How Goldcast Grew from $2M to $8M in Revenue Using Digital Events and Video Content (Interview with CEO Palash Soni)

Context: Recorded at SaaS Open Live Event

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Palash Soni

00:18>> 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. And we used them, AB tested them in the title, and we saw the registration rate, like, skyrocket.

Palash Soni Introduction and Goldcast Overview

Palash Soni

00:32>> Hi, everyone. 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 b to b 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 our revenue trajectory. And what I'm going to talk about

Revenue Growth from $2M to $8M

Palash Soni

00:57>> helped us get from 2 to 8,000,000 in the last two years. This was especially after we moved out of founder sales. Right? Founder led sales. And over the next twenty minutes, I'm going to talk about why did we come into a video and event for a strategy? How do we, 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

01:19>> connected and I'll talk about them. And before I start, a couple of disclaimers, know I 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 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 SaaS, everything in SaaS, there are tons of competitors and alternatives.

01:41>> 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 SaaS is a red fucking ocean. We all know it's so crowded. This is Martech map from last year. Probably won't even fit in the screen if we do it this

Why Goldcast Committed to Video and Digital Events

Palash Soni

02:03>> year. And I kind of knew this when I was going into Martech, 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 SaaS, and it became like super hot when COVID hit.

02:26>> 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 raise a lot less. And we were figuring out how do we stand out as a verticalized competitor to all these giant refunded horizontals. So we tried a bunch of things. We tried outbound. We did all the things that the influencers told us on LinkedIn. We had a good SDR team, and it

02:46>> didn't really work. 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 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

Outbound and SEO Attempts That Underperformed

Palash Soni

03:10>> on LinkedIn as well, and that is when we realized, oh, video content really works really well, and it kind of gels with what we are doing. So we started eating our own dog food. So I'm going to talk about key tactical strategies to power a good live digital event motion. So there are the two big themes that work for us is, number one is an event series. So event series, think about it as a podcast that

03:35>> is video based, 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 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,

03:56>> it's very thought leadership, but it's very engaging. And the key here is consistency. So you do it over a long period of time, and it initially is slightly flatlined, 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

04:19>> persona, keep it focused on them. The second is using summits, digital summits and mini series to create lightning strikes. So if you have something you want as a CEO or marketer focus on in a specific 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. And it's a product used for video

04:42>> content repurposing. And we said, Okay, let's couple it. Let's launch it with a mini series, like one hour session over four days, talking about AI video content repurposing. And we were talking about things that Eric from Single Grain yesterday was talking about, but there were some things that really worked for us in this and made it successful. So a couple of tactics. Number one is the titles that you see here, they are all derived from keywords

Event Series Strategy: Recurring Persona-Targeted Sessions

Palash Soni

05:06>> that our prospects use in Gong. So we looked at Gong, what are the words that prospects use, and we used them, AB tested them in the title, and we saw the registration rate skyrocketing. So you see that one one seven one 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 and tactical content, even competing products

05:32>> because we want to give people tactical advice, and that helps really well, especially if you are trying to drive like mid funnel. So if you see this, we had almost 500 people attending this in in, you know, span of three 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 doing this. And over time, this has become a big pipeline driver for us.

05:56>> So if you look at this trend, the early bars are bigger because it takes time for leads to convert into pipe. But it almost drives seven fifty ks of pipeline for us every month and for very little cost. It doesn't cost that much money to do it. And some very big brands also use it. So some of our favorite brands, like Sixth Sense, Drift, Zuora, they also use similar kind of strategies, especially if you want to

06:20>> learn about this and see this in action, look at Sixth Sense and attend their webinars and events, are awesome. And they very much 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, if you really make an engagement, then the live engagement is really sales code. Your sales team can use it to personalize

Digital Summits and Mini-Series for Product Launches

Palash Soni

06:45>> their outreach, the marketing team can use it to personalize their marketing, even the product and customer success team can learn a lot from it. So this is something that you do not get if you do a podcast instead. 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 content engine? That's a very key part

07:11>> of this. It will not work if we don't do 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 coming out, video asset coming out of say an event and webinar or anything like that,

07:33>> and then we cut it up in multiple clips, and then we post it on a regular cadence on YouTube. So the YouTube algorithm only works really well if you post repeatably on consistent topics, and that has caused a huge surge of traffic for us. Second thing is we create blog posts automatically that are SEO optimized and they have clips, video clips interspersed. So if a human is actually reading them, then they find it engaging and they

Using Gong Keywords to Boost Registration Rates

Palash Soni

07:58>> can go and watch the whole video if they want to. And the third thing, which is very important, is we can automatically create multiple LinkedIn posts using AI, and this is something that all of this GoldCast product does, but you can use ChatGPD as well and other tools. But it creates all these posts, and we give it to our employees and post it on our page, and it creates that drumbeat of posts on social that you

08:21>> need to stay relevant and top of mind to your audience.

08:26>> The second big thing that works really well for us is leveraging the speaker's reach. So we have very nice speakers, and when they come to our events, we give them, just right after the event when it's fresh in their mind, things to post on social right away. Right? We don't expect them to create it. We give them a LinkedIn post and a video clip of something nice they said in the event, and we give them multiple

08:46>> options, and they can go and post it. So the two things in between I I look weird in that, but these are basically this is the CMO of KPMG, and I got her on an event. She gave us just fifteen minutes, but right after I sent her five options, these are awesome things you said, she posted two of them, and we got two financial services firms as leads from those posts, they are both closing into 6

09:12>> figure contracts. And this is something that has worked really well for us. How do we leverage on the speaker's reach? And ultimately, all of this creates the virality you need from a go to market motion that works consistently over time. So we ask our prospects about how did they hear about us, and this is our number one way people hear about us, either through our events or through speakers sharing about us.

09:38>> So we talked about all of these things, but ultimately, the key takeaway is that you need to be able to create content and do live engagement using digital events because in this day and age, a brand is only as relevant as the last ad or the last video you posted, and and you need to do that at the speed of social to keep top of mind, and especially when things are getting crowded and crowded over time.

10:06>> I'll wrap up with some tactical learnings that you can use and just create a checklist of sorts. Use what the words that your audience uses to create that extra bump in registrations, attendance, do a mix of thought leadership and use case to create top funnel, bottom funnel impact, Get great speakers, one thing that I forgot to mention is use automatic calendar invites, anyone who registers for our events, we send them calendar invite and that bumps up

Repurposing Video into YouTube, SEO Blogs, and LinkedIn

Palash Soni

10:33>> our attendance by 30%, 40%. And then last, AI is your friend. To create content at the speed of social, you need AI. So use AI to repurpose content, to power your speakers, and ultimately get all of the data to drive pipeline and brand. Cool. I am actually done. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

11:00Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. 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 one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software

11:26founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.