Episode 20 – How to scale a startup – with zero marketing budget

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