- I landed in Oradea, Romania
about 24 hours ago and in honor of that
I'm in Robert's room right now,
he's my co-founder of Experiment 27,
I would love to go through the origin story
of X27 and some strategies going forward.
These are breakdowns of my interview
with my co-founder Robert Indries
on the digital agency marketing podcast.
If you want to hear the full episode
it's gonna be down in the description below.
Otherwise this is the best of, so let's jump into it.
The first thing we talked about was
how the two co-founders of Experiment 27,
me and Robert, met in 2015.
How did we meet?
- [Robert] We met two years ago, 2015.
I was doing freelance work and we started working,
I started writing articles, content etc for you
and then basically, afterwards you invited me to X27,
I started doing work there and I think,
I don't know how much was it, six months in,
something like that, after like six months
you said that I might have a chance as a co-founder
so basically that was very, very nice.
If I remember correctly, there was a period,
I don't know how much, like three months, four months,
in which I had to deal with most of production,
most of everything that was happening
and after that you decided to take an even more
serious step in the company and that's when
we both started kicking off.
- [Alex] Yeah, I was trying to outsource everything
while I was working full time at InspireBeats
that just was not working out.
Number two is, "What mindset shifts did X27 go through?
- [Robert] I think one of the
biggest mind shifts was committing.
When we started out we were both, Experiment 27
was like a side thing, so it was a side project
we both had other things.
And then as we started working more and more
we started committing.
And the moment we both committed it went much better
as in, we started keeping each other accountable
every week, actually I think it was two or three times
a week, so that was very good.
And then when we started scaling up,
the reason we did that is because we realized
that we have too much work.
So literally both of us were overworked
and then we said, okay yeah, let's start bringing
some more people in and then little by little
I don't know, we have like 10 people now or more.
I think proximity and what you see on your horizon right now
dictates a lot of what you're gonna do.
For example, at that point in time
our obvious next step was to grow X27
and not invest in anything else
because if you remember, every dollar we would invest
would literally I think double or triple the next month
so we would always get the marketing dollar back.
- [Alex] It was like 2.4 times.
- [Robert] Exactly.
- [Alex] I still remember that
because our accountants were like super proud,
they said that was the most they've seen.
- [Robert] (Laughs) Yeah, growth was amazing.
I mean, it just made sense to invest even more.
- Number three is, "How did we manage
"to keep clients for longer?"
- [Robert] I think the biggest mindset
with regards to how fast a company's churn
is what we sell them at the beginning,
because if you remember, including last year
I think almost all year and maybe a bit of this year
but I can't remember, basically we were always
selling three month contract.
And it's just a natural step, especially in marketing,
you can't really get amazing results in three months.
You can get results, but when people see that,
I don't know, you brought them let's say a 10x
increase of their marketing dollar,
they say, oh, I know this other agency
that promised 20x, right, in the same amount of time.
I know you remember we had example of a client
that decided to go with someone else
and then six months after, hired us again.
- [Alex] He's about to sign again.
He hired his friend to do all the sales
for his company and then sales,
now his friend is like, he burned him, he wasn't good.
(laughing)
- [Robert] Okay, yeah, so again,
clients that stay for a short period of time,
that's the pattern at least until now, end up coming back
and working with us.
But basically the major mind shift here
was selling differently.
So right now we are not selling
three month engagements anymore.
We sell year long contracts, up to three years.
We actually have something I think in the pipeline
for three years if I remember correctly.
But yeah, so changing from a very short amount of time,
from a quarter to like an entire year,
that has literally helped
and that has been increasing the level
of engagement we also get from clients.
- Number four is, "How is Experiment 27 evolving?"
- [Robert] Regarding production,
where I see it going is I see us
having all of the processes we need.
We have been working on this for months now.
It's beautiful to see how it all comes together
and how, just looking in retrospect
you understand where you made your mistakes
because at the beginning you make various assumptions
that this is how things should be
and then you keep on improving and improving and improving
and at this point in time, I'm so confident to say
that we have all of these processes,
everything is working to the extent of
the quality of the process.
And right now, because we're increasing the quality
of each process we have, it's amazing to see
like even in just a few days you see a difference,
a huge difference.
Going beyond that I see us growing exponentially
as per the work we're doing
because every single client again,
as I said in the beginning,
is a year long to three year long contract
and all of them are serious about marketing.
We don't have people anymore that come,
hey, I want to put $2,000 for three months and that's it.
No, that's BS.
If you really want to grow your company
and you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars
don't be a cheapskate.
Come on, you need to invest, you need give it time,
you need to be very good.
And I'm very proud to say that our current clients
are so much better in terms of their understanding
that hey, this takes money, time and effort
and they appreciate the work we're doing.
- Number five is, "Why did we raise our prices?"
So some people from the outside might see
a company going from, what we used to do like 2,000 a month
up to 10,000 or 14,000, 20,000 a month,
whatever it is now.
And just see that as, you know like, these guys are greedy,
or like, they're just asking for more money,
or anything like that.
But like, the more resources you're able to collect
from the client, that give us more,
that gives us more money to hire the best people
and you can also see again, not only are our clients
treating us better because we're charging them more,
but our results are a lot better than they were
when we were charging $2,000.
They type of clients that we're booking
for our clients, like Qdoba, like these big,
these huge companies, we never would have booked those
like six months ago.
- [Robert] Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Just imagine like, some of the case studies.
I mean, clients in terms of, I don't know,
McDonalds or Morgan Stanley, it's amazing to see them
react when they send over an email I say,
I can't believe you guys put us in touch with those,
that's amazing right.
- [Alex] I couldn't believe it either.
If like, we talked back about talking to
the people from a year and a half ago man,
talking to Alex of a year and a half ago,
I don't think he would have,
like he wouldn't realize how easy it was
or how simple it was to get meetings
at these gigantic corporations.
And number six is, "Why niching down
"was the best thing that we ever did"
- [Robert] We said if we want to become the best agency
we need to pick a niche.
Because if we're gonna work with 10 niches
we'll never understand what's important,
we'll never understand positioning etc,
or I don't know, one year after we really started scaling
we can say, yeah, we can predictably bring you
two meetings on your calendar per week.
I mean, that's a guarantee we make, right.
But after the second month you get that every single week.
There's no more maybe, right.
You need a few weeks to ramp up but after that
it goes, it's streamlined.
- [Alex] That's what's so interesting about niching.
Like it's, it doesn't seem like it from the outside, right.
It seems like hey, if you pick a niche
it's gonna be super boring or that sorta thing.
But marketing for agencies is so different
than marketing for SaaS or marketing for other B2B
companies, and learning those subtleties
and getting better and better,
it really is--
To grab the full interview with Robert Indries
check out the Digital Agency Marketing podcast.
It's on iTunes and SoundCloud.
You can check out the description below for that.
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Thanks.