Stephan Goss. He’s the entrepreneur and technology executive behind his first company, Zeeto, which he started at the age of 22 and is still running today. He’s led the company in expanding from a team of 3 people to 70 in just under 5 years and with the launch of the ad network, he plans on continuing the company’s growth story in 2017. Previously, he founded Samples.com & Getitfree.us, which is the biggest free samples property on the internet.
Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – The Power of Habit What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack and Gmail How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8.5-9 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Keep going for it”
Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:04 – Nathan introduces Stephan to the show 01:56 – Stephan bought Samples.com 3 years ago and Getitfree.us for 6 figures 02:31 – Everything started with Samples.com 02:48 – Stephan left Switzerland when he was 19 and spent 10 months living in tent 03:31 – Stephan and some of his friends were running ad campaigns on the internet 03:55 – Everything is lead generation with Samples.com 04:03 – They acquire users for $1 and they get $1.25 in return 04:30 – Stephan was making a 20-30% margin at first 04:59 – One of their large clients called and asked for more targeted leads who offered $8 05:46 – Stephan came out with a decent approach to find targeted leads 06:22 – Stephan was spending $10K for ads 06:51 – Stephan had a business partner and they had some cash flow to begin with 07:14 – The model of Samples.com was good because they can get their ROI fast 07:34 – Samples.com is still running 07:55 – Stephan continued the question asking model for the targeted market and scaled it 08:26 – The lead value is more of a composition of all the answers 08:46 – 2016 total top line revenue was $39M and total ad spend was around $20-25M 09:18 – Samples.com currently has 25 people 09:25 – Stephan spent the bottom line money on investing on the Zeeto site 09:42 – Stephan is currently breaking even with Zeeto 09:55 – Stephan still gets his salary from the company 10:23 – Zeeto’s model is taken from Samples.com’s question-model 11:10 – Zeeto is similar to Google Adsense 11:20 – Regular CPMs from Adsense range from $5-20 11:33 – Zeetos’ CPMs range from $400-2200 12:00 – From Nathan’s research, podcasters earn $15-20 CPMs 12:11 – Nathan shares how he asks his advertisers about their CAC and his audience 12:44 – With Google Adsense, there will be around 3 ads per page 13:27 – The technology around Samples.com and Zeeto is considerably pretty hard 14:43 – Facebook and Google has all this data regarding leads that other big companies don’t have 15:13 – Zeeto’s goal is to help publishers have a better revenue model 15:21 – Zeeto’s product has just been launched 16:32 – Stephan sees Zeeto as an additional feature to the paywall 17:01 – Zeeto is incremental 18:18 – It will be more complicated for Zeeto to write questions for each of the articles rather than by being an addition to the paywall 18:24 – “Questions are built to be more broad” 18:59 – Stephan doesn’t know what is really going to work yet 19:25 – Stephan’s goal this year is to see where they’re going to fit in 19:50 – Anything that will drive people to the web will work well 20:19 – Stephan’s sample call-to-action 20:34 – You can make custom questions fitted to the website 20:46 – The goal is to optimize questions for the best response rate 21:22 – Zeeto was built from scratch 21:54 – Nathan struggles with which of his advertisement he should show to his new subscribers 22:00 – Nathan sends them an email autoresponder 22:27 – Zeeto has a user group that has interesting attributes 23:07 – 3 advertisers are not enough to do it efficiently 23:14 – Zeeto now has 200 advertisers 23:37 – Zeeto is completely free and they’ll send a check for the revenue share 25:05 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
It’s easier for people to give out their details in exchange for something free. To collect your targeted leads, you need to have focused questions. Stay encouraged and Just keep going for it!
Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives