Content, community, and customer acquisition with Mutiny's Jaleh Rezaei
Jaleh Rezaei:
We're trying to make something that was historically very hard and therefore inaccessible. Very universally accessible to folks. And the way that we do that is by having a good focus on who the ICP is and the problems that they're trying to solve.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis, but I do study winners and B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? This week, Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and co-founder of Mutiny. Mutiny is a no-code AI and personalization platform for marketers. They launched in 2018, raised a Series B this year with Tiger Global, and they now have over 70 employees. In this episode we discuss how they carve out and dominated their niche, the benefits of building a community around their product, and why continually innovating to add value should be part of your long term strategy. Let's get into it.
Jaleh Rezaei:
So before Mutiny, I worked at Gusto, where I led marketing. I'm an engineer, so I've always approached marketing from the perspective of what's our goal and how do we get there, versus these are the tools that we have, how do we use them? And so when I took over the marketing team at the time, we had raised a bunch of money. The business had a ton of momentum and product market fit, and we were deploying capital in every marketing channel you can possibly think of from PR to content to advertising. And we were doing that because we were hoping that all of that spend would turn into revenue, but it wasn't turning into revenue at the rate that we expected it. And so my first challenge was to figure out why is that happening and then how do we solve it?
When we started to connect all of the analytics, what became clear is that we were bringing in the right audiences, but as our customer personas and buyers had evolved beyond that original founder audience to folks like restaurants and accountants and lawyers, the messaging and the content and the buyer experience wasn't really resonating with them. And so we had this huge conversion problem where we were bringing the right people, paying a lot of money for them, but we weren't able to convert them into revenue for the business, at least at the rate that we expected it. And so we looked at how are other people solving this problem, and it quickly became clear that there wasn't really great systems in marketing for driving conversion.
The best examples that I found were companies like Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, that had built their own dedicated growth engineering and data science teams to drive conversion. And so we decided to do the same thing. We built our own dedicated engineering team and started to create this human based system for connecting and integrating data, understanding where the opportunities were, and then creating changes and launching those and measuring the impact of those. And after about three years of this, it became really clear that this was absolutely the most impactful investment that we were making into marketing in the form of engineering salaries.
And that this is something that every company in the world needed, but there was no way that they would actually be able to build all that in-house on their own, right? It was so difficult to recruit engineers. It was really hard to figure out the right process around the experimentation, and so my co-founder who was also from Gusto, we started brainstorming and talking through how do we turn what we were doing into a no-code platform, a conversion platform that essentially every company in the world could use to have almost access to growth engineering team in a box and be able to convert all of their spend into customers.
Peep Laja:
A/B testing and personalization tools have been around for a while. So what was the wedge or the opening where it's like we have this hole in the market that nobody is really taking advantage of?
Jaleh Rezaei:
A/B testing is a really good first iteration of driving conversion. It's limited to one channel, which is the website. That has some gains, but in order to really drive conversion, you relatively quickly have to switch to segment-based optimization and testing. And in order to do that, you then need an engineering team to set up all of that infrastructure for you. And then once you move beyond the website, there is additional things, right? Like there's the onboarding flow. There's your emails. All of these customer touchpoints should be optimized. And the sign up form, right? There's so much opportunity for driving conversion, and those all fall outside of the scope of a basic web A/B testing tool. And so our vision for Mutiny is to start with the web component, but then build it out into a cohesive platform that allows marketers to drive conversion at every step of their funnel and every customer touchpoint.
Peep Laja:
What was your go-to-market strategy? When you launched, what kind of companies did you go after? What kind of titles were you targeting and why?
Jaleh Rezaei:
Our very first batch of users were people that we know. In the early days where you're looking for design partners, that was the best strategy for us. But then as we started to expand, we found a lot of opportunity with mid-market companies, so folks with 50 plus employees to like about 500-ish employees. That was our first segment that we were going after. They had big websites. They had a few people in marketing already, and they were essentially looking for opportunities to really drive conversion and efficiency within their overall marketing budget. And so the way that we went after those folks was we hacked our own product to essentially create one-to-one pages from a CSV data feed.
So we created a list of customers that we wanted to work with, and then we identified the contacts at those companies. And then we fed that into Mutiny to then create a bunch of one-to-one personalized pages for them, and we reached out to those people through LinkedIn and through email. And so that was our very first strategy and actually that product has now become the foundation of our ABM product, and we still to this day use it. It's scaled as we have grown, and it continues to generate about 25% of our revenue. We then started to invest in community, content, and events. And so content for us is if you think about the market that we're in, we're trying to educate people about this new category that hasn't really existed. It's something that people have wanted for a long time, but because they haven't really had the technology to do it, there isn't a ton of expertise around it.
So folks have a lot of questions around like, "Where should I get started? What are personalization tactics that I should implement? What are other companies doing?" And so we've brought this together into sort of this content and community flywheel where in our product when somebody is successful, they run a successful test, we ask them if they would be willing to share their success with other marketers. And so if they say yes, then we turn that into a playbook that we then publicly share with the broader community. And so we're able to take the success from the product and the early users of Mutiny who are power marketers and help train the rest of the market on how they could be driving similar results and implementing their own personalization and conversion programs. And so we've built a whole content arm around this. We also launched a community called M2 where marketers can apply to be in the community, and they can talk about whatever they want. Whatever pushes their agenda forward, that's the framework that we've built around our customer acquisition right now. We're starting to do a lot more events as well.
Peep Laja:
Mutiny is the prime example of how you can build a great business in an existing, mature, competitive category by focusing on a different ICP. Personalization tools have been around for over a decade. However, most of them sell to data science and conversion optimization types. Folks who like to argue over one-tailed versus two-tailed experiments. Mutiny chose to sell it to B2B marketers. Folks who have no interest in statistics but are looking for ways to drive more revenue. This type of play has been successfully done by others too. Klaviyo, email marketing for ecommerce. They entered the very crowded market. Email marketing was already huge, but they won by focusing on a specific market. Gorgias did the same with helpdesk. They entered the very mature category. Zendesk was already a giant, but then they focused on ecommerce and won. If you take on category kings directly, you'll get killed. So the winning strategy here is choosing your customer. Here's Professor Jonathan Byrnes, the author of Choose Your Customer, explaining this idea.
Jonathan Byrnes:
Basically, do something that's unique that only you can do where you've got a defensible market segment, and you can grow and be the best at that. If you try to compete with people who are the best at other things, you're going to get killed.
Peep Laja:
How you guys do marketing and sales is quite different from the other players in the space. Is that a conscious choice that you chose to invest heavily in sales and marketing over engineering or stats? What was your thinking behind that?
Jaleh Rezaei:
So in terms of our investment in Mutineers, we are about 50/50, maybe a little over 50% is in engineering and product. We do the standard ratio that a lot of R&D focused companies like ours have, so it's on the higher side. But I think the difference in our approach to marketing has been that we focused exclusively on really good acquisition marketers, so our entire go-to-market team, the entire marketing team, they're all acquisition marketers. We don't really have brand. We don't really have a big investment in any of the other fields. We are now building those things and expanding those things, but I really wanted to have a DNA in customer acquisition and people that knew how to sell and loved how to sell and could create messaging that actually was relevant to the problems that our customers had.
Peep Laja:
New customer acquisition is essential to the growth of your business. You grow mostly through customer acquisition and not loyalty. This is a fundamental law of marketing that Professor Byron Sharp explains in his book How Brands Grow.
Byron Sharp:
There are a lot of myths in marketing. One is the belief that your brand is so special and different that there is a unique sort of group of customers out there that like it. You need to try to find out who these people are, and you need to constantly only be talking to that type of person. This is a myth. It's just not a way to grow. And the other one which is related to that is the idea that we can extract growth out of loyalty, out of targeting our heaviest customers and that they are our most important customers. In actual fact, most customers for any brand are really very large. They don't buy the category that often. Of course, they buy the brand, so they don't get around to buying us very often. And these are the major source of growth, so it's vital that you reach non-customers.
Peep Laja:
Thinking long term ahead, what is the strategy today?
Jaleh Rezaei:
We are very focused on B2B companies. That's a big strategy trade off decision that we made early on. And so that allows us to build a much easier to use product for our customers. If you think about personalization and conversion, we're trying to make something that was historically very hard and therefore inaccessible, very universally accessible to folks. The way that we do that is by having a good focus on who the ICP is and the problems that they're trying to solve. The Mutiny experience is a combination of no-code, so the fact that you don't really need engineers to implement tests and different experiences for you, but also AI that guides you on what experiments you should be running. So for example, we might say to a customer, "Hey, healthcare is underperforming on your website. Based on what other Mutiny customers have done in order to increase the performance of the healthcare sector, we recommend these strategies and here's the estimated lift that we would predict for you."
And if they start creating that experience, we even start writing the content for them. So we would automatically suggest what parts of their page they would change, how they change the content, based on that aggregate data that we are seeing. Having a focus on a particular customer segment allows us to build a much better product more quickly, right? Instead of being a 3 out of 10 to a bunch of different segments, we get to focus on B2B, which is about half the companies in the world. And we get to build a product for them that is very guided and very, very easy to use. And so that strategy has worked really well for us. Now, in terms of how we think about the moat around the business, for us the most important thing is the data and the AI layer. And so that's the piece that we make a ton of investment in from an engineering standpoint. And as we expand in this broader platform, we essentially are deploying more and more conversion playbooks that leverages the same data and AI primitives. And so that's something that we consider to be a huge thing that we have to get right.
Peep Laja:
Know your ICP, know what their biggest problems are, then regularly think about how can we increase our customer value footprint? In other words, how can we become more valuable to the customer? Add more value, become more useful, add different kinds of value, become deeply embedded in their business. Here's Tamara Grominsky sharing an example of how they did this at Unbounced on a previous episode of How to Win.
Tamara Grominsky:
Landing pages as a core functionality, we're reaching really their peak market growth rate. And so we knew that there would still be interest in demand in landing pages but that that demand was decreasing. And 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:
What do you think about the idea that every technology eventually gets commoditized, including AI capabilities and the only long term competitive advantage is brand related?
Jaleh Rezaei:
I was actually talking with one of the co-founders of Gong, and we were talking about differentiation and moats, and his perspective was that, "Hey, ultimately everyone's going to copy each other, and so really the only winning strategy is speed and how fast you're innovating and staying ahead of the game." And I completely agree with that. So one of our values is faster always wins. I think it's really important that you are the leader and are constantly innovating and building the next version because the more successful you are, the more people are going to copy what you have put out there. We've already seen this happen with Mutiny as we've become the market leader, right? We're seeing people use our exact terminology, and I think that's okay. It's expected, and I guess in some ways it's a compliment.
But I do think that it is possible to invest in long term moats, so for us, that is the dataset. And so the dataset that is the byproduct of using Mutiny is which B2B segments saw what types of personalizations and did it lead to an increase or decrease in conversion? So we're building this dataset around what are B2B buyers responding to, and that dataset then powers the guidance that we offer inside of Mutiny. That is something that you can't really copy, and we are already seeing that be a huge differentiator for why people choose Mutiny and also why they're a lot more successful with Mutiny. But that's something that we believe will be a long term moat around the business.
Peep Laja:
Mutiny has baked innovation into strategy. By offering and building a vast unique dataset as a moat, they're thinking about their long term market differentiation. Not only are they competing to be the best, they're competing to be unique. Here's business strategist and Harvard Professor Michael Porter on why you should be competing to be unique.
Michael Porter:
Managers think about competition as competing to be the best. It's very natural for managers to want to be the best company in their industry. The best real estate group, the best bank. However, what we found is that's a very dangerous way to think about competition. Why is that? In business competition, there is no best. There is no best way to be an automobile company. It all depends on what needs you're trying to serve. The proper way of thinking about competition is that your job is to create a unique company. A company that offers something different, a company that offers something unique in which it has an advantage over its competitors. If you think about competition as just trying to be the best, that often leads you to have a very destructive competition, where in order for you to succeed, your competitor has to fail.
Peep Laja:
What are some pieces of advice you would give to fellow B2B SaaS founders?
Jaleh Rezaei:
So one of the most important things that we did early on when we were building Mutiny was we became an extension of our customers, and I'm talking about the pre-product market fit phase. So we would join their team. We would try to use the product alongside them. We would ideate with them. If they were stuck, we would offer to jump in and help. And as a result of that, we got to see what were all of the blockers inside and outside of Mutiny as they were trying to use our product. So to give you an example, one of the best features in Mutiny today is when you create a segment, you can see how big that segment is. We show how that compares in size relative to other segments of that particular attribute, so let's say healthcare relative to other industries. We show them what the conversion rate is, and we also estimate based on the lift that they can get, what is the impact that they can have on their overall leads and conversions by prioritizing that segment?
The reason we built that is because in the early days, and actually Amplitude was the customer where I think this idea originally came from. We saw that they were really eager to launch tests and experiences, but then what would happen is there was this step outside of Mutiny where they would have to go pull the data, sort it, and figure out which segments are worthy and are the biggest segments that they should focus on. And there was this whole sort of conversation that was very important to the overall workflow that was happening outside of Mutiny. And so we decided to, once we understood exactly what the crux of that was, we then built the simplest UI that allowed them to fully solve that problem inside of the product. And so that's probably my biggest advice for founders is to not think about scalability and just focus on how can you create the best customer experience. And then once you've created the best customer experience, you can always then streamline it, make it more efficient, make it more scalable and cost effective.
So my other lesson for founders would be to think about culture from the very beginning. I think a lot of times we are so focused on product market fit and building something that people want, we might ignore the culture piece. We might think that's... We don't have the luxury to think about culture. That's something that we'll think about when we're bigger, but in my experience, culture starts from day one. People say it starts when you hire your first employee. I think it starts with you and your co-founder, when it's just the two of you. The more you invest in people that are values-aligned, that are really behind the mission and want to help you be successful, the more likely you are to have a cohesive, dedicated team that's actually going to help you build a successful company.
And so for us, one of the rules that we have is that we want to make sure that we are the number one choice for the person that is getting an offer. And the reason is we don't want to necessarily win on compensation or on things that don't matter. We want their heart to be in it, and to essentially be like, "You know what? This is the place that I want to go to." And because of that, I think we've been able to create a very cohesive culture and if you look back at the past few years, it's been a really crazy market with the pandemic and then all of a sudden the V-shaped recovery and then back down with the recession. It's just very actually helpful to know that the team is fully committed and to be able to just focus on the customer, focus on the product that we are building for them.
Peep Laja:
So what are the three key strategies that spelled success for Mutiny? One, they picked the different ICP to sell to than most other players in their category.
Jaleh Rezaei:
So we are very focused on B2B companies. That's a big strategy trade off decision that we made early on.
Peep Laja:
Two, they built content and community around their expertise.
Jaleh Rezaei:
Folks have a lot of questions around like where should I get started? What are personalization tactics that I should implement? And so we've brought this together into sort of this content and community flywheel.
Peep Laja:
And three, they're really, really good at marketing and sales.
Jaleh Rezaei:
Our approach to marketing has been that we focused exclusively on really good acquisition marketers, so our entire go-to-market team, the entire marketing team, they're all acquisition marketers.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Jaleh.
Jaleh Rezaei:
One of our values is faster always wins. I think it's really important that you are the leader and are constantly innovating and building the next version because the more successful you are, the more people are going to copy what you have put out there.
Peep Laja:
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.