On today’s show, we have 2 amazing guests in one episode! I am interviewing Rob and Kennedy of Response Suite.

Rob entertains with hypnosis and Kennedy has a comedy show using his skills in psychology, body language, and reading people to read his audience’s mind

Tell us about what your software does for people?

• Response Suite is a user survey software
• Funnels customers to the correct product.
• Integrates your surveys with all of your marketing channels to enable entrepreneurs to turn feedback into sales.

How does Response Suite differ from competitors?

• Response Suite uses every answer that a customer gives to each question in a survey and creates a map of the customer on a granular level.
• Integrates with all your other marketing tools.
• Brings all your customer information into a single place.

How did you found Response Suite?

• Neither Rob nor Kennedy wanted to be entrepreneurs, they are both entertainers.
• While they were performing they each started online businesses to fill in time.
• They realized that there was no good, single software that could use surveys to funnel their customers to the correct course or product on their sites in the way they wanted.
• They wanted to be able to treat their customers as individuals to give subscribers a better experience and to increase profits.

How did you make your idea a reality?

• They ignored all the advice, they self-funded.
• Taking VC would go against their core value of never getting a job.
• As non-tech people it was impossible for them to outsource into another country, so they hired a developer locally.
• Having never had a traditional job, they didn’t even know how to do an interview.

What were moments that made you realize exactly what your software needed?

• While they were talking about their initial idea they realized that they could integrate their surveys into anything that has to do with your marketing.
• Realizing that a survey is something that could be put in front of customers at every step of the customer journey instead of just at the end.

How did you keep the company funded?

• They initially decided to allocate as much as they needed to keep the company going.
• They tried to make sure that they had 12 months of staff wages available at all times.
• They did a one-off launch that covered their bills for a while.
• They released Response Suite as a monthly or yearly SaaS.
• They were not making money, and then got hit with a tax bill.
• The company almost folded.
• They pivoted the business to become profitable.

How did you pivot your business to become profitable?

• They learned that they were too focused on what they did not do well.
• They pivoted by focusing on what they were good at.
• They mapped out who the prospects for Response Suite were and focused on them.
• They created a brand that targeted those prospects and funneled them toward Response Suite.

How does the company look now as compared to when you started?

• They originally thought that in order to be a successful SaaS company they needed to have an office, but have since gone remote.
• The majority of their customers come through back end marketing instead of front end marketing.

What advice would you give other SaaS entrepreneurs?

• Ignore advice. Not all the advice out there is relevant to you.
• You are the only person who sees 100% of your content, you can push out content more frequently than you think.

Resources:

Websites: 

Response Suite

Data Automation

Books mentioned: 

The Lean Startup

The E-Myth

Suggest a SaaS founder for the Automate, Delegate, Eliminate show at:

podcast@dataautomation.com