How Wing Assistant Founder Roland Polzin grew to $20M revenue with a 962 person team in 2023.

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 so this is uh our setup on Google ads and we upsold the existing customer [Music] base all right so over the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about um the very beginning what we knew when we only had about a million in gross sales I'm going to explain a little more about the value proposition at Wing assistant about the market who we selling to and about grabbing bottom of the fun on business next one I'll dive into how we always have efficiency on top of our minds how we were hyper responsive especially in the beginning as co-founders uh how we set up our Analytics uh specifically and then how we hunted inefficiencies to make really every dollar count and then we ultimately cracked uh 25 million in gross sales by multiplying the success uh with the magic ingredient and ultimately also beating Google uh on a small scale this is our uh no laser pointer okay well this is our Revenue graph so so we got a seed round in uh early 2021 uh 2.1 million and that really enabled us to spend a lot in marketing to hire a growth marketer um and up to that point we really only bootstrapped so I'm going to talk about the bootstrapping part and what you see here is basically all uh thanks to that Foundation that we had in the beginning so our value proposition at Wing is that we offer remote talent for small and medium-sized companies to Outsource um we're not only a virtual assistant provider quote unquote uh we're also a managed marketplace with a software solution so any anyone who comes with us to Outsource and delegate tasks uh they can use our software to do that to do that efficiently and securely um our Market is mostly smbs so that can be SS startups that can be marketing agencies that can be small e-commerce businesses or larger ones and with Advanced customer Discovery in the very early stages we figured out and we Dove deep into what really is it that makes our customers special uh what do they look like and what's our ICP now with that in mind we were able to grab the bottom of the funnel business so we learned what general keyword Universe was out there and we really doubled down on Google search campaigns so for example if someone was looking for Hey how to hire a VA or how to uh how to get remote Talent then they would guess what see an ad of wing assistant so really we would grab all those people that were already looking for the solution we had so it's ultimately very efficient we just grab the people that were already browsing um yeah so we really made every dollar spend count um by selling to people who were ready to buy and the key to that was that we set up our website such that uh it was really easy to buy so this is uh our setup on Google ads uh probably a little hard to read but it's not not so important what the what the gist is that uh you see all the keywords that we put in there and then those keywords really um did the magic for us now um I met uh I mentioned before how we made every count so um as co-founders we were hyper responsive so similar to my um my pred predecessor here on the stage we are four Co co-founders and so I can definitely resonate with um all that conflict that sometimes come comes with it but it also has the benefits of having uh Manpower in our case to do the job so we were bootstrapped in the beginning we only had um $100,000 from the UC Berkeley skyc Asel Ator uh so uh we were admitted in early 2020 and uh yeah we had to really get the most uh uh value out of our leads and so this is the setup I um implemented on our website the three ways to purchase one was you can set up a demo you simply use calendly uh set a time and then you speak with us about what you need how we can potentially help you uh second one is to uh just chat with us on the website chat we're using fresh chat and the third option uh was to directly purchase and that was actually uh and still is very unique in this industry because typically um yeah other companies uh in the space would make you fill out a form uh and then they get back to you and yeah obviously that's not really good for conversion uh counting or recording because you don't really know if those people are actually going to buy so um those three options of purchasing uh are uh not always not all equally uh straightforward so um for setting up the analytics uh we needed to uh Set uh set the conversion events for Google right so because Google needs to know okay which of these people that we sent to you which of those clicks is actually going to convert into a paying customer um and so yeah we use the Google tag manager who who here is familiar with that tool one two okay so maybe a third thank you uh Google tag manager is basically uh a little piece of script that you put on your website and uh it records user actions on the user side so on the user's computer if the user clicks the tag manager script will pick up that click and see okay well what what's what's going to happen here where did they came that they come from Etc um what you see here on the screenshot again like the details aren't as important uh but those are basically all the potential triggers that would fire if when a user uh uh does a certain action on their computer now um the most straightforward way of purchasing is always the the checkout right someone comes in gives us all their details put in the credit card information and hits purchase and then we know everything we know the purchase price we know the uh where the lead came from we we know their contact details and uh uh contact information so that's the perfect case for Google Google Google knows exactly okay that's that's the perfect customer I'm going to go out and do the same thing get those people it's not so straightforward with the demo setup because uh it's good if someone is so interested that they set up a calendar event with us and wants to speak with us but but only about 40% of those leads would actually convert so the majority of those still aren't customers but it's good enough and uh yeah by basically triangulating how many customers actually signed up with us of all the demos that we set up uh we could still uh fin angle enough to tell Google okay well that's about the um the value of one of each of these leads now what's most tricky is the third option the chat uh because as I said right the Google tag manager and also pretty much any other script that helps you record conversions and actions on the user's end it's on the users's end right so when we chat with them uh there isn't really a way where we can say hey that's a good lead like if the person asks us hey uh do you provide a executive assistant and we say yes we do and then they say oh great let me sign up with you that's the point when we want to tell Google hey that's a fantastic lead but we can't at least that's what we thought um yeah so what I then did was well I mean if everything is recorded on the users's end then on the users's end the chat shows up right so it's they have the chat open and if we chat them with a certain message and we just put in an inconspicuous keyword wouldn't that be picked up and yeah it will right so that's what we did and that's why called it the secret keyword beautiful and you see the the script here it's pretty simple script so whenever the word beautiful would show up in the chat window we would actually trigger in conversion and so an example of that would be here someone comes in as I just said in the example Say Hey I want to purchase from you and then our sales team nowadays or back in the day ourselves as Founders would say oh that it's beautiful we would love to move forward with you and at that point yeah I mean the it's kind of it's not natural you would say right it's kind of like a word that is um yeah let's say small enough to uh to not really arouse suspicions but it's big enough to make a difference and so that's what we did um yeah um click conversely uh I roduced the secret keyword rats so whenever there is a lead that we didn't want right and that happens more often than you would think right especially in our industry um since we recruit Talent from Latin America from the Philippines from India there are literally tens of thousands of applicants coming in every every month and they want to get hired and many of those go to our chat obviously we do have have an automation like a a clicky clicky uh process where they can say hey I'm looking for a job and we then filter them out and point them to the website but uh as you can imagine more than enough of these people they do want to speak to someone and they try everything uh to get their resume uh in the right place and so they will actually then take the time of our salespeople or back in the day of the founding team to actually make sales and so um yeah whenever that happened we would and and someone asked us hey uh I want to be hired can I apply and then we would say oh rats I can't help you with that but here's the link to our job site right so basically still help them but uh make sure that we record that that was not a good lead uh and that actually came in handy uh later on so with all that setup in place we were actually able to scale uh we expanded our keywords we expanded our service and we upsold the existing customer and so this is just an example this is the the website menu as you see on the very top left corner uh General VA or virtual assistant that's what we started with uh and that's basically where we got all the bottom of the funnel traffic and down the line we added all these additional services or Talent areas and we could do the same thing over and over again uh grabbing the bottom of the funnel traffic and really really grow efficiently so now um the magic ingredient it's not really a secret most of you know but it's data right uh data is power and um yeah to give you an example of how that uh example with the negative keyword uh or secret word rats worked uh and how I ultimately got a $441,000 refund from Google um let's try with our Tech table to play that video um in a second I'm just going to give a little more context to that at some point and we already had a sales team in place the sales team was uh telling me uh Hey Roland there's like every every hour there's like five people coming in here and they want to like they ask us uh to become a graphic designer or they're here for like a course for graphic designers so really odd I mean we did offer graphic designer service but we never would offer any um yeah any any training or classes for that so it it was really odd and it was so intense that It ultimately uh took away all the time from our salespeople and they couldn't sell anymore so um we were curious like what's happening right because it was so intense and like Google conversions and clicks and all that looked good so uh what I did was to dive into the data that we had from the traffic uh and I noticed that many of those rats uh leads they had uh um their UTM pointed at the bit uh what's it called The Bite dance browser so came from Tik Tok but Google doesn't work with Tik Tok right they're if if anything they're competitors for the ad space so why would people from Tik Tock come to our website that was super weird and so what I had my sales team do is okay you guys now I told them you guys asked these people who come in for graphic design promised them like a I don't know a $20 Amazon gift card and they and asked them to send over a screen recording of how they got to our website and they did and uh if you guys are able to do it uh let's play that screen recording that we got become a graphic designer it brought me to this website and that's where I found the information I needed this career is so fun but also super rewarding because you get to do everything on your own I seriously suggest learning more about about this swipe left swipe left on Tik Tok and see this website they click because they want to become a graphic designer they click again visit website and that was our ad and then they land on our website so what actually happened thank you guys um what actually happened was that some malicious actor they uh yeah they had a website they put our ad there and for every one of these Tik Tok people that they illicitly gathered they got the $7 $10 for every click and we paid for that traffic and Google thought oh that's fantastic they're all going to the website send them more right so yeah uh was very bad for us and we actually paid a lot of money for nothing and so yeah I fought with Google quite a bit actually over nine months um and good thing was that I had the data I had the hard prove that that was happening and with that data in place uh we were able to get that refund uh from Google I actually wanted to have 60,000 but well what can you do thank you okay so um that's basically the whole story uh so to go over what we did oh no that slide isn't showing up okay um yeah so in the very early stages right uh as a new player in the virtual assistant industry trying to introduce technology into the space to really become a manage Marketplace to ensure quality uh and to make those uh make Outsourcing efficient and secure uh we leverage Google analy uh Google Google ads and analytics uh to really serve this Market uh this mid-market small and medium siiz businesses s startups e-commerce businesses by grabbing the bottom of the funnel traffic and being really really efficient again being hyper responsive as co-founders Manning the chat doing the demos ourselves doing shifts so 24/7 there was someone to talk with those leads who came in and then hunting inefficiencies by rigorously introducing and maintaining um yeah let's say that um uh that uh data tagging to say okay who's a rat and who's beautiful and uh yeah then ultimately with all that analytics setup in place we're able to scale ultimately to 25 million total uh that's where we are today and hopefully at the next SS open I'm going to tell you how we did that to get 100 million thank [Music] you hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer