How Wing Assistant Reached $25M in Gross Sales With Google Ads and a Managed VA Marketplace (Interview with Founder Roland Polzin)

Event Context and Introduction

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, sasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Google Ads Setup Overview

Roland Polzin

00:18>> So this is our setup on Google Ads, and we upsold the existing customer base.

00:29>> Alright. So over the next twenty minutes, I'm going to talk about, the very beginning, what we knew when we only had about 1,000,000 in gross sales. I'm going to explain a little more about the value proposition at Wing Assistant, about the market, who we're selling to, and about grabbing bottom of the funnel 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

00:56>> as co founders, how we set up our analytics specifically, and then how we hunted inefficiencies to make really every dollar count. And then we ultimately cracked 25,000,000 in gross sales by multiplying the success with the magic ingredient and ultimately also beating Google on a small scale.

01:21>> This is our no

01:26>> laser pointer. Okay. Well, this is our revenue graph. So we got a seed round in early twenty twenty one, dollars 2,100,000. And that really enabled us to spend a lot in marketing to hire a growth marketer. 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 thanks to that foundation that we had in the beginning.

Revenue Graph and Seed Round

Roland Polzin

01:55>> So our value proposition at Wing is that we offer remote talent for small and medium sized companies to outsource. We're not only a virtual assistant provider, quote unquote, we're also a managed marketplace with a software solution. So anyone who comes with us to outsource and delegate tasks, they can use our software to do that efficiently and securely. Our market is mostly SMBs. So that can be SaaS startups, that can be marketing agencies, that can be small

02:30>> 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, 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,

02:57>> if someone was looking for, hey, how to hire a VA or 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.

03:20>> Yeah, so we really made every dollar spent count by selling to people who were ready to buy. And the key to that was that we set up our website such that it was really easy to buy. So this is our setup on Google Ads. Probably a little hard to read, but it's not so important what the gist is, you see all the keywords that we put in there, and then those keywords really did the magic for

03:52>> us. Now,

Bottom-of-Funnel Google Search Strategy

Roland Polzin

03:57>> mentioned before how we made every dollar count. So as co founders, we were hyper responsive. So similar to my predecessor here on the stage, we are four co founders. And so I can definitely resonate with all that conflict that sometimes comes with it, but it also has the benefits of having manpower, in our case, to do the job. So we were bootstrapped in the beginning. We only had $100,000 from the UC Berkeley Skydeck accelerator. So we

04:31>> were admitted in early twenty twenty. And yeah, we had to really get the most value out of our leads. And so this is the setup I implemented on our website, the three ways to purchase. One was you can set up a demo. You simply use Calendly, set a time, and then you speak with us about what you need, how we can potentially help you. Second one is to just chat with us on the website chat. We're

05:01>> using Fresh Chat. And the third option was to directly purchase. And that was actually, and still is, very unique in this industry because typically, yeah, other companies in this space would make you fill out a form and then they get back to you. And yeah, obviously that's not really good for conversion counting or recording because you don't really know if those people are actually going to buy.

05:31>> So those three options of purchasing are not all equally straightforward. So for setting up the analytics, we needed to set the conversion events for Google. 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?

Co-Founders' Hyper-Responsive Approach and Accelerator Funding

Roland Polzin

06:01>> And so, yeah, we used the Google Tag Manager. Who here is familiar with that tool? One, two, Okay. So maybe a third. Thank you. Google Tag Manager is basically a little piece of script that you put on your website, and it records user actions on the user's 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's going to happen here? Where did they

06:29>> come from, etcetera? What you see here on the screenshot again, the details aren't as important. But those are basically all the potential triggers that would fire when a user does a certain action on their computer.

06:49>> Now, the most straightforward

06:53>> way of purchasing is always the checkout. Someone comes in, gives us all their details, puts in their credit card information, and hits purchase, and then we know everything. We know the purchase price, we know where the lead came from, know their contact details and contact information. So that's the perfect case for Google. Google Google knows exactly, okay, that's that's the perfect customer. I'm gonna go out and do the same thing, get those people. It's not so

07:20>> straightforward with the demo setup because it's good if someone is so interested that they set up a calendar event with us and wants to speak with us, 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, yeah, by basically triangulating how many customers actually signed up with us of all the demos that we set up, we could still finagle enough to tell Google, okay,

07:50>> well that's about the value of each of these leads. Now what's most tricky is the third option, the chat. Because as I said, 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 user's end. When we chat with them, there isn't really a way where we can say, hey, that's a good lead. Like if the person asks us, hey, do you provide

08:21>> an 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.

Google Tag Manager and Conversion Tracking

Roland Polzin

08:36>> Yeah, so what I then did was well, I mean, if everything is recorded on the user's end, then on the user's end, the chat shows up. So 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. So that's what we did. And that's why I called it the secret keyword beautiful. And you see the script here.

09:08>> It's a pretty simple script. So whenever the word beautiful would show up in the chat window, we would actually trigger a conversion. And so an example of that would be, yes, 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, that's beautiful. We would love to move forward with you. And at that point,

09:34>> yeah, I mean, it's not natural, you would say, right? It's kind of like a word that is,

09:42>> let's say small enough to not really arouse suspicions, but is big enough to make a difference. And so that's what we did.

Secret Keyword 'Rats' for Filtering Bad Leads

Roland Polzin

09:56>> Click. Conversely, I introduced 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, since we recruit talent from Latin America, from The Philippines, from India, there are literally tens of thousands of applicants coming in every month, and they want to get hired. And many of those go to our chat. Obviously, do have automation, like a clicky clicky process,

10:33>> where they can say, hey, I'm looking for a job, and we then filter them out and point them to the website. But as you can imagine, more than enough of these people, they do want to speak to someone. And they try everything to get their resume 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, yeah,

10:58>> whenever that happened, we would and someone asked us, hey, 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 make sure that we record that that was not a good lead. And that actually came in handy later on. So with all that setup in place, we were actually able to scale. We

11:24>> expanded our keywords, we expanded our service, and we upsold the existing customer base. And so this is just an example. This is the website menu. As you see on the very top left corner, general VA or virtual assistant, that's what we started with. 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

11:53>> over again, grabbing the bottom of the funnel traffic, and really, really grow efficiently.

Data as the Magic Ingredient

Roland Polzin

12:01>> So now, the magic ingredient, it's not really a secret, most of you know, but it is data. Is power. And yeah, to give you an example of how that example with the negative keyword or secret word rats worked, and how I ultimately got a $41,000 refund from Google. Let's try with our tech table to play that video, in a second. I'm just gonna give a little more context to that. At some point and we already had

12:33>> a sales team in place the sales team was telling me, hey, Roland, every hour, there's five people coming in here, and they ask us to become a graphic designer, or they're here for a course for graphic designers. So really odd. I mean, we did offer graphic designer service, but we never would offer any

13:00>> training or classes for that. So it was really odd, it was so intense that it ultimately took away all the time from our salespeople, and they couldn't sell anymore. So we were curious, like, what's happening? Because it was so intense, and Google conversions and clicks and all that looked good. So what I did was to dive into the data that we had from the traffic. And I noticed that many of those rats leads, they had the

13:33>> UTM pointed at the bit what's called the ByteDance browser. So it came from TikTok. But Google doesn't work with TikTok. Anything, they're competitors for the ad space. So why would people from TikTok 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 ask these people who will come in for graphic designers, promise them like a I don't know a $20

Identifying TikTok Ad Fraud via UTM Data

Roland Polzin

14:03>> Amazon gift card, and and ask them to send over a screen recording of how they got to our website. And they did. And, if you guys are able to do it, let's play that screen recording that we got.

Nathan Latka

14:18Become 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 this. Swipe left.

Roland Polzin

14:31>> Swipe left on TikTok 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. What actually happened thank you, guys. What actually happened was that some malicious actor, they had a website, they put our ad there, and for every one of these TikTok people that they illicitly gathered, they got the $7.10 dollars for every click. And we

15:06>> paid for that traffic. And Google thought, oh, that's fantastic. They're all going to the website. Send them more. Right? So yeah. It 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. And good thing was that I had the data. I had the hard proof that that was happening. And with that data in place, we were able to

Recovering a $41,000 Refund from Google

Roland Polzin

15:31>> get that refund from Google. I actually wanted to have $60,000 but, well, what can't you do?

15:38>> Thank you. Okay. So that's basically the whole story. So to go over

15:48>> what we did

15:51>> oh, no. That slide isn't showing up. Okay. Yeah, so the very early stages, right, as a new player in the virtual assistant industry trying to introduce technology into this space to really become a managed marketplace to ensure quality and to outsourcing efficient and secure, we leverage Google Ads and Analytics to really serve this mid market, small and medium sized businesses, SaaS startups, e commerce businesses, by grabbing the bottom of the funnel traffic and being really, really

16:30>> efficient. Again, being hyper responsive as co founders, manning the chat, doing the demos ourselves, doing shifts, so 20 fourseven there was someone to talk with those leads who came in, and then hunting inefficiencies by rigorously introducing and maintaining yeah, let's say that data

16:52>> tagging to say, Okay, who's a rat and who's beautiful? And, yeah, then ultimately, with all that analytics set up in place, we're able to scale ultimately to 25,000,000 total. That's where we are today. And hopefully, at the next SaaS Open, I'm going to tell you how we did that to get 100,000,000. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

17:18Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latkov. 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 B2B software founders. So

17:45far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $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.