How Sander made collecting testimonials easy with SocialJuice!

Pratik

Welcome to SaaS unlocked. Place where we get to hear from amazing entrepreneurs, and innovators around the world. And today with me, I have someone very special.He’s a founder of SocialJuice. Welcome Sander to Insidia show Sasa unlocked and we would love to hear from you about your journey. Please share with the world, You are and what you are creating.

Sander

Hi Pratik. Well, thanks for having me. First of all, I’m Sander. I’m an A developer and the founder of of social juice, which is a B2B platform which makes it easy for companies to share, import and collect testimonials and reviews from their current customers to use a social proof on their website and social media. Yeah, to to get to get more customers.

Pratik

That’s excellent. So what inspired you, Sander, to create this product? How did you come up with this idea?

Sander

That’s quite a cool story actually. My best friend has a company catering business. He makes sandwiches for events and other companies and and he got an e-mail once from a from a client that said that they were very happy with their service and they were certainly gonna order again. And he took a screenshot of that and a screenshot of his e-mail Gmail client and posted it on his Instagram and that converted that, converted the new client. And I thought wow, you could have written this yourself. There would have been no way to see the difference. If this works, then yeah high-quality testimonials should make a whole of difference. And then I started looking into other similar products that do something like this already. And there are a couple, but there’s not like a very big one. And all of the small ones are growing very rapidly because this is a yeah this really work.

Pratik

You know, I absolutely agree with you. I’m a marketer myself, been into like marketing for over a decade now one thing I realized.In order for customers to buy from you, they need to trust you and the trust can be only created if other people are talking about you in any way. And if you get a testimonial. We don’t buy anything online today, today without checking reviews. Doesn’t matter if it’s like your mobile phone or your new laptop or anything else, even your software or service. So having that kind of a tool that enables you to collect reviews is a brilliant idea. So maybe, you know, being an entrepreneur, I face a lot of challenges in my like, journey. I’m sure like, you know, while you were creating this product or while you were like, you know, bringing your ideas into reality. What challenges did you face when you were working on your product?

Sander

The hardest thing certainly is doing is doing the marketing side. I’m a I’m a developer mainly, so I’m I love building products. But yeah, if you have a product that’s very good but no one knows about it, you don’t Found it. You don’t have a business. So getting spreading the word and getting people to use it and getting getting feedback and that’s certainly not the hardest thing for me, or at least which the stuff that I needed to learn about the most.

Pratik

That’s well said. You know, no matter how, even though Apple needed some kind of marketing when Steve Jobs launched, even though the product was brilliant. But the execution of going to the market requires an effort and initially like, you know.Until some people use it and then there is like you know domino effect or like word of mouth spread because of your product, but the initial push is required to generate that demand and I very well understand because my background is marketing. So now like you know how you’re like you know product like because you are like you know going to podcasts and doing a lot of marketing activities. How was your product evolved since it’s launched you seem like you know significant growth, and maybe you can share like you know when you launched and like you know how you’re progressing in your journey.

Sander

Yeah, absolutely. I was quite lucky in this regard because quite close to when I launched my MVP, I was picked up by APPSUMO, which is a marketplace for, for, yeah, for software. And yeah, they had success last year with a kind of a similar product and they, they were looking themselves for something similar. But yeah, it was quite an MVP, but they didn’t know because the site looked really good and the product. Worked. And so yeah, because of that I got a lot of early, early users who got in and and yeah, the cool thing about that community is they’re very active and they provide a lot of user feedback. So yeah, I got a whole list of feature requests, which is very, very handy actually as a founder that you don’t have to come up with new features. I could just rank them based on how much they were requested, which made the product a lot better very quickly.

Pratik

Like part of the journey. An entrepreneur when you’re building SaaS is like you know, sometimes we have some ideas but it’s not necessary that user might need those features or functionalities.And when you launch on Appsumo like platform, there are initial adapters or early adapters I would say. They use your platform and they kind of give you a genuine customer feedback that kind of helps you make your product better so that you can like you know. You know, market it to the scale and improve your product significantly. What can, what do you consider to be like, you know, key factor of your success until now, what is like one big thing that you wanna share with the world and that has helped you, you know, become successful at what you did with SocialJuice?

Sander

Hmm, It’s hard to pinpoint one thing, but I would say that good design and good UX is very important. People like good design software good design software and there are certain people that don’t even want to use bad-looking software. So if you take the extra if you go the extra mile to make sure that everything they get to see before they use your product looks very well and very good executed. It says something about the quality of the product itself. And if you if you would now look at this product and compare it to certain competitors that do something similar in the product itself just. Based on on on what the website looks like and stuff it it yeah it got a lot of positive feedback on that. People who see this for the first time and they say wow, it looks very good and I haven’t even used the product and I want to use it. So it’s it sounds like it is an afterthought, but for me it sounds like it. It really helped me.

Pratik

Absolutely. And when you say businesses have found that interesting and useful, maybe you can share how it helped businesses to grow their business. You know, you shared that example of your friend that was like, you know, sharing a screenshot of the testimonial that he received. Do you have anything to share with us on how initial users are using your product and that has actually helped them grow their business?

Sander

Yeah. First about the kind of customer that it is. At first when I was building this, I thought that it was going to be mainly B2C things like like Shopify stores and stuff. In reality, I saw that they were a lot of. B2B businesses that came in like people, people, businesses actually where you need to trust the other party or you need to work together. And with a lot of service-based companies for example, you have a similar service and a similar pricing. So, testimonials are what it really comes down to. Yeah, for choosing one over another and that’s why every company has a, this is what our clients say on their website and some texts they write themselves but people don’t dress that. So what we focus on is video. This is, it’s not, it’s not the only thing we do you.

Sander

And just use a regular reviews of stuff as well, of course. But the idea is to replace the generic text says nothing and no one reads because they don’t trust it with smiling faces of your current customers. And that, yeah, that’s increases website engagement and people click it, people see it, and if someone is just very positively talking about a certain service service, you’re way more inclined immediately to try it over something else.

Pratik

I have something interesting to ask like. I am into B2B marketing, right? You created this platform to simplify how you collect reviews and now like you know why somebody should use your platform. They can just like you know, ask them to do a loom video or screen recording. What is something that simplifies the process for them? Why B2B companies who are like you know, I have 200K followers on LinkedIn and the majority of them are like B2B marketers or B2B founders.

Pratik

Why they should like come to you and use your platform and how that will solve their problem to generate that reviews faster.

Sander

That has a very good answer actually. If I would e-mail all my clients, all my clients and ask them for a video review, almost no one would answer that whether would have video. Because first of all it’s kind of a big ask. And even if if they want to do it, they don’t know what you are expecting, so the expectations are another line. And even if they do know what you kind of would want, then imagine what that process would look like. Can you imagine them to open their their camera phone and then record something? You don’t know how long it needs to be. What do I need to talk about? It’s not clear at all. And then I need to open my e-mail client and oh, I’m already distracted and I’m gone. 

There are so many places where it can go wrong and people can drop off. It’s almost impossible to do it that way. We do it is you can simply send them a link wherever. It’s just a web link to a very clear testimonial collection page. And there you says hi where this company would like to get a testimonial from you we want you to talk about this, this and this. And of course you can you can change that in whatever you want. And then you have two big buttons. I want to record a video or I want to leave you with text. Of course you want the videos, but if people are not comfortable with that, we still want to hear what? And then yeah, they they pressed the button to record the video. They can record right in the browser and they can rewatch it. If it’s OK, press, press, send and it’s it’s sent off. There is very little distraction. It’s as frictionless as it can be for the big ask than it is so.

Sander

It’s just way more effective than doing it any other way.

Pratik

How much time that you think that you that companies can save from this process like you know because at the end of the day if you want to measure when making decisions like you know specifically marketing teams are the ones we’re going to use this product a lot. So the current process for any marketing, marketing team is to request like you know via e-mail like can you please record video and maybe send some instructions via e-mail. It is like a lot of back and forth and maybe takes a month or more to get that one testimonial video. How much time it takes from  Social Juice?

Sander

Well yeah, you can just create a testimonial collection page in a few minutes and you already got the link, you send it off and if they just press the link immediately, they can record a video and in 2 minutes send it off and it’s in your dashboard. That’s it, Want to do it?

Pratik

Boom! Like this is like a big headline for our podcast because, you know, reducing the time of back and forth and like immediately getting that testimonial is very crucial. I have seen from my experience because I’ve collected many reviews from my customers. It takes forever. And sometimes you just like, you know, they lose, lose interest unless and until you are like, you know, giving them some coupons or something to motivate them to do this. But it’s again a big ask and we need to simplify that. So really love what you created with this platform. What tips like you know just like switching gears from product side to bit more on your entrepreneurial journey and what tip you would give to other entrepreneurs who are looking to launch their successful product.

Sander

I have a very good one. The the hardest thing I had to do is, is, is marketing like I said. So first I thought I don’t know anything about this, I’m so I  sent out DMS to a lot of growth marketers and I’ve called. With like five of them and had like an half an hour conversation to talk about. If you were me with your expertise and now you know this this product, what would you do in order to get this product started. And I would expect them to say, I would start with this. If that doesn’t work, I would do this. If that doesn’t work, I would do this. But The thing is no one could could tell me this just just like they are also just trying and and and I don’t mean that they’re not good in their job of course. I just mean you have to try everything and yeah and if it doesn’t work.

Sander

You get you have to move quickly move to to the next. But there is no guaranteed way. If you do this it’s gonna work. So it’s better to to yeah to try a lot of stuff.

Pratik

Maybe I’ll share my two cents here for me, right, marketing is in demand, OK. Generating demand and the flow of the leads specifically, I don’t believe in outbounds, OK. And outbounds reach outs are very hard to convert versus inbounds and when you. Have that inbound lead generation for any business you are in, it’s like boom, they are interested to hear from you and in what you’re doing. And it’s immediate sale because of the brand that you create, OK. And now brands are created from testimonials. So if you have some initial base or portfolio and you have that amazing reviews that will create word of mouth. So there are a lot of platforms like G2, Tera, and Gartner and you can list your product there and like.

Pratik

Make amazing reviews from your current customers or better users even and then that will convert and that’s a sure short strategy of like you know. Bringing in more leads to your business because at the end of the day if somebody’s looking for review platform like Social Juice, they will Google it and like you know first page of Google is taken by 3/4 spots by review sites and they’re eventually going to find you if you have better reviews on those platforms. I’ve done it with multiple businesses in my career and help them like you know with testimonials so I can understand the product you have created. It’s mind-blowing. So, highly recommend listeners to give it a try and I’m sure it will reduce your time to collect reviews significantly. Now I want to go for rapid fire and it’s more about like, you know, giving inspiration to other founders, CEO’s, entrepreneurs about your journey and something maybe personal. It will be like 5 questions. So Are you ready? 

Let’s save the Rapid Fire and the stunning wrap-up exclusively for the Podcast. You can watch the full episode on INSIDEA’s YouTube Channel as well as on Spotify.

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