How we got 5,000 on our beta SaaS waitlist

please help me in giving a warm Round of Applause to Sarah Hawley [Applause] awesome hey everyone it is so good to be here uh usually I am on stage speaking about hiring and culture and building thriving teams so for the hiring segment at the next conference put me down but it was really fun to actually look back and find something in our company that we did that was really tangible and

actionable that I could share with you guys um and that is how we managed to build a 5 000 strong wait list before we launched our product uh so basically what I'm going to talk you through is this idea of um building a community first brand um and why why we take that approach and this opportunity to authentically co-create what we're building with people how we did that through using a

tool which we used a survey on the future of work so we reached out to everybody asking them what do you want to know what what do you what is important to you when it comes to the future of work because we are building the future of work and that was how we were able to engage them and then as we got all of those results and published them what it meant for our company moving forward so who is remotely just so you actually have some context about what we're talking about we are assassinabled

Marketplace for remote work so we help any company anywhere in the world find Higher and retain and pay Talent anywhere in the world so when we were launching we were thinking well which side of the marketplace do we want to build first and one of the hypotheses we had was if Talent joined our community and our Marketplace they're not going to expect to get a job the day they sign up but if a company joins and posts a job they are going to want to get

applications and if they don't they may not come back so our main goal aside from building brand awareness generally in the market was to launch with a pretty big audience of professionals so that the first companies would actually get applicants to their role and yet to their opening um and yeah I just went through all that so essentially our what our campaign looked like and I want to give some context about why I did this actually

because it wasn't as strategic as you would think basically what happened was has anybody here developed technology and experienced a delay in their product going live oh funny so that was basically what I was facing and I previously always built productized service businesses so anyone who's in the service industry knows that you can come up with an idea and sell it to somebody the next day you can create a PDF and get out there and sell it and

you can start delivering it and you can build it as you go not so with technology obviously once you've built it it's amazing it can scale millions of times but it might take three months or 12 months or whatever it is to build that new idea that you came up with so I was just learning this at the very start of my remotely Journey and we started development in May and we were due to launch in October in October my new CTO started took over the project from the custom software company that we were

using and very quickly told me there is no way in hell that this product is going live they are so far from completion and they had been telling me well just a few more weeks just one more month just two more weeks and I had been believing them but he was able to set me straight and say we're probably six months out at the rate they're going and what they have let to left to do so after I stopped crying and picked myself up on the floor and started thinking about what am I going to do I was like I have to do something like

I'm very uncomfortable as an entrepreneur just sitting here waiting for somebody else to build my product and what do I do with myself and so I saw this as an opportunity to start building our brand and get people interested and engaged in what we were going to launch in in the end it sounds like a very strategic plan and it actually worked out really well I don't know what would have been better though getting my product live sooner might have been more appealing to me but essentially what we did was we used

October to December sorry to gather the survey responses um and by marketing this survey and putting it out there and driving people to our website we were getting their email addresses for this pre-launch and just gaining excitement and then we spent January preparing the report so that we could um Market it and put it out there and then February to April we were able to use that as a marketing tool that positioned us as experts so that when we went live in April we had established

quite a bit of brand awareness and credibility and we also had some really cool stats and things that we could then take into our marketing moving forward um to give you some perspective on where we are in terms of a business so that was when we launched in April of 20 April 24th of 2021 and and this is kind of our latest quarter here so this has been our trajectory um and looking back now I'm very glad we launched with a community of people who actually knew who we were because it might have looked a little bit more

pushed out if we hadn't so when I think about community and growing a Community First brand it's really all about bringing people together around a common vision and a common Mission and it's an opportunity to genuinely engage with them and use their feedback and use their insights regularly to build the company and obviously early on but also still now and we are a mission-driven company so community-led growth makes a lot of

sense because people want to be a part of what we're building it also empowers them to invite their friends to be a part of this community and be a part of this brand that they love and that they enjoy and so that is also my background is creating community-led Brands so it felt like a very uh appropriate way to do this for a company that's trying to build a whole new future of the way we work together so as I said we decided on a survey tactically how we did this very easy we

just used typeform I'm sure everybody's familiar with that super easy way to create a branded tool and whatever you might choose in your strategy of creating hype and a wait list around what you're doing just something simple where the tools already exist out there and you can just hack it together it doesn't need to be anything crazy and then we told people how long it would take and why we wanted to use this we did a bunch of social media posts and started building our email list and then

emailing people regularly getting them to help us build the future of work co-create the work future of work with us um we spent about 500 dollars a month boosting posts and doing other kind of social media boosting some other social media posts to just continue to grow the community and awareness around what we were doing and then um added one of these pop-ups to our website as well so that all of that extra traffic that was coming to our

website even if they didn't do the survey or what have you we were capturing their email addresses for pre-launch it was just continuing rolling through that marketing campaign so in terms of publishing which is what we did next once we had created um we had over a thousand I believe um if my number was right there over a thousand responses to the survey so it was a really robust exciting interesting survey that we had a lot of amazing information in about the future of work

and so we spent quite a bit of time actually in this part I showed you at the start the timeline we spent about a month actually putting this together really nicely because we knew now we had this amazing piece of marketing material that we would be able to use into the future so that was the piece that really took a lot more time that we spent a lot of time on design we actually did an interactive web page that kind of detailed like some of the parts of the survey and then you could download the full report

um and uh this is yeah so we added something like this to our website to say that you can download the report here and so really it was about spending a lot of time making this report very beautiful and we were able to then send that out to all of the people who had joined our campaign to co-create the future of work and they were able to see the results and continue to be engaged in this journey of co-creation and we also were

able to generate a lot of media and sign ups from uh doing this survey and we still do today when I was looking at this um at this When I Was preparing this presentation I noticed that we still have people downloading this original survey like every single week journalists and different people who are interested in it so it's ended up being a really powerful tool into the future as well I also built a list of journalists on LinkedIn so I just searched my existing connections and

then also searched journalists in certain areas and added them as connections and then got their email list and it was that was a bit of a lengthy process but I was able to create a press release when we first launched when we first published the survey and I was able to put that out to all of those journalists and we were able to get media that way and then has anyone heard of quoted I think there's some other ones where you can sign up as an expert

to reply to journalist call outs I've gotten a lot of press from that website and so I would highly recommend that but once we had this survey tool over the last year and a half I guess we I was able to every time that I reply to a journalist on quoted still I can attach the future of work report and it gives us credibility it might give them some stats that they can use in their media and things so it's continued to be

a really incredible tool for us so just to go back over the timeline so we used that October to December period to gather the survey responses adding respondents to our pre-launch campaign we spent that month creating a really beautiful report that is something we now use into the future that's been incredibly valuable for us and then still while we were going to launch the campaign we were able to publish and Market the survey of feeding more and

more people into our into our pre-launch campaign so the overall results were a total ad spend of 3 500 that was over the whole period so that was driving traffic into that survey and onto our website and then marketing the survey into April when we launched so we did not have a huge budget at all and we were really doing this the best we could with the resources we had at the time just boosting our social media posts and

learning as we went we built our email list up to 5300 emails of which most were professionals as I said at the start we wanted to grow the professional side of the marketplace mostly but we did have about I think 15 of the people who signed up were also companies so what ultimately ended up happening when we launched in the first month we converted 50 companies and 793 professionals into

registered um people on people in companies on remotely which means they completed their entire profile and they're now set up on the platform over the coming months we converted more and more of them in and we have built our mailing list since then to 31 000 professionals and six and a half thousand companies so this was just really the starting point to kick this off and give us people and companies to start to talk to and Market to

um also it reposition it positioned us as experts as I mentioned and continues to attract media and PR and there's the number I was able to find is we just had 20 downloads of this just in the last month and this is a two-year-old survey so you know it's pretty effective tool that just kicks away in the background because journalists and people are always looking for stats and information um so yeah over the last not quite 20 minutes because I rushed through that I showed you how to co-create building

using a Community First approach and that authentic co-creation that engages people on the vision and the mission of your company and your organization which also creates a lot of loyalty and connection with the brand As you move forward determining a tool to work on that co-creation with them and we use the survey and then we had a landing page and all of that via social media which I showed you and then taking time to publish that content in a really

beautiful meaningful way we also I didn't mention this we shared it first with our community so that was kind of like the thank you and the reward to say thank you so much his first glance at the survey before we publicly published it and used it for all of the media and PR [Applause]