SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1177 Then Turn Your Customers into Advocates, North of $12m in ARR
14 Oct 2018
Chapter 1: What is advocate marketing and how does it work?
It takes a village founded Zubrin's back in 2008. Heck of a time to start a company, but it didn't stop him. He since raised 15 million bucks to build this company that helps with advocate marketing from people that are already customers of your product. He helps activate them.
He's worked about 250 brands, 100 of those brands now work with him on a monthly basis, paying on average 10 grand per month. So doing well north of a million bucks a month now in revenue churn or retention said the positive way, the Zubrin's way. 80% annual retention on those logos, which is healthy. They're spending and getting their money back, their CAC money back in about six months.
So healthy payback period. Lifetime value well north of $300,000. Again, their team of 25 based between San Francisco and India. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines.
We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes.
I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Rob Fugeta. He is the world's leading advocate marketing expert. He's the author of Brand Advocates, Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force. He's also founder and CEO of Zuberance, the leading full-service advocate marketing company. Rob, are you ready to take us to the top? I am.
Let's go. All right. My audience loves SaaS, so let's talk Zuberance first and then book second. Tell me what Zuberance does and how you make money.
Right. So we are an advocate marketing company. And what we do for brands like Lyft and TiVo and Intuit and others is we help them build what we call an advocate army. And that advocate army usually consists of thousands of enthusiastic customers.
And then we make it easy and rewarding for those advocates to tell the brand's story, share offers, to essentially serve as a volunteer marketing force for those brands.
And revenue models that appear place to ask or what?
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Chapter 2: How did Rob Fuggetta start Zuberance in 2008?
So just to be clear, it's not a pure play SaaS model. It's more campaign driven.
Well, it can. Yeah. So let me explain. So quite often it can start off as a campaign, you know, to get some user generated content, for example. Right.
Chapter 3: What types of brands does Zuberance work with?
And that can be a three or six month campaign. But quite often that transitions into an ongoing program. And that's treated more as a typical or traditional SaaS model with a monthly subscription fee.
Okay, so 250 brands that you've touched. How many today, though, have you kind of got into your full program and you're working with them on a monthly basis?
Yeah, over 100, I would say.
Okay, that's pretty healthy. That's pretty healthy. Okay, I mean, can I take 100 times that $10,000 per month number you said earlier? I mean, you guys are doing north of a million bucks per month at this point. Is that fair?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, good. How much north? You said that very confidently.
You know, I mean, I'm not able to give you exact figures. Obviously, we're a privately held company for competitive reasons and other reasons. We never talk about our revenues. We've been profitable since 2015. We continue to scale and grow the company. And, you know, mostly I think most important is that there is more and more validation by marketers, by brands, by others, by researchers that
there is nothing more powerful than an authentic customer recommendation. And you, me, everybody really looks with great skepticism at paid messages coming from the brands, including paid influencer messages. Really what we, everybody, and of course, according to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust word of mouth Over any form of communications, including advertising.
And so what's exciting and continues to excite me and our team and kind of gets us up and excited and stoked every morning about this is that more marketers are recognizing that without user generated content, without authentic customers out there talking up your brand. You really don't have a play today. And so that's what gets us excited and I think what bodes well for our future.
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Chapter 4: What is the average cost for brands to implement advocate marketing?
So we've invited those customers to do a number of things. One is to refer friends. Another is to create stories and content. And we give them rewards for that. And they can earn things like points. And those points can be redeemed for things like brand apparel, water bottles, hoodies, even a free Neato robot. Never cash. Never cash. Never cash.
And we also do things with charitable contributions as well. We're starting work with a company called Eating Recovery Center, which manages and operates a handful of recovery centers for people who suffer from eating disorders. And the advocates and ambassadors for Eating Recovery Center will actually earn karma points. And those karma points are going to be translated into donations to charity.
So, I mean, first and fundamentally, you have to feel like, you know, you are genuinely enthusiastic about, you know, you've had a great experience with a product or a service or a brand. You want to tell your friends about that.
So you send them a free robot, right? They have to use it?
No, we don't do that. No, we work with actual owners or users of that product or service.
The robot company will send you their customer list. You then go and try and activate some of their customer list of people that already use them.
Yeah, and then that's something that I think distinguishes Zubrin's if you look broadly in the advocacy and influencer marketing space is that we work with people who actually own the product or have used the service. And you know, in some cases, Nathan, these product owners know more about the products than the company marketing them. I'm not trying to diss the companies here.
It's just that these advocates and evangelists um, are, they live at the product every day. They know the ins and outs of them. They know the strengths and weaknesses of them. They really understand them. And also they know who in their social network would benefit from that product or service.
So how many advocates do you have on your platform today? Would you say, pardon me? How many advocates do you have on your platform today?
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