Unleashing the Power of ShareDocView, Calendbook and Salesforza: Boost Your Sales and Generate Leads

Artem Daniliants
Basically it's a document storage, it's analytics, and it has a lot of sales elements.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Did I do this one product or two products or three products?

Artem Daniliants
As many as you want.

Vincenzo Belpiede
In this dashboard you have all the events and all the upcoming. So this is our event actually have and booked me through this.

Mikael Hugg
What happens to the emails?

Vincenzo Belpiede
So webhooks allow you to connect with a lot of other systems. This is brilliant. What happened with that link? You know, over the visits, you know, how much time do people spend on the slides and stuff?

Artem Daniliants
I really enjoy doing this because you learn quite a lot.

Mikael Hugg
All right. Another good video coming up. So this time we are. We are having Venus from a shared view. Great to have you here. And my first question I have I have usually immediately there. What is it that your startup or company does? You know what it does.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. So it's simply too sad. That allows anyone to upload a document on share and then share different links on different marketing channels so you can find out who is viewing downloading your documents. Also get leads, email leads. You can get them verified as well. And there's a lot of things that we can do actually. Like you can brand it like doc dot your domain.com with a custom domain name. Actually, not only competitor who does that. And you can find out how much time people spend on your slides, on your pages so you can figure out where people drop off. There's just, you know, a ton of features. So the idea is like, don't send an attachment because once you send it out, you have no idea what people have done with the attachment. Send a document link.

Mikael Hugg
Okay. So it's basically the same that when you're using HubSpot's the email tracker, it's kind of like, you know, it lets you know when somebody has been opening your emails and that way you can you have more data to know that, okay, these guys are either making the decision or at least they've seen it and then you can continue talking with them. So basically the same idea, but just with Google slides or PowerPoints or it cetera.

Vincenzo Belpiede
PDF. Yeah. We actually had people switching over from HubSpot to us and they told us that basically there's a lot of features. That Hotspot was missing, a document sharing piece. Remember last time I tried it, basically you actually had to specify the email of a person you were going to share it with. But sometimes you don't have the email of the people you want to get their emails actually, and you share it on your LinkedIn or. They were under an email campaign and it gets forwarded, more people can be added. So yeah, because you know, as you know, spot does a lot of things. So I guess they are not able to go as deep into into each thing that they do.

Artem Daniliants
So if you think about your SaaS platform, basically it's document storage, it's analytics, and also it has a lot of sales elements, right? You can embed a form or something so that you can collect emails.

Vincenzo Belpiede
And so we don't have forms yet, but we do have embed. So you can embed a presentation like SlideShare used to offer this other tool that is kind of like gone Away because it was built to script. And so if you are trying to embed a presentation where you want to get lead generation is a really good option. Actually, there's no other good options out there for that because DocuSign doesn't do it and Google slides, that's not really allowing any generation. So in terms of embedding, definitely one of the best solutions out there. And then yeah, the other thing is this claim custom domain. So being able to have like docs dot your domain.com basically takes our growth engine away, gives it to your company, because anytime people have looked at your document, that could be like, Wait, what does this company do? Let me go check their their website

Artem Daniliants
You support. You mentioned PDFs and and slides and so forth. It kind of sounds like a sales tool, right? I think it's most useful when it comes to sales. So. So like has it been used by other, you know, types of people, professionals, or is it mainly sales?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, we've seen like of all sorts of people like, uh, consultants, trainers, uh, some lawyers, some VCs. Um, you know, obviously some founders. Basically anyone that is staring, even some people in the judicial field, anyone that will know who is accessing their documents also have more control. That's what we just said, an attachment. It's pretty much a vanilla use case. So it's it's definitely something that could be applied to most. But definitely we are focusing more on the lead generation piece, you know, the sales enablement, marketing sales that use cases.

Artem Daniliants
Right. Right. Uh, one thing that. Well, maybe you could tell us. How did you come up with the idea? How did you get.

Mikael Hugg
Oh, I was just about to ask.

Artem Daniliants
How did you get started? Like. And, of course, a little bit about yourself.

Vincenzo Belpiede
First of all, maybe I should say, like, kind of. Yeah, about myself. I was born and raised here in southern Italy and I would really change my life is actually finishing my master at Helsinki.

Artem Daniliants
Oh, nice. Oh, University.

Mikael Hugg
That's why you did the summers. Are you finished? High finish. Yeah.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. And then I became a which itself into economics, which then became Aalto University for the Finnish people. And then yeah, I really want to work in Nokia. So we did a business project with Nokia and we walked that and then I applied to three jobs and not and got all three because I was a freak about any kind of mobile phones and Nokia technologies. So I worked with Nokia for seven years in Finland, Germany, China ended up in California for five years. And then I was trying to move from device hardware, product management to software because I knew it was going to be impossible to build my company, but it was going to be more possible to build my own software company. And yeah, then we basically transitioned quickly to Microsoft after the acquisition. But I was okay with my green card ready to go and kind of start the entrepreneurial journey, you know, typical first startup. There was a lot of mistakes. We we built something a schools university education system which just doesn't have a money going around. And afterwards we just decided to kind of build stuff that, you know, for as we've seen maybe already working in the US, but maybe it was too expensive, you know, had too many features, too expensive. You know, actually, the way Sherlock came about is that I did a big analysis on on docs and, and alternatives to docs and publish it on my LinkedIn. But now I have about 20,000 connections and one guy he's Bulgaria, been living in Mexico for 20 years. He has a developer outsourcing firm. He said, Hey, cool, you know, kind of cool analysis. Why don't we build something better together? I said, Let's call, you know, I used to live in Mexico as well. A little program there we call. We really hit it off and we kept building everything remotely online. Then Covid hit. So we incorporated a company with with Stripe Atlas and just kept going from there. And I was just senior. We just got our first 5000 users. We decided not to want to raise any investments or whether from angels or venture capital or whatever, just want to keep growing the company. And yeah, that's, that's like the story of how it started, let's say, and about me.

Artem Daniliants
Awesome. That sounds, that's really interesting. So basically you bootstrapped it, right? You used your own funds to start the company so you don't do any any coding. Right? It's your partner and his company that does that.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Exactly. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
All right. All right.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Exactly.

Artem Daniliants
And where did you incorporate your company.

Vincenzo Belpiede
With Stripe Atlas, which is only available in Delaware. And yeah, that's because he was based in Mexico. I'm actually both Italian American citizen. And at the end of the day, I think that if you want to build a company to sell globally, then you know, Delaware and Stripe Atlas is one of the best options out there. So people don't have to travel to a specific location. I think also if you ended up end up one, want to sell the company, then you know, again, probably best location, I would say. But yeah, happy to hear your thoughts if you have any other thoughts around the other location.

Artem Daniliants
No, no, I think you may.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Leave a.

Artem Daniliants
Lower decision for sure.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Good decision.

Artem Daniliants
I never heard about Atlas. I don't know if you Mikael heard about Stripe Atlas.

Mikael Hugg
I have. I have. I have. I have. And I was actually planning to use it last year. Uh, but, you know, because we were planning to, to go to the US. Stripe is really convenient tool to to create your company and obviously deliveries. I think they have only Delaware is the only area that that is possible to do.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah but yeah they create the entity for you, right? They create the entity for you. And then like what about like bookkeeping and all the other junk that you have to take care of? Do they do that?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Think they have some other, you know, their they have some other providers that they can recommend you if you want to use them. Otherwise you can find your own. Of course, like I think there's a lot more providers in the US then. Then for instance, I also had some friends who worked with Estonia, which was also good for, you know, remote people and people building software for all over the world. But as far as a much smaller country. So the the amount of service providers, a little more small, smaller, probably like 300 times smaller is going to a population. But yeah, that's also another kind of interesting place for sure. I mean, unfortunately, we we also I don't know if I if you saw this on my profile, but as I kind of go back here to Italy, a couple of developers approached me to say, why don't we build something? You know, we don't want to just get a job. We want to build something cool. And we built a calendar book, which is basically a competitor of Calendly. The way we differentiate right now, it's not just being four times cheaper, you know, we started like $2 per month instead, $8 per month. Also, we've done some integrations with with webhooks that I'm not even sure the available. We currently we have the affiliate program so people can actually earn. When people join, you can use Stripe and charge for your time for free. So with that team was based in Italy. We actually incorporated Italy because everyone was in Italy. But the only good thing of like, you know, incorporating is that if you incorporate in southern Italy, there's some European funds as suddenly still considered a poorer part of Europe. And well, it is. And so that's that's one good thing about it incorporating in southern Italy.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. Makes sense. So you said that. You have. Now like 5000 customers, the users right now in the.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you about 5000 or 1 can work about 3000 And we've been recently more and more we've been able to like kind of cross-sell in between even though still still small amounts. But yeah, on the other side like I've been, I've been back in Europe for a bit and of course, you know, I own my own real estate. I don't have to pay for rent in San Francisco.

Artem Daniliants
That's convenient.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, even a lot bigger. And and so it's just like the time. Like the time horizon. It's much more about doing something from now to ten years and doing with our strength and, yeah, looking in the long term and doing all that we want.

Mikael Hugg
Um. Yeah, that is really smart. Yeah. Right now, a lot of people, that's when they have a good idea. They just try to find angel investors and then that just that is very time consuming. And also, you know, when you are playing with others money, you know, you don't have that same kind of freedom anymore. So that's very smart to do it. So what is your because, you know, especially like SaaS companies like this one, usually getting users, it's kind of like a tough. Task because just. Yeah, the big competitors that are just putting so much money in and then and so what was your growth hack? How did you get your first, let's say, 1000 users and is there tips that you want to share?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, we're just going to realize that, you know, when you just start off, you don't have your own strength in terms of sales and marketing. So there's a lot of other partners that just are dedicated to sell other people's software. And so we worked with a with a bunch of companies that that sell software for others even taking like a big percentage. In fact, we don't have a problem giving like big percentages to partners as long as they help us grow. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what we've done. You know, the. Then all sorts of stuff where it's like, uh, even at the beginning, uh, still doing some of the lifetime deals that really helps you get first users that improve your platform. And you know, some of these users have upgraded to, for instance, our custom domain, which is only 4 million subscribers. I mean, it's still it's still revenue plus, you know, I'm just constantly looking for a new distributor. So since I was a mobile Congress in Barcelona in February, I think like the yearly conference I went to this year because there's a lot of distributors that distribute phones, computers and also software. And so, yeah, really trying to rely on partners that dedicate themselves to selling software.

Mikael Hugg
And when

Vincenzo Belpiede
You're tired, you build revenue.

Mikael Hugg
And when you're talking about partners, they are basically affiliates like it's affiliate marketers or they are actual. Like their supporters because

Artem Daniliants
I think affiliate, your responsibility stops at the sign up. You just bring people to the sign up and then that's it. But I think distributor is who is actually taking care of the customer as well and so forth. Right. But Vince, please correct me if I'm wrong, or at. Least they even take care of payment.

Vincenzo Belpiede
So, you know, they actually sell for you and then they will give you whatever they made with your software. Right? So, you know, some of these companies, they make like, you know, over 100 million just selling software. Another one I'm talking to, of course, it's much bigger is like they do like tens of billions. But of course, the bigger the distributor, the more time it will take for you to get in their channel. And so we're like progressively moving upstream. But yeah, I was just like actually just posted a LinkedIn video about harmonizing all this channel ecosystem software solutions, which is basically companies that work in this channel ecosystem. The first one is called Partner Optimizer, actually knew them, already spoke to them, and they have a huge list of potential partners you can speak to and, and try to find deals so that you can you can you can work with them. So I'm really going to kind of try to stay more and more focused on that. Meanwhile, of course, we try to build our own, uh, kind of growth system and predictable like customer acquisition and acquisition systems. We actually have built with one of the first developers I ever worked with a mail merge on Gmail. Uh, we just released it. It's called Salesforce.com. Still early, but we're actually going to release a feature that I've never seen anyone having, which is batching. So you can first then set up like 6000 emails to go in the next month, 200 emails a day, and you just click once and the emails will also be personalized if you have the name and so on, and they will go from your Gmail into their inbox.

Mikael Hugg
We also used mail merge quite a much some years back and now we list which is even. Well that is like a fantastic tool. So. If you haven't, check it out. Check that out. It's a French startup and. Best best one of those 1 to 1 email outreach tools, that is right. Now.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Do the emails go out from your Gmail or or do they go out from there? So

Mikael Hugg
No, your Gmail, your Gmail, you you integrate your Google workspace with with them and they use your account to do it. And then you you know, if you're opening a new one like if you have a new account and new new domain, you can use their Lynn worm, which is the the tool that they use to warm it up your or your Gmail so that your stuff can actually go to the primary box and, you know, skip all these filtering tools what Microsoft and Google usually have in their email providers.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Cool, cool, cool.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. Heard about them. I definitely followed their. On LinkedIn, but I never actually got got to try that. So maybe I should at some point. We used a lot. It's a fantastic tool with all of our customers. We use it so, you know, can really recommend it.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Okay. And what do you guys do, by the way? You. This is a good time to tell.

Artem Daniliants
Oh, of course. Of course. Of course. We jumped right in. We jumped right in. And by the way, I really I really enjoy doing this because you learn quite a lot. So, you know, thanks for the tips as well. I already put Partner Optimizer on and Stripe Atlas and whatnot is really useful. But basically we are both in marketing and maybe Michael can tell about his company a little bit. But basically what I do is I have a growth marketing agency in Finland and I also have multiple startups where I'm involved and trying to do exactly what you do. So this is there is maybe a selfish reason for doing this interviews as well, so that we can learn and network and so forth. But that's pretty much about me. What about you, Mikael? Yeah, the same thing.

Mikael Hugg
I also have a growth agency. And. And whereas Artem is more into the technical stuff and, you know, coding parts and all that, we are more in, in B2B sales and, you know, digital marketing parts. We do, we do like, like low code solutions, obviously. But yeah, we are more in the. Non-technical parts more inventing how to. How to create new funnels for for our clients. And you know, usually we provide B2B clients. That's the biggest part.

Vincenzo Belpiede
What are your, your websites? Crossland SEO. Growth growth land dot KL growth land.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. We are located in Estonia and Artem is in Finland.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, and I'll send my link in the chat because it's a little bit more. It's harder I think, to type in DaniliantsVentures.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Okay. Got it. Yeah. Maybe I've seen this before. Okay.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah.

Vincenzo Belpiede
And you have any questions for me, or should I ask questions?

Artem Daniliants
No, no, no.

Mikael Hugg
We can continue with your stuff. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
So I think at this point, it'll be awesome if maybe you could demo your product a little bit, because the the idea is that we want people to learn about your product, learn about you, your company. And many times it's really hard to get a grasp on like, how does it really work? So maybe if you could demo it, that'd be lovely.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Should I do it? There's one product or two products or three products.

Artem Daniliants
As many as you want. As many as you want. You know, it's. It's. It's all good. Well, after. No. All of your products.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. I'll, I'll try to be quick and luckily they're not like, you know they're not hard to use at least that's what we hope. And then they are like not complicated in terms of what they do. So this is show you again, you know, more sales with powerful uplinks. You can log in with kind of your Gmail. Or a LinkedIn or just a normal email. This was first a brochure of a of a of a sorry of a company that was looking at their website there. It's finally open like this, their brochure open like this. Right. So in this case you see there's no branding, no lead generation. I could just download it and that's it. But if you use instead, share that view and you upload it here. And you can do all sorts of stuff with this document once. Once it's on the platform, you could say, you know, anyone can view it but not download or actually let people download it. But we asked for an email to view it or actually, you know, ask for an email to download it. It's actually a feature that I've never seen before from others. And then you can ask people even to verify the email, get notifications for the download. You can select the watermark or not. If the document is confidential, you can put a password or you can say, you know, I'm just sharing it and ask them and me, and then you can do this. Companies like you can call it like LinkedIn. So you know that it's going over on LinkedIn and you have this link. And if I open the incognito window, I'm going to show you kind of like what happens, you know, for other people. They will see the document right away. But then if they want to. If they want to download it, they will have this landing page. They have to, you know, give your email. We actually have also Google one type site in the SolidWorks where you not incognito window in your end up in there. But so now you will actually be able to see like kind of you know what's what what happened with that link you know where the visits you know, how much time do people spend on the slides and stuff.

Artem Daniliants
Can you see what slides, Can you see what slides did? They did actually, you know. Okay.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you'll be able to see, like, how much time was spent. Yeah. So in the second time I hit it because it was having troubles loading. Then you see, I actually ended up going on slide four for I didn't watch the whole presentation, but you can see people that didn't watch it all. And then as you get this email leads you. We have integration with 5000 apps via Zapier so you can kick off an automatic email.

Mikael Hugg
I was actually about to ask, do you have a Zapier connection possibility? But yeah, you obviously have this great.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. So Gmail with mail came, it's like, you know, really anything, you name it. Then we also reports so that you can see like, okay, which documents are being downloaded or visited them all and even like which campaigns you can add your team. And then, you know, if you're on Gmail, you can open shut off you anywhere with the with the Chrome extension. You can download for free. And then finally, in terms of branding, you can add a watermark for for your documents. You can change the branding in this part top left. So it almost becomes like a white label software and even the logo can take you to your website for more leads and more generation more visitors and you can change the color of this part. It's a green card now.

Artem Daniliants
Cool pictures.

Vincenzo Belpiede
So that's the pro team.

Mikael Hugg
Is that is that the pro team plan you have? So that allows you to.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah actually this was like the individual this was the individual plan because the team will have actually five team members and you can have shared team folders or private ones. And then what we have, which is also really interesting for, for larger companies who typically work with larger companies, but we've also added a few core customers that have few employees, but they really wanted the name. So you could have like docs or, you know, was it like Daniel Daniel's Adventures, right? Or Docs Dot Roland Co And they basically steals our growth engine because we actually been growing You know this is definitely like a we chose a product that has virality and factor what they call it. It just keeps on growing on its own. But yeah, that's pretty much about the shared open.

Mikael Hugg
So why it's so cheap. So this is the this is the thing, you know, this is suspiciously cheap.

Vincenzo Belpiede
What's going on?

Mikael Hugg
Yeah, it seems like a crazy product.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, to be honest, it's. It's, you know, it's how we started it, right? We definitely spoke many times about practicing with the, like, open the video and make it like, really a no brainer to do. But also, you know, if you look at like Canva pricing, like Canva offers, like so much stuff, right? And it's like you need to be able to compete with them as well, right? So the whole point why we started is that we felt the pricing of our competitors in us was too high. We think there's like 5 billion people connected to the Internet, so the opportunity is just larger. And yeah, that's how we're keeping the price is lower, the price gets higher for custom domain. It does depend on the customer, but you know, it's definitely higher than than here. And really we do it like a we speak to each customer to figure out what's depending really how many employees they have. Um, but we kind of want to make this a no brainer for people, right?

Mikael Hugg
Yeah, I mean, like exactly what happens to the emails that. People, you know. If you're putting it that they need to give your email to have a possibility to download it. So what happens to the emails? Do you collect them or is there a database for the emails?

Vincenzo Belpiede
The emails, definitely, you know, going to service them, but you know, they are available for any any users here on the Leeds area. So of course, you know, they can contact. We need to be able still to contact them our lawyer us because if there is anything like an issue with the system for suspicious links we need to be able to to interact with also leads that have been added to our platform.

Mikael Hugg
Uh

Vincenzo Belpiede
But, but really, like each, each user has its own leads. And then with integration and we've got all other systems and stuff, gets the marketing automation going.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I also noticed that on your enterprise plan.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Artem Daniliants
Sorry. Yeah. So on your enterprise plan, you mentioned that there is a dedicated server and that kind of seems a little bit odd. So dedicated servers. So basically for your enterprise customers, you have a dedicated server so that there are no other customers on that server. So for, for privacy reasons. So for resource allocation, like what's the deal behind that?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, for privacy reasons. Also because when we set up the name, which is quite kind of complicated and a bit manual, still, we can easily like just assign a separate instance on AWS. So some larger customer asked us that they just want like all their data in one place, potentially be accessible by them as well at the level. And so that's why we have that.

Artem Daniliants
Okay, so you deploy your solution on customers infrastructure, right?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Or on a separate AWS instance, which can be accessed by the specific customers if they want to have like a deeper level of integration.

Artem Daniliants
Okay. Okay. Okay. That's that's yeah, that's really, really interesting. Also, if I may ask some nerdy questions. So like, what is your tech stack? Like what did you use to power the SaaS service?

Vincenzo Belpiede
I know definitely we're using an AWS background and then we're using UBS in the in the front end.

Artem Daniliants
Okay

Vincenzo Belpiede
But that's what I remember off the top of my head. I do have a tech stack document somewhere for. I don't have to pull up, you know.

Mikael Hugg
Finally, finally, we have. A. Non-tech. Founder in this. Podcast because we. Usually always have the tech tech people. Thanks.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, sure.

Artem Daniliants
So I can geek out with them. But, you know, now it's. Yeah,

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah

Artem Daniliants
And then, you know,

Mikael Hugg
I usually. Zoom out just. Because I don't, I don't, you know. Anderson som But. I'm not a developer. I really, you know, yeah, I always have a hard time.With this myself.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Uh, that's a yes. Yes, that is true. So if you want, I can show you this very quickly. Please do book, uh, kind of calendly competitor. Basically, you know, as you see, one of the insights that we have were to have less splits. Whenever was the other. Similar solutions was always doing too many clicks. In this dashboard you have all the events types and all the upcoming. So this is our event. Actually asked and booked me through this and it worked. That was great. Uh, thank God I went and read the notes because I thought I was going to have to join. It's almost so dire. And of course, if you want to change anything here, you can. We just added like, you know, we have all the app integration you can redirect to your own domain. We just added Stripe to actually even free users can charge for their time for users will just add a euro or dollar extra just to make it you know, then premium customers don't have that dollar extra buy from our side because you can ask questions, you set up the days and so on. That's pretty standard. Um, and then we, we allow up to ten calendar connections. Right now only Google is on the Google accounts but so like outlook and so actually also standard emails and actually calendar has got a lot into integration. So we mentioned Stripe, Zoom, Zapier, which already spoke about it and then webhooks. So webhooks allow you to connect with a lot of other systems that actually tend to be a little cheaper than than Zapier. They are a little more geeky as well, but potentially even more powerful. And then of course, you can invite your team if you get more licenses or of course, you can embed into your website. We actually recently went on on Wix and it's actually quite interesting to be there. It's definitely a great platform for us. We just launched, but you know, just an easy way to add coloring book to your Wix website. And the other really cool thing about Coloring book is that we have like really a like I think now it's over 330 people that are voting on our public roadmap and so they are really telling us what to do. So really persistence in terms of some of the stuff we've done, the questions with a lot of votes on that, the webhooks, the Zoom integration. So we just tried. Of course

Mikael Hugg
I really like how you use Trello as as, you know, showing publicly or roadmap. And this is, you know, all the people who are thinking about growth hacking. This is one very good example on how to create these social engagements in a way that you actually get your users to participate. And I've actually never seen anyone use Trello as, as open roadmap stuff. This is brilliant. Very, very smart.

Vincenzo Belpiede
I remember this lady from front up. I actually met her in San Francisco. They got a great source and they made the roadmap public on trial. So I actually saw it from her and I was like, we've done this for all of our products, actually. Now she's using Aha ideas. It's a dedicated company. To be honest, I still prefer Trello, you know, because it's a lot more visual. I think one day when we have an extra little sister, I would love to build a dedicated version for this and maybe like completely integrate integrated into our website so people have to get out to trial or sign up or a different thing. Um, but yeah, that's the, that's kind of, that's it for now in terms of terms of coloring book. And then, you know, in terms of like, uh, sports, I still like kind of relatively young, but it's, it's definitely there. I don't know if you guys ever use, like, street or street or any other of this. A Chrome extension. So basically the idea is that I was really I really was spending like too much time in terms of, uh, importing and exporting, um, different information. So what was happening here was. So let's do, like, a test, right? And maybe let's go and get the go write some some spam emails to write to spammers. Um. So what Salesforce is cool is that the CRM is really on a Google sheet so you don't have to import export and you could just copy paste emails in there. The only thing is that right now there's little kegel or investor interest. Okay. Yeah, we're not really interested. We'll add them to the spam. So this is so funny. Uh, so we add this in here, right? It's going to be added to our CRM. There you go. Right. I could decide to, like, here. You know, let me select this guy. Or like, in an email that I want to send. You know, maybe I could tell them, Hey, you are actually in my spam folder. Are you legit or not? I'm just building a use case for this, but of course it's not the best. Um, just also to use data that probably we don't really care about. So and then let's say once you have two people, you could actually start a mail merge, right? So we already selected people because we already selected this, this boxes. And then afterwards, like the people you could say like, you know, you went in Spam Hive, you went by spam folder. So then I have a preview. And then, you know, I could like email these guys and I can either do it in 10 minutes or 2 hours, 24 hours, and soon it's going to be available to this batch. So if you have like a lot of emails, you can say send like 50 emails over 60 hours or something. And you know that that call out to send like to in the next 30 days. So one time click and it's done for next 30 days. And yeah, of course you can add different variables right from from this Google sheet if you add the other names or like whatever else. Yeah, I could show you the name here. So that will give us a new preview with the name the I think Global Network. And also what we added right now is that we have like a chatGPT integration so that it's going to provide you a better subject and think. I'm not sure yet a better body. Oh, I have to pay for it. It's a premium feature. Yeah, that's the prerequisite that says, you know, like charging this stuff is expensive. So.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, for sure.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. So, yeah, but it's like free to use it in this class.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah, a lot of people exactly like that because, you know, for consumers. You know, you can get the free version. As well, but they don't realize that it is actually that it's expensive when you're using it. That's part of actually

Vincenzo Belpiede
I'm glad I was demoing this because while demoing this that probably we want a page in between that explains, hey, you know, this feature is premium because charging it is expensive if you want to pay for it here. But as you see, this is apparently it's still kind of one of the product. But, you know, we actually what was cool is that we actually built this kind of like for our own use because we just, you know, we realized we're going to spend a lot more money sending a lot of cool demos with other people still. So we said, let's build a tool that we're actually going to like, really use ourselves. Um, and so now we're back to we're definitely going to, to use it more. But yeah, of course we're making it available to, to other professionals and small companies that just need to get started with their, with their lead generation so and communicating to their leads.

Artem Daniliants
So a question that I had, you know, regarding all these three products, who is in charge of your UX and UI?

Vincenzo Belpiede
That's that really an area that, you know, leaves a lot to be desired, especially for this last one. We are definitely like super, super scrappy. We also do believe that it's just better to like get it out, get, get work done, get get the tech done well and even like verify the business. Although the business we really it's kind of like we go and stuff that we know people are using and then we just try to. So definitely this side it's it's it's an area that, you know, as we have more resources maybe to share across this, maybe we could have a dedicated designer that works across three different products, maybe even tries to integrate them a little bit, cross-sell them more so. We basically the answer is like we don't really have anyone or it's better. One of the our frontend developers been really like learning a lot. We this UX c l it's like little Duolingo for UX people. I think of view is like, okay, but still that we could could use some help and then yes it's a lot of work so. Achilles. Achilles heel spotted.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. So, of course, I. I didn't mean anything by it. I just wanted to. I just wanted to understand, you know, how do you approach user experience? Because you are kind of creating products for yourself in a sense, right? Like you are the user, you are using it. So I was just wondering how do you do the the UX UI? But obviously, obviously once you have more resources, I think it kind of makes sense. But one thing that came to my mind because some of your products are very inexpensive, right? Have you considered having a lifetime price? Like. Right. Like you.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. Please.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, yeah. We have. We had lifetime prices for all the products they sell through lifetime prices. So. So we've done that as well. And then we constantly, like, keep changing prices and increasing and so on. So we're experimenting all the things with pricing. Actually, the, the first book I wrote is not very good, but it was about pricing as pricing and definitely changing pricing and try different strategies At the core of what I believe.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. Yeah. That that makes sense. That makes sense. Have you done any kind of like SEO optimization for your products? Because in many cases that is a pretty good way to get customers.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, we've done probably third of you more because we have a blog short of you.com/blog where there is like we've been featuring a lot of like LinkedIn top influencers and I'm seeing that there's some this amount of traffic coming from some of these guys that are like a lot of followers. Maybe they're highly searched on on Google and actually check one of them. So yeah we've we've done definitely, definitely some some of this. But I think one of the things I'm looking at and potentially could be other projects that I'm seeing and know what you guys think about it, maybe I'll ask you guys. Is there an opportunity? That's what I'm wondering about, of building a product that helps you automatically in a smart way, build a lot of blog posts with AI and just get them out? Of course, maybe human will go and check and improve, but that's something I'm wondering about. If you guys think there's an opportunity there

Mikael Hugg
There is an opportunity, and most likely there's going to be a lot of these kind of tools coming out real fast. Jasper and I was one of the first ones that were kind of allowing to do that. They have their own AI they are using to achieve it. Yeah, I mean, that is. This, that is. Think that you should definitely get into.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, it's a gold rush. Kind of. Everybody is trying to make one. I really like koala dot s H for content creation, and the reason for that is that it actually uses Serp data from Google to kind of understand the competitors for the keywords you're trying to rank for. And Koala also has APIs. So you could actually automate like the whole thing. Koala also has access to GPT four via API, so you can use GPT four to create optimized content and it's very much geared towards SEO. So there are a lot of features. Good for SEO.

Mikael Hugg
Glass said that they used it before, but instead of it's not possible right. Now, I think it's

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, some companies, some companies have access to GPT four.

Mikael Hugg
They already have the access to that for. In the playground. Right. Okay, cool.

Artem Daniliants
Since you traveled the world, worked in different places, you know? Why did you choose to go back to Italy?

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, that was actually. I think I remember them.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Food.

Artem Daniliants
Like family food like number one.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. But yeah, definitely. Just like a lot of, you know, 20 years away because I was in Rome for three years and then International High School, five years in Milan, 12 years abroad. So that makes it 20 years. So after 20 years, I really missed it. So I got my citizenship. I said, you know, let me go check out how Italy looks. So I felt like a foreigner back here. And then I think the weather is great. It's been a little too hot last couple of summers even hit 44. So I was about to melt. But aside from that, the weather is great over, you know, it's like very sunny. It's one of the saddest parts of Europe. It's actually very safe, you know, contrary to what maybe some people think, you know, Southern Italy mafia. Actually, most of the criminals, they're like doing macro stuff. They're doing like Bank heist. And, you know, after like, we're all behind, we're all behind bank. Like, we're like, oh, all kinds of those. So. So it's very safe as well. Great weather, great food. Of course, for me was family, you know, even just speaking my own language. And I go out when I go get a coffee here, it's just absolutely mind blowing. My guests, actually, Now I have a guest from London that is like joining the SDR. So we're doing like some training here. And, and, and, you know, having I have a huge house full of, like 400m² that would have costed, like tens of millions, I guess, California, but it was a lot cheaper here. Um, so really, like I saw a lot of really big pluses in terms of being back, but and I feel bad in a way, but mentally now I feel like I'm in some tech conference right now with you guys, you know, like and it's awesome. So we're always all here connected. I recently got the Gigabit, the.

Artem Daniliants
Internet connection.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Internet connection, fiber optic so that like,

Artem Daniliants
That's amazing

Vincenzo Belpiede
Right there. And unfortunately, my iPhone camera was not working with the solution for the what you call that continuation technology.

Mikael Hugg
I have I have it here working, you know, So.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah, it maybe you just have to go some. Some kind of. Settings or something.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah.

Vincenzo Belpiede
But you know, it just seemed like city. And really the other thing is that, you know, without all the conferences to go to, all the little events that were, for instance in the Bay Area, I have so much more time to actually focus on work and work on a product and work on, you know, the growth and sales strategies versus go out and just meet people. Or worse, to be honest for me, investors, because do

Mikael Hugg
You think it's worth it to like right now go to Silicon Valley and, you know, take part of all this little. I'll.

Vincenzo Belpiede
I think it could be fun for maybe sharing your 20s. It could be fun in terms of discovering and so on. But I really do think right now you can discover all of it. You know, if you have enough people on your LinkedIn, if you look at the news, if you try other stuff, you need a lot of time in the back office to actually try this stuff and do the work. You know, I think too much, too many people would see them hopping from one event to the other. They would end up raising money because they were always there asking people blah, blah, blah and pitching and pitching. But then really, a lot of this company, I think, also failed because they didn't put in enough work. Right. And I've seen in some companies of some friends of mine in San Diego, there's a little bit more quiet place. They have raised money for San Francisco, but they were like in San Diego, a little bit less demand, a little bit more time to focus on their product and work. And so I see the similarity and I lived in San Diego is great, but as much as it felt like home, there's nothing like where you were originally from the US and your first 14 years of your life. So that's why I'm doing something similar to my friends in San Diego, just just being in a quieter place and just yeah

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. You know, you're absolutely right with it, that one. That's why I wanted to ask, what is that? Because that is it's not always a it. I think it's it's really now comes to all the startup hubs in the whole world and like for example Helsinki. Obviously it's not that big as, as as the most of places, but it's really like, well, you know it because you'll be living there and there's a lot of these small events. And mainly it kind of feels that it's, you know, Comic-Con stuff that people are dressing as some sort of like, comic, you know, actors and etcetera. So it kind of feels like it's saying just for the entrepreneurs and, you know, they participate. They have these like it's just acting like an entrepreneur, but it's not actually doing the real work. Well, what is the thing that makes you sure that you get to the, you know, investing rules and all that? So.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, for sure.

Vincenzo Belpiede
So you have to balance, you know. Maybe you can go a few times, go to a few select ones and that's it. So I do think slushies is a great event. I did go there when I first got back. It was definitely I learned a lot. It was definitely very inspiring. But I was also like, you know, I wish I could have it more focused on bootstrapped startups and so more focus on allowing startups to me to cross sell, allow startups to meet distributors. I think right now it's still all the narrative is about, you know, you build a startup, pitching investments and so on. And sure, I think that's the track, but it's also faster.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah, it's a story.

Vincenzo Belpiede
It's another event about SAS and they had a bootstrap, uh, founder stage, which was great. I was actually supposed to speak there as an empty which got coffin was destroyed out standing there listening but couldn't speak. Um, but it was I think that's what we need to change narrative a bit that I'm seeing quite a few other founders trying to trying to change this, but it's it's going to take a lot of work still.

Artem Daniliants
Did you did you see there is MicroConf, it's a community for bootstrapped SaaS founders. It's kind of a conference and there are a lot of like videos and there is community and all that good stuff and it's all around smaller bootstrapped SaaS founders. So could be interesting. Could be.

Vincenzo Belpiede
I think I've seen it where it looks like they're going to have one in Europe, in Lisbon on the first and 3rd of October. I always like to give a conference like a first go analyst, like just to see how it is. Of course, since I was invited to speak at Detects Africa Next Me Marrakesh, because I'm really interested in like Africa and finding more distributors there and like, yeah, I've also been trying to focus on conferences where I can go and speak, and that's maybe one perk of having those 27,000 followers on LinkedIn that, you know, if you do some good posts, they might have some, some decent marketing for free. And

Artem Daniliants
Yeah

Vincenzo Belpiede
That's been also my strategy in terms of view and try to speak there as much as possible.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. One question that I have, and I think we can start wrapping up one question that I had is that you got your US citizenship, right? Yeah. So US has this weird policy where you are liable, like for like you're liable for tax from global income from anywhere in the world. Didn't that kind of like isn't that not very often.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah that's always still like there's a bunch of people who give up their citizenship for that reason. You know if you live in a country like Italy that has a double income taxation agreement and, you know, kind of whatever money you pay to Italy, then it's, you know, you don't have to pay double again to us within a certain threshold. I've also heard there's like talks in discussions to try to get rid of that because I think it's the only country in the world that does it. And I think there's always been there's always more and more American citizens that live abroad that have been, you know, kind of it's been their life has been made too hard to live abroad. So a lot of them gave up their citizenship. So you lose citizens with that. So it's a little. But yeah, so far it's been fine. But I don't understand why some people keep that up at some point. Yeah. For me also on the other side when when, when there was like threats of wars in Europe, I was like, I'm glad I had because it gets worse.

Artem Daniliants
You can escape.

Vincenzo Belpiede
I know where to go. But, I mean, it's it's crazy and sad to think about this stuff. No, but it's like, yeah, jokes aside and I mean, it was not really a joke that that was the only time it crossed my mind to, like, go back. But it's also like you never know how it is in your life right now. I'm feeling very happy in Europe, but, you know, you never know. Of course, something changes if you like going back and just having that option, it's just great.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. And maybe, you know, your business will grow and you will move maybe to us because of availability of maybe funding or whatever that is. It's really good to have multiple passports. You know, you can start collecting them at some point.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Whereas I at the moment I got my I'm at the moment I got that second passport. I felt like very lucky. But also I felt like, you know, I was like, wow, there's some countries in Africa that, you know, people are not allowed to go anywhere basically without a visa, right? So it's like it's really a world that is like so different, right? If you have a European passport, your passport is so much better if you're both even better. But it's like it really made me feel like I hope one day in the future or maybe when we go to Mars, we'll just be citizens of Mars and maybe one day in the future will be citizens of the world. And that's, you know, it's like just create an evil, even playing field, not evil.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, hopefully not.

Vincenzo Belpiede
You know? Yeah, exactly. Just that. But of course we still have as we don't, you know, we don't like to go there, but there's still too many differences across certain people, especially older age. You know, they can get along well together like we can as geeks. But yeah, let's see. Maybe. Maybe we'll just be citizens of Mars. So you guys going?

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, I think it's going to be a one way ticket, so you really have to think about it.

Mikael Hugg
I need to ask my wife.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, if you are.

Vincenzo Belpiede
I'll wait for a few missions to go and maybe come back and they'll.

Artem Daniliants
They open little Italy there. Maybe then Venus, maybe then.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Or if we know there's an asteroid coming over, then. Then time to go.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to be the first choice. But I think we can.

Mikael Hugg
Cool.

Artem Daniliants
We can wrap up on this lovely note, you know, going to Mars and all that good stuff. Vince, it's been a tremendous pleasure. I learned a lot. It was really, really interesting to talk to you. I will definitely contact you on LinkedIn. Reach out in future. Maybe if there is anything you can do. And yeah, and if you need some help with the UX UI, I can I can try to help you as well if there is a need at some point.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely that's up in talk as well. More one on one. Try to share even some more and yeah look forward to, to connect those on LinkedIn. Feel free to send a connection as well.

Artem Daniliants
Of course. Of course. Well we'll do that.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Thank you.

Artem Daniliants
So thank you very much.

Vincenzo Belpiede
Keep those paleo.

Artem Daniliants
Or how all and have a wonderful, wonderful week. Take care. Bye.