Mikael Dia is the Founder and CEO of Funnelytics, a leading analytics and funnel mapping platform. The platform helps businesses plan and portray their marketing funnels and measures and optimizes customer journeys using data-driven strategies. Mikael has successfully launched three seven-figure businesses, including Funnelytics, White Coat Digital, and IIFYM, showcasing his entrepreneurial understanding and innovative approach to digital marketing. He is also the author of The Funnelytics Chronicles.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [03:27] Mikael Dia shares how Funnelytics transforms visual strategies into actionable analytics
- [09:10] The pivotal moment Mikael decided to transition from agency work to focusing on Funnelytics
- [17:21] How Funnelytics started with a lifetime deal and the lessons learned from that pricing model
- [19:35] Tips for bootstrapping a business
- [23:52] Strategies to identify and reduce customer churn
- [29:51] The challenges and rewards of raising capital for Funnelytics
- [34:44] Mikael explains why he decided to raise money to grow his business
- [42:53] The strategy behind using raised funds to build Funnelytics 2.0 and scale the business
- [48:14] How Funnel Daddy leverages Funnelytics to provide high-value services
In this episode…
In today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape, the ability to transform vague assumptions into data-driven decisions is crucial for businesses looking to propel customer acquisitions. Imagine having a tool that enables you to visually plan out your entire marketing strategy and overlay actual performance data to help you determine what is effective and what is not. Wouldn’t this be incredibly valuable?
Digital marketing expert Mikael Dia shares how he saw the potential of a digital whiteboard that could plan customer acquisition strategies and overlay analytical data for making informed decisions. He discusses the limitations in his digital marketing agency, where disparate data from various platforms made it difficult to measure and optimize client results effectively. Mikael dives deep into his innovative canvas-based analytics platform, explaining how he flipped the script on traditional marketing analytics, enabling businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions. He also shares eye-opening insights about raising capital and the pressures of venture-backed growth.
In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz hosts Mikael Dia, Founder and CEO of Funnelytics, about transforming marketing funnels with data-driven strategies. Mikael shares how Funnelytics transforms visual strategies into actionable analytics, identifying and reducing customer churn, funding challenges, and the difference between Funnelytics and traditional analytic tools.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
- “[SaaS Series] Tips To Thrive in the SaaS Space With Sujan Patel” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Top Agency Series] Leveraging Digital Marketing Agencies for Media Buying With Liana Ling” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “Chris Yeh | Blitzscaling, Scaling in a Pandemic, and How to Friend a Billionaire” on the Smart Business Revolution Podcast
- “AcuityScheduling: Split Testing Mastery & Converting Sales- with Gavin Zuchlinski [Sales]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
Quotable Moments:
- “Building spreadsheets to aggregate data only goes so far; you need visual mapping to really comprehend the flow of customer conversion.”
- “I thought I knew what the market wanted, but really understanding your customer segments is crucial to delivering the right product.”
- “Fundraising is just selling your company to a different type of customer.”
- “Raising money is no different than selling a product; you’re selling a company to a different buyer, the investor.”
- “The more we focus on customers who are using the product and make it stickier for them, the easier it is to find more.”
Action Steps:
- Enhance visualization skills with strategic mapping: By visually mapping out customer journeys, you can identify bottlenecks and opportunities.
- Implement data-driven decision-making: Draw actionable insights from data for more informed decision-making and optimization of customer journeys.
- Adopt a customer-centric mindset: This step is crucial for aligning your offerings with market demand and ensuring that your solutions resonate with the right audience.
- Develop a dual-focus product strategy: This strategy can help reduce confusion and improve user experience, addressing the challenge of serving diverse customer bases with a single product.
- Leverage community and feedback for product development: Meet the evolving needs of your customers and leverage community-driven insights for product innovation.
Sponsor for this episode
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:01
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.
Jeremy Weisz 0:22
Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Mikael Dia of Funnelytics. You can check them out at funnelytics.io. And Michael before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since this is part of the SaaS series, some other great guests to check out, Sujan Patel, founder of Mailshake, they help with email outreach and sales engagement. Talks about how he built the company to over 70,000 users. That was a really good one. The one of the co-founders of Pipedrive. I had them held back when they had like 10,000 customers, I think they have over 100,000 now at Pipedrive. And a big thank you to Liana Ling, who’s CEO of AdSkills. They’re a company that trains media buyers. She said you must have Mikael on the podcast. So thanks Liana for the suggestion. Another one was Wade Foster, founder of Zapier. He talks about the journey and check out many, many more episodes at inspiredinsider.com.
This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream partnerships and relationships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the accountability, the strategy, and then the full execution. So Mikael we call ourselves, kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company, so they can create amazing relationships and run their company, and we can do everything else. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasts and you should have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].
I’m excited to introduce Mikael Dia. He’s a digital marketing expert and the founder of Funnelytics, which is a leading analytics and funnel mapping platform. And Mikael has transformed how businesses understand and optimize their customer journeys, and that’s using data driven strategies. So Funnelytics helps to track, report and optimize your marketing funnels using a visual canvas. And I’ll do a screen share. We’ll kind of poke around the website a little bit and that they pull data from all different types of platforms to get the most accurate results. The software helps companies make faster decisions and improve client results. You can check it out at funnelytics.io. Mikael, thanks for joining me.
Mikael Dia 3:03
Oh man. Thank you for the intro. Thank you for having me. I am very, very excited to chat with you.
Jeremy Weisz 3:09
You have a really interesting journey. We’ll go in reverse order, because I want to hear about Funnelytics first. But you’ve started other companies, language learning companies, you had an agency as well. That’s kind of where Funnelytics come out of. But just start with Funnelytics and what you do?
Mikael Dia 3:27
Yeah, I mean, you did a really good job kind of describing it, to be honest, we’ve basically built an analytics-powered whiteboard, is kind of how I like to say it. It’s think of Miro or your lucid charts or your diagramming tools, where on the canvas, I can go and add my traffic sources. I can go and add my pages, my different actions. I can connect them all together, but then I can click a button and overlay all of the data right there on top, and people can see exactly what’s working and what’s not, basically the flows that are driving customers to their business.
So a lot of times, people have no clue what’s actually generating them customers like, what are the paths that those people are taking? And when you use a tool like Google Analytics, or you build spreadsheets or charts or graphs, it’s really, really hard, because it’s like linear, it’s columns and rows. And with Funnelytics, because it’s a canvas, it’s, think of it as a whiteboard, I could just visualize that flow right there on that Canvas.
Jeremy Weisz 4:35
So if you’re listening to the audio version, there is a video version. You can check it on YouTube, and we’re on the Funnelytics site here, and you could see old way versus the Funnelytics way. Just, can you walk me through a little bit about what we’re looking at with the Funnelytics way here?
Mikael Dia 4:53
Yeah, so I think it’s important in order to understand the Funnelytics way, you have to understand what people do today to plan, measure and optimize the customer journey. So we really think about customer journeys or marketing funnels in those three buckets, right? I need to go and plan out the strategy. What exactly are all the different touchpoints? What are the pages, the emails, the automations, the traffic sources, the retargeting, all of those things that we’re going to put together in order to turn a stranger to become a customer, right? So that’s the planning phase. And a lot of times during the planning phase, I also want to put together some forecasts and say, well, if I spend this much and these are my kind of conversions, this is the outcome, right.
Then, I then need to, kind of, once I launch this and I actually build my pages and do all these things, I now need to measure the results of this. I need to go and log into Facebook. I got to log into Google Analytics. I’ve got to build a spreadsheet, maybe put together a dashboard using Looker studio or some other dashboarding tool to kind of look at my reports and my numbers, but I’ve got to measure the performance of this strategy in some way, shape or form, and then the challenge comes around. Okay, well, what do I do in order to optimize? It’s great to have data, but I need to draw conclusions from that data, get insights from that data, so I can act and actually make some changes and some stuff. So typically, I’m going to have a data analyst, or somebody who understands how to translate this data into this strategy, and then they’re going to come up with some recommendations, and maybe they’re only going to look at a page, or whatever it is.
Well with Funnelytics, because we basically allow you to plan on a canvas, so you have that planning whiteboard, in a sense, but then, because you can overlay the data right on top of that same strategy, you can just basically overlay numbers on top of your actual strategy, right. So now I can see very quickly how many people go this way versus this way. What are my conversion rates? Where are people dropping off on this particular strategy? Because all I’m doing is overlaying numbers on top of this particular strategy.
Jeremy Weisz 7:15
Got it so, like when we’re looking at here, there’s Facebook here, and so you’ll see overlaid, okay, there’s X number of people going in here, X number of people are actually clicking here, and then X number of people are actually going to check out, and then paying is that you got it?
Mikael Dia 7:33
Exactly. So I can very much see, and then I can isolate, let’s say hey, you know what? Let’s isolate Facebook, or let’s isolate Google ads to see what exactly those people are because there’s going to be some people that go one way and a certain percentage that go another way, and I can kind of really filter that data and analyze that data to really start to make some smart decisions.
Jeremy Weisz 7:55
Yeah? So kind of like a strategy measure and then optimize. You got it? Yeah, there’s a really good post on your site. I want to encourage people to check it out here. So if people go to funnelytics.io and they have a blog page, this one happens to be, this is a customer journey mapping. So I thought this was really very, very thorough and goes into great detail on the elements of the customer journey and even kind of what you were talking about, breaking up some of the strategy piece, and the behavior, the attitudes, experience and everything like that. This is the five step guide here. People can check this out. One of my favorite parts of this, because I always forget about it, is this part, which is customer journey maps from the awareness to the interest to the purchase, the retention to the advocacy. So I just want to encourage people to check this out. This is really, really as thorough as I’ve seen, as far as a customer journey mapping.
Mikael Dia 8:57
I’m glad you found it useful.
Jeremy Weisz 9:00
So the idea, okay, you were running an agency, talk about what you wanted, and then you created the solution for yourself.
Mikael Dia 9:10
Yeah. I mean, honestly, it’s exactly what I just said, right? I used to do this for all of my clients. So what we would sell on the agency front was these kind of funnels, these customer acquisition engines or systems or funnels, whatever you word, fancy word you want to use. But we would map out all of the pages. Sometimes, it would be a webinar with an opt-in to a webinar, and then email follow ups, and then that sends people to a sales page. And sometimes it would be something slightly different. Maybe it would be ads over to an opt in for a downloadable PDF, and then there’s a quick upsell, whatever, right?
So we would sell people strategies that would help them acquire customers using kind of paid advertising. And in order to sell my clients, I would map out this strategy on a whiteboard. I would sometimes translate it into like a little PowerPoint. I actually went to Fiverr and got little icons designed, little icon packs of like, oh, this is an opt in page. This is a webinar page. This is a Facebook icon. And then I would kind of just map this so that I could explain to my client, this is the strategy we’re going to deploy for you, right? And what I found is, when I would show them that strategy, when it was visual, it clicked in their mind, like, okay, I understand how you’re going to help me get clients. It’s less about, oh, you’re going to create five blog posts, or you’re going to do this every month for me, this is an actual system that’s going to help you go and convert these strangers into customers. But then, when it came to like actually looking at the data, that’s when I struggled, because now I’m logging into Facebook, Facebook’s telling me it got 20 conversions, when in fact, it didn’t.
And then Google says it also got some odd number of conversions. And Google Analytics says there were actually only 10 conversions total. And then my CRM says this, and Stripe says that, and my page builders say this. And then I would build spreadsheets to try to aggregate this data and see what’s really what and then when I would report back to my clients, I would report in a kind of dashboard format, so I would show them a chart or a graph, and I would show and it didn’t click for them. It didn’t make much sense. So again, the idea was, man, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just have a digital whiteboard that allowed me to visualize this strategy and then click a button and just overlay these numbers on top? I mean, how hard could that be?
Jeremy Weisz 12:03
Famous last words, like millions of dollars of investment later,
Mikael Dia 12:09
Exactly, after millions of dollars of building a product and realizing, oh, turns out analytic-powered whiteboard is not that simple after all. So, but that’s kind of how this started.
Jeremy Weisz 12:22
So your agency business, you were doing paid ads, and then building the funnels behind those paid ads for people, and then at what point, and then you obviously are creating this because it makes for a better client experience, also stickiness, also retention, all the same reasons why people would want to use it for themselves. At what point did you decide? Okay, I should really start a separate business out of this.
Mikael Dia 12:49
Yeah, so I launched. So I started building the tool, and I hired a developer near the beginning of 2017 maybe it was near the end of 2016 I don’t know. It was somewhere around there. And it was like, part time, right? I was running my agency full time, and it was just, again, I was just using profits from my agency to pay this developer on the side. And I remember it was around like, maybe October ish, September, October. I went to a mastermind with a friend of mine, and I showed him the prototype of our mapping tool with the kind of idea of, like the analytics. But the analytics was not at all ready like it was a prototype at that stage. And I showed him the mapping tool. I showed him you could drag and you have, like, this way to map out strategies and stuff. And he was like, man, this mapping tool is really sweet. And I was like, yeah, yeah. But, like, forget the mapping tool. The mapping is just the way to visualize the analytics. Like, who cares about the actual mapping itself? Like, anybody could build a mapping tool.
He’s like, Yeah, but it’s really cool and very easy. Like, okay, he’s like, I think you should give it away for free and then sell people on the analytics. So I was like, actually, it’s not necessarily a bad idea. I don’t really care about the mapping tool. I just want to visualize the data. I’m a nerd that way. Hence why it’s called Funnelytics. It’s not called funnel map, but that’s what I did. I was like, okay, let me do that. In December of 2017 I started advertising the mapping tool, and people signed up to our mapping tool. I spent about 10 grand or so just literally ads straight to the mapping tool. In fact, you see here, if people are watching the video, I have this book here called Funnelytics Chronicles. That was a book that I wrote after from our first year of launch of Funnelytics. But I spent about two months just advertising this mapping tool, and about 6000 people signed up, and I put everybody into a Facebook group, and again, I was still running my agency, so I was using that Facebook group to kind of share how I was growing my agency, why I built this tool. And I would like tease little sneak peeks of like the vision of Funnelytics, right, having the analytics aspect of things, about 3000 people out of the 6000 who signed up to the mapping tool ended up coming into the Facebook group.
People were raving about this mapping tool, how easy it was to kind of show clients these things. And I decided to open up a beta group of the analytics. And again, it was like, it wasn’t even beta, it was alpha, like the analytics. Just it really didn’t work, to be completely honest, it kind of worked, but not really. And I was like, let me see. Let me see if people really are going to buy this. But instead of going the SaaS model, and charging, let’s say, 99 bucks a month, knowing that, okay, this doesn’t really work. People are going to churn after a month. I was like, maybe I’ll just get them to buy for lifetime this access to this analytics tool. We’re going to call them our founding members, and we’re going to charge them 700 bucks. And I kind of expected to sell maybe 100 of them in, like, I don’t know, a month, a month and a half, two months, I don’t know, it turns out about 300 people bought in 48 hours, and we made $200,000 and that kind of made me realize that, okay. I mean, it took me a really long time to make $200,000 in my agency, 48 hours. I’m on to something. So I kind of kept that going. I did it again in March. We made another 200 kind of a launch of, like a lifetime value. Yeah, another launch of the lifetime deal.
Oh, love the lifetime deals. Oh, man, they do. I’ve learned a lot about lifetime, and I’ve learned a lot about running a SaaS company and selling lifetime and whether or not it’s smart, and there’s so many things I could talk about like that backfired on that front, but in general, in that…
Jeremy Weisz 17:21
Would you do it again, though knowing what you know now, or how would you do it differently; lifetime perspective?
Mikael Dia 17:27
No, I probably wouldn’t do a lifetime. I guess it depends. I guess it depends on what the product is and what is the ongoing expenses associated with it. So for us, we sold lifetime to an analytics tool. We had people install Funnelytics on like, I think one of our lifetime buyers ended up installing it on Rydercup.com which is like the PGA Tour. And it was during the weekend, and like, instantly, like 12 million people over the course of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, like, hit our and we had to up our servers, and just they crashed everything, and literally just the increase in our server costs, like, was like triple what this person just paid us, right?
Jeremy Weisz 18:16
So maybe do lifetime with like, an asterisk or something. Lifetime, if you go above a million something…
Mikael Dia 18:23
Certainly I would do something like that. And I would probably also do instead of lifetime, it doesn’t sell as well, but I would do a heavily discounted yearly. And the reason for that is because now people are there. It gives you some indication of recurring revenue. You get recurring revenue from it. You’re not supporting people forever. If they stop paying, you don’t have to support them anymore. But, I mean, can I complain we made one and a half million dollars in our first year, another $2 million in our second year, kind of with this lifetime model. So it was what bootstrapped this company is what allowed us to kind of get off the ground, and then I switched, and then churn came. And that’s a whole other story.
Jeremy Weisz 19:18
So I know at some point the journey raised money. But let’s still talk about the bootstrapping phase for a second. And you bootstrap now you have an influx of cash. What do you build first? Like, what features did you decide to build in the beginning?
Mikael Dia 19:35
I think looking back, I very much had tunnel vision of what I wanted versus what I was seeing the market was responding to, and I think if I would have not been so focused on what I wanted, we could have grown, at least from a monthly recurring revenue standpoint. We could have grown much faster. We could have built something that was a little bit more aligned with the type of customer that was coming in. I was building something for an advanced marketer. Yet, I was speaking to a beginner marketer or beginner agency, right? And what they wanted out of the product was much more on the mapping side, much more about the sales tool aspect of things, and much less about the analytics aspect of things. But because I was so tunnel vision on building the tool I wanted, it kind of created some, some barriers.
So I spent most of my efforts and most of our money on the analytics front, building features that allowed you to, you know, look at your data, filter the data that kind of stuff, which, again, it’s in the name. It’s called Funnelytics. It was literally took the word funnel and analytics and mash them together. That’s how creative I was. But looking back, again, our main customers at the time were not these advanced marketers who were looking at data to that degree.
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