Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Yam Regev, CEO and Co-Founder of Zest, where marketers go to share and discover marketing content that is manually curated by the Zest “tribe”.
Tune in to hear about Yam’s early career at a web marketing agency, how Zest manages to scale without automation (they’ve got 7,000 people curating content!), why they eschew traditional marketing, and how they are now serving enterprise companies in a unique way to generate revenues.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
- [00:48] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
- [01:30] Ten years ago, Yam co-founded a web marketing agency.
- [01:45] After he sold his shares, he moved to an Israeli Wix-type business called “Webidoo”.
- [02:30] He co-founded Zest about two years ago.
- [03:00] Zest’s mission is to convert information overload into individualized professional knowledge.
- [03:18] Zest falls into the EduTech category.
- [03:55] It is a great place to find helpful, actionable professional marketing information without having to search around the internet and deal with less trustworthy resources.
- [05:33] There is no way to game their system, so it offers the truest resources.
- [06:40] He wants to see steady, linear growth. So, Yam is trying to figure out what the correct ratio is to succeed.
- [07:22] Using machine learning, they have figured out what good content is.
- [07:45] Zest uses Human Based Computation.
- [09:45] They found product-market fit pretty quickly.
- [11:12] 56% of Zest’s users are CMOs, VPs, CEOs, and Founders.
- [11:30] Yam feels this is because, the higher up you are, the easier it is for you to see that Zest cuts through the noise.
- [12:07] There are about 7,000 people curating content at Zest.
- [12:50] Zest divided their users into three categories, the largest of which is the Enterprise category.
- [16:15] They try to limit the amount of partners they work with each week.
- [16:50] This quarter, they have generated around $15,000-$20,000 in revenue.
- [17:21] They currently have about 17,000 users.
- [18:57] Once they added more people to the curation process, it gave the business a spark.
- [20:15] They don’t do traditional marketing, but grew through content marketing.
- [21:40] They are doing everything (funnels, etc.) without automation, which they know sounds unscalable, but it is working for them.
- [22:40] One new tool that Yam likes to use and thinks has helped in the last few weeks has been Teamwork. It has been helpful managing a mostly remote team.
- [23:58] Yam recommends the podcast “Everyone Hates Marketers”.
- [24:35] Yam likes Intercom’s marketing and sales bog.
Resources from the interview:
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