Grow your e-commerce business with your SuperFans!

 

Isar Meitis the host of Business Growth Accelerator in conversation with our CEO, Jay Gibb, explores how a contact picker can be leveraged to grow via affiliate marketing.

Via anecdotal evidence from CloudSponge customers such as Stitch Fix, JustFab, and many more – discover just how a single button can be game-changing when growing an e-commerce business via word-of-mouth marketing.

Podcast Transcript

Isar Meitis:
Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and every now and then I, or everybody I guess, stumbles upon something that is unique. What do I mean by unique? It’s a niche solution to a broader topic or a problem. So in this particular case, I’m looking at marketing, and within marketing, there are many aspects of marketing. One of those aspects is organic growth, and everybody likes organic growth.

Why do we like organic growth? Well,

(A) because it has lower tax or lower cost of the acquisition comes with organic because it’s organic, and (B) in most cases, it has higher lifetime value and higher conversion.

So you basically win on all ends of the marketing equation if you want, if you can increase your organic traffic. Now, there are many different ways to increase your organic traffic, but. One of them is if you can lower the friction for your super fans to share your value with others, you gain a huge benefit over your competition if you cannot do that.

Now, this last sentence that I said, is a quote from Jay Gibb who is our guest today, and we are going to geek about exactly these topics on how can you maximize the traffic that’s already coming to your website, and how can you maximize the value that your super fans can provide and enhance the stuff that you’re already doing.

Jay, for the last 15 years of being the founder and the CEO of CloudSponge, which is a company that provides exactly these kind of services, they enable companies to empower other people to share how good they are. And they also, I help companies grow organic traffic in a more efficient way. Hence he’s obviously an expert on this topic. And like I said, it’s a very unique niche approach to growing, marketing and growing sales. And hence, I’m really excited to have him on the show.

Jay, welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator.

Jay Gibb:
Thank you for having me, Isar.

Isar Meitis:
I wanna go back to when did you figure this out, right? Somewhere in your career, and you’ve done a bunch of things before you founded, CloudSponge. When did you figure out that this is, quote-unquote, a goldmine that is not tapped into in a high enough efficiency or frequency?

Jay Gibb:
It was, the story, like the origin story is really, kind of a scratch your own itch, origin story, but I think a lot, a lot of people Yeah. Can, can relate to, And we were, it was 2009 probably. And at that point in time, I was kind of making a transition from being a software developer to being more on the entrepreneurial part of my professional journey. Excuse me. and we were, we were building a product called, well called CloudSponge.

I guess we didn’t really have a name at the time, but we, we started calling it CloudSponge and you know, if you remember 2009, 2010 time period, the cloud was kind of a new thing for retail, right? (Yeah). The idea, the idea of, you know, not, you know, having your own music on, you know, CDs or not sort of having your email. On your hard drive. (Yep). On your computer or not having your contacts on your hard drive on your computer, (Yep), That was all sort of new. (Yep).

And we had this idea back then, that there was a business opportunity to create a tool that retail could use to, as they started to trust the cloud. Like Gmail and Hotmail at the time, right? And, and Yahoo and all these Webmail service providers and they started to store all their emails in the cloud and not really use Thunderbird or Outlook for desktop or you know, those kinds of desktop clients. We had this strategy in mind where we could say, listen, let’s provide a service to retail that allows them to sponge their contacts from the cloud and keep a physical copy of it on their hard drive. Because people are not comfortable trusting the cloud just yet.

Isar Meitis:
Right. Not like we are today. So more of a backup. That was the original idea. Yeah?

Jay Gibb:
That’s right. The idea was like, you know, you can go ahead and trust these services and we’re gonna be kind of an insurance policy for you. (Yeah). So you can, you can give us permission to have access to  you know, your Gmail contacts, your Hotmail contacts or whatever, and our software will basically keep a copy of that for you so that if the cloud ever goes away, like you still. Your data. (Right, Okay) and so we built that. We built this thing that basically connected with all the different places where people stored their address books in the cloud, right.

And was, you know, dozens, couple dozen different, you know, ISPs and, you know, like the ones I’ve already listed Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, et cetera. And during that journey, Of, of engineering this solution and integrating with all those different services we saw over and over and over again that other developers were also building. Similar integrations, right? (Yeah). Like we were bumping into other developers doing this on Stack Overflow and Google Developer Forum forums and Yahoo Developer forums, and it was like a thing that PE people were doing.

They weren’t doing it for the same retail result that we were sort of after. They were doing it for their own reasons, but they had all the same struggles and all the same questions of how do I do this? How do I parse this API result and all those types of problems. And so we could see that this was, this was something that there was an opportunity to create an abstraction layer. Okay. Sort of distinguishing from our like business strategy. We built this thing that was basically the best on the market for, you know, connecting with all these address book sources.

And then, you know, the business strategy, the retail strategy that I described, like it didn’t really work out. Like we didn’t really have a good marketing strategy. We didn’t have enough budget to really like get it out to retail the way that it needed to be. And so as we were considering like, what do we do with this business, we decided to pivot and say, listen, like we’ve already built something that’s got an extraordinary amount of value to all these developers that work for all these other companies so that they don’t have to do their own direct integration. With Google and Yahoo and AOL and everybody else. So let’s just turn this, instead of it being a retail strategy, let’s turn it into a B2B software as a service, basically like a API that people can consume.

And so we did, we put it up on cloudflare.com, we pivoted the business, made it a, a B2B tool, and started selling it. And I immediately went back out to all those developer communities and said, Hey, by the way, like if you don’t wanna build this over and over and over again for every single. Place where people stir their contacts. (Yeah). Yeah. Just come to CloudSponge, pay us a monthly fee and you know, you can use our single point of integration and we’ll handle all, all the hard stuff for you. Right? Yeah. And then, so this is two, that was 2010. and, and then after that is where we figured out why is everybody buying this from us? We didn’t know that at first. We just knew that everybody needed it, right? Because we had seen them all building it, and then as soon as we went out there, some other competing companies, like one of them was called Octa and it was acquired by Facebook, by Mark Zuckerberg in 2011, I think.

And so they just vanished off the market and orphaned a whole bunch of customers. And then, a company called Plao had one, and as soon as they saw us like pursuing that product, they immediately just abdicated and gave us all their customers. They didn’t want to do it anymore. So they gave us everybody that was using the Contact Picker, I think they called it Contact Grabber. And that story went on and on and on.

And we basically started to absorb all the different companies out there that were sort of, that needed a way to, you know, use address books on their websites. And then we were able to observe, like we now, we have hundreds of customers using it within a year, and we could talk to them and look at their websites and figure out like, what’s the use case for this? Like, what are they doing with it? and you know, I think your audience and yourself, like everybody’s seen this stuff before. It’s like the, basically the like an Add from Address Button. That you see right on websites for, you know, inserting a com separated list of email addresses into like a refer a friend form, or creating a recipient list for an e-card or an event invitation, or a wedding invitation, or a wishlist, or it’s you know, Add from Address Book to quickly find everybody, you know, on a social network like Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. (Yeah). Right?

And so in those things, all those situations, those use cases that exist around the internet where you want to have a button on your website that says something like, you know, ‘Pick From Contacts’ or ‘Add from Address Book’ or whatever. And when your user clicks on it, you want to give them a menu of options like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, et cetera. And then when they authenticate and they give you permission to read their contacts, then you get to give ’em an, what we call it a Contact Picker. (Yeah).

So an alphabetized list of all your contacts show up and you can select the ones you want and submit the contact picker and then sort of, sort of follow through with whatever the customer’s use cases, right? (Yeah). Yeah. So it’s kind of a long answer to your question, but I mean, in there is where we sort of discovered the opportunity in that journey. It was like the first place where we discovered it was where we saw other people building something similar to what we were building. And then the second place where was where we had enough people using it that we could learn from their like use case. And then sort of zero in on the, our positioning and our marketing messaging around like precisely what are the reasons why a contact picker is useful for a business.

Isar Meitis:
Before we dive into answering the question, you just ask yourself, which I think it’s a great question to ask as a follow-up, I wanna summarize two points that are really, really important out of this from an entrepreneurial business leadership perspective. One is customer feedback. Seeking real customer feedback is maybe the most important thing you need and can do for your business, meaning. You would have not found that out.

If you are not curious about the use cases of multiple clients and probably literally going and asking them, okay, now you connected this thing, what are you actually doing with this? And how are you integrating this? And what’s the benefit that you see from doing this? And then you would’ve still been a vanilla product that is just a backend integration solution, which is not a bad thing, but it would’ve led you to what you’re doing today.

Based on the fact the company has been around for 15 years, it’s probably pretty helpful. So I think that’s a very, very important point. the other really critical point in that story is not falling in love with your original idea. Like we, especially entrepreneurs, we’re very passionate about what we do, and you have this great idea and you’re willing to climb Mount Everest for it. But every now and then there’s a fork in the road. And you may wanna consider the fork in the road if it makes more sense from a business perspective, from a technical perspective, from a changing environment perspective, right?

Maybe your market has changed and too many entrepreneurs saying, no, I’m gonna conquer that mountain and I don’t care about anything. And they actually miss opportunities to create a better product, a better service, and a better value for their audience and more successful for themselves. So two really important points. Now I’ll go back to the question you asked. What are the benefits of adding this button on the website? Because there are many cases, like I said, you, mentioned multiple use cases. I’m sure you have some statistics on what’s what happens if you allow this kind of form with or without that button.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, and I think the answer is different by use case. Right? Fair. Like, let’s, let’s start with the most extreme example of a social network. Okay? So just, let’s just role-play. Let’s say that you’re building a social network, right? So you, you’re, your job is to get people to create the profiles on your website. Yeah. And then networking, like finding a way to connect with other humans, right? (Yeah).

Well, it’s, I would argue that it’s literally impossible for you to succeed without giving each of those people a way to use their contacts to not only find their existing network on your network. But then invite the rest of their network to your network. Sure. And the reason why I’m so sure about that is go to any network that exists. I don’t, I don’t care which one you choose. right? (Yeah).

Go to like, Mighty Networks. Go to, you know, LinkedIn, Yahoo or LinkedIn. Twitter, Facebook. Instagram. I don’t care which one you choose. Yelp. Even Yelp is one of our customers that uses it for this Nextdoor is one of our customers. (Yeah). That uses it for this. (Yeah).

Like there is not one successful social network business on the internet period that doesn’t have an Add from Address Book functionality. So that’s like one really extreme case where the metrics are either you have it and you succeed, or you don’t have it and you fail. Right. Really, like,

Isar Meitis:
Yeah. Over there. The use case is, by the way I’ve been a LinkedIn user for as long as I can remember, right? So for a very long time. Still to this day, every probably two months or so, they send me an email message. They’re like, oh, would you like to add your Google address book into the thing to see who else? You know? I’m like, no, because I think I am already connected with all the people that are on my address book and a lot more but they keep on chasing that because like you’re saying, that’s their way to know a lot more about me, know what to show me, know what I care about, and potentially maybe get a few new people into the network.

So over there, the use case is very obvious. Let’s go to less obvious use cases and more, you know, in the B2B world where, you know, B2C maybe. Okay, like you’re saying, you, you want to give people promo codes, like, you know, put in five friends and we’ll give you promo codes for your friends. What are use cases in the B2B world where it gets, I think, not as obvious

Jay Gibb:
In B2B – yeah. Most, most of our strongest use cases are, are b2c. like the one you just described in, in the B2B case. You know, one of the ones that we see often and, you know, a, a, a popular, a popular tool called Envision uses us for this, where they have a tool that, where people can create designs. (Okay), you know, to, for like product designs or website designs. Oh, okay. These kinds of designs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, they wanna, they need a way for those creators to invite their team or their clients or, you know, some, some sort of part of their network and they have, obviously, they have ways where you can type in each of your teammates, email addresses one by one, and invite them all individually, and they have a button right there on the same interface where it’s like, well, if you wanna make this quick, like just click on the ad from a dress book button and it launches the CloudSponge Contact Picker. And then you can just find all your coworkers or your client’s email addresses or whatever, select them all and invite them to the project that you’re creating. Right?

So, you know, that’s the invitations, which is kind of a, a use case that also bleeds a little bit into b2c, where we’re talking about event invitations and, e-cards, right? Where you’re, you know, you want to send out a holiday card to. You know, a hundred people, fans, family, et cetera. And it’s more of an invitation use case. And the idea of, you know, most of these ones, the ones that, the ones that don’t use CloudSponge, what they do generally, and you’ve probably done this if you, if anybody listing has, has, has created a, you know, like a Christmas card or any kind of holiday card, you’ve been faced with that interface at some.

Where it’s like first name, last name, email, first name, last name, email, over and over and over again. Or there’ll be a button somewhere where you can like download a template of a spreadsheet. Like an Excel spreadsheet? Yeah, like a CSV file. Yep. And then you go and you fill it all in, and when you’re done, you upload it to them. (Right). And then our customers that have that problem, that UI problem right there in that same interface, they’ll just have like, if you want to, if you wanna skip all these other worst options, just click on add from a dress book, select everybody you want, and you’re done. Right? It’s all populated directly from your address book. Right.

Isar Meitis:
So, yeah. Two things I really like about what you said, because I think both are in the heart of so many b2b. Staff today. One is collaboration, right? So many tools provide for collaboration today, whether within company or outside of the company. You do a forum of specific people for a specific project, and all the people in the project needs to be involved because you want your subcontractors or your suppliers, or depending on the company, you want them to be able to communicate on this topic altogether, so everybody sees all the messages. And this could be, like you said, any collaboration platform, either within a specific tool or in Slack or whatever the case may be.

You need a way to connect with multiple people that are not necessarily from the same location. So if they were, well, maybe it’s easy to copy the list and paste it, but if they’re, you know, in different locations. And I think what you’re saying makes a lot of sense. And the other is events. I think events is more, companies are finding out. Too many are not yet, events are a huge, powerful tool like your own events, like not going to. A traditional trade show or you know, the, you know, Chamber of Commerce event. But having your own event is an amazing, amazing tool to grow businesses and build relationships and nurture these relationships and, own the messaging that happens, and so on. And, then, like I said, you need to invite people.

And these people, again, will be people from a multiple aspects of. A wider variety of sources. So they’re not necessarily just gonna be people from your organization or even people from your industry because there might be suppliers from outside the industry that still supply stuff that might be relevant for the event. So I think these two use cases are extremely relevant. What are. Some best practices because so far we talked about a button and I think now we e established that this button is very helpful. What are some best practices beyond that? On when I create some kind of a contact form for whatever the case may be. And again, we all have contact forms on our website, whether it is to talk to a salesperson to learn more about us, to connect with us, and so on. All of that is stuff that we need to know and we need to. And so what are best practices for contact forms to, that people need to use in order to make the most out of what they’re already doing on their website?

Jay Gibb:
Well, so let’s distinguish just to make sure that we’re, we’re talking about the same thing, right? So contact form and, and I’m, I got personal beef, with this, that’ll probably come through here a little bit, but, Like mail, mail, two links are designed the, the purpose of a mail two link, which is like a lot of basically like the most lowest common denominator of a contact form on a website. Yeah. Those are meant for a hyperlink on a website to allow a visitor of the website to conveniently communicate with the people that run the website. (Yeah. Right). Yep.

So that’s like a contact us, like support link or whatever. not in a situation where an address book is useful, correct? Right. a contact form again is, is like a, basically a, a slightly more elaborate version of a mail two link. Instead of using a mail two link, it’s. It’s like, what’s your question and, and we’ll send it to the company for you, kind of thing. Right. The beef that I’m talking about is where people, web designers, for some reason, probably 20 years ago, started using mail two links as referral links.

As a way for me to not communicate with the owners of the website, but for me to somehow use that mail to link to communicate with my friends about your website, Yeah. So now it launches a, a click it and it launches, you know, my email client, which only works half the time. Yeah. But, but the two field is left. Correct. I’m no, I’m, no, I’m no longer emailing like, you know, essar business growth accelerator.com. Like now I’m, I’m expected to use that two field to type in my friend’s email addresses and maybe the body of the email is like prepopulated with some message or like a unique referral link or something like that. (Yeah).

I, you know, that doesn’t work. That’s one of the things that we see people coming to CloudSponge  Like StitchFix, it’s a thing that they currently have and they regret it because it doesn’t work and they’ve got no way to measure it and see whether it’s like how, how often people use it and how many emails they send with it and that kind of thing. And so they’ll come to, to us and they’ll replace their existing, basically like, tell your friends about us with a mail to, like, they’ll replace it with something that when they click it, they. The, our contact picker, they can select their friends and then it, then it either, then it opens up the mail two link with all those email addresses populated for them in the two field or the BCC field. Or it’ll push them into, you know, an interface where they can send an email to their friends. Like an invitation, for example. Invitation or like a referral code or something along those lines. Yeah.

Isar Meitis:
Yeah. Okay, so, so let’s talk about the latter, right? The, the, the second type of contact form. What are best practices to make the most out of it, other than that button? Meaning, if I wanna evaluate the form that I already have to know that it’s not good or that I should make adjustments to it. Like what a process that I can use in order to understand what I can do.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, I think one of the, the first thing that I always suggest, and I’m sure you would suggest as well, is to figure out how you’re gonna measure it. Cuz I think a lot of people just kind of go with their gut and they don’t realize that if you don’t measure something, you don’t improve it. right? Yeah. And so you want to, you want to start with a measurement for forms like that of, You know, if you can imagine enumerator and a denominator in a simple like, sort of percentage formula, the denominator in the formula should be like The number, total number of email, the total number of people that successfully submit the form. Okay. Right? Yep. and you’re gonna divide that number, into, or you’re gonna, you’re gonna an enumerator of the formula.

You’re gonna use the total number of email addresses that are inputted into the form. Okay? Right. So if I’ve got one user, Just to keep it simple for, for the beginning, I’ve got one user that inputs one email address. Right? That’s one divided by one. (Yeah). I’ve got one user that inputs two email addresses. It’s two divided by one, et cetera, right? Yeah. And you keep going that way. And that way if you, if you start there and you just start measuring that, and you get this number of, basically it’s like your, you’re viral coefficient, right?

How many, how many people are using this form to invite one or more other people, right? You wanna get that number as high as it can be. you’ll, you’ll find that like one of the best practices there is. Basically make it so that people don’t have to type email addresses. That’s what all of our customers discover is. They’ll find that, you know, even though, you know, with a, a form that’s got the Add from Address Book link beside it, even if only one out of 20 people use that link. Vast majority of people don’t wanna use their address book and they’ll type email addresses no matter.

No matter whether it’s present or not, 19 outta 20 people are still just gonna type an email address. Right. One out of 20 people that uses it will generate a half a total of half of the referrals that are sent by that form. Right? So you’ll, you can, you can double the effectiveness of that one form by adding a button. It makes it so that you’re super fans, the people that really want to use this form a lot, and send that referral code as many times as possible. Like if you add that button for those people, they will completely eclipse everybody else. Right? So you’ll get like a really incredible return on that investment.

Isar Meitis:
I’ve got an interesting question for you, and maybe it’s a conversation you and me should have off the podcast, but it’s still an interesting question. I’m gonna ask it. did you ever consider reversing the process? Meaning as a user I get to fill in, you know, details of myself, and or other people, at least wife and kids and stuff like that regularly. So kind of like, you know, Google has their form feeling thing, but if I had a Chrome extension, let’s say as an example, that’s connected to my account, that can pull addresses that I can use, every time there’s a relevant form available, I, I will use that meaning from a consumer end perspective.

I see the more I think about use cases of stuff that you’re talking about, when I have to put other people’s email addresses, and again, it’s usually closer people, but sometimes it’s friends and family be because, you know, we, I found this great discount to a show that is here in. So what do I do today? I go there and I copy the link and I put it on WhatsApp, and I create a WhatsApp group and I, but if, if there’s a thing there, let people know about the show and I could just say, oh, I wanna send it to this, this, this, and this. I think I will use that. And I think just out of the top of my head, I think that’s an interesting use case that I don’t know if I haven’t seen that again other than the Google Autofill kind of thing. But then it’s only my personal information.

Jay Gibb:
The answer is yes, we have talked about that. and, and we’re just, at this point, we’re just not really set up for a two front war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, cuz that’s, you’re right, it’s a useful use case, but it’s a completely separate business. It’s a totally different like correct like target market and marketing strategy and positioning and everything about it. Would be a, it would have to be a totally different brand. And, and, and I’m not sure if we, I’m really careful not to split focus.

I say no to things more often than Yes when it comes to enhancements and, you know, pivots if you will. Yeah. I agree with you that that is, that’s something that I think a lot of people would find useful and they would, it would be, Something where you could, you could trust this company that’s providing this extension that you’re using and you have control over, and it’s in your computer, it’s in your browser. You might trust that more than you would trust an Add from Address Book button that’s just on a website, out party website in In the Wild, right? (Yeah).

So for those 19 people, You know, out of 20 people that wouldn’t choose to click the button, those people, you might end up with something where, you know, they’re like, oh, I don’t need to click that button cuz I’ve already got my address book right here and my fingertips and I can kind of le use it. Almost like a, like a password manager, right? (Yeah), Exactly. From like a, from a technical perspective, right? Yeah. So I totally get where you’re, where you’re coming from. And I love it and I might use it myself as well, but it, but it, but as far as, you know, you know, clouds sponge, having the bandwidth and, and, and the ability to properly succeed at pursuing that opportunity, probably not something that we would do, or at least not right now.

Isar Meitis:
I think that’s good business advice. Focus on what you know you’re good at and don’t chase, you know, something else that may or may not fit the other stuff that you really know how to do. What are other best practices for these kind of forms or people that people should follow from a UI/UX perspective, that, that you’ve seen that help other than adding that button?

Jay Gibb:
You know, I think select all is something that comes up a lot. Where, yeah. You know, a lot of people will sort of get on the more spammy end of the spectrum that makes us uncomfortable. Right. Where they’re gonna want to have a way to just take everything from somebody’s address book and do something with it. Yeah. and I would say that’s, awful practice. That’s, the opposite of a best practice, right? Absolutely not. (Okay). There’s only a very few situations where I would suggest that ingesting somebody’s entire address book is okay and a good idea, and all of them, the thing they have all in common is consent.

The user needs to be like fully understanding what they’re doing, what you’re gonna do with this data, why you’re doing it the way you’re doing it, and how they can reverse this decision if they change their minds. Right. and so I think one of the things that I end up, you know, as I go through our, our customers and, you know, we do occasional audits and sort of, reviews of their UIs and, and help them improve and succeed. That’s one of the things that’s on the, on the checklist.

Isar Meitis:
So you’re saying one of the top things is, is clarity. Like what is the purpose of this form? Exactly what we’re gonna do with the data you’re gonna give us, what we’re not going to do with the data you’re gonna give us and, and I assume there’s always, well not always, but I assume a lot of times there’s some kind of a carrot. Right. Do this and we will offer you x.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, there’s, there’s always something, right? Even if it’s just, you know, like some altruistic thing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be financially motivated. Most of the time the successful ones have some kind of double-sided referral program where, you know, both the sender and the recipient are gonna get something when it converts, right? in, in those cases, you know, I think it’s, The conversion rate is going to be better and the sort of durability of the feature and of the business is gonna be better if you just let the users, select people individually and not provide a select all option, right?

Because you’re just gonna water down your results and you’re just gonna come off as being kind of scummy if you’re not careful with that. Yeah. and in that same, you know, that same kind of category, As you know, you know, sort of being transparent with the user, making sure that they, they know the other thing that all the best ones have, and some of them have taken this really far. Like one of our customers is, is Wise, formerly known as TransferWise. Yeah. And they’ve taken this one to an extreme that I never saw anywhere else, but, showing the, showing your user precisely the message that you were gonna send to their friends on their behalf, rather than just having them wonder like, do I want to click this button? I don’t know. I don’t know what is gonna be sent to my friends. Right? (Yep).

You, you kind of want to have a, you know, at least a window. It doesn’t necessarily have to be editable. although you can make it so that your user can add their own custom message, right? That’s another part, another thing I would suggest. but making it so that they can at least visualize the email that’s gonna be sent to their friends as close to what is actually sent. Like, if you can make it like pixel perfect, like a templated thing that looks like an email and yeah, they can feel really confident that they know precisely what’s gonna happen when they click the send button. it’s gonna improve the conversion rate of those forms dramatically. Right? And then the

Isar Meitis:
extreme, again, going back to full transparency, right? The more transparent you’re gonna be, the more likely people are gonna use that referral setup that you’ve created because they would feel more comfortable that they’re actually doing good, versus there’s some kind of, you know, other motives that they’re not aware of, that they probably wanna avoid. So, I think this is great.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, transparency is key. And then, you know, I guess the sort of, the other thing I touched on is the sort of the personalization of the customization of the message, right? And that’s the place where Wise has taken it to this extreme where it’s great. Like if you, if you try using their system, you’ll see like if you select three or four people that you want to refer, Then they’ll show you the preview of the message that they’re gonna send those people, but then there’s a way for you to edit that message for each of them individually if you want to (Interesting).

Rather than just editing it once and all four of them get your edited version, there’s actually a way for you to go to like each. Each person and say, I wanna send this person this, you know, customized version and this one a different customized version. and that’s a that’s a next level step that I, I haven’t seen anybody else do yet. And that’s why, you know, on, we have a category on our blog on the cloudsponge.com/blog called teardowns. And it’s basically a category of blog posts where when we see extraordinarily. Good or interesting implementations of these kinds of forms.

We’ll go and like, make a video and tear it down and sort of share that with our audience because we see a lot of that stuff often. (Right). And the Transfer-Wise or now Wise one is one of my favorites from 2022.

Isar Meitis:
every now and then you find somebody who has a razor-sharp niche. And I loved your answer to my question as far as this might be a great idea, but not for us. especially because of what you’re doing, because you have such a clear functionality. Sounds very basic. Like, okay, well it’s just a button that adds the thing to the form, but that button that adds the thing to the form is a goldmine to so many companies who do not have that. and it solves a very basic problem that I guess a lot of people have.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah. If we, if we took things too far, you know, we would never get customers like Airbnb and Yelp and, and next door cuz they’re not looking for like, Email delivery tools or Refer a friend, like programs, like they’ve got the engineering horsepower to just do that themselves. (Right). But all of them don’t want to build this piece this single point of integration. All the address books. (Yeah). All of them. See, like that’s kind of a commodity and yeah, they probably could build it, but in comparison to paying us 170 bucks a month Yeah. They can’t, they can’t even have a meeting for that much money. (Yeah).  Build something and maintain it, right? Yeah. and so that, you know, us sort of staying precisely in the niche that we’re in and being really careful about. Expanding that is critical to our ability to acquire those enterprise-size clients.

Isar Meitis:
Jay, this was really interesting. I think there are a lot of really important takes for this, by the way, even generalized, not just to a form that gets sent to people. I think every time you want personal information from any client coming to their website, and it doesn’t matter how you want it, the more clear you are on what you’re gonna do with the data, why you need. And the more and the easier you make it for the person to give you that information. Just higher conversion, you’re gonna see, again, in any use case, in any kind of place where you’re asking people for information.

So I think all of this is really great. Tips that, that literally any company can use. Because like we said before, regardless of the type, we all have some kind of a contact form on our website. If people wanna know more, if they wanna follow you, if they wanna work with you, if they wanna see more of your content, what are the best places they should go too?

Jay Gibb:
Your audience should go to cloudsponge.com/businessgrowthaccelerator.

Isar Meitis:
That’s easy to remember.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah. And then we’ll make a page there with your face so they recognize it and, you know, it links to socials and, you know, a place for them to download like a white paper that we have. It’s like a, a questionnaire that’s kind of like a health audit. Score four-year word-of-mouth features on your website. It’s just free, it’s like a six-page pdf that just kind of guides somebody’s thought process and maybe inspires some, some new ideas. and then anybody that goes there and wants to actually use CloudSponge will get a 20% discount for the first year.

Isar Meitis:
Awesome. This is great. Jay, this was really interesting. Thank you so much for being a guest of the show. Thank you for

Jay Gibb:
having me.