Aug. 16, 2021
How to Acquire and Retain New Customers with Tim Wu
In episode 83, host Eric Dickmann interviews Tim Wu. Tim is a growth specialist, podcast host, and Head of Growth Marketing of Hatch, a VC-backed FinTech startup based in San Francisco, California. Hatch is an information technology and services company that aims to provide accessible, transparent, and fair checking and lending products to help people start and grow their businesses.
Tim also hosts the Hatch Small Business Spotlight podcast. Together with his co-host, Katie, they feature Hatch Cardholders and their trials, tribulations, and successes of starting and scaling their businesses. The podcast also highlights inspiring stories of entrepreneurs all over America, how they built their business, and the lessons they've learned as they scale.
For show notes and a list of resources mentioned in this episode, please visit: https://fiveechelon.com/how-to-acquire-retain-new-customers-s6e2/
Send us your questions or comments
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WEBVTT
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business.
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This week, I'm excited to welcome Tim Wu to the podcast.
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Tim is a growth specialist, podcast, host and head of growth marketing at Hatch, a VC backed FinTech startup based in San Francisco, California.
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Hatch is an information technology and services company that aims to provide accessible, transparent, and fair checking and lending products to help people start and grow their businesses.
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Tim also hosts the Hatch Small Business Spotlight podcast together with his co-host Katie, they feature Hatch card holders and their trials, tribulations and successes in starting and scaling their business.
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Today, we're going to be talking about how to acquire and retain new customers.
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Please follow our podcast in apple podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice.
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As we welcome new guests in season six of The Virtual CMO.
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Now let's get to our conversation with Tim Wu.
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Hey, Tim.
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm very glad you could join us today.
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Yeah, thank you Eric.
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It's great to be here.
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Thanks for having me on the show.
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Absolutely.
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I'm very interested to hear a little bit more about your background and what you're doing today.
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So maybe to kick things off just for the benefit of our listeners here, tell people a little bit about your background and how you got to Hatch.
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Yeah.
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Um, I can probably start from the very beginning.
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Um, I'll try not to bore you all with the details.
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But you know, going way, way, way back, I actually don't have a formal background in marketing.
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But I actually was at one point in my life doing bankruptcy consulting out of a firm in Los Angeles.
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Pretty much had decided that I wanted to do a little bit more than kind of interfacing with legal clients all day.
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And I actually took up freelance writing as a copywriter, as you know, my first step into marketing.
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So from there kind of leapfrog my way through press communications, made my way into more growth marketing tactics for lead generation and conversion.
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And then eventually it led me to my very first startup in the Bay area with the CEO of Hatch, Thomson Nguyen, who I knew was his very first company that he was actually looking to build coming out of Y Combinator.
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Jumped on actually as their Head of Growth and Marketing.
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We were acquired by Square.
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And then eventually, I actually spent a solid of time working alongside Thomson and team over at Square Capital products.
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About three and a half, four years in, decided that you know, startups were, you know, really where my heart was, even though I enjoyed my time over there.
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And just by chance, Thomson was actually starting his second company by then, which was Hatch.
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So it kind of just all came full circle.
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And I'm actually now leading the growth marketing function for the team.
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Very interesting Square has had quite a run haven't they?
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Yeah, definitely.
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I think you know, it's one of those very, very tough decision for me to actually make the jump from that team over to Hatch, but the opportunity that we have in front of my current team here was just too good of a chance to pass up.
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So it also just allowed to just roll up my sleeves again and get used to building things from scratch, which I really, really love to do.
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Well one of the reasons that I'm excited to have you on the show today is that you're a growth marketing guy and you're also competing in a pretty crowded space.
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And I think that that's very typical of a lot of the listeners that we have on this show.
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You know, we talk and have talked with many of our other guests about the fact that there aren't too many, truly revolutionary products out there, right?
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Most products are incremental improvements over something that is in the marketplace.
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And as I understand Hatch.
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You know, you guys are a financial services firm that is targeting small and medium businesses with some financial products.
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But as we look down the street, you know, there's a bank on every corner.
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So as the growth marketing guy, how do you really look at defining your target market so that you can ultimately be successful with your marketing efforts?
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Yeah.
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You know, I think like for me, it's really interesting kind of challenge, especially since it is such a crowded market, I think, um, I, we don't like to refer to ourselves as a neobank, but you know, that's just the term that generally gets used for, you know, banking services that are built on top of banking platforms and APIs and such.
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So yeah, to plus one your point, it's a super crowded space.
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I think the way that I've been approaching how we are actually acquiring users at Hatch and trying to find our target market is actually just really working on the basics.
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So we actually do a good amount of just paid advertising with Google, Facebook, just kind of testing like the tried and true methods for, um, you know, being able to acquire users get in front of eyeballs.
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And then from there actually is actually when you start to think a little bit more creatively.
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So once you actually get all your fundamentals in place, you're attracting users, you can see what exactly your CPAs and your, your overall CAC is for acquiring these folks.
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Then you can start to you know, be more creative about like, how can we utilize our products?
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How can we use referral systems?
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How can we actually leverage one work stream that we're actually working on right now is actually reaching out to small business blogs and, um, essentially like influencers.
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So we're, you know, the more customers that we have on board, the more interviews that we have with them and get to know who they are, and these are actually micro merchants, people who are just starting their entrepreneurial journey.
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It gets our wheels turning on, like where exactly do these people, you know, read, like where are they getting their advice?
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Where exactly are they looking to you know, get just more information on how to start their businesses and then it actually, you know, kind of comes up organically and okay, well, there's a couple channels that we want to start testing.
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And you know I think what the really fun thing about marketing and growth marketing is in general is that you know, you kind of go into these new work streams and explorations with the expectation that not everything is going to work.
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So instead it's like you focus on the things that do end up working because you have to you know just scope it out, put a little bit of time into it, you know, set some budget aside, and then just look at what your overall returns are going to be.
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To sum it up.
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it's, you know, you've kind of focused on the basics first.
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And then from there, you are able to think more creatively on how to find new channels that could work for you.
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Well, you mentioned a couple of things there that I think are interesting.
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You know, first of all, as a new company, right, you have to focus on brand awareness, you have to make people aware that you're out there in the marketplace and what services you offer.
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You a little bit about the potential of using influencers or people in the marketplace to help get your brand out there and then talking about partnerships.
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And that was one of the things that I noticed when I looked at your website is you seem to be tying your products to value added offers that seem to make a lot of sense for small businesses.
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I see a lot of companies out there that offer things, but they don't necessarily have that much applicability.
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And it seemed like you were very targeted in the kinds of offers that you're tying to something like a credit card, for example.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So I think, um, and you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit earlier, like, because we all operate in such a crowded space, there are certain points where financial services feels very commodified.
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You know it's always just like, who can help you save the most fees?
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Like who's the one that's, you know, offering no monthly minimums?
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And everybody essentially has a you know in network ATM's for free.
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like, these are just like table stakes features.
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So I think for us, we had to really again apply the feedback that we were getting about our customers really.
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You know, just again, do the basics, like get on interviews with our customers and like ask them exactly what it is they're looking for.
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Just get to know them and what their struggles are.
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And that's actually how we, you know, what you're referencing is actually our Hats Perks Program.
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So in adition to the banking and then the credit services that we offer, our next move was like, Okay, well, how do we actually make our products even more enticing for small business owners?
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Like if we look pretty similar and have like the same amount of reliability as another service, are there things that we can do to set us apart?
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And the first thing we were like, okay, well, you know, if we're like really targeting folks who are brand new to businesses, um, or sorry, brand new to building their businesses, they're probably not going to have a lot of access to discounts and tools.
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So if we can leverage our brand and leverage our ability to just like strike up partnerships and get discounts for customers, you know off of like business software in advertising services and, you know, HR software, accounting software, like that just kind of helps them in general, and I think for us, it actually just opens a lot of doors to, again kind of just like starting that conversation with some of these perks partners that we have in thinking a little bit more strategic about like partnerships down the road, whether it's distribution, whether it's like growing our perks with them, like that's,kind of how we've seen it.
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So.
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When the business started, did you have a very specific customer target in mind?
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Had you built out that avatar and really understood what they were, or did you start a little more broadly and experiment to see really which segment of the market gravitated towards your offering?
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Yeah.
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You know, I think for us, um, I can't take credit for this one actually.
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So I'll kind of speak about our CEO and his journey a little bit.
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I know this is an interview with me, but I would like to think we're on the same page and we're pretty aligned on this, otherwise, I wouldn't have jumped on board.
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You know for us I think you know, we both work at Square and, um, you know, it was, you know, obviously nothing but good things to say about it.
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Super mission driven company as well, helping small businesses, very similar in scope.
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But what we actually had found in working there was that there was actually a whole sector of micro merchants and even earlier businesses where, you know, when you think about Square, you actually think about, you know, the, uh, farmer's market.
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Um, you know, seller, who's like, oh, I need to take a credit card payment really quickly.
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You have like the reader, like that's kind of how they started.
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But at this point it's such a huge financial services company and a lot of their target market actually has kind of gone up market wiith you know their primary POS product.
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So they're actually working with more like entrenched and established small businesses that, you know have brick and mortar stores and, during his time and our time there, you know, we were really focused on kind of serving those, those customers and figuring out how to go even more up market.
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So I think from his experience there, he actually had found that, you know what?
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Maybe there's actually other services that we can provide for folks who are really, really just getting started, you know?
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Like maybe they don't even need to know about how to take a credit card payment yet, because they just simply need a bank account to run their business and separate their personal finances.
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So I think for us, it started off with that need.
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He had a thesis on how he wanted to develop that and then essentially just built the first prototype of our business line of credit product which is just, can we actually, um, you know, Essentially just like, uh, you'll have somebody come through like an application process, review them, and go through an underwriting process to determine if they qualify for a line of credit without using like hard credit scores or FICO scores, and that's essentially what he built.
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And so that initial archetype of just like the business owner who's again, just getting started limited credit, or you know, maybe they've made some mistakes in the past, and you know, they're kind of just recovering from that, but they have like a pretty cash rich business and they just need kind of like a second chance and a second lease on you know starting something new.
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You know, that's essentially how he determined it.
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So I guess you know organic in a way, but I think it also ties into a lot of his own personal experience and you know, what he worked with on previous products.
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So.
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We talk so much on this podcast about creating content of value, really things that people can read or view or something that will help them along their journey, whatever that journey may be.
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And it sounds like especially for a company like yours, it's targeting the smaller.
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micro businesses, there's probably a fair amount of education that needs to go along with that process, right?
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Because maybe people don't know how to effectively use their money within a business.
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How important is that kind of educational content to you in terms of your overall marketing strategy?
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Yeah.
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You know I think in general, very important.
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Like if you actually go to our Instagram, it's actually, you know, one of our more curated social media channels and in intersperse with our content, we actually have a lot to do with small business advice.
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So we actually host a blog as well, where we actually have our writers write about, you know things that are going to be very topical for small business owners.
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So we kind of get into the nitty gritty with like, you know, what's the difference between a sole proprietorship versus an LLC, lLC versus S Corp and C Corp.
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Like a little bit more of the, um, I guess like small business technical content.
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But then aside from that, you know, we always think about like, okay, how can one piece of long form content just get stretched?
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And it's like, we've 1500-word blog posts can also be potentially like a series of social media posts that can be consumed in a more bite-sized fashion.
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From there, we actually have a couple of other things that actually tie in our customers as well.
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So we actually launched our own podcast series called the Small Business Spotlights, where we literally just grabbed folks who are in our customer base, we ask them if they're willing to spend, you know, 30 minutes with us on a quick phone call, not unlike what we have here.
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And then they pretty much just tell us, like, how did you get started?
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What were some challenges that you face?
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What are some moments?
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You know just made it feel like it was all worth it.
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And I think this aspect of actually allowing our customers to tell their stories.
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is probably actually more resonating with people than just us writing like more informational blog posts and things like that.
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Like, you know, those are all things that we know that we have to do and we have to deliver to our customers on an ongoing basis, but you know, what I'm really excited about is actually letting our customers tell the stories because they get really nitty-gritty.
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You know, like they start talking about, you know, just.
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Uh, you know, I, there there's someone that I have in mind, you know, they have like a notary service and she had like a full-time job and she actually, you know, built up her notary service because she needed it for her own personal kind of things she had going on, and she just couldn't find somebody who could come to her and notarize documents for her.
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So she essentially said, why not start my own thing, took some classes, and is built it up to be her actual full-time job..
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So she has like little stories about like, yeah, you just have to.
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I think she said she took her first notary gig.
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Not the right term for it,, but you know, like a notary job, like I'm out of somebody's car.
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I think it was like during COVID.
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So somebody had to like pull up and they were massed up and she notarized her documents for them.
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And I think those are actually going to be like the more inspirational stories that, um, I am more excited to actually tell, um, from our own customers, because, you know, just small businesses or small business owners, they're generally going to go into what they're doing and have like a general guideline on like what they need to do to get started.
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But it's like, I think from these like actual personal experiences where we can kind of learn from each other.
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So, um, your question, I think content is super important.
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And then we're always thinking about like different ways that we can deliver that content, and hopefully through the eyes of our customers as well.
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So.
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Well, I liked it a lot because I think that there are a lot of brands out there that tout a community or we're all part of a family.
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While you're not, you're not.
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I'm not in a family with it, with this company, that's just not the case.
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But I do think that there's a lot of value in sharing the stories of other customers and the experiences they have.
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You know, that's one of the reasons we do this podcast is we share stories from other businesses and marketing professionals so that people can pick up things along the way and maybe save themselves some, some trouble of having to go through the pain of something by mistake.
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So there's a lot of value I think, in sharing those stories.
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So I think that's great what you're doing, and I can see where that would be a value to potential customers.
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Yeah.
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Awesome.
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Thank you.
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Yeah.
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So I'm curious, you mentioned you do some paid advertising across different channels.
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Explain a little bit about how you do experimentation there.
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How do you find the messages that really resonate with that ideal customer?
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Yeah.
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So I think, um, I actually spent a lot of time.
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Um, well, let me kind of take a couple of quick steps back.
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We have a lot of different touch points with our customers across the organization.
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I think its pretty typical and quite common for, I think like, depending on what function that you operate in a company,I think usually if it's like super technical, like engineering or more administrative or operational, you don't really get a lot of exposure to who your customers are.
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And I think at startups, you can't help but know about your customers.
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You're hearing about all the time, whether you're an engineer, whether you're an intern, like it just happens all the time.
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And that's actually something that I knew that I missed kind of going into a larger company.
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Square did a great job and has always done a good job of telling their customer stories, um, always across the board.
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So we actually wanted to kind of apply that level of rigor and just consistency and frequency of just like talking about our customers all the time.
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So stage set, that being said, you know we actually have a lot of processes in place where the CS team will actually, you know, have some sessions with our product team and it's like all, you know, open invite, anybody can kind of pop in for these kinds of like, here's what our customers and the voice of the customer are saying.
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And so for me, I actually spent a lot of time just thinking about and reading a lot through a product review or product interviews, transcripts.
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I actually set aside some time each week to actually just follow along with our customer support team to just determine what are people asking for?
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And aside from blogs and that sort of thing, I do my best to just kind of like think about the language that they're using.
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You know it gets to the point where all use tools, like building word clouds, just to see like keywords that people are trying to pick up.
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And then we essentially take that and then we apply it to, um, through the lens of like, um, SEO and then just we're thinking about like copy changes or writing new emails.
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We just try to use a lot of the words that our customers are utilizing.
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So they might not call themselves, you know, SMBs and small business owners like we imagined them to, like in our perfect little, like customer persona, they call themselves other things like, you know, like I'm the boss of my own business.
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I'm the owner, like things like that.
00:20:18.488 --> 00:20:47.778
And so essentially utilizing like their words as much as possible to be able to communicate back to them is like super important to me, and you kinda got a balance, like I think there's there's a lot of different ways to kind of slice and dice, especially when you're thinking about like product copy or you know site copy and you can go like the ultra SEO search engine optimization route, and sometimes these landing pages are kind of like, don't want to say but like kind of devoid of emotion, because it's just like, it's purely by data.
00:20:47.778 --> 00:20:49.157
It's like what are people searching for?
00:20:49.518 --> 00:20:53.958
And so I think, you know what we like to do is kind of apply a mixture of both.
00:20:54.018 --> 00:20:56.097
It's like, you know, what exactly are our customers saying?
00:20:56.097 --> 00:21:03.198
And then you know run it through the I guess, like the process to see how we can make it you know, go as far as possible.
00:21:03.347 --> 00:21:03.557
So.
00:21:05.780 --> 00:21:08.631
Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast.
00:21:08.631 --> 00:21:13.490
But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level?
00:21:13.701 --> 00:21:20.060
If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you.
00:21:20.330 --> 00:21:26.240
We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step.
00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:29.030
We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads.
00:21:29.300 --> 00:21:33.441
How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers.
00:21:33.800 --> 00:21:37.371
How to strategically package and position your products and services.
00:21:37.701 --> 00:21:42.110
How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business.
00:21:42.441 --> 00:21:50.211
To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services.
00:21:50.661 --> 00:21:51.921
Now back to the podcast.
00:21:53.971 --> 00:22:09.990
When you have so many competitors in the space who are trying to show up in those organic search results who are out there, buying ads on Facebook or Instagram, or are buying keywords on Google, it's hard to compete, right?
00:22:09.990 --> 00:22:18.661
A lot of the things that you're probably going after are what a lot of, you know, even some of the top financial institutions in the country are going after, which drives up the prices.
00:22:18.931 --> 00:22:28.391
So how do you find that area, that space, where you can effectively compete against those guys, and not blow your whole budget on a single campaign?
00:22:29.010 --> 00:22:29.340
Yeah.
00:22:29.371 --> 00:22:36.540
I mean first off we definitely try to do our best to stay away from the high volume searches cause we're just going to get blown out of the water, you know?
00:22:36.871 --> 00:22:44.671
When our competitors are you know, like more traditional, like lending and financial institutions and they have, you know billions of dollars to throw around.
00:22:44.701 --> 00:22:46.810
It's really hard to do that.
00:22:47.181 --> 00:22:58.230
I think one way that we've been doing it, actually one thing that we're trying to scope out right now is actually to purchase more specific keywords that are very specific to these certain customer types.
00:22:58.230 --> 00:23:04.770
So again, going back to who your customer is, um, just making sure that you understand what industry they're in.
00:23:04.891 --> 00:23:05.820
You know, are they retail?
00:23:05.850 --> 00:23:07.161
Are they professional services?
00:23:07.161 --> 00:23:08.820
Are they food and beverage?
00:23:09.090 --> 00:23:13.830
And then I'm essentially looking for keywords on things that they might be using there.
00:23:13.980 --> 00:23:23.760
So instead of you know, saying something like business checking account for small business, which is going to be insane for us, like to just keep up and we won't have the budget to keep up with it.
00:23:24.240 --> 00:23:33.121
You know we're going to be looking at small business checking account for a restaurant in a localized area.
00:23:33.240 --> 00:23:37.590
So those are like little ways that we can kind of refine the keywords a little bit.
00:23:37.590 --> 00:23:41.850
They're not going to be bid on as much, by some of the larger competitors.
00:23:42.060 --> 00:23:55.631
And then t's just common combining the customer personas, and also adding some locality in is also one thing that we're looking at, so again, kind of going back to the data as well.
00:23:56.191 --> 00:24:02.070
You know we started with the basics, we kind of set off some really broad match kind of campaigns to start.
00:24:02.371 --> 00:24:09.060
And then we actually naturally just saw within our Facebook and our Google data regionally where we actually had the most traction.
00:24:09.421 --> 00:24:16.240
So immediately, we had no thoughts about this at all, but all of a sudden we had a bunch of folks out of Texas.
00:24:16.510 --> 00:24:54.240
And so you know, one of the things that we've just kind of gleaned from our data is that like, even without really optimizing for it, somehow with our broad targeting, we actually ended up with a lot of businesses operating out of Texas, and so from there, we can take that and further refine our strategy because then we can start to do keyword search results off of like very specific cities in Texas, apply it to some of these persona terms and you know, it's essentially just going from like the broadest net you could possibly do into, you know, just like a really focused to spear that you're going to be very specific on.
00:24:54.480 --> 00:24:59.161
And generally, you know, buying those kinds of ads and keywords will be much cheaper for us.
00:24:59.730 --> 00:25:08.250
Well, I love that because you're looking for where you're getting traction and expanding upon that versus just stubbornly going after something that it may be very difficult to get traction on.
00:25:08.431 --> 00:25:10.800
So I that's a fantastic strategy.
00:25:11.070 --> 00:25:13.681
I know too, that you've got some VCs that are backing you.
00:25:13.860 --> 00:25:18.721
So you've got lots of people that are looking over your shoulders at what you do and the money that you're spending.
00:25:18.931 --> 00:25:20.790
So we all know marketing is a cost center.
00:25:20.790 --> 00:25:22.530
You know, we like to spend money in marketing.
00:25:22.800 --> 00:25:24.451
So how do you manage that?
00:25:24.480 --> 00:25:26.280
Do you do most of it internally?
00:25:26.520 --> 00:25:32.881
Do you hire a lot of it out to agencies or freelancers or other people who can help you execute some of this strategy?
00:25:33.121 --> 00:25:34.681
How do you organize your marketing team?
00:25:35.100 --> 00:25:35.550
Yeah.
00:25:35.951 --> 00:25:45.260
You know for us, we're a pretty young company still, so we've actually gone through the whole You know when I came on board about a year ago, we actually were working with, uh, an advertising agency.
00:25:45.891 --> 00:25:49.171
Eventually we were just like, Hey, we want to run a bunch of tests.
00:25:49.171 --> 00:26:02.161
We want to do a lot of experimentation, it's going to require a lot of, additional operational work in terms of building landing pages, um, kind of rallying our content internally around it and making sure that like, customer support is all looped in.
00:26:02.490 --> 00:26:09.451
Um, and so there's, there's a lot of cross-functional work that we need to do where an agency is just not really gonna work out for us.
00:26:09.661 --> 00:26:10.830
It's kind of interesting, right?
00:26:10.830 --> 00:26:20.161
I think that early stage startups, kind of depending on the nature of your business and really just like the skill set and like the overall composition.
00:26:20.161 --> 00:26:27.631
I think that agencies can work to a certain extent and it just kind of depends on you know, how your team is set up in the first place.
00:26:27.901 --> 00:26:35.100
But, you know, I think one thing that, um, given that we're at that series, a mark where, you know, we're, you know, kind of approaching.
00:26:35.340 --> 00:26:36.421
The a 50 person mark.
00:26:36.510 --> 00:26:41.280
Um, at this point there's still a lot of work to go around among a very small group of people.
00:26:41.490 --> 00:26:51.721
So one thing that I've been doing is actually whenever I make a hire for my team, um, we actually just make sure that they have like a pretty broad skill set and they're like good in one area.
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