our own channel.

So, we started with Helloumi, and we had these Messenger and WhatsApp integrations, and we were super dependent on those. And I'm talking about WhatsApp waking up in the morning and saying, "hey, I'm going to ban a thousand numbers today". And then all of our customers would get banned because the integration was not official, there was no API. And same for Facebook Messenger, we can all remember that summer - I think, I don't know if it was 2016 or 2017 - that they didn't allow users to create more chatbots. Then they allowed them to create chatbots again... There was a lot of uncertainty. We had Messenger, we had WhatsApp, we have no control over those. So we were like, hey, let's create something ours. Let's create something unique, something we have full control over. Let's create a live chat! And yeah, that's how it all started. So, we created a live chat. It was nothing special. Nothing different from other live chats you could find there - there were, like, hundreds of competitors. And while it was great having our own product, the reality was that again, no differentiation means you're dead. Like, they start comparing you to Intercom to drive to these huge players in the market. It's just super difficult for you to justify your value proposition against those. You're multi-channel, whatever, but at the end of the day, you're super premature to compete with these giants. So we kept thinking about it.

And here comes the interesting story of the origin of Landbot. So, it was 2017, I think, it was around May, so probably, like, four years ago, and one day we woke up, we started getting support tickets from our customers complaining about their live tests not working properly. We went and checked it out, and, surprisingly, for some reason, the live chat which was embedded into their home page went full screen - but I'm not talking about a real full screen, it was just the iFrame that went full screen, which means that the website itself was blocked. So, visitors would have only the possibility to start a conversation with our live chat, so it was a huge problem that we had. Like, I mean, back in that time, we probably had 30 to 40 customers, not a huge number. But all of them were complaining, like, "hey, I installed your live chat and it's blocking my website, and customers can do nothing but startconversation". Well... We found out that the conversion rate skyrocketed at that time. I mean, I think it was a, probably, a four hour bug or something like that. So, we fix it quite quickly. But the reality was that if users don't have any other option rather than start a conversation with your live chat, obviously your conversion rate, if you are collecting data with that lifetime, is going to skyrocket.

And it might sound super obvious, like yeah, I mean, they can't do anything, they can't scroll down, they can just leave their contact details. But we started thinking, "hey, why don't we, you know, play around with the format of what a live chat is? Why does a live chat need to be that bubble you click on it, it opens on a third of the screen and you start a conversation while browsing, you're not really paying attention, like, full-focus, to any of the two. So, why don't we combine the best of the two worlds? Why don't we take this by as a learning experience like, hey, only the conversation is just the conversational experience, you land on a website, you don't see any menus, and the way to scroll is just a company talking to you - and, obviously, collecting data".

That's what lead generation is all about. And that's how Landbot was originally born - as a bug in our live chat that would skyrocket our conversion rate. And our customers, they were not really, you know, getting the big potential behind it, they were just angry, we fixed it and it was all okay. But, in our case, it was like, "hey, we went for a... I think we were converting 5%... And we went from a 5% to 27% a conversion rate. From 100 visits to our homepage, 27 of them were leaving their email, which was just mind blowing. And we were, like, if we can replicate this - maybe not a 5x in conversion rate, but a 2 x compared to your regular website for live tech. Yeah, that's how it all started. So let's create Landbot, a landing page with a chatbot, a conversational website you can only speak to and it's going to give you information, it's going to request the information from you... And we started working on the launch of this experiment.

Todd Chambers
I'm kind of interested to hear this story! So, how Landbot got from those early days to where you are now. And so, a failed experiment led you to see a huge increase in conversion. Like, "holy shit, we actually have something here". What did you do next?

Cris Villar
So, we started looking for some platforms where we could launch this experiment, this better product. We first found Bettalist, they're from Germany or the United States and they are a marketplace for a better product to get some early adopters and some beta testers. We also found Product Hunt, which is a super, super famous marketplace for new products, where big corps and also small side projects are released. So, we defined a plan. So, all right, we got this new concept we want to try out, we need people to try it out and give us feedback and hopefully gain some early traction. And so let's look for platforms where you can launch these products and get some exposure for free, obviously.

So, we started with Bettalist. I think Bettalist, I mean, the impact is way smaller than Product Hunt. I think we made it to get around 200 signups or something like that. But it was enough to set up a few calls and understand if they really were interested in building these conversational stuff. And so, probably like, a month later, we decided to go back to multiply by 10 that launch and go for Product Hunt.

We knew that they had like, I don't know, 15 million visitors per month. And exposure is huge. And we've seen other successful projects and products being launched there before. I mean, the whole company, I'm talking about 10 people probably, back in the day, we really focused on these. So, we need to take into account that the previous model was still running. So, we were Helloumi, we had these consistent messaging omni-channel platform, and, at the same time, we were preparing this big launch on Product Hunt. So, the same way we needed a website for our SaaS product, Helloumi, we needed a website, which was a conversation, obviously, for Landbot and we needed to explain some stuff to customers and create that initial signup flow and allow them to do some customization. And it was a huge challenge. It was completely new to us and, as you can imagine, like, a thousand things things to do. But we made it! We made it to the to the launch day. It was...

Todd Chambers
Sorry to interrupt, Cris, but, so, when you were going for this Product Hunt launch, was the idea, like, we need to try and make this thing self-onboarding, so people can sign up themselves, create accounts themselves, they can build it, they can embed it, that was the goal and you got that done?

Cris Villar
Yeah.

Todd Chambers
By the way, multiple people that have been on this podcast have also said that, back in the early days, they use Product Hunt to get some traction. But how does that work? You pay them, like, a commission for every sale and then is the deal that you have to give a huge discount? Is that how the product works?

Cris Villar
No, not really. So, you don't really need to pay anything to anyone to launch on Product Hunt. What you do need is the hunter, that's how they call the people that are allowed to upload these products to the marketplace. So you can become ahunter, but you need to follow some steps, like, have a certain score, dependent on the number of comments, likes, and how active you are within the community. So, they get different roles within Product Hunt. So, whether you're a hunter or you find one that's willing to upload your product, you talk to him or her and you scale.

So, in our case, our initial hunter, if I'm not wrong, was Chris Messina. Yeah - quite famous in the space. He's one of those super big names in the Product Hunt community - creator of the hashtag, like, super crazy profile. And we talked to him and we were like, "hey, Chris, we want to launch this product, you're a hunter, so, you're able to do so, would you like to do it for us". And all you have to do is prepare something they call a hunter's kit, which is just a couple of screenshots, the tagline, the logo, a description, and you're good to go! And you don't really need to launch any promotion, you don't need to pay anything to anyone. But it's true that most products on Product Hunt come with a promotion. I think in our case it was something like 50% off for six months, or something like that - something that would empower users to give it a try, because it's a great opportunity in the commercial side too! So that's how it works.

So, it's completely free to use, you just need to find the right hunter. If you don't have the permissions to upload products, you prepare the hunter's kit, you launch and you start getting traffic and getting visits. And the way it works is that people can upvote products. So, you see products and it's like, Facebook, with different likes for each product. And you can you can upvote the product so it creates a score and a scoreboard. You make it to the top three and you get a lot of exposure, because you get browser notifications for those that have it activated like "hey, Landbot was launched today, the no code conversational chat bot builder", and, well, you get it... It's important to be on top.

I have also heard a lot of stories from founders that talk about not being successful in Product Hunt, and I think it's a huge combination of factors. So, I mean, you can really, you can have a great product, you can prepare your hunter's kit, you can be ready for the launch with a great promotion, and maybe not have the impact you were looking for. Because I think it's important to be prepared in terms of product and hunter's kit. How are you selling your product? It's also how you take advantage of trends. And I think, in our case, that was key. So, we're talking about 2016. Chatbots were super hot, and if you combined chatbots with the website space, the world was not there yet... So he was more chatbots for Facebook Messenger, and all these tools. So, we combined this conversational user interface trend with this chatbot trend - all in the website, super customizable, not dependent, only third-party channel... And he just exploded. I think it was the right time, right moment. And we really crushed it, to be honest!

I was gonna say like, how did it go? Yeah. Did you make the top three or...

... Yeah, we made the top one. We made it the top one product of the day, we changed that to get the browser notifications, to get email newsletters, you know, nurturing that loop, and you keep receiving more and more and more visits to your product. And I think that within seven days, probably, like, 20,000 people talked to Landbot in our website. And we got the first hundreds of signups in those first couple of weeks. So, it was a huge success.

I mean, it was too big of a success for us, to be honest. I mean, you could pay for Landbot, but it was a shitty experience, and he was buggy... And you were not really sure where your money was going. But it was, I mean, the whole flow would work. But it was like super, super, super early and super alpha. But we made it, I think, at the right time, the right product.

You know, one thing that's important as well is, when you launch on Product Hunt, it's not like it ends there. So, we launched on Product Hunt and we kept working on the product that day, the next day, and the following one. So it's important to keep iterating that product, especially if you get in some early traction like we did, because otherwise you'll just lose a lot of power for that launch. And yeah, it went super, super great! And it really got us thinking, "wait, we got more sign-ups in Landbot than, you know, two years of our previous SaaS business model. So, it might make sense to give it, you know, full-focus.

Todd Chambers
The really cool thing as well as you get tones of users, right? So, like you said, you can iterate, you can learn what these people are doing, you can get more feedback, you can change the product. So, like, once you've got that injection of users into the product, were there some things that stood out, like, "okay, actually, yeah, we should change this, we should change that". Was there any fundamental learning from getting all those those customers in there?

Cris Villar
There were a lot of learnings. But you know, the product was so unfinished, that we had a clear set of priorities. So, we were obviously receiving inputs and feedback in terms of how to build an experience we could improve or things like that. But again, it was so early that we needed to allow customers to pay, we needed to allow customers to add these blocks, which is super, I mean, we only got three block types, and one is not working. So we need to fix that. And for example, when it comes to customization, the beginning, you could only change probably a couple of colours and the font. And we knew that it was super important for us to allow it to be super customizable. So, we did have a lot of, you know, feedback from users. But at the same time, we were really aware of where we need to to work on to become really self service, because that our main aim, and you mentioned it earlier. So, we really wanted to become self service. And that comes with a lot of sub processes, you need to nail down, from the sign-up login, payment process, the onboarding... We usually forget about, like, how these customers are going to start paying, and what are you going to get from those customers that turn in terms of information or feedback. So it's you know, all about building the process. And that was the main priority in the beginning, once everything was working, once a customer could sign up, log in, build a chatbot, have conversations... That was the right time to start iterating the product itself, adding more features and listening to users feedback.

Todd Chambers
The story so far, you had two big moments. One was obviously the original pivot. The second one was this Product Hunt, you got a bunch of users. And, when I look at Landbot today and, like, full transparency, people listening to this, Landbot is actually a client of ours - we run your PPC. So I actually understand the marketing, like, under the hood. And what's super cool about Landbot is you have tones of organic content, you rank really highly for a bunch of organic keywords. You also have, like, a community, you kind of, like, done all the right things. And that's kind of got you where you are today.

But was there another milestone after that which stands out as kind of, like, yeah, we also did this? And that also gave us another big spike, or was it just after that, you just, you know, double down on those priorities? You just said you started building content, like, yeah, what was next - if there was a standout moment? Or was it just incremental after that point?

Cris Villar
At that point, it was, I would say, it was pretty much incremental. So, probably the big the key moment was when our revenue from Landbot surpassed our revenue from the previous model. I think that was, I mean... You can have really great feedback, you can have great feelings, intuition, hunters, whatever you want to call it, but when you start making more money with that experiment that you weren't making with the previous business model, I mean, that's the best indicator you can have. Yeah. So it's not... nobody's gonna argue, "why are you changing from Helloumi to Landbot?" Because you're making more money, you're getting more traction. So, I think it was more of an incremental change, we started seeing how more and more customers would become an early adopters. And yeah, it was a super easy decision, at that time. I think it took us probably a couple of months or three to to have a bigger customer base for Landbot than we had for Helloumi.

And then there was this process of merging everything and make it all, you know, as a single piece as possible, explaining to the previous customers what Landbot was all about, why we would change the name from Helloumi, what our website was talking about this when he was originally talking about this, that's also important, you know, if you think about it. Now it's like, "hey, it was 20 customers", like, you don't really need to spend too much ever on, you know, explaining everything. But at that time, it's really every single customer, you have at least, like we did, name and surname, and you could call any of them and get feedback. So it was it was super important for us to make them understand why Landbot was launched, why we should double down on it, and how things are going to change from here onwards. So yeah, it's that incremental change.

Todd Chambers
One of the mistakes that I personally made (and I've seen many other companies do as well) is, like, not knowing where to focus and spreading yourself too thin. Because, back in those days, like you said, you had all these different priorities. You've got to build the product, you've got all these things that take up so much time and resources.

How, let's say, when the revenue surpassed, how did you approach growth, and how did you kind of choose where to double down? Or did you kind of do all sorts of different things, collect data, and then double down in certain areas, like, basically, how did you approach growth in those early days when you had such little resources? Because I have made the mistake of spreading myself too thin trying to do loads of different things and kind of doing all of them poorly. Like, did you guys make that same mistake? Or did you just kind of, like, find your growth channels early on...?

Cris Villar
I think we were lucky to find at least one growth channel early on, which was Product Hunt itself. During the next year, I believe we launched three times on Product Hunt. So every launch you could have a look at our signups graph, you know, for every launch, you would see that spike, and that would be enough for us to grow at a double digit rate. So, the way we saw it was, yeah, we want to go from, I think we were from three to 35, or something like that from 3K ARR to 35K ARR. And to get there in, let's say, eight months, we need to grow at these rates. And to grow these rate with the current conversion rate, we need this amount of users, and we don't really have money to pay for those users in terms of paid acquisition or things like that. So, we found these channel, Product Hunt, that was super successful in the first launch. So, let's just try to replicate it. Let's keep adding more and more features to the product and justify that next slot. And let's get more users, more signups, more customers. And let's repeat as long as you can, you know, use a channel like Product Hunt. And I think it's it's clever to keep using it. And I was that was our case.

So, we combined those those launches with some media exposure we got from, you know, we had some context from our previous projects, like Helloumi. And they would want to cover this new shift to a conversational website because it was very cool. I mean, it was it was noticeable, it was it was interesting for readers. So, if we combine that Product Hunt exposure with these media - completely free efforts we made - that was enough. I mean, we had enough signups to keep us alive, to keep us growing and eventually raised our preset series in 2018. So, it just it felt natural, just reverse engineering. "Where do you want to be in six, eight months from now? How much do you need to grow?". And you just start building that funnel, like, how many people I need on top, is Product Hunt going to be enough? If it's enough, just focus on that. I need maybe some media, let's focus on media. If it wouldn't have been enough, we would have probably explored like paid acquisition way earlier or things like that. But it wasn't really necessary.

Todd Chambers
I didn't know you guys had done three separate Product Hunt launches, which is super smart, because, I mean, it doesn't cost anything like you said. And especially because you had such big increases in new customers as well. So, yeah, anybody who wants to gain traction as a SaaS company Product Hunt seems to be a good choice.

But I guess, like you said, you have to be kind of in the right moment, right? Like, you said the conversational chatbots were like, yeah, hot at that time, which kind of leads nicely onto another question about positioning. Positioning is super important, right, like, in the SaaS space? I mean, yeah, it's exploding, right? There are certainly, you know, chatbots, there are so many different chatbot providers, how do you think about positioning, you know, today? And, you know, how are you approaching, you know, Landbot's unique position in the market?

Cris Villar
Yeah, positioning, it's a huge topic. Yeah. Like, what you said, with this market saturation? Like, there are probably, I mean, only chatbot builders, we probably have, I don't know, 100 different options, we can all think, I mean, we can all think of sort of. But yeah, there are a lot of options out there. So yes, positioning becomes super, super duper important to the way we approach it. It's important to mention that we were lucky enough to participate in a positioning workshop with April Dunford. I think she's probably the number one SaaS positioning expert in the world. And she really helped us with this.

But, in the early days, we had no April, we had no resources to hire, so he was more about intuition. In the early days, the way we recent positioning was which tool we want our customers to exchange for Landbot. So, what they are currently using, that's going to be switched to Landbot, and we would just position ourselves there. So we knew we were in the lead generation space, data collection, and we got different players there. We got form builders, on one hand, it can be like, SaaS form builders, like JotForm, or SurveyMonkey, or you can be just a WordPress plugin that's a forum. We had also these live chat spaces with Drift, Intercom, these automations and also some sort of lead generation. So in the early days, it was more about, "hey, let's let's compete with these, let's position ourselves around these two sides of the the spectrum. We are not a forum, we are not a live chat - we're like a combination of both. We are a data collection chatbot, and it just felt natural to position ourselves there.

And also, I have to say that the customers feedback helped us a lot here, because obviously, when you ask customers, "where are you coming from? And they tell you "Jotform, Jotform, Jotform", and you start understanding where in the mind of the customer you're at. Because, at the end of the day, I mean, positioning is all about when you want your users or customers to compare you with something, what's that you want them to compare you to? Because if you position your company right, it'll be a no-brainer for them to choose Landbot over any other competitor. And I think that's the key.

So, in the early days, it was super useful for us to listen to customers, which tools were they using in the past and why they switched to Landbot and, again, this form builder, live chat, data collection space was the one where we felt the most comfortable. That was early, early, early in the days of Landbot. And then, a couple of years later, or a year and a half, we went through these amazing workshops with April Dunford. It was a way deeper exercise. And it took us a couple, I think it took us the three, four days, fully focused only on positioning, following a framework that's proven to work. And then we narrowed it down way more. And we went through these series of exercises to understand who we really are, and what's our value proposition and where we are in the mind of our customers, and where we want to be in the next six or twelve months in the mind of our customers. Is it the same place? Is it a different one, so you need to make decisions to get there.

And right now, I would say... It's something that changes, and we're going to do some positioning workshops soon again. But I think right now we're more comfortable in these chatbot builder space, because we know that it's going to be feasible for us to fight the contenders that are in the space. Because positioning is also a super strategical subject, like, you can decide who you want to fight and who you don't really want to fight. And, if you're clever enough to anticipate these potential fights, you can position your company in one space or another. So, yeah, I mean, it's a huge topic. It's very abstract, but you can definitely get it to be super practical. And yeah, that was sort of fate. I don't know if that answers your question at all.

Todd Chambers

No, and thank you just for context as well. April will be - thanks to you, you gave this introduction -, April will come in on this podcast in a few episodes. So we can, yeah, we can dig in a bit more to positioning in her episode. It's a huge, huge subject. Right, but some good advice.

Let's talk about sales. So does your current role encompass sales as well?

Cris Villar
Not now. It was, during 2020, I was leading both sales and customer success. Now we've hired a VP sales to join the team. But yeah, I'm in sales. I can I can share a bit more.

Because we were, I mean, originally Landbot is a PLG self service company, and 100% of our customers would come in self service mode, and obviously support, success, all these things would contribute to conversion rate - but it was essentially self service. So, at one point, after raising our previous series in 2018, we have some money in the bank, and we wanted to increase our headcount and to sart testing new market strategies. So we were like, "alright, so, we are 100% self service now". But our average ticket was around 60 bucks per month or something like that. And we wanted to sell 5 times, 10 times more expensive than that, and what did we need to do that? A sales team! That was our main reasoning. We don't really need a different product, We don't need more features, we can just lead the sales team to sell it five times more expensive!

So, yeah, we started testing this go to market - initially it was outbound. And I think this was one of the huge mistakes. If you're a PLG self service company, and you're just testing out new go to market strategies, probably going for outbound, which on the other side of the spectrum, It's not the... I mean, it could it could work. And we all heard of stories where the initial sales driven motion starts without outbound and it's super successful. But I would say that, for a company like ours, it wouldn't make that much sense. And it turned out, I mean, it sort of works.

So, back in 2018, we build our sales team, initially two people, but it scaled to nine people within a year. So, we got the whole pack; consultancy, Salesforce licence, everything, processes over processes. We have market researchers, sales development representatives, account executive sales manager - the whole pack. And the reality is that you need way more than a sales team to sell more. So, you know, adding more go to market strategies is not what you need to sell more, you really need to think about who are you selling to, if you want to sell at a higher price point... Having a sales team is not enough to justify that, you need to accompany that with service and product. And I think that was one of our our main early mistakes.

So, in the initial sales times, we were not really selling that much. But then something happened, which was the WhatsApp API integration. And we would try to sell Landbot ten times more expensive to customers - same offering, just because you got a dedicated customer success manager, we can sell it at 500. That's not going to work. But then, all of a sudden, WhatsApp released their API and made it public. And that changed completely the sales rep in motion. So they now had an excuse to sell at a higher price point, because there was a clear feature, clear differentiation that customers were willing to pay because they had all these in the professional plan, but if I go to the business plan, I got the WhatsApp integration? Shut up and take my money! And it sort of worked in the early months. But then we faced what I believe many startups face, which is some sort of misalignment between the individual contributors of their sales team, the manager of that sales team, and the executive team of that company. So, well, we all heard the stories about, yeah, if you don't properly set quotas, targets... Then, you know, some free riding starts to happen. And, you know, we came to a point where we were sort of selling with these nine people sales team, but it was not contributing as much as the self service model, which by the way, we were invested zero on, when it was the main engine of the company. So, it's like, yeah, "come on, we come from a sales service model, it's working great. We're a sales driven motion, we invest a lot of resources on that end, it's still not contributing as much as we wanted to!".

So, after a year and a half with that sales team, we decided to take a step back and go back to basics. And by back to basics I mean what I was explaining at the beginning, so, going from a self service to an outbound sales driven motion. I think it's a huge step. So, there are some middle things you can do, and one is, well, building an inside sales team. So why don't we, you know, take the natural step of being more proactively selling when we having conversations with our customers, I think it feels more natural than having people doing cold calling to the United States for no reason. So, we went back to basics. So, we had a nine people team and we went back to four people. We were lucky enough to be able to redistribute some sales team members into marketing, customer success, and some other teams, which was also great for the team, and we decided to merge sales and customer success. And we've seen this structure in some other PLG companies, and we thought it just made sense. So, if you really want to align with your customers, if you want to sell the value, the closer you can get to customer success, the better. So, I think Customer Success understood as Customer Success support and all that it's, I would say, the cornerstone of customer understanding. So, if you're able to merge that sales team that's hungry, that looks for quotas, that just wants to sell more and more and more with these older approaches where these folks really want to help customers, and they really want to understand where the customers are at and they want them to be successful... It worked! It worked, we merged the both teams, we went to an inside sales approach where you were super supportive. "You use Intercom? Hey, I'm this, I can help you out with that". So, it's not like you're only selling - you're supporting, and "supporting the new selling" was one of our mottos in the early days. So, let's stop cold calling. Let's stop, you know, overselling. Let's focus on the customer needs. And if you have to sell the 30 euro plan, sell it I mean, you don't need to sell everything for 500. And it worked, during the whole 2020. And that was when I was leading the sales team and it was super great! I mean, the sales team became product experts, there was super aligned with the team, since they were handling full cycle there were no you know, crazy handoffs between SDRs and account executives, and then handed over to customer success... So it felt way smoother for the whole flow. our ticket was lower, that's for sure. But our customers would retain three times better than with the previous sales motion. So, inside sales full cycle approach merging customer success and sales was probably the best decision we could have ever made to our service team - especially being a PLG self service company.

Todd Chambers
Super cool! It's really, really good advice. Let's come full circle, because we're coming to the end of our time. When I look at when our relationship with Landbot started - roughly a year ago - it's really interesting for me to hear the origin story, because when I look at Landbot today, the way that you've know positioned the two products side by side, the way that it's all self service, the onboarding process, the marketing, like, everything's, like, super on point. But it's like a really interesting journey you had to come along and all those those learnings along the way...

But what are you guys up to today? You probably have decent money in the bank. You know, you're hiring for different positions, I know you're stress testing your go to market strategy, you're doing these positioning workshops... But, like, kind of, where are you today and, like, what is the focus for Landbot, you know, over 2021?

Cris Villar
So, I have to say two things. Number one is keep stress testing our go to market strategy. So, the same way we went back to basics and we merged sales and customer success for 2020, right now it's it's separated again, and we brought in a VP sales role. He is coming from Pipedrive, and we are super happy to have him now then we nailed down the natural sales process for the PLG company in the early days. We want to go back to the full motion, with different steps and going up market. So I think that's going to be one of the main focuses for for 2021, you know, scaling that that sales team. Now we know way more about the processes in the product and how we can market things. And we got these crazy experts coming from other super successful companies, that's going to be one of the main focuses in 2021.

And the other one is definitely going to be activation. Activation for us is the number one, it should be your number one priority, period. I mean, if you properly activate three months, I mean, the rest will come. So, you'll convert users into paying customers, you will retain paying customers, you'll expand those paying customers. So, it took us a while to understand the importance of activation. But I think that now we did, I mean, I would say 70% of the company is focused on activation, whether that's post conversion with all these onboarding processes, whether it's pre-activation with our platforms, and all... I mean, it's activation. We understand activation, by the way, as the point from sign-up from getting to just, you know, test the tool, until you build that habit around it. Yeah, I mean, you divide that into set up and habit. I mean, there are many frameworks out there, but these are the basics. And then you start, yeah, you start building that funnel, and which steps every user need to make to become really, really successful with the product. And that's our main goal.

That's our main focus, because, as I was saying before, unfortunately, and it happens to many sales products, probably plus 90% of your signups are not really getting anything out of your product. And you keep investing more and more and more than that 10%. And you want the number of top to be vigorous, that top 10% gets bigger to you. But why don't you try to go for 15 or 20 or 30% of that signup base that you're not making it to activate? And I think it's the most clever investment you can make. So, focus on activation, focus on the early states of data user or customer. Because companies with such a short sales cycle have this problem. it's sometimes hard to differentiate between users and customers. I think our median sales cycle for the self service part is probably, I don't know, five days, it really varies, but it's super fast. So, yeah, activation process is paramount. And if you want to play with the big corps, if you want to raise Series B, C, D, give it that net dollar retention on month 12, really, really looking good. Or, if not, you're gonna have ugly conversations with VCs all over the way. So yeah, I think activation is our main focus right now.

Todd Chambers
It's incredible advice. Last question, more of like a personal one. It's funny, I've asked this question a few times, and everybody kind of struggles with this one. So, I'm interested to see how you take it, but, like, how do you protect your time when you come to work? You know, in the day, like... Actually funny enough before we started recording, you were like, man, I just came from three meetings. It was like, three meetings?! You need to shift gears, but like, how do you protect your time? How do you make sure that you're productive and you're not letting people steal time away from you? Like, how do you prioritise?

Cris Villar
I have to say, I've tried a million things! From the Eisenhower Matrix, to blacking out slots in your calendar... You know, I mean, I came to a conclusion that, with every single 1-on-1 I have with my with my team, I mean, time management is probably the biggest challenge we have today with this attention economy, or whatever you want to call it. So, I think it's honestly, I think that every individual will have to find what really works for him, I've tried pretty much everything.

And what I what I found out, and I think it's a good piece of advice, so, what I try to do every single day is when I'm doing things that I think I'm not really adding value doing, I just write them down in my notebook, like, physical notebook, with a pen. So, for example, if I'm making some adjustments in our MRR because our financial platform is not getting data correctly, I just write that down, like, "I think these could be automated" or "there could be someone that's handling billing, for example, that could do it better than me". So, if you write down all those things, where you don't really add value and you take some time in your week to whether automize it, automate it or talk to the right person that would handle it more efficiently, because they are already handling all these topics. If you can get rid of two, three processes of these every single week, you'll definitely notice it. That happened to me, and that was one of my goals for 2021. So, just write down all those things you think that can be automated or delegated to the right person, because you're not switching from one thing to another. Yeah. And one day you'll notice that you'll still have a million things to do, but at least you're not doing that old stuff. But you can get focusing on the next one.

I think it's not about, you know, finding the perfect, you know, moment where your calendar is empty and you get time... No, I think it's not about that. It's about being able to tackle the challenges of the future and not sticking to the challenges of the past when you can automate those or delegate those. But yeah, I think it's a super complex topic. I mean, I've tried blockings slots in my calendar, and it never worked. I mean, personally, it's never worked for me. And yeah, so, I think just making these short lists of things you can avoid doing in the future by automating them or delegating them is probably the most straightforward piece of advice regarding time management.

Todd Chambers
Love it! That was the best answer I had. So yeah. Nice.Well, listen, Cris, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate you doing this. And yeah, where can people follow you reach out to you if they want to?

Cris Villar
Yeah, I'm not super active on Twitter or things like that. But I really get on with my network on LinkedIn, so they can look for me on LinkedIn, Chris Villar And yeah, I'll be more than happy to connect! I'm always sharing Calendly links with anyone that asks, sharing my thoughts. So yeah, more than happy to connect.

Todd Chambers
Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, and speak soon.

Cris Villar
It's been a pleasure, Todd. Thank you!

Todd Chambers
Thanks for listening to the podcast, guys. for links to any other resources, head over to https://uprawmedia.com/blog. And, super important, please let us know how we're doing! Check the links in the description where you can leave some feedback or you can just email me todd@uprawmedia.com. 'Till next time, adios!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai