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.
00:12:04 · Evgenii Tilipman, Ezekiel Iferia
[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. [00:13:42] S0: So how fast can you actually move? You ship in one to eight weeks. What determines whether it's fast or slow?
00:13:42 · Ezekiel Iferia, Evgenii Tilipman
[00:13:42] S0: So how fast can you actually move? You ship in one to eight weeks. What determines whether it's fast or slow? [00:13:52] S1: Revision cycles, man. Know, sometimes companies have... Well, I mean, always companies have different philosophies and priorities, right? For example, Chili Piper has a very simple now powerful later philosophy, meaning that they just want to keep things rolling, they just want to release new things. Whereas some of the other companies we worked with, they were very slow and they were prioritizing that visual appeal that they talked about instead of running with their marketing campaigns. And I find that it's a leadership problem in the sense of new founders don't really trust their marketing executives to do their jobs and it's slowing the companies down. And I honestly don't feel like that's productive, but it is how it is. So to give you a better answer, it depends on number one, external forces, those we cannot control. And number two, internal forces, how big is the scope? What do we have to do? Do we have to redesign? Do we just have to redevelop? Do we need to release two more pages that are new or do we need to release 20 new pages? So it depends, I guess, on the volume of work there is, but it's always important to have a clear line of communication and set expectations well enough to cover for the potential timeline. [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?
00:15:38 · 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.