Hey, everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Savvas Zortikis, the CEO and Co-Founder of Viral Loops, which is a venture-wrapped viral and referral marketing platform.
Tune in to hear how they turned word-of-mouth into a business model, how they drive 1,500 organic leads per month, and why Savvas thinks you should focus in on a couple of business elements instead of a whole bunch of different ones.
Show notes:
- [00:46] Before we jump into today’s interview, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
- [01:08] Savvas Zortikis, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Viral Loops, which is a venture-wrapped viral and referral marketing platform.
- [01:41] He’s been in the marketing industry for 3 years.
- [01:52] He has worked internationally for major companies (BMW, Mercedes, etc.)
- [02:22] He started the agency as an in-house project.
- [03:05] They are a referral marketing platform.
- [03:14] They want to make word-of-mouth work for small and medium businesses.
- [03:36] An ecommerce store that is just starting out doesn’t have the word-of-mouth it needs to succeed.
- [03:57] Savvas wanted to make a flexible and personalized approach that would work for different businesses in different industries.
- [04:30] They were inspired by other brands like Dropbox.
- [05:00] One of Savvas’ favorite stories is about a growth marketing academy. They organized one of the biggest growth marketing conferences.
- [05:18] They decided to run a registration campaign using the Milestone campaign through Viral Loops.
- [06:04] The more friends you invite, the more you get out of it.
- [07:02] Viral Loops drove 30-40% of the traffic through the campaign.
- [07:38] Viral Loops is a SAAS business, so they have a 40 day trial and then they charge you based on the number of people that join your campaign starting at $49/month.
- [07:57] Currently, they are really close to 40,000 MRR.
- [08:11] Currently, their growth rate is at 25% month over month.
- [08:30] In terms of leads, they get around 1500 leads per month.
- [08:50] Most of these are organic leads from blog posts. No paid ads.
- [09:10] Viral Loops customers are paying an average of $100/month, but they currently have fewer than 800 customers.
- [09:45] They launched in February 2016, but they didn’t do any marketing; they were just building the product and wanted to get people to test it out.
- [10:21] They tried many marketing tactics, but this was probably a mistake because it spread them too thin.
- [10:50] So, they decided to only do outbound marketing for two months. It was a disaster.
- [11:08] Then, they started posting a lot of content and launching products.
- [11:30] They got a lot of customers through Product Hunt, then that company became their customers.
- [11:55] A tactic that has worked well for them is that they give their product away to marketers for free.
- [12:02] When they get value from Viral Loops, they then spread the word.
- [13:25] There is no silver bullet when it comes to marketing and growth.
- [13:55] They started focusing aggressively on acquisitions and then activation.
- [14:28] Savvas thinks you should focus in on a couple of things instead of many different ones.
- [14:50] It doesn’t’ pay to divide your focus into too many parts.
- [16:18] Another mistake they made was that they didn’t take customer success too seriously.
- [17:30] Customer satisfaction is a main driver for word-of-mouth referrals.
- [17:55] They need to train their customer success employees to become growth marketers in a sense.
- [18:40] Viral Loops is testing a lot of tools, but twp that have added value is Segment and Intercom.
- [19:28] One book that Savvas recommends is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. He thinks it will prove helpful to those starting a business from scratch.
- [20:20] Savvas really likes Rich Ross’ podcast, which isn’t about marketing directly, but he talks to a lot of successful people.
Resources From This Interview:
- Viral Loops
- Savvas on LinkedIn
- Savvas on Instagram
- Segment
- Intercom
- Must-read book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Rich Ross
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