Hear the story of how the Riddle.com team grew Riddle to be a leader in the quiz marketing space – with no marketing budget, no sales team and without a dedicated support team. It’s all about having a killer product!

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets. Plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling our successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Hey, Boris, welcome back for another episode of our Quiz Makers podcast. Thanks for coming along.

Boris 0:39
Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Mike 0:43
Great. And welcome to all the listeners out there.

When we started this podcast, we called it The Quiz Makers because that’s what Boris and I specialize in. That’s what riddle.com as a quiz maker does.

However, there’s also a story that we like to share about how you can grow and scale a startup.

Now obviously, every startup is different. But we also want to pass on some of the lessons that we’ve learned.

And so Boris, you and I were talking just this morning about some of the conversations you’ve had since you were mentioned as one of Entrepreneur.com’s “Top 20 tech founders in Europe to follow”. Could you brief the listeners on some of those conversations and kind of what’s come about come from?

Boris 1:32
Yes, one of the the key topics actually, when I talk to people, they want to know how to do do you make that list?

The honest answer is, I have no idea.

And then the next question is, “How did you manage to find all these cool customers? I’m seeing Riddle quizzes everywhere from the BBC to the NFL, Red Bull, all huge brand names.”

So they always ask, “What’s your sales tactic? How big is your sales team? How much you spend in marketing? Can you guys be profitable, and still get all these customers?”

That seems to be a common thread of what people are most interested in when we talk about Riddle.

Mike 2:14
Perfect. And this is one of the things I love so much about working at Riddle, the answer is also quite fun. What’s the answer you tell them?

Boris 2:25
Right – the answer is that the sales team is zero. We don’t have any sales guys, which is usually met with complete disbelief.

Then they’re like, well, then you and your co-founder, Mike – you’re probably all day on the phone and on LinkedIn, trying to get these customers. Honestly, how much time do you spend like a day trying to find new leads?

Mike 2:49
Oh, well, that’s also easy.

Zero.

Yeah, so generally, I will answer lots of questions on our support chat. Those will lead to product demos for people who are interested, but we have the luxury of people reach out to us and talk to us because they’re interested.

And that’s a totally different proposition versus calling, messaging, and pleading with people to try our product.

Boris 3:16
So that’s the simple answer to the question.

Next? “How much marketing budget do we spend to get inbound leads?” It’s the same answer.

As for the sales team question, we spend no money on ads.

Well, it’s actually that’s wrong. We dabble in a little bit of Google ads for about $5 or $10 a day. You know, mostly just to test some things out. But you can’t really attract any any meaningful traffic was that kind of ad spend. So we really don’t do anything.

Then obviously the next follow up question is “Well, what do you guys do, right?” “How do you get all these customers?” And I think it all starts – you have to have a good product. If you don’t have a product that people like, no tactic for sales or marketing are ever going to be long-lasting.

I guess if you’re an amazing marketer on social media, or on TikTok, you could probably sell something crappy to a lot of people exactly once. And then you’d be done for.

Mike 4:26
Absolutely.

Boris 4:28
But for repeated success, you have to have a good product. (I’m actually thinking that we didn’t always have a good product.)

Mike 4:35
No, that’s very true.

Actually, I wanted to take that one step further. I would say not even just a good product. And this is going to sound slightly egotistical, but your product needs to be a great product. You need a product when people discover it, start to use it and love it so much – they want to spread the word about it.

For an average to good, people will just use it. That’s great but not enough.

But you really need that those brand evangelists, those brand ambassadors to really do that. And yeah, as you mentioned, like any startup, we made some missteps. We made some mistakes early on.

Boris 5:13
Yes, we used a lot of our initial funding rounds to build a product that we or our investors believed would be an amazing product. So we talked to a lot of people, who told us that our idea is amazing.

And we spent a lot of time and money building on our beliefs, launching something, and then realized in just seven days with heavy investment in marketing and sales people (we used to have salespeople) -returned, I think it was $10 or $12 in revenue.

Mike 5:48
Yeah, that was not one of our finer moments, was it?

Boris 5:51
No, that, that was fairly frustrating.

But you know, as a good team, we didn’t despair or fight over it, we just took action, which was to kill the idea and try something new.

And the new approach was to not listen to ourselves so much – or to our investors about what they wanted to see.

Instead, talk to the customers and ask them, you know, “What do you really want? What would you buy?”

And also asking them for their credit card and say, “Well, would you buy that now?”

You know, we had the basics of that, and we made it better over time. That’s become the Riddle you see today, which focuses on just the best tools to build quizzes, polls, personality tests out there. And building them was heavily informed by feedback from our most important customers.

You know, that’s probably the second thing that we do after finally arriving at a product that is really, really good. At least as good as everything else out there. (I would say better, but because it’s our company.)

The next thing is to listen to customers by talking to them on customer support. And you’re probably leading that effort, Mike. So we’ve already done an episode on customer support before but just give us a 30 second pitch.

Mike 7:19
Essentially, when we started, we tried several different approaches, we tried several different pricing models – freemium, offers, all sorts of things.

But what we kept hearing was that people kept asking questions – and wanting a certain subset of our features. And because of our backgrounds from work at Tickle.com and then a whole bunch of other quiz marketing startups, we thought “Look, let’s just focus on that.”

But a key part of this cycle is you’ve got to hear from your customers, especially early adopters. So Boris and I started using this really cool software called Intercom and answering all support messages. I’m sure many of our listeners have probably seen them on other web sites, there’s a little chat box windows that pop up. And normally a live person will say, “Hey, how can I help?”

The downside is that this approach does hurt your work life balance a little bit, because we’ll be answering messages from the pub, or I answered messages while hiking up in the Himalayas, where we actually h