How Wing Assistant CEO Roland Polzin grew Wing Assistant 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...