Kulish: Paid Ads Fail for Culture Tools Due to Top-Down Purchasing
Stas Kulesh · Slack Tool KarmaBot Doubles to $400k ARR, Turns Down $1m Offer · Sep 23, 2021 · at 9:09
Stas Kulish, founder of Slack employee recognition app KarmaBot, explains to Nathan Latka why the company spends zero dollars on paid digital advertising.
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“It's really, it's so difficult because the main decision makers, they are at the top of the chain. We don't set, we don't like Trello. Engineers don't come to their superiors saying like, let's buy Trello gold. It's so cool. We've been using for a while with karma. It's usually the culture. The culture is coming from the head and then we need to convince those people. It's really difficult to target them and convert through ads.”
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“It's like, it's a disco, disco bot grow bot previously. So they were, they are in essentials. They are on the front page. We cannot, like, ask, we, I asked actually, it's like, to put karma next to them, but it was counterintuitive. They invested money in this…”
Kulish: Customers churn after 2-3 years seeking novelty, not from product dissatisfaction
“Recently we noticed that people, after using Karma for two years or three years, they just switched to another product because they sort of, they want the novelty. Not because the product is, well, not doing it for them. It's just the team wants something new.…”
KarmaBot spends zero dollars on marketing
“Well we don't spend anything on marketing just because we don't have anything any, anything extra.”
Kulish: KarmaBot serves over 3,000 total teams with 350 paying
“We've got a freemium solution. So altogether, I think it's more than 3000, but 350 of them are paying. So that's teams. 350 teams.”