Mapping and Measuring Your Marketing feat. Mikael Dia of Funnelytics

ASG 076 – Mapping and Measuring Your Marketing feat. Mikael Dia of Funnelytics

Chris Davis: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the All Systems Go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot, learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of Automation Bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis: [00:00:32] Welcome to the All Systems Go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, founder and chief automation officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about small business, marketing and sales automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals in automation service providers. And if you like to become one or, find out more. Please visit AutomationBridge.com/asp. In today’s episode, we’re going to discuss mapping a tool. We’re going to discuss the software to allow you to map and measure your marketing to improve the quality of service with a Mikael Dia and Mikael is a digital marketing expert and founder of Funnelytics, a software company helping entrepreneurs and marketers convert traffic into more profit. He’s passionate about helping entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs scale their business in a faster and more efficient way. Mikael developed a simple visual tool for entrepreneurs and marketers to understand the numbers in their marketing at a glance in order to easily fix the holes and optimize what’s working. Had a great, great conversation with Mikael. We talked about not just the software but his journey there and he just he’s just a wealth of knowledge and dropped all types of nuggets to be mindful of when when building software to serve marketers.

Chris Davis: [00:02:08] All right. So before we get into it, let me just welcome you. If you’re a first time listener, do me a favor and listen to this episode in its entirety before you subscribe and leave a five star rating and review, because I’m sure that you will after listening to this podcast, if you’re if you’re a listener to the podcast and you have not subscribed yet, please do. So we’re available on Apple podcast, Google podcast. You can subscribe on YouTube anywhere where you get podcasts, where they’re so while you’re at it and subscribing. If you haven’t already leave a five star rating and review, it will be greatly appreciated. If, for whatever reason, you cannot figure out how to leave a review or where we have you covered, go to automationbridge.com/review and we’ll do all the heavy lifting for you. All right. So let’s jump right into today’s episode. Mikael, welcome to the podcast, glad to have you on. Man, how you doing?

Mikael Dia: [00:03:02] I’m doing fantastic, man. Happy to be here. Happy to be on the podcast with you, Chris.

Chris Davis: [00:03:06] Yes. Yes. And I’ll give I’ll give the listeners some insight. We’ve been we’ve been playing a bit of text tag, you’re it for a couple of years. In the initial year that we initially had a meetup was the year the Raptors, you know, won the when the finals, got my

Chris Davis: [00:03:25] Championship Raptors right here. You know, if you noticed, we’re in it right now and have a great year.

Chris Davis: [00:03:32] Oh, man. What a classic. We’re so glad to have you on, man. I want to talk. I have so many people in my program, so many people in my community, so many people I’m connected with. That use for analytics are are confused and what analytics is and how it does, because it’s it really is. The tool became more required as digital marketing became more and more of a norm. And it does solve a burning issue. But before we get into it, like always, I want to give our listeners a bit of insight on your journey to where you’re at now. So tell us about life proof analytics. You know, as the marketer, what were you where you always in the Internet space marketing, did you stumble upon it? What was life like beforehand?

Mikael Dia: [00:04:22] Sure, how far back do you want me to go?

Chris Davis: [00:04:25] Let’s do after you graduated.

Mikael Dia: [00:04:27] All right. So I went into engineering was my kind of degree in university and civil engineering specifically, and I hated it. I mean, I it was terrible. Like I knew by by like the end of my first year that there is no way I’m going to be an engineer. However, I don’t want to start a new thing because I didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time. Yeah. You know, you graduate high school at sixteen. Seventeen year old you are you’re supposed to know for sure what you’re going to do your degree in and then that’s your career. And I’m like this, this is dumb. However, you know, I ended up graduating and getting my degree in civil engineering. And one of the things that I did right after was I started a T-shirt company with a few friends of mine. And it really wasn’t much of a company. You know, we had T-shirts that we printed designs on and we tried to hustle and sell. However, like the thing that got me into the digital marketing space was we originally sold out of those T-shirts really, really quickly because it was me and my two buddies. We were fresh out of university.

Mikael Dia: [00:05:45] We had a bunch of friends, a pretty big network from that standpoint. So friends, family, all bought T-shirts. So we ordered a lot of t shirts like we thought. All right. Well, that’s how easy it is to sell T-shirts. Let’s order a bunch more and get that discount right. Because if you hit quantities, they come cheaper. So we ordered stacks. We got boxes of T-shirts. And it turns out that once your friends and family buy t shirts, they don’t want to buy again. So then we were like, oh, OK, how are we supposed to sell these things? And that’s what kind of led me down this rabbit hole of how do you sell online? I literally Googled, like, how do you sell online? And this was in 2009, maybe 2010. Yeah. And I’m like Google had just kind of started doing the whole slap thing and, you know, and at the time, there are still tons, tons of content that you can find where you fall into this rabbit hole of like learn how to make ten thousand dollars a month from the beach with just a laptop and an Internet connection. Yeah. And I was like, all right. Well, I don’t like being an engineer, so I’d much rather sit on a beach and make ten thousand dollars a month like.

Mikael Dia: [00:07:09] So let’s figure that out. Let’s go down that path. So I ended up buying ebooks courses. All sorts of stuff I learned about CEO and first it started off with like affiliate marketing, building out a little review websites, and then it went into learning about like ranking articles on on Google through CEO. Then I went into PPC and paid advertising on Google and then Facebook. And then then eventually I got into the whole concept of funnels and yeah, I mean, the rest is history. It took me a long time to figure out how it actually all works and how this whole puzzle fits together. However, it all started from that concept of trying to sell these T-shirts online. And that started the journey. I mean, yeah, from there I ended up I started a Mandarin language school. I went I moved to London, to the U.K. I started a Mandarin language school. I started the language app. And then I ended up growing a digital marketing agency. And that was my first seven figure business and. From the marketing agency stemmed funnel attic’s.

Chris Davis: [00:08:23] Oh, man, so, so much juice there. I did not know you were engineer man. So I’m an electrical engineer, are you? Yeah, I actually enjoy my studies, though. I did enjoy studying electrical. My wife is a civil, OK, and she had a similar experience to you. Like it’s like I could complete this but I don’t really like doing it.

Mikael Dia: [00:08:44] Yeah, well as soon as I completed I was like I worked. It’s funny man. I worked as an engineer for six months I think. And after graduating and literally, you know. You know, AutoCAD. Yeah. You know. Yeah, yeah. AutoCAD drawings. I would drive like I live in downtown Toronto and my job was like outside of the city. But if you’ve ever been in Toronto traffic, it’s ridiculous. Oh yeah. So I would drive an hour and a half in the morning sitting in traffic, sit in front of my computer for eight hours doing AutoCAD drawings of roads and bridges and and all that stuff. And I would drive an hour and a half back to my condo in Toronto. And after six months I’m like, screw this and I’m going to figure out something else, because this is not this is not I’m not doing this for 20 years.

Chris Davis: [00:09:34] Yeah, I know that. I made it a bit longer. I made it two years where I actually enjoyed it. And then, like, the latter five, six, seven total, I was just like, how do I get out of it? But I didn’t know, like there was nothing, which sounds like I was searching just a couple of years before you because my search started around to you said 2010. My started right around 2009, 2008 ish. Yeah.

Mikael Dia: [00:09:59] My mind is around there too. It’s hard to pinpoint it. Right.

Chris Davis: [00:10:03] I just remember Pat Flynn having like a blog and I was like, this guy makes money writing words on the internet. Yeah. How does that work? You know? So for you. For you, McKale, what was that transition point from your engineering to the to your freelance? It was that just a decision you like? Look, I’m I’m done.

Mikael Dia: [00:10:26] No, you know what? I think the main thing is so it started off with the desire to make money online. Right. And that’s a very, very. Like, poor way to word it, because everybody talks about making money online, however, making money online is not a business. Making money online is not starting something. It’s just it’s it’s it’s this arbitrary thing of, like, you’re making money somehow. I remember I used to sell I don’t know if I don’t know if these even still exist. I assume they do. I used to sell solo ads and I used to be like so solo as basically I would find a somebody who has a really large email list and I would broker a deal with that person who has a really large email list. And I would go to somebody who is an offer and I would say, OK, you can send out an email to this list, will guarantee you a thousand clicks to and you pay, say, 40 cents a click. So it’s four hundred bucks will send out the email with your link in it. And there you go. Right. I use to broker these deals. Yeah. I would make a good amount of money doing this. Right. So like this is make money online. It means nothing. It’s not a business. It’s not. It’s like opportunities for you to make some cash, right. Yeah, but I realized like a that’s not sustainable. You can’t really just make money online.

Mikael Dia: [00:11:54] You’ve got to build something. Even all of these people teaching, you drop shipping or any of that stuff, it’s like. When you look at it, the real way they’re making money is by building a coaching business on how to do drop shipping. Yeah, that’s really the real the real business behind. And that’s the real engine behind what they’re doing. Yeah. Otherwise, if they were just making millions of dollars freely, they’re certainly not setting up a coaching business on the side because they just love coaching. People like it. Right. So what I found is that if you truly want to build a business, you’ve got to understand all aspects of it. Right. Like marketing is is just a piece of the puzzle. Like you’ve got to you’ve got to realize that the marketing side is. Yes, the heartbeat, the engine. Like, you’ve got to make sales for sure. You’ve got to exchange dollars for value. But at the end of the day. It transitioned more into entrepreneurship, so as I started understanding how all these pieces fit together, I started getting a lot of expertise in marketing. However. Marketing is not a business either. Marketing is a component of a business, it’s a killer to drive that business forward. So I had to start learning all of the other aspects right. What does it take to do to not just attract customers, but how do you close them? How do you sell customers? How do you actually deliver value? What does that look like? What type of value are you delivering? How do you retain these customers? A software company versus a Mandarin language school versus a coaching business versus infl products? All very different value propositions, all different ways to deliver value, all different ways to attract customers, to close them, et cetera.

Mikael Dia: [00:13:50] And and then that’s not even to mention the component of, like people. Right? If you really want to build a business, you know, I have a friend of mine who says, you know, Biggie Biggie says more money, more problems. But he says it’s not more money, more problems, it’s more people, more problems. Like, that’s really what it comes down to is the more people you have around you and the more people you have together, the more problems you have. So all of these things over the course of some. So from like that transition of engineering, these are all things that piled up and on and on. And as I started to unveil what does it really take to build a seven figure business, even an eight figure business, like how do the all these things later on and pile on? And it started with this very blindsided, this these blinders of let’s make money online, let’s get a stranger to pull out their credit card and pay for something. That’s where it started. And it kind of grew from there.

Chris Davis: [00:14:51] Yeah, that’s a great synopsis, man. Making money online and building a business are not one in the same. No, you know, not at all. It starts there. You know, most people that’s where they start. That’s the question mark. The big the big sexy. Right. Like, oh, money online. And then it’s like, well, after you make that money, it needs a model. You’re a business model to to do something with that money. Because if you’re just making it, that’s that’s not a business and it’s you can’t sustain that. Right. So so we’ve got the backdrop, which makes sense to me a little bit now, like you were always involved in some form of visual representation before the creation of a thing even, you know, in the in the engineering days. So now fast forward to funnelytics. Give the audience a synopsis, overview of what is what is funnelytics and what drove you to create the software.

Mikael Dia: [00:15:48] Yeah, no problem, man. So let’s take a step back to when I was running my agency. So I ran my agency from 2014 to twenty eighteen when I launched analytics and then I stopped and while I was running my agency. We used to do the same thing over and over again, right, and every marketer goes through the same motion or marketing team, I should say. Usually when you’re starting off, you’re wearing all the hats, meaning you’re doing the strategy, you’re doing the actual build, you’re doing the actual analysis and seeing whether or not it’s working and then you’re figuring out where to optimize and all that stuff. But what I just outlined there is the same all the time. Right. So it always starts with the plan. And as you’ve mentioned in the past, like usually you’ll start with a whiteboard or you’ll start with a lucid chart or diagramming tool or PowerPoint presentation, but you’re just mapping out a plan, a funnel. Right. I’m going to take Facebook. I’m going to send that traffic over to a landing page. When they get to that landing page, you’re going to put in their name and email and then they’re going to get a sequence of emails and that’s going to go over here and then there’s going to be retardant. So you map out this entire plan. On a whiteboard, wherever it is.

Mikael Dia: [00:17:08] OK, then you’ve got to go to the next phase, which is OK, I’ve got to build this out right. I’ve got to go and build all of these pieces. So I use click funnels or I use active campaign or MailChimp or lead pages or all of the thousands of tools that are coming out in the market constantly to build these things. I need to send text messages, OK, I’m going to use Twitter or whatever it is right now instead of my Facebook ads. I need to write copy. I need to do all of these pieces so that this plan is now alive. Right. And things are are on the Internet. It’s out there. We can start sending traffic to this and we can see what happens. So then once you’ve built, you move on to the next phase. So I call this the I call this the launch phase. So first is the plan, then it’s the launch phase. After you launch, then you go on to the next phase, which is measure. So everyone does the same thing. We need to figure out whether or not this is working right. So I’m going to start sending traffic to it, whether it’s Facebook ads or maybe I’ve got some organic traffic from or maybe I’m doing outreach. It doesn’t matter. Right. But I’m sending traffic to it and I’ve got to measure the performance of this plan.

Mikael Dia: [00:18:18] Right. However. I’m looking at charts, graphs, spreadsheets, basically rows and columns to try and understand whether or not my plan that I mapped out on a whiteboard is actually working, but I have to try to decipher these charts and graphs to see how these two things correlate. The problem is Facebook is going to tell you one thing. Google Analytics is going to tell you some other thing. Then you’ve got your stripe account that’s going to tell you some other revenue. And then you’ve got MailChimp, who’s telling you that this stuff is happening. So you’ve got all of these data points from all these different places that you’re trying to tie together to understand back to this diagram. And none of them are actually like the diagram that I put together is not linear. Right. So there’s multiple traffic sources. There’s multiple retargeting points, emails. Those things are happening dynamically. Yet charts and graphs are linear, right? They’re meant to be step one, step two, step three. Or you have to interpret them in kind of that linear fashion. So. I kept running into that same problem of like, man, how can I communicate to my clients that my plan like the performance of this plan specifically? Right. How can I communicate that in a way that they can understand and in a way that my team can also understand so that we’re all aligned? And I don’t have to be the hire of data analyst to tell me what the hell’s happening.

Mikael Dia: [00:19:49] Yes, so. Funnelytics was born out of that problem, out of that connection. How can I take a map, a drawing, a plan and overlay the data on it so I can instantly see where the bottlenecks are? So it was very simple, which is wouldn’t it be cool if I could take my white board, put it on a canvas on my computer similar to a mural or lose chart? Except everything that is on there is very much marketing driven. Right. So it’s marketing icons, my pages, my traffic sources, my actions. And when I connect it together, I could just click a button and it would overlay all of my data. I could see my conversion rates. I could see how many people landed on this particular step. I could see the flow. I could see where the drop off points are. I could visually see what’s working versus what’s not. That’s where the idea of funnel that came came about. And that’s basically what we built, a tool that allows you to map out your strategy and overlay your analytics data and explore how are people flowing through the journeys that people are going through on your website, through this campus environment, as well as charts and graphs?

Chris Davis: [00:21:06] Yeah, and I have to give you props here, because I’ve been a user of Funnelytics. Maybe I don’t think I was part of the launch, but it was fairly early. And I remember at the inception of it, it was just like pages and simple icons. And then it’s evolved into having that that data layer you’ve got forecasting in their KPIs, you’ve got more more icons. Just talk a little bit about the patients. I know you as the CEO, you saw it. It’s like, look, this is what analytics is, OK? We’ll start here because oftentimes people want to start at the end, like with their vision. What was that like for you to say, OK, this is a good start, not the full vision. We’ll get there, but we’ll start version one and maybe buy version ten.

Mikael Dia: [00:21:58] We’re there. Yeah, I mean, look, man, we’re the vision is still like we’re nowhere near where like my vision is still a good three to five years from where we are. Yeah. A. It’s tough, man, it’s it’s tough to disconnect vision and reality, right, so you can easily draw out a vision in your mind of like, OK, this is what my program is going to be or this is what my platform is going to look like and this is what I want it to do. But then reality sets in and it’s like, OK, well, I’ve got one engineer who only can work a total of eight hours a day, and this one feature is going to take one hundred and sixty hours. And this is one of the 300 features that I think this platform should do. So now you got to sit down and say, OK, well, how do I prioritize this? How do I decide what is first? What is second, what is lost? And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to to make those types of decisions. It’s easy to say this is where I want the business to be or this is where I want my tool or my platform or whatever. I want it to be here in X amount of time. But the steps to get there, there’s really an unlimited number of combinations of ways that you can possibly get there. Right. So my philosophy is always. Iterate fast, right? So when I kind of talk about that, that motion of plan launch measure, the last piece of that which every every marketer does is is optimized, right.

Mikael Dia: [00:23:36] So once you measure, you’ve got to make some decisions and you’ve got to decide, OK, what am I tweaking to try and improve this? Right. That’s the optimization phase. And then you cycle through. Right. So you optimize the new plan and you make a new plan. You build whatever you’ve set out for optimization. Then you go and measure and you optimize and you keep going through that cycle. The question is, how fast can you move through that cycle? Right. If you’re planning and building right for a year, but you don’t have anything to measure, then you’re just building off of your gut. Right. You’re building off of your intuition as to, OK, well, it needs all of these things in order for somebody to start using it, in order for me to start establishing a benchmark. The easiest way to solve it is by by flipping it, by saying, OK, how can I build, how can I plan this feature, build it as quickly as possible in a prototype version so that I can actually start measuring to see whether or not people care about this. So then I can make iterations on that feature and improve it if they even care about it. Because I’ll be honest, when I first launch final, I had no clue if people cared. No clue. Like, I was just like, I just want this for myself.

Mikael Dia: [00:24:56] Like, I just want this for my clients and for myself. So I launched the mapping tool, the canvas for free. And I had no clue, no clue whether or not people cared. I just. All right, well, let’s just launch it. And it was a buddy of mine. His name is Scott Clifford. He he’s the one who kind of pointed out and he’s like, you should really launch this mapping tool. I was like, yeah, but I’m building, like, this analytics feature and all these things. And I was stuck in that kind of plan and build mode. Right. And he’s like, just see if people like this mapping tool, because I think this mapping tool is really cool. Just give it away for free and then up sell people on to the analytics. So. All right. Well, fine. And as I did that. We started seeing data, we started seeing that, you know, various requests, right? Oh, can you do this or can we add this and things that I never even thought about, things that weren’t at all in that kind of product roadmap, but allowed me to shape the tool and allowed me to kind of iterate. So that’s the best way I can explain is just go through that cycle as quickly as you possibly can. Plan, launch, measure, optimize, plan, launch, measure, optimize, don’t plan for a month and then launch for another eight months. And then, you know, how quickly can you move through that cycle because you’ll learn fast.

Chris Davis: [00:26:16] And what I what I really like about what you said is, is optimize around what people care about. Don’t assume don’t don’t force people to care about something. You don’t put it out there. Go through the cycles. And when it comes to optimization, which is very difficult to do without measuring. Right. You need data to help you determine what’s what, because I know a lot of times in my time in this in the startup space, the tech startup space, it’s also a balance of what people are saying they want. And you identify like, OK, not not just what we can do, but is what they’re saying. Is it a one to one of what we can deliver? Because sometimes I’ll be like, hey, we want this feature when in actuality it’s something else that’s that’s lacking or missing, that if you provide that, it inherently solves that problem. Right. So it’s always this balance that I found with listening to people. I think most software fails when they don’t have a vision in their vision is whatever their audience tells them, like whatever the whatever the

Mikael Dia: [00:27:25] Customer thinks, you can’t have. You know, again, this goes back to that famous quote from from Henry Ford. Right. If he asks customers what they wanted, they’d say, faster horses like you can’t you can’t innovate with that by asking people what they want. Otherwise they would be the innovators, not you. Right. So you’ve got to innovate by focusing on how you see the world and how you see that you can change things. We have very, very specific vision here at politics that people can. People don’t need to be data analysts and data scientists in order to understand what’s working versus what’s not like you, you can reimagine how to look at data, how to look at your your analytics, to derive insights, however. I still need it’s a balance, as you said, I still need feedback from my customers and I’ve got to take that feedback and I’ve got to ask myself, does this feedback line up with our vision? Does this feedback line up with where we want to go or is it going to take us in a completely different direction? Because there’s lots of things we could do with funnel. It looks like it’s a canvas at the end of the day. Right. So I could easily build a planning tool where you could go and add your whole team and start now becomes a project management tool where you plan your projects around the actual map. We could build a, you know, a way to pass.

Mikael Dia: [00:28:56] There’s lots of stuff that we could do with all of this question is. Does it line up with your vision and are you moving towards that that direction? Right. And you can’t be everything for everyone now. Easier said than done, I will tell you that, right, like we have about fifteen hundred right now because as of, you know, recording this, we’ve got fifteen hundred people signing up to follow this every week. And like, I can’t be everything to all fifteen hundred of those people. Right. Right. However, it’s very, very difficult to cut out the noise and to know precisely who are we building this thing for. Especially when I first started, I didn’t even know who I was building it for it to begin with. I was building it to solve my own problem. So when all of these people started coming up, I was like, I really don’t know who this is for, right? Like, it’s like this guy is a strategist and a solo marketer. This person works for a Fortune 500 company and is an optimizer. This person is a media buyer and wants to spend more money on Facebook ads. They’re looking for this and he’s looking for that and they’re looking for this. I’m like, but you all came in for this one, Kambiz. And it’s like you’ve got a really kind of be selective with your your feedback process because you can’t bill for everybody.

Chris Davis: [00:30:15] Yeah, I can’t help but draw parallels. You know, we’re talking about software, but it really applies to if you’re a service provider or you have a physical product, this process that you have to go through where you’re not going to know, you’re the perfect audience getting started. You’re not going to have the perfect pricing model. You’re not going to know what they really care about. You’re not going to know any of this. And I run into so many entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, I’ll say that that really drives them crazy. They spend so much time trying to get some certainty instead of just just go through it, go through the process, get it wrong, get it right, tweak it, you know, measure it like you said, and then you’ll end up finding, OK, the vision that I had. I can see it for this audience. Now, let’s make that shift, which you guys are in the in the in the middle of doing so. So tell us about this. What what’s next for analytics?

Mikael Dia: [00:31:17] Yeah, that’s a good question. So as we started with politics, we really again kind of went out to the market that. I knew and I was part of which is the solo entrepreneur start up, call it the click funnels crowd. Right now I’m a massive Russell Brunson fan. I studied him for years and years, way before he even had click funnels, however. The market that they’re after and the people that they’re helping are start up entrepreneurs, right? They’re brand new to entrepreneurship and that’s who we were really speaking to, because that’s who I kind of was right. I have a small agency, small business, et cetera. However, as we’ve grown and as we’ve evolved on politics, as we’ve realized that A, we’re no longer a small we’re still a small business, but we’re we’re shifting towards being more of that kind of mid-market. We have a lot of data, more more employees, et cetera. We started to realize that, number one, the market that we’re currently serving is there’s a disconnect between where our vision really is as an analytics platform versus where they’re at in their journey. As marketers and as entrepreneurs, as businesses, so we need to start thinking about who really, really gets the value of that proposition that we’re faith that we have. Right. So an interesting statement that I that really, really made me realize.

Mikael Dia: [00:33:00] This was something called it’s from a book called Obviously Awesome by by a lady named April Dunford. And she’s an expert in positioning. And she gave me an analogy. I’ll share the analogy in just a minute. However, positioning is defined by a set of value, like a specific value that a very specific customer cares a lot about. So if you break down that sentence, there’s a few things to consider there. The main one being cares a lot about. Right. And if you look at where we are as a company, we’re an analytics tool serving businesses that don’t have much data to analyze. Right. So when you think about that, you’re like, actually, we’re building something for for the wrong market. We’re building something because they don’t care a lot about the analytics layer. Right. And it kind of made me start to realize that we need to shift our positioning, but be who we go and talk to and who we serve. I’ll give you an analogy from from April that really made me realize this. OK, so imagine you bake a new type of cake, right? A new baked good. And it’s kind of like a hybrid between a muffin and an actual cake. Yeah. Have you heard this before?

Chris Davis: [00:34:27] No, I haven’t. I’m just ready.

Mikael Dia: [00:34:29] Ok, so it’s made of flour. It’s got chocolate in it. It’s sweet. And now you’ve got a very critical decision to make. You’ve got to decide where are you going to categorize it, OK, because everything that you choose, whatever you make as a decision, is going to define everything that your customers perceive. So, yes, let’s talk about it. Right. If I were to categorize it as a muffin, OK, how much is a muffin?

Chris Davis: [00:34:58] Mm hmm. Much cheaper than a cake

Mikael Dia: [00:35:01] You got, so

Chris Davis: [00:35:01] Like maybe eighty nine cents to a dollar. Fifty nine. Seventy nine.

Mikael Dia: [00:35:05] When do you eat a muffin?

Chris Davis: [00:35:07] In the morning.

Mikael Dia: [00:35:09] Where do you buy them?

Chris Davis: [00:35:10] At the bakery. At the gas station. Right. Grocery store.

Mikael Dia: [00:35:15] What is the what is the competition to a muffin.

Chris Davis: [00:35:18] Maybe a doughnut

Mikael Dia: [00:35:19] Doughnut. Maybe a bagel. OK, what about a cake? Let’s flip it now. A cake. Where do you buy a cake.

Mikael Dia: [00:35:29] Yeah, you. There’s cake stores. Right.

Chris Davis: [00:35:33] When do you eat a cake. Birthdays event. How much does a cake cost.

Chris Davis: [00:35:38] Much more man. Oh they can get up their average cake. Maybe five ninety nine to ten dollars if you want the basic one at the grocery store

Mikael Dia: [00:35:47] To go up, get right on it. Right. What’s the what’s a competitor to a cake.

Chris Davis: [00:35:51] Let’s see. Still cookies.

Chris Davis: [00:35:54] Cupcakes, cupcakes. Pies.

Chris Davis: [00:35:58] Yep. Yep. Pies. Absolutely right.

Mikael Dia: [00:36:01] So all of a sudden by and you eat like you said on a birthday etc.. The same product. Right. It’s still made of flour. It’s still a baked good. It’s got chocolate in it. Sweet. By me categorizing it as a muffin, I’ve instantly told the marketplace that it should be priced at this. This is how I should classify it. This is where I buy it and this is what it smells like and looks like and all that stuff. If I classify it as a cake, this is the category that it falls under. This is what it is. So bye. By you understanding that concept, you can kind of go and say, OK, where do we fit in the market? Right. So we’ve got this product that helps you see your your marketing data and analyzes your marketing data. However, if I classify it as a funnel marketing tool or if I classify it as a marketing analytics tool, or if I classify it as a customer journey platform, all of a sudden it instantly triggers different thoughts as to what it is, right? That’s correct. That’s correct. A marketing analytics tool. Well, does it have reports? Does it have dashboards? Because instantly I’m thinking if you’re a marketing tool, you need these things, right? If you’re a funnel tool, what do you build funnels? Do you build landing pages? Like instantly? I’m thinking that that’s what it should do because that’s what the crowd or the market tells me. So you’ve got to start asking yourself these types of questions when you’re positioning your product and your service because the same product or service can be positioned in a multitude of different ways.

Mikael Dia: [00:37:38] But it is extremely important to make that that call and make that decision. And that’s why it’s so important to kind of go through that cycle of plan, launch, measure, optimize as as fast as possible. You may not get it right. Right. You spend all of your time planning and saying this is one hundred percent a marketing automation tool and you keep attacking the market. However, it’s actually not. And it’s the rest of the world kind of sees it as something else. You’re not going to be able to grow, right? We’re kind of in that same boat right now with phenolics, we’ve realized that we’re really yes. And analytics tool. But what we really are is a performance analytics tool. We look at the performance of your website’s conversion rates by us thinking about that and by positioning ourselves as performance, customer journeys, understanding the flows that people go through in order to get to the purchase. That’s a very, very different proposition than a funnel marketing tool, right? Yeah. And it speaks to a very different crowd. Right. Who uses the term customer journey versus funnels. Right. Customer journeys are people who have customers first and foremost. Right. Otherwise, if you don’t have customers, you don’t care about the journeys. Yeah, right. Yeah. So that’s the transition and that’s the shift that we’re going through as a as a company is understanding who our core customers that truly care about what we’re building. Right. That’s the. Yeah.

Chris Davis: [00:39:06] I love it man because you know, I’m still thinking about your your baked goods. Right. You have all of these materials and you know, as the CEO, you can literally bake whatever you want,

Mikael Dia: [00:39:19] Whatever you want. Right.

Chris Davis: [00:39:20] And perhaps there’s something that you make that the industry loves, the market loves, but you don’t enjoy making it.

Mikael Dia: [00:39:28] Yeah, right.

Chris Davis: [00:39:29] Or there’s something that you like and the market likes. But the effort that it takes to get it to the market, you’re like, I don’t like that. Right. So it’s also with these raw materials, the house. So you’ve got a scalable model in SaaS which says, OK, I can easily go to the masses. That that’s fine. That’s good. But who really is best now that I that I’m familiar with with this creation? I always think of think of it like babies. I always talk about like automation’s, like the first time you built automation, this little bitty baby automation. And then as contacts go through it, it matures. It starts to show its holes and you can, you know, fill the holes and now becomes this mature automation. And it’s the same, right? You’ve got this idea. You’ve got this software and it’s little bitty baby. And then as users use it more and more, not only do you get feedback from them, but you get to look at it now as a more grown, established entity and say, you know what, you’re actually bigger than I thought. Like, you grew faster than I realize and you’re actually taller. So. So, no, I’m not going to have you go here. You’re going to go play sports.

Chris Davis: [00:40:41] I got

Chris Davis: [00:40:42] Over here. I initially thought I’d have to have a kid be maybe my height and just be good at regular stuff. But no, you’ve got to go to the NBA. Yeah. And that’s what happens, right? Like you saw it and you’re like, wait a minute, funnel it. No, it’s good for this crowd. And I can’t we talked about it before this podcast. And I just I just want you to touch on it. Did you feel any level of any capacity at any capacity, some abandonment or disingenuous nature towards the small business, knowing that you’re going a bit more upmarket? Because I hear that a lot from SaaS Like, no, we’re strictly for small, you know, this, this and that, and it’s OK, you know. So was that something that you struggle with or was it just like, look, this is where we’re going? And that’s it who’s on the boat is on the boat?

Mikael Dia: [00:41:31] Yeah, it’s it’s a good question. You know, we’re still going through that transition of the market, right? We’re still figuring out exactly where we need to move up market and how how that looks like. So from from that transition standpoint, we haven’t fully, you know, abandoned the small businesses or anything like that just yet, however. You know, you’ve got to you’ve got to make a decision as a as a CEO as to what are you truly trying to solve. Right. Like, you know, building a business is about solving problems. You’re even if you’re selling a course, you’re selling a product, you’re selling anything, you’re solving a problem. You’re you’re giving somebody value in exchange for their hard earned money, right? Yes. Where can I give you the most value? Right. Can I give you value if you’re a small startup and you’ve got literally no traffic to your website? Can I really give you value, even if you pay me ninety nine bucks a month? No, because our tool is meant to give you insights on your data and to measure the performance of your data or your marketing, and you’ve got no data to measure. So I’m not giving you any value at ninety nine dollars a month. Right. However. If you’ve got a million visitors a month, your website and I charge you two thousand dollars a month, let’s say, for to help you can my tool and what we’ve built help you find ways to optimize that million visitors a month? Yes.

Mikael Dia: [00:43:11] Really, really quickly to the point where you’re going to gladly pay me a lot more than two thousand dollars because a small little uplift will generate you significantly more money on the back end. Right. By understanding that data and by getting insights from that data. So you’ve got to understand that you’re in the business as entrepreneurs. Where in the business of. Exchanging value, right, giving value to a consumer or another business, right? Yeah, and in order for us to understand that, we’ve got to understand, well, who has who cares about that thing the most. Right? That’s the key there. Right. And that’s why I go back to that sentence from April. It’s like, who cares about it? A lot, right? I can’t get you to care about it no matter what, because you’re small and you just don’t have any data. There’s not much I can do, right. Like I can abandon you all I want or feels like I’m being you. But the reality is the value of politics will come when you’re bigger than a startup. Yeah, right. And that’s just all it is.

Chris Davis: [00:44:20] It’s what it comes down to. I love a man. You’ve got to grow, man, and you can’t be afraid of growth and what it what it brings. And here’s what I’ve learned is that most of the complaints when a company grows are from people who are not, you know, it’s like, no, don’t do this. Why are you up charging? And you could listen to that. But then you if you really pay attention. I know you do. You look at the data, you say, whoa, look at this success that our customers are getting in. Those people who are who are complaining, they’re really the ones who aren’t moving much and probably aren’t a good fit for your tool anyway, because like you said, they don’t have much performance to put into it. Right. They don’t have much data to analyze. You know,

Mikael Dia: [00:45:08] That’s it, man,

Chris Davis: [00:45:09] Yeah, man. So, man, this was great. I hope my hopes with this was to give insight, you know, of course, to a platform that I use. And I talk all the time about mapping out. You’ve taken it to the next level, which which I did not see in the beginning. And I’m so glad that you did, because what is the map without being able to understand the performance of what you just mapped out? Exactly right. So being able to do that, man, you’re so early. The digital marketing landscape is still early and it’s evolving. And I’m looking forward, man, to seeing how you guys continue to add to the to the platform and make it stronger. I know this is probably the most straightforward question that I could ask, but if people want to find out more about you and your software, where should they go?

Mikael Dia: [00:45:59] Yeah, go to funnelytics.io And sign up to a free play around with a free mapping tool. And that’s it, man. If you want to learn more about everything that we do, most of it is there.

Chris Davis: [00:46:12] Great, great funnelytics.io And I’ll give you a personal shout out Mikael I’m connected with you on LinkedIn and I enjoy your short videos on marketing and growing a business. So if you want to get some good content in your LinkedIn feed, feel free to feel free to connect there as well. I’ll have all of the links in the show, notes Mikael. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast man. I really appreciate it.

Mikael Dia: [00:46:38] Appreciate you man. Thank you for having me.

Chris Davis: [00:46:41] Thank you for listening to this episode of the All Systems Go podcast, did you enjoy just learning about the journey, the tool itself? Right, the importance of mapping, mapping, your marketing, as well as that nugget that he dropped on positioning? Oh, man, that was great when he, you know, talked about the raw material, you could build with it what you will and what you decide to build, whatever the going rate in the market is going to set the value before you even put a price tag on it. These conversations, I have to say, I am enjoying thoroughly with these founders because they just give you a greater level of insight into what it takes to build the software that you’re using and relying on in your business and your clients. So who needs to hear this? Let me let me ask you this. How many marketing consultants are marketing automation consultants, do you know, that are using some form of mapping tool? Now, in full disclosure, disclosure funnelytics is great for mapping the page flow. He said that right map and understanding what’s working, how how your website is working. What about the logic flow? Right, what about the the variety of other maps that are that are required, do you know a marketing automation consultant or professional that is not supplying these things? Please, please make sure that you get this episode to them. If you are a owner, a CEO, and you have not seen a map of any form of what you’re doing, a request it be send this to your marketer for some simple checks and balances, OK? And if you found value in today’s episode, make sure you share it.

Chris Davis: [00:48:31] And here is where I make my formal invitation for you to subscribe if you have not already if you’re a first time listener. This is my invitation to you. Welcome and welcome to the family. Permanently hope. Hopefully you will subscribe and join the small business owners, savvy entrepreneurs and marketing automation professionals that get this type of teaching, this type of conversation, this type of value every week, every Thursday. So make sure you join and leave a five star rating and review. Here at Automation Bridge, we’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. Simply put, we want to help you put the automation system, the automated systems in place for your business. OK, gone are the days and times and frustration of you trying to do it yourself. It’s just not going to work. Let’s just be honest, OK? But if you want somebody to do it for you or if you want to be that person, that does it for businesses, for a living, a lucrative living. By the way, I want you to go to Automation, Bridge, Dotcom, Fortgang, ASPE, and take the next steps to talk to myself or someone on my team to assess if you be a good fit for any of our current program offerings. More importantly, the Automation Service Provider program, where we give you a structured curriculum to make sure that you are fit to to provide the service of automation at an excellent level.

Chris Davis: [00:50:00] That’s what the business owners need. That’s what we’re creating. If that’s you, if you desire to do so, go to automation, bridge dot com forward, slash a HSP. We’re also accepting guests for the podcast. So if you’re a SaaS founder of a marketing or sales software, as Mikael is, we’d love to discuss your software and journey. Let let our audience learn about some tools that they can be leveraging for themselves as well as well as their clients. And if you’re a marketing automation consultant, experience any level of success with your clients and you like to share with our collective audience. Please, if you’re SAS founder or marketing automation consultant and you want to be on the podcast, go to Automation Bridge.com/guest, let no grass grow under it. That that’s another way of saying act now, OK? There are businesses that are in need of somebody to build their automated systems. That need is growing by the day. OK, if you want to be a part of the solution, please take up your mantle and say I’m ready to become an automation service provider and I’m going to automationbridge.com/ASP. All of the show notes and podcasts are accessible and automationbridge.com/podcast, you can go there and listen to all other episodes at your leisure. So until next time I see you online… Automate responsibly friends.