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Xtensio's Journey from Services to SaaS
68 Plays3 years ago
xtensio is a classic story of how a service-based company turned a problem into a product.
The company was working with startups and needed better ways to support buyer personas and other marketing activities
It launched a few templates that resonated and then realized that there was more than enough demand to pivot the business.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, xtensio CEO Alper Cakir talks about the journey and how it has leveraged content marketing to drive brand awareness and inbound traffic.
It is interesting that xtensio doesn't have a marketing department. Instead, it relies on Cakir and in-house employees to create most of the content.
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Transcript
Introduction and New Focus of Marketing Spark
00:00:05
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark.
00:00:09
Speaker
For the past year, I've mostly interviewed marketers about B2B SaaS marketing. They've offered amazing insight, and I've learned a ton along the way. But going forward, I'm going to shift the focus of the podcast. While marketing will still be part of the mix, a big part of the mix, I'm looking to interview B2B SaaS executives and entrepreneurs about their journeys.
The Origin Story of Extensio
00:00:31
Speaker
And today, I'm talking to Alpere Chucker, the CEO of Extensio. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Mark.
00:00:40
Speaker
Let's start with Extensio's origin story. How did the company start? What was the inspiration for it? So actually like your audience and past experience with this podcast is in line with our past as well. We were originally an agency. We were not particularly a marketing agency. We were more of a UX and UI agency.
00:01:03
Speaker
But we were working with a lot of companies who were trying to go to market, so they need to understand really all the details of their own business so that they could get the most impact out of the gate.
00:01:18
Speaker
So working with these companies, you know, like we were in service business for a couple of years, we realized that we were actually starting really with all the marketing basics. That was the ideal persona for you guys. Who is, you know, like how do you define your value proposition? What is your brand positioning? For those, we were doing all these exercises. And then at some point we said, you know what, like let's build something that helps us do these things for our clients.
Developing Extensio's MVP
00:01:47
Speaker
And that was basically the MVP for us. Then the initial product was a couple of templates, a user persona, a landing page, a pitch deck, and I think it was a lean canvas. So those were the initial templates or documents or projects we put in on Extensio. And when there was an interest, so like first we were basically trying to solve our problem helping these clients.
00:02:15
Speaker
which became the MVP for the product. When we saw the interest, we started putting more and more effort into Extensio and eventually Extensio took over and then became our main focus. Before we go forward, one thing I was remiss in the introduction was telling people exactly what Extensio does. So maybe you can do that for me. Extensio is a collaboration platform for business communications and strategy. So we help companies
00:02:43
Speaker
make better cases internally or externally through collateral. So it's essentially a document builder with a built-in template base that enables marketers, salespeople, entrepreneurs, operations, HR, you name it, like we reviewed for example at this point, we're basically a platform where people create better business content.
00:03:09
Speaker
You start off as a service company, you feel this pain or this need or a problem you need to solve, so you start developing these templates.
First Customers and Product Transition
00:03:16
Speaker
How did you start to attract your first customers and users? Was it clients of yours? Was it word of mouth? How did those first customers come on board? So the first iteration, we first realized that there was interest around one particular template first, and it was the user persona. This was, now it's more common,
00:03:38
Speaker
But when we started five, six years ago, it wasn't. And people were trying to really understand what the user persona is, how they should use it, how should they go about it. So the initial version that we did was just a PDF. It wasn't even a product. It was some PDF we put on Behance and our own website. And then we put together an how-to guide along with it on our website. And then we started seeing that there's interest in this.
00:04:08
Speaker
Then when we first launched the product, which was about five years ago, it didn't do even a fraction of what it does now, but it was just a page builder. And we clearly saw from the beginning that we needed to give it a purpose. So just having a page builder for documents was not good enough at that point for people. So the templates that we already built in PDF
00:04:35
Speaker
For a user person, I became the first template we also built on Extensio. And that match started driving people. So the initial one, we had our own clients and customers that wanted to use it. So that was good interest. Then anybody who we put basically a link on the same Behance post on our website saying, hey, now there's an interactive version of this, go try it. And we started seeing adoption through there.
00:05:02
Speaker
And then when we did a launch, we went to the usual places, like product hunt, et cetera. And we were also seeing people just posting in places like Reddit, Reddit, et cetera. And then we were getting also traffic from those resources as well. So it was all inbound, pretty much. So we created something that people needed. And we put it in a couple of places and hoped for the best. And it works.
00:05:27
Speaker
A lot of companies evolve
Realizing Business Potential and Shift in Focus
00:05:28
Speaker
from services to products and they launch something, they put it out there.
00:05:33
Speaker
and it's a hit or it's a miss, and I'm curious about when you knew. What was that moment when you knew that Extensio, this product that you had launched, had evolved from a concept or something that was interesting to a going concern to the point where you knew this was a business, that you knew that you were gonna shift the focus of Extensio from services to product? Was there a moment in time? Did something happen that made you realize, okay,
00:06:01
Speaker
This is a business now and this is how we're going to move forward. We were lucky to have the agency running because when you're doing that and have a side project, there's less stress. So we didn't have investors. To this day, we're still bootstrapped. So we were able to build that product.
00:06:20
Speaker
to a point where it was really valuable for people. And when we saw that it got sticky for some people, and now looking back, we're seeing that those are the people, well, these people need to create something that looks professional.
00:06:34
Speaker
they need to create something that is impactful, they need to create something on brand, and they're not able to do it. So we realized that our competition was not other tools. So these were not people who would go do it on Photoshop or Illustrator. These were the people who would hire
Evolving with Feedback and User Needs
00:06:49
Speaker
designers. So our competition was mostly actually other design outlets. So when we realized that, then building the additional templates to help that group of people,
00:07:03
Speaker
helped us bring more people in. And then we started building a lot of analytics around the product, where we see that usage. At the moment, when we launched on product, I think it was the second most popular for that day. So that was something there. But again, a lot of times, data shows you something, but it doesn't reveal the whole story. So data is really good for growing something, but it's not
00:07:32
Speaker
great for innovating something. So like you take the data and you're inspired by it. So like we said, you know what, actually what we built can be utilized for these things as well. So we started building all these additional features and and also like, you know, the moment you start putting something out there, you start getting feedback or lack of feedback, which are, you know, great goods in terms of steering, you know, your, your vision.
00:07:56
Speaker
And it's a journey. So when we started seeing the interest, once we saw traffic coming from Reddit, when we started seeing traffic coming from Product Hunt, when we started seeing more people, instead of using the PDF version, using this, when we started seeing them coming back for doing other stuff. And when we started seeing feedback, they were saying, oh, you know what? It would be great if you could do this as well on your product. Like that was the moment, or that was
00:08:26
Speaker
phase where we said, you know what, we should put more effort into this. And having the agency helped us have a smoother, safer transition. Here's a softball question or perhaps a loaded question or perhaps a really tough question to answer. When you look back over the last five to six years, the journey that Extensio has been on, what do you think the keys are to its success? And I ask that because many, many startups fail because there's no need for the product. So when you look back at your own journey,
00:08:55
Speaker
Is it because it was the right product at the right time? Is it because of the insight that you gained along the way? Was it because you were creating something new and different? Like what are some of the key elements that you can attribute to the success that you've had?
Keys to Extensio's Success
00:09:11
Speaker
A lot of the times companies are looking for that silver bullet. And sometimes some of them are really lucky. They get that silver bullet early on. For us, it was really the whole, everything you just mentioned,
00:09:23
Speaker
And on top of that, the encapsulating concept, I think, is persistent. So we were seeing things that work, seeing things that don't work. So we were constantly moving to this stage. We're still agile. So every two weeks, there's a new push, and there's a future that's being improved, a position that's being changed, a new piece of content that's being launched.
00:09:45
Speaker
You're a small team, but we are constantly trying to improve things. So being persistent about evolving has been helpful for us. And that evolution is driven by a couple of things. One, the users. So they tell us a lot now, again, with their data, with their feedback, or with lack of their data and feedback.
00:10:10
Speaker
So we used that to determine how we should steer this ship. And also, we are artists at heart as well. So we also tried to look at the world out there and say, you know what, we can do better or we can do this in a different way. So it wasn't the shortest path that we took. It was really a winding the road. But again, the journey, I think one of the things that helped us was not
00:10:37
Speaker
raising funds from a VC. Because then we would have less time, then we would be making promises that would be hard to keep. So we were able to control our destiny a little bit better and be able to be more flexible throughout this time because we were strapped.
00:10:57
Speaker
So you launched something that people like using. It's a product that is sticky. You're seeing inbound demand for it. It's obvious that this is a business that you could move forward with. When did you realize that marketing needed to be part of the mix? And what were the first moves that you made from a marketing perspective? Like what were the first strategic or tactical decisions that you made to actually get marketing to be part of the DNA of the company?
Integrating Marketing into Extensio's DNA
00:11:27
Speaker
from the beginning, but marketing, yeah, like it's, it's, it wasn't in a very conventional marketing. It was more about, you know, like this was the time where inbound was becoming more popular and everybody
00:11:44
Speaker
started hating banners and, you know, email and all that stuff more and more obviously. And personally, that wasn't in line with who I am. Like I really wanted to provide something that is valuable, still market it to the right places or put it in front of the right people. And then, you know, hope that they will use it. And then that's going to turn into another launch, right? So like, so when we first launched, one content was from the get go,
00:12:14
Speaker
a big piece of extension's journey. We launched it pretty much with no templates and nothing happened the first couple of weeks. Then when we started releasing those templates, that was the time where we started seeing interest because now all of a sudden it ties into more specific needs. I'm trying to do better marketing or I'm trying to launch this product. I'm trying to
00:12:39
Speaker
raise funds for my startup, all those things, they had all those groups had a better need for product like Extensio. And also from the beginning, we also build some reference referral loops into the product as well. So like you would sign up and then you would invite people and they would like at that point, about 25% of our own users were coming through other users referrals. So like that, all that thing. And again, like we for the first year, it
00:13:09
Speaker
We were not making any money for this, or maybe like for the first year and a half. It was more about, here's a product, use it. It was feedback. We'll evolve it. We'll improve it. And that usage eventually was like, okay, now we can start monetizing this thing.
00:13:24
Speaker
One of the interesting things when it comes to entrepreneurs and marketing is many of them start with product. It's all about the product. They're building a better mousetrap because they have identified a problem or they just see an opportunity. Next is sales. The entrepreneur becomes the head of product, but they also become the head of sales. And eventually they look towards marketing as being a growth catalyst. In some cases, it's almost a necessary evil as opposed to something they want to do. But it sounds like
00:13:54
Speaker
Extensio really embraced some marketing as a key part of how the company moved forward. Now, not have been traditional marketing. I mean, you were doing some content marketing, but also some user marketing. Did you think about marketing as something as a siloed activity or was it just something that came naturally or something that was just part of growing the community and growing the business over time? So we were, again, like the agency being a consultancy for startups, mostly at that point.
00:14:24
Speaker
We had a really clear understanding of everything you just mentioned. We were already telling all these clients, look, it's not about the product. It's not about sales. We need to build something that is useful for people. We need to build it at a time where they know that they need it.
00:14:38
Speaker
Or we would need to educate them. It's going to be tough. How do we differentiate you? All those things were built into our DNA, even if we're just doing UX or UI or maybe just an onboarding screen or something for an app. It was all about, are we answering the right questions for the users? And we always believed in this concept. Every startup or every business stands on three feet. So there's a problem.
00:15:03
Speaker
there's a group that has that problem, and there's storytelling that makes these two connect together. If one of these are lacking,
00:15:13
Speaker
So like, which may be like, you know, like the problem is not valid or there's nobody with that problem. Or like, you're not doing a good job telling that story so that the person with the problem is not interested or not aware of your solution. From the beginning, this was built into our DNA. We knew that, you know, we had to build something that targets the problem and then makes a story that would be valuable for the person who has that problem. And in our case,
00:15:39
Speaker
That was the startup who was trying to build a brand. That was the company who was trying to streamline communications internally. That was the VC firm that was trying to source better startups, whatever it is. A lot of the products are way easier.
00:15:57
Speaker
explain. We do this on your warehouse and their data becomes like this. It's great. So it's easier to market as well. One of the ambitions of Extensia is it's very horizontal. So you can use it for a lot of things. So for that reason, our marketing is very bucketed. So when we talk to the agency, we say certain things because the value we bring for them is very different than the value we bring for, let's say, a first startup. What does it mean for a
00:16:23
Speaker
working better with clients and building their brand. Maybe that one is like about going to market or raising funds. So like I said, but the, the, the core is, you know, like all these groups, you look at the personas again and say like, okay, this, this group is getting this value. And a lot of the times we, this was also a lesson that we learned along the way. It's not about fixing your problems. It's really about finding your strengths and doubling down on them more than anything else.
00:16:51
Speaker
So in our case, like we are not trying to be an alternative to PowerPoint. Like they have a lot of powerful or prissy or, you know, anything out there, they have a lot of powerful features.
Content-Driven Marketing Strategy
00:17:02
Speaker
We're not going to be building all those. Cause if we do, then we would be hurting ourselves. Instead, what are the areas that we are more successful at? It's like making it simple, you know, providing a starting point for these people, making it so simple that, you know, there's pretty much no learning curve. You can just go in there.
00:17:20
Speaker
get what you need in a couple of minutes. Quick question. Does Extensio have marketing people on board? No, nobody did get it. So like we have customer success and product and myself, and then we work with, well, when we realize that, you know, this inbound is going to be the main course of action for our marketing. Obviously we started putting more effort into, you know, making sure that Google likes us.
00:17:49
Speaker
that through SEO. So like we are, when we hire, let's say a vet person, we make sure that they're not only good with code, but they understand all the basics of SEO. And throughout time, like I got better at, you know, content and SEO and like making the research keywords and all that stuff. But no, there's no, at this point, there's nobody who's solely responsible about marketing. So what kind of marketing does Extensio do and who does it? Is it all internal? Do you use freelancers and contractors?
00:18:19
Speaker
So the content gets created by us. And, you know, like we use insurance, we use seasonal contractors where we say, okay, now like we're building additional content. Right now, Extensia is about a little over 50 instructional templates and about 100 editable examples. And for all of these, we have landing pages and how to guides as well.
00:18:44
Speaker
So all that content brings up a couple of hundred pages on our website that drives most of the traffic. And through good content, we get a lot of, so we also don't do SEO just to trick Google. It doesn't work. It's about really adding value. So we try to create multiple times better content than anybody out there. For example, if you're building, let's say a sales strategy document,
00:19:14
Speaker
then we go do the research, look at everything out there, and try to create something that really helps people perform better. And when that happens, we automatically start seeing this content going to places that we didn't even dream of. Sometimes government sites mention us, sometimes a lot of the universities mention us, and that has a lot of clouds that brings us even better positioning as well. So content creation is just distributed inside the company.
00:19:42
Speaker
What about other types of marketing? Are you any advertising? Do you go to conferences? Do you do webinars? Do you do eBooks or is it all simply about blog posts? I'm just curious about the portfolio or the arsenal that you're using. We have an affiliate program, which, you know, we set it up, uh, I think it was two years ago. We're not really doing anything about it. People sign up and they refer extensive and they get.
00:20:05
Speaker
25% of the revenue for life. So if anybody's interested, you can just go to extensive account slash affiliates, check out and that's that's that has been one of the venues, but we don't buy any ads. We're not in conference this year, actually, maybe a couple of conferences, but I mean, I go to conferences,
00:20:25
Speaker
to, to learn and network myself. But like Extensio has not done any sponsorships. We didn't get into boots, none of those things. We haven't tried ads. That that's something we may try next year. It's been mostly the content again.
00:20:42
Speaker
The advantage of being a content creation platform is you create the content in the platform. That's been one advantage that we have over just creating regular blog posts, which is like super saturated. We were doing that at the agency and it worked great, but this was like 2010. So now it's really hard to get attention because there's so much content out there.
00:21:09
Speaker
Looking back, what are the biggest marketing lessons that you've learned along the way? Both good things that you've learned and some of the things that you've learned to avoid that simply doesn't work or it just doesn't work for your company. So like when you couple of years, like when you first start, there's no baggage. So you can just do something and then move on to the next thing.
00:21:30
Speaker
But over time, actually, we realized that every decision we make comes with a lot of the things that we support that we did in the past as well. You know, like we can just, for example, just move on to another affiliate marketing platform, because we got a couple of thousand people who are using that already. So like the change becomes a little bit harder as you make sure. And one of the things that we made is I think was not realizing the
00:21:59
Speaker
longer term of cost, cost of things, for example, and I'm going to name this because you know, like it's been a bad experience for us intercom. I see your intercom using intercom as well, which is great if you got you know, you know, let's say 1000 people visiting and like doing something and then you're sending messages, but
00:22:18
Speaker
At some point, like our free plan was bringing about like 17,000 people a month. And all of us at the intercom expense started exploding. So like that was in the decision that we thought a lot about when we first adapted the tool. And all of us have been like, now all our campaigns are in there. Our, you know, like our support is in there. Like there's a knowledge base there. All the things they built, they were just, you know,
00:22:45
Speaker
taking them and like running with it because like it's the easier thing to do. But you need to be careful about your model versus the platform you use this model. Like in the intercom space case, for example, they're all about, you know, those user base because they're not really built for companies like us where there's a freemium model where you would have like thousands of people use the platform. And so like that, and that change.
00:23:11
Speaker
changing things and finding the better options that fits our business model was one of the challenges we went through.
00:23:20
Speaker
As far as the marketing landscape right now, when you look at the fact that primarily your marketing is being driven by content, which drives inbound, you mentioned that content is becoming more crowded.
Navigating a Crowded Marketing Landscape
00:23:33
Speaker
It's harder to break through. How do you see the marketing landscape as a B2B SaaS entrepreneur? What does the marketing landscape look like to you? Like what do you see as some of the most interesting trends or things that you're going to explore in 2022 as you try to
00:23:45
Speaker
drive growth, bring new users onto the platform, or conversely, try to keep your users on the platform. I think that moving forward, there are a couple of things that are becoming more obvious. One, Outbound is getting harder and harder and harder. We're a product-led growth company, and we like that. We're doubling down on that. Making the product better,
00:24:09
Speaker
targeting the right audience and being at the places that that that audience exists is our main focus. I get dozens of messages on LinkedIn. My email is at this point, you know, like I get a lot of inquiries from all sorts of places. And like, I'm just going like marking down spam, like deleting them, like first sentence I get it, like, let's move on. So like my morning styles like that. And obviously, like marketers are going to find other
00:24:37
Speaker
Places now actually like I get SMS is I get cold calls, you know, like it's it's annoying It's gonna get in more annoying and I don't want to be a part of that annoying part I want to be on the good side of story as much as I can so like we're gonna Keep being on that side as much as we can some of the trends that I'm seeing moving forward is content is getting harder to Get traffic with because everybody's trying it but it doesn't mean that there's a good contact that
00:25:06
Speaker
There's going to be always good content and that's going to be always performing. One of the main takeaways I've seen the last couple of years is we are all media companies and I don't mean just the products or the companies.
Authenticity and Brand Marketing in the Media Age
00:25:20
Speaker
I mean also people as well as people as well. Everybody's now
00:25:24
Speaker
a media company or a media personality, a media entity. What that means is that people are going to need a reason to believe what you say or to somebody else. And that doesn't happen again with just a couple of sentences you say. It happens over time. So the brand marketing is becoming more of a value, in my mind, through being a media company again.
00:25:45
Speaker
And that and you know, like some of the things we see explode is obviously podcasts, right? So and video is become became so accessible. It's I think just a psychological barrier for us is just harder to be on camera than
00:26:01
Speaker
like just writing something that you can fix 20 times, do revisions. But having said that, the thing that performs in my mind most nowadays is vulnerability, not being the perfect person out there, but being who you are with all the little errors and faults that you have. That's the brand, just embracing that and not being genuine. I think it's going to be key moving forward, not only for people, but also for companies.
00:26:28
Speaker
If there was one marketing channel or activity that Extensio would embrace in 2022, what would that be?
Future Plans for Extensio in 2022
00:26:37
Speaker
We're definitely doubling down on content. Mostly the kind of content that is unique to us, which is templates in our case. So again, we want to make that library
00:26:49
Speaker
not bloated, but definitely more inclusive. So that's where our focus is for the first two quarters of 2022. And then we are seeing a lot of potential, again, from video. We may go into that. And also, stepping a little bit away from inbound through search, which has been the main bread and butter for Extensio, we want to
00:27:12
Speaker
put more focus on the brand itself as well. So we're actually doing a lot of partnerships, a lot of supporting the startup ecosystem, marketing ecosystem, sales ecosystem, as much as we can through professional organizations, through meetups, through webinars, et cetera. So we want to be partnering with anybody who is doing anything in those fields and part of the, be a part of their journey and support them with our platform as much as possible.
00:27:42
Speaker
because we want to make sure that Extensio is the communications and strategy platform for those groups. Alpero, this has been an excellent and inspiring conversation. Where can people learn more about you and Extensio? Extensio.com, and then I'm sure it will include all my links of LinkedIn, Twitter,
00:28:00
Speaker
Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help PDB SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.