Ep. #4, Guerrilla Marketing

Kyle Wild: There's a really fine balance to strike here. We invested almost exclusively in community for more than three years. If a social network, a social gaming company, and a publishing e-commerce company could all use the same kind of system, then it was probably a pretty big market.

Support is not a team at Keen. Support's something we all do. If you file a bug, you might be talking to the CTO.

Yaron Sadka: Hi, I'm Yaron Sadka, senior sales engineer at Runscope. You're listening to Road to Growth, a podcast about startup sales organizations brought to you by Heavybit, a nine-month program for developer-facing startups.

Road to Growth is a bi-weekly series that breaks down SaaS sales organizations one piece at a time, from the first person to kick off sales at a company all the way down to the partnership and cohesion with the marketing and product teams, we'll take you through what it takes to build a powerful, fine-tuned sales organization.

If you're interested in being a guest, have a topic for us to discuss, or a role you'd like us to dive into, send an email to roadtogrowth at heavybit.com. In this episode, I'm joined by the CEO of Keen IO, Kyle Wild. We discuss the power of guerrilla marketing in building a strong community around your brand and then selling into that community without betraying the trust you've built.

From Google Analytics to Keen

Welcome everybody to another podcast of Road to Growth. With us today I have Kyle Wild of Keen IO. Kyle, thanks for joining us.

Kyle: Thanks for having me.

Yaron: Appreciate the time. So for those of you who don't know Kyle, CEO, co-founder of Keen IO. Before we get started, we'd like to do kind of just a quick rundown of who you are, where you come from, and how you got to where you are today.

Kyle: Oh, that's a big one. Who are you? Go. So I grew up writing code in the middle of nowhere. My older brother is a programmer, which is a huge advantage if you want to become a programmer.

So in the 90s I was kind of building online businesses and figuring out how to make more money than my allowance by making online businesses like ad-supported content companies, I had a custom graphics company. So I figured I was gonna just not go to college and do online business. The dot com bubble burst and online businesses stopped working.

I didn't really understand why because I was like 13. So I went to college and studied engineering at the University of Illinois, and right after college I got recruited to the Google Analytics team. So that's pretty relevant. So what I did there was developer support, which is essentially talking to developers and hearing them complain about what they can't do and hearing their ideas for what would be better.

I found the organization wasn't super supportive of taking customer feedback and making a better product, at least for developers to do analytics. So that's pretty frustrating. Being in a support role when you don't have product input is pretty frustrating. So I left after a little under a year and started joining startups.

So I did that for about five years, three different companies. I was the first engineer. And these are totally different kinds of companies, but one of the things that I had to do at each of them was build some kind of analytics infrastructure, something to store events at large scale and analyze them.

And the third time I thought I did a pretty decent job of it, and I realized if a social network, a social gaming company, and a publishing e-commerce company could all use the same kind of system, then it was probably a pretty big market.

So the end of twenty eleven I went to my roommates, my then roommates, they were my roommates for about twelve and fifteen years respectively, Dan and Ryan. And they happened to be building Force.com, which is still one of the big cloud developer platforms, and told them kind of what I was thinking and we'd been thinking about starting a company together forever. We tried a couple times. For whatever reason this one stuck, so we quit our jobs and started Keen.

Yaron: Nice. And so that was in 2011, correct?

Kyle: Yeah, we officially quit and started in January 2012.

Yaron: Nice. So what is that, about a little over three years now?

Kyle: Yeah.

Yaron: Doing pretty well?

Kyle: Ups and downs.

Yaron: Well, star of life. Great. So we're mostly focused on the sales part, sometimes marketing, because those tie together.

Guerrilla Everything

Keen's first starting out, there's just the three of you, right? You're just trying to get people to use your product. Eventually you raise funding and now you need to actually grow the company beyond just something that people are using, kind of everyday library kind of stuff.

How do you take that mindset, and what are those pieces of the mindset? There's different avenues that you focus on, right? So you have the marketing channels. Well, you have SEO, SEM, you have different kinds of marketing, and then you also have different kinds of sales. When you first started, what were the different avenues you were using for growth?

Kyle: So when we started, we were using, I mean, anything. We were Techstars company, we didn't get into YC, we were in San Antonio, there weren't a ton of developers there. But we kind of turned that into an advantage because we had to do online community building because there aren't enough developers in San Antonio to drive this kind of business.

And our first splash was a blog post that hit the front page of Hacker News. It was our first blog post. It was about the experience of applying to different accelerators. And that drove people to a splash page.

It gave us the beginning of a Twitter following. We manually followed thousands of people on Twitter. We found influencers in the developer API world and just favored their tweets obsessively till they said something to us or followed us back.

Yaron: So a lot of guerrilla stuff, sounds like.

Kyle: Oh man. We hired Zirtual to go through because at the time I was coming out of a couple different Facebook app businesses and Facebook apps were kind of big at the time. There's a company called AppData that lists the top-ranking Facebook apps by, I think, revenue. It's kind of like App Annie is now for mobile.

And we hired a Zirtual to just go through the list, not the top 50 apps, but everyone from 51 to 500 or something. Because we figure the top fifty apps are busy, and find us contact information for all of them, and then we just emailed them.

Hey, we're a new company. We just started two weeks ago. We're in Techstars down in San Antonio. We're thinking about making something to make analytics better for companies like you.

Can we have 15 minutes of your time and get your advice? This is like the standard customer development outbound email.

You use the word advice like three times and don't try to sell them anything. In the PS, say PS, I'm not trying to sell you anything. We don't even have anything to sell. I really just want your advice because you're so smart and important. And the response rate is pretty good.

And man, guerrilla everything. We still do guerrilla stuff. We're scrappy kids from state school. I don't know, we're just scrappy.

Yaron: So I guess that's kind of permeated through the company then, is that kind of scrappy guerrilla mentality?

Kyle: Yeah, and you can take it too far.

If you're so guerrilla that people start to think that you're cynical, then it can really affect the brand. And if you're gonna build a community, the brand is really the most important part. So it's doing guerrilla stuff in a way that is authentic to whatever kind of brand you're trying to build. It doesn't look desperate.

Yaron: So it's kind of like your first thought isn't necessarily going with that whole enterprise mentality. It's, hey, can we do this in a way which isn't overly expensive, over the top, where that's been done before. Use a little originality, do something a little different way and use some creativity to bring that to the table.

Kyle: Yeah, and then the blog started picking up. We started writing. We didn't have anything to write about in terms of the product. We didn't even know exactly what we were gonna build or in what order. So we just wrote about the experience of starting a company, the experience of going through an accelerator, raising an angel round, hiring people, hiring your friends.

And those blog posts, a number of them really took off. We still get a lot of business from blog posts from 2012.

Yaron: Yeah, that's great. I know Iron had a huge one on Go and Ruby to Go that still to this day is bringing in thousands of people. So that's awesome. I know it's tough for people to sit in front of the computer and kind of blog or write a post. Do you guys have any sort of calendar that you require, you hold yourself to, kind of like one a month or anything like that?

Kyle: No, I mean what we do have is we have an ongoing program. We've done it, I think, every quarter for the last four quarters, called the Writeathon. And it's a whole day.

So on staff we have a full-time, we have a professional storyteller who's a writer, editor, public speaker. And he also was a high school teacher right before we hired him. So this workshop is kind of a perfect thing for him. And one of the things he does is run this writer's workshop where everyone at Keen is invited to attend. We tend to see between twenty-five and thirty-five, I think, percent of the company attend each one.

And the idea is there's improv games at the beginning to kind of loosen you up and get you past your kind of bias toward perfection and start thinking on the fly. And then some structure, some framework, writing, outlining, peer feedback, editor feedback, and then draft. And he's also the person on staff who's the best person to help you get your post published and get it into the queue.

Yaron: So he's full time with you guys?

Kyle: Yeah. So a lot of what we've had to do, because we're forty five people now, the things that we know work, and they worked really well implicitly among ten people, we've built structure to make them work at a larger scale.

So we didn't used to have to have Writeathon, because there were six of us and we all saw the entire business from end to end and we knew the impact. But hiring a new person and they come in and they write one blog post, it doesn't take off, they're like, oh geez, well, I'm not earning my keep, I can't do that again. And kind of getting them over that hump, we realized that adding some structure is really helpful.

Yaron: Nice. So blogging is a big one for you guys.

Events on the Cheap

What other pieces, I guess, on a marketing perspective, helped you drive your sales while you didn't have a sales team, if any?

Kyle: Yeah, I mean even with a sales team, our growth is still largely community oriented. So we do events. Events are really cheap the way that we've done them. They've been incredibly cheap, like when we moved into this space in Heavybit.

This space is beautiful. And during some of our tenure here we were doing more events than several other companies combined. And I'm like, you guys are crazy. This is free. We get access to this awesome space and it's so impressive.

Taking advantage of what you get for free is huge.

We had some investors that had a lot of Twitter followers and a lot of AngelList followers. That's free. All you have to do is send them an email like, can you please share this tomorrow at nine? And they will. If you're not doing that, even though it's free, that's not scrappy.

So we did a lot of community events. We started a thing called Happy Data Hour. That's just a happy hour with a bunch of data geeks. Very low structure. And then we found other companies who were further along than us to help us run those events.

So one of the first ones we do with KISSmetrics and Segment. We've done them with DataHero, we've done them with Iron. So we've put together these events with companies who are either further along or they just don't have a hundred percent community overlap with us.

So there's a different kind of infrastructure heavy backend developer that uses Iron, for instance. We have a customer base among those, but we were historically a lot stronger among front-end and mobile developers.

So finding other companies to go in on it, it's one of those things, it cuts the bill in half because you can be like, okay, we'll get pizza, you get beer, whatever it is. And it doubles the reach. So we started doing that in San Francisco and now we've done them in, I'll have to check the numbers, at least five or six countries, at least thirty cities.

Yaron: And is this while somebody's traveling over there?

Kyle: Yeah. Typically it's like somebody's already got a reason to travel there. Maybe we have a customer visit. Maybe we're pitching an investor there.

Yaron: Because I know a big thing for a lot of startups is cost when you talk about events. So you have to travel. So now you have to send somebody there. That's airfare, that's hotel, that's food, and then on top of that now the event. So how did you guys kind of circumvent that or even justify it in your own?

Kyle: I mean we did one in Tokyo. Somebody flew me out to give a talk and they paid for the flight.

And I was like, hey, can I move my returning flight three days later? Doesn't it cost you guys anything? And they said yeah. So I had a couple extra days to build a network, put an event together.

We had maybe 30 or 40 developers show up. So if you're already in a city, it also creates a lot of urgency to attend if you're just like, hey, we're gonna be in Berlin Thursday next week. All of a sudden all the other calendar things those people had on Thursday of next week, those things feel less urgent.

So we found being in a city you're not from is actually a great way to drive people to attend and motivate them to attend.

We've done events where we actually paid the full price, but it's pretty rare. And those only when they're really strategic.

Yaron: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of what it is is just asking for things you want, which a lot of people don't do.

Kyle: Yeah, I think entrepreneurs have to. That's the job description.

Well, another thing that we did that was really successful is when we go to a city to plan an event, we find a local company who has the kind of community we want to reach there. And we ask them to provide the space and we'll provide the food, or we ask them to split the bill. And then their marketers and our marketers work together on how to generate demand.

Because when we first went to Memphis, we didn't have any Twitter followers in Memphis. We didn't have any customers in Memphis. How are we going to market an event there? So we found local companies in these different cities and had them co-sponsor with us.

A Team for Community

Yaron: And is this you driving the marketing efforts? Do you have a marketing person in-house who's taking charge of this before, you've now raised, I think, Series A, right? Before that, who was heading that?

Kyle: So our first employee and I were probably the most active for community stuff for the first year. But when you're six people, for us there was nobody whose job is pure, just marketing. We all did some degree of it. At one point we had five of our six people had a blog post with more than 10,000 uniques on it.

Yaron: That's impressive.

Kyle: Which was pretty awesome. And the sixth actually I think has one now, but it didn't count for that time. So we kind of did it like everything else we did at that stage. We just handed things around and nothing fell on the floor because you're all in the same room.

And then maybe our eighth person is a community evangelist guy named Justin Johnson, you probably know.

Yaron: Yeah.

Kyle: Because everyone knows him. When I met Justin, we had like 5,000 Facebook friends in common or something ludicrous. It's like over a hundred Facebook friends in common. I'd never met him. In our LinkedIn's, you know when you meet one of these people and you just have so many different connections to them, you realize that they're some kind of weird superconnector.

So Justin was a formerly kind of a community and sales guy. He'd started his own company that was developer community oriented. And then he went to General Assembly and did like a twelve-week developer.

Yaron: Right, like the intensive.

Kyle: Yeah, the intensive. And he came out of it and he was like, I want to keep developing my dev chops, but I want to use my skill set that I built all through my twenties somewhere. And I was like, well, he came to me for advice and I just gave him a job offer. But he was the sales guy, so he probably came to me for a job offer. He just knew how to get it.

So then we started handing this off to Justin and it really started to explode. And now, I mean the company is divided into four major groups and one of them's community. We hired the head of community from SendGrid about a year after that, a guy named Tim Falls.

Yaron: Know him as well.

Kyle: They're both great. And we hired SJ out of Mashery about three months ago.

Yaron: And so their full time jobs is just to drive community?

Kyle: Drive community awareness. Tell our story, get us out there, and interact with community.

I mean, we do new stuff all the time too. This summer we did our first webinar. It was awesome. We didn't know webinars are a thing.

I'm not a webinar audience member, but there are a lot of them out there. And so we're doing a follow up of that next week.

So our Slack community, which is slack.keen.io, a little plug. Our Slack community is now over 500 people and way more active than the IRC channels of companies at our stage. So I think that making a move toward Slack has really helped.

Yaron: And anybody can join.

Kyle: Anybody can join. And we do scheduled events on that to keep activity consistent. So every Friday morning there's a scheduled talk with a topic and sometimes a guest.

And that allows us to keep re-promoting this, like essentially we're saying every week, hey everyone, we have a Slack channel for our community. But you can't just say that every week. You have to have news. So by having

Yaron: slack.keen.io.

Kyle: Yeah.

Yaron: Just, okay.

Kyle: So by having a new event every week, it keeps it interesting and fresh for us and for the community, and it also gives us an authentic reason to keep talking about the fact that we have it.

Community Meets Sales

Yaron: Right. So now taking that, pivoting kind of towards sales, are you following up with any of these people in terms of leads, or what are you doing now with this community that you have? Right, they're interacting with each other, they love your product. Is there someone out there reaching out to them saying, hey, what are you doing with us? Turn that into customer stories and kind of work in that sales piece.

Kyle: Community and sales have a really interesting interface. I think that companies who invest too early in sales, sometimes their community can suffer, and companies who invest too or I guess too heavily in one or the other can weaken the other one.

We invested almost exclusively in community for more than three years.

What that's done is people really, really trust us because they've never had somebody call them up trying to sell them anything.

Now, what that means is we actually have this brand impact already in place. So if we were to go hire a salesperson, when you picture like a used car salesperson, and they do exist in software, like they're out there, I'm sure you guys have met 'em, it wouldn't work. Our customers would, they would run screaming to the exits.

There's a really fine balance to strike here between how do you make sure that you're generating opportunity, which is what community can do. It's generating potential, and that you're seizing the opportunity. You're benefiting from some of the potential that you're generating.

Because if you over-index on how do I seize the opportunity, how do I get revenue out of these relationships, you're not going to get as many new relationships. So it's a long way of saying we're still figuring it out.

Yaron: I mean, I don't think anybody has the perfect formula, right? That's the beauty of the space that we're in. Everybody has their own different way.

I've been a part of two different sales teams and neither has done it exactly the same. In fact, very different ends of the spectrum. So everybody has those growing pains.

Everybody Does Support

For you guys, have you started hiring a sales team? Are you looking to hire a sales team? Is that something you're looking to avoid?

Kyle: We have a sales team of four people, one sales engineer and myself, I kind of do a little bit of everything, but I'm more than half focused on the sales team. We organized ourselves into a revenue team, which owns the self-service revenue. We have a very broad base of customers who put in a credit card and never have to talk to us.

And that's historically what we've built our business on. So this group owns the self-service revenue piece and enterprise sales revenue and the customer success component of enterprise sales revenue. And they're the organizers of our support function.

So support is not a team at Keen. Support's something we all do on a rotation, but where it's owned and organized has to be somewhere.

So we've gotten some benefits from that. There are thousands of integrations out there in production and when these people file support tickets, we all see them. And you can turn on your Intercom filters. You don't have to get it, but I get pretty much every support ticket. When I sat down today I knew that you'd sent me a support ticket.

Yaron: Well I got 80 responding to my support ticket right away. So I was like, you're on the vibe team. I didn't know you guys were doing support now.

Kyle: Yeah, I saw the conversation. She's like, yeah, everybody does support here.

There are tons of benefits to that. You can tell I came from a support team that didn't have enough authority back at Google Analytics. This is in reaction to that.

If you file a bug and it's like, oh, there's something going on with the iOS client, you might be talking to the CTO. And that bug's gonna get fixed probably. It doesn't necessarily have to go through a traditional bureaucratic process to get handled. And we spread the knowledge and customer empathy across the company.

And that includes customers who should be buying our enterprise product, but they don't know it yet. So there are things that people on the revenue team are maybe more attuned to that, but everyone's getting better and better attuned to that. So if somebody says we really like the product, but we wish we could write our own MapReduce jobs. You can do that with our enterprise product.

We don't really advertise it, but if somebody asks that, we'll tell them, oh actually you can do that with our enterprise product. Keen Pro. Would you like me to introduce you to somebody on the Keen Pro team? So it's still inbound even among our own customer base.

Yaron: And do you have an enterprise page? Is there any way they can find this out without having to contact you?

Kyle: Yeah, they can. So we're actually launching our Keen Pro page this week, but we have a plans page where they can kind of see, but it's like a bunch of checkboxes. And I think that when we see them we know what they mean, but when the customer sees them it's like, what does this mean, raw data stream? I don't know what that means.

But for us it has a lot of meaning. We know all the ways that thing can be used. So we're working on that. We just relaunched our website last week, so this is all pretty new for us.

So our community team and revenue team are actually really, really close. We work really closely together. And that's something I'm pretty, I wouldn't have it any other way. Because if you put those things at odds, like it happens in a lot of companies, it's worse in open source companies, but it still happens in these pay as you go moving into the enterprise kind of developer companies.

When those functions are at odds, the customer can feel it.

Because it's kind of like, oh, I've got my ally over there at the company and I've got my enemy over there. We want to be allies across the board.

So support is one of the channels where these things come from. And then just the community team is out there and getting FaceTime with people and hearing. We always like to ask for what's going great, what's going poorly, if you could tell Keen to make any feature next, what would it be? And sometimes they'll say a feature that we actually have already built and it's in paid beta right now and they just don't know about it.

So keeping the community team educated on what the enterprise package is and why it's valuable, that's pretty key.

Keeping Everyone in Lockstep

Yaron: So you touched on an important point there, is educating your own internal team on what's available and what isn't. You have sales, you have community, how do you make sure that they're kind of in lockstep? Because if you're talking to an engineering team, you know exactly what's going on. But not everybody's gonna be privy to that information since you may or may not even interact with the engineering team on a daily basis as the company grows. Do you guys do anything to kind of keep that tight amongst yourselves?

Kyle: We're not so big that that's become a problem yet. We kind of have a product function. I said there are really four major groups, but we kind of have a fifth, which is just Ryan, my co-founder. And he's kind of the product clearinghouse.

He takes inputs from community, from all of our sort of marketing and conversation and support efforts, from sales, deals in process and deals that we lose because of a given kind of piece of the product that's missing. Deals on the horizon and obviously all of the engineering roadmap stuff. He takes all those inputs and makes decisions. I don't think that will scale indefinitely, but he's a pretty smart guy, so we'll rely on him for now.

So one thing we do is we do board meetings every six weeks, which is pretty fast. And we share that content with the whole company. We're pretty transparent about that. We also have a weekly AMA across the company.

So if somebody's curious about, hey, can we sell this yet or not? Like I heard somebody was on it in beta, but then somebody said, well you can't sell it yet because it's not done, so if somebody has that kind of curiosity, we encourage them to ask it publicly to spread the knowledge.

Yaron: And is this something everybody has to attend or is it just kinda like an

Kyle: It's not required, but we do Metrics Monday, which is like we go over our company wide goals and how we're tracking every week on Monday. Then sometimes it takes fifteen minutes, sometimes it takes thirty minutes. It's kind of hard to predict, but it rolls into the AMA. Neither of them is required, but the attendance is really high, like 90% or more.

Yaron: Yeah. Well it seems like you guys have a really good thing going over there at Keen. I know you've achieved a lot even without a sales team, so kudos to you guys. I know that's pretty hard for people to do.

But again, thank you for coming in and sharing that information with us. We really appreciate it. Best of luck to you and yours, because I know you now have a new baby. So congratulations. Hopefully you're getting your sleep at night.

Kyle: Doing my best. Thanks for having me.

Yaron: That's all we have time for today. Questions? Feedback? Contact me at roadtogrowth at heavybit.com. Thanks again to Heavybit for sponsoring our program.

To learn more about Heavybit's nine-month program for developer-facing startups, visit heavybit.com. And while you're there, make sure to check out their library. It's packed with great educational talks from developer company founders and industry leaders.

Thanks again for joining us. Have a great week.