00:00:01 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:00:01] S0: Welcome to the Iferia Techcast, where we bring you all things, science, engineering, technology, and innovation. I'm your host, Ezekiel Iferia. And today, are joined by Evgenii Tilipman, founder of Khod. What started as a one person web flow shop is now the agency behind 20 plus funded b to b startup launches, including Bland AI's $40,000,000, series b, Synthflow's series a, and Piper. Evgenii and his team helped AI Web three, and SaaS startup turn their marketing websites into demand generating assets. He's here to break down what funded startups get wrong about their website and what to do instead. So, Evgenii, I am truly honored and excited to welcome you to the show. Thank you very much for joining us here today, sir. [00:01:05] S1: Well, thank you very much for having me. It's my pleasure being here and looking forward to talk about everything that it is we do and have done for some more clients. [00:01:16] S0: It's a pleasure to welcome you, Evgenii. So let's dive into it. You know, let's start with the simplest question. You know, you run Khod, an agency that builds website for funded b to b startups, AI, Web three, enterprise, SaaS. So, what does a funded startup need from a website, you know, that a smaller company doesn't? Why do they need something different?
00:01:43 · Evgenii Tilipman
[00:01:43] S1: Well, that's a great question. I mean, overall for any type of IT company, the goal of the website usually is making money, right? It's a tough place to be in. You're fighting for attention across many competitors, especially now with AI, it's very easy to compete. But you know what makes things easier to compete? Getting extra revenue or getting extra money or getting extra investments. So a lot of these companies really, they care about the website from the standpoint of actually getting revenue. And we'll cover that in a bit. Will talk about what it takes. But for let's say some earlier stage startups like seed, pre seed, even sometimes series A, companies oftentimes they don't really have their positioning nailed down, meaning that, well, the website is something that you will want to show your investors. You want to show where you are right now. And if you're pivoting, you want to show where you're pivoting so that you can get that investment round so that you can actually work on your product, you can do marketing, you can pivot your website. And over time, as you establish yourself as one of the bigger players, at that point, you can say confidently, hey, we did a lot of research, we have invested a lot of resources into our marketing, this website does its job. It brings in revenue, it brings in demos, etcetera, etcetera.
00:03:33 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:03:33] S0: Alright. So, you know, you have launched sites for companies that just raised 20,000,000 to $40,000,000 So what changes for a startup's website, you know, when they go from pre revenue to series A, you know, What's suddenly urgent that wasn't before? [00:03:50] S1: I think the number one thing that I've noticed happen is companies start hiring aggressively, their needs grow exponentially. And what may have started as a small website project with, I don't know, up to 10 pages can now scale to 200 or 300 pages within months, right? So it really is about how fast you want to scale your marketing output and not only marketing, but also like oftentimes you see that companies need to create pages dedicated to the brands, to the career section, to hiring, to actually showing some resources so that you are found online via Google and all of those AI sources such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etcetera. So what I've noticed is that whenever companies raise a significant sum of money, what first happens is number one, they think, okay, we got all these resources, now we need to scale. What do we need to scale? Well, we need to leverage people. So they start hiring. One of the first campaigns that we've seen happen so far are immediately career pages. And then as soon as that's done, they start scaling the content, the commercial landing pages, etcetera, etcetera. So kind of get to the point where you have the infrastructure and then scale your day to day operations for web so that you can actually support the revenue that you're targeting.
00:03:50 · Evgenii Tilipman, Ezekiel Iferia
[00:03:50] S1: I think the number one thing that I've noticed happen is companies start hiring aggressively, their needs grow exponentially. And what may have started as a small website project with, I don't know, up to 10 pages can now scale to 200 or 300 pages within months, right? So it really is about how fast you want to scale your marketing output and not only marketing, but also like oftentimes you see that companies need to create pages dedicated to the brands, to the career section, to hiring, to actually showing some resources so that you are found online via Google and all of those AI sources such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etcetera. So what I've noticed is that whenever companies raise a significant sum of money, what first happens is number one, they think, okay, we got all these resources, now we need to scale. What do we need to scale? Well, we need to leverage people. So they start hiring. One of the first campaigns that we've seen happen so far are immediately career pages. And then as soon as that's done, they start scaling the content, the commercial landing pages, etcetera, etcetera. So kind of get to the point where you have the infrastructure and then scale your day to day operations for web so that you can actually support the revenue that you're targeting. [00:05:42] S0: Alright. So Evgenii, you know, you said there's a single biggest mistake, you know, you see funded B2B startups make, you know, with their marketing websites. So what exactly is it? You know, what are they doing that looks like progress but is actually hurting them?
00:06:02 · Evgenii Tilipman
[00:06:02] S1: Well, I would say there are two levers that are pushed in order to grow your website or to grow the revenue. When I say grow the website, I really mean grow the revenue of the company through the website. So what you need to do is you need to pull the first lever, which is enough people need to see your offer. And that means that you need to increase visibility of that page or bring more traffic. What they see a lot of companies do is they pump out a lot of ads and those pages are not optimized at all. So people are oftentimes bouncing off the page even before they land onto the page. So there are a lot of things, like a lot of technical things that can be improved there. But this is number one thing that I see. And number two thing that I see is, okay, let's say that you have a lot of traffic on those pages, but what isn't there is the conversion rate optimization, meaning that, hey, a lot of people see this page, but they don't really know what to do. You're not being upfront about it and you're not giving up the offer easily, which is something that you may want to do because otherwise you're not really going to grow as a business. So those really are two of the biggest mistakes. But if we just say one largest thing is they don't oftentimes talk to their customers enough to really know who their target customer is. So the positioning oftentimes is very much different from what the market needs. So I kind of gave you three things now. So there are these two things that you need in general, these two levers. And the number one biggest problem that I'm seeing is oftentimes positioning.
00:08:10 · Ezekiel Iferia
[00:08:10] S0: Alright. Thank you very much for sharing that. It was a really insightful response indeed Evgenii. So can you elaborate on that by walking us through a real example? Tell us what did the company do wrong and what happened when they fixed it?