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DON DODGE: Hi, I'm Don Dodge and this is Google, "Root
Access." Today I have a special guest, Alex Moore,
founder of Baydin, an email productivity company.
Welcome, Alex.
ALEX MOORE: Thank you, Don.
Great to be here.
DON DODGE: So what is Baydin?
What do you do?
ALEX MOORE: So we built a suite of productivity tools
that help the most heavy email users manage a lot of
messages, schedule things from inside their email, and just
basically keep on top of their email.
DON DODGE: So how did you come up with this idea for Baydin
and why did you think it was a problem that
needed to be solved?
ALEX MOORE: So it came out of personal pain.
Before this I was an electrical engineer working on
HDTV parts.
And as I matured in my career little bit and started to ask
to run a couple projects, I realized that I was spending a
lot more time in front of my email than I was my
oscilloscope.
And so I figured someone needed to do something about
that and make it a little bit easier to stay on top of it.
DON DODGE: So what were the key pain points that you said,
oh, this is the answer.
I've got to solve it this way.
ALEX MOORE: The biggest problem for me was just trying
to keep everything in my head.
So every time I'd need to get a project from somebody or I'd
need to follow up with somebody, I had to try to keep
all that in my brain.
And so I kept a million messages in my inbox, lost
track of all of them.
And it just didn't work very well.
DON DODGE: Hmm.
So you've talked about hockey stick growth and how most
companies don't have hockey stick growth.
What has been your experience?
ALEX MOORE: Yeah, when I was starting beta and I heard that
the companies either had linear growth
or exponential growth.
And what we found from our own company, and most of the
companies that friends have started, is that you end up
somewhere in the middle.
You end up with growth that's polynomial rather than one
user invites five, invites five more, invites five more.
So you end up with something where it's not linear growth
but it's also not that hockey stick growth that only social
gaming apps actually really get.
DON DODGE: And were there any pivots in your
journey with Baydin?
ALEX MOORE: Definitely.
We started out trying to do a crazy automatic semantic
search, basically a science project.
So we pivoted ever to much simpler stuff that was a lot
easier to explain and a lot easier to
wrap your head around.
DON DODGE: So how do you know when to
pivot or when to persevere?
ALEX MOORE: It's a good question.
I think that's one of those things where it's just more a
matter of how your intuition tells you to go than it is
something you can measure.
For us, it was pretty clear that we needed to pivot
because nobody could understand what we were doing.
We talked to people, we'd say, oh, here's what we're doing,
and they'd say, huh?
And no matter how we tried message it, I think it was
just too out there, too science projecty.
DON DODGE: So let's talk about messaging.
The channels that you used to get your message out, and how
do you choose which channel is working or test messaging
across channels.
ALEX MOORE: For figuring out which ones to try, for us it's
been really counter intuitive, things that we thought would
work really well haven't.
Things that we didn't think had a chance, but we had an
intern who tried some stuff and it worked great.
So I think it's less about selecting
good initial channels.
I think there are examples of just about every channel
working reasonably well as it is knowing when you spent
enough effort on a channel and knowing when to move on.
DON DODGE: So how do you know if it's the message that's not
working or if it's the channel that's not working?
ALEX MOORE: Well when we try to test the channel, we always
try different messaging inside that channel.
So we never try, for example, if we're running an ad, we
never try one variant to the ad and then throw up our hands
and say, oh, that didn't work.
We try 20 or 30 or 50 or 100.
For us what we typically do is spend a month looking at a
channel in depth.
So we set up an ad campaign, we look at it the next day, we
add more ads, we look at it the next day and adjust toward
the ones that are working better.
DON DODGE: So what are examples of channels that
you're referring to here?
ALEX MOORE: Sure.
So some channels that have worked really well for us are
app stores like the Chrome Web Store and the Google Play
Store recently.
Emailing our own customers, just sending them regular
emails and keeping them in the loop.
Content marketing.
So for example, we put together a couple of
infographics that they did pretty well.
And then lately we've been working on SEO landing pages
to try to pick up people who are looking for things like
what we do.
DON DODGE: So say more about SEO.
That's been successful for you?
ALEX MOORE: It has.
Yeah, SEO is beautiful for us, because it's been a channel
that started out kind of small and has grown over time.
So at this point those landing pages account for about 20% of
our traffic.
But they started out, it was just a handful of hits a day.
DON DODGE: You mentioned the Chrome Web Store as one of
your channels.
Tell us about that.
What was your experience there?
ALEX MOORE: Yeah.
So we were one of the earlier companies, one of the early
products to get into the Chrome Web Store back in, I
think, 2011.
And we added our extension to the web
store and got it featured.
So it was one of the things that came up when you went to
the Chrome Web Store.
And we found that delivered us some really high quality
traffic, because the people going to the Chrome Web Store
are looking to find a solution to a problem they have.
And they're looking to install something to
help them with something.
And so when they found us, they tended to stick.
And it's been really good going forward, even after
being featured.
We continue to get traffic from there even to this day.
DON DODGE: Are there tricks or approaches to like the Chrome
Web Store in the copy or the way that you present the
product that work?
ALEX MOORE: Yeah, things that worked that helped us a lot,
adding testimonials to the product helped a lot.
And then even more important, the Chrome Web Store is just,
it's a set of tiles.
So when you go there, you just see a whole screen full of
little tiny tiles.
And so getting something on there that explains what your
product does, some kind of compelling three or four word
hook made a big difference for us.
If you just put your product name and logo, no one knows
what that is.
DON DODGE: Interesting.
Well, this is all we have time for today.
Alex, I'd like to invite you back again to go deeper on
this, because it's quite fascinating.
So in another show we'll go deeper with Alex.
We have a special offer for viewers of Google "Root
Access." If you're a developer and you're developing
applications in the cloud, we have a $2,000 credit for you
to use Google Cloud.
The information on how to get that will
appear on your screen.
So thank you very much, and we'll see you next time.