The Entrepreneurial 100 Mile Race: A Story about B2B Marketing Success and Personal Growth

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Maria.

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She is a four times founder and chief revenue officer.

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She has worked with companies in early stages to achieve remarkable growth.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey Eric, thanks for having me today.

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We appreciate you joining us and you're joining us from Costa Rica today, right.

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That is right.

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And you're in the jungle on solar powered internet.

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Is this a true story?

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That is a true story.

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The internet is solar powered and the electricity is powered by a hydroelectric generator, so I'm calling in completely off the grid.

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That's amazing.

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Why don't we start by you sharing with us, just a minute or two, a little bit of context about who you are and what you do, before we get into your story?

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Sure, I'm a four-time founder.

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I've had two marketing agencies, I co-founded an email deliverability startup, I had a photography business and I also have a company where we help people make big life changes.

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So corporate to consultants, united States to Costa Rica big lifestyle changes.

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I have a lot of experience in both the professional side of helping scale companies and then also the personal side of helping scale the person or helping prepare the person to be a founder and be effective and drive revenue.

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So that's a little bit about me.

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In 2016, I sold everything I owned and moved to Costa Rica.

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So I've been down here about nine years now eight or nine years and since I've been down here, I've been working as a fractional chief revenue and chief marketing officer.

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That's awesome, and I saw one other remarkable thing on your LinkedIn that I have to ask about because it's so remarkable and memorable.

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I don't know I've ever seen this before.

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On the personal side, is it a true story that you ran a hundred mile race?

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that you ran a hundred mile race.

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Yeah, actually, just about a month ago, about a month ago, I finished a hundred mile race.

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I flew back to the United States to run this hundred mile race on an Island that is six miles by four miles wide.

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So we had a lot of loops and running around and finished in 29 hours and it's something I've been working for towards since 2019.

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And the theory behind it is, if I can put in all the work and all the training and all the dedication to complete a hundred mile race, it really is a great reflection when things get hard in business and life, to reflect on.

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You ran a hundred miles, so what's this?

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Wow, that is crazy Remarkable.

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Congratulations on that, that's.

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I've never heard that before.

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That is just fantastic.

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You can run the next one with me.

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I'll start training for that tomorrow Awesome, so let's get into your story.

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I think you have a B2B marketing story for us.

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That's also pretty remarkable.

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Yes, if you're going to ask me about the best marketing I have ever done, one story definitely comes to mind, and this story that I'm going to tell is actually the company that I left and moved to Costa Rica, so it's a success story that made it really hard to decide to move here.

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But in 2013, I joined a technology startup called Synapio.

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The technology startup originated at an Atlanta startup weekend that I happened to be organizing.

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I used to organize startup weekends.

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If you're not familiar, a startup weekend is a 72-hour hackathon.

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It brings together developers, designers, marketers.

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Two-hour hackathon it brings together developers, designers, marketers and folks with business ideas.

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People pitch their business idea, several ideas get chosen and people form teams and they have the whole weekend to build an MVP and essentially, a pitch to the investors and the judges at the end of the weekend.

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I watched this company start at the startup weekend and then I followed their journey and in 2013, they acquihired my marketing company and we were brought on to essentially help scale using marketing technology.

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So in 2013, they acquihired the marketing agency I had at the time and we were brought on to use marketing technology to scale this company.

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The company was B2B.

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We built email deliverability software.

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So, essentially, email marketers.

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When they send large numbers of email messages, if they don't maintain clean email lists, they start getting blocked by their email service providers and internet service providers, which causes big problems.

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As you can imagine, many companies use email marketing to drive revenue and if they can't send email, they're not going to drive revenue.

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So we had a problem.

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It wasn't a sexy problem, it was unsexy.

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The company actually got invested by 500 startups for being the unsexiest startup of the year I think it was in 2013, because we were solving that problem.

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So, anyway, let's talk about what we did to drive revenue.

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So we came on and they had a single page website with this really like gross looking strong hamster as the logo, and all people did was sign in, upload their email list and go through this verification process.

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When I came in, my first goal wasn't to make this website pretty.

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It didn't even really matter that the website was ugly.

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My first goal was how can we get people who have already loaded up and uploaded their email list to convert, and that's the first problem I started solving.

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It wasn't branding, so, just for reference, I'm definitely a revenue marketer, more on the revenue and data side data analysis.

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So we came in and we implemented.

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The first thing we implemented was an email technology called Customerio, and that was to allow us to send behavioral and transactional emails.

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So that was the first step.

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The next step was to provide these email marketers insight into what their email lists look like.

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The biggest loss of clients that we had was between the signup stage and the paid stage, so reducing the the number of people who signed up and didn't pay.

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We had to figure out how to solve that problem and through customer discovery, talking to our customers and understanding, we identified that they needed to know what their email lists look like before they were convinced to pay for it.

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What does that mean?

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That means what percentage of these emails on my list are actually bad.

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So we were the first company in the email deliverability space to offer what we called a free email list analysis.

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So an email marketer came to our website, uploaded their email list and then we provided a report that said this percentage of the contacts are invalid, this percentage are valid and this percentage it can't be determined because the server is not responding.

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So it gave email marketers a clear idea of oh my gosh, 50% of my email list is bad addresses.

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Do I want to pay to get that cleaned?

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And when we say clean, we essentially run all the email addresses, provide the data back to the marketer so then they can access that data and send.

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Run all the email addresses, provide the data back to the marketer so then they can access that data and send to only the good addresses.

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So we built that into the product.

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So, essentially, somebody signed up on this very unattractive website, uploaded their email list and then they got a clear view of what was on that list and then they paid to purchase the list.

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Once we added that element of getting a preview of what the list looked like, we had a 20% sign up to conversion rate for about eight months on the website, which is incredible.

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So 20% of the people who signed up on our website converted.

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Now, to be fair, it's a big problem when you're an email marketer and the majority of your organization's marketing revenue comes from email and you get blocked.

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That's a problem you want to solve immediately.

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So we were solving something that had a real pain.

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Once we solved that problem and we had this great conversion rate, then we addressed the branding issue because, literally, the logo was this really buff hamster holding an email list.

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So then we addressed the branding issue.

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But before we addressed the branding issue, we addressed the revenue.

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We made sure that people were converting.

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So we addressed the branding issue.

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And the way we addressed the branding issue was twofold.

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One, we knew we had revenue growth goals that would be incredibly difficult to meet if we were scaling organically growth goals that would be incredibly difficult to meet if we were scaling organically.

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And two, both myself and another co-founder had previously worked in another email deliverability company and we had both previously built the entire brand of that company.

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So, full circle story, we made the decision to acquire a company called datavalidationcom that both myself and the other co-founder had built that brand from scratch.

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I think we started on that in 2011.

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So we acquired that company, which gave us a nice boost in revenue.

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It gave us a new brand.

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So, moving from Sanapio, which was this buff hamster, we were now datavalidationcom and then we started focusing on building out the branding of that with our new technology, so bringing those two together.

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So we went from zero to $2 million in 18 months.

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The first step was bridging the gap between conversion, signup, getting people to sign up.

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So building this free email analysis report version sign up, getting people to sign up, so building this free email analysis report.

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The second step was acquiring a brand that had some customers it didn't have a huge customer base, but it had some customer base and adding our technology and then really building out the branding to make things nice, and so that was the second piece.

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And then the third piece of the puzzle was behavioral email marketing.

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So if somebody uploaded their email list and hadn't purchased within a day, or if someone uploaded their email list and hadn't purchased within four days, we implemented behavioral email marketing to trigger when people hadn't taken action or had taken action.

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And that was the final piece of the marketing technology that we use to really make sure that, from end to end, we were attracting our customers and then converting them.

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I will say that once we put a really nice website up with nice messaging I think our messaging was never get blocked from sending email Our conversion rate dropped from 20% to 8%.

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So that was sad to see, but it's expected when you build a nice website and you have different pages and whatnot, and yeah.

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So that's the story.

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We essentially and I think the important piece is we were a B2B company.

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We sold to B2B marketers and because of the effectiveness of the marketing that we built.

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We had marketing channels, so email service providers would recommend their clients, when they got blocked, to use our services.

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And then the self-service nature of the product we never hired a salesperson through the entire company, through the entire journey of this from zero to 2 million, and so through that use of marketing technology, not only did we drive the rev, drive all most of the revenue in the organization, but we also prevented increasing headcount.

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So it was a pretty interesting architecture of how we built it.

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That is pretty remarkable Getting the first $2 million in revenue.

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A lot of founders will say it's the hardest $2 million in revenue to get the whole zero to one or zero to $2 million problem, if you will is pretty hard, and being able to do that without a sales team and selecting the right pieces of technology, like you mentioned, customer IO and pulling together the branding.

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I have nothing against buff hamsters, but I like that data validation as a brand is a lot more descriptive.

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So it would naturally probably lead to more growth that people know what you do versus an empty vessel name.

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Exactly, and during this growth, I joined the company in 2013.

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I visited Costa Rica in 2014 or the end and I wanted to come back to actually to where I'm at right now the same farm, the same place.

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And in 2015, I came to Costa Rica to volunteer.

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We made it a company-wide perk because we were a fast-growing startup, so we had to have really cool perks.

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So we made it a company-wide perk In June of 2015,.

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Anybody in the company can work anywhere they want in the world, and so everybody did.

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Somebody went to Spain, somebody went to Romania and I came to Costa Rica.

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And it was during this company-wide perk that I created and it was my idea that I started realizing I think I want to move to Costa Rica.

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And so we were in this huge growth spurt.

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I'd hired basically the fourth hire to the 15th hire of our team, and I was down here trying to convince myself I wasn't crazy for wanting to leave this amazing ride, this amazing journey with this entire team I built to just move to Costa Rica and in the end, I decided to move and I decided to leave.

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It was incredibly difficult.

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The company continued on, I think last year, the year before they were acquired by emailablecom.

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So they the they ended up being acquired, but it's it's quite crazy that my, my most memorable and most remarkable marketing story ends in me leaving the company to move to Costa Rica.

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We all have goals.

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I've traveled myself to 63 countries, including Costa Rica, which I agree is quite beautiful, so I can't quite blame you for wanting to live there.

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So I think we all have goals we want to get to, and there's nothing wrong with people having goals that are different.

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So I think getting that off the ground is pretty remarkable.

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Most companies 80% of companies don't even make it past the first 18 months, so I think that's pretty awesome how you were able to do it.

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Yeah, it was such a fun journey and such a fun ride, so I'm really grateful for the experience and it was awesome.

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Let me ask you here we are in 2024.

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Things have changed a little bit in the email space, for sure.

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I used to be a big email marketer proponent.

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That was a channel that I lent heavily on, and I think today that channel is interesting.

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It has a lot of challenges and I think that's the case across a lot of the marketing channels today.

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That marketing has really evolved a lot over time.

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If you were in a time machine and someone came forward five years, they'd be like whoa, what is happening here?

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This is very different.

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So what can you recommend for marketers in 2024 to be successful and to win?

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What advice would you give other marketers?

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So I think the number one piece of advice that is going to be relevant today and will still be relevant in 10 years is getting your numbers together.

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So what does that mean when we have so many different marketing channels, there's so much marketing noise, there's so much to cut through, so much investment goes in these different buckets and oftentimes I'm a four-time founder, so I've been on the receiving end of this and I've also been in the marketer seats seat on this the metrics that marketers provide founders and that founders need to ask for from marketers.

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They are not impressions, they are not clicks, they it is revenue.

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And so the first and most important thing I'd recommend, before I start any project I put together, I get together all of the sales and marketing expenses for the organization I'm going to work with those, go into a spreadsheet historical expenses we look at the percentage of the overall revenue that is being spent on sales and marketing and determine is that sufficient or does that need to increase?

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And then we come up with customer acquisition costs.

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But the interesting thing is, when you do customer acquisition costs, that needs to be all sales and marketing expenses, including payroll.

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That's critical because payroll is a very important part of customer acquisition costs.

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So I think, getting your numbers together, knowing your customer acquisition costs, and then, once you have that, when you have new channels that you SEO Google, my Business, organic, social you need to be able to see the conversion and have attribution to those channels.

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And this it sounds I don't know if it sounds complicated or it sounds easy, but it's complete, it's totally, it's 100 percent critical.

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So just one quick story on this we had a, we have.

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I was working with a client and they were like we need to cut marketing spend.

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So they asked the team to come up with ways to cut marketing spend.

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And so their team came up with ways to cut marketing spend, and when we all came together and we looked at the numbers, what they came up with, the cut was no, we're not going to pay for SEO anymore.

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27% of all the conversions in the company came from SEO, and without that data point, they would have cut their highest, one of their largest revenue generators and one of their highest converting channels.

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And so if you don't have the numbers, you can't make good marketing decisions.

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And so it's worth the painstakingness to get all the numbers from the clients, to get the spreadsheet set up and to keep those updated, because that's the guiding, that's the goal, that's the guiding North Star, that's where we want to go.

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Is our marketing driving revenue?

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Because if it's not, it's easy to turn things off that aren't driving revenue.

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Yeah, I think the focus on driving revenue should tie back to the fact that it's not marketing spend, and convincing companies that it's not marketing spend, it's marketing investment is the biggest battle that I've had, because they view it as spend, not investment, and if you're not looking at it as an investment, you don't see where the revenue is coming from.

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It doesn't tie that way in people's minds.

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They're thinking this is like a like just a cost center.

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It's not a cost center, it's an investment and driving revenue.

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So I agree, people have to have their numbers together and I think the biggest confusion point about getting numbers together, like you mentioned, is people confuse activity metrics and revenue metrics.

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Right, definitely.

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Definitely that's where people trip at the finish line.

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Whoever is showing the metrics has the control, because we can show metrics that look good and we can leave out metrics that look bad, and so that's why I'm a big fan of using a centralized way for all vendors to be measured by, and that's our revenue generation and our CAC analysis per channel.

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And then that really clearly brings to light the effectiveness of the spend, and it eliminates the ambiguousness of but you had 50,000 impressions or but we had 20,000 downloads of this.

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If it's not driving revenue, is it worth the spend?

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And I think when I work with clients, that's typically what I talk to them about.

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It's not getting into the small, the nitty gritty of the details, it's let's look at really what's driving revenue and get clarity in that, and let's make our decisions based on that.

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Yeah, because everything directionally works at some level right.

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The question is which, which things work better Exactly, and so that's having the standardized metrics helps you compare and come to that conclusion.

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Thank you very much for sharing these stories and this great advice with us today.

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We appreciate it.

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Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends.

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They should hear these stories and this advice.

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And thank you so much for being with us all the way from Costa Rica, from the jungle, today, maria.

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We appreciate it.

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Thank you so much for having me.