Strike Gold
By Jonathan Kahn & Roy Povarchik
Each Monday, join Roy and Jonathan, for a new hour-long episode with some of the top marketers and growth experts.
Learn how to grow your startup from companies such as Amazon, Elementor, Ahreds, Backlinko, Monday.com, Zappos and more.
Strike GoldMay 12, 2020
Building & Nurturing 250k Loving Users on an Online Community, BOOM25!
This episode is all about community, and how the UK focused Cashback startup Boom25 built a community of over 250K Raving fans with over 77% engagement.
Boom25’s Head of business development Yaniv Rozen and head of marketing, Avinoam Abramowitz join us to talk about the journey to disrupt the UK cashback market and finding their early-stage channel market fit.
Boom 25 is an Israeli-based UK focused startup that’s revolutionizing the CashBack market by emphasizing the user experience and user relationship.
In our talk, we discuss the challenges of building a company in an industry where it’s hard to create trust in and how they’ve developed a thriving community that is much more than online shopping and discounts.
How did Ahrefs get 250k organic visits a month?
In this week’s episode of Strike Gold, we speak with Joshua Hardwick, head of content at Ahrefs, a company that develops SEO tools and resources to grow your search traffic. Our conversation well left us speechless!
This episode is little the antichrist of the growth hacking bible - but a very interesting lesson in making brave marketing choices.
Customer Development with the Founder of Headliner App
In this week’s episode of Strike Gold, we speak with Oliver Wellington the Co-Founder of Headliner.app.
Even though Headliner.app is already a well-known marketing tool for podcasters the company’s co-founder Oliver Wellington believes they aren’t at Product Market Fit yet.
As some of the top products in the world, Headliner.app was born as a side project. The team has been working together over a decade, sold the previous company they collaborated on and in the last two year, have been working on the best marketing tool suite for podcasters that now serves over 30k podcasters.
The road to creating the online video creation tool to help podcaster promote their podcast online wasn’t easy from the start, the journey is filled with lessons every young company can learn from.
Branding, Sales & Marketing, Gong.io’s VP Marketing Shares Extraordinary Insights.
In this week’s episode of Strike Gold, we speak with Udi Ledergor is the VP marketing at Gong.io.
If you’re unfamiliar with Gong, they have raised over 68 million dollars to help sales leaders succeed by understanding their conversation with the customer and get them to revenue success using AI and conversation analytics.
Just so you get how on-it Udi is, on his first day at Gong he has already created an ebook, created a landing page, got a database and built a successful email outreach campaign offering the ebook. Like a great steak, Udi is a seasoned marketer with over 15 years of experience and 5 VP positions (and product beforehand).
He wrote the top-selling book for planning and generating leads from conferences and trade shows called “50 secretes of trade show success”
There were so many takeaways from this episode, it’s almost impossible to summarise them all, so listen up and enjoy.
Marketing insights from the top B2C VC in Israel!
This episode is different. On so many levels.
For instance, we usually interview founders/marketers/growth functions within startups. This time, we have Daniel (Danny) Cohen, a general partner at Viola Ventures. Yup, we’re going to the investor's side.
It’s also not an ordinary episode because Danny Cohen is all but the ordinary investor type that comes to mind when you think “investors”
Being one of the outstanding B2C investors in Israel, his investment interests include Consumer Internet, e-Commerce and Digital Media. He serves on the board of Lucky Fish, Playbuzz, Puls, Splacer, Maapilim, Deep, Lightricks, and Origami Logic. He was also on the board of Tapingo (acquired by Grubhub for $150M).
Recently, Lightirkcs, one of the companies he’s been working with since their round A 5 years ago has reached a $1B valuation and it’s only climbing.
In this episode, Danny, the Pearl Jam fan and investor talks all about what type of things he is looking for when investing in companies, the big difference between B2B and B2C investments and why a company with a marketer with a product background might score more points than a classically trained marketer.
If you’re a b2c company looking to get investments - listen closely
How Honeybook perfected Influencer Marketing as a traction channel
Martha Bitar is the head of business development at Honeybook, and she has a pretty in-depth and excellent user-advocate affiliate program case study to share.
If you’re unfamiliar With HoneyBook, it’s a Tel-Aviv-SF based startup that aims to make the life of freelancers and creatives that much more comfortable — from onboarding new clients, sending price quotes, time tracking, invoice and even charging their clients. It’s an all-in-one perfect suite for all of your freelance out there.
As head of Biz-Dev, Martha works with other companies to partner up to help growth. From product integration to co-marketing partnership and influencer marketing to chatting with other people looking to get into Honeybook.
In this episode, Martha joined us to talk about the company’s unique Educator relations program.
How Brian’s Dean improved Backlinko’s organic traffic by 80% (using one SEO tactic)
If you’ve searched for “top SEO experts to follow” you’ve seen Brian Dean’s name for sure.
He is responsible for coining terms such as “The Content Roadshow technique”, “The Skyscraper technique” and more.
And on the first episode of our second season, The man behind Backlinko has joined us to talk about his latest case study on how he grew his organic traffic by 80% (roughly 1 million visitors a year).
In this episode you’ll learn Brians’ full case study process, why you should mix SEO and social optimized content in your calendar, how to get buy-in from your ex-team for your next SEO experiment and more.
Running a Survey, Learning the Truth & Improving Your Product!
Running surveys and conducting user interviews are one of the most critical things you can do to ensure the health of your product and reaching product market fit.
Without product market fit - you can grow slowly, but not exponentially.
Last week, Jonathan and I decided to run a survey and get some real feedback on how what do our listeners feel about Strike Gold.
We wanted to understand what are the changes we can make that can get our listeners from liking us - to loving us and being more keen to share the episodes with their friends and colleagues.
Most importantly - we talk about how to run a survey, how to handle results with small sample size (under a 100 responses specifically) and share the questions we used, why and more.
What you’ll learn:
- What questions should you ask when running a survey
- How to analyse results for a small sample survey
- What questions we asked (and answered we got)
- What made us run a survey (and when should you)
- What should you do with your survey results?
How Storytelling can get you Clients, Funding & Fame! (With Donna Griffit)
Donna Griffit is by far one of the best storytellers experts in the tech industry. period. full stop.
From turning executives’ Linkedin’s profile upside down to building pitch decks that get companies funded and compelling the stories that made some of the world’s most well-known companies skyrocket (and one spaceship) - she’s done it all. If you think I’m hyping our guest - you can just visit her website and break your finger while scrolling to what seems like an infinite scroll of testimonials.
In this episode, Donna shares why a good is a bigger asset to your company than you imagine and how it can literally change your entire company’s path.
Think about a situation where every investor is actually rooting for your company because your caught their attention, or every person you have a small talk with becomes an advocate for your company.
Yup, a good story can do that!
Plunge into this week’s episode to learn how to craft your company’s story and get more attention.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What does storytelling mean for a startup
- Why having a good story early on will change your company’s path
- How to tell if your story is good or not
- The rules for creating a winning & compelling story
- What are the ancient story archetypes will all love
- How to think about your story for B2B and B2C companies
- How Donna used value-giving to get her brand out there
- Lessons from working with major global tech brands
Do you have what it takes to be a CMO? (With Efrat Fenigson)
Efrat Fenigson had quite a journey before assuming the CMO role at futuristic drone company Airobotics.
From being a programmer at a leading gaming company (Hi there Spongebob game!) in Australia through a series of impressive marketing roles to co-founding her latest initiative G-CMO, Efrat’s story is a combination of self development and amazing marketing insights.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to start marketing in a niche market
- The importance of really knowing your target audience
- Why online surveys aren’t good enough when it comes to building personas
- The process for branding and positioning your startup as an industry leader
- How to think strategy before tactics
- What are the key differences between someone who’s a good marketer and a good CMO
- The future of CMO’s
- What you need to become a great CMO
- Building a personal brand
How Alex Katz turned Pornhub into a Cultural Phenomena!
In this episode we have the co-founder of the creative agency Officer & Gentleman Alex Katz, talking about their creative process and working with one of their most unique clients - PornHub.
While Pornhub has become the standard name when it comes to talking about “porn sites”, their marketing is much more than that. The work Alex and his team has done with the site has turned watching porn from being a secret people are embraced about to a brand Kanye West reps for.
So how did Pornhub went from being “another porn aggregator” to a cultural phenomena?
Listen to this episode to find out!
What you’ll learn:
1. How to seize opportunities to find your next clients
2. How to market with “earned media’ in mind
3. Choosing the creative process based on end goals.
4. How to understand trends to improve your marketing
5. Going from Taboo to mainstream
6. How Alex Katz made Pornhub a legitimate brand
7. How to work with data to build your marketing
Campaigns mentioned in this episode:
How Zappos Created a Company Structure where Innovation Thrives
Josh Levine works at Zappos.com at Brand Marketing and is responsible to help market Zappos's culture externally and help small startups and companies to grow their culture organically by uncovering what they are passionate about and their core values.
In this episode, Josh shares main lessons and insights from how Zappos operates and fosters a culture of innovation and experiments. He also shares the core values and tactics that help the company become really user-centric at scale.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why Zappos think of themselves as a “service company that just happens to sell shoes”
- How does Zappos empower their employees to come up with new ideas (and own them)
- How to keep accountability when working with a Holacracy
- How to get your customers to feel like they are a part of something bigger
- How to create a company that truly is “customer first”-centric
- Why experiment fostering company is the key to growth
- What’s Zappos secret on-boarding process?
- The influencers formal vs informal dress code
- Zappos’ unique strategy to share information with employees
How Commun.it Hacked their way to 700k Active Users!
Between super growth hacks and helping brands and governments fight fake news, Commun.it a bootstrap company has managed to grow to 700k users strong.
In this episode, Ran and Netanel, 2 of the company co-founders join us to talk about building a boostrap company, fake news and how they use processes, automation, and providing value to grow their company.
In this episode you’ll learn
- How fake news work on Twitter
- How Commun.it use Quora to generate leads using influencers
- How to turn “non-convertors” into advocates
- How Commun.it use viral loops to harness user engagement to grow their audience
- How to get more testimonials and reviews using value
- How to stay sharp and prioritize
How to scale up Facebook Ads (with Azriel from Ratz Pack Media)
Managing Facebook ads at a scale is a whole different art than managing small budgeted campaigns.
Azriel’s Facebook Advertising agency has worked with over 100 client worldwide, including SaaS startups, eCommerce, brands and what not.
In this time, his agency has dealt with anything from zero to none- budgeted campaigns to large scale well over the 100K monthly budgets.
In this episode, Azriel shares his workflow to optimising funnels and shares tips on scaling up your Facebook campaigns (with strategies for both B2C & B2B)
What you’ll learn:
- Why Facebook’s new CBO is good for newbies and bad for experts.
- How to leverage CBO to optimize your campaigns (and why you should start now)
- Arzriel’s workflow with new clients
- What’s the on thing you have to do before scaling your campaigns.
- How to scale your campaign if you’re a B2C (or e-commerce).
- How to scale your campaign if you’re a B2B startup
- Tweaking creatives vs. tweaking budgets.
Using data to getting your A-ha Moment (With Otniel Ben Amara from Dojo BI).
Making data drive decisions can be the difference between having your product completely fail and wining over the competition.
In this episode Otniel Ben Amara, data scientist & engineer. Co-founder of the Data Agency Dojo BI, stops by to talk to us about working with data to improve your product.
We talk about anything ranging from when should you hire your first data analysts and how to scale your team to how to query your data and finding your A-ha moment to reach product market fit.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to define your A-ha moment based on data
- The basics on how to think and approach your data
- How ‘Houseparty’ found their A-ah moment
- When should you hire your first data analyst
- What’s the formula to the company size-data analysts ratio.
- How to turn data into growth insights
- Why your onboarding the most crucial moment for your product
The secrets to becoming a Technical Marketer! (Elad Levy)
Elad Levy , now CMO of Fixel, has gone a long way to from being a marketing Junior to the Technical Marketing expert he is today.
In this episode Elad talks about his work in Fixel and gaining technical knowledge as a marketer.
He also talks about the transition from being a “tactical” marketer to adopting a wider strategic marketing perspective, how to find marketing opportunities as a small marketing team and why you should refer to yourself as a small company and not a startup.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why calling yourself a startup is great for investors, bad for marketing
- What are the two technical skills every marketer needs to hone
- How to prfioritize marketing efforts to spot the best opportunity
- How Fixel hacked a conference to build super targeted offers
- Why you should start with things you can automate and scale first.
Super Bowl 2019 Commercials Breakdown
Did you watch the Super Bowl? Of course you did. You wanted to see all those ads didn’t you?
In this episode , Roy & Jonathan (AKA “we”) go through the Super Bowl ads that made an impact on us - good (You did good Pampers!) and bad (yes, we’re looking at you TurboFax creepy ad!).
So what were the best commercials (and why) and who creeped us out? And who did we think just shows plain out disrespect to the legacy?
Yup, we talk about it all in the week’ episode.
Also! We were honoured to have Rise’s star and Super male model Blake Korman with us!
Here are some of the ads we’ve mentioned
Gett Delivery Growing A company within a company (With Danielle Sharabi)
Danielle Sharabi took over Gett Delivery's growth pretty early on in the product's lifetime. In the past few years, she dedicated her efforts to educate the private sector on using more 'same day' deliveries and finding the right product-market fit for the service.
In this episode, Danielle shares stories and tactics she in her 5 people team used to grow Gett Delivery. She talks about the pros and cons of building a ‘startup’ within a company, why brand matters from day one (and what it even means) and how thinking differently and being scrappy can help young companies to win the game better than huge media budgets.
Listen to the episode:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- The pros and cons of building a startup within a company
- How a team of “superheroes” think
- Why small teams with the right DNA move faster
- Why you need to become a “problem solver” and not a “problem dweller.”
- The importance of cross-company collaborations
- How to bring you A-ah moment into conferences and events.
Building a product-based community (With Magali Bursztyn)
Magali Bursztyn, now a community manager at Waze and ex-Wix knows all about working with users who don’t only use your product, but love it and want to be a part of it.
In this episode she shares from her experience how to get user engaged into a community, how to create a culture where your users are a part of your product and you are a part of their lives and how to build a brand that is human and people care about.
Listen to the episode:
In this episode you willl learn:
- How to engage users and nurture them to become part of your community
- Why sharing the process with your users builds trust and loyalty.
- The power of face to face get-togethers.
- Why your users can be the best feature compass
- How to make your brand’s personality shine on Social Media
Why Strategy beats Tactics, with Yan Yanko!
Yan (Yanko) Kotliarski is the VP digital at Atreo and one of the most well-known Performance marketers in Israel.
Over the past decade, Yan has worked with some (if not all?!) of the biggest brands in Israel, gives talks about Facebook ads and marketing campaign.
In this episode, Yan talks about how working in Atreo has brought his understanding of the importance of strategy to a whole new level, why the original message most B2B tech startups can limit their growth and how you should start thinking about your marketing.
Listen to the episode
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why your tech-oriented marketing message doesn’t work (even when marketing to other tech people).
- How to dig into your data to build a useful buyer’s persona.
- Why Strategy should come before tactics - even when you’re eager to start.
- Are TV & Radio obsolete?
Building products for developers & lessons from Google, Slack & Twitch!
building product for developers & lessons from Google, Slack & Twitch
Amir Shevat has definitely done some impressive things in his career.
From driving the Startup Ecosystem Development for Google
Being the director of developer’s relations for Slack (if you’re using any Slack integration - this is the man you should thank)
To his current role, where he is in-charge of building products and tools to enrich the developer’s experience for Twitch.
In this episode, Amir shares blows our mind with what Twitch really is (Future of sports and interactive viewing experience), to what marketers need to know about it, how to work with Twitch influencers and more.
Amir also shares insights from what he is learnt from working at Google, Slack, Twitch (Amazon) about process, project management and building better products for your users.
What you’ll learn:
- What exactly is Twitch
- The “Win win win” model
- Why “Alignment” is important (and what it means for your company)
- The magic of single-threaded ownership
- How Amazon reverse-plan its products
- What’s the press release method to building better products.
The process Monday.com uses to manage product growth!
Michal Lupo is the Growth Product Manager of Monday.com’s , a visual project management platform that that helps you to Plan, organize and track projects in one visual collaborative space.
In this episode, Michal stops by to talk about the company’s growth processes, how they choose their focus KPI, ideate with the them and run the experimentations cycle to help growth their product’s retention and adoption rate.
You’ll get insights of how a fast growing company like Monday.com treats their growth, how its teams operates and what the day to day of the process looks like.
Listen to the episode.
What you’ll learn:
- The structure of Monday.com’s growth teams
- How the company handles their growth meetings
- How does a testing cycle looks like
- The method used to ideate, prioritise and run tests
- How does Monday.com chooses and define its KPI’s
- How Monday.com uses the ICE method.
- How to stay focused on test fasts versus testing a lot of different things slow.
Our guest:
Michal Lupu has 7 years of experience as a product manager and is currently the growth product manager at monday.com. She’s the one in-charge of making sure the team is focused on the biggest opportunities, run the most significant tests and run fast.
Prior monday.com she was a product manager at ironSource and lead her own startup called SKEEPER, a productivity app for skipping the hassle of long lines.
How to market to developers! (lessons from Coralogix)
In this episode, Ariel Assaraf, co-founder and CPO of Coralogix stops by to share his insights on how to market to developers.
If your product is directed towards developers or CTO’s this episode is a must have. Ariel debunks that developers are an audience that is “allergic” to marketing and talks about understanding what your user really cares about.
He also shares insightful lessons on how to think different about your marketing (including your marketing stack and team structure), how to get your first big clients at an early stage and what do customer really buy from your when they sign that contract.
As a marketer, this episode is full of golden nuggets.
Listen to the episode here:
What you’ll learn:
- How to gain the trust of big clients as an early stage company
- How to really understand your audience
- Why only developers can market to developers
- What marketing channels work surprisingly well for them.
- How to change in startup culture changed the developer role in a company for goo.
About our amazing guest:
Ariel Assaraf is the co-founder and CPO at Coralogix, previously a group leader at Verint and PM at the intelligence unit 8200. Loves to contribute to good causes.
About Coralogix
By integrating log insights into the software delivery process, Coralogix streamlines the development lifecycle and empowers each one of the departments in the R&D organization (Dev, DevOps, SecOps).
Key Insights we’ve learned from our podcast guests so far!
Elementor’s journey to 1 Million users!
Ben, who joined the company before the first version of the product launches, gives insights about how they got their initial traction in a saturated market, the 1# thing the company does continuously to grow it’s popularity and the its secret sauce to its success.
How to get users to do what you want using “Choice Architecture”
How to bootstrap your way to 22,000 users
How to work with a Creative & get the Best Results.
Most of the time when people hire creatives, they waste their money and time. Why? Because people don’t know how to work with creatives.
They either confuse someone with a creative outlet as being a creative (designer, marketing person) or simply get the processes wrong.
Come learn from the Master of Influencer Marketing!
He’s here on the show to talk about how he grew Hypr and signed with some of the world’s biggest brands.
BUT(!) he’s also here to explain exactly how to run a successful Influencer Marketing campaign. From setting goals, finding the right influencers, how to structure the deal and more.
How this app got featured on the App store and at apple events! (at a $0 budget)
If you’re thinking he spent millions of dollars - guess again. We’re talking near 0 budget.
How F#%@ Up Nights went from an idea to sold out events!
How Yotpo Redesigned their Website & Improved Conversion by 93%! [Playbook]
How to never run out of content ideas (Like ever!!!)
Steve Job’s marketing rules broken & Nike wins the jackpot
[Outtake] Initiative Q, Does it Deserve the Hype?
How to Market a Merch & Swag Company! [Brainstorming Session]
In this episode we cover:
- Going into the mind of your target audience
- How to stand out (and why it’s better than being better).
- Smart targeting strategies
- Why your ads should resonate what your target audience already has in mind
- How to use analytics to choose your marketing message and ad.
- Does your audience wants to make the best decision or the best received decision by their boss.
[Top Secret] Our Instagram Framework to Gain 43k Followers
Since When Do Pop-Tarts® Bite Back?
In this episode we cover:
Roy Povarchik tries to Master follower engagement on Instagram stories
Jonathan‘s been stealing lunches from our sponsors kitchen and creating more engagement on his contact
Do brands need to stay politically correct?
Is the value of peoples attention span more valuable than gold?
Why should let your values lead your branding and create authentic marketing
Bambi versus Lion King
The Kardashian’s
What does authenticity really mean?
Is Influencer Marketing Just a SHAM!?
In this episode we talk about:
-Is influencer marketing real or is it just the sham?
- what it takes to create an impact with influencer marketing (and what are the common mistakes)
- What is the one metric you should care about when choosing the influencer
- Are Brand rivalries is it worth doing?
- What is the one element that will make or break your brand rivalry campaign
- Are you hitting your emotional cues in your advertising?
The Talk - The Birds the Bees & the Leads.
We also discuss how Social media is influencing your kids in ways you didn’t even think of and is Facebook marketing dead? Or do you just suck as a marketer.
How to steal Creative like a Boss!
Is Brand Narrative as addictive as cocaine?