SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Visably Helps You Manage Search Exposure, $700k Raised, Pre-Revenue, Launch Soon
06 Sep 2020
Chapter 1: What is Visably and what problem does it aim to solve?
So we are pre-revenue. We're in beta. We've been developing the product for about a year and a half. We launched the beta product earlier this month, in fact, so July. So it's free. Anybody can come to the website, sign up for a free account.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello everyone, my guest today is Chris Dickey. He's building a company called Visibly, a smarter search strategy is what he's focused on, trying to help brands identify their footprint in search.
All right, Chris, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. So I think when most people think about this space, they probably use a tool like Ahrefs or sort of SEMrush. Help us understand your different vision.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think those are fantastic tools. I use them as well. There's no reason you shouldn't be using either of those platforms. However, it's important to recognize that what we're interested in is understanding what are all the potential touch points where a customer may find a brand in search.
And where those platforms fall short is they focus exclusively on how your website or your own domain is performing, which is just like one of many ways that a customer may find you. There's like this massive kind of map of a customer journey where they might click on a review and that might be their very first touch point. It might be an ad, maybe an e-commerce website.
Say you're selling shoes or something like that. Someone like actually clicks on an Amazon link and Amazon's recommending your product. I think the thing that I come from it, from the perspective of a PR agency, and we are always leveraging third-party endorsements to help promote our clients' products and services.
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Chapter 2: How does Visably's approach differ from traditional SEO tools?
You know, it's tough. We started with our own networks. I'm an agency owner, so I know a lot of marketing directors and a lot of other agencies out there and kind of dangled it in front of them. We've also worked with several B2B outlets like PR Week, PR News, PR Daily.
We're going to start doing some more work with the SEO community pretty soon with Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, things like that. We're chatting about search engine visibility strategy on podcasts. We're telling people, as an agency owner, this was not an idea that I just came up with one day. This started four years ago.
with my PR clients saying, how do we have more impactful PR hits? And we, we, we recognize at that point, the most impactful thing we could do for our clients, the PR team was win more placements in search, the top of search and the places that their websites couldn't rank. And, um, we kind of developed a practice around it. And then, you know, the idea was like, how the heck do we scale this?
We need software. And that's when I had that question saying, where does my brand exist in search? How do we audit these, these, these searches?
So how Chris, how much did you spend? This is always like the challenging part, right? When you're spinning a piece of software out of an agency is how much of your agency profits do you dedicate to building the MVP of the software? It's not cheap to build good software. So how'd you make that decision? And how much have you spent to date on the software?
Totally different companies. Agency operates on its own books and its own LLC. Visibly is its own thing. We have investors for that.
How much did you raise?
We raised $700,000 up front and we received a grant from Zeta Wyoming to kick it off for $50,000. I put in another $50,000 of my own money. I'd say to date we've
infused around 800 000 and we haven't spent all that yet but chris that must make you super nervous right like what if you launch this and like no one wants it that's it i think i think every startup has that question in mind right like it's entirely possible that someone's like oh i don't i don't care about that but can't you hedge that by getting like pre-sales to some degree yeah we just haven't built a product yet you know that we can sell yet um
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Chapter 3: What insights can brands gain from their search presence?
They raised $700,000 to build this tool. Helps brands understand what their footprint looks like on search across multiple assets, PR, paid, organic, or review rating on Amazon, whatever it is. They help you understand that. They're a pre-revenue today. They've got about six people on the team, four engineers, two marketers, looking to launch here in the next couple of months, call it fall 2020.
earning about 30 to 40 grand per month right now as they look to drive new free signups, about a thousand free signups so far in the first three weeks they've been accepting it. So nice early traction. We'll see what happens. Chris, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thanks, David.