How Caya & Slidebean Dominated the SaaS Market with SEO and YouTube
We're going
Caya:through this SEO exercise, we peaked at 2019, getting 400 k visits to the website. We had a as a company, we had a huge churn problem. But where our focus for growth was, you know, getting more customers top of the line, not necessarily fixing our churn issues. But in that thinking, it's like, hey. Now we get more customers through.
Caya:We're like, well, we already rank really well for all the keywords we wanted to rank for pitch deck. I don't think we can rank better. So what do we do? And we're like, well, okay. What's the 2nd largest search engine?
Caya:YouTube. Yeah. So we're like, okay. How do we rank on YouTube? And our first thinking was, well, let's start making videos about these topics that also rank on YouTube.
Caya:Now video is such an expensive kind of video as a channel for b to b SaaS marketing. So we had this genuine coincidence in our team that two members of our support team had studied film. So we're like, hey, like these guys, when they heard the idea, like, hey, like, yeah, we're done for this. Like, we'll just carve out some time and and start producing videos in a very experimental manner. And, man, we did this for, like, 18 months.
Caya:A very much trial and error sort of game of, hey, like, what if we make a video like this? We did not understand YouTube at all, did not understand YouTube SEO, nothing, until, I think, it was, end of 2018 when we finally sort of found a little formula match, right, which was somewhat search optimized for search, like this green screen format with some animation and a script and a teleprompter. Like, that that format worked. We're thinking of YouTube as a as a direct response campaign. So we we needed to make sure that the ROI was there.
Caya:So whatever we paid to produce the video, even even though it was cheap and in house, we have to recover it. And for that first video on pitch decks, which still ranks really well, it it's the only video about pitch decks that we've made that has crossed a 1000000 views because it's been around for so long and it ranks so well. And once that clicked, you know, we we continue to iterate on on solving it. You know, fast forward to today, now understand the YouTube formula much better, and we operate that branch of the business a little bit like a media company.
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Paris:Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Paris Talks Marketing. Today, I'm with Kaya. Kaya is a seasoned entrepreneur with a flair for storytelling. He currently spearheads Slidebean, which is a venture backed startup established in 2014.
Paris:He's their CEO. Nestled in the heart of New York City, Slidebean assists founders in pitching to investors through its innovative SaaS product and specialized consulting agency. Since stepping into the role of the host for the company's YouTube channel in 2018, Kaia has navigated the brand to become one of the platform's most watched start up centric channels, fast approaching the 500,000 subscriber milestone. That's amazing. Kaya, welcome to the show.
Caya:Thanks a lot for having me, Paris. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening.
Paris:So I'm gonna start with something that I've been testing lately, which is I'd like you to bust a myth for our listeners. So tell us something that you think is a generally accepted or widely held belief in marketing. Hopefully, something relevant for SaaS marketers that you think is really pure BS, or it's just a myth, and please help us to bust that wide open.
Caya:Well, I I think it is a bit of a myth how much or the fact that Google or whether Google penalizes you for publishing AI generated chatbot content on your website, I e, chatbot blog articles. Most people think Google does, but Google's official position is that they don't, at least today, November 2023.
Paris:So you think it's okay to publish chat cpt produced content on a blog or on a website?
Caya:That's Pandora's book. Like, no. I don't think it's okay. I just think that it can aid with the current rules of SEO. Yeah.
Caya:It can definitely aid the writers and the and the content team on a blog, you know, speed things up, rank for more keywords as long as the, you know, source content of that or the the source so the the main information is something that a human generated, something that's more useful than what a j I what an AI is just repeating. I get 1. And 2, yeah, some editing. Right? Making sure that it doesn't sound too body.
Caya:Yeah. So it can help. It's legal to allow it to help according to Google standards today.
Paris:Mhmm.
Caya:There's a question mark on whether that that'll still be a fact a few months or years from now.
Paris:Yeah. To me, this is this is a fascinating topic to debate because when I think about if Google will rank this content and presumably it's useful content. So Google's mission is to rank content that's useful for the user. So if Google ranks this kind of content, then how does Google even differentiate its SERPs from the content that you're going to get directly from chat GPT? And isn't that putting Google at risk that if I can get the same answer with less ads, less clutter, less scrolling and digging, I'll just go over to ChatGPT and and get the same answer in a cleaner format.
Paris:Isn't that a threat for Google that there's no differentiation?
Caya:Yep. I I think there was concern in one for Google. I I read a couple articles that when chat gpt released, some red flags, some some alerts got turned on at Google because I mean, Google's a great company. It does a lot of things. But, you know, their core business is the search and and ad business.
Caya:I think that a lot of searches, even today, a lot of searches, where you want a simple explainer for something. I I've I go to GPT. Right? I bought a new iPhone a couple weeks back. So, my, like, shortcut button, like, the little button then you program with the action button, I programmed that to chat GPT audio, chat GPT voice.
Caya:Yeah. I'll I'll let force myself to use it, but also it's actually quite useful. You can have a conversation with an AI that's much smarter than the Alexis and the series and all the alternatives. It searches the web. It gives you answers based on web searches.
Caya:So I think that that inevitably, at least at some percent, at some degree, replaces, Google search for me. If I want a summary of a really complicated I don't know. When when we're doing research for videos, I want a summary of a really complicated historical event, I'll get the summary from GPT. I'll I'll double check fact check it with Google, but, you know, that's a search that didn't happen in Google anymore.
Paris:Would that have been a search that you would do in Google previously?
Caya:Yeah. Yeah. It would've. You know, I guess before GPT, all my research started at Google. Now it doesn't.
Paris:Yeah. Gotcha. Let's pivot over to SEO now because there still is a vibrant SEO profession and Mhmm. A lot of people are still doing it. It's debatable whether or not as certain types of queries are gonna move from Google over to chat GPT or otherwise AI.
Paris:SEO is still a thing. And you all have had a lot of success in growing your organic traffic over the last years. And I will pull up a slide graph once I find my screen sharing button. Here it is. And this is, this is your organic traffic trend.
Paris:It's slidebean for the last 5 years. And there's been some ups and downs, but there was there's this period in around 2020 where there's a big run up. There's another big run up in 2020. Let me pull back to, to all, because this is actually the, to the chart I wanted to show. Yeah.
Paris:And this is something I checked in real time while I was watching you speak at SaaS doc a few weeks back, Rutland, this run up from virtually 0 in about a 2 year period to, to close to a 150 or so 1,000 monthly organic visits. And I think this is probably understating it because Ahrefs, it doesn't really know, it's, it's sampled data. So I love to know, and our audience would love to know, how did you achieve that? And and is that strategy still something that could work today?
Caya:Yeah. That was a good question with some charts. Yeah. I think that we peaked around 2019. We probably peaked around 400,000 maybe, organic hits a month.
Caya:So maybe a third of traffic. After seeing this comparison with with Ahrefs, like our own data against Ahrefs, we just assume that it's about 3 x for everyone because that's what that's what it is for us, and that's the only other reference I have. But yeah. So this is a I I love this story. It I think it's one of our most successful stories as a as a company.
Caya:So, you know, some background. You know, we we discovered our core keywords, our most important highest converting keyword a little bit for that that bump. And that keyword was pitch deck. So we were Slidebean, we built it as a presentation platform. So at at some point, we're like, well, we wanna rank for presentation software or for PowerPoint alternatives and for all these keywords that for people who wanna get rid of PowerPoint and replace it.
Caya:But those people, we we try to target them via ads, via search. It didn't convert very well. And we discovered, again, through search that pitch deck was a fantastic keyword. People would come, they convert, they'd accept our pricing, they would use the tool. These are Stutter Founders mostly if you're googling pitch deck.
Caya:You know, so they're savvy enough. They understood our our UI. So not a lot of questions related to how the product worked. Someone would call that product market fit. I wouldn't yet, but I'd say that that was an audience.
Caya:So we're like, okay. Like, let's just bid as much as we can, until the economics of paid marketing break. And once they did, which peaks in maybe a spend of around 20 k a month, we're like, okay. Well, what do we do now? We've maxed out our ads for pitch deck.
Caya:We're like, well, I guess we should rank organically. So, you know, I I convinced the team and the investors that and we we didn't have a whole we hadn't raised a whole lot of money yet. I convinced them on this, by my estimation, 1 year bet on SEO, which meant recruiting a team, building a team, and starting to produce starting to produce a lot of content around this keyword that we already knew was valuable for us. I think that that's very important, and that's, I I think, my first takeaway. Like, I would never do this for a keyword that might be useful because it's just it's just too much work.
Caya:Right? I would only do it once I know that that keyword will drive me good quality customers. Me writing 1 or 2, I would say high quality content pieces every week, which were sort of like the baseline article extending and then replicating that article, you know, 4 or 5 more times with ghostwriters. So the ghostwriters would take this article, this good piece of content, this good piece of knowledge, and, you know, rewrite it, optimize for a different keyword, and rewrite it optimized for for for another keyword. And they would do kinda like 5 iterations of that.
Caya:So our SEO became this, hey, like, one hit piece, 5 satellite pieces that we're targeting kinda like long longer form versions of that keyword. And so 1, 2, and then step 3, we figured and I don't know if this holds up today. That's probably the biggest I don't know if it it it helped at all back then. But we had this thesis which was, well, we have this good quality content, but our website doesn't have any domain ranking. Therefore, it doesn't rank.
Caya:Therefore, nobody's reading it. So Google Analytics doesn't really know or Google doesn't really know if this is a good quality piece of content. So how do we get data? How do we get traffic into this so that Google knows that we've written a pretty good piece of content? So we made this bet of running Facebook ads at the time.
Caya:Facebook was cool back then. We we made this bet of running Facebook ads. I think the chart says 20 yeah. 2016, 17 is when we're doing this.
Paris:It's it's right around yeah. 2016 is when it started to ramp up. Early 2017.
Caya:Yep. Yep. Again, I don't know if this holds up, but what what it figures, what what if if we push traffic to this long articles, people read them, and we push good traffic. People who would read an article and then read the next one. So low bounce rates and high high average time on-site.
Caya:Right? If we put quality visits on readers there, Google search will know. Like, Google will know. Again, I don't know if this holds up, but we spent probably $100,000, I'd say, pushing traffic from Facebook as, you know, to these articles. I think we have to mind But
Paris:is it on face on Facebook ads, about a 100 k during that period?
Caya:Yeah. I would say something like that. Mhmm. Yeah.
Paris:What would you estimate roughly the ROI on that is on that 100,000 investment for that traffic?
Caya:The I I think I I wrote an article about this at some point. The ROI is, probably 20 x by now. We've made 1,000,000 of dollars from the search traffic we get from from the pitch to keyword. I mean, it it is the backbone of our business in in many ways. We didn't understand how important it was gonna be.
Caya:You know, this I think yeah. The investments that year was, you know, in the round of a 150, including the team who was marketing team was solely dedicated to this. But, you know, I I think by the time I wrote the article, we could safely attribute about half a $1,000,000 of revenue to search. And I I wrote that piece maybe, I don't know, 2018, 2019. So yeah.
Caya:It's it's been the backbone of it. Especially because now that the website ranks, it's much easier to rank for any other keyword that we wanna rank. Like, I think our what's our yeah. Our domain rating on on Ahrefs is 73, which is super high by by many standards. And that that has made our lives easier as we launch new products or as we try to optimize for other keywords.
Paris:Yeah. What kind of team did you build to execute that strategy?
Caya:It it was mostly a I mean, we didn't have any I don't think we had any writers in house. So I was doing all the writing. This is this is kind of a technical not technical, but like a like a niche type of topic. Right? Pitch decks.
Caya:Like, who can write good content about pitch decks? That you know, who's an expert on pitch decks? You know, other other founders, and you you can't hire them as content creators for SEO. Or at least we could we couldn't afford them then. So, I was really the editor slash main writer there.
Caya:A lot of the kind of satellite articles, we we hired this company to do it. And then the team was, you know, a mix of social media people. I think that one one good fact of SEO is that it's changed and evolved so much over the years. Things that were white hat SEO or allowed, right, in Google's rules, things that were allowed in SEO are no longer allowed, and that that's changing all the time. So one one challenge that we found was we were trying to recruit people, we're trying to find SEO experts is that a lot of these SEO SEO experts operate on the rules of 2 years ago.
Caya:And it's it's very feasible that something that used to work 2 years ago is now a black hat technique by Google. That happens all the time. Mhmm. This is a good example. Like, the first ever the the reason why Google beat all the other search engines in in when Google launched, I don't know, 97 was because the search engines back then were really dumb.
Caya:And they would when they would when you would search something, they just find for a they just find a page that had a lot of that keyword repeated
Paris:in
Caya:that page. So people would people would do this thing called keyword stuffing, which was just putting this keyword a 100 times on the website. Sometimes they put it in the background, like, behind the website background or in with no color so the bots could read it, but people wouldn't. And they I would just stuff the people would stuff pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch a 1000000 times. And then, like, that would rank really well on on search engines.
Caya:Google was the first search engine that started being smarter and outsmarting, like, the hacking of SEO. And they've been playing that game all along. Right? I remember, I think, to probably that dip that you see there on that chart, that dip is called Google starting to focus on page speed. That's yeah.
Caya:I I remember because it was a traumatic time for our company. Because we had all this huge SEO build, and suddenly Google decides that, hey. Like, we now really care about the speed of your website. At that point, we all through that first period, our website ran on Squarespace, believe it or not. Squarespace is a I I think as an early company, great platform.
Caya:Like, it allows any marketing person to, you know, to publish stuff, to change landing pages, without having to be a like a super great web designer or to have a coder on the team. And that was crucial for us early back then. We didn't have a dedicated engineer developer for our marketing team. We just built everything on Squarespace. But Squarespace has this way it operates that it's slow for Google's rank, and it's Google didn't like it one bit.
Caya:So it pain and losses very heavily for that. We took too long to catch onto it, and, you know, we had to go through this massive shift. We we moved to website to Webflow, and that was a whole new learning process.
Paris:Yeah. And is this a strategy that you still generally employ today about this pillar cluster? I think about it like a pillar cluster model where you have a pillar page and then you build cluster pages around it, and then you interlink them all. Do you still do something similar to that?
Caya:Yeah. We do. Now that we have the ranking, what we try to have is you know, the problem is a blog article or a blog page is not a great convert it's not a great landing page. Right? It's it's an art it's an article.
Caya:Like, you may have, like, some materials, some downloadable thing in there, but it's not a great converting landing page. So we try to make pillar pages landing pages now. Like, we can afford to do that now because we have the domain ranking to do that. So, like, one of our recent successes has been our financial modeling business. We started with a template on a blog post, but now there's, like, there's a business associated to it.
Caya:But if you look like Financial Model for Startups, we probably rank high up there for search. And that was a combination of many articles that eventually pointed to a page. It it gets a lot easier now with the fact that we have an established domain ranking. But probably the you know, going back to the original topic, like, that team of 5 people who would I'm sorry, that team that would take an an an pillar article and write 5 versions of it, I'm sure that company is dying because you can do that with GPT now and Google sees
Paris:That's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. So could this strategy be be viable with using instead of the those freelancers or whoever were producing those satellite pages to do that with with GPT?
Caya:I think so. Again, I I don't play by I don't play by the same rules as everybody else anymore because our website already has a big ranking. So, like, I don't I don't know if that works from scratch. But, you know, every article, every indication that I've researched about this seems to indicate that that would be a set solid sound strategy. As long as the source of I mean, as the original article is good, as long as I I think that actually, at Sastock, the CEO of Jasper not the CEO, the CMO of Jasper spoke.
Caya:And what she was saying was, well, well, their their business is literally creating a tool that, you know, produces this content for you. And they have this internal company rule that no content goes live on their social media or on their website unless it's been edited by a human. So, yes, it's generated by AI, but at least there's a human who reads it, who make sure that it's coherent. The source of that content, the creative source of that content was written by a human and you know that it's useful. But, yeah, the tedious task of just writing a new article from it, yeah, you can delegate that to a bot today.
Paris:Yeah. That's That's interesting. I think I think that that is something that we're gonna see a lot more of, and it's just becoming so accessible for any type of company with any level of resources now to produce content at real scale. So there's no unfair advantage for larger companies with big marketing teams or even big content marketing teams that can publish tons of content because now that that can be done by a one one person team, really.
Caya:I mean, he has a note. Right? And that's the thing that the the dangerous part of it. Like, you know, Tim, who's who's the CMO of Ahrefs, is a good friend of mine. Like, we're we've been their customers for a while, and we've we've geeked together in the past.
Caya:You know, they're a $100,000,000 company now just in this SEO tool. So SEO is obviously a very important business. And I was asking him, like, what what do you think? Does this, you know, does SEO I mean, does chat GBT really affect SEO, on and, you know, how it'll behave in the future? Like, yeah, I think that a larger company still has some unfair advantages.
Caya:For example, you have more creative brains strategizing about good content strategies, doing the keyword research stuff, finding out which keywords to target. Right? It's not just blasting a 1,000 articles around a 1,000 topics because that I don't know if that works. Right? So there's a strategy aspect to it that's human.
Caya:There's a creative aspect to it of, hey, like, what are we gonna write about? Is this an actual useful piece of content that people will read? I think that's a that's a human part. The writing, yes, you can now automate or heavily automate, if not 95% of it can can be written by GPT. And then there's the promotion of it, which in case of SEO also includes a little bit of the backlink game.
Caya:I hate the backlink game, the exchanging backlinks, and just, you know, cold emailing people so that they include your article. Yeah. But the larger company still has, an advantage over the fact that they have credibility and the fact that they have a you can have a massive team. We get this. As our domain ranking started growing, we started getting all these emails more and more.
Caya:Like, I I we probably gets, what, 4, 5 emails a week from people wanting backlinks on our on our blog. It's a it's a big game, and I hate it because it is not about the quality of content. It's just about your the size of your workforce.
Paris:And it's it's all about the metrics. We get a lot of those emails too. And I think I think link building still is a really viable and churning kind of a service. I think there's still a lot of a lot of people that are are doing that and buying and selling links.
Caya:Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Paris:But I also I also hate it. I mean, generally, it feels kinda sleazy, and it is an attempt to manipulate rankings more or less. Yeah. Now a quick word from our sponsor. The Paris Talks Marketing Show is affiliated with Hop Online, a performance marketing agency focused on high growth SaaS and other recurring revenue based companies.
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Paris:Now back to the episode. Well, let's, let's pivot over to I wanna not pivot over to video. And this is something that you've done phenomenally well with Slidebean's YouTube channel. And you are, you are the star of that channel. I'm looking at now closing in on half a 1000000 subscribers.
Paris:And for us, a B2B SaaS company, that's just unheard of. So you've basically created a media company out of Slidebean with this YouTube channel. How did you get the inspiration for that? Was it something that you always had a natural, affinity for producing videos and it, it, it fit right into your, into your wheelhouse? Or did you make a conscious decision that we need to create a media company alongside the business?
Caya:Man, it that it is a funny story that yeah. Because, so my background I I started digital animation in college. So I am a guest, you know, kind of story storyteller, you know, with with some background in I wouldn't say film, but at least in video production. So that's one. You know, I I was applying these skills to pitch decks, which I think a lot of them are related design and storytelling.
Caya:But when we were doing when we're going through this SEO exercise, this is around the time on that chart. Right? So we peaked at 400 k visits 2019, getting 400 k visits to the website. We had a as a company, we had a huge churn problem. That's that's another story.
Caya:But we're like but, you know, our our source of growth was or our focus for growth was, you know, getting more customers top of the line, not necessarily fixing our churn issues. But in that thinking, it's like, hey. Now we get more customers through. We're like, well, we already rank really well for all the keywords we wanted to rank for pitch deck. I don't think we can rank them better.
Caya:Like, for some, we were a second or third, but, you know, getting to that first position was probably not gonna happen right away. Then what do we do? And we're like, well, okay. Well, let's go to the second what's the second largest search engine? And you could say Bing, but it isn't.
Caya:2nd largest search engine is YouTube. Yeah. So we're like, okay. How do we rank on YouTube? And our first thinking was, well, let's start making videos about these topics that also rank on YouTube.
Caya:Now video is such a an expensive and or was and I think it still still is. But at that point, kind of video as a channel for b to b SaaS marketing, I think I don't think it was an the obvious choice, especially because of how expensive it was. You know, there's not only the gear, but the production. There's the challenge of finding a host, which inevitably, you know, puts a lot of power into someone who if it if the host is not a founder, it's someone with a lot of power if that becomes a an important channel for the business. Yeah.
Caya:And just producing and editing content. So we had this genuine coincidence in our team that 2 members of our support team had studied film. And, you know, film out of our support team was is in Costa Rica. Film is not a huge industry down here. So yeah.
Caya:Like, you you don't necessarily working in film, you know, working on a startup and doing a little bit of film projects on the side. So we're like, hey. Like these guys, when they heard the idea, like, hey, like, yeah, we're down for this. Like, we'll just carve out some time and and start producing videos in a very experimental manner. And we did this for, man, we did this for, like, 18 months.
Caya:A very much trial and error sort of game of, hey, like, what if we make a video like this? We did not understand YouTube at all, did not understand YouTube SEO. Nothing. But we we just really enjoyed producing the content, so we just went for it. Until, I think it was, end of 2018, I think, when we finally sort of found a found a little formula, MATCH, right, which was somewhat search optimized.
Caya:Yeah. A little bit optimized for search. I like this green screen format with some animation and a script and a teleprompter, like that that format worked. We were we're thinking of YouTube as a as a direct response campaign. So we we needed to make sure that the ROI was there.
Caya:So whatever we paid to produce the video, even even though it was cheap and in house, we have to recover it. And for that one that first video on pitch decks, which still ranks really well, it's the only video about pitch decks that we've made that has crossed a 1,000,000 views because it's been around for so long and it ranks so well. And we hate it now because it's it's a much younger me, a very bad percenter version of me with bad animation, but it still ranks. And we can't we can't really delete it. And once that clicked, you know, we we continue to iterate on on solving it.
Caya:You know, fast forward to today, now understand the YouTube formula much better. And, yeah, we we operate that branch of the business a little bit like a media company.
Paris:Do you go off of a structured editorial calendar, or, is it a little bit more loose and inspirational based on on how you produce?
Caya:I wish. I wish. It's it's very loose. Not a lot of people will know this story, but we launched a video on on Sam Altman on Friday, just on this whole open AI mess. We have a series called Company Forensics where we sort of cover these these types of stories.
Paris:That actually here.
Caya:We didn't have a video on Monday. Like, on Friday last week, we had sort of ran out of ideas a little bit, and I haven't I didn't have a new script. So Friday last week or, I mean, the Friday before this video released, if you will, we had no clue of what the next video was gonna be. And then these news comes out and, like, well, we have to make a video about this. And we sort of sprinted that video and produced it in about a week.
Caya:It normally takes about 2 weeks to produce a video. We do a little sprints. Luckily, the team's in Costa Rica, so we don't. Thanksgiving is not a holiday down here in Costa Rica, so we could work through Thursday Friday, and get that out. But yeah.
Caya:It it's very, sometimes it's very last minute. Sometimes we have videos that we do take, you know, 6 months in in planning and executing.
Paris:Yeah. I haven't seen this video, but it looks looks awesome. 21 minutes. And when when you have a trend like that, or when you have a story that breaks like that, the Sam Altman story, even if you did have an editorial calendar, I think you have to hit the pause button on that and just jump on the story because it's, it's trending. And here, I do have it on the, up on the screen, but at 92,000 views And that that video was published 2 days ago.
Paris:So that's phenomenal. A lot more views than practically any of the other recent videos from the last few months that I can see.
Caya:Yep. Yep.
Paris:Yeah. Although this Oppenheimer Oppenheimer's town, that's pretty cool. That that's how it's going to be used.
Caya:As you can see, we've sort of moved away from from the startup type content. Right? So, like, we swam in in between these two oceans for a while where, you know, we're we're producing content for startups, like deep technical dives, and those are that's an old series we used to call, startups 101. It works great at it works great at converting people to our platform because we would do a video on how cap table works or how convertible notes work or how stock options for employees work. And I wouldn't say technical dives, but very good explainers, right, with some visuals and understanding of these real honestly, very complex topics.
Caya:So that worked really well. That still works. Those videos still get a lot of traction, a lot especially from search because, you know, if you go to search for how can verbal note works, nobody I don't think anybody's explained it better than we have. So that that video is still is still relevant on YouTube. But what we figured at that point was, like, well, these are kinda niche topics.
Caya:Right? Like, only, like, really nerdy startup people, Founders really care about them. Great. There are customers for SlipeBean, but how do we how do we get more views? And that's when we started making these videos that are around tech and startups and a little bit of business, but not necessarily the the tech start guys.
Caya:So we we sort of found this middle ground where we're getting more views because a lot more people care about this content. We've learned so much about YouTube, about how a much larger channel on YouTube operates and what works and what doesn't and how much revenue you can make from media. You know, we we have sponsors in some of these videos even. But on the other side, we sort of abandoned the startup 101 deep dive niche, which we owned. And we I think we still own simply because those videos are still there.
Caya:And we try to we try to make both of those live in the same place for a while, but it doesn't really work because, you know, the YouTube algorithm really penalizes the fact that people watch some of your videos, but not others. Right? The algorithm wants people to binge watch that every video you have you have this audience that watches every video you release because they care about them. So they have to be, someone related. I I I spoke to somebody on
Paris:Like episodic almost, Tom?
Caya:Yeah. But just a related topic. I spoke to this guy on a conference which was which was an eye opener. I can't remember his name. So but, you know, he he had this big impact on on the channel because when he said it's like, hey.
Caya:I love your company Forensic Videos. I love you know, always always watch them. But sometimes you do these videos on, like, this really advanced financial model stuff for a startup. Like, I'm not a founder, so I don't really care about that. So when you publish that stuff, it makes me feel that your channel, your content is not for me.
Caya:You're like, woah, that's that's actually very we didn't understand the algorithm as well back then. But now that we do, we that totally makes sense. Right? And the algorithm really wants, you know, people to to binge. So, you know, one of the answers to that is we're we've decided to carve out the startups 1 on 1 content.
Caya:We're launching a new channel next year, which will kinda go back to those roots and finally kinda create that separation of, hey, like, this channel is more of a media company, and we'll Mhmm. We'll take another stab at the start of stuff.
Paris:Interesting. But you do monetize the YouTube channel today, the slide bean?
Caya:Yeah. Yeah. Revenue generated. I think 99% of these are monetized, except if they're selling something or, you know, pitching something that we that we sell and and they convert very well. And we have sponsors for for many of them too.
Paris:Yeah. What advice would you give to a b to b marketer and a midsized SaaS company that's just getting started with video and maybe it's not possible to build something like you've built over the years with your YouTube channel. But what's the best advice for just starting to get, get some video up on YouTube if you don't have a lot of resources?
Caya:Yeah. So two notes on that. I don't think that YouTube requires that much effort. Like, all all the all these all this deal about the iPhone 15 is on the fact that it now has like this video quality, like like cinema quality camera. It doesn't.
Caya:It's a good camera, but you don't really need a lot of gear that you don't already have to make video. So that's, I think, step 1. I think that a lot of video is just a lot of trial and error. Like, I could I wouldn't be able to host the videos I host now if I hadn't been doing it for 4 years. Because there's you know, you get used to kinda like your tone of voice, the speed at which you speak, and and the only way you learn that is with trial and error.
Caya:So I would I think that the best way to kinda start that is just make shitty videos. You can make a video on Loom with just, like, a little bubble of your face there and just do a tutorial or something. And I would encourage people to do that because it teaches you so much just to kinda, like, be on a cadence of of production. You know, beyond that, my feedback would be, you know, make it a if you're if you wanna bet on it, make it, you know, be ready for a month's long bets. Like, don't don't try it for 3 months, and if it hasn't worked, give up because I don't think anybody's solved the YouTube formula that quickly.
Caya:I mean, some people have, but you have to take your time. And then there's there's the fact that it's, you know, useful first, sell sales you later. Right? So it has to be a useful piece of content. If your product is organically placed in there, great.
Caya:Like, I think Ahrefs, now that we talked about them, they have a fantastic channel, where their product is very organically placed in every video. But, whether you're using it or not, you know, you learn a lot about SEO on their channel. And I think that that's what people are after. And then last but not least, TikTok and and YouTube Shorts. I think that they very much lower that barrier now.
Caya:You know, so the advantage, like, I'm a I'm a I'm team long form content. Like, I love long form content because it lets you know, there's a creative aspect to it. You know, we like to think of these videos like little documentaries even. And we make an effort to bring a little bit of a little bit of our knowledge in film to, hey, like, we we shoot in 24p, and we put some grain into the film. There's some color grading, like, we we we there's an art aspect of it, like, it and everybody in the team is passionate about this, so we put that effort.
Caya:We can't do that in shorts. Right? Shorts are, like, quick, snappy type of content. But at the same time, the barrier is so much lower that you can go and experiment, and and it's much easier for for a company to dip their toes.
Paris:Yeah. And you you mentioned at the conference that you force yourself to spend maybe half an hour to an hour a day on TikTok. Do are you still doing that?
Caya:I mean, yes.
Paris:Almost or
Caya:This this is this is 2020. So 2020 when I adopted TikTok, this was a beginning of the pandemic. I remember my my girlfriend used to go to bed. She she worked in marketing too. So, you know, she would force herself to watch TikTok.
Caya:And I would hate the content. Okay. This is boring. Eventually, I did the same. I'm fine.
Caya:I'll I'll force myself to watch TikTok. I love TikTok now. I I really now I have a block on my phone, so that I don't waste more than 1 hour on TikTok a day. It gives me this warning, like, times screen time thing. Because I really enjoy that content.
Caya:But it's TikTok for me is leisure content. It's like, I get a lot of comedy. I get pets and some food stuff. And that's kinda like a place to kinda shut my brain. But, you know, you have to understand the format.
Caya:And same with YouTube, right? Like, I don't I don't force myself to spend time on YouTube. I really enjoy watching other creators' content. But you have to sort of live it if you want to, you know, play in that game.
Paris:Yeah. Do you think there's a place for TikTok in the marketing mix for b to b SaaS companies?
Caya:Yeah. I think there is. Yeah. I think there absolutely is. It's it's I think it's harder to find.
Caya:I haven't figured it out yet, so that's why I don't speak too much about it. But I think there absolutely is. Like, I I follow, you know, I'm a I'm a spreadsheet geek, so I'll you know, I follow a couple of good channels on spreadsheets where, you know, I think it's easy organic to, you know, to plug a product, be useful. Again, again, like I said, I haven't figured out what that channel is, and I I can't think of one yet, like, at least b to b SaaS. But somebody will figure it out.
Caya:We we have some ideas for next year. Maybe maybe we will.
Paris:Yeah. I mean, you could say that the audience is not there yet if I'm selling to, I'm selling to a b to b audience that might be, I don't know, no younger than maybe 25 and up, but they're not really on TikTok. But perhaps it's also just a repurposed value. You can you can repurpose those onto YouTube shorts as well, And then you can include those in different even different campaigns like performance max. And now there's a new format from Google ads called Demand Gen Ads.
Paris:And it's basically, it's the Google Discover feed and it's YouTube Shorts. It's those two properties mostly.
Caya:Yeah. I I give credit I think a lot more people are in TikTok that than we might think, like, genuinely, even though it's it still has some shade, like, you can really you at biggest TikTok feature is the algorithm. Like, the algorithm really understands what you like and what you don't. And, you know, after 10 swipes, it'll know quite accurately what stuff you care about. I think that there there's not a lot of SaaS content out there being produced.
Caya:I get the occasional kind of podcast snippet. I get I think I get the occasional because sort of, like, This Week in Startups, Jason Calacan is like, I think podcasts being repurposed as little TikTok shorts are fantastically used in a way to maximize that content. Yeah. Nobody's really figured out yet, but we'll give it a shot.
Paris:Yeah. Cool. Well, Kai, this has been great. And I I know we've gotta wrap up in a minute, but is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I would have asked you, or is there anything else that you think could benefit our audience?
Caya:No. I think we've gone through the good pretty much covered everything. I'll drop my Twitter handle. It's Kaya he I guess my x handle. It's Kaya here.
Caya:If you wanna follow-up with anything, happy to share. And, yep, take a look at YouTube channel. Just youtube.com/slipe.
Paris:Well, thanks thanks for the time today, Kai, and and I really enjoyed it. And have a great rest of your day down there in Costa Rica.
Caya:You too, Paris. Thanks thanks a lot for having me.
Paris:Another great episode in the books. Hope you enjoyed it. If you wanna get notified when future episodes drop, be sure to subscribe to Paris Talks Marketing on your favorite podcast player. And to learn more about our growth marketing agency, visit hop.online. That's hop, h o p dot online.
Paris:Have a great day.
