How Testimonial CEO Damon Chen grew Testimonial to $2.4M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hi everyone okay so my name is Guillaume I'm the CMO at testimonial.to it's actually my first time at a conference so please be mindful of that so testimonial is the platform to help you collect and display testimonials so we're going to cover multiple topics and it's only 20 minutes so it might feel like we're going a little bit fast but I have a I have it all set up so you can go back to that information later on so we'll start with cold and warm Outreach cold Outreach so for testimonial there's a lot of different Niche and different clients that we're trying to tap into so when it comes to real estate we dig a lot we looked at different platforms to use and if you're looking to find actually uh the email of a real estate agent that'll get into the Inbox and that's not forwarding emails the best one that I found so far has been Keller Williams it will give you very practical emails to use then as we're looking to work with different agencies something because in Legends you can can actually give us multiple accounts from that point on so there's a lot of directories that you can use for example the HubSpot one is giving it giving us 7 000 leads so then this is the same thing for zapier for example or webflow so in our case we integrate with the HubSpot so that makes it even more reasons to talk and work with them same thing for webflow for example so then there's AI Tools in our case AI tools are very visuals so they get results like this for them to create a wall of Love is something that makes a lot of sense for them so it's something that we're trying to look for different directories and this sort of stuff and so then when it comes to created Outreach we just covered that so when it comes to customized Outreach we try our best to pretty much customize every message that we send out so there's a couple of ways that we can do that for example we create a world of love for different companies so we have different tools that we can go on G2 for example enter the company name and you'll give us a wall of love for them so then we can just actually contact people with a wall of Love created for them my plan is to make a bunch for all of you here today and then DM it to you on LinkedIn or Twitter and that's just an easy way for you to get the good visuals of the potential result that you would have so then when it comes to finding new leads something that we do is we have a product and automation that contacts everybody launching on product so it's just fully automated every day it's contacting the first 10 people launching it's a very easy automation that you can set up on your own and you can do the same for a new domain pretty much registered with built with or you could do it for funding rounds at different places receiving reviews so when it comes to the code Outreach we just talked about creative customized and automated for the warm Outreach there's a lot of very basic sequences that you should be setting up like the onboarding flow churn and reactivation campaigns but what has been working the best for us has been the credits and limits so every time that you're running out of for example it's only two testimony video testimonials that you can capture so in our case being able to sending out different limits emails and we can even see that people are capturing additional testimonials so they'll make them even better fit to potentially upgrade in the future so Damon has this system where he puts every product that they on slack so then it helps me be able to create monthly product updates in no time just pretty much copy pasting over the information and that's about it so when we have a VA that pretty much goes into a spreadsheet and creates different fields for us so then every time that we contact people it's very customized to what's actually already on their website so the this this has been very useful because people even this is sent to people that already signed up on the platform so then we visit the website and try to customize the Outreach that way so now we're going to get into my favorite section this is a section that I've this is stuff that I've been doing since I was very young it's helped me work with a lot of musicians like Avicii or grammatic it's also gotten me a job at appsumo through NOAA and now with Damon just by sending code DMS to them so this is something that we do for example through Damon's account through the testimonial account and my personal account so you can use messages like this that do not include any links this is just plain text because you want to make sure that your preview message is looking as clean as possible so in this case there is no links there is just a simple intro the little Emoji has been working quite great and you always want to avoid any 10 the fact that it's mentioning a link so what you would do if you're sending a DM on Twitter directly you would want to Exile the thumbnail link because then you'll actually show up like this even if there's a link within your text so then there's a certain Chrome extensions that you can use they'll tell you the ranking of somebody on Twitter so hivemark will tell you that Damon is the number 15 in the Hindi hackers category so there's a bunch of different categories that you can use like the no code one and you can filter through them and find great leads that way and then this is this has been my favorite thing on Twitter these days is people putting tweets that tell you to reply with something or to comment to access something what's great with this is this just gave us a whole bunch of leads located in San Francisco and all those what's great with those is if you try to DM them afterwards they use a much higher chance of receiving a response because they're currently active on Twitter it's here if you just go through somebody's followers it's a metaphor of them five years ago so that's not very useful in this case it's people that commented you could do it the day of you can let it run if it's something that's going to get a lot of traffic you may want to give it 24 to 48 hours so it dies down and you don't miss out on too many Deeds so that covers about the the Twitter Outreach when it comes to LinkedIn we have a slack automation that pretty much gives us a recap of who's signing up on the platform so every morning I go through them and connect with people on LinkedIn this is something that's actually been working really great because we schedule a lot of demos that way when it comes to managing all of this we do it with a tool called text.com this is a great way to pretty much you can sync up all your inboxes you still need to invite at this point but if you go on Twitter you can find somebody that'll give you an invite pretty easily I've not seen many people use this which is very simple we'll skip through it quickly but it's just sending a very simple text shortcuts if you're sending the same text often it will help you save a bunch of time okay so that covers LinkedIn so before starting to work on your blog you obviously want to do a lot of keyword research and that's something that we spend a lot of time doing ahead of time you also want to look for different Niche content that's you know very specific to your company so this is what's helping us get Google Snippets for even keywords like notion so if you were to Google this now you will get this result here so something that Damon her founder has been doing for a long time and is doing very well is pretty much building in public and sharing what he's doing so he decided to stop sharing his Revenue numbers publicly so he wrote about it and this is the kind of articles that get featured on the hiker news and this sort of stuff so this is the traffic that was generated at that time since we started to focus back on the blog we can you'll be able to see this later on if you want to see those charts in more in more detail so that now we'll get a little bit more into building in public this is something that's helped Damon reached about 350 000 and above in annual recurring Revenue just from building on building in public via Twitter not even LinkedIn at the time so that was all from just Twitter but then he started to focus we started to expand on other things that will go a little bit broader so for example he was featured on his favorite podcast in the hikers and then a few other podcasts including the one from Nathan here that From Success open and so something that's a little detail to us that's been actually working quite well is sharing designs on figma so it's uh all three resources that you can find on your own but it's getting a good amount of Attraction people are using it for free and what's great with that is it's covering a lot of keywords so for example if you go on in you look up the the one over here social proof and review widgets if you were to look that up on Google you'll get results for that but you'll also find that as you look through the figma community so it's it's just helping us through different keywords and showing up for testimonial reviews and user generated content and this sort of stuff so then we're using everything that I just mentioned to share it on I can use and get some traffic that way or we for example the figma designs we share them on the figma community on Reddit and then we even created our own separated...