Stas Kulesh, founder of KarmaBot, discusses customer acquisition and marketing spend with Nathan Latka.
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Slack prioritizes its portfolio company Disco on its app directory
“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…”
Insight
Kulish: Paid Ads Fail for Culture Tools Due to Top-Down Purchasing
“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 k…”
Insight
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.…”
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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.”
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Kulish: KarmaBot's regular customer has 100 people and pays $100 monthly
“Around 100 people paying around 100 a month. So this is the regular size of the team and the regular bill.”
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KarmaBot saw initial COVID surge followed by huge demand plunge
“When COVID started, we had a huge surge, and I think this was around the time when we spoke the last time, the first time with you and we were really hopeful that this is gonna stay, but then a year ago, we saw a huge plunge”