Discover how fast-growing Hair Fuel uses quizzes to find, segment, and convert new customers for their critically-acclaimed hair care products.

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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 a successful startup since we launched way back in 2014.

Okay, welcome, everyone – I’m really excited to have as our guest in this episode, Laura Sagen. Laura is just a bonafide, bonafide quiz geek – she is doing something really incredible with her business, which I will let her talk about, but she is the founder and CEO of The Hair Fuel.

So I’m going to toss it over to you, Laura.

Laura 1:00
Thanks, Mike. Super excited to be on your podcast. I mean, you and I’ve been in touch multiple times over the almost two years since I started using the software.

So a little bit about The Hair Fuel. It is an all-natural subscription-based hair growth mask that gets delivered every month at our customers’ doors. And like I said, it’s completely all natural safe for pregnant and and young mothers – it doesn’t have any sort of nasty, weird chemicals in it.

I often joke, it’s so safe that you can eat it. Don’t do it though – it tastes absolutely appalling. Because I know the ingredients, it’s definitely safe. And so, that’s basically the gist of it.

Mike 1:44
Perfect. Well, I have to ask, just for people who are just listening to us (vs. watching on YouTube), you’re not going to see my shiny dome, but I am somewhat follicly-challenged. So I’m guessing The Hair Fuel will have no value to me whatsoever.

Laura 1:58
Ah, but I think you’re wrong. It’s not that I think – it’s that I know. I think it can be a whole different podcast episode on that, but the logic is that our target audiences both male and female. As the first step, we decided to target females because this kind of notional self care and applying a mask on scalp is something that is a little bit more female-friendly. Females tend to be a little bit more friendly towards that entire notion. Males tend to expect just to pop a pill. But yes, it works both for for men and women is just for men because of androgens involved.

Mike 2:52
That’s fair enough. So actually, Laura, as you mentioned, you’ve been using Riddle (which is our quiz maker software) for about two years.

What was your marketing problem? What were you looking for and why did you find us? And hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed… how are we helping?

Laura 3:11
So how did we even come across the whole idea for quizzes? First, a little sidestep is that I came across quizzes with some sort of business coaching website. And it asked “What kind of enterpreneur or something are you?”

It was a such a good quiz. I don’t know what software they used. But it was a really, really good quiz.

Because the questions, they were interesting to answer, and then offered the value that I was getting afterward. So, the drip marketing was very valuable to me.

And also on the back of it, I was working on on launching The Hair Fuel at the time. I thought, “I’m willingly giving so much information to that business. And then I’m getting value back.”

So that was a very interesting proposition. Because I’m a strong believer of providing value for people first – if it is the right value, then people will come back, they will ask more questions, they might buy your product – or they might not. That’s not necessarily the point at the quiz stage.

And how I found Riddle specifically? You might have to thank your SEO person – because I googled for software, and found one of the review websites and it sounded pretty simple to implement – pretty straightforward. So I just decided to give it a go and you know, almost two years since and we’re still using it.

Mike 4:51
Well, this is one of the things I’m so happy with about Riddle – just like yourself, starting with The Hair Fuel. I’m sure you’ve had customers from the very start, and it’s neat for us to see kind of the growth of, “Hey, we started with Riddle, when we were doing this.”

And then we’ve kept improving it, so to keep hearing all this feedback is wonderful. So I love it.

But you actually mentioned something really interesting. And it’s about that transparency, and about offering value as a business to potential customers. And they might never be customers.

But, you know, it’s that, “hey, take this quiz, fill in the form, and I’m going to give you information that is useful”. I really think especially with GDPR, and California’s CCPA, and all this privacy stuff coming out – being upfront, transparent and saying, “Hey, this is how I can help you and this is how you help me” is a really good marketing approach.

Laura 5:47
Yep, absolutely, I think. And that’s the kind of the change that we’re slowly observing is that brands and businesses, they tend to focus on providing value, providing content – that kind of leaves you on the cliffhanger. But I prefer “We’re going to give you the full story, the full solution to your problem. If you’re offering value and communicating your values as a business, your ethos as a business to the customer, and that aligns – then you get an ongoing relationship.

So it isn’t about making the sale, but finding the right people who really need your solution. And if there is a match, it’s a lot is a lot more organic – and way less pushy.

Mike 6:49
And also just, it’s less ‘icky’. You know, I like being ethical and transparent.

So we offer like, on our site, we offer a moneyback guarantee of 30 days, if you don’t like us – no problem.

You know, that’s not a big deal. We want people to commit to us – thinking “Hey, this is great on both sides. Let’s stick with this.” And it sounds like you guys have a similar ethos, which is really cool.

Laura 7:15
Yes, indeed. And you guys are dealing with software, while we deal with physical products.

But we do offer a money back guarantee period that people can return to us. And more often than not, we actually willingly refund even if it’s beyond a little beyond that period – we’re just say, “You know what, it’s fine. We understand. Sometimes it’s not a match, and that’s okay.”

Fortunately, we don’t need to do it very often. But as a company, we focus on bringing that value. And for some reason, if someone says, you know, “It doesn’t work for me, because of these reasons”, we try to understand what those reasons are, and then give advice give recommendation on the other options available for people.

So this might happen if someone’s let’s say allergic to specific ingredients, or they’re just being lazy, I think laziness is a big, big one. But it’s all about going beyond and not focusing just on your sale, but focusing on what can you do for the customer? How can you help them solve their problem?

Mike 8:32
Yes, and also it’s not about being transactional, it’s actually about “Let’s actually build a really good relationship”.

And actually, almost every grumpy customer, if you handle them correctly and you’re empathetic, they can turn into a big brand ambassador. We got some people who might have had bugs and the way we handled it, they said “Bugs are happen but you have my back – this is great.”

Cool. So a question for you. How did you find customers before you turn to Riddle and quiz marketing?

Laura 9:13
I’m excited to answer this. I love to answer. I actually we’ve been with Riddle – I started pretty much at the same time as I started working on the website.

It was like I said, two years ago – the concept and the company was still in its nascent phase when I thought, I wanted to prepare and give people value through quizzes.

It just seemed logical because no