Wes Bush:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Product-Led Podcast. My name is Wes Bush, author of the book on product-led growth, and I have Ramli who is my co-host and Francois, who is the head of growth at Deputy. Today we're going to be talking a lot about the first seven minutes of your onboarding experience. Earlier, I was talking to Francois, and we had this incredible discussion just about how his team spends an insane amount of time and resources really just optimizing this first seven minutes of the onboarding experience. So we had to have him on the podcast, really just to hear around some of the reasons of why they're doing this, why they're focusing so much on this first seven minutes, and how they're doing it. What are they doing in that first seven minutes to really improve this experience.
Wes Bush:
But before we dive into this, I really just want to take a step back and ask him, can you share your story of how you became the head of growth at Deputy.
Francois Bondiguel:
Great. Great introduction, thanks Wes. Man, that's a long story. I'm originally from France, and when I was 21, so maybe 13 years ago, I did an exchange, I was an exchange student in New Zealand. And then when I was in New Zealand, I wanted to stay, so did an internship in a web design company. And then they say, if you want to come back after your Masters, we'll sponsor you. So they sponsored me, I came back to New Zealand, worked for them. Six months later the company got acquired, and then the CEO at the time, the head of sales and myself, I was 23 at the time, decided to create our own SaaS company. And then we made the classic mistake of hey, we're in love with the product, not with a problem we're trying to solve, let's build a product. So we did pocket [smyths 00:01:57], so I've done that for about three and a half years, and then exited, sold my shares back to the original founder.
Francois Bondiguel:
Worked for an agency for a couple of years doing online marketing, and then I got the opportunity to work for Vend, which is a SaaS company from New Zealand that grew very, very quickly. So I spent about five years there, the company grew from $2.5 million revenue a year to about 30, so quite an exponential growth. We hired a lot of people, and I ended up becoming CMO of the organization. Which was really good, team of 22 doing all of the online marketing. And then a frustration of mine was it was really hard to touch anything related to product, so I got really interested in growth, what can we do to extend the marketing capabilities around product.
Francois Bondiguel:
So decided to work in growth, effectually being head of growth at Xero, for about nine months as a giant experiment. And then the CEO of Deputy, someone that I've known for quite some time, who really admired the marketing we did back at Vend, so he was always keen to hire me as CMO. The timing never really worked, but then one day he's like, "Hey, I've got a role for you, it's head of growth, reporting to me. You have freedom, you have a team, you have resources, we're just raising a bunch of money, just go hard." I took the job about a year and a half ago, a bit more, and yeah I've been at Deputy since then.
Wes Bush:
I guess just for those that are listening who are like, "What the hell is Deputy?" Want to just give us the high level overview of what it is?
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah. Deputy is a SaaS company, and we do employee management. So it's an employee management system where effectively you can schedule your employees, you can manage time sheets, leave approval. But also for legal compliance, make sure you're employees have been on breaks, when they do opening and closing it's complying to the law. We've been growing really, really fast, there's now about 850,000 active users, and about 200,000 location around the world using Deputy. And last year we raised $81 million from having P and Open View. So we're part of the Open View ecosystem, a thing that you know really well. And yeah, that's Deputy in a nutshell, and we've been growing very, very fast since.
Ramli John:
Let's talk a little bit about onboarding, Francois. Wes already talked a little bit about this, about the first seven minutes. I'm really curious how you got to that, how did you get to that magic number, seven minutes. Was it through experimentation, or you had some data to really back that up?
Francois Bondiguel:
To really back that up, yeah for sure, for sure. One story that's quite interesting there, before I answer that question, is when I was at Vend, as marketing people we are responsible for generating demand. So we actually got about 6,000 trial months, and about 5 - 6,000 content download a month. So we build a pretty sizeable thing. But then once they land in the software, or on iPad on the app, the experience they had back in the days was pretty shit. I was always trying to battle so hard with product to say, "Why are we not doing anything around onboarding, it's so obvious." But there was no squad dedicated to it ever. So you looked at the stats, and then you look at well, it costs you $150 to generate a trial, and then half of those people are not going to even go past that first experience. Even worse, 60% of those people will not have a second session. Meaning that you spent all of that money, they come, and more than half of them never come back.
Francois Bondiguel:
So that was the premise that really got me to hey, we need to really own this if you want to increase the unit economics. At Deputy, we had the opportunity when I came in, and I came in with [Chodam 00:06:07] who's a product guy, one of the best product guys I've ever worked with, I've worked with him across three companies. So both of us effectively, when we came at Deputy, there was already a very small growth team called Goldmine, and their goal was to look at the onboarding piece in a way, and look at the things that it can do around trial to paid conversion rate.
Francois Bondiguel:
When we came in, one of the things that we wanted to do was okay, what has been done, what hasn't been done, and then what is the data around it. Are we doing even tracking, how many sessions, what's the behavior, what do we know about those people? So we tried to work around what's the north star matrix. Is it the number of session, or is the length of the thing, is it how many things they do within the onboarding? One of the KPI that we wanted was the length of the first session, so we effectively did even tracking, and tracking on the session.
Francois Bondiguel:
What's interesting about Deputy is a lot of people use our software online, but also a lot of people use the app. Because if you're an employee you need to use the app for clock in, clock out of your workplace, you can ask for leave on your mobile. So what we did is okay, so if they do a session on desktop, but the average length of time of a first session user is seven minutes, and then on mobile we calculated that it's four minutes. Slightly different IOS and Android, but on average it's four minutes.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. One of the things that I always find fascinating is just the drop-off rate. You mentioned it was 60% of people who would sign up and never come back.
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah.
Wes Bush:
And then the other clients I've worked with, I've seen even worse. So it's pretty common for a lot of SaaS companies-
Francois Bondiguel:
Very common.
Wes Bush:
... to lose anywhere from, in my experience, anywhere from 40 to 60% is usually around the average amount of people you can lose in that first experience. So I'm really curious to dig in here. How did you find that out, and then start improving on that metric?
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah, so that metric is the metric at Vend. At Deputy, it's a little bit better, it's kind of like 50/50. What we've done is to simply track session, and see how many. What's difficult is as I said, session across devices. Where it gets a little bit tricky is more around okay, some of the behavior tracking, if they've tried our software on an app first, do they then go back to the desktop to complete the setup. So we've looked at different data points, and really focused on that main KPI. Which is length is seven minutes, and we know that the drop-off is really, really high, what do they do. So that's where you have the data, but you don't know the why. What we've done is used Full Story. We use Full Story quite a lot, where we start recording and watch people going through our onboarding, and then what happened to them.
Francois Bondiguel:
What's interesting as well at Deputy is there's actually two phases for us. First one is what we call a sign up, which is you're on our website, and you put your name and your email address. That's a sign up. So if we have a successful sign up, and then the onboarding start pre- getting into the product, where you're then being asked more question about your business, what industry you are and everything. So we set up your trial, and then you get into the trial. We've got sign up, onboarding, trial and onboarding again. So it starts very early, and the reason for that is between sign up and trial, there is a small drop-off, about 15%, which is very, very low. But the reason for that step is we are collecting all of the information that we need for tailoring their trial experience with industry and size and location, or for passing that on to sale in terms of what account they are most interested in.
Francois Bondiguel:
And the reason I'm mentioned that is one of these successful experiment we've done this year was to change the flow on mobile, where the screen that you see in that first onboarding changed, and I kid you not, overnight we generated an extra 1,000 trial a month just like that. The problem is not all trial work equally. There's a few things like that. But that was massive. That was like wow, just like that. So that was pretty cool. But it goes to show that that piece is also really key, even before they get into that first product experience, that pre-onboarding.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. So initially, when you were looking at the onboarding experience, you're like, "You know what? This looks a little shit, it could be improved, and how can we focus more on this." One of the things I find a lot of companies struggle with is maybe it's someone on the marketing team, or someone on the growth team, they start to pick up on this experience could be better, we focus a lot in marketing on commercial optimization. Having a specific landing page, for instance, for a specific ad campaign. We want to get as granular as possible, because we all know the more personalized, the more customized an experience is for someone, the better it will convert. So when we just see this one size fits all in the onboarding, a lot of us growth folks cringe. How did you start to get people involved and focused on improving this experience?
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah, I guess not the luck, but more the situation that we've created at Deputy is that there is a team looking after it. So that team, you have your classic PN, your front end engineer, your backing engineer, your UX designer, as well as your mobile engineer. So we have the muscle and the brain to be able to say, "Well, what experiment do we need to be able to run in what space?" And they usually start around what are the obvious lever of growth, where do people drop off the most? Or, have we found any particular behavior that correlate with the likelihood to buy? So I work with MadKudu in a couple of companies, when we start looking at okay, can we build a model that analyze what people do in that first seven minutes, and tell us if there's anything that we need to change to encourage more of that behavior.
Francois Bondiguel:
The problems is sometimes self prophecy, where the way you build the onboarding experience mean that's what they're going to do, therefore you're not learning anything particularly new or insightful around well, if I change this would that change my conversion rate, yes or no. So it was more based on the principle of growth, which is remove friction. I've done a bit of online marketing for e-commerce store before, and a lot of success that I've met there was by removing friction. Friction to try, friction to get that value, the pass-through value needs to be really, really smooth.
Francois Bondiguel:
So for us at Deputy, it was trying to understand okay, if the audience is businesses in hospitality or retails, they have five to 10 stores, 50 to 100 employees, what type of solution do they need, what are they looking at. And then basically trying to understand what are the condition by which they could experience what are they looking for. What's extremely difficult at Deputy, it was the same at Vend, and a little bit at Xero is that businesses of that size, they run the business in their very own way. If you're a retailer, the workflow you have in your business space is very specific to you. Because you might not be tech savvy, you might got advice from people, you're using some type of software.
Francois Bondiguel:
It's quite interesting, because then your expectation of what a product should do is going to be very different from the business next store who's running it a different way. The way they do clock in, clock out, the way they do time sheets. They might use pen and paper, they might use Excel, it's all very, very different. So you can't give them, as you said, a one size fit all in a way, but what you can do is understand as I said, what's the condition, what's the pass-through value?
Francois Bondiguel:
For us, we need three things in order for us to show you the value that you would get if you were to set it up right away. Not fully, but just to get the base. If we get an area, some employees, and an idea of where and when they're going to work, then we can auto-create schedule for them. What we've done now, the latest experiments, we each did was the demo data. So if you say you're a retailer, it gets pre-populated, we can see schedule, you can see your employees, you can see how it's going to flow. Does that answer your question?
Wes Bush:
Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think that's always interesting for a lot of people as soon as they are getting into the weeks of their onboarding. But for some marketer or growth-oriented person, what would you recommend for getting their hands dirty whenever it comes to improving their onboarding? Because I know for a lot of people listening, they're going to be familiar with marketing, but they don't really know too much about the product experience, and how to really work with maybe it's the development team, or the product folks. So if you're in growth or marketing and you see this as a big opportunity in your business, what do you do?
Francois Bondiguel:
Well, first I'll just write an equation, and the equation is you need the economics of your business. It starts with generating the leads and trying to convert them, but that piece where you lose so many people just kills you. If half of the people don't come back, you've just spent double, do you know what I mean, right away, it's that pure and simple. You start like that because that's the business case for we need some people to be dedicated. And they can come from product, they might not have a growth team, but you need product and engineering leadership to agree and back up the idea that it makes sense from a business standpoint to optimize that particular unique economic.
Francois Bondiguel:
And then yeah, and then you don't have to have a full squad of 10 people to do that. What you need is the mindset of what experiment can we run, how can we have an impact, what are the things that we could do? And then you need one or two engineer and a designer, and here you go. And the person that does growth in this company, or whatever, can do the PM, can do the documenting, the vision, and all of that. But you need a very, very small thing. It's more it needs to be dedicated, and it needs to be free to try and experiment what they want to do, and they need to have the data capability to do basically the tracking as well as the reporting.
Wes Bush:
All right. Ramli, take it away.
Ramli John:
I'm going to change gears a little bit and ask you about, you talked about some experiments that you did that worked really well removing friction. Were there any experiments that your team ran where like, "Oh no, that's not something we expected," or it didn't work out as well as you expected?
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah, many of them. Many of them. One of them was, as I said there's a lot of cross-device at Deputy. One of the thing is the conversion rate from trial to paid on mobile is really, really low compared to the one on desktop. And obviously as I said, I talked about the audience, if you're a retailer, if you're in hospitality or healthcare, that can often explain a little bit of that behavior. But what we wanted to do and to say well, if you first discovered Deputy on mobile, and we know you're not going to convert on mobile, can we send you to desktop? Can we find different ways in products, by email, through different mechanism to try to get you back into the desktop.
Francois Bondiguel:
So on mobile, we start doing notification, banners, different thing in the onboarding experience to be like, "Hey, get the full Deputy experience on desktop, it's going to blow your mind." We'd be like, "Yeah, that sounds really clever." And it did nothing, absolutely nothing. People hated it at first, basically all of them were removing the banners, and then none of them really went to desktop. So we tried to engineer behavior that wouldn't happen anyway. So that was definitely kind of a failure.
Francois Bondiguel:
We've done... yeah there's been... not catastrophic failure really, except when sign up on onboarding doesn't work because we introduced a bug, but that's a different kind of story. But yeah, I think the failure would be more you don't get the result that you want. You've done a couple of things, for example, on mobile. It takes time for us to set up good trial, and so that loading experience before was just a really, really old thing. So we've used that time that can be up to 25 second in some instances, even on desktop as well, to say what value can we bring right here right there? We try doing things like little tiles that educate you on what you can do with the product, what are the benefits. There's an option to hey, you are too busy to set it up, we can do it for you. Contact us, send us your stuff and we'll set up the trial for you, stuff like that. Does that answer the question?
Ramli John:
Yeah, it does. Actually, I had another follow-up about that, where you were almost introducing customer success there, a human element into the onboarding. Did that help? I know-
Francois Bondiguel:
This-
Ramli John:
... other companies work like that.
Francois Bondiguel:
... Yeah, that's really interesting. The human element is interesting, because in an ideal world, you want to do product late growth. Which is it just works. People come in, they look at your website, they get the value prop, they just sign up, they're on board. They really like it, they've done the discovery, and then boom, they want to set it up, they don't even talk to you. That's like the dream. This is the beauty thing. The problem as I said, in those audiences that I talk about, once again is their workflow is quite different. And when you get to a certain size, it gets quite tricky.
Francois Bondiguel:
In that particular audience, ecosystem is quite key. And when I talk about ecosystem, it's at your heart you probably have accounting, either your Xero or your Intuit QuickBooks in the US. And then you'll have your point of sale software if you're in retail, or if you have a store, and then you'll have your Deputy, your employee management system, and then you'll have your HR platform and your payroll and all of those things. And that needs to be, as soon as an ecosystem like that, that create friction and complexity, because it's really hard to sell fumble someone that wants to do an integration. Because to make that magic is possible, but it's very difficult.
Francois Bondiguel:
So the human element come from us saying, "Well, what we have experimented with is that if someone book a demo with us, and talk to a sales person, 63% of those people will convert." Which is really, really high. That was one element, so what we've done as the growth team, as part of the onboarding, to try to figure out are there any moment in that onboarding phase when we dictate that someone is a good opportunity, and that's what MadKudu has helped us to do. And if so, can we ask them if they want to do a demo. And then we give a demo length based on the quality of that particular trial. So if the quality is low it's 15 minutes, if the quality is high it's 45 minutes or half an hour. That's another way that we've done the human element.
Francois Bondiguel:
The CX piece, and that's common in most SaaS companies is that you want to give that support so when they discover the app, you cannot un-select question, they understand it better and all of that. The problem is that has a cost, and by targeting, for us, hospitality and retail, you also get a lot of small businesses. Businesses with just a few employees, they're looking for a small use case, and they're going to need a lot of help. And you want to help them, but it doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint. That's where, human element I still believe, in our type of SaaS is very critical. Still very important, it has a place. With obviously product-led growth first, but it has a place and it does work.
Wes Bush:
And for a lot of companies listening, they're going to totally agree with you. The ideal product-led growth, people just sign up, start buying on their own, no humans needed.
Francois Bondiguel:
Woohoo, you made it.
Wes Bush:
We all celebrate.
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah, yeah.
Wes Bush:
But then it's also a big question of when. When should we have that human element, when does it make the most sense to add these people into the process, and really ask ourselves, are these people adding friction or are they adding value in this whole process? So how do you go about deciding, when should we have people in our onboarding process?
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah, it's a very good question. At the moment, the way we currently do it is we do provide wide support. Meaning that we do accept that if someone want to talk to us, they should be able to talk to us. Not only that, but we actually go to them, from a sales point of view, and ask if they need help. Through email sequencing and contact, and so we are quite aggressive with regard to how do we want to convert those opportunities, and how. The reason for that when you're in hyper-growth, you have to be hungry. You can't just be too passive. And even us, we're like an in-bound company, so we get a lot of trial and all of that, we're not even going hunting yet, which is this year. But when you do that, when you go aggressive on in-bound, and then you've got enough human people to cover the amount of demand that you generate, then you tend to get a blanket approach where everyone get an opportunity to talk to a human person.
Francois Bondiguel:
As I said, from a product standpoint, what the growth team as done is to use lead scoring to then only offer demo based on the lead score as well as the length of the demo based on how good do we think you are as a trialist. But as we grow, and as we do, what needs to happen is you need to do a segmentation piece, which is to understand who is your audience. Who truly is your audience that you're after? Because for us at Deputy, there's businesses in 150 countries, of any size, in more than 40 industries, that are using Deputy for many, many things. So if you don't know which one bring you the most money, which one have the best product market fit, which one make the most sense from a strategy point of view, then you can't be aggressive.
Francois Bondiguel:
But that's what we're doing. It's the concept of that particular target audience is the target audience, and we need to go after them. So that's where the human element becomes more, at what stage do you identify that they are the one that you want to target? And when you do, what do you do about it? For example, for us let's say that the target segment is emerging retail, in New York, impacted by the Fair Workweek laws. I'm not sure if you're familiar with those laws in the US, with Fair Workweek? But it's effectively laws to protect shift workers, employee who work by the hour. And business have to comply, and a lot of them don't, because they don't have systems to recall what their employee do, when they take a break, when do they close, when do they clock in, and all of those things, it's all pen and paper.
Francois Bondiguel:
But I don't know. Oh, sorry.
Wes Bush:
No worries.
Francois Bondiguel:
Sorry about that. Yeah, so good.
Wes Bush:
I guess on that note too, I have two follow-up questions.
Francois Bondiguel:
Yeah.
Wes Bush:
The first one is just the common thread from onboarding. It's really just, you have to understand your audience, which really that's really just segmentation at its core.
Francois Bondiguel:
Yes.
Wes Bush:
And when you think of onboarding as when you start the experience, you want to select the box that's most applicable to you so you can learn that part of the product, or something else you have a multi-product product. How do you really approach segmentation?
Francois Bondiguel:
Well, since I've joined Deputy 17 months ago we've done two segmentation pieces. Actually Open View helped us for quite a bit. What you need to go through, basically your numbers. You need to understand, from a financial point of view, first of all is do you have the data on who they are, what industry they are? And usually industry data is not clean at all, you need to really clean it out to be able to get the insight. So you look at your data, the financial, the industry, the sizing, and then you look at what makes sense from an economic point of view.
Francois Bondiguel:
It's like okay, so usually businesses in retail have 49 employees on average, or 49 seats on average, their conversion rate from trial to paid is 15% in particular location. So for us is US, UK and Australia are primary markets. So yeah, you look at the data that you have, and then you look from a financial point of view, does it make sense. Because ultimately it's about revenue. For example, we serve larger companies. We have companies with 40,000 employees on Deputy, which sounds awesome, and which it is. McDonald's is using us in New York, for example. Aesop, Amazon, Nike, all of these companies are using Deputy for a lot of this stuff.
Francois Bondiguel:
But the problem with that is it costs a lot to serve, because they have very high expectation, and the way they use our product, even our enterprise product, cannot stretch out a lot. And as I said before, there's a lot of things about integration that are complicated, so you end up basically reducing your gross margin because suddenly you're doing all of that work, you hire all of those people to do all of the set-up and custom implementation. And it's great, and it's a great logo on your website, but you're making no money on the deal.
Wes Bush:
And I guess as a extension of that, so segmentation, when you do get that down, it allows you to have a lot more clarity about who you should go after, because not all logos were created equal.
Francois Bondiguel:
No, correct.
Wes Bush:
Most people could agree with that. Some deals you close and maybe it's for brand or something like that, or it doesn't make sense at all.
Francois Bondiguel:
Correct.
Wes Bush:
So how have you really built a lead scoring model over the years that has been able to help you find and identify the people who you should go after?
Francois Bondiguel:
Before answering that question on the segmentation piece, a key thing as well, outside of the size, and the industry, and the location, is the product market fit. And that's really key, is that's something that I haven't seen in many SaaS companies, to really look at your product, and say where does that really fit? Where is there a smooth process happening where someone will naturally come in, be attracted by the value prop, use the software, understand it quickly, and then decide that there's value to pay for it? Because the more industry you target, the more people you target, and the more edge use case you're going to get. At some stage either you build a Frankenstein, or you make a call on what's your vision and who do you go after. I think that's quite key.
Francois Bondiguel:
So now to answer the lead scoring thing. The first time that I used lead scoring, and it was very interesting, the use case was we were generating so many leads that the sales team couldn't cope. They had 400 leads each month, so in order for us to be efficient we implemented a system that shows, one is the customer fit. They look at effectively thermographic information, demographic information, and basically say, based on the people that bought from you before, do you look similar, yes or no, as a company. And then we built another model which is a likelihood to buy, based on the behavior that you have in the app are you likely to buy? And then we did a ratio that combined those things and say, okay how good are you as a lead for us, effectively.
Francois Bondiguel:
That worked really well at Vent, and then at Deputy, at Deputy was a bit different. The set-up was more around can we quickly identify the one out of a lot of value, and then do the human element that we talked about, like pushing more demos, and doing more one on ones. And for the rest, we'll do more like one to many, or full product-led growth. There's no friction, and then everything happens.
Wes Bush:
Okay. Perfect. One of the things that I really learned about today is just whenever it comes to onboarding, it's really important to segment, and really understand who you should be helping. Because I think it's so easy for a lot of people to create these onboarding experiences, and not actually think about how are we really helping here? Is it going to be that business that's going to be a terrible fit for your business? Don't optimize for that kind of person, optimize for the one who is really, it's tied to revenue at the end of the day. Who are those people who are your best fit customers, who have been around a long time, who have high retention scores, and are unhappy and willing to pay you. And really just optimize that onboarding experience for those people.
Wes Bush:
So I wanted to really just thank you for taking the time to go through this whole process for your onboarding experience. And I guess on the last question of the day, how have you helped get more people to an aha moment in the first seven minutes?
Francois Bondiguel:
The first seven minutes. Yeah, yeah. As I said, what we try to understand is for those audiences, what are they trying to achieve. And when I talk about it, it's funny, one of the aha moment I had myself a long time ago at Vend is I was on holiday and I visited a Vend customer. They're a fashion retailer in Wellington, so I went upstairs, [inaudible 00:34:45] Boutique. When I said, "Hey," because I found them randomly on Salesforce, I was like, "Hey, I'm going to visit those people." She had a little booklet, of a few pages, and in that booklet she had a full checklist of her business flow, and how would that fit with a point of sale software that she was looking for. She had it all coded out beautifully, by area, that needs to do this, and this is how, and everything. I looked at it and I was like, "Can I get a copy of this? This is amazing." This is how a really good buyer will think. And if we can help you tick a lot of these box, you will buy. It doesn't have to tick all of the boxes, but it's a few of them.
Francois Bondiguel:
So I asked her what is the most important to you, what are the things that you could tick in that list that would make you feel like, "Oh my God, I get it, this is how I'm going to use it." Because what's quite difficult for companies, like for SaaS companies, that what you have in mind of the value and everything often doesn't materialize, because the person that is trying it out is only giving you seven minutes of their life, and most of the time they will miss it. And it's such a missed opportunity.
Francois Bondiguel:
So at Deputy, what we've done is to say, "Well, we've analyzed with MadKudu what action and what behavior correlates with conversion rate, our data team has done it internally as well. We know there is certain key events or action, for example at Deputy, pushing your first payroll is really likely, if you do this, that you will buy. It's a little bit of self prophecy because it does mean that you've plugged in your payroll provider, but if you do that you will convert. He's having a good time. If you do that you will convert.
Francois Bondiguel:
So what we did is well, in the first seven minutes, we know that they're going to try to add a few employees, they're going to try to look at how do we handle scheduling, what does the schedule look like for your employees, they're going to look at what happened with clock-in, clock-out, how would my employees coming in the morning, and then that's when we introduce apps and all of this stuff. And then for us it was like well, if we've analyzed the data and they show that they're trying to do similar things, can we do that for them? So that's where the demo data comes in, where we say if in the pre-onboarding you've selected that you're a restaurant owner, then the trial that you're going to get has employee that are like staff member, like a chef and stuff like that. So you'll have that full set up. The schedule will already there, so you can see day by day what's going to happen. So you just play around more, set-up your discovery.
Francois Bondiguel:
And that's the key thing that I've learned in my 11 years is that there's two phases in a trial. There's a discovery and a set-up. The discovery is more, can the software do what I want it to do based on my need, can it solve my problem. And then the set-up is more, hey, I want to start use that thing. Some buyer do both together, some buyer do one, never do the other. But it's quite interesting to have that. So what we try to do is to say, "Well, we don't want you to set-up, we want you to discover now." So by pre-populating a lot of that with relevant information, you can see and play with something that is there.
Francois Bondiguel:
Another thing that we have experimented, but not to the fullest extent as I said, is we have a team that can actually do it manually. So the dream, and the vision that I have at Deputy is that, because we have team across SEO, the growth team has SEO, websites, CRO and the onboarding pieces, that if someone search for keyword land on our website, we know a lot of them already. If they look at it, download an ebook, whatever, we personalize the experience on the website. When they sign up, we know all of that stuff about them, about their stuff. So we fully personalize that experience, all the way to when they buy. Because we also look after the check-out page. But that's the full journey, that's the dream. That's the dream, yeah.
Wes Bush:
That is really cool. I love that last part, I wrote it down, because it was so important. Just the understanding of the two different phases of onboarding. There's the set-up phase and the discovery phase. You're totally right that there's going to be some people who are willing to do both of those phases at the same time, but there's so many examples of products where all you can do in that first onboarding experience is just set-up. You mentioned FullStory, there's Hotjar, there's Drift, Intercom. You name it, there's so many of these products that rely on just you uploading a java script to your website or something like that. And the whole onboarding experience is just setting it up. So I like that distinction, because it is so true. You have to get people set up before they can really discover, and see a lot more of that value. So thank you for sharing that golden nugget.
Francois Bondiguel:
That's all good, I'm very glad that I can share some of that experience.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. So where can people find out more about you and some of the work you're doing?
Francois Bondiguel:
LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the best place. Yeah, 12 years ago when I moved to New Zealand I was a student and a young French guy in a foreign country, and as a good immigrant I realized that if I want to stay I need to build a network. So I start investing a lot in LinkedIn, adding people one by one when I meet them and all of that. I've grown that quite significantly, not in terms of number of people or whatever, but just in terms of the quality of the people that I met, and the opportunity that has given me.
Francois Bondiguel:
I think that's something I will say, "Hey, there are things that, not everything in life is a growth hack, at least not a quick one. Some growth hack took 10 years, you need to think about the full spectrum. Get some quick wins, but don't forget about the long run." But yeah, to answer your question, add me on LinkedIn, talk to me, if I can help you I will. As you can hear I've got a 10 month old baby boy who's really a cutie, but it also takes some of my time and family is really important. Yeah.
Ramli John:
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time Francois, really appreciate it.
Francois Bondiguel:
No, that's all good. Again, if I can answer questions from anyone online, just add me on LinkedIn, contact me, it would be great. Thanks very much guys.
