Learn more about Postaga at: https://postaga.com/
Find Andy Cabasso on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewcabasso/
JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host, JC Granger. I have with me here, Andy Cabasso, who is the Founder of Postaga. Andy, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Andy: Awesome. Yeah, thanks, JC happy to be here. A little bit about me. I used to be a lawyer. And I guess I’m still a lawyer. I’m not like disbarred or anything like that. But yeah, I guess I have to, like throw that in. Like, I don’t know, I don’t got one of those guy from Breaking Bad kind of situation. I don’t. Anyway, so used to be a lawyer and found myself in digital marketing. In particular, because I, when I was applying to work at law firms, they all had really bad websites. And I was like, I could do something about this, I have a little bit of a background and a partner of mine, we started a digital agency, specifically focusing on that vertical route, the agency sold it, I got acquired by a larger company in the legal industry, and kind of from the experiences that I got running an agency, I started Postaga, which is a tool for marketers to help them build links, do digital PR, get connections to journalists and press and also do cold outreach, and so yeah we kind of built that from our learnings as an agency and trying to find a repeatable, scalable way to do link building outreach.
JC: So that’s really cool. Because I love Martech, right? I mean, I’m a marketing guy, do I have an agency. You know, so when I hear about stuff like this, you know, my tail wags, Right, my ears perked up kind of thing. So let me ask you a question. So I remember a software called Yesware, which was kind of a piggyback onto Gmail, and it kind of had this similar feel where you could pull in, you know, contacts and send it, it was for PR, right to kind of just, yeah, who was. So it sounds like, and I’ve taken a little tour of your software, it seems like you have this mix between, you know, this outreach version of yesware. And the database version of something like, you know, one of those big, you know, like, PR software’s you know, that that, you know, like, like meltwater or something like that, right, you know, that has all that, am I kind of correct here, is that is it a combination in there? Or is it something completely different? I’m totally off?
Andy: Yeah, so yeah, it kind of like combines a few different tools, and one, so it combines like, the, like researching and prospecting kind of tools that you find like elements of like H Refs, or something like that, or Zoom info or something like that, for finding relevant blogs and businesses and websites and stuff like that. combining that with contact finding tools, like we have a native integration with LinkedIn to make sure we can find the right people at these businesses to connect with an email finding and verification aspect to it tools, like you see, like hunter.io is a popular one, we integrate with them. And then there’s the email outreach component to it, like yes, where, like you mentioned, like, it helps create personalized outreach emails to all of the contacts. So instead of spending hours and hours, through this whole process of prospecting, and finding emails and personalizing emails for everyone, our software helps automate and streamline that.
JC: So let’s talk about so let’s walk the audience through kind of almost visually in their mind, what it’s like to use a software and Who is it for? Right? Like, who gets the biggest benefit out of this? You know, what problems are they dealing with that this solves? And then, you know, what is it like to use the software, you know, you say link building, and then we talk about PR, but that people kind of get thrown over? They’re like, well, how does reaching out to reporters? You know, link building? Or or, you know, I mean, so like, is it helping to kind of walk us through it a little bit.
Andy: So yeah, we have a few different use cases, which is why I talk I’ll talk about something like link building or PR, or like cold outreach for sales. Because the workflow is like, is a very, it’s very simple workflow from kind of beginning to end. So you have whatever your like, like, at the end of the day, what it helps you do is it helps you find like research and find relevant websites or businesses that you want to connect with, finds their email addresses and helps create personalized out pitches and email sequences for them. So that’s what it does at the end of the day. But it’s also like it’s also useful in specific contexts. So like for link building, for example, let’s say I’ve got a blog article and I want to build links to it to help me increase my search rankings so I can get more traffic and more customers. So I’ve got an article that I want to build links to with Postaga, I could find relevant websites that I want to pitch my article to find the contact people and then have a tailored personalized email for them to tell ask them to check out my article and possibly link to it for like digital PR, which there’s a lot of overlap I think with digital PR and SEO nowadays, because at the end of the day when another blog is citing or mentioning your business, that builds links to your business also. But yeah, I think there’s kind of like some distinguishing between that in terms
JC: Yeah like guest posting..
Andy: ..and things like that. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And so like, well, one common thing that we’ve seen with like people like in the digital PR space is like, let’s say, I’ve got an ecommerce brand and I want other blogs to write about my products and like, do like lengthy reviews about them. Or like, I’ve got a software business and I want other blogs to like, catch on to it, I see that like, as an example, let’s say, I make a CRM, there are a lot of CRMs out there. But let’s say I’ve got a really particular CRM that I think is great, it’s the best and I want other blogs to write about it. Let’s see, I can find blogs that have written articles about Active Campaign and HubSpot, and pitch them from the perspective of, “Hey, I saw you did this really great article about Active Campaign. Since your audience is interested in CRM, here’s a new unique CRM that you haven’t written about yet, what do you think about that? I’m happy to give you a demo, I’m happy to like we have an affiliate program happy to share the information about that with you as well”, and stuff like that. And that’s like the digital PR angle to this and how people use that. And then the last major use case is like sales, cold outreach for like B2B. So finding potential customers and finding their info and then pitching them to check out your product or service.
JC: So yeah, it does have kind of that zoom info feel from the sales. I didn’t know it had the sales part to it by there. When I was looking at it. I was I got dialed in and focused, too. Well, cuz here’s what I really liked, you know, your software with the demo, when I was looking at it was that there was a screen where basically said, what type of campaign Do you want to run? And it gave me like, six options, right? And it said, you know, do you want, you know, guest posts kind of thing, or, you know, you’re trying to get, you know, links, or you’re trying to reach out to people and had all these options, which I thought was really cool, because it runs you through this flow, but I didn’t see the sales part of it. So that’s interesting that it has that aspect. So you said you have a native integration and a LinkedIn one, how hard was that to get? By the way? How many hoops did you have to jump through to get a native API into the most lockdown platform on the planet?
Andy: So maybe actually, so I might be, might have phrased that wrong? That’s a good question. I’m not the development technical person on the team. But we have an integration with LinkedIn that pulls relevant data for contact people from LinkedIn, I guess, maybe native integration is not the right phrase..
JC: I was gonna say, I mean, listen, they exist, but to apply to get one of those with them, I mean, is the most chaotic process, but no, I do see, you know, is there’s Zapier integrations and things like that, you know, where you can pull information through? Okay, that makes that makes more sense. But I was like, Wait, how hard? Did you have to pull your hair out for that one? So walk me through a little bit here. You know, what motivated you to really do this? I know, you mentioned, you know, that you’re kind of origin story was your lawyer, and they really sucked at websites. But you know, but that’s a far, you know, gap between that part of the story versus where you ended up. So like, really? What was the progression? You know, what, what problems were you trying to solve? And how did it keep going down this path?.
Andy: Yeah so one kind of common thing for agencies is like, if you’re doing SEO for clients, you want to help them rank better get more traffic, so they’re, you know, happy with your services, they stay with you. And you can kind of grow your agency and make sure your clients are happy. Now, there are a lot of agencies out there that offer SEO services, and a lot of people who have been burned by SEO agencies. But like, one thing that we were really seeing is like, one of the most impactful things is link building, the amount of links from other relevant websites pointing to your particular website has a huge impact on your website’s traffic and search rankings. And we wanted to see if we could find a way to do that organically from real relevant websites to help our clients. But the process as it existed at the time, when we had our agency was very disjointed. And it just didn’t. It wasn’t scalable for us, like we couldn’t, we couldn’t do link building for our clients without charging them many thousands of dollars per month that was like beyond what our clients were willing to pay. And it was very, very labor-intensive. So we were wanted to see if there was a way that we could just streamline this process. And that’s how we ended up building Postaga.
JC: So how much time does this save, let’s say, an agency or a business that subscribes on its own, I mean, you know, to link build and to get, you know, the SEO quality and whatnot. You know, how much time do you think someone is saving just by using this?
Andy: Hours per week, if not days? I know, I know. Some agencies have people on their teams that just do link building, and they’ve done things very manual in terms of like, they’ll go into search engines, they’ll like combing or scrape results, and then review all of that. And then from there, like, like, our workflow really mimics the process of what people have been doing manually and just streamlines it automates it. But like, we have a few case studies of users who said, like, you know, I used to spend hours and hours a week, if not days per week, just building these kinds of campaigns that you’re able to do in just like 10 minutes of time. So, yeah.
JC: So how do you prioritize the new features that come out? You know, I mean, what’s really, you know, are you doing a lot of client feedback? Is it more of you know, the path of least resistance on what takes less time to code in? You know, things like that, you know, how do you prioritize, like, what’s going to be coming out for the software?
Andy: So we get a lot of user feedback, which is been really good for us. And we also have, you know, analytics and statistics. And we see like, what’s the most popular? What are people spending the most time on? And what do they want to see? And we’re also trying to be mindful of like, for us, like, as we grow and build this product? Where do we see the direction of it going? And so we have our like, we built our priorities around that. We have some, like we see, you know, more and more automation being key to this. So, for example, like, we get a lot of people like interested in Postaga, or like, you know, what, our company doesn’t do a lot of link building now. But we’re interested in it being one a part of like, a strategy that we implement. So what can we do, and through our onboarding process, we help people out as much as we can. But there’s still definitely for some more novice users is still a very educational component that needs to take place. So we’ve been developing more and more automated and streamlined features that like with the push of just a button, it’s like, here’s my website, Postaga kind of will crank out ideas of campaigns that you could run, basically running them all for you to a certain extent.
JC: That’s really cool. So let me ask you a personal question here. Let’s go back. So I just want every now and then, but I am curious about you for this. What did you want to do? Like, what do you want to be when you grew up when you were a kid, right? And then does that match what you’re doing now? What you’ve done? And if not kind of like, how did you get to where you’re at? You know, just what, what was your dream as a kid? And then where does that path lead you?
Andy: When I was a kid, I wanted to direct movies. I was definitely like I was in. You know, no one’s asked me that. I like that. Like this. I’m thinking about this. Now. I like I was into, I took like film classes in high school and, you know, made movies with friends and stuff like that. And I was definitely interested in that. How would I get into running a business? Now? I have? Where did I stray? Where?
JC: You know, where did you go from wanting to be a director to a lawyer? Right? Like, I mean that that was the first..
Andy: Oh, man. That’s a great question. No idea. How did I end up being like,
JC: It seemed like a good idea at the time?
Andy: Yeah, it seemed like a good I think that’s probably the The answer is it seemed like a good idea.
JC: There was always a girl involved, or was it to impress a girl?
Andy: No, actually, like my wife who I was..
JC: Your mom counts? Maybe it was to impress your your mom, to be a lawyer? I don’t know.
Andy: Yeah, maybe the parents wanted me to be a lawyer. And that made me that was it. But yeah..
JC: You’re happier now though, it looks like doing this, which is good. That’s very cool. So you know, The Future of Biztech? You know, I talk a lot about kind of what’s coming down the pipeline. First, let me ask you this. The first question is, where do you see your industry going? We’ll say 5-10 years. And by that, let me define that. I’m talking specifically about SAAS companies that deal with, you know, Martech, Martech SAAS, especially in the SEO link building field, because there’s a lot of competitors out there, right? But yours is interesting, because yours combines a lot of stuff. But where do you see your industry? going? Where do you see the technology of link building? Or, you know, outreach and things like that? And automation? Where do you see that going? 5-10 years?
Andy: Well, so in a very, like short term, I’m seeing a lot more in terms of like automation, and AI in particular like to, in terms of like, uncovering opportunities to basically automating as much of this process that’s been traditionally very manual as possible. Yeah, I know, they’re like, in terms of like SEO and that space in general, there’s like a lot of interest in like AI, GPT3 kind of technology with everything from research to content creation. And I’m seeing that in the in email personalization as well. It’s still pretty young, but there are a lot of companies exploring that. So aside from like, basically, taking out as much of the labor-intensive parts of marketing and analysis as possible, as is where where this is all heading.
JC: The AI part is interesting. I recently subscribed to copy.ai I don’t Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing. Let me let me just Copy.Ai – what a crazy good software because there’s what I thought it was going to be right? It sounded good already. And then I went in there and I started playing around with it. And I thought, Okay, well, you know that the AI, it’ll spit out some, like email subject lines is what I was going for it for example, yeah. And I thought, okay, and it only asked two questions, it was like, you know, tell us the name of the product, or the service, and then give like a one-sentence description that was, and I thought, that’s really not a lot of information. So that’s how I hit go. And I’m blown away. I mean, the stuff that it came up with was pure gold. I mean, I’ve been doing digital marketing, 20 years, I’m an email marketing guy by trade. And this blew me away. So I guess my question is this, and for one I’m gonna ask you this straight up to is, you know, you’ve already heard of Copy.Ai, obviously, do you have any plans to integrate some of that type of AI? Because, again, with what you’re doing with the outreach, are you gonna do any kind of native integration with them by any chance? Are you going to build your own AI to compete with that to help for your software, because I mean, that type of AI integration to what you’re doing, it could be incredible.
Andy: So we do have some AI elements already to what we do in terms of things that like prospecting, but there’s definitely going to be more coming down the road in terms of what we see into like, we’re building a lot of data right now to know things that like right now, with outreach, a lot of it for people just starting out, it’s a guess you have no idea if this copy is going to get a response from any of the people that you’re reaching out to. But the more people using our platform, the more data we get to know. Okay, here is the likelihood that Neil Patel responds to this email that you’re sending out, you know,
JC: Oh so like a ranking score of the percentage of chance of them replying?
Andy: That stuff is is definitely interesting to me and things that that we’re interested in, we’re seeing all of our, like, we know what our users copy is, and we’re seeing how that performs. And so that’s kind of the AI stuff that that I’m interested in, in particular.
JC: That’s cool. So what do you have coming out soon? Like I said, this podcast kind of drops about a couple months after we record, but you know, what, what are some new features that is going to be coming out soon that my audience and kind of either already, by the time they listen, go check out or see coming down soon on the pipeline.
Andy: So as of today, in mid May 2021, right now, if you’re looking at like building outreach campaign, and postado, whether it’s for digital PR for link building, there is a kind of a workflow that helps you kind of choose the type of campaign that you want to run. But you kind of have like, you need to input some like search keywords and things like that, in the next few weeks, I think by for sure, by the time that this episode drops, we’re going to have this feature that we’re really excited about, which basically, it’ll take your website and give you specific recommendations of outreach campaigns that you can run and already build them for you, basically so you could. Yeah, so it’s an
JC : It’ll maybe let’s say, I have a bunch of blogs. And we would say, Listen, this blog is right, right here for the picking. And these are the pages that we think you should reach out to. And here’s the pre-built campaign to do it. So it just it just crawls your site and says, here’s the low hanging fruit, go nuts, and it’s already ready for you make a little Edit and then hit send kind of thing?
Andy: Exactly.
JC: That’s That’s cool. That’s very cool. You see, I love that love those inside scoops. If for nothing else, because I’m I guess you know me and you are talking now. So I actually get to hear before anyone else.
Andy: I mean, normally I’m like, Alright, this is a closely guarded secret. Can’t tell anyone about that. But yeah, as long as the episode isn’t dropping tomorrow or anything like that.
JC: I’m gonna keep I’m gonna let it go a little later, just so I can get myself I’m getting
Andy: Well, I will I will let you know personally when this is out.
JC: Good. No, I definitely want to know that for sure. So let me ask you this. You know, I talked to a lot of business owners, you know, you’re on your second business in a sense, right? You know, being a lawyer isn’t itself you know, a business and you’re on this one now? What is the best advice that you’ve ever been given in business that you could share with the audience that just maybe just changed how you looked at things or really helped you?
Andy: The best advice I’ve been given in..
JC: Or best advice you could give just from your own experience..
Andy: I think from from my own experience, the one thing I would tell anyone that I ever work with anyone that I ever hire, especially is just stay curious. And don’t stop trying to learn more because you level up your game, the more like, the less satisfied you become with blog posts or things that just that you think are giving you answers on something like for marketers, especially, test everything out, test it out yourself, run AB Tests, try and like just never be I guess never be satisfied with like the amount of knowledge that You feel like you have and don’t just rely on that exclusively. Like, it’s great to, like, keep getting experience and keep learning new things and like being like, Alright I that will inform your your decisions for like, what marketing channels and things like that to work on. But don’t stop trying to get into more trying to learn more and just improve your skills because it just, it’s going to up your game, it’s going to make you more valuable and make everything that you do much more successful.
JC: I completely agree, especially coming from that industry so yeah
Andy: Yeah, for marketing, especially like I’ve hired like many people in the past and I’ve seen like the ones that end up being the most successful in their roles and end up progressing are the ones that just stay curious and ask a lot of questions. And like, if you’re if you’re working at a company and you’re like worried like, I’m like bothering my boss asking too many questions or, or I just curious about this one thing that I’ve just seen that like taking that curiosity and never being satisfied with just like being complacent really has kind of a just a huge impact on the organization that you’re in and for your career.
JC: So this might sound like a dumb question, given that you have a software that really helps with this, but outside of using your own software for yourself, obviously for to promote Postaga, which I imagine you obviously use for yourself. What other types of marketing are you doing to promote postdoc? What’s working? You know, what maybe didn’t work? You know, my audience sometimes gets a lot of value from kind of just hearing what’s out there that work, what isn’t working?
Andy: For sure. Yeah. Like, man, what is and isn’t working? What is what isn’t working is like always like the more interesting thing, right? It’s like, Alright, maybe I could maybe I can save you some time.
JC: Time and money. Yeah.
Andy: So I guess, like, there are some things that are some things that are like are not as quantifiable that I’m trying to better quantify. So, for example, I personally am very bad at I think, at social media. It’s not like it’s something I’m really trying on. But it’s not a skill that I have personally. But one piece of advice that we got from another startup that in a similar space was one thing that’s going to be helpful for for you is building an online community related to your, your specific niche and your product. And so far, that has been like a has been a really good thing for us. So like what we did, right before we launched, we built a private Facebook group dedicated to outreach and link building. And it’s been good for us. I really, now that I’m talking about it, I wish I had better numbers for it. But it’s been like, there’s definitely been like a lot of work to put into it. But it’s been very good for keeping people engaged. Also, like as a new another channel, aside from email, our users know what’s going on what we’re working on. For me also, it’s like been good for like, also like, as another channel for support. So because sometimes people will like, like, Hey, I’m trying to solve for this problem.
Andy: Does anyone have any recommendations and outside of like, me answering support tickets, I have other users in the community also that can help and chime in and have been great for giving ideas. I’ve sourced a lot of our own blog posts and content just from conversations that have happened in our like, private Facebook community. So like, that’s been good for us also, like, I, I hadn’t really thought of that before starting this business. But like, since getting that advice and doing it, I would definitely do that again, for if you’re you ever have if you’re starting a SAAS business in particular, or really, I don’t know, most any business, I would definitely look into some sort of, like, social community. There are there are a lot of options out there, you’re like, Alright, do I want to do a Facebook community? Or do I want to do something like slack or discord? I personally didn’t want to do like slack or discord, because those conversations are much more ephemeral and instant. Like, if I miss something in Slack, then it’s gone forever in 10 minutes, you know, but something with Facebook, You don’t need to be, like, present there all the time.
So that’s kind of the idea. That’s what that’s one thing. What else? other channels and things like that? Um, I guess what would be no surprise to anyone. Organic SEO and content marketing are extremely important. create content, create lead magnets on your best content pages. Make like to help make sure that the people who visit your website, get into your ecosystem, get onto your newsletters, so you can then throw them into a drip sequence of getting them to sign up for your product if they haven’t yet. And for anyone who signs up for your product or service, have some sort of educational series to get them to check it out and to upgrade from whatever plan they’re on to another plan or something like that.
JC: I mean, the money’s in the list, right? That’s what, that’s what I was taught and learn and agree with. You got the list? It’s like an ATM machine, you know?
Andy: Yeah I feel like that, like definitely, like the people who have been doing, like digital marketing from the earliest days are like the best at really using that email list. And I don’t just, I got nothing more to add to that.
JC: Yeah. That’s all right. Listen, Andy, I’m so glad that you came on the show. I love the software, like I said, and you know, even after we jump off this, I have more questions for you just sign up here. But how can the audience check out Postaga? Where do they go? And then how can they reach out to you personally, if they have some higher-level partnership kind of ideas or anything like that?
Andy: For sure. So we have a two-week free trial. You can check that out at post daga.com. That’s P-O-S-T-A-G-A.com. I’m pretty easy to find on the internet, because there are not any other Andy Cabassos. So you could find me on Twitter, @AndyCabasso. A LinkedIn, it’s Andrew Cabasso, so because I don’t know it sounds maybe a bit more professional, I don’t know. And our private Facebook group that’s all about outreach and link building is called Grow Together SEO. So yeah, check that out also.
JC: Eddie, thank you so much for being on the show. And I look forward to talking to you soon and check out the software even more.
Andy: Awesome. Thanks, JC.
JC: Thanks a lot. Bye.