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Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer at landing page and conversion experts, Unbounce. We learn what to do when your category becomes a race to the bottom, why AI and machine learning should be used to help marketers not replace them, and how Unbounce built their biggest moat. I weigh in with my thoughts on the risks of competing on features, the power of taking a differentiated position in the market, and why category creation is such an attractive play.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Tamara Grominsky on how Unbounce are pairing marketer and machine to create a new category and fend off the competition
Tamara Grominsky (00:01):
If you're building for a very specific audience and solving a very specific problem, it's going to be very hard for anyone else to do that exact same thing.
Peep Laja (00:12):
I'm Peep Laja, I don't do fluff, I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? Next up, Tamara Grominsky, chief strategy officer at Unbounce. Unbounce was the first company to offer a do-it-yourself landing pitch builder 12 years ago. But since then, more companies have entered the space. They found themselves battling a growing price war with competitors. So how are they going to win? In this episode, we'll learn what to do when your category becomes a race to the bottom.
Tamara Grominsky (00:46):
We don't want to just ride out this category, we want to create the next version of this category.
Peep Laja (00:51):
We hear why AI and machine learning should be used to help marketers, not to replace them.
Tamara Grominsky (00:56):
So that really, you're working together as partners. Almost like you have a whole other teammate to get more conversions.
Peep Laja (01:02):
We learn about Unbounce's secret sauce, the biggest moat they've built.
Tamara Grominsky (01:06):
We're also doubling down on one thing that no one can compete with, which is our...
Peep Laja (01:11):
Let's get into it. Tamara, when Unbounce got started, what was the landing page builder category like?
Tamara Grominsky (01:20):
Honestly, it didn't even exist. So we had a group of six founders and one of them, his name is Rick. He really had this problem himself.
Rick Perreault (01:30):
The idea was born out of the need for marketers, myself, running online ad campaigns. Every time I wanted to do landing pages, I'd have to go to our web development team to get the landing page design and developed and launched live.
Tamara Grominsky (01:43):
What would come back is yeah, we can do this but it'll take three months or six months or maybe next quarter when we have time.
Rick Perreault (01:48):
So by removing IT out of the process, Unbounce kind of gives control back to the marketers. So they can launch their campaigns on their schedules rather than ITs.
Tamara Grominsky (01:57):
So really, Unbounce was first to market with a do it yourself type of landing page builder.
Peep Laja (02:03):
So the go to market message was you have an unsolved problem and we are now solving it for you.
Tamara Grominsky (02:09):
Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like you're being blocked by your teammates, essentially. You don't have a designer or a developer who can help you, take that on yourself and become more empowered as a marketer.
Peep Laja (02:20):
So the go to market motion then there was and this is a product-based differentiation, we're solving a problem that you couldn't solve before. What were the first years like? What was the success like?
Tamara Grominsky (02:32):
It was a very fast growing product and so it was completely bootstrap. There wasn't really any real funding to get them off the ground. But the appetite from the market was so strong. They had really strong relationships with a few other people who had similar problems. Like Rand Fishkin from Moz became a huge early adopter and that helped to grow Unbounce really quickly. They just started asking for feedback, "Hey, do you have this problem? Do you want to try my tool?" At first, there was also very little competition. So really, if you were looking to become a more empowered marketer, Unbounce was the place that you would go to do that.
Peep Laja (03:08):
But then the competitors came.
Tamara Grominsky (03:10):
Yes, that always happen. Someone has their great idea, someone else wants to copy it. So the competitors came and really, we saw it in two different areas. First was people who also wanted to be a landing page builder themselves. So there are core competencies and they already knew what to build because we had built it for the past year or two. So it was really quick for them to catch up to that core value proposition.
Peep Laja (03:35):
I've said it before, you cannot compete on features alone. If you have features that the market really wants, you can be sure that others will copy you. Competing on features is a transient advantage. At most, you maybe have a year or two headstart. Doing something innovative is really great and you can grab market share fast but it's inevitable that others will catch up.
Tamara Grominsky (03:57):
We also then saw that other players more like market automation tools, well, they wanted this feature as well. So then they started building it in, not as a core competency but as a feature that they offered. So really, we found that we actually had two whole categories of competitors, landing page builders, and then also, marketing automation or marketing software.
Peep Laja (04:15):
So it's a classic case of leading with innovation, coming to the market with innovation is a great thing to have. In the beginning, you gain a lot of traction, you address an action pain. But then at some point, this is getting commoditized.
Tamara Grominsky (04:32):
Yeah, that's exactly it. One of our differentiators, even as we were fighting some of those competitors, was our thought leadership. So because we were innovative because we were first to market, we had a real philosophy on this. I think that allowed us to grow even in quite a competitive space. So what is a landing page? How should you think about it? What are the best practices around building it? Even if we were fighting on a product feature level, that allowed us to stand out.
Peep Laja (04:59):
Interesting. This is very similar to what Devin Bramhall, CEO of content marketing agency, Animalz, said in a previous episode.
Devin Bremhall (05:06):
We intentionally focused on thought leadership on the block, wrote very deeply about what we know from perspectives that other people aren't currently taking. That is what we did, that helped our reputation enormously. Even though, we don't get a ton of traffic on our blog. It made the people who follow us really devoted, huge fans like you. Think we're hot shit, whether they even know if we are or not.
Peep Laja (05:29):
Back to Tamara.
Tamara Grominsky (05:30):
About 10 years into the market, we now have a plethora of competitors. We're seeing that it has become completely commoditized and really, people are fighting with price. So it's a race to the bottom, who's going to become the cheapest for the exact same amount of feature. So we started to ask ourselves 10 years into Unbounce, what will the next 10 years of Unbounce look like? What will the next 10 years of this category look like? What can we do now to stand apart, differentiate ourselves, and really build a really exciting future?
Peep Laja (06:00):
So you had invested in brand, you have a strong content engine in social media, blog, your own conference, building the brand. But even then, that wasn't enough to really keep the growth going. There was downward pressure on pricing because features were not really that differentiated.
Tamara Grominsky (06:21):
Yeah, that's exactly it. It's also a change in market. So 10 years in, we were solving really a product or a technology challenge the first 10 years. But now, okay, there's so much SaaS software available, software is more affordable. There's more businesses coming online, there was more offerings. So we had to start to think about what can we do different.
Peep Laja (06:46):
The amount of competition in SaaS is ridiculous. Can you name more than one product that is objectively better than the competition? I doubt it. Michael Porter, the father of modern day business strategy said that instead of competing to be the best, you should compete to be unique.
Michael Porter (07:02):
The competition is not zero sum. If every company finds a unique need, then it can set out to meet. If it tries to deliver something different than its rivals, multiple rivals can be successful. If your competitors kind of understand what you stand for and what you're committed to, maybe they'll make a different choice. Rather than get dragged into these kind of mindless price wars that we see in so many industries.
Peep Laja (07:26):
I think it makes a lot of sense. Think about IKEA, the world's largest furniture maker. It's still the only one doing what it's doing. Nobody has copied their set of strategic choices.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
Visit ikea.com.au. We can plan, deliver and install the whole thing for you.
Tamara Grominsky (07:44):
We also saw that landing pages as a core functionality were reaching really their peak market growth rate. So we knew that there'd still be interest in demand in landing pages but that demand was decreasing. So we also had to start considering how can we plan for the future, what are the emerging customer problems that our customers have that we can start thinking about solving today? To kind of expand that core value proposition that we offer and grow our market share.
Peep Laja (08:13):
Right. So the market reality change, customer's needs were changing, evolving, new technologies becoming available. Then you realize that you need to change your strategy going forward.
Tamara Grominsky (08:26):
Yeah, that's exactly it. So we were at a place where we felt like there was a few key competitors. If you were to go to any of their websites or talk to any of their sales folks, you'd probably hear a really similar story. So we weren't okay with that. We were like we don't want to just ride out this category, we want to create the next version of this category.
Tamara Grominsky (08:45):
So how are we going to do that? Well, we need to really understand who our customers are, what the customer's problems are, and what are our unique competencies as a business. That then feeds into us choosing the right customer problems to solve. That then would allow us to kind of carve off our own path away from the rest of the pack.
Peep Laja (09:04):
So tell me more about that. So you realized that you need to change and you were quite clear on what you needed to rely on like your own expertise and who your customers are. So what all went on behind the scenes and which different directions were considered?
Tamara Grominsky (09:20):
So honestly, the first thing we did was recognize that we had become a bit of a catch all tool. So really, any marketer could use us. So we were everything to everyone. We realized that in order to grow at the rate that we wanted to grow, we needed to choose a bit of a specialization or a bit of a niche. So the first thing we did was really look at our customer segmentation and ask ourselves who are our best customers, what is the target market that we want to win in, and then how can we start to fortify that market?
Peep Laja (09:51):
Another guest on the show, Nathan Barry, founder and CEO of ConvertKit has a similar view on the importance of choosing a niche.
Nathan Barry (09:59):
Everyone say like choose a niche. That is the easiest advice to give and the hardest advice to take.
Peep Laja (10:04):
What's your take on this advice right now?
Nathan Barry (10:07):
I think it's probably the best advice ever. We could just say we're just not building any of those features. The professional bloggers, the creators, they don't care about that. So we're able to be really opinionated about the features that we build. So what's interesting, you mentioned not playing the feature game. I think we can play it better than they can in our market.
Peep Laja (10:28):
Right, you can focus better.
Nathan Barry (10:31):
We can focus better. So we can make something that is really compelling.
Peep Laja (10:34):
Back to Tamara.
Tamara Grominsky (10:36):
When Rick and the other founders started 10 years ago, it was 12 years ago at this point, they started to solve that small business marketer problem. We said we believe that the small business industry needs help. It's the cornerstone of our whole economy but small businesses are at a disadvantage, especially when we look at technology. So the technology that is emerging around us, there's optimization tools, there's building tools, there's now AI and machine learning. All of them were priced out of the small business market, meaning it was way too expensive for them to get into game or required things that small businesses didn't have. So yeah, there are some really great optimization tools but they require you to have 100,000 visitors to your landing page, not 500. They require you to have so many different variants that no small business has an enough time to actually build.
Tamara Grominsky (11:25):
So we are seeing that small businesses couldn't afford the tools that were being built for them. They didn't have the time or the expertise even to engage with these tools. We started to see some options that emerged. Of course, one of our core competencies was that being the first player in the market, we had 12 years of conversion data. We've facilitated almost 1.5 billion conversions. So we started to ask ourselves how could we supplement or augment this small business marketer to help give them that competitive advantage? So we really did consider all of the different options. But at the end of the day, we felt very passionate about doubling that on the SMB market. We believed that we could innovate in the machine learning and AI space, so we really took that big bet.
Peep Laja (12:13):
Your other competitors in the space, they took different routes. They made different strategic choices.
Tamara Grominsky (12:18):
Yeah. So one of our competitors, while we were really fortifying that kind of middle market, SMB space, they started to move up market. Actually, rather than simplifying technology, maybe complexifying technology. Actually, increasing those barriers that we were seeing some of our customers struggle with. Meanwhile, other competitors were going a bit broader with their message. So not just landing pages but adding on other tools like don't just build your landing page but build your website as well. So this was also a really great opportunity for us to double down on this area that we felt we could really own.
Peep Laja (13:04):
On the inside when you were discussing this, was it easy, unanimous, obvious decision or were wars being fought?
Tamara Grominsky (13:08):
I wouldn't say wars but I would not say there was a... Yes, we're all in consensus around this. I think there's a couple things to it. When you think about machine learning and AI, people have anxiety around that. What does that mean? Also, it's difficult to build. So a lot of our questions were like could we actually productionize this type of technology? It's one thing to say that we want to do it, it's one thing to prototype it. But can we actually get it in the hands of customers and make it work?
Tamara Grominsky (13:34):
So what we did in order to really increase our confidence that this was the right strategy is we started to play around with this idea. At one of our conferences, we actually built a really cool little game called marketer versus machine. Where we showed a couple different versions of a landing page and we said which version do you think is going to convert best? We let all of the marketers at the conference say and then we let the machine say. What we saw was it was about a 50-50 split. So you basically had an equal chance of flipping a coin as the marketer making an educated decision about which version of the variant would convert best.
Tamara Grominsky (14:07):
Meanwhile, the machine could predict it I think 80% of the time. So we really saw that the power that machine learning had with landing pages. Honestly, then for the past three, four years, we've been building our own R&D department. We've been experimenting with machine learning. Trying to really understand the balance of where can we augment a small business marketer, rather than automating them? So when we looked around at what else was happening in the space and other tools, not just landing page builders. But other tools are introducing ML and AI to the type of market we have. It's almost always within the context of automation. Let me take this off your plate. Let me replace this for you so that you can do something else entirely. We don't believe in that philosophy. We believe in elevating the marketer's marketing IQ and then augmenting it with machine intelligence. So that really, you're working together as partners. Almost like you have a whole other teammate to get more conversions.
Tamara Grominsky (15:05):
Really, at the end of the day, every little experiment we did would increase our internal confidence. That A, we could build this technology and productionize it. But that also, B, our customers in our market wanted this and that there was a demand for it.
Peep Laja (15:23):
If you're not clearly differentiated, that's a problem. Most companies aren't. Set a goal to be able to hold the fundamentally differentiated position in the market. Build a vision of what a unique version of you could look like and start building towards that. The most common strategy in business is playing the brand preference game. My brand is better than yours. The problem is that customers don't find incremental improvement exciting. Another common strategy to compete is to do better marketing, outspend the competition. Hard to win at that one. A smarter path is creating a new market or a new subcategory. Winning then is no longer based on my brand is better than your brand but rather on being the only brand for this subcategory. Competitors lose because they lack the new must haves the subcategory brings.
Peep Laja (16:11):
The requirement to when the positioning came but building a new sub-category is new or improved must haves. That provide different or significantly better user experience. When Tinder launched, the dating category was already super competitive. But Tinder took away a lengthy profiles and introduced this new swiping UX that people loved. The rest is history. To find an opportunity to develop a new subcategory, you need to create a new set of must haves. Ultimately, this is about differentiation and why the customer would choose you. Unbounce is betting that you won't want a landing page builder without conversion intelligence.
Peep Laja (16:52):
So once the decision was made that's how you're going to differentiate, that's how you're going to build towards, can you tell me how that impacted your product strategy, marketing strategy, overall strategic trade offs? How that impacted the way you run the business?
Tamara Grominsky (17:08):
One of the best things about having the strategy was that, all of a sudden, we had all of these different teams and stakeholders who were all aligned on the same strategy, which was really empowering. You're starting to see that momentum grow. I think the biggest conversations we had though, was almost that chicken and egg conversation of what comes first. We build the technology and then bring it out or to what level do we need to prime the market to even be responsive to this technology? Where we land was that we could have the best ML solution in the market. But if an SMB marketer is not ready to trust it, adopt it, and use it, we will never be successful. So we actually decided the go to market front first, while we then internally built the technology. We really focused on our narrative design, on our positioning. On how we would connect machine learning and artificial intelligence to the SMB. Understanding what the barriers to adoption would be, where those anxieties would come out. So that A, we could take all of those things into our product decision.
Tamara Grominsky (18:09):
So understanding, well, it's really stressful for me if a machine just makes a decision. Well, now we can build a feature that allows you to interact with the machine, so that you feel like it's not making a decision on its own. But we can also build content and videos and messaging that helps give you that confidence and helps you understand how a machine works. So that by the time that features ready, you're already primed to use it.
Speaker 8 (18:30):
That's why Unbounce created Smart Traffic. The AI-powered optimization tool that automatically sends your visitors to the landing page, where they're most likely to convert. Turn on Smart Traffic and start converting more visitors today.
Peep Laja (18:43):
You mentioned the strategic narrative. So tell me what kind of narrative did you land on? How do people get exposed to this narrative? How are you serving that messaging to people in your sphere of influence?
Tamara Grominsky (18:57):
So one of the things we realized pretty early on into the strategy was that our vision for how we wanted to apply machine learning and AI actually went beyond the landing pages. So we started to think about not just how do we evolve our product but how do we evolve our category? Really, at the end of the day, we decided we wanted to create a new category called conversion intelligence. We believe that conversion intelligence is really the pairing of a marketer and a machine to increase conversions. Of course, landing pages are critical to that but there's also other things that we can build that will help support that goal. With the landing page as like that core point of conversion. So we started to define what is conversion intelligence, what are the pillars of conversion intelligence? That was really the narrative thread for us.
Tamara Grominsky (19:40):
So what happened? What was the big change in the world? How were our target market adapting to that change? Then how could conversion intelligence be a solution to how difficult that change was to overcome? Once we were ready to bring that narrative to market, we actually did a manifesto around conversion intelligence. As we mentioned, Unbounce has always been known for that thought leadership. So we wanted to make sure that this was a strong opinion about what the future of marketing looked like. So we built a manifesto post and we posted on our website. We started to share that on our social channels, at conferences that we spoke at. Then we started to sprinkle some of that into our positioning, on our website.
Tamara Grominsky (20:18):
But really it's a process. We can't just go one day from being hey, we're a landing page builder, to the next day saying we're now a conversion intelligence platform. We need to take people on that journey. I would say that's been at least a year journey. We're really coming to the middle journey where we can start to be stronger in that message. So now, you'll see that what started as a manifesto post has now become our core positioning. We're starting to launch features that are conversion intelligence features. We're building whole conference talks that are about conversion intelligence, rather than just pulling in the threads of the story behind conversion intelligence,
Peep Laja (20:54):
Is the idea between conversion intelligence also to build a category or is just your, let's say differentiation?
Tamara Grominsky (21:02):
Honestly, we believe that we will be building a category. We believe that we need to evolve beyond landing pages. But that there isn't really another category in the market that's doing exactly what we're talking about here.
Peep Laja (21:15):
Whoever manages to become a category king stays there for a long time. Whoever was the leader in ketchup in the '60s is still there or look at CRM. The top 10 have not changed in 10 years. How much more money has Salesforce made compared to other CRMs in these last years? This is the reason why category creation is such an attractive play.
Christopher Lochhead (21:34):
This is Christopher Lochhead. Category design actually requires going against pack mentality. It takes courage to be different, particularly if you're doing something very forward on your skis To be legendary is to be ready for setbacks, disappointments, and failures because shit happens.
Peep Laja (21:56):
Once you're the king of a category, you'll get all these amazing benefits. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors. Think companies bringing only incremental innovations to the market. Harvard Business Review found that out of 100 fastest growing companies, 13 were category creators. But they accounted for 53% of incremental revenue growth among the top 100 and 74% of incremental market capitalization growth. In 2014, Apple two 91% of all of the profits from the entire smartphone market, 91%. In 2016 in an even newer market, Uber had an estimated 85% market share. The category king in tech dominates in a way rarely seen in other sectors. There is very little value in second place and almost no value in third place and beyond. But if you look at other long term successful businesses, also outside of tech. What many of these have in common is that the intention is set about designing their own completely new category and position themselves as category kings in those markets.
Peep Laja (23:02):
What these companies also have in common is what they didn't do. They did not set out to create something better or cheaper or with more interesting features. They created something entirely new. Entirely new categories that were completely different from anything that had come before. As human beings, we put the category first and the brand second. If we like the category, we'll be interested in the brand. Of course, creating categories is no easy feat. Most are naïve about the amount of millions it takes to pull it off. You need to bring a fat wallet and true innovation. So tell me more about the strategic bets you are making towards 10 things. Also, what are you saying no to? What's the trade off?
Tamara Grominsky (23:46):
One of our strategic bets actually came around doubling down on the idea of a value of a conversion. So, obviously, conversion intelligence is centered in conversions. As you know, the value of a landing page is you are able to direct traffic to your landing page rather than a generic page, which will increase your chance of conversion. When we started to ask ourselves what is the value of our product? It was the ability to foster and facilitate that conversion rather than just build a landing page. But when we looked around at the market, we saw that almost everyone was charging their customers to build a landing page, not to get a conversion. So we did over two years, honestly, of pricing research to understand what is the right value metric for our business? What is the right price point? How do we package that?
Tamara Grominsky (24:31):
At the end of the day, we came to realize that the value metric should be a conversion, not a landing page. So one of our big bets was actually changing our whole pricing model and moving away from charging based on the number of landing pages you've created, to the number of conversions that you are able to capture. One of the major push backs that we hear is, well, you're penalizing me for my success. But it's actually the exact opposite. We are willing to risk our entire business model on the fact that we believe we can help you get successful. We will only be successful and grow ourselves if we help you grow as a marketer and as a business. So that was a huge bet because A, we are risking our business model based on that. We can't grow, unless we can really follow up on our claim that will help you get more conversions. Then also, created some noise in the market that we definitely have to defend against
Peep Laja (25:18):
Before you made the leap and actually change your pricing to that new model, I'm sure you modeled it behind the scenes and would see what the impact on revenue would be. So tell me about the fears before you changed it. Then can you talk about the actual financial impact?
Tamara Grominsky (25:37):
I'll tell you what I can. So one of the things we did is when you're charging based on landing page, we have a pretty good idea of how many landing pages a customer will build. We have 12 years of history of it and it hasn't changed that much. We know the average number. When you think about conversions, the average number of conversions that a customer is getting is growing rapidly and the amount of conversions that our tool facilitates is growing rapidly. So that's actually harder to model because it's not a stable metric and it's a metric that's growing at a faster rate. So we had to do a lot of future predictions. So what we did was we looked back at the last two years of our business and we said if conversion based pricing had been in place the past two years, what would our revenue have been compared to what our revenue was with our old pricing? The other piece was we had to identify all of the areas where the pricing might not work well.
Tamara Grominsky (26:29):
So one of the examples, you've used our tool and used others. Is conversion tracking is actually an optional thing. As a customer, I don't need to track my conversion. So one of our biggest risks going into this was what if every single customer turns off conversion tracking the moment that we launched conversion-based pricing? So the biggest bet we had to take was on ourselves and our belief that a lot of our features actually require conversion tracking for us to understand what's happening with the conversion, to analyze it, and then to produce the machine learning features we need. So we needed to believe that customers would be so interested in those net new features that we would build, that they would be willing to keep conversion tracking on, in order to receive those features. But that was a huge bet in ourselves and on our future features that we would be delivering. So I would say that was probably one of the bigger risks that we were considering.
Peep Laja (27:20):
So how did it play out?
Tamara Grominsky (27:21):
Good so far, I would say it's an emerging story. It's been out for about a year now. For us, one of the big components was for the first year, just wanting to make sure that there was no negative business impact, which there wasn't. Then assessing openness to conversion being the value metric. We've learned a ton about who's open and who's not open to that. How do we need to work better to help customers understand the value of a conversion. So that they can then translate that into the value and price point of amounts. Then also, how can we help customers expand? So as they get more conversions, they then move up the pricing tier, and then we're able to grow as they grow. So I would say it's a work in progress but overall, it's helped strengthen our narrative, and has led to generally positive business results.
Peep Laja (28:11):
Tell me more about other bets you're making to compete and win.
Tamara Grominsky (28:13):
So second big bet that we're making is moving beyond landing pages. This has been a real focus for us this year. When I say moving beyond landing pages, I don't just mean having AB testing or having an optimization tool like Smart Traffic. I really mean how do we engage with customers when they're not even building a landing page? The reason we believe this is important is yes, the core focus is on that point of conversion on the landing page. But we recognize that there's a journey that a visitor takes before they get to the landing page. Then also, a journey that the lead capture takes after the landing page. The more that we can control or influence that whole conversion journey, the better that we can increase the point of conversion and increase that conversion rate.
Tamara Grominsky (28:57):
One of the first things that really interested us was that GPT-3 copy generation space. So we were already doing our own research internally in our own R&D around how can we generate higher converting copy? Our own research has found that copy has a significantly higher impact on conversion rate, rather than design or layout of the page.
Peep Laja (29:18):
Two to one, right?
Tamara Grominsky (29:19):
Yes. Sometimes even more important than that in some of our studies. So we know that this, we have to solve this problem. GPT-3 comes out last year and we see a ton of companies get access to it. Start to build really unique things, particularly AI powered copy generations. So we had things like copy AI, conversion AI, Snazzy. We were seeing that not only where people interested in this space but they were using it. One of our fears had always been, well, it seems kind of cool but will customers and marketers actually want to create copy? But we're seeing these tools are growing huge. Every single month they're getting customers, they're getting customers to pay for it, they're creating copy. We're following along online and there's a ton of interest. So we actually acquired one of those companies.
Peep Laja (30:06):
Yeah. So this is a line then with you guys are going for the SMB market. SMBs typically, don't have in-house copywriters. If you're not a copywriter, putting words together, it can be hard. So it seemed like a match.
Tamara Grominsky (30:21):
Yeah, so that was the main one. One of the things that we heard time and time again from our customers and from our market research was I just don't know where to start. So we acquired a company called Snazzy and what we loved about them was it helps you with this idea of you never have to start from a blank page ever again. We also recognize that right now technology's not going to create the best content you've ever seen every single time. It still requires that marketer's touch. But again, it goes back to that idea and that philosophy we have around we're not trying to automate or replace the marketer. We're trying to augment them. So as a marketer or SMB, I come in, I add a few things like my keywords, my audience, whatever I want to write about. We're going to come up with a starting point for you and then you can then put your own marketing IQ on top of that to polish things up. Also, when you think about everything, we've also learned around conversion intelligence and not just how to generate copy but how to generate higher converting copy.
Tamara Grominsky (31:18):
We believe our secret sauce is applying our 12 years of conversion data. The 1.5 billion conversions that we've facilitated. Understanding what copy generates the highest conversions. To help you yes, solve the copy generation. But not just generate good copy, generate high converting copy. Help you create as many variants as possible, as quick as possible. We know that will be to higher conversions as well.
Peep Laja (31:45):
Yeah, absolutely. So when you're looking at the next 10 years, what are some of the biggest risks that you perceived?
Tamara Grominsky (31:53):
The risk is always that technology evolves so quickly that what we're building today becomes almost redundant tomorrow. I think GPT-3 is a great example of that. It's like overnight, a whole category was created. There's many companies that were trying to solve that problem with other AI models before that came out. We can't think incrementally, we have to think large and innovative. We can't be thinking what's going to be cool a year from now, we have to be thinking what is the product going to look like 10 years from us that we can leap frog what others are doing.
Peep Laja (32:24):
Are you also thinking about moats? the competitors, every feature you build good chance, they're going to try to replicate it. So what are doing to build moats?
Tamara Grominsky (32:36):
We're trying to build a few strong moats that we can own, rather than taking like a ton of large bets. If you are building for a very specific audience and solving a very specific problem, it's going to be very hard for anyone else to do that exact same thing. So other people can say that they have our value but they don't have our exact value for our market. So we're doubling down in our target market and we want to be the best solution for small to mid-size businesses. We're also doubling down on one thing that no one can compete with, which is our conversion data. We have been around the longest, we've facilitated more than 1.5 billion conversions. We're growing every single day. All of the features we're building, even across other products beyond landing pages are leveraging that data set. We're building models off that data set. So yes, you could be a customer with us, you could leave tomorrow. But you're not going to be able to get your history of conversion data or all of our entire customer base history of conversion data to power you. We believe that data will be the biggest moat that we can build.
Peep Laja (33:40):
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.
Tamara Grominsky (33:42):
Thanks for having me, this is awesome.
Peep Laja (33:46):
So what were the three key strategic decisions Unbounce made in order to grow and succeed? One, they focused on thinking long-term and innovating beyond their existing category to fend off the growing competition.
Tamara Grominsky (34:02):
We have to meet the thinking what is the product going to look like 10 years from us that we can leapfrog what others are doing.
Peep Laja (34:05):
It would've been so easy to stay the same, to do what they've always been doing but they didn't. If you don't look around and pay attention, you might pull a Nokia. The competitor that kills you is inevitably, the one you did not see coming because you were too busy working on your category to see them attacking you via your blind spot. Two, they decided to use new technology, AI and machine learning. They were making a strategic be that this new tech is here and it's not going anywhere. It's only going more mainstream. So they adopted the new tech early and went all in.
Tamara Grominsky (34:39):
We believe in elevating the marketer's marketing IQ and then augmenting it with machine intelligence. So that really you're working together as partners.
Peep Laja (34:48):
Three to double down on creating the best solution for the specific target market.
Tamara Grominsky (34:53):
If you are building for a very specific audience and solving a very specific problem, it's going to be very hard for anyone else to do that exact same thing.
Peep Laja (35:01):
That's a strategic choice. How do you recognize a strategic choice? Well, is the opposite of your choice stupid? If it is, it's not really a strategic choice. Strategy is the act of making distinctive choices that position your organization uniquely to win. If the opposite of your choice is stupid, it's not a strategic choice. We compete in high quality. Well, the opposite will be competing in low quality. That would be stupid. Non-stupid decisions are necessary to compete but don't enable you to win. When you make a choice for which the opposite is not stupid. In fact, there are competitors doing the opposite and succeeding. Now, you have the possibility of a distinctive strategy and that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja, for more tips on how to win follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.