Founders, Rene Banuelos and Jerry Rocco, have proven to be the strength behind 22Social. Their combined skills and experience has paved the way for the creation of an app that is truly a collaborative effort. Jerry's direct marketing background and Rene's development skills have made this team an unstoppable duo. In less than one year they have taken 22Social's user acquisition to 24,000.
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We're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software.
Bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it.
Make your advertising remarkable and valuable.
Make your offer impossible to refuse.
Today's Podcast Highlights
[07.25 - The motivation has been really working with business owners and seeing the frustrations that they've had.]
[07.38 - It's not easy especially someone that's new to start getting results online and especially in social media.]
[08.23 - The technology makes it easier for you to get your stuff up and running fast.]
[08.55 - We've put up a first product and decided to let people use it and see where it went from there and really listen to a lot of feedback and that’s really has been shaping the software.]
[09.48 - A year and a half getting no feedback with technology can kill you.]
[11.16 - Everything we've learned from the past has been applied to 22Social in some way.]
[14.27 - I've been programming since I was 14.]
[15.16 - Trying to find the right talent and keep getting in-house versus outsourcing a lot of it.]
[16.40 - We really learned where we had to improve our software in terms of making it easier and simpler to use.]
[17.31 - I think one of the biggest reasons why we keep growing is just our pricing point.]
[18.23- We're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software.]
[20.31 - It's just a regular fan page and our offer is "Try It Free".]
[21.11 - We collect their name, email address and we pop them in an email auto-responder right away.]
[22.16 - We bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it with a unique promise.]
[22.54 - We're seeing about a 30% opt-in rate.]
[25.54 - I think being part of, being in front of our audience and being in front of our users, and being accessible has played a big role on the fact that people have stuck on with us.]
[28.40 - Within a few clicks you can get a picture, a product, words, whatever, and a call to action right in the flow of traffic.]
[33.09 - By giving that other person your content it's a win-win.]
[35.51 - One of the reasons is that low entry point of $2 to get on a trial account versus staying on the free account that converts over to a regular subscription after 30 days.]
[36.27 - Make your advertising remarkable and valuable.]
[38.01 - Make your offer impossible to refuse with a user-friendly proposition that provokes scarcity.]
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Full Transcript
I met up with Rene because he is a founder of a software company (22Social) and I like connecting with as many successful startup as possible and getting them on my show, talking about their successes. Because his technology is all about Facebook marketing and includes an amazing streaming piece within Facebook using Google hangout, so we thought rather than do like a podcast like we do normally, let's do it as a hangout. With that being said, let's just check first of all that everyone can hear me okay.
If you're listening, just type in the chat box below and say, "Hi Paul" and for those of you listening on iTunes or on the podcast, sadly you can't do that especially if you're driving, but otherwise we'll make sure this broadcast is just as useful to you guys on the podcast as is to the people watching on the video.
You'll be able to get the show notes online on disruptware.com and in any links or anything that we discuss on the broadcast and obviously that will be available as a transcript on the blog and go there and get everything you need. Without further ado, I've got on the line, I've got Rene as I said, I’ve also got Jerry Rocco, who is also a co-founder and head of marketing as well.
We're going to talk to them both. Talk to them a little bit about their background, of how they got into creating this amazing software and more importantly how they actually got customers, which of course is what we’re all interested in, and then what we'll also do is just talk a bit about software itself, and hopefully give you a demo and give you an idea of how you can actually use that in your business as well, to get more customers, get more leads, and obviously convert everything into sales. Let's get started and say hello to Rene, hey Rene how are you doing?
Rene Banuelos: Hey, how’s it going Paul. Thanks for having us both here. I'm really excited here especially the fact that you're doing it in a different format, you're running a hangout and then repurposing that to podcast, I think it's great, I think that's what a lot of people should do, thanks for pushing the envelop there.
Paul Clifford: More importantly thanks for taking time out of your busy day, in fact I can see the view behind you, that's PETCOPark, right? With the Padres event?
Rene Banuelos: Yeah, PETCOPark is right behind me. They've been installing a new huge screen TV in the last few weeks or so, they're testing that now, I don't know if you guys can catch it but anyway. Yeah, it's a great view, but I'm not looking at it you guys are so, turn around.
Paul Clifford: I knew obviously we’re going to be doing this today and I knew you'd be doing it in your office. I love the location where you are, sort of a startup area in San Diego. I thought I had to beat that and I was trying to think how I could do that. So I actually moved all my gear outside into the garden, out of my crummy office, so hopefully behind you, you can see something a bit more interesting than the blank wall. We’re outside, as long as no birds decide to take over the mic or land on it or my dog doesn’t interrupt us then we're pretty much all good to go. Just before we get started, let’s just check Jerry's on the line, hey Jerry?
Jerry Rocco: Yeah, can you hear me?
Rene Banuelos: Yeah, now we can.
Jerry Rocco: Excellent. Fantastic. Yes, I'm on the line? Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. I’m probably in the least interesting place. I’m in my home office just writing and doing some videos, so I'm glad to be here and sharing what we're doing with everybody.
Paul Clifford: Awesome. I haven't done many hangouts before, so you know, to everyone listening, I’m kind of playing this a little bit by ear. Obviously Rene and Jerry have been doing this for absolutely ages, but as I'm in control today, so if things don't work quite as smoothly as they should, then you known, by all means, let us know in the chat box, leave any questions in the chat below. Let us know that we're coming through okay and whether you've got anything you want Rene or myself to answer.
Let's get started. Now, Rene tell me a bit about yourself. So 22Social, great company, you're really going places. I think when we first met we went out to a bar in, I think it was Nick Unsworth's event and we're chatting away and you’re telling me that you’re getting customers on and you're converting your free customers even into paid at something like a 10% conversion rate, which I thought that's fantastic, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of that, just tell me a bit about yourself. How did you actually get into all of this?
Rene Banuelos: Well actually it's higher than 10, but Jerry is going to cover that, but just a short story about me. I have a pretty diverse background, I love business, I love marketing. I've also been programming since I was 14. This company I guess in some ways has a few of my personalities in it and a few of the other co-founders personalities as well, but mainly this has been a work in progress.
We used to build the Facebook marketing systems that were white-labeled and one day we just said, we're tired of other people asking us to build them systems and then they don't use them or they don't promote them so they don't go anywhere so we said, “Screw it, let's take the bull by the horns and do it ourselves and start promoting it.” It's been exploding ever since, but back in the early days even before it was 22Social that's when I met Jerry Rocco.
I have a great team. Some people who follow 22Social that you might have met Andrew and some of the other guys. We met up with Jerry back in the early days and realized that Jerry had a lot of the internet marketing skills that we didn't. We have similar backgrounds as well, we’ve both done network marketing, we've done different things. We figured it was a perfect match, so he jumped on board and decided to help us out.
We continued working on, like I said, on several internet marketing or Facebook marketing systems, but then when it came to really shine; I guess 22Social is the result of a lot of practice projects that we were paid for in a nutshell. But, I think the motivation for mainly the most active or more the original founders for Jerry and also Andrew, myself, is been really working with business owners and seeing the frustrations that they've had.
It's not easy especially someone that's new to start getting results online and especially in social media, especially because it's really misunderstood that we figured, “What can we do to simplify the process as much as possible?” I say that so many times on different interviews because it is, that's the reality of it. The easier it is for you to setup something like a landing page or a funnel and with 22Social actually inside Facebook, the better result you're going to be.
Because you’re going to be able to spend time what I call a human side of it, which is connecting with people, which is working on your offer, working on your words, and all the other stuff that you can't easily replace that with a machine. But, if the technology makes it easier for you to get your stuff up and running fast, capture the leads as best as possible and harness that information, so like I said before, you just focus on the human side then we are doing our job. That's really what drives us, it’s making it easier.
Paul Clifford: Got it. But you didn't start off, like with this did you? When you got started, you got together and start creating some software, what you see today isn't what you intended it to be, is that right?
Rene Banuelos: Well, good question, we've been through what Eric Ries, from Lean Startup calls is the learn loop. We've put up a first product and decided to let people use it and see where it went from there and really listen to a lot of feedback and that’s really has been shaping the software. One example is really we weren't really working with hangouts. We couldn't do it when we started, so that was a transition or a result of that feedback loop and a lot of exploring on our part.
A lot of it too is one of the features, our clone or syndication or simulcasting feature, I used three words already. Mainly in the software side, simulcasting is more popular word, but that one wasn't even in our imagination back when we started so we're constantly updating. We had a major upgrade in the last week or so two weeks I guess, that's big, if anyone else is building a project.
I've heard stories of people spending a year or year and a half putting a piece of software together, that's a year and a half of not getting feedback, especially with technology that can kill you. Fast forward a year and a half what you thought was great at the beginning may not even be relevant once you launch it, so speed is critical.
Paul Clifford: Very true, very true. Looking at the, again, coming back to Lean Startup, I did this, this afternoon. I have another SaaS application which we're building and I got this great idea and the first thing I do is I mock the whole thing up and I do it in a wireframe using a tool called Balsamiq.
We just get on the phone with prospects, with people in our market and click through the screens. Say, "Is this, does this solve a pain for you?" and get that immediate feedback even before we start building. Often, we either get the validation or we get that, “Nah, it’s not that good really, I can do it this way.” Saves just like a fortune in terms of development process just by using that principle.
Rene Banuelos: I mean we actually launched a product before, I mean we have feedback before this is not our first product, like I said we built marketing funnels before. Everything we've learned from the past has been applied to 22Social in some way. That's where we were confident to actually just launch a first product. We turned on the system and got people to buy and use it and tell us from the live system. I mean, I like what you're saying Paul. The cheapest, quickest way to do that is better, if you're doing it with wireframe that saves a lot of time.
Paul Clifford: I think the ultimate goal if we can ever get that working is to actually get someone to buy from a wireframe. If I can actually sell my app from a wireframe.
Rene Banuelos: That would be great right? Get it kind of like I guess a kick starter right buy a 100,000 copies or subscriptions to my software, "Okay, I'll see you back in 60 days, I'll enable it and you’ll have your membership or your subscription enabled, right? You’ll be able to use it." That would be amazing.
Jerry Rocco: That's how we met Rene.
Rene Banuelos: What?
Jerry Rocco: That's kind of how we met.
Rene Banuelos: Yeah, actually if you want to tell that story Jerry, go for it.
Jerry Rocco: Yeah, a little bit. We actually, we met through a Facebook ad when you think about it. But now, we met through Facebook, but not traditionally through Facebook., It wasn't like we became friends on Facebook through our personal profiles. You went through an ad, one of the ads on the right hand side, right?
Rene Banuelos: Sneaky Jerry man, your funnel got me.
Jerry Rocco: I'm not a traditional like social media marketer. I'm more of a direct marketer, but we formed a relationship, even so, ironically through Facebook, through a direct marketing relationship and now here we are in a hangout together years and years later. But, our first endeavor together was you came to me with pretty much something very similar to 22Social.
The whole system for my team and I said that sounds awesome, I love it and you had put together a proposal for me. I said, I love it, it sounds good, but how about we sell it first and then we fulfill the orders later and so that's what we did. We sold the Facebook product put a 146 people on a webinar, we sold 86 of them and then that's how we became friends and business partners, selling that.
Rene Banuelos: That wasn't even, that was a little more than wireframes. It was actually the artwork of what the finished product was going to be. It was very easy on the eyes. Andrew did an amazing job back then. Andrew was already part of our team. That helped out a lot, but yeah that's how we got going. We were going to do some of that. I almost forgot that's how it happened, you're right. We've done that before. That's how we sold some marketing funnel, Facebook marketing systems in the past actually, but just from screen shots from the Photoshop output of it.
Paul Clifford: Got it. Your background before that, it wasn't in software right? I think you mentioned you're in, obviously you knew internet marketing, you knew social and everything, but how did you create the software aspect, did you hire people, did you outsource it, how did you actually go about that? You have this idea in your head and you need to like get one or two, I don't know how many you've got, but developers to actually build something.
Rene Banuelos: Actually Paul, I think you're asking me, but actually Paul, I'm a little bit of a rare breed. I've actually have a software background. I know if you caught it initially, I've been programming since I was 14 and I think that's helped me come up with ideas because I know what can be done, what's feasible in a short span in terms of development.
A lot of the architecture behind 22Social, I put that together and we just hired developers to help me actually implement and write all the software, and a lot of it I wrote myself. We haven't had to go through that I guess that most people would, so we're different in that sense. I think in a lot of areas like even our branding I think Andrew Lane has done an amazing job with our branding, our colors and logos and all that, we didn't have to look for it.
We mainly, if I can say, it's been in recruiting. Using a word from network marketing, but trying to find the right talent and keep getting in-house versus outsourcing a lot of it. Jerry in some ways almost recruited himself by finding me almost through that ad, that's what solved our problems. If I could give anyone advice it's really either recruiting people in your team or recruiting people you can actually create a win-win situation with and work together and solve different problems right...leverage each other's strengths. That was a long answer to that question.
Paul Clifford: Oh, no, no, it’s cool. That makes complete sense especially if you come from a development background, but let’s look at the business side though, first of all, because now this is obviously this is the hard bit, in actually getting customers on board. Tell me about it. How did you get like your first 20 customers? How did you actually get them on board with you?
Rene Banuelos: Wow, the first 20 or private first couple of hundred were hard work. We got referred to a group of people and one of the MLM companies that I believe are still using our software. We did a lot of testing with and I won't name them, but it's probably the group of people who were least tech-savvy in the marketing industry. I guess the good thing about that is we really learned where we had to improve our software in terms of making it easier and simpler to use, but that's really what it was. Going back to your question is, just through our relationship that referred us those few, first 100 or 200 clients.
Paul Clifford: That relationship though, that referral relationship, what did they do? Did they market to their community your software or something like that?
Rene Banuelos: Yes, exactly, that's what they did. At that time it was a network marketing company. We connected with one of the leaders in that company and that person promoted it to their reps and that's how we got the first few hundred accounts.
Paul Clifford: Okay, and then now, how are you scaling? What's your model like? What's your pricing module and how did you get customers into your funnel?
Rene Banuelos: I think one of the, Jerry you might want to answer this after I do, but one of the biggest reasons why we keep growing, we keep getting leads and Jerry gets excited every morning as he sees the emails of new leads or sales coming in, is just our pricing point. If you, we're not an opportunity, we’re not a networking company, we're not really an affiliate program either, but we allow people to earn a subscription to our service for free by referring three of their friends.
Either if you're in internet marketing, you’re probably working with a lot of colleagues and you need our software. All someone would have to do is refer three accounts and then we would waive their fee completely. Some people get one, some people get two or three. Some people get four or five referrals and even more.
That's allowed us to really go viral, because we're encouraging people and rewarding them for sharing our software. I think that's one of the reasons why we've grown so much from that.
Jerry Rocco: I could actually show our funnel pages if anybody wants to see them.
Rene Banuelos: Sure.
Jerry Rocco: Okay, I don't mind doing that. I’m just going to make sure I can stop these videos here from playing.
Rene Banuelos: Just be very descriptive for the people who are listening to us and in the future on podcast.
Jerry Rocco: Oh that's right, that's right. Okay, let me just share my screen really quick.
Rene Banuelos: If you don't mind Paul?
Jerry Rocco: If you don't mind?
Paul Clifford: Yeah, yeah, no of course.
Jerry Rocco: Okay, cool. All right. I'm just going to...people might be wondering who is this guy sitting in this dark room in his beach apartment or whatever. If you can bluebox me, folks if you want to take a look at these. This is when Rene said why I am excited every morning. If you look at the far right hand side of my screen it's right now it’s like 3:17. I know what time it is everyday because I can look at what time my leads come in and it’s usually a few minutes from the last one.
At 3:16, 3:10, 3:10, 3:00, 2:53, this happens all day long because we were talking about the funnel right? We spend about a $100 a week on just simple promoted posts. No expensive sophisticated marketing on Facebook whatsoever. This is the growth that people are looking for. I haven't even gotten through till the beginning of the day yet. At 6:40, 6:40, 6:38, and it goes on and on. This is just one page of 100 leads and this goes on throughout today until 12 and then it goes into March. I can keep going and I'll show you the pages that actually generate this and you can see now I’m on March 11th and it just keeps going. All these leads just keeps going.
Paul Clifford: For people listening on the podcast, what Jerry is showing basically his inbox in Gmail, which is just showing hundreds and hundreds of emails coming in with every new lead that’s coming through your funnel and I guess what you're saying then is that the way you're doing that is you're getting free registration through promoted posts on Facebook, right?
Jerry Rocco: Well, what we're doing, here, I'm going to get another page here. This is our fan page that we're on right now. It's just a regular fan page and our offer is "Try It Free" and then we do a lot of free content around trying it free. When people try it free they click on this link right here and for your podcast listeners, this is the landing page inside Facebook and this is one that Andrew designed with me and the call to action here is "Try our free Facebook app, it's fast, it's easy, it's risk-free."
We're going to give you this awesome page. We have a bunch of social proof on here, a bunch of testimonials on here and we have a bunch of buttons for people to take action. Get it free, get it free, get it free, and then we have a lot of social proof. When people click "Get It Free", they pass through to another page and now we have their commitment and at that point we collect their information. We collect their name, email address and we pop them in an email auto-responder right away, so that way they're already a lead, and that's how we generate our leads because they get it free.
As soon as they get it free, they're pushed over to this video and there's no video playing right now, but there’s usually a video playing right here and you're name is in the top left hand corner because it's Facebook. We know who you are and so we put a picture on the top there because you’ve already clicked the button and accepted our apps. So we know who you are so we say, “Hey, Rene if that’s you, then this is your last chance to see this video.”
Then we just say, then what we do is we bring up another problem, which is half of, most of your connections today are on mobile device and most apps out there, almost all of them aren't mobile. You just got an awesome app that was free just like everybody else's, but here's a glaring problem that you don't even know about and if you're watching my screen for your viewers as McCauley Culkin over there going, “Oh no the pages don't work” on our landing page.
We tell them what’s at stake, we bring vivid awareness to the problem and then we solve it with a unique promise that’s easy to take which is, let us solve this effortlessly, automatically for you for only $2 and if you leave this page you won't get this $2 offer again. The fear of loss there is we're going to save you $20, you won't have another chance to try our software. It's $22 a month, but you can try it for $2.
Then we say, once you try it, if you refer three you can get it free so you can get everything we offer for $2 and that's been good for us because it's been easy to get our customers in the door and capture leads and then we're seeing about a 30% opt-in rate, a 30% upgrade from when they get the free app, because we don't even know if they have a fan page when they get the free app.
That's kind of a qualifier. Most of them...we try to target only people who have a fan page, but when they get the free offer, then we know that they're interested and then we show them, we educate them a little bit more, bring about a problem, solve it for them, make it easy and that's how we convert at 30% for the second offer. That's pretty much it.
Then we just kill them with value over and over and over and over and over again until they get excited about what we're doing. They share our product and I could even show you the admin panel where you could see how many, it's about 40%, 30%. I think our system numbers every week we do about 33% to 38% every single week, go from light to pro, that doesn't mean they stick that way throughout time, but that's the initial immediate conversion.
Paul Clifford: Right, okay. So you got around about 30% to convert from free to the trial, the paid trial, the $2 trial, right? And then what sort of percentage then convert from that more basic, renew...in the $22 a month?
Jerry Rocco: You're saying what's the average life of a customer?
Paul Clifford: Yeah, well I guess what I was thinking is what percentage, you got 30% to convert to Pro at $2, what percentage then if you know convert then into the full amount?
Jerry Rocco: You know, numbers suggest around like 85%. I don't have anything right now, 85% to 90%.
Paul Clifford: That's brilliant.
Jerry Rocco: At least for the first month, we found our average user sticks around for, and we've only been around for like, really pumping this product out for a year, our average user is about 8 months.
Paul Clifford: That’s pretty good though. You got 8 months worth of customer revenue converting the majority like 80% odd percent $2 into paid and so there must be a trick. Are you doing like some really good educational, are you pushing good educational material to them during that trial period to make sure that they really get good adoption, you know what I mean by that? So that they really come on and start using it, see the benefit, which of course then creates the extension.
Jerry Rocco: Not as much as we should, but we do some.
Paul Clifford: We're all the same.
Rene Banuelos: I think to chime in on that, we took a little break from that probably towards the end of last year. We really saw the feedback of people saying where are you guys, we need to know, we need to learn from you and I think that's what worked initially and that's what is starting to work again is committing to what you just said Paul is actually providing a lot of value and a lot of training and that's what Jerry, Jerry has done a really good job in the last few weeks.
Also providing a lot of support. We run two hangouts a week. Tuesdays we run a marketing hangout at 12:00 p.m. Pacific and Wednesdays we’re on support hangout for the newbies who want to just ask any questions. I think being part of, being in front of our audience and being in front of our users, and being accessible has played a big role on the fact that people have stuck on with us.
Paul Clifford: I can see that and then having the live broadcast weekly and especially via hangout method, you can really connect. I think you break down any barrier in the internet and focus a lot more personal right? Obviously that’s working for you really, really well.
Jerry Rocco: Absolutely and you were talking about feedback loop earlier. On our Tuesday hangout, I had asked everybody, I put a comment up and I said, just tell us what business you're in, and we’ll try to apply this concept to your business. Thirty-five people immediately replied just to that comment and that actually went on our wall and then about another 35 replied outside that comment within just a few minutes.
It was just like, “Well, we know who our customers are and what their business is." It's really that simple. Not only that, I mean we can go back and go through, because every time somebody clicks on a button because Facebook is the world's largest person registry, what Rene is created is the ability to pull a profile out of Facebook. This is all spam compliant and it's actually one of the only sustainable ways to get ideas out of Facebook because all those scrapers are going to be gone eventually.
Facebook’s pretty clear about those terms of service. They want you to develop the lead and that's what we offer somebody is the ability for them to create a page that has a button on it that people can click that button, pulls the Facebook profile out and it goes into a lead manager for them. It can also trigger a sequence of auto responded messages.
If you are a pro-marketer that's definitely recommended, but you can get to know your customers by clicking on their profiles, who they are, what time they clicked on your profile, when they were born, date of birth, where they live. You can see what they had for breakfast, if they posted it. It’s a lot different than the old crumpled up piece of paper.
Paul Clifford: I love that. I think you call it, is it SRM, social relationship manager, I think. So basically CRM, a customer relationship manager almost, built in to Facebook and that's really, really powerful. As we're moving into the product itself now, maybe if you just give us some other key benefits for people listening, what is the magic thing that can really, by using your software that can really help develop their business.
Jerry Rocco: There are a couple of different people that can use our product. There is the person who is just getting started and most of the time they're, the trouble with them is they don't know how to get their product to market fast, speed to market, like Rene had said earlier, they're stuck with programming, financial excuses, barriers just to getting their product in front of their customer.
For them within a few clicks they can get their picture, their product, their words, whatever, and they’re call to action right in the flow of traffic and then once they get their offer up there, it's easy to tap into traffic through Facebook. For the newbie, it’s just easier to get their offer where everybody is. For the Pro Marketer, we have a lot of other benefits, as far as, not only being able to get your offer where everybody is, you can get multiple offers there.
When you're doing advertising, you can collect better leads because everything is verified through Facebook as in the web where you can't verify anybody’s email address, name and identity, Facebook we do that. We can also get fans that multiply themselves because if you fangate the actual app, which means you restrict this page to only your fans, who have to like it first. So it builds your list, builds social proof, gets you free exposure, then they land on your page.
As a Pro Marketer, like I said you can extract that information, put it in an email auto-responder to build that sequence, that trust and relationship on an automated basis and the mind-blowing stuff is you can extract the ideas of the people who click on the button, so then you can put that back in the Facebook ads manager, what they call the custom audience and only market to the people who have been on your page and been through your process.
When you do that as a Pro Marketer or Extreme Pro Marketer, you’re always looking for your lowest cost per click and if you're paying for advertising in Facebook and you should be, and you're sending traffic out of Facebook and your competition is sending it in Facebook, you're going to be at a disadvantage. Because if you’re buying traffic from Facebook, it's better to keep it in Facebook and that's what we offer the Pro Marketer.
For the guys who've got a bunch of affiliates, or the company that has got a lot of affiliates or reps, if they can create one successful sales funnel, anybody can duplicate that sales funnel with two clicks, $2, and two minutes basically.
Paul Clifford: Wow, that's amazing and that's the cloning feature isn't it? That you have?
Jerry Rocco: Yes, and I can demo any of this stuff in real time if you want to see it.
Paul Clifford: Right. I think it's a link below, so basically anyone listening here can actually click the link below the screen and actually take a whole copy of a whole page and put it in their own Facebook page, right?
Rene Banuelos: Exactly and one of the things we added in the last few weeks is actually it's you're not just taking a copy of the page, you're actually emulating the page you clone, which means or simulcasting is another word. Any time let's say Paul somebody made a copy of your 22S page, installed that in their Facebook page, any time you change any of the media, let's say you have a new hangout next week, that's automatically updated, if you change the headline or the copy or anything like that, it automatically gets propagated.
For affiliates or network marketing teams it's perfect because the super affiliate or the main affiliate can create a funnel and have it be reflected if there's a change in copy because it converts better, it all automatically gets reflected to all the pages that clone the original. In a network marketing team, if the leader of that team creates new hangouts every week, changes the video, does anything, the down line doesn’t have to worry about all that.
It gets, automatically gets, propagated and the ones who do want to, who are a little more experienced, a little more savvy, who want to overwrite that and say, “You know what I like the whole page, but I want my own headline” then they can do that as well.
Paul Clifford: Right.
Rene Banuelos: They can actually override that and keep their own headline, so it doesn't come from that parent page.
Paul Clifford: Not just affiliates though, say if I was a company just selling my own product, then I can build my own page, my own demos, I can do all the testing and everything like that myself, and then I can ask, then my affiliates to clone that page and I know that they're using a funnel that converts.
Rene Banuelos: Exactly, exactly. Right on. Correct. I mean that's the thing with uses, we've had talks with online radio stations. Imagine from a radio station perspective let's say, you normally have an audience, right? I mean let's say you're an entrepreneurship radio station. There's a lot of people who'd be interested in having that content especially quality content on their Facebook page.
Allowing them to clone let's say like a radio station page on to their Facebook page, gives them that content. One of the hardest things to do for most people, non-marketers is to create content. By giving that other person your content it's a win-win. They get to actually provide that content to the tribe and you get the exposure. So that’s the other way to look at it as well, to apply it.
Paul Clifford: Brilliant.
Rene Banuelos: Don't know if I confused you, but!?
Jerry Rocco: I love it because affiliate marketing, you have, if I enter into an affiliate marketing relationship with Rene, my most prized possession, my list, I'm going to give it to him because I am selling his products and then he's going to enter into a relationship with another product creator and then my list, which I had was all mine, I gave to Rene, now Rene shares it with another product creator and I'm diluting my most prized possession my list.
With 22Social it allows the product creator who's the best at doing the demos, the best at doing the selling, the best at answering questions to be demonstrating on an unlimited amount of pages, but all of those independent reps keep their own likes, keep their own leads, sharing the profits from the sales, but never jeopardizing the integrity of their list because their list never goes to the main affiliate and they don't suck up everybody's list and we know how valuable list is, because you just got to keep filling it.
Paul Clifford: Sure, sure, absolutely. I guess for anyone listening if you ever want to try it out I think there's a button at the bottom of the screen, which I put on there, it took me two seconds, where you can just join 22Social. What you can also do if anyone is on is just click the like button at the top and that will actually just like the Disruptware page, which will be much appreciated some love would be really, really cool. For other people who are looking to get in touch with Rene or Jerry, how should they get in touch with you?
Rene Banuelos: Jerry?
Jerry Rocco: Okay, I was going to say our page is always the best place to find us, you know private message our page or post something on our page. Depends on what they're looking for. Contact us personally through the pages it works as well just ask for us and we'll probably read that or Jerry or Rene at 22Social.
Paul Clifford: Cool, just before we finish let's just have a look, does anyone got any questions, you know that want to ask...had a couple of questions in the chat box. Rene or Jerry do you want to just cover a couple of those?
Jerry Rocco: Sure, this is interactive, it's a hangout, so anybody can ask anything. Whether you're mobile or not, which makes it the hangout. Rene did you see something on there that you wanted to talk about?
Rene Banuelos: Yeah, I think Rich Love has a few questions here and he says can you talk about how we get, he puts 10% conversions, but we actually get higher than that, and I think one of the reasons is that low entry point of $2 to get on a trial account versus staying on the free account that converts over to a regular subscription after 30 days. I think that's one of the reasons, Jerry correct me if I’m wrong, but he also has another question he says, so you want to cover that since you answered it.
Jerry Rocco: Sure, I actually, I'll give a 5 step formula that I usually follow through with any offer that'll work that I followed with this offer and you could probably apply it almost to anything. The first step is one, make your advertising remarkable and valuable, so you want to stop people, you've heard get their attention right away. You want to take it remarkable, but you want to make it valuable in any advertising you do.
If you look at some of the stuff on our page, you notice there's a lot of value in it, but I'm also asking for that sale. The first thing I do is make it remarkable and valuable. The second thing I do is, name and vividly describe their urgent problem because you want to bring that to the forefront and stir some kind of emotion right away. The third thing I do is prove that I can solve their problem, wait no wait, one, two, three, hold on a second.
Paul Clifford: It is five right? It is five.
Jerry Rocco: This is my copywriter's cheat sheet. I actually wrote it, but I keep it next to me. One is make your advertising valuable, two is identify and name their urgent problem with vivid awareness, three solve their urgent problem with a unique promise, so when you get to 22Social, you know it's a unique promise. It's different than anything else you saw. The moment that your visitor sees that they think they know what's going on, they're gone. Always keep them on their toes and keep them engaged.
Solve their urgent problem with a unique promise. Then four, prove that you can solve it with unquestionable proof. We do that which is a ton of social proof that just kind of happens automatically first, thankfully. If you don't have social proof yet, you don't have testimonials, things like that to answer objections, you can always go with undeniable facts that agree with the world view of your ideal customer.
Then five, make your offer impossible to refuse with a user-friendly proposition that provokes scarcity. So that's why we have, it's only $2, it's automatic, it's right there, you already clicked the button, just get it over with, finish it, give us the $2 or you're going to end up giving us $22 later. So that's kind of what we do, hopefully that was helpful.
Paul Clifford: No, that was really, really good actually. You can see how compelling your offer on your page is. The $2 thing that you do, even that looks quite simplistic from my perspective. I can see myself almost wanting to sign up because you've made it so point and click. Simple, okay, basically it's literally drag and drop. You don't have to do anything complex and before you know it you got something live, streaming within your Facebook page, which I think is really, really powerful. And of course that's...your business is growing now for you've been growing this for like about a year now, is that right?
Rene Banuelos: I'm sorry?
Paul Clifford: Rene, is it about a year now you've been growing really, really focusing on getting your customers on broad?
Rene Banuelos: Yeah, it's been May of 2012 which is, no 2013, not 2012, confusing my years there. So it's been less than a year actually. We've had explosive growth we keep getting fresh customers every single month, every single day actually, so it's been insane.
Paul Clifford: How many customers you're up to now?
Rene Banuelos: We have more than I think is 21,000-22,000 close to, not quite 22,000 free accounts, I mean total accounts, free and paid.
Jerry Rocco: More than that.
Rene Banuelos: I don’t check it every single day. I should probably.
Jerry Rocco: I'm looking at them right now...it's like 23 or 24,000, yeah. I can't do the math right now, I’m trying to add them all up. It's right around there give or take a thousand from 22,000-23,000.
Rene Banuelos: Wow, you’re right we passed 22,000, we should’ve...that should have been a big landmark for us.
Jerry Rocco: We went right passed 30,000 likes on our page and none of us blinked right? We were just like, ‘oh we just went to 30,000’, all right, just keep going and that was two days ago now we're at like 33, 30 - , I don't know, we gained like a hundred and something fans a day and those are almost exact to the amount of leads in customers we get a day because they have to go through the funnel. So a lead does actually equal sale for us. In an environment where everybody is saying, "You can't sell on social, you can't sell social."
I think one of the things that helped us too is, we went out and said, "Yes you can. Stop listening to everybody who says you can't." In fact we just took down our website. I don't know if you’ve checked out our website. We don't need a website to win online and neither do you, go to Facebook. That was our website. Something we learned from Ryan Holiday when he had said, when he was looking for the name of his book which is "Trust me I'm lying." It's confessions of a mass media maven written in red.
It's an awesome book. Probably one of the best starts of a book I've ever read, but he says, "When I came up with that title and people either loved it or hated it, I knew I have the right one because it polarized people." Anytime you can polarize people, the people who are listening are going to listen harder, and the other people are going to listen because they hate you.
Paul Clifford: Yeah, yeah, that's brilliant. On that point though, you said, even your home website goes straight to Facebook. What are your concerns long term? About your whole business, babysitting and revolving within Facebook, do you...you know how these things happen, right? People get banned, I’m not saying you’re not doing anything wrong at all, but things can get out of control and obviously you're whole business is based in that. How do you feel about that?
Jerry Rocco: Did you see my email inbox? Those are mine, they're not Facebook's. They're in my email auto-responder, all that data, all those Facebook IDs. You think I only have one Facebook account? I mean for doing advertising. If I had all those IDs and I had all that data and if everything exploded today on Facebook, I could still go in and market to all those IDs.
It's all about the list right? And Facebook allows us to build the best list possible because I know those are real people. Where Google messed up and gave me a thousand email addresses, they don't know, who I am, they're trying to figure that out. But Facebook knows exactly who I am and who you are, and who Rene is and that’s the benefit of having that list, it's a real list.
Paul Clifford: Okay, but still you know the software, the technology, you know, is still based within Facebook and so...
Rene Banuelos: Obviously, Paul, there are some risks with that, I mean, like with anything, there is some risk with that and mainly, I mean one strategies is to actually abide with what Facebook wants to do long term and not go against the current and keep feeding it because we generate fan pages all the time. We get a lot of people who never have a fan page to create one.
We also encourage a lot of people to actually use our app platform to drive traffic. We're feeding the giant and that's one of the reasons for that is, I mean if you don't then you're...they have no reason to keep you right? And I think that goes for apps in general. I mean, if you're feeding the giant, that giant likes you, but I mean obviously you can't eliminate all risks right, so.
Paul Clifford: Right.
Rene Banuelos: I don't know if that answers that.
Paul Clifford: No, no, no, I totally get you. I totally get you. Listen before we go. I know your time is short, we just got a couple more questions coming in so I think Rich just wants to ask how you can become an affiliate and I guess he can get straight in touch with you, maybe by that link at the bottom?
Rene Banuelos: If you have a Pro account you could actually remove the link at the bottom, so it doesn't have to stay there. So yes, I think it was Marcus who asked that right? Yeah.
Paul Clifford: No, Rich was actually asking how he can become an affiliate.
Rene Banuelos: I'm sorry. We actually don't have an affiliate program, but if he has questions or anything like that, he can message me, but we don't have an open affiliate program. Let's say, I was reading the other question Marcus Raven actually asked another question, says would all our apps have the 22 logo in the bottom and that's the one I was reading. Sorry I got a little sidetracked, and basically, no, you can remove that 22S logo from the bottom of the page if you have a Pro account. A lot of people keep it cause they want people to click on it get an account from us and earn their three accounts and have us waive their fees so, but if you want to, you can.
Jerry Rocco: I think Marcus might be thinking about re-selling the apps, that's usually the question and yes you can. So the follow-up question which maybe on Marcus' mind, can I re-sell these apps cause for $22 a month you get 10 of these apps with a complete with mobile companion and all the features, so you could go out and set one up for a local business or another one up for a local business and they could get a free account and they’d be able to manage the app as well, as long as you had a Pro account cause there is a shared management feature as well.
Paul Clifford: Wow. There you go, another benefit for you. I’ve kept you guys for long enough. I really appreciate you coming on board with this interview. I found it fascinating. Not obviously about the software, but also about your marketing strategies as well. Rene and Jerry thanks ever so much for sharing your insights and the inside of your business, I really, really appreciate that.
Jerry Rocco: Been a pleasure, thanks for having us.
Rene Banuelos: Thank you Paul.
Paul Clifford: You're welcome, and that’s it for today's session. If you’ve listened to this on the podcast, then go to disruptware.com to pick-up the show notes and otherwise this video will be on the Disruptware page and also on the blog as well. By all means leave us some comments or let us know if you have any questions and I can refer them to Rene. Thanks for listening. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.
Jerry Rocco: Thank you.
Rene Banuelos: Thank you.
Recommended Resources:
1. 22Social - click here
2. Balsamiq - click here
3. Book - Trust Me I'm Lying - by Ryan Holiday