Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Marketer's Journey from Side Hustle to Startup: Jay Desai
55 Plays4 years ago
Jay Desai has always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
At 11-years-old, he had a newsletter business. In middle school, he was reselling sticks of gum bought at Costco.
While working for Trend, a B2B startup last year, Jay came upon a problem: how to collect content from around the Web for future reference.
One thing led to another and Jay created Swpely, which he describes as Pinterest for B2B. It's a free service that makes it easy to collect digital content, social media, updates, videos, and photos.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Jay talks about the transition from full-time employee to entrepreneur, and how he plans to grow Swpely into a full-featured content aggregation platform.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and Jay Desai
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm Mark Evans and welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. Everyone seems to have a side hustle. It's not enough to just have a full-time job anymore.
00:00:20
Speaker
Most sized hustles are at best hobbies or micro businesses, but sometimes a side hustle turns into a real business. And today I'm talking to Jay Desai, a B2B marketer who recently launched a new business, Swipely, that has received an enthusiastic response. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Hey Mark, great to be here. Great to talk about Swipely and everything else in between.
00:00:45
Speaker
So let's start at the beginning. It wasn't that long ago that you were a full-time B2B marketer, mostly around creating content to
Jay Desai's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:54
Speaker
drive leads. You were doing what a typical B2B marketer was supposed to do, but in the midst of the pandemic, you developed this side hustle and this side hustle turned into something else. So maybe we can give a little bit of a backstory about you
00:01:11
Speaker
your track record as an entrepreneur and how that evolution from full-time employee to startup founder actually happened.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of it goes back to my parents. So my dad owns his own business. And just being around in that entrepreneurial environment, it kind of puts that spark into you when you see someone working every day to grow their business. I did some things that some other entrepreneurs might have done in the past. So in the fifth grade, I used to even have this little newsletter that we made on
00:01:49
Speaker
Microsoft publisher, I don't know if it's still a real platform anymore, but we used to print these out and sell them. And one thing that was super awesome is one day I was able to get up to five employees and was able to pay them actually a dollar each, which was a really like awesome moment for me as someone who is like 11 years old, no concept of money. It was a really fun thing to do.
00:02:11
Speaker
And so that entrepreneurial spirit continued to manifest. I sold gum in middle school. I go to Costco and get the big gum packs and resell the sticks to people in middle school to make a little money. And then I really knew I wanted to be a founder probably at the age of 15. I knew I wanted to start a business. And it was more so a matter of when, not if.
00:02:35
Speaker
actually talking about Swipely, that was another project that I started. And before that, I actually gave my chance at a full run at a business back in March. So I started a sports newsletter that epically failed, did not do so well, but
00:02:52
Speaker
I spent way too much money that I probably should have before validating, but I learned a lot of things from that. And so I've been able to kind of translate that into my own business. And in terms of like the shift for me, I spent some time a few years in marketing, just really getting my feet wet, kind of understanding the environment and like,
00:03:12
Speaker
learning how to be a better marketer and you know it was kind of like a culmination of having that entrepreneurial fire in me and then also being able to be in a good financial position to take a business risk like anyone that's going to start their own business obviously there's a risk involved because you have to spend money up front with no guarantee of return so that's kind of how I ended up here at Swipely.
00:03:33
Speaker
So let's take a step back and talk about what you were doing. What was your full time job? How long had you been there? What did you like about it? And how did the entrepreneurial itch start to emerge? At what point did you recognize there was a problem? Maybe you looked for other tools to solve that problem and you couldn't find them.
00:03:55
Speaker
it suddenly dawned on you that maybe there it was time to shift from a full-time job to a startup describe that journey last year so you're hard at work it's the middle of a pandemic you've got a full-time job to do but something's happening in the background can you give us the backstory.
The Birth of Swipely: Concept to Creation
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So I've been in my last company trend for about a year and three months, I think. So, you know, like I said, I've, I've always had this like entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe it's something that's in me. I like to be in control of my environment. And so, you know, as someone who's working for someone, obviously, you know, you get a degree of autonomy and stuff like that. But,
00:04:36
Speaker
i knew it one day i kinda wanted to run the ship and and give it a shot and see if you know i could. Fight out there for myself to see how successful i can make it out there on so that was a big part of me that played into it and it was really just kind of you know i wanted to be a founder for a really long time and it was kinda just figuring out what that idea was in terms of swipe lee you know.
00:05:00
Speaker
And a problem I faced as I kind of entered, you know, I've entered in LinkedIn and I've kind of like been in that space now and creating content. And now I'm on Twitter and creating content. So as someone in the B2B creator economy, I kind of face the problem that's swipely is solving myself. So I really had a hard time, you know.
00:05:20
Speaker
producing content after I gave away everything that I felt that I had. It was hard to come up with content ideas and figure out how to repurpose stuff. And even as a marketer at my old job trend, we had a newsletter, we had a podcast, constantly looking for ideas for that stuff and creating content. You really need to keep your ideas organized and really have a backlog. And so I think all of those factors together
00:05:49
Speaker
created this product over here, Swipely. They just all kind of climax together and help put me in this position. We've talked about Swipely. There's some mystery still among the audience what Swipely actually is. So what is Swipely? What problems does it solve? And how does it work? And how much does it cost? And where are you at so far in terms of its launch?
00:06:12
Speaker
For the audience, Swipely is basically the way that I describe it is Pinterest for B2B and I'll unpack that a little bit more. So it's a tool for you to basically save all sorts of modern content. So I think, you know, we've all seen like a bookmark bar and have probably used like a bunch of bookmark apps. Maybe we're also taking screenshots and doing like a link dump and things like that.
00:06:34
Speaker
But content has really evolved over the past ever since, you know, that the ever since social media has entered the landscape. And, you know, nowadays we have, you know, video podcasts like this one, tweets, LinkedIn posts, all sorts of this modern content. And so when I kind of think about traditional content, it's like your websites and images and that modern content is kind of everything that's come
00:06:57
Speaker
after that. And there's not really a solution that exists out there to be able to save modern content and really organize it. And that's the piece that's really growing the most, right? People are writing blogs all the time, but I think I read this crazy stat. You know, there's like 500 million tweets that are going on in a day and only like maybe 50 million blog posts that are posted a day. So that's a really big discrepancy over there where you're seeing like modern content outpacing maybe traditional content by 10 X.
00:07:27
Speaker
And so just being in that type of environment and figuring out like micro content seems to be the play where a lot of people are leaning into shorter pieces of content is kind of why it brought me into an interest for Swipely. I just faced this problem myself and I was really looking to go out and solve it.
00:07:48
Speaker
You know it's interesting because as someone like myself who creates a lot of content, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter, I have a podcast, and I create a lot of content as well. I've used Pocket, Evernote, Notion, all kinds of different tools to collect and curate content and never found something that did the trick. And what I find surprising is that there
00:08:10
Speaker
Wasn't something like pinterest for bdb content it's interesting to me that swipeling didn't exist before and also you came on the scene had this problem and discovered that hey there's an opening here for something like this to will you surprise that. There was a gap in the market that you could just walk into.
00:08:32
Speaker
Yeah, maybe a little bit. I did some research as someone who was a collector. I was looking for that solution myself. I didn't expect to go out and build it. I thought there might be something out there that would be helpful for solving that issue, but there really wasn't. And when you combine that with the entrepreneurial fire that I have, it was pretty
00:08:55
Speaker
pretty, I really wanted to go out and go and do this and create swipely and create a tool like this. And, you know, it's actually pretty interesting. I think content is constantly evolving. And I think even for swipely as it exists today, the thing that we're going to have to decide and look at is, you know, how can we stay up to date with the evolution of content? And that's something that a lot of platforms still struggle with. And so I think there's going to be a lot of openings, not just today, but in the future for tools that have
00:09:25
Speaker
a hard time keeping up with changes that are going on. I mean, you're seeing new apps like Clubhouse come in that are just audio only. So I think there's always gonna be opportunity for people to come in and there's always gonna be some sort of market gap that needs to be filled. I think it's a matter of how do you fill that gap and then how do you continue to keep filling the different gaps that pull up right next to you.
00:09:52
Speaker
What I'm curious about is when you have a full time job these days, being a B2B marketers, you're on all the time and you're trying to create content and publish content and social media. How do you go from coming up with this idea to actually developing the product, the vision for it and the strategy for it when you're, when you're spending so much time at work, how did you allocate the time? Who did you collaborate with? What was the process to turn it from an idea into reality?
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was really hard. I don't think I mentioned that earlier, but the company I was working at, Trend, was also a startup itself. There was five of us. It's a team of five. Obviously, there's a lot of work. I was basically doing a lot, like most of the marketing for the team and really managing everything. And building any startup is a lot of work. Trying to build two startups is something I would not recommend to anyone out there.
00:10:49
Speaker
but you know it really started out with me thinking from that experience that i have with the sports newsletter like how do i create a more minified version of what i have and so you know i had this grand idea for pinterest for b to b and i really had to sit down and kind of unpack that like how do we get to something that that's that big right pinterest is a.
00:11:12
Speaker
I think they're a publicly traded company. They are. Yeah, there are publicly traded company and they do millions and millions of dollars in revenue. So you can't just build that in one day. They've done tons of rounds of funding and all of that stuff. And so.
00:11:27
Speaker
What I really had to sit down was, okay, how do we get there? What can we do as a first step to move closer to that? And so I really had to work through that and kind of landed on our first version, which is what you see currently going on, which is our Chrome extension linked to our dashboard for content saving. So I figured, hey, if we can save the content, then we can start continuing to keep adding stuff that are there. We don't have to get anyone to create new things.
00:11:54
Speaker
reinvent the wheel and so it was really just figuring out what's that minimum step and then going out and basically doing as little as i possibly could to get this idea out there and not in the sense of you know i i didn't want to support the idea or do any of that stuff it's just that launching a product and the more things that you add to a product
00:12:19
Speaker
take a lot of time it's very easy to underestimate that and so by taking a step backwards and thinking hey how do I provide the the most minified like experience and still kind of plug in some value there and so you know even for when we started the product you know it started out as a as a sketch i have a sketchbook that's sitting in my cabinet over here
00:12:41
Speaker
I sketched the idea out the last week of October, put together a single page website, just grabbed it from a template, changed some things out, you know, put together a text only logo, that was pretty easy to build, and then just put it out to the network to see and so you know, the product wasn't even in the
00:13:00
Speaker
getting built. Right now, what I saw was we were able to get a lot of market validation, you know, we had a lot of people sign up for the waitlist, there was a lot of interest generated over there. And so I actually had to go back to my, one of my friends, he's a developer, and I called him up, I think maybe after we hit 100 people on the waitlist, and I was like, Hey, I have this product that I haven't built, I put it out into my network,
00:13:26
Speaker
People kind of validated and said they'd be interested and i have a hundred people looking for this product that doesn't exist and so. After that we kinda got into building the product and really working backwards and even our email sequence like i think i only had a one email that got fired right after you signed up and.
00:13:44
Speaker
uh, you know, occasionally we'd, we'd send out one email a week. Um, we ran like a small giveaway that was really like low stakes. And so it was a lot of low stakes things that allow me to keep working on my full time job, um, and kind of just plug into swipe Lee where I could. Um, and obviously I've taken more responsibility in that sense, but you know, that's how we're still operating. We always ask ourselves, like,
00:14:08
Speaker
Is this something we actually need to do? Like, is there a way to take a step back on this? Is there a simpler way to do this? That'll provide, you know, maybe only 70% of impact is maybe like the full blown thing, but it's going to take us, you know, like 30% less time. And so those are the kinds of things that I'm thinking through as we're running the business.
00:14:31
Speaker
I think it's really interesting because I can remember when you threw that idea out on LinkedIn and the reaction to it. Obviously there's a lot of marketers on LinkedIn. So it was a, it was a great target audience for your great way to throw out the idea and see if it, if it had any traction. What are some of the lessons you've learned along the way as you evolve the idea, as you develop the product and it became a reality, some of the things that went well, some of the things that you would do differently next time.
00:14:57
Speaker
I think the biggest advice that I would give to anyone is you your product or whatever you're offering doesn't need to be as complex or perfect as you think it is. And that's really like easier said than done. But the only person who's going to know what the end product is supposed to be.
00:15:17
Speaker
is you, the people that are viewing your product are only going to see the product as is. In terms of what I would do different, I honestly would say there would be nothing that I would do different. I'm thinking about it right now, but we've made some mistakes in terms of things that we've done and things that I quote unquote maybe wished I did different, but I actually probably wouldn't change those because without those
00:15:44
Speaker
failures over there, there wouldn't have been whatever the lesson that's learned. And so, you know, in terms of like missteps, and we really haven't done very much, you know, it's it's great that we've been able to to promote the product without sharing that much, you know, even the the website that I put together the first iteration of it, the single page site.
00:16:03
Speaker
that got a hundred people to sign up there was no pictures of the product on the website at all there is literally nothing on and so you know i just tell everybody to take a step back and don't let those false objections like don't let yourself. Disqualify you from launching something because you think something's missing or you know something needs to be a little bit better you'd be surprised at what people.
00:16:28
Speaker
would love to jump into. And the only person that knows what that end thing is supposed to look like is you. That's what I would say there. And the traction has been incredible. I mean, we've seen some great growth, which I'm happy to jump into as well. But it's just been an awesome, awesome experience. And I wouldn't really change anything because it's really just gotten us here today. And I've learned so much from any of the mistakes that I've made.
00:16:52
Speaker
So maybe you can talk a little bit about the growth because obviously there's demand for this type of product. There's lots of people creating all kinds of content these days. Content marketing landscape is shifting as you talked about with more micro content being developed. What are you seeing on the platform so far?
00:17:10
Speaker
Right now, the big thing that we're tracking is activations, so user growth.
Growth and Future of Swipely
00:17:15
Speaker
I think, I don't know when this episode's gonna air, but for context right now, we're about 10 days over here into our invite-only beta launch. And the last user count I checked was at 525, which is absolutely crazy for 10 days. Our big goal is to hit 1,000 users in 30 days, which I'm feeling really good about our chances.
00:17:36
Speaker
but it's just been incredible. I mean, user activation is the main thing and kind of we're working backwards. We have a little bit of a product market fit survey as well in the application that we're taking a look at, but right now it's really just getting people in and getting them to not only get in, but selling them on not what Swipely is today, selling them on what it can be tomorrow. And so that's something that's really big to me too is every user that comes into Swipely isn't just joining
00:18:05
Speaker
for this modern content saving tool as it is right now. We're saving images, videos, podcasts, tweets, LinkedIn posts, websites. That stuff is all cool, but we still have a lot more to go. And I really want people to buy into the long-term vision
00:18:22
Speaker
because and actually one of the emails in our onboarding sequence that mark you'll probably get at some point is basically a list of the next things we're planning on building i want to be completely transparent and get people to buy into the vision and say hey if you can help us bring one or two people to swipe we can build all of this stuff for you and that's really what i'm i'm trying to sell on and so that's the stuff that's really important to me.
00:18:50
Speaker
The next obvious question would be, how are you gonna make money? Because from what I understand, Swipely is a free product, at least for now. Do you have any thoughts about how you monetize the platform? Is it something that you thought about from the beginning when you had this great idea? Or is it still a work in progress when it comes to identifying the different avenues for revenue?
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely a monetization plan. I think the big one that we're going to have is probably ad revenue at some point. And that's when we kind of turn on our social functionality. So that's what's coming next on the swipely roadmap is, you know, we're going to offer a full social solution and we'll probably plug in a little bit of advertising. But one thing that's really important to me is having like purposeful advertising. I think a lot of advertising nowadays on social media is like stuff that might be like irrelevant.
00:19:42
Speaker
and stuff that you're just not really interested in. And you know, I hate getting bombarded with the same ad like a few times, but, or more than a few times. But one thing I do think, and this is what I love about ads is when you get the right ad at the right time, like let's say, you know, I was on a website with a cool like pair of shorts or something, or someone sent me this website for a cool new product. That's an ad that I'd want to see again. And so,
00:20:09
Speaker
That's something that I'm constantly thinking about is how can we create those purposeful experiences? So that's a big part of it. And then another big part is we really wanna empower creators. So with that advertising revenue, I think we're probably gonna be taking a different approach to most companies in the sense of I wanna empower everyone in the B2B creator economy to be able to get a piece of that ad revenue without having to do very much other than just creating your audience.
00:20:37
Speaker
That's something that's important to me. We've got a couple other plans in terms of like APIs that we can offer more content features and more content saving that we can do. Maybe even like private swipe files. I mean, there's just a whole bunch of different directions. I'm not super concerned on the monetization piece right now because right now it's user growth and you can't have
00:20:58
Speaker
You can't monetize anything without the users there in the first place. I'm planning on keeping this show free for as long as I can run it. I mean, we have like no operating costs. We're spending like 15 bucks a month on our website, six months a month on my email. We have our server costs, but they're basically credited because we have AWS credits. So that's basically free. And then I've got like a Zapier integration that I'm paying like 25 bucks a month on. So we
00:21:24
Speaker
We could realistically run this thing for a really long time for free. For me, it's about how do I create more purposeful experiences for everyone? And then the money part, I think it's going to happen at some point. I'm not super concerned about it. But right now, to me, what's most important is just providing an incredible experience for everyone that's on there.
00:21:45
Speaker
Well, it's a very exciting proposition and I'm really fascinated by the transition from full-time employee to side hustle to startup. Where can people learn more about you and swipely?
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, so you can head over to swipely.com. It's S W P E L Y dot com. So swipe without the I and then L Y dot com. Go ahead and jump on there. We'll actually give you a promo code as well. So you can skip the wait list over here. If you use Mark's name, Mark Evans, um, you'll actually be able to skip the wait list and go straight into the product. So definitely take advantage of that code and get in there, mess around with it.
00:22:25
Speaker
And we have a lot more things coming. The more users we can bring to the platform, the more I can build for everyone that's listening. So that's what makes me really excited is the building piece. But yeah, check it out. We save a lot of content right now. A lot more to come in the future and would love to have you as a user on Swipely.
00:22:44
Speaker
Awesome, that's Jay. And anybody who's interested in Jay can go to LinkedIn. He's got a pretty good presence there as well. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Jay, visit marketingspark.co.
00:23:04
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.