443: Supademo: From Cold Outreach Failure to 7-Figure SaaS - with Joseph Lee

Summary

Episode 443: Supademo: From Cold Outreach Failure to 7-Figure SaaS - with Joseph Lee

Hosted by Omer Khan

In this insightful episode of The SaaS Podcast, host Omer Khan converses with Joseph Lee, the Co-Founder and CEO of Supademo. Supademo is an AI-powered platform designed to help SaaS companies create interactive product demos and tutorials, enhancing onboarding, sales, and product education.

---

1. Introduction to Supademo and Joseph Lee’s Journey [00:00 - 17:24]

Omer Khan introduces Joseph Lee, highlighting his transition from running Freshline, a B2B seafood marketplace, to founding Supademo. Joseph shares his experience with Freshline, a business that achieved $3 million in revenue with a 13-person team before losing 95% of its revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite multiple pivots to sustain the company, the venture did not meet its initial growth expectations.

Notable Quote:

"It's not about the size of the team, but about what those people are doing." – Joseph Lee [06:43]

---

2. Genesis of Supademo: Identifying the Problem [17:24 - 23:00]

Joseph explains the inspiration behind Supademo, which stemmed from his frustration with ineffective product videos. He observed that live screen-sharing sessions were highly effective in conveying product value but weren't scalable. This realization led to the creation of Supademo, aiming to automate and scale interactive demos.

Notable Quote:

"When I could get someone on a live screen sharing session and walk them through the product, they instantly got it. The problem was I couldn't scale that." – Joseph Lee [17:38]

---

3. Early Challenges and Pivoting Strategies [25:38 - 40:44]

Facing difficulties in converting early-stage founders into paying customers through traditional cold outreach and product-led growth, Joseph pivoted to more grassroots strategies. He leveraged Reddit by offering free, personalized demos to early-stage founders without direct sales pitches. This value-driven approach resulted in a significant increase in signups.

Notable Quote:

"I flipped the paradigm on its head by offering value first, which led to a couple thousand signups." – Joseph Lee [27:45]

Joseph also engaged with product update emails from companies like Airtable and Zapier, embedding interactive demos in their changelogs to showcase Supademo’s capabilities, thereby enhancing visibility and credibility.

---

4. Strategic SEO and Content Marketing [30:59 - 47:36]

Joseph emphasizes the pivotal role of SEO in Supademo’s growth strategy. Drawing inspiration from Zapier’s programmatic SEO, Supademo created SEO-optimized free tools pages embedding interactive demos related to high-volume keywords. This strategy not only boosted search rankings but also demonstrated the product’s value directly within relevant content.

Notable Quote:

"We created an engine that allowed us to produce hundreds of these demos, embedding them in high-volume search keyword pages." – Joseph Lee [32:57]

---

5. Shifting the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) [20:44 - 22:27]

Initially targeting busy founders, Joseph realized the limitations of this approach, particularly in converting early-stage founders into paying customers. Supademo shifted its ICP to larger organizations with dedicated teams in sales, customer success, and product marketing. This transition unlocked more consistent and expandable revenue streams, as larger teams have a higher propensity to adopt and stick with Supademo’s solutions.

Notable Quote:

"Our bread and butter is mostly organizations that are above 50 in headcount, extending up to Fortune 100 companies." – Joseph Lee [22:20]

---

6. Balancing Product-Led and Sales-Led Growth [37:01 - 39:00]

Transitioning from a sales-led to a product-led approach posed significant challenges. Joseph highlighted the necessity of shedding previous sales strategies and focusing intensely on product quality and user experience to drive organic growth. This shift required meticulous attention to messaging, craftsmanship, and feature development to ensure the product could sell itself.

Notable Quote:

"Being product-led means you don't have the luxury of pitching every single customer yourself; everything must be intentional." – Joseph Lee [37:01]

---

7. Experiments and Scaling Growth Channels [40:44 - 47:36]

Joseph discusses the importance of experimenting with and methodically scaling growth channels. Supademo experimented with ungating their product to enhance the time-to-value, leading to significant organic traffic increases. Focusing on channels that closely aligned with their ICP, they achieved a 12% conversion rate from free tool users to paying customers.

Notable Quote:

"Free tools pages drove probably 50% if not more of our traffic." – Joseph Lee [45:43]

---

8. Challenges with Outbound Marketing [48:44 - 51:59]

Joseph shares Supademo’s experiences with outbound marketing, which ultimately did not yield positive results. The overwhelming noise in inboxes and the intensive resources required for effective outbound strategies made it an inefficient channel for their lean team. Consequently, Supademo chose to focus on more scalable and predictable marketing channels.

Notable Quote:

"With our lean team, we'd rather not do outbound poorly than try to force it." – Joseph Lee [51:59]

---

9. Adapting to Evolving SEO Landscapes [48:44 - 49:36]

Addressing concerns around the future of SEO amidst the rise of AI tools, Joseph affirmed that foundational SEO practices remain crucial. While AI is changing search behaviors, maintaining high-quality, valuable content continues to drive organic traffic and authority. Supademo’s focus on creating structured and valuable content ensures their visibility remains strong.

Notable Quote:

"If you've done all the fundamentals well, you're still going to get some upside." – Joseph Lee [49:36]

---

10. Lightning Round Highlights [54:08 - 56:41]

In a fun segment, Joseph participates in a lightning round, sharing personal insights and preferences:

• Best Business Advice Received: "Take the leap of faith. Just start." [54:13]
• Recommended Book: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor – Explores how happiness can enhance productivity and overall well-being. [54:19]
• Successful Founder Attribute: "Pragmatic grit – being determined while staying realistic." [55:11]
• Favorite Productivity Tool/Habit: Practicing Wim Hof breathing exercises as a substitute for coffee. [55:21]
• Dream Business Idea: Starting a restaurant and being an active chef. [55:32]
• Fun Fact: Joseph is ambidextrous, playing sports either left-handed or right-handed. [55:52]
• Passion Outside Work: Sports – Helps him focus and manage ADHD by providing pure, moment-focused engagement. [56:04]

---

Conclusion [57:03 - End]

Omer concludes the episode by congratulating Joseph on Supademo’s impressive growth from $100k to over $1 million in ARR within a year, scaling to seven figures with more than 1,000 paying customers. He expresses enthusiasm for Supademo’s future and extends best wishes to Joseph and his team.

Notable Quote:

"Congratulations on going from basically zero to seven figures in two years. Looking forward to seeing where you take this business next." – Omer Khan [57:03]

---

Key Takeaways:

• Founder Resilience: Joseph’s journey underscores the importance of adaptability and resilience in the face of unforeseen challenges like the pandemic.
• Value-Driven Growth: Offering genuine value through free demos and interactive content can effectively attract and convert customers.
• Strategic SEO: Implementing a robust SEO strategy, inspired by industry leaders, can significantly enhance organic growth.
• ICP Refinement: Identifying and targeting the right customer profile is crucial for scalable and sustainable revenue.
• Balanced Growth Approaches: Successfully balancing product-led and sales-led strategies can drive organic and predictable growth while optimizing resource allocation.

---

Joseph Lee’s story with Supademo is a testament to how innovative strategies, combined with unwavering determination, can transform a struggling startup into a thriving SaaS business. For listeners looking to build or scale their own SaaS products, Joseph’s experiences offer valuable lessons in resilience, strategic pivoting, and effective growth tactics.

Transcript

[Omar Khan]

Foreign welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode I talked to Joseph Lee, the co founder and CEO of Superdemo, an AI powered platform that helps you create interactive demos for onboarding, sales and product education. In 2020, Joseph was running Freshline, a B2B seafood marketplace. He'd grown to 3 million in revenue with a 13 person team, but when the pandemic hit, the business lost 95% of its revenue almost overnight. He and his team tried several new approaches and eventually pivoted to a white label platform for food distributors that help keep the company alive. In 2023, Joseph started exploring new business ideas. He kept coming back to a problem he'd struggled with for years. Product videos didn't work. Most customers didn't watch them or understand the value. But when he could get someone on a live screen sharing session and walk them through the product, they instantly got it. The problem was he couldn't scale that. That insight sparked the idea for Superdemo, but getting people to pay for the product was tough. His first target market early stage founders liked the concept, but few became paying customers. Cold outreach went nowhere, product led growth stalled and for a while nothing really worked. So Joseph went back to basics. He created free demos for strangers on Reddit, replied to product update emails with personalized super demos and embedded interactive demos in helpful how to content. And slowly things started clicking. Today super demo generates seven figures in ARR with more than 1000 customers and a 10 person team. In this episode you'll learn how Joseph used Reddit to generate thousands of signups without pitching his product. What happened when Super Demo removed its signup wall and how that one move transformed their SEO strategy. How Joseph turned failed outbound into a signal for better positioning, not just a channel problem. We talk about how embedding their product into real tutorials helps Super Demo turn low intent traffic into active users, and why targeting founders didn't work and how shifting to larger teams unlocks stickier expansion ready customers. So I hope you enjoy. I talk to a lot of founders who have the same challenge. They've got an amazing product idea but need a technical team to build or scale it. If you're looking to develop a B2B SaaS product but don't want to hire and manage an in house team, let's listen up. Gearhart is a product development Studio that handles the entire technical side of building your software. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite. Who's founder trusted Gearhart after his $200 million exit to help build his next big venture. Some of Gearhart's customers have gone through YC and their portfolio companies have won over 10 startup competitions. Until the end of May, they're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team. Just visit Gearheart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO. All right, Joseph, welcome to the show.

[Joseph Lee]

Thank you for having me.

[Omar Khan]

It's my pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[Joseph Lee]

Good question. If I had to pick one, as a proud Canadian, I gotta go with a hockey quote. It's don't go to where the puck is. Go to where the puck is going.

[Omar Khan]

And we know it's the great Wayne Gretzky. Right? Comes from. So awesome. So tell us about Superdemo. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[Joseph Lee]

Totally. So superdemo is an AI powered demo automation platform. So what that means we help SaaS companies create high converting interactive product demos and tutorials for onboarding, sales, enablement, product marketing, and a plethora of other use cases. And really the problem that we're solving is demonstrating how products work, how features work. It's essential to not just salespeople, but across the stack again in training and marketing and in enablement. But doing so today is notoriously difficult. So it takes a lot of retakes, re recording, scripting, only to have it be out of date every time your product changes, which is a problem that a lot of startups deal with. So we wanted to create a better system and a better product that could help alleviate some of those pain. Points.

[Omar Khan]

Great. So just. So for somebody who's listening to this and they're saying, okay, you help create demos, what does that look like? What's the output? Is it a video that they can put on their website or present to a potential prospect?

[Joseph Lee]

Both. So basically, yeah, you turn on the extension, you walk through your product or your feature, and Supademo automatically annotates all of the steps, turns it into this guided interactive demo. It, it's shareable as a link, just like a YouTube video, and it's fully trackable, but you could also embed it directly into your homepage or your support docs, onboarding, et cetera, et cetera.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. And did I read on the website that you add sort of a level of personalization to the demos as well. Like, what does that mean?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, so there's different ways you could personalize it. You can obviously like use tokens and variables to automatically personalize your content for a variety of different users, whether it's through the URL parameters or through like forms. Or you can use AI in the actual kind of demo creation, demo editing process to personalize it for whatever audience that you want to tailor it for.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. So give us a sense of the size of the business where you today in terms of revenue, customers, size of team.

[Joseph Lee]

Totally, yeah. So we're a pretty lean team. We're a team of 10. Probably for the first eight months or so it was just me and my co founder. So happy to have a little bit more help now on the team revenue side. Last year we went from 100k to a million in ARR. So in 2024 grew about double digits every single month. And yeah, right now we're at about 60,000 free users and 1,000 plus paying customers companies.

[Omar Khan]

So about a year ago you were doing about 100k in ARR and now you've crossed 7 figures.

[Joseph Lee]

That's correct.

[Omar Khan]

Awesome. And I think you've raised about a million dollars as well, right?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, slightly over a million.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. I love that. I love seeing lean teams building stuff. Right. Because in many ways it's like when someone, I can't remember who it was, maybe it was Adam Robinson on LinkedIn where he was saying he, he was at. He was at some place and somebody asked him like, how big is your team? And he. And he said, oh, we're at this size. And it was like, oh, you must not be doing very well then. Right. And it's like, well, how. Why is the size of team relevant? Right. It's much more about what those people are doing. And, and I've seen, you know, some people do very well building multiple seven figures, having successful exits, and it's like just two people. That's pretty impressive to me. So let's break this down a little bit more and I want to. Obviously we'll talk about where the idea came from and how you've built this business so far, but you have an interesting story. This isn't your first startup. Previously you worked on a product. I think it was called something else, I think when you started, but it's called. Is it Freshline now?

[Joseph Lee]

It was called Coastline Market and then it became Freshline afterwards.

[Omar Khan]

Cool. And I think you worked on that business for about eight or nine Years, long time. So yeah, so just let's talk about that. Let's share that story because I think in some ways it's relevant and it's a great story of like, oh, moments and founder resilience and how to get out of these sort of tough moments. So just tell us like what was the bit, what was the business and you know, who was it for?

[Joseph Lee]

Totally. And it's a story of like a little bit of stupidity and naivety involved in it as well, which I think you need as a young founder to dive in and just take risks. But yeah, the original company was called Coastline Market. And essentially what we tried to do is we were trying to democratize access to smaller scale fishermen and help kind of small scale fisheries. Fishermen sell direct to restaurants and we would handle all of the logistics of getting fish and seafood from point A to B to C to D. So ultimately we wanted to create a predictive B2B seafood marketplace, helping chefs get fresher ingredients more traceable, lower priced. And ultimately fishermen would get more money in their pocket. They wouldn't be squeezed for pennies on the dollar. And that's the company that we ended up building for about three years.

[Omar Khan]

When someone thinks of going out and building a building software, most people don't start by saying, let's build something for fishermen. So did you have some background in that or connections in that industry that drew you to it?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, I think it was just kind of harkening back on my co founder of that company, his experience growing up in the Maritimes, which is kind of the east co of Canada, and how he would frequently talk to lobster fishermen on the dock that would actually take their boats dock to dock to dock across villages before going to the main packer and selling their catch to kind of the broker. So when he asked that packer or the, the fisherman, hey, like, why are you going through all this trouble to sell bits and pieces of your catch before going into the town? That's when we realized that the seafood industry was super antiquated, monopolistic. Fishermen were getting pennies on the dollar. And from there we just decided to just like dig deeper and learn more and more and more. So we were two students in university, like flying out to Boston and flying out to Nova Scotia, trying to learn more about the industry and just talk to fishermen and talk to packers to get kind of the lay of the land. And then the idea evolved from there.

[Omar Khan]

And how long did it take you to build the product and get those initial customers for that product?

[Joseph Lee]

We actually started manually And I actually try to encourage that across all different types of businesses. So what that entailed was we had a dummy front end where restaurants could placeholders and we were not dealing with big volumes at the time. And what that meant is we bought a Ford F150 truck and I would drive to the dock, pick up the fish from the fisherman on the boat, put it on the back of the truck. I have so many photos of this. And I would physically drive to the restaurant and do the deliveries.

[Omar Khan]

Wow.

[Joseph Lee]

It was a painful experience.

[Omar Khan]

When you said to me we did this manually. I had this picture of you in an office getting some kind of orders through the web, picking up the phone and coordinating something. I had no idea manually meant manually, like getting in a truck and delivering the fish.

[Joseph Lee]

I wish. Yeah. No. Nothing hardens you as an entrepreneur than getting yelled at by an angry chef at like 5 o' clock because your delivery is late and they're just reaming you out and they're like patrons watching you. And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry.

[Omar Khan]

So I'm assuming you did that because you wanted to validate the idea before you spent a ton of money. And as students, I'm sure you didn't have a lot of money to play with. So how long did you do that before you turned it into a product?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, luckily we only did that for probably like a handful of months, three months or so. There was still the odd mistake that would happen where I would need to basically stop coding and rent a car and like fix a delivery that was supposed to happen by a subcontractor. But you're right, Omar. I think what we were trying to do is, hey, let's fully understand the problem that we're looking to solve by like putting ourselves in the shoes of the people, like boots on the ground. And that really helped accelerate the product cycles as we kind of got ready to actually build.

[Omar Khan]

Right. And you, I think you eventually grew this business to what, around 3 million in revenue?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah. So things started ticking. We were automating more and more. We were growing out the headcount. We had a swanky office, we raised the big round. So, yeah, ultimately things were going really, really well. And as you know, Omer, I think in the midst of us preparing for series A is when the unfortunate events of COVID hit. So, you know, us being catered towards kind of logistics, seafood, high end restaurants, probably three worst hit sectors of, of the economy when it came to the pandemic. Yeah, we were in a position where we essentially lost 95% of our revenue. Went from 3 million to probably less than 100,000.

[Omar Khan]

Wow. And how much had you raised? How big was your team at that point?

[Joseph Lee]

So we were about, I believe we were about 13 people. Don't quote me exact numbers.

[Omar Khan]

And how much had you raised?

[Joseph Lee]

We raised about 2.5 million at that time.

[Omar Khan]

Okay. So I know I talk to a lot of founders who say, hey, Covid was our pivotal moment because suddenly there was more demand for our product and we started to see all kinds of growth. And for you it was the exact opposite. Right. It was the worst time and it was a nightmare. Probably when you wake up and you realize what suddenly happened, what did you do? Were you able to get out of that situation, turn it around?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, I think the big thing that we took away after talking to advisors was just having that bias to action. So our investors, our network, everyone was very supportive in us basically doing whatever it was necessary to ensure the viability and the health of the business in the long run. So ultimately what we ended up doing is we went through a series of probably four or five different micro pivots where we went into initially high end grocery delivery and then we went into essentially shopify for food distributors, helping kind of the distributors and wholesalers that were also struggling. So our competitors who were also struggling during the midst of the pandemic, helping them set up home deliveries so that they could get some revenue in through the door to then eventually becoming just a white labeled e commerce and operations platform for distributors.

[Omar Khan]

And how long did that process take on these pivots until you landed with something that seemed to be working?

[Joseph Lee]

I would say the process took about four months, four to six months. And it was a very fluid situation. I think what we were trying to do again is not be so beholden to moving in one direction or another, but just maintaining optionality and being flexible to what the market was demanding and where it was headed. Because at this point we still didn't know whether restaurants would come back or it wouldn't come back, whether home deliveries would even stick around or not. So basically just taking all the learnings and trying to retrofit everything we had built already in terms of technology to different types of use cases within the industry.

[Omar Khan]

Got it. Okay. And then what eventually happened? Did you end up selling the business?

[Joseph Lee]

No, the business still is running. So it's coming up on almost 10 years now of operating. So not quite a failure, but definitely not the venture backed success that we obviously raised money on and were hoping for.

[Omar Khan]

So Are you still involved in that business and how much of your time goes into that?

[Joseph Lee]

I'm no longer involved in the business, so I left back in 2022. I do have a board seat and obviously I'm cheering from the sidelines and helping whenever I'm needed. But yeah, I'm not operationally a part of the company on a day to day.

[Omar Khan]

So a couple of years ago you decided to launch super demo worlds apart from the world of software for fishermen to sell their catch. Where did the idea come from?

[Joseph Lee]

Scratching my own itch. So during that transition from a B2B marketplace to a B2B SaaS product, we very much became a sales led organization. So what determined success was how many demos we could get. So it was all about dialing phones, sending cold emails, getting people online to do kind of a screen sharing session. And throughout that process I think I was familiar with loom and video based product demos and I was trying to use it to essentially help tech nascent audiences like owners at distribution plants or fishermen better understand what we were doing and why they should care. But it was a very difficult sale. First they didn't understand our marketing language. They didn't want to watch a 10 minute product video and sit through. They're very impatient. But what I realized is when I did actually manage to get them on a screen sharing session and went through that back and forth interaction in a more engaging, lively two way street, that's when that light bulb moment hit for them and they're like holy crap, like I need this at my, my distribution plan. When can you get started? And obviously you can't scale one to one demos. So in the back of my, my mind I started thinking how do we actually replay and, and scale this moment of delight of like screen sharing and having that back and forth session that is a lot more interactive and engaging in a much more product led way. And I hadn't actioned upon it for a while but then eventually after I'd led the company and I was, I like to say, wandering the wilderness trying to figure out what to do next, that's when I just started throwing spaghetti at the wall. And this was one of the things that my co founder and I ended up building.

[Omar Khan]

And did you do any other kind of validation other than scratching your own itch from, from the experience of your previous business?

[Joseph Lee]

Yes. Yeah. Talking to customers, talking to customers, figuring out what are they doing today, what are the workarounds they're going through and what is the like the relative pain of that workaround? Whether it's effort based, whether it's time based, whether it's monetary based. First of all, I came to realize that if they're not going through a workaround, it's probably not a painful enough problem for you to do it for, for it to be worth solving in the first place. And then I just started digging deeper and deeper and deeper and understanding, hey, how big is this industry? How much of a propensity do we have to build a product that can carve out a niche? And when some of the math made sense and also the qualitative aspects of like, do I want to build this type of product? Made sense, we just decided to kind of go all in and build.

[Omar Khan]

Supademo, who was your ICP at the start?

[Joseph Lee]

Very different from what it is today. And I think that's just natural as like your product graduates and becomes a little bit more established. Initially it was for the busy founder. So for busy founders that are doing everything, we wanted to give them a tool that would allow them to create engaging content, engaging product demos for lateral use cases across their organization in a quick and efficient way. And that's the ICP that we really honed in on and focused on in the beginning.

[Omar Khan]

And why did you end up picking a different icp? Was it because you were struggling to get traction or did you just find that it wasn't a big enough opportunity?

[Joseph Lee]

I think a big proportion of our customer base is still founders. But what I think naturally happened is the willingness to spend, the stickiness of the user as well as the propensity to land and expand is obviously just greater within an organization that can naturally add seats from product marketing to customer success and in training and to sales versus I think the elasticity and the sensitivity to price is a lot larger in an organization that is sub 10. And not to say we don't want to service them, but the realities of building a business that is durable over time, you're going to have to graduate, I think naturally, to bigger and bigger customers that are a little bit more consistent.

[Omar Khan]

So now it's like larger organizations who maybe have a sales team or a CS team. Is that who you focus on more?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, I would say our bread and butter is mostly organizations that are above 50 in headcount. And we go from there all the way up to we have several Fortune 100 companies that use us as well. So again, we don't necessarily dissuade specific types of customers from signing up or finding value or upgrading because we are product led. We let anyone in But I would say that's where we deliver the most value and have the stickiest customers.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, no, it makes total sense. And I've seen a lot of founders who, when they start off by scratching their own itch. The obvious ICP is other people like themselves. Right. So it's like, let's find more people who've been struggling with the same thing I have, and let's give them that solution. But one of the constraints you're going to come against, especially if you're targeting founders who are very early stage, is they're not going to have a tendency to just splurge out on every new piece of software that comes along, versus a larger organization where even if you're charging them a few thousand dollars a month, it's like, you know, it's no big deal. So that makes a huge difference.

[Joseph Lee]

And I think you. Beyond monetary, I think you bring up a good point here. Omar is also, I think it's hard to make your tool become habitual because the founder is wearing so many different hats. What they're doing today can be very different from two weeks from now. And you need that habitual, consistent usage, ideally to have a loyal customer as well. Right?

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, yeah, great point. Hey, have you heard of SmartSuite? They were just named 2024 SaaS Startup of the Year by Startup Grind. Well, I recently discovered that Gearhart was the development team behind their success. Gearhart is a product development studio that specializes in scaling B2B SaaS. Companies built by serial entrepreneurs. They understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. With offices in San Francisco and London, plus a distributed team of 43 experts, they've helped build over 70 successful products. To learn more about how Gearhart can help scale your development, check them out at Gearhart IO. That's Gearhart IO, I'm guessing, you know, having somebody, a salesperson might be using it every day, versus a founder who's like, okay, I've got to do the demos. I have something that works now. Let me spend the rest of the week with the other 79 things I need to do. Right before I come back and do anything else. I want to talk about how you got some of your initial customers. And people often ask me about Reddit and people. I would say you can't just go on Reddit and pitch your right because it's not going to go down too well. But you kind of did that. But you had a very unique approach and you were delivering value. Can you talk about what you did there?

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, yeah. So I know Reddit, I think as a community can be extremely powerful, but people don't like to be sold to. So my twist on things was how can I insert my product into discussions or create a community where we're talking about the theme of my product without being overly salesy? So the way I thought about it is, hey, we have a lot of people on Reddit that are early stage founders that are building and maybe struggle to showcase their product in the right light or explain the benefits in a succinct way. So I put out an offer on Reddit saying, hey, this is who I am, this is what I'm building. And I actually want to create product demos for you for your use case so that you can utilize this across your sales stack, marketing, onboarding, et cetera, et cetera. So I kind of flipped the paradigm on its head where I said, for people that want to opt in, I'm going to prove value and give you value without anything in return. And if you choose to sign up or subscribe, that's an added bonus. But that's not an expectation. So what I ended up doing was, hey, post your SaaS. All you have to do is post your website. I will go through the upfront work and the hassle of signing up for an account, learning about your product, and I will actually create you an interactive guided super demo. And I'll share an editable link with you so that if you want to edit it and use it, you can. But I'm going to respond to your comment in line so that other people in the community can kind of take a look and say, whoa, that was really, really cool. I'm going to check out Supademo or I'm going to ask for my product to also be audited and created a demo for. And that ended up actually spiking our first probably a couple thousand signups.

[Omar Khan]

Wow, I love that. I love that. Because you found a way to creatively talk about your product on Reddit, you led with value. A lot of people would have just said, hey, I'm building this new product, here's my sign up link, let me know what you think. Or something like that you were willing to offer to do the work for them and go the extra mile. I think if you're giving somebody say, hey, I'm going to give you an editable link as well so you can tweak it as well and you still don't have to buy my product. That's a very hard offer to say. No to. And I think it's a great example of, you know, I often hear this, what's the expression like, show me, don't tell me. I think this is a great example of that because every time you're then coming back and posting a demo in the comments, everyone's getting a very visible way of seeing this product in action and what it can do and how it can work and so on. So I think it's great you were also doing some stuff with product updates that you were receiving. What were you doing there?

[Joseph Lee]

So, yeah, I would try to subscribe or sign up for as many tools as I possibly could and I would respond to every single product update. So airtable sending a product update. Zapier sending a product update. I would literally respond to the product update with the super demo that I created for that product update saying, whoa, this was really cool. I love the new automation feature. It would be even cooler and people would understand the value far better if you embedded this super demo in your change log or in your product update. And I would just again, start with value. Didn't have as much success with the larger organization, but again, I think any organization that was like say sub 500, they appreciated the gesture. Even if they didn't use the tool or sign up for the tool, a lot of them ended up telling other people about what had just happened.

[Omar Khan]

It takes a lot of energy and tenacity to keep doing that day in, day out. And especially if you're replying to a whole bunch of these emails and putting the work in to create demos and you're not getting replies. So what kept you going?

[Joseph Lee]

I think it's always just conviction. The first thing I did when we had our MVP is I made sure that I was the number one power user of our product. So I fully understood every pixel of our product and why it was valuable. And because I was using it day in and day out and it was driving results for me. I had such high conviction that it would drive the same amount of results if used the right way for other people. So I knew that it was a no brainer and that if I could be tenacious enough and just pound the pavement enough, the ball would start rolling and from there it would get easier and easier. And it has since then.

[Omar Khan]

Love it. You also were telling me that you started SEO very early on, but you also coupled that with making sure that your product was sort of embedded in part of the content. Can you talk about that? Maybe start with how you came up with that idea or strategy and Then how did you go about the execution?

[Joseph Lee]

The strategy was actually derived from something similar that Zapier does. So I think Zapier is very well known for doing programmatic SEO very, very well, where they will have keywords, for example, integrate Google Docs with why and they'll always come up first for it. And they've like set up a beautiful like structure for doing that. And obviously in doing so they put their product front and center. There's like an embed of how to do that exactly on Zapier. So I wanted to emulate something similar where people are naturally searching for high volume keywords. Like, you know how to export frames on figma as PDFs, right? Obviously very low intent keyword when it comes to product demos. But it's a search term that we can easily position ourselves and explain to the viewer using an interactive super demo that's embedded inside of a web page. So we created an engine essentially that allows us to turn that out at scale where we just get someone to create hundreds of these demos and then we create these programmatic templates where people search for it, they find it, they click through the demo, they get to value faster. And the hope is a sliver of them look at that and say, hey, that was a really awesome experience. I could probably utilize this for other use cases at my organization.

[Omar Khan]

I love that. So initially when you talked about that, I was thinking, okay, so you were doing, you were creating content and by embedding your product you were showing people how to create demos. But this was quite different because you were focusing on tasks that people were trying to complete with certain software and then showing them a demo how to do that. That's kind of pretty meta. How did you figure out which for that type of scenario? I mean, Zapier is very good at that, but I'm sure they have a huge content marketing team or whatever. When you're a startup, and I assume it was just you too at the time, how do you decide what types of keywords you're going to focus on initially?

[Joseph Lee]

I think you obviously want to focus on products that are in the periphery of tools where maybe there's overlap in the icp. I definitely didn't want to go after tools that are used by, for example, insurance companies where none of those viewers would ever convert. But if someone is looking for a screenshot tool or if they're looking for tutorials on loom, we know that there's enough overlap where if somebody has a good experience, they're going to convert. From the research Side, I mean it's just doing the work, doing the work on ahrefs, looking at keywords, looking at identifying products that we want to target. And in a similar vein, we did something similar, more middle of funnel where people are looking for product demos, right? They're looking for a product demo of Canva or product demo of Linear. And oftentimes for most of these sales led organizations, all of those demos are gated. So you have to talk to a salesperson and do that work. So if we can do some of that work and create kind of an interactive demo that provides a high level overview of that demo and again follow the same strategy and try to place ourselves for Canva product demo, then a portion of them are going to see that and say, whoa, it's really cool that I can see this demo without talking to a salesperson. I should do the same thing for my website and have a product demo page.

[Omar Khan]

So wait, you were putting these demos on your own website?

[Joseph Lee]

Exactly.

[Omar Khan]

And then basically saying you want the demo, the actual product you're going to have to sign up for, but you can just come to our website and just see it without signing up or anything interesting. I know that when we were talking earlier, sort of the growth strategies tactics we talked about that got you to probably like the first thousand or so signups. Before we talk about some of the other things that you did, I want to talk about this focus you had on being product led. You had come from this sales led background and that's what you had been doing day in, day out for years. You're building a product now to help people be more effective with sales led, kind of, you know, sort of a gtm, but at the same time your own business, you want to be product led, which makes sense. But tell me about some of the challenges you, you experience trying to do that.

[Joseph Lee]

It can be very difficult as a founder if you have reach certain milestones or have built a company that has gotten to a certain level of traction and kind of gone through the rigors of daily company building to come back to point zero and have to restart and shed everything you have learned and start all over again. So I think you need to shed your ego. You need to forget everything that you have learned because that could actually impede your ability to execute, especially if you are operating in a wholly new industry like I ended up endeavoring into. So I came from a very sales led enterprise B2B startup to very much a product led lightweight B2B opportunities. So I think that is very, very difficult and when you are especially product led, you don't have the luxury of pitching every single customer yourself and selling them on the mission and vision. So you need to be so intricate and detail oriented and intentional about every little thing that you ship out, whether it be messaging, craftsmanship of the product or the features that you're shipping. So yeah, it was a huge challenge.

[Omar Khan]

Give me an example of a struggle you had with getting product led working. Because I know it was a tough transition to make and you know, you had told me it was demoralizing and also you didn't have much Runway left at the time and there was this pressure to, to get some traction quickly. But maybe give me an example of one of the struggles with product led.

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a common fallacy and misconception that if you build an amazing product, people will come. And we dealt with that too. Right. We had what we felt was a really exceptional product. And I also bought into this notion of, hey, if we just have the best product possible, we're just gonna get customers. And this was again before me like pounding the pavement and posting on indie hackers and posting on Reddit and doing all these things that weren't scalable. And yeah, that was a difficult lesson to try to learn because we were spending so much time on the craftsmanship and the details with the product. And I realized if people aren't hearing our story and seeing our product being distributed, doesn't matter how good our product is going to be.

[Omar Khan]

And all you had going was, I guess, was you started SEO pretty early, but we all know that doesn't happen overnight. And all the other things you were doing were very non scalable things. So you have no predictability? No, no. I guess you get these little peaks and troughs of, oh, this thing worked. I got a few signups today, next three days, nothing. And then something else. Tell me about how that changed. What did you start doing to get kind of stop doing the non scalable things and start getting more predictable leads?

[Joseph Lee]

I think the unscalable things are a necessary evil for you to get to a certain benchmark. And then naturally I think the snowball starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you end up getting more organic traffic, more brand mentions, establish your kind of identity in the, in the space. So I wouldn't say there was like a single thing that got us there. I was always like to say, like success in startups at different points, it's like a microcosm of a million different things that led to and bubbled up to the output that you wanted. So I think for us it was, hey, let's do whatever is necessary, throw spaghetti at the wall and get us to a certain level of traction. But at the same time, let's be really measured and intentional about trying to establish not 10 channels, but starting with one channel that is predictable, where we can, you know, accurately say, if we put X amount of effort in, we're going to get Y amount of value or output. And then once that is established, then looking at the next month and say our focus this month is to add one more channel and then one more channel. And obviously you can't linearly add kind of scalable channels, but that ended up getting us to three to five channels that are kind of working like clockwork. And even today we're just shipping new channels and new experiments to try to get us to 5, 6, 7, 8 different ones.

[Omar Khan]

How long do you typically run an experiment for before you know whether it's worth continuing with the channel or ditching it? I see a lot of founders who, you know, they know they should be testing channels, but the longer you do it, the harder it becomes to walk away from it. Especially if you're getting some conversion, right? If you do something for like six weeks and you get nothing, you're like, okay, right, let's just try something else. But if you get like a few leads coming in and you're like, oh, there's some signs of life here, we should do more of this, right? So, but then it never really takes off. So what was that experience like for you and, and when, how did you decide when to say enough is enough?

[Joseph Lee]

I think it depends on the channel. And I think when it comes to unclear results, I think that's a common mistake that a lot of founders have is being wishy washy about the experiment and the output and the hypothesis of like, what is success and what is failure? You should be pretty concrete about your timelines and the amount of time or the results that you would like to derive from the experiment. And it should be clear cut whether it doesn't mean that that is a bad channel, you should never do it. But if it doesn't meet the benchmark from your hypothesis, that just means you need to set it to the side and do something else. So I think that's a common thing that founders, including myself, struggle with day in and day out, results wise. Again, yeah, I would say it depends. To give you a specific example, one of the experiments that we ran was, hey, what if we could ungate our entire product. We're all about time to value. How do we get people to the aha moment? And our hypothesis was, hey, the signup process is actually impeding people's ability to like see value more quickly. So we made our entire product experience ungated. And as a byproduct of that, one of the benefits was we could then now spin up bits and pieces of our product as free tools without building anything new. So for example, we already in our product had the ability to add hotspots to screenshots, or we had a feature where you could edit screenshots. So we would take that module and create an SEO optimized free tools page where we optimize for the keyword free online screenshot editor and made it completely ungated so that someone looking for that search term could come on board, edit the screenshots, do everything they needed to do without signing up, and at the bottom they would see, hey, do you create product demos? And you're having a tough time scripting and rerecording. You might like Supademo so that those set of free tools pages, they drive probably 50% if not more of our traffic. And that experiment took probably like a week to figure out whether it was successful because it just shot up like in the organic SEO front, where within, within days it was ranking number one for like a search query that was tens of thousands per month.

[Omar Khan]

That's smart. I remember talking to Sabha, the founder of VEED IO, and they did something very similar where they were kind of making like screen capture, screen recorders, all this type of stuff. And you could start using the tools before you ever had to sign up and get into the product. But also there's always the risk. You're like, I'm going to have all these people using this stuff and I don't even have an email address. How were you coping with that? And was the belief just, if we get enough people seeing these tools, some of them will actually sign up and then maybe they'll be more qualified.

[Joseph Lee]

I think how we thought about it is let's focus on the tools that are again within our vicinity of ICP. So what are product marketers using, what are CSMs using, what are founders using? And even if it's not the highest search volume tool, we'll focus on that because the propensity for them to cross pollinate onto our tool is way, way higher. And that thesis has proven to be true because roughly 11 12% of everyone that jumps onto the free tools page ends up converting as A sign up. So that's a pretty big number. Numbers we couldn't get just by our product and traditional SEO alone. So you're not going to see us do a free tools for like a pricing calculator. It's just not in our scope and we heavily emphasize and try to use our existing product instead of building something new. I think engineering hours obviously maybe not anymore with AI, but it used to be very expensive so we would basically only use stuff that we had already created and just create a page for it.

[Omar Khan]

You know, lately I've been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn where people are showing these graphs of HubSpot traffic tanking. I don't know if you've seen those. And they're like, oh yeah, this is the end of SEO and blah blah, blah. I think it's natural that you are going to have some changes happening with how much AI is being used. And I find myself using Google less and less. But at the same time I've seen anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people who have done nothing to optimize themselves for showing up in the LLMs, but they're still getting traffic through there. So it's almost like if you're doing some best practices and providing valuable content, whether you're optimizing it for Google or ChatGPT, the chances are you're still gonna get some upside. But have you been seeing a, a decline in your organic search traffic, like Google traffic? But overall, what's the story?

[Joseph Lee]

It's tough to say in a certain. Just because as organic search has gone down, we have been ramping, so we haven't seen the effects because we're not at scale. Right. We're very much at the precipice of growing. But with that being said, Omar, I think you bring up a very good point. I think if you've done all the fundamentals well and you have well structured, valuable content, that's not going to be ignored by ChatGPT and perplexity and Claude and all these tools. And like you mentioned, we haven't done as much optimization on the AI search side of things, but we are seeing an increasing number of people finding us because we have the authority with traditional SEO and we have the link building and we have the domain authority and that trend translates directly into being cited. Right. By AI.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. I think it's a fascinating kind of change we're going through and I don't know what the answers are, but I know if we boil it down to first principles, it still is about create valuable content. And there may be some tactical things you need to do differently to, to reach the right people on different platforms and so on. But anyway, that's my opinion. Did you try Outbound?

[Joseph Lee]

We did, yeah. And it completely flopped. Yeah, it has not been a great channel for us.

[Omar Khan]

Why do you think that is? Because you're getting clearer about your icp. You can potentially do the outreach and send them a demo of their product or something. I'm sure you were probably doing that given you've done a lot of that from day one. Why do you think Outbound hasn't worked?

[Joseph Lee]

I think generally, I think there is increasing noise in inboxes. I mean you probably, I know I have probably gotten 50 to 100 junk sales emails just today. So I think there's a lot of noise to cut through. And to cut through the noise you need to be exceptional at sales. And for us as a product led organization, we don't have as much resources and effort carved out for turning Outbound into a really, really methodical, successful machine. So I think it's a misconception that just hiring a BDR and getting a CRM and getting some tools and warming up your domain or your email and sending out Outbound is going to solve it. I just don't think that is the case. There's so much more to sales, whether it's like deliverability, messaging, cleaning leads, motivating staff, timing. That needs to be right in order for you to be successful. I think it has to be a huge focus of your organization for you to get it right. So for us we don't have the time, nor did it did we give it the attention that it deserves for it to be proved true or false. So we ended up saying, hey, at this point with our lean team, with our growth motion, we'd rather not do it, rather than do it poorly.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that the noise is much greater now and more people are using AI tools to do Outbound. And there used to be a time when I used to try to reply to every single email that I got, even if it was just to say no thanks or something like that. And now that's just not a scalable thing to do. And so I've actually gone the opposite because I realized that, you know, one of the most valuable things we have is your attention. And if you're in your inbox and it's just getting filled with random emails, even, even if you're just going to open it to look at it and Decide you're not. It's not relevant or whatever. Just getting back to focus on doing things is really hard. Hard thing to do for me especially. And so I'm more these days about, okay, look, I can't reply to everything if people are using AI tools to bombard my inbox. What are the AI tools I can use to filter out those emails? To only get the right stuff through. And hopefully the people who are making more of an effort will get through those filters and we can still talk. But yeah, it is more of a challenging thing to do.

[Joseph Lee]

A funny pattern that I've seen is more people are getting through the noise by getting AI to make mistakes in the subject line. So misspelling. So five years ago, you would never respond to a cold email that had your name spelled wrong, but now it's actually a differentiator. You look at it and you're like, oh, this definitely wasn't AI written. So it caught my attention. Which is kind of funny.

[Omar Khan]

Isn't that what spammers do as well? They do this stuff. You write these ridiculous. They write these ridiculous emails and you look at it and you're like, who would respond to something like this? And that's what they're counting on. It's like the people I think who would respond to that are probably going to be like their icp, Right? It's kind of a really sad state of things. Okay, great. Great conversation. I think we should wrap up. Let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Bray to roll.

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Omar Khan]

All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[Joseph Lee]

Take the leap of faith. Just start.

[Omar Khan]

What book would you recommend to our audience? And why?

[Joseph Lee]

The Happiness Advantage. I think it goes into the science. Why happiness and having positive outlook can actually change the physiology of your thinking and your body itself.

[Omar Khan]

That's the one by Sean Ach, right?

[Joseph Lee]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah. I had this guy who turned up at my place today to work on the shutters, and he was the most positive, optimistic guy I've ever come across. And I was like, you know, when I'm feeling down, I'm gonna call your office and make up an excuse. And he was like, yeah, yeah, just tell them something's wrong with one of your shutters and I'll be round. And, you know, I'll cheer you up, man. It's like, love the people like that. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[Joseph Lee]

I would say Pragmatic grit. So not just grit, but being pragmatic about when to be gritty and not give up.

[Omar Khan]

What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[Joseph Lee]

I like to do WIM Hof so like breathing exercises. So sometimes it's a good substitute for coffee.

[Omar Khan]

What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[Joseph Lee]

You know what, when I am fu rich, I would love to start a restaurant and just be that crazy boss that is in the kitchen.

[Omar Khan]

Ordering the fish.

[Joseph Lee]

Yeah, right.

[Omar Khan]

What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[Joseph Lee]

I'm ambidextrous. So depending on the sport, I either play left handed or right handed.

[Omar Khan]

Well, that's got to be an advantage. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[Joseph Lee]

I'd say sports. I've grown up playing sports since like pretty much since I was born. I've played organized sports my entire life. I think it's a really good conduit to turning off your brain. As someone that has like ADHD and is always on, I think sports are often the only way for me to just like be purely focused at the moment and not think cool.

[Omar Khan]

All right, so if people want to check out super demo, they can go to superdemo.com and that's supersupademo.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[Joseph Lee]

They can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

[Omar Khan]

Okay, awesome. We'll include a link in the show notes to your LinkedIn profile. Thank you. Joseph, Great conversation. Really enjoyed chatting with you. Congratulations on going from basically zero to seven figures in two years. Looking forward to see where you take this business next and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[Joseph Lee]

Thank you for having me.

[Omar Khan]

It's my pleasure. If this episode got you thinking about building or scaling your own SaaS product, let me tell you about a resource that can help. Whether you need a complete technical team or want to scale your existing one, Gearhart might be exactly what you're looking for. They're a product development studio that specializes in building B2B SaaS platforms. What's interesting is that they can act as your fractional CTO and technical team, but with a unique twist. They've built strong connections in Silicon Valley and can even help connect you with VCs when you're ready. Plus, as a proud Ukrainian born company, they deliver Silicon Valley expertise with an offshore pricing model. They're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team until the end of May. Visit Gearhart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO.