719: Question Based Advertising is The Future, $40M In Sales Doesn't Lie!

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Stephan Goss. He’s the entrepreneur and technology executive behind his first company, Zeeto, which he started at the age of 22 and is still running today. He’s led the company in expanding from a team of 3 people to 70 in just under 5 years and with the launch of the ad network, he plans on continuing the company’s growth story in 2017. Previously, he founded Samples.com & Getitfree.us, which is the biggest free samples property on the internet.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Power of Habit
What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
Favorite online tool? — Slack and Gmail
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8.5-9
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Keep going for it”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:04 – Nathan introduces Stephan to the show
01:56 – Stephan bought Samples.com 3 years ago and Getitfree.us for 6 figures
02:31 – Everything started with Samples.com
02:48 – Stephan left Switzerland when he was 19 and spent 10 months living in tent
03:31 – Stephan and some of his friends were running ad campaigns on the internet
03:55 – Everything is lead generation with Samples.com
- 04:03 – They acquire users for $1 and they get $1.25 in return
04:30 – Stephan was making a 20-30% margin at first
04:59 – One of their large clients called and asked for more targeted leads who offered $8
05:46 – Stephan came out with a decent approach to find targeted leads
06:22 – Stephan was spending $10K for ads
06:51 – Stephan had a business partner and they had some cash flow to begin with
07:14 – The model of Samples.com was good because they can get their ROI fast
07:34 – Samples.com is still running
07:55 – Stephan continued the question asking model for the targeted market and scaled it
- 08:26 – The lead value is more of a composition of all the answers
08:46 – 2016 total top line revenue was $39M and total ad spend was around $20-25M
09:18 – Samples.com currently has 25 people
09:25 – Stephan spent the bottom line money on investing on the Zeeto site
09:42 – Stephan is currently breaking even with Zeeto
09:55 – Stephan still gets his salary from the company
10:23 – Zeeto’s model is taken from Samples.com’s question-model
11:10 – Zeeto is similar to Google Adsense
- 11:20 – Regular CPMs from Adsense range from $5-20
- 11:33 – Zeetos’ CPMs range from $400-2200
12:00 – From Nathan’s research, podcasters earn $15-20 CPMs
12:11 – Nathan shares how he asks his advertisers about their CAC and his audience
12:44 – With Google Adsense, there will be around 3 ads per page
13:27 – The technology around Samples.com and Zeeto is considerably pretty hard
14:43 – Facebook and Google has all this data regarding leads that other big companies don’t have
15:13 – Zeeto’s goal is to help publishers have a better revenue model
15:21 – Zeeto’s product has just been launched
16:32 – Stephan sees Zeeto as an additional feature to the paywall
17:01 – Zeeto is incremental
18:18 – It will be more complicated for Zeeto to write questions for each of the articles rather than by being an addition to the paywall
18:24 – “Questions are built to be more broad”
18:59 – Stephan doesn’t know what is really going to work yet
19:25 – Stephan’s goal this year is to see where they’re going to fit in
19:50 – Anything that will drive people to the web will work well
20:19 – Stephan’s sample call-to-action
20:34 – You can make custom questions fitted to the website
- 20:46 – The goal is to optimize questions for the best response rate
21:22 – Zeeto was built from scratch
21:54 – Nathan struggles with which of his advertisement he should show to his new subscribers
- 22:00 – Nathan sends them an email autoresponder
22:27 – Zeeto has a user group that has interesting attributes
23:07 – 3 advertisers are not enough to do it efficiently
23:14 – Zeeto now has 200 advertisers
23:37 – Zeeto is completely free and they’ll send a check for the revenue share
25:05 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It’s easier for people to give out their details in exchange for something free.
To collect your targeted leads, you need to have focused questions.
Stay encouraged and Just keep going for it!

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Founder of Samples.com, he bought that domain for, call it, mid six figures, four or 500 grand,
0:05.5	several years ago. They've processed, they do about 40 million top line there on about,
0:10.2	you know, call it 25, 29 million bucks in ad spend. Again, generating just millions and millions
0:15.2	and millions of leads that they've then sell to targeted advertisers in a very efficient way
0:19.4	based off user surveys.
0:24.8	I hope his model replaces advertising because I think advertising is totally broken and the incentive structures are messed up. Check out his new company, Zito, which I'll link to in the
0:28.9	show nuts. Coming up tomorrow morning, you will learn from Steve Olshar, who breaks down how
0:33.8	wealthy people put on a conference. But first, here's today's episode.
0:38.2	This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their
0:43.8	industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:47.6	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and
0:51.3	how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
0:56.4	Five and six million. He is hell bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold
1:01.5	market. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Stefan Goss. He's the
1:08.7	founder, entrepreneur, and technology executive behind his first
1:12.5	company, Zito, at 22, which he created at 22, and continues to run today. He's led the company
1:18.3	expanding from a team of three people to over 70 in just under five years. And with the launch of
1:22.8	the ad network, he plans on continuing the company's growth story here in 2017. Additionally, he also
1:28.3	founded Samples.com and Get ItFree.U.S., which is the biggest free samples property on the
1:34.9	internet. Stefan, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. So you're giving us a bunch of free
1:39.1	samples today on the episode, right? We get everything for free, anything we want. That's right. That's right.
1:43.3	Just check out Samples.com. And all seriousness, tell us about that real quick before I jump into Zito. So
	...

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