How Testimonial Reached $350K ARR With a Team of 2 Using Organic SEO and Founder Brand (Interview with CMO Guillaume Bardet)

Introduction and What Testimonial Does

Guillaume Bardet

00:01Hi everyone. Okay, my name is Guillaume. I'm the CMO at testimonial.tio. 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.

00:20So, we're going to cover multiple topics and it's only twenty minutes, so you may feel like we're going a little bit fast, but I have it all set up so you can go back to that information later on.

Cold Outreach Strategy and Lead Sources

Guillaume Bardet

00:32So, we'll start with cold and warm outreach. Cold outreach.

00:39So, 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 dug a lot, we looked at different platforms to use and if you're looking to find actually 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

01:02use. Then as we're looking to work with different agencies, something because an agency account 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 us 7,000 leads. So, then there's the same thing for Zapier for example or Webflow. So, in our case, we integrate with HubSpot. So, that makes it even more reasons to talk and work with them. Same thing

01:29for Webflow, for example. So, then these AI tools. In our case, AI tools are very visuals. So, get result 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

01:56to 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 wall of love for different companies. So, we have different tools that we can go on the 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

02:16make 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 good visuals of the potential result that you would have.

Automated Product Hunt Outreach

Guillaume Bardet

02:28So 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 Hunt. 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

Warm Outreach and Onboarding Sequences

Guillaume Bardet

02:50places receiving reviews. So when it comes to the cold outreach, we just talked about creating 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 testimonial video testimonials that you can capture. So

03:17in our case, being able to sending out different limits emails and we can even see that people are capturing additional testimonials. So that'll make them even better fit to potentially upgrade in the future.

03:30So Damon has this system where he puts every product update on Slack. So then he 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.

03:43So 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, 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 gonna get into my favorite

Cold DMs and Twitter Outreach Tactics

Guillaume Bardet

04:10section. 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 Noah and now with Damon just by sending cold 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

04:34that do not include any links. This is just plain text because you wanna make sure that your preview message is looking as clean as possible. So, in this case, there is no links. There's just a simple intro. The little emoji has been working quite great and you always wanna avoid any the fact that it's mentioning a link. So what you would do if you're sending a DM on Twitter directly, you'd wanna x out the thumbnail link

05:01because 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 that'll tell you the ranking of somebody on Twitter. So, HiveMark would tell you that Daemon 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.

05:27And 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 command 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, there is a much higher chance of receiving a response because they're currently active on Twitter.

05:53It's you know, if you just go through somebody's followers, it's a matter of follow 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 gonna get a lot of traffic, may wanna give it twenty four to forty eight hours so it dies down and you don't miss out on too many deeds.

06:14So, 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

LinkedIn Outreach and Demo Scheduling

Guillaume Bardet

06:40a great way to pretty much, you can sync up all your inboxes. You still need an invite at this point, but if you go on Twitter, can find somebody that'll give you an invite pretty easily.

06:52I'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'll help you save a bunch of time.

Blog Strategy and Keyword Research

Guillaume Bardet

07:03Okay, so that covers LinkedIn. So, before starting to work on your blog, you obviously wanna do a lot of keyword research and that's something that we spend a lot of time doing ahead of time. You also wanna 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.

07:31So, something that Damon, her Founder has been doing for a long time and he's 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 hacker news and this sort of stuff. So, this is the traffic that was generated at that time since we started to focus back

07:54on the blog. You'll be able to see this later on if you want to see those charts in more detail.

Building in Public and Founder Brand

Guillaume Bardet

08:03So, we'll get a little bit more into building in public. This is something that's helped Daemon reach about 350,000 and above in annual recurring revenue just from building in public via Twitter, not even LinkedIn at the time. So, that was all from just Twitter.

08:22But then, to expand on other things that will go a little bit broader. So, for example, he was featured on his favorite podcast, Indie Hackers and then a few other podcasts including the one from Nathan here from SaaS Open. And so, something that's a little detailed to us that's been actually working quite well is sharing designs on Figma. So, it's all free resources that you can find on your own, but it's getting a good amount of

08:49traction. People are using it for free. And what's great with that is it's covering a lot of keywords. So, example, if you go on and you look up 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 it 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

09:14user generated content and this sort of stuff. So, we're using everything that I just mentioned to share it on how can you use and get some traffic that way or we, for example, the Figma designs, we shared them on the Figma community on the Reddit and then we even created our own subreddit which we're calling SaaS alternative. What we're doing with this one is, we have a lot of competitors that have a domain that's less strong

Programmatic SEO and Integration Tutorials

Guillaume Bardet

09:39than ours. So, we don't want to create alternative to pages within our domain. So, what we do is we're using the SaaS alternative subreddit and it's actually ranking on Google within about forty eight hours.

09:54So, then we're going to get into programmatic SEO and ads and sponsorships. So, for integrations, this is, as I mentioned earlier, it's what's helping us get on a lot of Google snippets. So, we're covering a lot of different topics, for example, how to turn a Slack message into testimonials or even WhatsApp messages, little snippets that you get in Gmail. But then, we get even more specific in the tutorials hub. So, that's where it's collecting G2 reviews

Newsletter Sponsorships

Guillaume Bardet

10:23on Shopify. So, this is covering pretty much two good keywords within one article. So, then we're sponsoring different newsletters. For example, the one from Justin Welch or the one from Eddie, very good copy. This has been great because you can also wanna build a relationship with them. For example, Damon is underpaying. He's underpaying by about $500 per ad spot for just being a good relationship with them and working with them for the long term instead of

10:51just a single ad spot.

10:57So, upsells and super fans. So, add ons and space quotas and all of that is something that our tool can benefit a lot from because you're collecting certain amount of testimonials or maybe you need certain features that's limited to your plan. So, Daemon has it set up in a way with a tool called airplane. Dev. So, it helps me be able to reply to the live chat and answer and handle the upgrade for anybody or the

11:23seat quota for just pretty much entering the email and clicking the one that I want to.

Affiliate Marketing and Rewardful

Guillaume Bardet

11:29Obviously, since we're just a small team of two people and still a little bit low on the side of trying to spend a lot on marketing and stuff like that, affiliate program has been very helpful. So, so far somebody is making $790 from just writing a single medium article and having that featured pretty show pretty high on the results of Google. So, different I would definitely recommend using a tool like RewardFull, so you can set that

11:57up pretty easily. You can even then use the tool to actually get, as you're doing sponsorships, can simply create a reward for link for them and be able to better track the results that way.

Pricing Page Redesign and Adoption Lift

Guillaume Bardet

12:11So, Daemon had this what might seem to some people to be useful little feature which is you have a free plan and you had the starter plus plan hidden within the free plan. But then we started to think about it and I told him that I don't think enough people are actually seeing it. So what we did is we did a quick redesign and just shipped it on the site. So now you can see it on

12:35top over there. And that overnight pretty much increased the adoption by 100% from just simply redesigning the pricing page, but not actually shipping any new features or shipping any new plans. So, just a simple redesign can actually have a big impact on your numbers.

12:53So, then Daemon likes to ship as fast as he can and just fix bugs very quickly. So, this case, he gets people to sometimes even talk about us afterwards or sharing online or people that are happy with the results and just think that we're actually a bigger team than we are.

13:10So,

Domain Acquisition Strategy

Guillaume Bardet

13:13Daemon likes to remove friction. This is, you know, everybody, these people trying to find your tool because we're called testimonial.to. It's not a very common domain name. So, he spent about $30,000 buying every other domains that he can think of And just about last week, we finally actually turned that profitable. So, you know, it might seem like a lot of money upfront, but it's actually turned into more revenue already and this is just a couple of

13:39months in. So, if we keep on doing that and you keep seeing the revenue from that, it's actually very useful.

Intercom Search Optimization

Guillaume Bardet

13:48So, within intercom, people is always searching for different keywords. So, what we do is we try to include as many of them as we can. So, example, here we're including different integrations. So, this way if somebody is looking for how to turn Apple Podcast into testimonials, they can just put Apple Podcast and they'll see this result.

Free Fetching Tools and Product-Led Growth

Guillaume Bardet

14:12So, built a few fetching tools we call them. So, is for somebody that launched on Product Hunt, you can just enter your link and the people that built the tool and they will give you a whole wall of love. So, this is something that we do for G2 also and for Twitter collections. You just enter the link and turn it into a wall of love. And finally,

14:38Damon, you know, there's a lot of little features that your tool needs. For example, he finally shipped a way for you to change the email on your account. He did that some time ago but this is he's doing that for every little thing that he thinks of just to simplify and remove any friction along along the way. So that was product led growth. And so that's that's about it. When it comes to finding everything that I've

15:04mentioned and all the tools, you can go to testimonial.tiosasopen. You'll be able to find the entire presentation and you can submit a request for us to build a wall of love for you or you can find the fetching tools yourself. I definitely recommend checking out some of the tools like text.com. It's been saving us a lot of time. Feather is a way to pretty much run your blog within Notion, Rewardful as I mentioned. And if you're

15:29trying to build great videos for your tool and different screenshots like some of the ones that you see, you can use screenshot as Screen. Studio or Snapper. Then airplane dev dev was the way to pretty much do a bunch of automated task within your system. Typefulli, many of you probably are familiar with it, is just to schedule tweets since it just made it that you can schedule stuff on LinkedIn also. Then Missive is a great way

15:54to manage your inbox for free and HiveMark to find different collections on Twitter and find different leads that you can work with. So that's about it for testimonial and thank you very much for having me on.