How Goldcast CEO Palash Soni grew Goldcast to $10.8M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording and this is a graph of all the VC money raised in ourspace right and this is also a graph of my blood pressure and we used them AB tested them in the title and we saw the registration rate like Skyrocket hi everyone uh welcome back from lunch I'm palash I am the CEO and co-founder of goldcast I'm very glad to be here we are a B2B video and event marketing software and I'm going to talk about how do we use a video and digital event strategy to drive an awesome go-to Market motion so here we go okay to put things in context this is a revenue trajectory and what I'm going to talk about helped us get from 2 to 8 million in the last 2 years this was especially after we moved out of founder sales right founder Le sales and over the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about why did we commit to a video and event for strategy how do we you know what tactics we use to power a great Live digital event motion and then how do we use that to power a great content engine all three are connected and I'll talk about them and before I start couple of disclaimers I know everyone is back from lunch so if you yawn or nap I have no problem with that and then I do a lot of Shameless L plugs for goldcast and I will apologize all in advance so please forgive me and you can use goldcast for anything you like you see today as with SAS everything in SAS there are tons of competitors and Alternatives you can use them as well but I wouldn't mind that either so let's start so why did we commit to a video and digital event based strategy right that's that's a key question why do you do all the hard work and the big theme Here is that SAS is a red ocean right we all know it's so crowded right this is like mtech map from last year probably it won't even fit in this screen if we do it this year and I kind of knew this when I was going into mtech but you don't really feel the pinch till you have to sell in a market like this right and this is a graph of all the VC money raised in our space right and this is also a graph of my blood pressure as this was all happening and digital events was like a sleepy corner of SAS and it became like super hot when Co hit and all our competitors were raising a ton of money and we also have raised more money than I would have liked to but we still raised a lot less and we were figuring out how do we stand out as a verticalized competitor to all these like gantly funded horizontals right so we tried a bunch of things we tried outbound we did all the things that the influencers told us on link and we had a good SDR team and it didn't really work right this is from one and a half years back and our reply rates were pretty bad pretty poor we also tried a lot of SEO inbound blog stuff and it kind of worked but it didn't really really work because what we realized is that it's hard to stand out as a brand and build a brand with these two tactics it's good to capture demand but not to create demand and to stand out and we posted on LinkedIn as well um and that is when we realized oh video content really works really well and it kind of gels with what we are doing um so we started eating our own do food so I'm going to talk about key like tactical strategies to power a good Live digital event motion so the the two like themes that work for us is number one is an event Series so event series think about it as a podcast that is video based uh that happens on a recurring regular basis and is targeted to a Persona so for instance we have three key personas we have an event marketer Persona we have the VP of demand gen and a CMO over the last two years we have done event series that happen every like two weeks to four weeks targeted to these personas and we talk about anything that's relevant to them at the moment we don't talk about a product it's very thought leadership but it's very like engaging and and the key here is consistency so you do it over a long period of time and it initially is slightly Flatline then it grows and at the peak we have had almost like 100 people attending these on a weekly basis and it's great engagement and then it tapers off and then you move on to the next one so that's event series works very well if you target the right Persona keep it focused on them the second is using Summits digital Summits and miniseries to create lightning strikes so if you have something you want as a CEO or marketer focus on in a specific spefic period of time say a product launch or you are repurposing your brand or things like that then you use this so for instance last year we launched an AI product just like all of you right and it's a product used for video content repurposing and we said okay let's couple it let's launch it with a minseries like 1 hour session over 4 days talking about AI video content repurposing right and we were talking about things that Eric from single grain yesterday was talking about uh but there were some things that really worked for us in this and made it successful right so a couple of tactics number one is the titles that you see here right they are all derived from keywords that are PR prospects use in gong right so we looked at gong what are the things that like the words that prospects use and we used them AB tested them in the title and we saw the registration rate like skyrocketing so you see that 1171 people registering they are all marketers that registered for this event the second tactic that worked is we said okay let's ditch thought leadership in this let's talk about use cases tactical content even like competing products because we want to give people tactical advice and that helps really well especially if you're trying to drive like midf funnel so you see this we had almost 500 people attending this in in you know span of 3 days and a lot of Engagement so the stuff in the bottom that's all data that's very key engagement data that we got from um doing this and over time this has become like a big pipeline driver for us so if you look at this trend the early bars are bigger because it Tak takes time for leads to convert into pipe but it almost drives like 750k of uh pipeline for us every month and for very little cost right it doesn't cost that much money to do it and some very big brands also use it right so some of our favorite Brands like sixense drift Zora they also use similar kind of strategy especially if you want to learn about this and see this in action look at six cents and attend their webinars and events they are awesome and they very much you know embody what I'm talking about and then the last thing which is obvious but also important to know is that this thing drives a lot of live engagement if you do digital events well right if you really make an engagement that then the live engagement is really sales gold right your sales team can use it to personalize their Outreach the marketing team can use it to personalize their marketing even the product and and customer success team can learn a lot from it so this is something that you do not get if you do in a do a podcast instead right but this is very very valuable stuff that you get from Live digital events and it has worked for us the second part is how do you use this to power an actual like content engine right that's a very key part of this it will not work if we don't do you know content after it and the big thing here is something that we have kind of talked about in other sessions as well is how do you use one video asset and then repurpose it into multiple different marketing assets right so three things that work really well for us we take a video clip you know coming out video asset coming out of say an event and webinar or or anything like that and then we cut it up in multiple clips and then we post it on a regular cence on YouTube right so the YouTube elard of the M works really well if you post repeatably on consistent topics and that has caused a huge surge of traffic for us the second thing is we create blog posts automatically that are SEO optimized and they have Clips video clips interpers so if a human is actually reading them then they find it engaging and they can go and watch the video if they want to and the third thing which is very important is we can automatically create multiple LinkedIn posts right using you know using Ai and this is something that all of this goldcast product does uh but you can use chat GPD as well and other tools uh but it creates all these post and we give it to our employees and post it on our page and it creates that drum beat of you know posts on social that you need to stay relevant in top of mind to your audience the second big thing that works really well for us is leveraging the speaker reach so we have very nice speakers and when they come to our events we give them just right after the event...