How Rick Koletavitoglu is building 150birds.
150birds is a lifecycle marketing management platform. Read how Rick came up with his idea and how he is growing the business.
This week we are with Rick Koletavitoglu, founder of 150birds. Rick is a successful entrepreneur, who previously co-founded and sold CreatorDen, an online-marketplace. He then moved to SF, started freelancing and came out with the idea for his new venture. Let’s dive in!
TL ; DR
👦 Intro, co-founded 2 other companies, a social network and online marketplace.
🚀 Sold CreatorDen, moved to the Bay Area, freelanced.
💡 Idea origination, frustration with the state of freelancing, wanted to give small businesses a better way to manage marketing.
📈 Public Beta, getting feedback and finding product-market fit.
💲 Pricing strategy, flexible and multi-tiered, with the option to scale up or down
🔍 Finding users: WeWork, Google Ads working well, FB for branding.
⚡ Lessons learned: don't get caught up in the hype. Launch sooner if you can. Launch frequently. Keep iterating.
Hi Rick. Could you give us a brief intro about you and tell us about your background?
I studied Business Management at American University, where I started a niche social network called ThirdCultured.
It was a challenge to get the density of alumni and staff to use the platform, and that failure taught me the challenges of building advertising-driven businesses where consumers are the product.
I eventually founded CreatorDen, an influencer marketing marketplace and agency bridging the gap between content creators and brands for sponsored collaboration.
That company became the industry leader in influencer marketing in Turkey.
After I sold out of CreatorDen, I moved to San Francisco in search of my next endeavor. As I started freelance consulting for startups, I saw how broken marketing was, where working with agencies and freelancers is inefficient and can lead to a lot of waste.
I quickly noticed that many of the services were recurring, and with the advent of remote work, and rise of ecommerce, there was an opportunity to build a product to help small businesses manage their lifecycle marketing.
What are you working on? Can you give us a description of your project?
150birds helps small businesses grow their online sales-everything from customer acquisition and loyalty to retention.
We have a vetted community of more than 200 seasoned marketers that we mix and match based on the needs of our customers. Customers pay a flat monthly subscription fee and scale their marketing program up or down as needs change.
Our project management software allows customers insight into their marketing program. Our data flywheel gets smarter with each additional operational team, training our dataset to understand the efficacy over time and then using that data to make better marketing strategies.
How did you come up with the idea for 150birds?
I was frustrated with the state of freelancing as a marketing strategist and wanted to productize myself. I saw how the gig economy emerged in the last decade, and providing transactional, short-term work wasn't a sustainable working relationship for businesses marketing teams. I wanted to provide marketing freelancers with access to long-term, more consistent work while giving small businesses a fast and cost-efficient way to manage their marketing.
Which strategy did you use to find your first users? Which channels worked well for you and which didn't?
I met our first customer while working at WeWork, and we've been working for more than six months together now. Google ads have also worked well for us.
How is the product growing?
We've been in public beta since the start of Q2 and have learned a lot through analyzing customer service requests and feature feedback.
We've taken that information and used it to update our scope of services and hone in on life-cycle marketing, which we believe will be an excellent match for the growing number of e-commerce businesses.
Could you give us a general overview of your growth strategy?
The pandemic has caused a worldwide shift to move many people to make their purchasing behavior online, and ecommerce saw the equivalent of 10 years of growth in a few months.
We target small businesses that are looking to grow their ecommerce sales. Account-based marketing has yielded excellent results, and we plan on continuing the initiative to amplify our growth.
Another channel that I believe will be huge for our growth is the referral marketing program we are getting ready to launch.
What’s your opinion about this enormous shift to online purchasing that we saw happening with the Pandemic? Do you believe numbers will change when we’ll come out from the CORONA emergency or do you see this as a permanent shift?
Not only have e-commerce sales been growing ever since stay-at-home restrictions took effect, but this change in consumer behavior is here to stay.
Now that consumers have experienced the ease of and reliability of e-commerce, we will undoubtedly see a rise in penetration post-pandemic. While brick-and-mortar stores may gain back some foot traffic, the shift to omnichannel retail is here to stay.
An interesting statistic from a few weeks ago is that if you look at the holiday forecasts, they are up an overall 2%. Still, online businesses are set to grow at least 35% as consumers avoid crowds as they get out; ecommerce is a viable option for many folks.
You founded other companies before. Could you give us a brief insight on your hiring process? When do you believe a founder should start to hire?
Don’t hire until you can afford to.
This generally means unless you reach a level of profitability that you are comfortable allocating towards building your team unless you raise external funding.
I have found this component of company building to be both the most challenging thing to do as a founder and the most transformative for the business.
When you have the capital to go out and hire, remember that the time you’re sending is costing you money. So try to create filters for weaning out candidates who are not a good fit from the get-go.
Many founders struggle with pricing. How do your pricing tiers work, and how did you decide to price your product? Do you have any particular suggestions on how to approach pricing?
Pricing is a tricky one indeed.
Our pricing is based on the average amount of work our specialists have to put in for each tier.
While some of our customers are newly transitioning to e-commerce, our flexible and multi-tiered pricing provides them with the option to scale up or down as the business makes progress in its growth trajectory.
Our solution has seen the best adoption with traditional companies who are looking for support in digitizing. We provide the whole gambit of life-cycle marketing services needed from customer acquisition to loyalty and retention.
My suggestion on approaching pricing is to understand what your customer is willing to pay and offer more value at a better price point than your competitors.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
In the small business market, we compete directly with agencies, given that we provide an end-to-end solution for life-cycle marketing. For larger clients, we compete with heavily managed marketplaces like Advisable and MarketerHire.
If you could talk to your younger self at the time of launch, what would you say? Would you do something different?
We've launched a few times now.
Don't get overwhelmed with product launches. Just keep going and iterating.
If I could talk to my younger self at launch, I'd say, don't get caught up in the hype. Launch sooner if you can. And then launch again. Launch frequently. Keep iterating.
That's how we got to where we're at with our SaaS business model; it's challenging to bring continuity in a marketplace between multiple freelancers and businesses. As an ecommerce business owner, once you turn the marketing faucet on, you ideally don't want to ever turn it off.
And for an effective team, you need an ongoing relationship with 4-5 specialists, which is challenging to do through generic marketplaces because of the short-term nature of the "gigs".
Our goal is to have our specialists work with our customers for the duration of their brand lifetime, where we provide them with long-term contracts and financial security.
Thank you Rick for your time!
You can follow Rick on Twitter to stay up to date with his journey.
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