GE 261: How Viral Loops Drives $40K MRR and 1,500 Organic Leads per Month without Paid Ads (podcast)

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

Leave Some Feedback:

• What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below.
• Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here.
• Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes.
  
• Get the non-iTunes RSS feed
  

Connect with Eric Siu:

• Growth Everywhere
  
• Single Grain
  
• Twitter @EricSiu