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?
00:08:31 · Evgenii Tilipman
[00:08:31] S1: I mean, I would like to tell about our own website. We were... So I'm just going to use us as example because I feel like I'm over invested in the company and it used to be or I can say we have a very bad experience and it's a good example and a bad example at the same time, right? So we are a service company, we are servicing other businesses and it's all about the number of leads that we talk to. So what's the logical conclusion? We need to see more people, we need to talk more people, we need to get more people to see our website. And what we did was we've over focused on SEO. And at some point in time last year, was like 3,000 people per month, which I would say it's decent amount of people, not huge, but it's not terrible. And we had maybe 30 people in total a month seeing our offer pages, which is really low, it's around 1%. And the problem there was that, well, if the people are not seeing the offer, obviously, well, we cannot really convert them. And to make things worse, in February, the website has had a reduction in month over month traffic by 75% because AI Overviews has eaten up a lot of informational queries. So people are not clicking into our site. It's been really bad. So think about 1% of 3,000, well, of 25% of 3,000, right? It's very low. So what we did was, first of all, great time for a rebrand. Rebrand really helped us improve our positioning. And then we started to slowly optimizing for AI and for SEO once again, and we started placing our CTAs very high within the resource pages. So why did we start doing that? We noticed that people do not scroll past 30% of our pages. That means that most people, they're in the hero section, maybe one or two scrolls and that's that. As soon as we place the CTAs like large CTAs that are very visible in the top side of the website, we noticed that we had a significant increase of people going into our offer pages, which in turn just by pure numbers improved our conversions on-site, even though we had significantly lower traffic than we did before. So that's my mistake. I've seen similar types of mistakes happen to SaaS businesses and you just have to look at the data, figure out what's working, what's not and reverse engineer the solution to your problems.
00:11:43 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:11:43] S0: So, Evgenii, you know, talk about how a startup should think about your website in the four to eight weeks, you know, before announcing the funding round. So what actually changes? What should they prioritize and what should they absolutely not touch? [00:12:04] S1: Well, Ezekiel, a lot of things that I see is companies are rushing to redesign their websites and they're not really changing their position, they just want that premium look and feel whatever that means. And for me, that was always questionable because they are creating pressure on the marketing team because the job of the marketing team is to create a lot of visibility and buzz around the race. But now founders oftentimes they want to redesign the whole thing to say, hey, we have raised a lot of money, now we are a brand new company or we are different, when in fact they're not. And the question then arises, well, why do you do that? What's going to happen if you don't redesign? What's going to happen if you don't meet the deadline of that redesign? And oftentimes the answer is nothing. Nothing's going to go wrong. You're still gonna get a ton of traffic and even more so you're gonna get a lot more traffic because then your marketing team will not be thread thin between like five different campaigns. Right? So I would say for companies that are looking to raise, unless they're doing some sort of major repositioning, they should just focus on marketing campaigns that are actually going to bring in eyeballs instead of trying to change who they are by changing their visual appeal.