Why Customer Advocacy is your Best Growth Channel

Mar 12, 2020 4:34:26 AM
Author: Kieran Flanagan

For the best companies in the world, customers are their best growth channel, and that starts by providing an excellent customer experience.

In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to Matt Barnett, founder and CEO of Bonjoro, a company that helps to create a delightful onboarding experience via personalized videos.

We talk to Matt about:

- Where the idea from Bonjoro came from, and how valuable personalized video messages were in Matt making sales.

- How Matt defines his perfect customers using the jobs to be done framework.

- Why customer advocacy is the best growth channel, a customer can develop.

Happy Growing


Time Stamped Notes

[3:00] - Matt takes us through his company. It's three years old, with 15 employees, distributed across different countries. They have 25000 customers and 1500 trials per month.

[6:30] - Matt takes us through what it's like to get funding as a company based in Australia.

[8:10] - Bonjoro uses data to create personalized video messages that customer success uses to better onboard users onto their products.

[8:55] - Matt takes us through where the idea for Bonjoro came from. He used personalized video messages as part of their sales processes. Once he realized how well they worked, he focused on creating a product around that use case.

[14:30] - To get early feedback on the product, Matt went to events and showed it to them in person. Their big break came when the product started to get used by both ConvertKit and Basecamp.

[16:40] - A couple of things that helped Bonjoro's growth was their focus on the brand from a very early stage and the creation of their affiliate campaign. They've also invested in customer advocacy, which has helped them to grow through word of mouth.

[20:10] - Matt finds it hard to define who Bonjoro's ideal customer is. Their product is relevant to a broad set of companies and users. Instead of focusing on a customer type, they focus on the most popular jobs to be done; people can do with the product.

[22:30] - Matt does want to focus on a specific type of company as he feels it will help them scale more effectively. He thinks the best fit companies are SaaS and education companies.

[24:10] - Matt wants to sell into larger companies that can help onboard their full teams onto the product. That's good for both churn and LTV.

[25:35] - Bonjoro gets adopted within companies via end-users who start using it and then get other people onboarded to the product before eventually buying it.

[27:40] - Matt doesn't see Bonjoro as a video company. Long-term, he wants to help customers understand when is the best time to use personalized content.

[29:30] - We talk about the importance of customer advocacy and how companies can leverage customer advocacy for growth.

[31:45] - The best way to identify your super fans is to treat all of your customers as super fans from day one. Over time you'll identify who your best fans are and how they're helping to promote your company with their industry.

[35:00] - Matt's a super fan of Zapier. He tells us what helped to make him such a fan.

[37:35] - Matt talks about how he manages a distributed team as a founder and some of the difficulties caused by timezones.


Matt on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium

Topics: Growth, Podcast, Founder

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