Ruben Dua 4:51
It before a lot of that stuff. The premise though, is I remember the first time I put an animated GIF on a landing page And I was like, animated GIFs on landing pages are going to change everything. And then the moment came when a video, I was able to put an embed a video on a landing page. And the way to do it back then was nasty was very gnarly at a huge file, it was an MOV file, it was a WMV some really old antiquated formats, and then you’d have to embed those on a page. And then as a result, someone could watch a video and making it actionable and having them click to another place and do another thing and book a time and a calendar. Obviously, none of those things were possible at the time. But just this idea of creating a landing page as a clone to a human being, or to a story or to a short film or whatever have you, I realized that was really going to change everything. And since that realization, I’ve absolutely been on that path. And now, we see ourselves helping now. We’ve had over 70,000 people sign up for the Dubb platform since we started, these are people in sales, these are people that run agencies, these are solopreneurs, SMBs, we have fortune 500 clients, and they’re all really trying to do one simple thing, which is how do I create more relationships? How do I capture my essence, capture my story, connect with someone via content via landing page, the calls to action integrations on a page? And how do I streamline the whole communication process. And that’s exactly what we’ve committed to doing. And it’s been a hell of a ride, I’m having the time of my life right now, working really hard. Again, listening, building, and growing. And really, at the end of the day, our success is all rooted in other people’s success. Because at the end of the day, when you build a sales platform, it really doesn’t matter what the features are, doesn’t matter what the tech is, it matters how much people are growing in terms of specifically revenue and incomes that were routed to that.
Jeremy Weisz 6:57
Ruben, talk about some of those inflection points where you’re talking about listening. Right? And what someone told you that shifted the product, or a feature?
Ruben Dua 7:11
Yeah, well, it’s interesting, because in the pre meeting you asked, should you mention one of the startups before Dubb that I had started called Spreeify. And I was like, what, let’s not mention that it’s kind of not relevant for this. And maybe it is relevant, because the failures that we go through, in order to get to the successes, we don’t talk about those, sometimes we don’t want to talk about them, sometimes people don’t ask about them, but they are absolutely on our path. The obstacle is the way as I like to stay. And that’s an old Ryan Holiday. Yeah, this book. But yeah, and that’s a beautiful thing. And I think that this idea of failing forward is really important. I think one of the big biggest problems that happens in entrepreneurship and technology development, is this idea where an entrepreneur, someone determines that there is a problem in the marketplace, and then determines that they have the viable solution to solve that. And then they go to the marketplace, thinking that just because they want a machine that puts the cream cheese on the bagel, automatically, that everyone else is going to want that, and then they go to the marketplace and they realized that this device for 100 bucks, which is super difficult to clean, is not embraced by the market whatsoever. And as a result, it’s like a failure. And this is a story rooted in listening. The problem is that the problem here is not how to put cream cheese on the bagel, the problem is how to save time in the morning, and how to streamline the mourning process, and if you understand really what the core problem is, then you can actually figure out a solution and say, okay, well, maybe it’s not something that puts the cream cheese on the bagel, maybe it’s just the bagel cutter, because when I use a knife, it makes a mess. And I can cut my fingers. And maybe it’s just a bagel chopper and boom, you got a bagel chopper. And if you can get a patent on that, or if you can get first to market and distribute that, then you’re doing really well. But I think the idea and the point here, though, is that we can have a general essence of what is broken. But if we think that we have the entire solution ourselves, that’s maybe arrogant. And the better solution is to listen and to figure out what is it that people are actually going through?
Jeremy Weisz 9:26
Yeah, focusing on the benefits as opposed to the feature sets, like you were saying I focusing on this is the benefit in maybe iterating based on the benefit, not the feature. With Dubb, what were people saying early on that shifted what you were doing?
Ruben Dua 9:43
Well, I think that in the beginning, it started with how can I get people to just read my emails and respond to my emails. That was the first problem that we were trying to solve that emails. Email is the cheapest freest way to run your sales period. There’s no better cheaper way to do it. Social media is amazing. Live webinars, podcasts, it’s all amazing. But emails, you can literally go to a company, you can download a list of emails and start in cold emailing them and just praying that someone’s going to respond. And it’s not easy, because it’s become very difficult, with domain technology and the way that it sort of blocks, you know, mass emails. But the point was that getting those email responses was very difficult. And incident realization, which is not rocket science is that when we add humanity to the process of communication, that people are going to ignore you less, I mean, just think about it for a second, if you pop into an elevator, or a coffee shop, and someone says, hello, if you have decent manners, you’re gonna say hello back, you’re not going to ignore that person. But to ignore an email, on the other hand, you don’t have to have good manners, you can have the best manners on the planet, and delete or ignore an email. And you’re good, right? Because that’s just not the etiquette. It’s not the expectation in our society. But the second that you add a smiling face, like when you sent me a Dubb video, I was like, okay, I wanted to reply to you, like immediately on the spot, because I was like, I’m not going to ignore this. This is amazing. And just think about how powerful that is. All that we’re doing is bringing ourselves right. So that was problem number one. And then problem number two is okay, great. Now we have a response. Well, now, what’s the next thing in our funnel? Like, okay, well, we need bookings, you know, we need people to go to our website and fill out that form or book a time in my calendar, Acuity Scheduler, a great calendar program, just like Calendly. And there’s so many on the market. And we sort of realized we need to go and create deep partnerships with them, which is why we created a partnership with Acuity and all the other ones. And now, calendar integrations. So now people are booking times that people calendar. So think about that for a second, before you had a hard time getting a response from the person. But then when you did, hey, let’s book a time. Okay, when works Tuesday at seven, no, let’s do Thursday at four, back and forth, back and forth. And then now all of a sudden, instant calendar booking. So that’s the next thing. And then we started to just keep going down.
Jeremy Weisz 12:08
You’re like eliminating these friction points.
Ruben Dua 12:10
Yeah, right. So it was just how do we take out friction from the sales process? Right. And we ended up, and we’re still going, we haven’t stopped. But we ended up saying, Well, how can you take a credit card? How can you actually go through a contract? How can you actually do a screen video, using the Dubb Chrome extension or desktop app, where you do a contract walkthrough, have a call to action that goes to digital sign link. And the person can actually watch a video of you doing a contract walkthrough, and then doing a digital signature and completing the contract all asynchronously. So just for the people that are running agencies out there, I know what the sales cycles look like, for every digit that you add to the contract amount, it could be another six months of waiting time. You know, I know, the loyalty issues. I know that it’s like you’re only as good as your last campaign. It doesn’t matter what you did in the past. Like, I know some of those challenges, because I’ve worked in the agency world. And I’ve run agencies and I’ve worked for larger agencies. And it’s not easy, just think what you can do with video.
Jeremy Weisz 13:18
I want to talk, we’ll get into some of the mistakes you mentioned about bringing the humanity back to the process. So in a second, I want to talk about mistakes people make with outreach. But before we get there, I want to know some of the things you learned. I know you have worked, like you said at some big agencies before, Scorpion being one of them. And I’d love to hear some of the learnings from Scorpion.
Ruben Dua 13:46
Yeah, Scorpion is a fantastic company, Inc 5000. Company, at the time I was there, they were based in Santa Clarita, which is ironically now where I live. So in my building where I have a terrorist, I can overlook and actually see that building where I used to be employed, and which is kind of interesting and kind of cool. It’s sort of a memory. But what’s so interesting is that, this is a 200 person Sales Team at the time. And the rhetoric was, it’s hard to get people to respond to our emails, it’s hard to get calendar bookings, like before, there’s a lot of competitors when we go to these trade shows, there’s competitors, there’s online vendors, there’s overseas vendors as low-cost people there’s industry-specific ones. So, you know, competition was fierce, which I think is just natural in the marketplace. So the question really was how do you differentiate yourself and how do you as a salesperson, how do you go get that response? And I remember one of the sales reps that sent a first I think it was a screen video of a proposal. Got a one-day close on a five-digit deal, and that was almost unheard of. And it was like sign on the spot. And I was like, wow, there’s something here. There’s something here, the largest deal that I have heard signed via Dubb, it’s less than 10 million. We have a couple of fortune 500 clients, I don’t have a specific amount, but there have been some really large deals that have taken place via this type of communication. And I wish I had more specifics, and I really wish I got a commission on. But that, unfortunately, is not how our pricing structure works.
Jeremy Weisz 15:37
Maybe we’ll change that for enterprise, right. So you cut your teeth, it’s Scorpion. There any other I don’t know, from a structure standpoint, like leadership structure of the company, because you really learn from inside because I don’t know what was like, around the staff level at Scorpion? Is it like in the 500 600 people?
Ruben Dua 15:59
Yes. 500, 600? Yep.
Jeremy Weisz 16:01
Is there anything that you took from just observing, whether it’s the culture or the structure of the organization that you took to Dubb?
Ruben Dua 16:07
Well, I think one of the things that I think is really important when we think about leadership, and we think about structure is this idea of having an open communication, a transparent vibe within a company. And the reason why that’s really important is because the people that are on the frontlines of the business, like the sales reps, and the account managers, they’re the ones that are, again, going back to listening. They’re the ones that are speaking to customers, they’re the ones that are getting the objections, they’re the ones that are getting the rejections. And by taking that information and having that, sort of sprinkled throughout the DNA of the company, we can make improvements. So if there’s no communication, or Ill communication between that type of customer listening, and the architects of the business, then things start to fall apart. So I think what we always have tried to do any organization I’ve ever been a part of, I’ve always tried to say, listen, this is what the customers are saying. And now what are we going to do with it. So I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways that I have now is transparency, communication, and then taking that feedback and then turning it into fuel data that blooms and blossoms, the company. Your objections, if you understand your objections in a business, it’s one of the most valuable things that you can do. Like one of the things that we do, we have a low churn rate, right? Relative to the industry. It’s like a 6% churn rate, which I’m proud of, but when people do cancel, for whatever reason, we always do a deep interview, there’s a survey, we call them we text them are like, what happened, what went wrong? And we gather that information, and then that information, we go reinvest back into the business and try to figure out, okay, well, there was a glitch on Windows 3.0, we should go do a build for that, or just say we don’t support that. And then boom, we’re making improvements, so we try to just constantly, it’s this feedback loop, there’s a lot of really great books on this, Lean Startup, there’s a lot of books on sort of 360 Feedback. So I’m definitely a student of this space.
Jeremy Weisz 16:09
Let’s talk about some of the mistakes people make with outreach, right? Obviously, someone using Dubb, it’s very personalized video message. And I know, I’ve heard, I suggest people check out your YouTube channel, we have some great videos there on the sales process, and how you can really use video and you’re a big proponent on doing deep research, a little research goes a long way, a lot of times, but what are some of the mistakes you see people making?
Ruben Dua 18:49
First when I say, the mistakes that I see people making, I’m going to start with myself with this, just because I don’t want to come from a place where I’m pointing my finger at other people making mistakes, because I have made a lot of these mistakes myself. So I do want to start with some accountability here, and some humility. But I remember being in a boiler room situation in a startup, actually the one that you mentioned Spreeify, and I remember being in a massive scarcity mindset. We don’t have enough pipeline, we don’t have enough leads, we don’t have enough revenue, there’s no growth, our business model was terribly flawed because we didn’t have a recurring revenue model. And it was really stressful for us because we never knew if we were gonna get our paycheck. And ironically, one of the interesting things about running an agency in my opinion, if you’re not doing it the right way, is where you’re fronting the cash for the ad spend for the client. And then you have to go do a net 30 which actually turns out to be net 90 sometimes net 120, if you really get graded, and all of a sudden you become a bank. You become like the world’s worst bank, you’re just fronting other people’s money. And then if for some reason that they say that there’s been no results, and we’re not going to pay, then you’re really screwed. Reason why I’m saying all this is because that type of stress that type of financial stress for founders, it permeates through the entire culture of the business. And if you have this scarcity mindset, if you have this fear mindset about how am I going to get paid and how am I going to drive revenue, then you start to act desperate. And desperation is one of those things where it’s so interesting when you think about desperation, because it functions in a very similar way to the way that olfactory senses operate. And what I mean by that is that in early human, early mankind, if a little family is in a little cave, and there’s some stench in that cave, no one’s actually going to smell that. Because the way that our nose and our olfactory senses work is that we sense Delta, we sense change. So if we’re used to smelling like this every single day, we just smell normal. It’s a survival thing that happens. So when we’re desperate, we can’t smell the desperation on us. But boy, does it reach out to other people. And now let’s dissect that a little bit. What is desperation look and feel like? Well, it’s long emails, it’s emails that are overthought, it’s emails that are selfish with the word, I too much that lack empathy, that lack value, the lack an understanding of what the other person is going through, that lack the research, the necessary research required to understand what a prospect is, and what they’re going through. Instead of saying, I do this, and I’ve done this, and I’ve worked all these companies, and I’m amazing, instead of actually focusing on what the other person is going through, based on the research that he’s done, because you’ve had the time, the abundance mindset to give you the time to understand them. If you mix all that together, with desperation, it’s just not good. Let’s think abundantly. Let’s invest the time let’s bring the humanity back. Let’s actually not go for the sale. Let’s not go for the kill. Let’s actually go for the relationship. Let’s not close more deals. Let’s open more relationships.
Jeremy Weisz 22:21
Love it. Let’s talk about a real-world example. And what someone did. Chris is a good example. What happened with Chris?
Ruben Dua 22:29
Yeah, Chris Kirkpatrick life180.com He’s a great life coach. He had a really interesting story. And actually, I have my Kindle here. So let me grab it. Here’s my Kindle. But what he did was, he’s an old-time Dubb subscriber, and he’s had some great wins on the platform. And he had some, as you mentioned your dream 100. Right. And I think he references a book and I unfortunately, I can’t remember the book right now that he references but is it called Dream 100?
Jeremy Weisz 22:30
Chet Holmes, Chet Holmes talk about dream 100. Yeah.
Ruben Dua 22:54
Bingo. That’s the book right there. Thank you so much. I have not read that book. But I intend to. So he said, look, I’ve got my dream 100.
Jeremy Weisz 23:10
I had Amanda Holmes on the podcast talking. Her dad, unfortunately, passed away. But she talked about the book. And I think they did a new addition to the book. I think it’s called The Ultimate Sales Machine.
Ruben Dua 23:24
Boom, there it is.
Jeremy Weisz 23:25
Talks about the dream 100.
Ruben Dua 23:26
There it is perfect. So when we think about the dream 100, my interpretation of that is, who are 100 dream clients? Right? These are our ideal client profile, the contract size is good, cultural fits great. Everything’s spot on. Right. So now how do we go turn 100 into 10 meetings? And then close to those meetings? It’s a 2% conversion rate, right? How do we go do that? Right. So his premise was, let me go and use Dubb, send video messages from my phone as a one touch point of my screen as a second touch point, showing very specifically, what that company is going through, like going to their website, going to their press releases, doing narrated screen videos explaining how he could actually help in this whole process. And then the third thing that he did was to actually take his videos, upload them to Kindles. And Amazon Kindle devices is 60. But you can actually get these for 60 bucks, you can actually get them for even like 30 bucks refurbished on eBay, apparently. And you can upload a video to a Kindle, you can send it in a nicely packaged box, you have to put some click me or sorry, yeah, click me here and then swipe up because that’s the first thing that you want the person to do when they open this gift, this corporate gift. You want them to click the button and then swipe up and then boom, the videos playing a view explaining how you can provide value to them, right non salesy relationship focused. And then of course, he followed up with some more video emails using Dubb, which is great, he got the activity reporting. So you could actually see when people were watching the videos, and then he knew when to pick up the phone. And then he landed the YouTube video that we did had to $3.4 million deal, which is on our YouTube channel, rev show, the contract was $3.4 million. But actually very recently, a week ago, last Wednesday, in our webinar, he actually told us that that contract is now $10 million, because now it’s been some time and they’ve renewed multiple times, and they’ve expanded the contract. So actually, the video should be called How to close a $10 million deal.
Jeremy Weisz 25:37
Got to update that. So what did he do talk about the video itself? So what in the video that he put on the Kindle?
Ruben Dua 25:44
Yeah, so it was an introductory video, he did plenty of research. One of the things that I think makes your podcast what it is, is because of the research that you’ve done, and I had a chance to kind of research your research and research the shows that you’ve done. Obviously, the reason why you’ve landed the guests that you have with all those amazing names, is because you put time in and you understand people and it’s that relationship build. And that’s just continued to kind of scale itself. And how impressive is that? So congratulations to you. It’s very impressive. But I think the key here, and I’m preaching to the choir is research, understanding who is this person? What are their goals professionally, personally, what sports teams are they into? Like? Do you want to buy them some cubs tickets? Do you want to send them a video of a YouTube video of something interesting that happened at the Superbowl? What is it that’s relevant for them on a personal or professional basis? It all comes down to the research. But I also have to always add you can’t be salesy in this process, you have to let the relationship happen organically the way that it’s gonna happen, maybe very similar to how podcast conversations happen. Organic non-salesy.
Jeremy Weisz 26:57
Love it. Let’s talk about an ad agency, a large ad agency. And what happened with that?
Ruben Dua 27:05
Yeah, I mean, the biggest problem, in my opinion, we have a whole section for agencies in our technology, and there’s some original content that we’ve created for agencies, and this idea of Account Based Marketing. The good thing about it is that contract sizes are big, you can diversify your offerings, and make things really, really juicy. And you can be an agency of record for years, if not decades, which is amazing. The problem is that the second…
Jeremy Weisz 27:36
I’m just showing if you’re watching the video, we’re here on dubb.com. And they have a lot of industries that they help with this one in particular, is industries backslash agencies, so you can see some of their specific content for agencies. But keep going.
Ruben Dua 27:53
There you go. There’s some logos there. But the interesting thing is that competition is probably the number one challenge that people go through when running an agency because there’s cost-cutting, there’s overseas, we want to go specific, we want general, we want an all in one solution, we can’t work with you anymore. So there’s a lot of different reasons why clients might say, actually, we cannot work with you anymore, where the loyalty just kind of sort of dissipates, right? So the way that we’ve figured out to solve this problem is, how do we increase communication? How do we increase transparency? I remember working for an agency, and I will not mention the name, but there was zero transparency from week to week, no one would know what was happening to our ad accounts, like where was money being spent? What are the conversions? We had no idea what was happening. And we had to wait for that one-hour meeting every week. And in that meeting, how can you expand on information if you only have one hour to talk about seven or eight different topics? So we always recommend to people, increase the amount of communication that you’re doing throughout the process, send them a three-minute video giving them an update on what’s new with Facebook, you know, how are those TikTok ads performing? How are those LinkedIn $15 CPC ads performing there? Are they actually driving conversions? Give that type of information as quickly and as often as possible. And then if you can use a platform, there’s Ryke, I think that one is a popular one. There’s Asana, there’s Bootcamp, there’s monday.com. There’s so many different platforms out there that allow people to increase their communication. Ironically, we’ve built a lot of integrations with those so that people can capture videos and just send those videos over. One of the things that we love to say is replace a 30-minute meeting with a 30-second video. And what I mean by that is, instead of having to jump into a zoom, and go through a bunch of screen recordings, or go through a bunch of data, some spreadsheets, updates, you can craft it short email, and you can have a quick screen video in a very short amount of time, that might convey a lot of the most important information. And then, of course, this is a dialogue back and forth. But the key here is transparency, communication and content, really, education information. And that really builds trust.
Jeremy Weisz 27:53
Yeah, I love that. Replace a 30-minute meeting with a 30-second video. I’m sure a lot of agency owners would like that one.
Ruben Dua 27:53
Yeah, watch what happens. I mean, it’s amazing how you can take six slides and you can turn into, let’s just say a minute-long video. It’s amazing how possible that is, you know, if you just get to the core essence of what you’re trying to say it’s a pitch, it’s an elevator pitch. The cool thing is that, while I’m talking, I can be showing stuff on my screen. So it’s visual communication, I don’t need to mention those logos, I don’t need to say we’ve worked with X Company Y company and Z company. That’s a visual on the screen. This is one of the first rules of filmmaking show, don’t tell. So if I were to just say, hi, it’s Ruben from Dubb, I wanted to share some information on how we help agencies. And here’s some people that we’ve worked with, here’s some case studies that we have, and some specific results on some wins, love to connect, if I can show visually, what I’m talking about throughout that entire experience, watch what impact that makes. And if you can show their website, and some of the specific things that you’ve discovered in their world, that really makes an impression. When I was in the agency world, one of the things that I love to do was to find a problem on their website. And I never did this in an arrogant way. I did this always in a very humble way. But I would find something like oh, your SEO or your domain reputation, or there’s a broken link or something, right? ADA compliance, whatever it may be GDPR, always find something that’s kind of noteworthy, like, hey, I noticed, this is something that you should know about, if you ever want to talk about it, I’m happy to be a resource. Or in fact, here’s a link to you can do your own research, right. And all of a sudden, be like, thank you so much for pointing that out. I did not know that. And now all of a sudden, they have some internal dialogue. And either they love me or they hate me at that point, because I found a bug. But hopefully, there’s alignment and the conversation at least can get started.
Jeremy Weisz 32:24
Yeah, I love that. I mean, adding value is really the goal and a form of real relationship. I love to Ruben, I look at the page, if you’re watching the video, you can see I’m scrolling down here, I love to hear about the decision of having a starter package that’s free, right? Because again, this cost you money. Right, when you have a free package, obviously, it’s that balance of creating a frictionless process with running a business. So talk about the decision to have a free version.
Ruben Dua 33:04
Yeah, this is one of the levers in the SaaS world that we can do, right? So one of them is there’s the option where you give a free trial, and then you have to pay and then there’s the option where you have a free option and then you can stay on the free option or you can upgrade it right so those are sort of two kind of choices, two options I would say in a very specific choice that SaaS founders have to decide upon. And the reason why we chose not to require a credit card either a during the signup process or be after the free trial period was because we understand that it takes time for people to feel comfortable doing videos there’s tech hurdles, there’s self-confidence issues, there’s actually a lot of things that people have to go through in order to finally get comfortable recording video. And if you think about it public speaking, people are more scared of public speaking than they are to swim with sharks naked I don’t know something funny, right? Right. We’ve all heard that stuff before. So video is kind of like, it’s a form of public speaking. I mean, you can click stop or cancel it’s not like you’re at HubSpot inbound conference that a big stage with 1000 people in the audience and you forget what you’re gonna say and you just lose your stuff, it’s not like that, it’s more controlled environment, but at the same time, you’re on a stage, your videos out there maybe in perpetuity, and for some people there’s a confidence hurdle when it comes to that. So we realize if we want to be empathetic, we can’t just be like, alright, gun to the head. You got two weeks. If you don’t, then you’re out. Sorry, goodbye. We realized that people need some time with that. Right. The other thing is that we realize that if people start to use our platform, then our brand gets out. Similar to zoom. Now, if you sent me a zoom link, when I saw the Zoom link, instantly, it zoom, I trust zoom, I’m going to click on that I’m not going to have an issue with it. So we have sort of a secondary.
Jeremy Weisz 33:12
That make sense. They’re sending it out. And the free route, it’s got the Dubb logo, it’s got the Dubb URL and people are being exposed, the more videos people are sending, they’re being exposed to Dubb.
Ruben Dua 35:16
Yeah, exactly. So, there’s really two factors of that one of them is this idea of trying to gain brand ubiquity, which is what zoom has done. And that makes it so that when someone attends a Zoom meeting, or fills out a zoom form, that the conversion rates much higher, because there’s trust, they’ve heard of that technology, so they don’t have fear about clicking on it. And then the second thing is our marketing, it’s our social coefficient, right. So every person that he uses Dubb, and then sends a video to someone else, our brand gets out there, and then theoretically, we can get another customer. And then what that does is it allows us to a grow our company, to grow our revenue, but that also allows us to a reinvest into the business, and then be is keep our costs down. Like we could easily have our costs be $150 per month per user, like there’s a world where that happens, Salesforce, SaaS integrations, priced like that all the time, a lot of coaches even tell, hey, texture prices, and watch what happens. We didn’t want to do that we wanted to stay a little bit reasonable. We wanted to make it so that, it’s a volume play. That’s what you started have to do in SaaS. I think that’s a sign of a healthy SaaS company where they figured out how can I get some level of scale? Of course, we don’t want to give away our technology, because we want to invest in it and people associate value with based on the perception, right? So if we were to make our prices $1, we’d actually probably do a lot worse, because people would have a very poor perceived value.
Jeremy Weisz 36:59
Yeah. No, I love this. It’s super. It’s almost like a no-brainer for our company, I think. How hard was it to get the URL Dubb? dubb.com seems like it’s pretty amazing.
Ruben Dua 37:17
Yeah, we started out as dubb.co. And then I was trying to get dubb.com I always love the word Dubb. It’s like a recording, there’s something makes up like, like rims, there was that whole thing, like car rims, dub is like a car rims over 20 inches. It’s kind of a funny subculture. So it’s kind of rolled off the tongue. And so, early on in the process, I sort of made that a target, like, I’m going to go acquire that domain. And I started to negotiate. And I started to go back and forth with the owner at the time. And we landed on that price. God to get a four-letter domain name now, that’s a word. And in the lexicon, it’s become very expensive, very expensive. So we’ve had some significant offers on that domain. But we’re like, hey, we’re running a business. Sorry, we’re not just gonna sell our domain here. You get funny emails, but I would encourage people to, dot coms are cool, but they’re not. They’re not essential anymore. There’s a lot of great domains out there .ai .io .co is a great one .agency. I mean, that’s a cool one if you’re an agency dot agency, I like that. So I would say don’t get too stuck on the domain, it really doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, your brand, your logo, your feeling your essence that’s really what matters.
Jeremy Weisz 38:38
How are people Ruben using the SMS campaigns and two-way SMS messaging. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video platform have those features?
Ruben Dua 38:52
Yeah, definitely. I’m able to do a screen share in a moment, if you’d like to see that. Okay, cool. So I’ll just kind of sort of set us up here. So I think what’s really interesting about…
Jeremy Weisz 39:04
By the way, Ruben has no idea what I was asking on this whole call. But thanks for playing along.
Ruben Dua 39:12
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. I’m always ready. But unless I’m not so. So the interesting thing about SMS is that SMS is sort of like the wild west of marketing. There’s some regulation, but there’s not regulation and sort of etiquette rules the same way that there are with email. If you misbehave in email, you will get punished period there is absolutely no way around this. Google and outlook and all the other email servers out there have figured out ways to figure out if your mass blasting emails, and if enough people report your domain or your email as spam, you’re done. You’re finished and then you have to start from scratch. You have to warm up a domain and then go through the whole process again. So there’s sort of this vested interest if we are going to email market to have really good email hygiene, to make sure we clean our list to make sure that we understand who we’re sending this out to. Because if we misbehave once again, we’re gonna get blocked. With SMS it’s not quite like that just yet. Now, the reason why I’m saying this is not because people should take advantage of this medium. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s the reason why I’m saying this is because we all need to do the diligence to understand how we can have really good SMS campaigns, how we can actually go through the process. When are we allowed to send an SMS to someone? You know, can we go by a list of phone numbers and just cold SMS people? What does that mean?
Jeremy Weisz 40:45
I’ve never heard of someone doing that. But yeah.
Ruben Dua 40:48
What does that look like? And these are really important questions to ask ourselves. At the end of the day, just ask yourself, what kind of SMS, mass SMS, have you responded to? If someone sent you a cold SMS, what did that look like? Did you actually say, yeah, I’d love to click on that and fill out that form or put my credit card in? Or did you say stop, unsubscribe. So I have to start with that preface. It’s very easy to send an SMS campaign on Dubb. You configure your sender, Twilio, I like Twilio, simple texting sales message, Amazon couple configurations, you can decide which one’s best for you. You put your message in with some personalization script first name this way, Dubb has a CRM system. So every person, every contact in your CRM that has a first name, will actually have the first name displayed in the text message. And then of course, have a link right here. And that link produces depending if it’s an iPhone or an Android, it displays like a thumbnail, like an image, a thumbnail for the link itself. It’s called the meta OG image. So that sometimes looks nice. And then you select a video, and then you just send it, you just blast it out, you send this out, save it, and then go to your campaign builder, and then poof, it’s gone. The other thing that you can do is you can build an automated workflow. So for example, if I wanted to have an automated workflow, and say, everyone that did x, like filled out a form, I added them to the CRM, I could create a task for myself. And then I could also create an action that sends an SMS. And here I have send email or SMS. And then I can, of course, select my SMS that I just wrote, and then have this trigger and send, right. So once again, I would recommend that people do their research to figure out, what is the right etiquette, I would say do not SMS cold contacts, you’re gonna get a lot of stops and unsubscribes and some hate mail. Don’t do that, in fact, the provider might even block you. So just do your research. However, if you do get people’s phone numbers on a form, opt-in, this is a great way to send them an ebook, this is a great way to send them a calendar booking link, this is a great way to send them that Acuity link or a YouTube video, because they opted in. And that’s just efficient, because our devices are right in our pocket. And the open rate on SMS is 90%.
Jeremy Weisz 43:20
In your platform, it’s two way so can you respond back then within the platform?
Ruben Dua 43:26
Definitely, yeah, you can message back.
Jeremy Weisz 43:29
I could see people using it for their clients, possibly clients sometimes just want to respond via text. But you don’t want to give out personal cell phones. So when you’re using it in Dubb, are they opting in? Are you sending a message to opt-in or you just send them a message? Because you have them as contact?
Ruben Dua 43:50
Yeah, for us, it’s all opt in? What happens here is that someone will sign up to Dubb and they will I just kind of gave a sneak peek of what that two way SMS looks like. It’s a traditional kind of SMS thing. It’s also available on the mobile app. But I think what’s interesting for us is that if someone signs up to Dubb and then they put their mobile phone number and then we have we do a verification, and then we send them a link so that they can attend the training. And that has been positive, we don’t get angry, stop unsubscribe messages to that, because they signed up, they filled out a form and now we’re providing education, and then for the record, we’re not salesy in the trainings or the webinars that we host either because that’s just going to cause sort of a bad experience.
Jeremy Weisz 44:40
First of all, Ruben, I want to thank you, one last question. Before we end I want to point people to check out dubb.com to learn more. It’s a really slick platform. I’ve used it myself. So thanks for the value you create and provide for people. My last question is as mentors on this journey in entrepreneurship, who are some of the mentors that stick out to you? And maybe a piece of advice that they’ve given you?
Ruben Dua 45:11
Yeah, I really liked this question. I think that for me, my first mentor is my father. And the specific thing that I learned from my dad is to talk to strangers. Because we grew up a lot of us are taught to not talk to strangers. But in fact, talking to strangers is where you learn about humanity. And I remember, as a young kid, I would be embarrassed when he would talk to the taxi cab driver, or the person at the coffee shop, or the restaurant, and just someone stranger on the street, right. And I’d feel embarrassed, I do that whole thing with my elbow saying, stop, stop embarrassing. And then I realized what he was doing. Because at some point, the knowledge was starting to sort of self-perpetuate. And as he started to talk to more people, he knew more things. And then all of a sudden, I remember, it was like I put the puzzle together, I was like, oh, he talks to people so that he can learn. And then he talks to more people. And then he shares the information that he learned some of those other people, and then he’s just expanding the knowledge base. And it’s basically like, the internet in your brain. And I was learning and I was quietly learning throughout this entire process. So I think the importance of really listening to people is so valuable, if you notice, in society, you know, some of the most successful people are in fact, some of the most quiet people. This is an old Confucius quote, wise men no speak dumb man speak. So listening, I think is a really important thing. So I learned that from my father, for sure. I think Napoleon Hill, I think he taught us to burn the boats. And I think that on another podcast, we should talk about this idea of taking your safety net out, like what would happen if you actually did that, like, if you’re forced to be successful, burn the boats, Google that one. That’s a cool story. General Cortez kind of evolved that story.
Jeremy Weisz 47:18
Ruben, I want to be the first one to thank you, everyone, check out dubb.com more episodes of the podcast and thanks, everyone. Thanks, Ruben.
Ruben Dua 47:25
Thank you so much.
