00:15:38 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:15:38] S0: Alright. So Evgenii, you know, what's the actual differences, you know, between a site that looks good and, you know, a site that actually generates lead? [00:15:50] S1: That's that's a great question. So you cannot generate leads. You cannot in general create revenue if you're not asking for that revenue, right? You need to create as many touch points as possible with potential customer to invite the customer to purchase a service from you or to book a demo or something else. As I said, most people, don't scroll that far. If you have some real estate to use to invite people to see your offer is the first part of your website or the webpage. So the goal there is to do that as much as possible. Obviously, you want to target the right intent. In SEO, there are two things that are very common in SaaS websites. Companies make number one, informational intent and number two, commercial intent types of pages. You want to create more of the pages that are latter. So the commercial pages, because those are the pages where you can make revenue. And the difference between websites that are actually performing well and those that don't is just that, how many commercial pages you have and how often you invite people to procure your software or your services or anything else you may offer. [00:17:22] S0: All right. So you started Khod as a one person with a flow shop. Now you have a full team. What specifically broke when you tried to grow? What did you have to learn about systematizing creative work?
00:17:22 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:17:22] S0: All right. So you started Khod as a one person with a flow shop. Now you have a full team. What specifically broke when you tried to grow? What did you have to learn about systematizing creative work? [00:17:40] S1: Well, I don't necessarily think that we had to systematize much the creative work, although it is a good idea. But creative work is a tough cookie to crack. You cannot have an ideal system. A lot of creatives have very different systems and they achieve equally amazing results. Not to say that the results are the same, they're very different, but equally brilliant. What I do think that changed in between when I first started Khod one at the time it was a different brand, it was just caring about the customers. I think that right now I care a lot more about the customers, which is why we grew, but also trying to resolve the biggest bottlenecks that I have at the time. In example, a bottleneck may be marketing, a bottleneck may be sales, a bottleneck may be operations, right? So like the delivery, the design, the development, etcetera, etcetera. So it's always been, look for what is the biggest problem at the time, solve that and move on to the next thing. [00:19:05] S0: Okay. So Evgenii, I'd like you to share some lights on the founder agency conversation. So what should a founder ask their web agency before signing? There's some red flags that should make them walk away.
00:19:05 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:19:05] S0: Okay. So Evgenii, I'd like you to share some lights on the founder agency conversation. So what should a founder ask their web agency before signing? There's some red flags that should make them walk away. [00:19:22] S1: I would say number one, if I saw a lot of agencies that were saying yes to everything. And then it turned out to be a very bad experience. Even when we were starting when we had like three people, we were saying yes to a lot of things that thinking about it now I should have said no to. And the problem of saying yes to everything is that number one, you're being overworked, the whole team is being overworked. Sometimes you cannot even deliver the service, but you think that you're going to find someone to deliver it for you like white label. And the issue with that I see is you're going to be burnt out. You're going to have to hire a new person that you don't have enough margin for, so it's not going to be financially wise. And the clients are going to hate you for saying that you can't do it when in fact you couldn't have. So look out for that red flag if the company is saying yes to everything and if they aren't really setting any boundaries, that's a big problem. Obviously, there's a pricing thing. If the company seems to give you an offer that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And let me give a third red flag being if there's a lack of transparency in the processes, you better run.
00:19:22 · Evgenii Tilipman, Ezekiel Iferia
[00:19:22] S1: I would say number one, if I saw a lot of agencies that were saying yes to everything. And then it turned out to be a very bad experience. Even when we were starting when we had like three people, we were saying yes to a lot of things that thinking about it now I should have said no to. And the problem of saying yes to everything is that number one, you're being overworked, the whole team is being overworked. Sometimes you cannot even deliver the service, but you think that you're going to find someone to deliver it for you like white label. And the issue with that I see is you're going to be burnt out. You're going to have to hire a new person that you don't have enough margin for, so it's not going to be financially wise. And the clients are going to hate you for saying that you can't do it when in fact you couldn't have. So look out for that red flag if the company is saying yes to everything and if they aren't really setting any boundaries, that's a big problem. Obviously, there's a pricing thing. If the company seems to give you an offer that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And let me give a third red flag being if there's a lack of transparency in the processes, you better run. [00:20:56] S0: All right. That was a very insightful one. So, you know, what's something, you know, what's one thing clients don't ask, you know, that they always wish they had?
00:20:56 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:20:56] S0: All right. That was a very insightful one. So, you know, what's something, you know, what's one thing clients don't ask, you know, that they always wish they had? [00:21:07] S1: Well, to be frank, I don't really think that there is something they don't ask. It depends on case by case basis. What I always try to do is I try to ask as many questions as possible just to make sure that we are not running into some issues of ignorance. And then when we ask certain questions, clients sometimes remember certain things that they have forgotten and it just helps out a lot. So the goal is always to over communicate, try to get as much info as possible. And oftentimes I just say, hey, we are going to ask a lot of questions. They may sound dumb to you, but trust me, we need to know these things so that we are not delivering subpar work. And oftentimes they're understanding because obviously we have not been in their business for a long time. They do not expect us to know their business as well as we do like our own. And it just makes sense that we're ask silly questions that are part of regular onboarding. [00:22:27] S0: Evgenii, you are a Webflow agency. So I'd like to know why Webflow for b to b SaaS instead of WordPress, Framer, or custom build?
00:22:27 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:22:27] S0: Evgenii, you are a Webflow agency. So I'd like to know why Webflow for b to b SaaS instead of WordPress, Framer, or custom build? [00:22:42] S1: And that's a great question. And you kind of got it right, but also got it wrong. So on our site, you'll see there's a service page called Webflow Development Agency. That's the core thing that we deliver, right? We do Webflow development. But also we are not really technology based. We don't care about, I mean, we do kind of care about the technology, but we have done Webflow websites, we have done Framer websites, we have done WordPress websites. And as of recently, we have started doing custom development. We have migrated our own websites to Next. Js and Sanity CMS. And we are now in the middle of a couple of migrations that are going to be in Astro, which is another custom tech stack. [00:23:37] S0: So Evgenii, when should a startup build custom and when should they definitely not?