How I Grew Factors.ai by 6x by Prioritizing Strategic Marketing Initiatives

uh thanks a lot for being here this is the last session for the day so on the second day what I'm going to talk about is we had a startup 4 years back started off initial traction 200k plate then we pivoted then scaled up with founder Le marketing that's primar what I'm going to talk about today morning there was a great session by Adam Robinson about how his social coting and founder Le marketing actually scaled that's more

like the superhero version of how you do things this is more like a boy and exj version where like if I can do it anyone else can repeat it Adam Robinson is anyways a legend so in a sense making it kind of opening up our Playbook on how we grew after our pivot so the first thing what I'm going to talk about is fonded marketing most importantly hiring a head of marketing and the team structure then about our strategy and sales and Partnerships

so this is our story where kind of 2022 hedge to 2022 we kind of plateaued we were just a little bit of background about factors. a we started off as a AI Le analytics product so we are ex Google Engineers we are very passionate about analytics and AI we started building around what we thought was great initial traction what we realized is there is something as founder market fit it's not that

analytics is not a big Market amplitude so many other big companies are there but what we figured out is like we were in really good for selling that 200k deals basically based out of us and selling it so hence we figured out like this is not something which we are there so we move pivoted from analytics to action so what we do now is signal based sales and marketing specifically focused on LinkedIn ads so companies which spend on LinkedIn ads work with us to build High intent audiences push them into

LinkedIn optimize those LinkedIn ads and most importantly see what's working what's not working and iterate so if you're spending on LinkedIn ads we are the right people to actually optimize and run your LinkedIn ads to deliver Pipeline and that's what we solve for and that pivot is where we changed from end of 2022 and after that you could see our growth now we are almost close to $2 million and uh why we did that is action is a lot more easier to sell when you're selling out of India lower AC and then

you able to build it but that's pivot is one part of the whole story what we also realized is when we pivoted is the key thing here is at this point in time the most important employee in your in your any startup is not the 10x engineer or 10x product guy it is the 10x marketer you can build stuff but ability to take your product into the market is the most important thing is something which we realize because there are so much askas

companies it's not like in 2013 where there are maximum like five or 10 companies which are there for each and every category mtech is kind of like super kind of crowded where like if you had to stand out you need a really great marketer to actually stand out and as Founders we didn't actually get marketing so the first thing which we did is Founders prioritizing marketing so in a sense like right from none of us actually doing marketing I was taking care of sales and another person was taking care of product both of us started focusing on marketing

fundamentally LinkedIn paid ads Etc the second thing is hiring a head of marketing what we were initially doing in the earlier part of the growth story was we used to have great consultants and great point in case in terms of SEO Consultants paid marketing consultants Etc but you really need a steward that is like you need a head of marketing to actually make sure that everything else aligns together both from a positioning standpoint and also from a strategy and execution standpoint so hired the head

of marketing so this is how our sorry okay I'll just come to that part but the founder Le marketing part was this where like we started with LinkedIn posting social posting is one of the easiest leverage high growth channel for you that is like right from having maximum like less than 5K this thing currently we are having more than 200,000 plus Impressions both our Founders follower counts are more than

20K each and you could say like 22k and pindas is at 7000k and what we also did is co-opted our entire sales team also to post on LinkedIn LinkedIn posting doesn't actually cost and most importantly you can connect with folks and when you post relevant content people actually interact and then they actually show intent into your product Downstream that's something which we did so fundamentally Founders and employees focused on completely on uh social posting which is low cost but maximum

scale for us to actually get in through we also Focus on getting top marketing analytics Voice top uh uh product marketing or any other B2B marketing ABM marketing leadership voice Etc this is actually a little more easier hack within LinkedIn so LinkedIn actually asks for like comments on specific posts and specific places where you can if you consistently comment on that it's basically like if you cons comment on more than 20 articles you would be actually pushed up as a top marketing

Voice or a top specific category voice which is there this helps you getting featured in so many other articles and more importantly getting on top of the funnel so in a sense in a lowcost way one you can increase your Social following plus you can also be a recognized voice in your category which you're trying to sell to and most importantly you would actually be talking to your prospects and clients which is there which is in LinkedIn you can connect to the people who you actually want to sell to and it re returns into a fly we that's something

which we focused on which was a lowcost way this is also what we did we started doing multiple podcasts so both nullin they did a session in the morning as well and triple do who did a SEO session we did multiple B2B marketing sessions which were there multiple podcasts we appeared in almost every other speaking events or hosting multiple LinkedIn lives and other events LinkedIn live is another more easy hack for you uh in a sense if you're doing a podcast you need to record you need to have the sounding

everything right and then you have to make it push it LinkedIn live on the other hand you can go live and you can also push the data back into YouTube and from YouTube you can create shots third you can transcript the whole LinkedIn live and then make blogs and other parts out of it this and also the worrying about the whole audio quality video quality everything gets combined into the LinkedIn live itself you don't need to separately run a whole podcast here and this is something which we did which was also a kind of like founder Le lowc

cost actually pushing it back into audiences Etc the other thing which I mentioned earlier is hiring the head of marketing so earlier it was a co-founder multiple Consultants social media inous and a demand generation in house this is a kind of a recipe for disaster for any SAS startup because if you don't have a steward which is like a hiring a 10x marketer who is a head of marketing who can have the gravitas in terms of getting people to work and more importantly hiring the right people at

multiple setups and third part is execution that is like finding the right product marketing person finding the right content marketing person making sure they they do what their job is same thing with social media and demand generation so we hired a marketer had the whole team under him and then had the sub team also and working with consultants in multiple Parts last part is the second part is a section the marketing strategy planning and moving up Market these are three things one is which channels work for

you that's something which you need to figure out if you are a devops tool there are certain channels like Discord Reddit Etc which you can run ads if you are on sales Tech Google ads work really well mtech LinkedIn ads work very well so depending on which channel which you want to work out you need to figure that out second is 80% planned and 20% experimental I'll share some of the experimental strategies which we did and lastly moving up Market once you find the product Market fit and growth so the first thing which we saw

the channels which we worked for we started off with paid paid is the most easy hack which you can start with running competitor keyword running specific high in keywords and getting people in which is there so in a sense like we were able to generate almost like fight 100 plus qualified leads on a monthly basis and this is something which is consistently continuing plus we also did email marketing offline sources and organic search you need a great SEO part to actually bring in uh organic

socials which is that 200 plus blogs 26k unique visitors but one thing which always gets missed out in these numbers is paid doesn't work Beyond a point it's like a cocaine you can't just keep taking it Beyond a point and the ppc's competitors start coming in it's more than like $50 PPC it's not sustainable at all which is where you need to get to other channels which is like running LinkedIn ads second is organic posting on LinkedIn third is like Partnerships

and few others which I'll also cover Downstream which is there the second thing which we also did is from a marketing standpoint is bitting big on LinkedIn lives I covered some part of it one thing is like being Shameless in a sense like when you start with your first LinkedIn life you won't have more than 25 30 concurrent users but what you need to basically invest in is like I'm going to do 150 episodes over the next 3 years that is one per week every week over the next 3 years

once you start doing it the live attendance metric starts going up and most importantly your actual buyer personas who see your LinkedIn live either directly or later then they come back and ask for Demos in multiple ways like can you give me a demo can you this thing this happens in multiple sets this alone has generated more than 100 customers for us close to 800k in Revenue which is almost a zero paid channel for us which is the part which I talked

about is like Beyond a point paid search saturates which is when you start also bet again back into LinkedIn live to create the next leverage motion which is there the other part is that 80% planned efforts and 20% uh experiments plann paid efforts are great like you run LinkedIn ads you're running paid search ads uh bran made a great presentation on how you focus on LinkedIn ads audiences and running uh Parts you also focus on organic Su but you also need to start

having lead magnets in some sense depending on your category depending on what works for example rtech categories they start with an Roi calculator some other categories start with few other kind of like specific Finance uh cap table calculator sham made a great presentation yesterday on how SEO with basic like ramp or remote started with certain uh esops calculator Etc what we did as a LinkedIn advisor since we primarily solve for LinkedIn ABM we did a LinkedIn advisor which is a complete

free tool developed with an intern over a period of two and a half days what it does is you put in your email ID and mention three of your competitors automatically we go check out their competitors LinkedIn ad Library come back with a report on what are the key pain points which your competitors are talking about what is the key value proposition they are talking about what's the recurring process which recurring phrases which they have this was a very easy to have tool but lot of companies just started signing up for it

so we had we are having currently more than 200 plus signups where people just want to come and check out their competitor ads what is a value prop Etc a tool which took more than 200 just let's say a little over 2 and a half days for us to build it and we have the signups coming in so so this is a experimental section now we are taking it more mainstream where we are actually actively going and prospecting to clients saying that this is what we are doing but what I'm trying to convey here is you have your paid marketing efforts

and things saturate Beyond a point you start doing experiments and some of the experiments starts working well and then you start capitalizing on it and without these lead magnet experiments your growth funnel actually starts saturating and faster you do it better it is and it's always a experiment we did multiple other experiments like this none of them worked one of those worked then we are scaling this up last thing is going up Market we started off in

2021 end of 2022 our price point was $99 uh for the basic CH then it went to $250 then we actually scaled up to $400 this is our entry level product which is there of course the larger level product is more closer to $2,500 to $3,000 so in a sense unless in otherwise you start figuring out a way where you can actually increase pricing and push your market up and close out certain lower-end customers there is no way your ACV and uh your Revenue numbers are

going to grow uh this is a kind of a choice which you do at a different point in time so for example at 2024 two months back we got the confidence to do it when we cross 300 plus customers when we were at less than 35 customers we didn't have the balls to actually put the price up so in a sense it's like also a fear of what you're doing and how you're doing it and how you experiment it in certain ways and that's something which we did

lastly as I said there are different levels of growth paid marketing social marketing experiments and then started with Partnerships one thing which we really invested in on is like we wanted to catch on to a big gorilla in the market so one was of course G2 which is one of the largest review sites they have more than $100 million in Revenue three time edits uh uh run by Godard and Linkedin which is the largest B2B platform we worked over a period

of kind of like one and a half years to build the LinkedIn partnership so we started with India then we went to APAC so venessa is sits out of APAC we started with multiple WhatsApp messages etc for them to eventually feel that we are a good enough company to partner with and this takes close to like more than one and a half years for them to give us API access put us into a panel and then eventually take us into as a kind of a partner which they want to

Champion across globally and this is something which we started working on very early and that started showing results this is in parallel with our paid marketing and other efforts which we are doing but after one and a half years we started showing efforts this is one of them secondly like 2023 we went to the Mumbai Office that's when we started doing some events and sessions with them making sure that we show some value for them sorry and the other one was

G2 this blog went up in 2024 the effort for this blog started with last saster I met with Godard who's a CEO of uh G2 in person showed us showed him our product about how we solve for certain specific use cases they got interested then they connected me with the APAC head then they connected me with the India head after 9 months they started putting up this blog now we are signing an annual contract and a partnership agreement where for all G2 customers factors. goes

live but as I mentioned this is the third growth lever which we had so the first level is like start with your paid search ads then you start with your paid experiments or kind of like multiple experiments lastly you also parall work with Partnerships each one has its own life cycle something works at different points in time paid search works immediately experiments some work some doesn't work but once you catch up on that you have a LinkedIn live or others to actually take you to the next level

Partnerships it's a one and a half 2E Journey before it actually starts giving you Revenue all three runs parallel so it's a kind of a trifocal lens as a Founder which you build on sign partnership which just there second thing is also partnering with agencies this is one thing which all the time which you look at is like you are a product which is there and there are agencies which are Services providers which actually complement you you look at it as a transactional relationship in

initially it never works what you do is you reverse it into like how you co-create content towards each other how you start talking about each other on LinkedIn where it becomes beneficial and then they start talking about you as well in multiple places and then your audience grows uh so for example like uh di from haal started talking about us in multiple plays how we play an important role uh sham and others also has spoken about us in multiple places which is that and like this we work with multiple

other agents genes over a period of time we are able to crack that now we have agencies coming inbound to us to start working with us so in a sense the first set of agencies which you work with are like totally non-transactional where like you give a lot more than you can actually even remotely get but over a period of time this becomes a kind of a strategic partnership this results in others having a foro to then come in and start working with you this is something which we worked on pretty early and

started uh giving dividends eventually for us and most importantly do foood your own product uh if you can and this is something what we have set up multiple workflows which is there in essence we identify which company comes to your website immediately search within hubad whether it's already existing lead or not a lead find who are the people who are in your bio personas from Apollo immediately push that into a workflow where like if the checks uh

check the person's email is verified run it into a sequence on email emils and uh find a lead Etc this is one email workflow which we create parall we also send it to a LinkedIn uh sequencing workflow where like we push the data into a LinkedIn sequencer like sales Robo or drippyy or uh lgm where we directly start identifying the key Persona and running LinkedIn sequences to them lastly also like we run LinkedIn ads to the same set of sequence so in

ense what we are doing here is like we look at our website with 27k plus visitors as a lead Channel because in B2B nobody randomly visits your website anyone who has the time to come and check out your pricing page or your blogs is most probably a prospect identifying which are the companies which they come from second once you know which companies they come from then you do a scoring of them like showing who are the ones who are showing intent who are the ones who are in your ICP then you filter that list identify who

are the key bio personas within that company which is there because for example I don't expect a data scientist or a data engineer to show interest in our product if someone let's say XYZ company is coming to our website mostly it's the marketer in that company who's showing interest we get their email IDs from Apollo or clay or cognism or Lucha which is there whichever tool which is there automatically bring in their email ID push that into a sequence which is an email sequence and start running a proper email sequence why this helps us

at any point in time you can't afford to have more than like say three four SDR and it's like at a certain stage which is there and SDR have to to spend more time selling which is like creatively finding out like what is the kind of a better email which they can write what is a better sequence they can write what's a better LinkedIn messaging or content who they have to connect rather if you automate most of their tasks what you get is like they can work at 2 or 3x their capability levels in one sense so you are basically automating the task of

pushing the data into a sequence and running the sequence so that the SDR can focus more on kind of connecting with the right folks on LinkedIn and also sending out the right emails at the right time or manually intervening when the time is right the second part is also is multi-threading one is email is one sequence email gets saturated so less than 1% of emails actually get replied to so what you do is you go after LinkedIn LinkedIn on another Channel actually the reply rates are almost 3 to 4X better for example LinkedIn doesn't have the concept of

spam where like you can identify the right person you can connect with them The Connection rates are close to 20 to 25% if you send 100 connection requests 20 to 25% connect with you from the 20 to 25% let's say 3 or 4% of them actually net actually reply to you in some sense so you have a better connection so you also multi-thread into a LinkedIn sequence the third part is you also want to run LinkedIn ads to the same set or you want to run retargeting ads to the same set ads actually work like an air cover when the emails and other things

go on the ground so that you actually give a brand or a brand awareness to the same set of accounts what this leads to is the better reply rates and better qualification rates and the last part which I haven't shown here is basically you also push this data back into an auto dialer so you have Auto dialers or power dialers which are there in the market so you identify which companies and which users you are interested in you're sending them emails push the same data back into a power dialer so that you can start calling them as well so

this is a multi-threaded where like having a two or three member SDR team you can make them work as a five or six member SDR team generate 25 to 30 leads on a monthly basis I'm not promising the moon like suddenly you'll get 300 leads but the chances of kind of like instead of having 10 leads a month can you make it 15 to 18 becomes far more possible that's something which we are able to do with this kind of workflows and also ability to multi-thread and other this thing and this is something which we have also soled within the

product eat your own dog food uh in a sense we basically look at every single company which comes to our domain see what is their engagement how they are looking at it and then going after them with the same part so this this is what we push our own sdrs and account Executives to use our product to know which is the company which is showing interest prioritize and focus on companies which are showing interest for example if there are 12,000 visitors on my uh website I can't go after each and every one of them I am going to look

after the top 100 or 150 companies which are actually in my ICP actually showing intent for me to go after hence the chances of conversion becomes better rather than going after each and everyone in the same place just that sorry so just to summarize these are the things which we talked about first and foremost Founders have to become marketers there's no other way unless otherwise you learn marketing there's you're going to be handicapped

throughout second is hiring a CMO or a marketing Steward who can actually control your agencies your Consultants your product marketers and your paid search marketers most importantly the team strategy or team structure second part the marketing strategy you start with paid then you start with experiments and most importantly you start finding a ways to go up market in terms of increasing pricing and other paths lastly Partnerships which is a parallel thing it takes more than one and a half two

years to get big gorillas into your place but once you get them they actually sponsor for events and booths and putting you in front of their customers it creates massive dividend down the line communities and agencies don't treat it as a transactional part work with them to co-create content Etc once you have couple of them in place the rest follow Fall Fallen directly with you and hiring a sales team and making sure they work at 3x levels with automations and workflows that's the last part which we work on which is

there this in essence helps you with kind of like helped us moving from somewhere around 200k in Revenue to now close to $2 million so that's where like 6X growth which we had this is of course this wasn't done in a matter of 3 weeks or uh 8 weeks this is something like a one and a half year struggle for us but this worked and if we are able to do it back from India totally with a a bootstrap team of uh 25

30 people sitting out of India and then building it I think this is possible for everyone else as well [Applause]