Welcome to Human Marketing, a weekly podcast for B2B marketers, unpacking how brands can stay authentic, demonstrate authority, and build trust as AI floods or feeds with content. I'm Chris Nelson, founder of Human Video. We remotely produce podcasts and other video content with real humans and just the right amount of soul.

Today we have Tony Hopponen, who is the founder of Landing Rabbit. I had bumped into Tony about a month ago on LinkedIn. I'm not sure, can't remember who connected with who, but we ended up having a great conversation in the DMS about all things landing pages, and I think social selling and lots of other stuff eventually led to suggesting me jumping on a call and we had an amazing call, but a week ago, one of those ones where you get to the end of it and go, I wish that had been my podcast episode. So I'm delighted to have you on. Tony, welcome.

Thank you so much, Chris.

Cool. Before we dive into the world of landing, Robert and everything in that, I'd love to take a big step back and acknowledge that you, according to LinkedIn, you had 12 years and nine months as founder and CEO of Flockler, which is, well, I mean over to you. I'd love to hear more about that whole story. There's probably a lot to dive into there in that whole experience and what Flockler did and how, I guess you got to this point. So yeah, tell me that story, Tomi.

Yeah, thanks. I'll just start with a short intro of what flockler is because I'm sure that not many people are aware of. The platform is relatively niche player in a certain market and floor player helps brands mostly consumer facing like education, travel, e-commerce to gather feedback and reviews from their customers, and mostly through Instagram, Twitter, even YouTube, Snapchat, different social media channels. The original idea that we had when we started building the product was that we helped TV channels, TV shows, local news, media, those type of organisations to gather content from their readers. Back then when we started, that was like 2010 ish, there was a lot of talk about the newspapers and the media going down because of the digital. So moving from traditional channels, even TV challenged by internet, and where are we going to watch it in the future? Maybe some of those fears were not that true in the end.
I mean, people always think that changes are faster than they are, but that helped us build a product that the idea was to build a relationship with the audience, get the audience participating through digital channels, and then that could support the media business, kind of help them build somewhat similar relationship as they have through the traditional channels. For example, a print newspaper locally is more than just text. It's like a community tool in one way or another. And yeah, that was the original idea. And then over time, Instagram started growing really fast and I had already some brands using our service for Twitter campaigns, so Twitter used as some sort of a engagement tool where brands were asking that, do you want to win a trip to Bahamas? Share your image with a hashtag and you get a chance to win. Those were the first ones.
But then when Instagram started growing, then more and more brands realised that we really need to engage our users, and it seems that people are already sharing content, mentioning us through hashtag, we need to be part of that conversation. And that was the origin of the platform, Flockler that helped brands together. And yeah, it was 13 years running it from very sort of like RA style. We had some angel funding, which was related to government funding that you can get in Finland where the company was based is not anymore, but that was the headquarters back then. And in Finland you have the system that if an investor invest, then you're more likely to get a grant or some sort of subsidiary from the government and that mechanism we used, but otherwise it was bootstrapped from day one. And yeah, exciting journey that then ended for me together with my co-founders, we decided that if we will find a buyer for the service, we'll be happy to do some other stuff. 13 years is a long time, and we were around that same domain of user engagement since the day one, and even though the product kept changing, but at some point they start feeling like, I've been talking about this user engagement for 13 years and it's nice to do something else. Sure. That's the story.

I read somewhere that you started off with a founder led marketing and that which then ended up in product led motion, but doing all of that with no sales team. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, we started first, obviously most startups start as a sales guy or the CEO. You are responsible for finding those clients no matter what. So I was using cold calls, emails, anything. I agree matching to get hold of customers and that works until a certain point. But then to actually scale and build something that you can acquire customers internationally, you have two options. You either create a sales model that you believe is going to be profitable even if you give it to someone else, if it's not just the founder running. It needs to be quite systematic and the deal sizes need to be quite high to justify hiring someone. And the other option is to go more like self-serve content marketing style. And I think the timing was right for us in a way that people in general brands as well started talking about content marketing being a big part of what they're doing and something that they should invest in.
Some people were saying that brands should become more like media companies, which I think was bullshit, but that was, anyway, the thought leadership thinking back then that this is the future. And I started testing that for my company as well, like writing a lot of blog posts. I had at the start, I was working with someone who used to work for The Guardian, so a really talented writer, and she had set up her own business to help brands to create content and create impactful, impactful blog posts and eBooks and stuff for, and that was the start. But I quickly noticed that content marketing for SaaS companies is more than creating the impact and being memorable. You also need to have a path from content to some sort of engagement or conversion, not necessarily that you buy straight away, but at least you are one step closer in one way or another to get in touch with us.
And I started learning more and more and then eventually Flockner became only SEO and Google ads, and then obviously word of mouth from our customers, but SEO Google Ads and no sales team. We had a live chat on our website and then when people ask that, could we have a call with someone, then we try to push them as hard as we can to just read materials, look at this video, how can we help? It's just easier to handle it straight away instead of organising a call and then forgetting what the call was all about. But then when some customers really insisted, then we had demo calls where I was running a demo of the platform and obviously there were larger companies that sometimes needed a bigger onboarding and presentation for the whole group, but mostly it was just SEO and Google ads. And that really taught me probably everything about SaaS marketing, what it means to run a service where it all relies on the quality of your product and the quality of your content and nothing else. Whereas in a sales led organisation, you often you hear founders saying that, well, marketing isn't that big for us. We have our sales team, and then it's up to sales team to convince. But I chose a different path for that.

Yeah, it was so much in there. Is it fair to say that the product was suited and was less appropriate that you would jump on loads of demos or was there an enterprise tier where you maybe could have had more demos but just didn't want to or didn't want go down that rid of having building sales team?

I think originally part of the challenge or part of what we wanted to see if it works was the fact that can we actually run this as a self-serve and is it possible because that was the exciting bit when I started the company, the cloud and all that was like it must have been early days

In all

Of that. Exactly. And there were companies like 37 Signals that I was looking at, and they had three people, one in Denmark, one somewhere, they were in different locations and they were able to run the service profitably and build a world class service. And me and the two co-founders were thinking that why couldn't we do this as well? What's stopping us now with the cloud wasn't the same as it is today, but it was fairly possible to do it in a way that is a truly global company. So I think part of it was that motivation and curiosity to see if we can pull it off. But then later when it became the real Google Ads SEO play, then our pricing point was also quite low. So starting from $50 ish per month. So the deal sizes, the typical one was like 1000 a year.
People tend to stay with us quite a long time. So it meant that the average value was like three 4,000 per client. So you can do sales work by can't be the full blown where you spend months and months getting one customer. It would've needed to be very efficient. And that's what I meant when I said earlier that sometimes you need to find a repeatable sales model. And it's quite hard to do that as a founder to replicate yourself when you hire someone and give them enough tools so that they can be successful at what they do. It's like founders often overestimate, they think that maybe they say that I'm not that good at sales, so if I'll hire someone who's really professional and they must do much better than I've done, but they underestimate the fact that you really need to have a process to use those sales skills. And if the sales so far has more been founder convincing, appealing to emotions, telling the founder story, a bit of tears that just makes a difference,

That transition from, I guess, well, I mean if it is a transition from Finder led and then to the growth, it's almost unscalable, isn't it? And that's a really tricky journey and in a certain way, what I'm building, that's going to be a great problem to have I guess. But I always wonder just about that. And when we're creating didn't find lead motion and creating content with founders and other senior thought leaders, maybe in a company like that, scaling that is really tricky.

It I know from experience with sales people that even though you would find the best possible ones, then if your product is not ready for it, if everything like the supporting functions inside your company, if it's not ready for it, if you don't have enough resources to scale, when salesperson comes in and says that, Hey, by the way, I sold this case. And then you're like, but our platform is not doing that, what do you mean? And then you either have those resources and capabilities in-house or you don't. And yeah, that's a challenge. And when it comes to content, if you are a specialty like scaling the content production inside a team, even asking marketers in SaaS teams to produce more content, be more active on LinkedIn and things like that, it's a big ask. Not all marketers are either content writers, they might be more visual, they might be creating ad assets, they might not be writing long form content. Video is another good example of what we're doing right now. We're podcasting videos and so forth. Different skill sets. Yeah, hard to scale those, especially if the founder is the one who's driving the first motion. It's hard to scale that later.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's great. So that came to an end, a solid exit from that, a bit of a hinterland of consulting and helping other founders a bit, but then what, you got the bug again, you needed to start building again. Tell me more about Landing Rabbit and how that all came about.

Yeah, I think the first month or two after the sales, we didn't really have obligation to work for the previous campaign. We just helped them out a bit with practicalities, which was nice, but also very strange way of cutting ties immediately and just stopping after 13 years.

Yeah, I've heard that the longer the stay around for 18 months thing is actually really tricky as well, or can be, it depends maybe on the reality, but I've heard other find say that can be really, really the hardest bit.

Yeah, I don't have the experience to sort of staying so long, I can't say what is harder, but I can see the benefit of just really quickly changing elsewhere because for the buyer at least one of the big benefits was that they were then able to just really start with their own playbook, what they wanted to do. And they probably knew already that some of the changes that they're going to make are going to hurt me personally because I've been running the company in a completely different way and handling my team and employees in a different way. So I think it was probably a good choice. But yeah, there was a bit of a moment when I was unsure what's next for me? And my plan was to actually just take it easy for a bit and not to rush into anything, but when you're an entrepreneur, then just staying put and not doing much and just thinking is really hard.
I'm one of those that, yeah, I can plan and do plans, but I much rather try to build something. So instead of writing a long document, I'm like, okay, let's just test it out and see what we can learn. So I quickly found a friend of mine is running a SaaS company, so I found myself helping him a couple of days a week and then some others on the side. And then I very quickly started planning the Landing Rabbit, the current company that I've been building now officially since last autumn. But before that already I was running research interviews and asking people, asking actually, I didn't ask questions about the product. I was asking questions, how does their workflow look like? Who participates in a certain process with them? And then slowly but surely started building the idea of landing Rabbit than what it is today. But yeah, it was an interesting time of life after 13 years or almost 13 years of full energy in one thing. And then I, until the day when it was signed, I was still 100% if not more, pushing the company. So that hard stop made life a bit interesting for a month or two.

Tell me about that. How did that feel? What were those few months, if you don't mind me diving into that a little bit?

Yeah, I think not even the first few months, maybe even a bit later, but eventually I realised that or what was the biggest shock was the fact that I realised that I've been kind of lying to myself all these years. So when you're running the business, then you hire people and you get investment, you partner with clients, and then you start building justifying to yourself that why are you spending so much time with this company? Why are you working so long hours? And you justify that by saying yourself that I've got these employees, I need to pay the salaries. I've got the investors that I need to pay back someday. I've got all these responsibilities, deadlines, and so forth. And that's how you justify the long hours, maybe some of the relationships that are hurting. At the same time, it's just a matter of fact that if you build the business, you need to work a bit harder probably than at least for some time.
But then when I had a sort of chance to really stop and think what matters, I just realised that the only reason why I was building that was very selfish. Being able to make those decisions yourself, being able to build stuff that is meaningful, making choices, even hard choices when things are not going well, just deciding that now we are going to change the direction of the company. And I think when I joined my friend's company for a two day a week kick, that was the final moment when I realised that, yeah, I've been lying to myself saying that I'm building these companies for someone else. I'm just building them for myself. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. And when I was trying to, or when I'm helping others, what I struggle with is not to help and follow what the leadership wants to do, but it's more like, well, if I see them they're about to crash and they should change things, then I really struggle because I'm like, I don't know how to voice that out, say that, Hey guys, you need to make changes, otherwise this will crash and burn eventually, or that this doesn't really scale.
And I obviously try to convince the leadership, but it's just not motivating for me to see that for a longer period of time. So yeah, I think that was the moment when everything else about selling the company, there's a lot of emotions obviously related to that, but I think the deepest cut was the fact that, Hey, I've just made excuses all the easier years and I just really want to build something for myself. And yeah, the rest are then added bonus on top.

I love that. I love that. And that thing that you build for yourself again became landing rabbit. Tell me what problem is landing Revit solving?

Yeah, it's a problem that I've experienced when I've been doing sales and SaaS marketing for LER previously, and then the other companies, honestly, I started with an idea of listing first things that I experienced with Flockler that were not working well, what were the problems, the challenges, time consuming things. And I had a long list and then plus some ideas that I had just outside the folk work. But I started interviewing people first regarding how to optimise their landing pages because that was one of the pain points, landing rabbit, sorry at Folk that when I created Google Ads campaigns and I had landing pages, I was barely getting things done. Some new landing pages, tedious work to get them done, but testing new versions was basically impossible. I just didn't have time. So the new version for me, if the campaign was not working, the new version was let's build another landing page, because I didn't really have any tools to make that testing faster.
So I started interviewing people that, Hey, how do you guys test? So could you tell me about how do you optimise those landing pages that you have? How do you make them better? And people were saying that, well, Tony, it would be great to test this, but we just don't have enough landing pages to begin with. We have a backlog of things that we haven't built yet, so testing and AB testing would be so cool, but just we don't have them. And then I was like, okay, yeah, sounds, that's my problem as well. But I kept going. I interviewed more people and more and more people were saying that that's the bottleneck. I just don't have those pages to begin with. It would be great. And then I changed the focus a bit. I started interviewing other SaaS marketers and they kept saying the same, that regardless of the size of the company, the current landing based building requires three skill sets.
So you need to be able to write content and not just any content, but really know your customers and understand what message would land and so forth. Then you need to design it one way or another. You need to create a mockup or ask someone to design it for you, and then finally you need to build it somewhere. And there are tools for all of these. I'm using Google Docs for writing a content, then I use Figma or something else to create a mockup, and then I either build it myself in a content management system or someone else builds it for me. There's tools around that, but that process is just like three separate skill sets and three separate stages and in between there's a lot of back and forth. In my previous company, we had a custom build website. So what it meant was that when I finished a copy in Google Docs, I either created a quick mockup or actually designed it, but then I had to wait for a long time to get someone to actually build it because I didn't have the tools to build it.
And then by the time someone built it, I was like, okay, what was this campaign again? What I said, the momentum is kind of out of the window and what I've been now trying to solve with landing Rapids or what we're trying to build is a tool that helps you remove those obstacles in that process. So it starts with a planning for the marketers or marketer plans content first, what is the page about? Who's the customer for this page? What are the benefits, features, problem and solution for this specific customer or industry or job role? Then the next step is to with AI assisting you to write the best possible content, and at the same time you can see the design building for you. So you'll see design that looks like your website, something that you are familiar with, and you can just focus as a marketer.
You can focus on the content writing the best possible one, and then the last bit is to import it to your existing website, and that's what we're trying to handle as well. So we're trying to get rid of that three-step process with back and forth and delays to a place where marketer can, if not build the full page and the final version, but can get very close to that version on their own and then share that with others and get better feedback and get more things done. That's the problem and idea at the same time.

I love it. I love it. And we've had a great chat about how you're going about that and some of the technical challenges of that and the rollout of that, this podcast called human marketing, thinking about all things human marketing and applying that to the world of landing page design and maybe the optimization of landing pages. I'm kind of assuming you've dived fairly deep into the world of landing pages at this point. What thoughts do you have on, I guess, humanising landing pages or thinking about the human element in marketing of the design and the optimization of landing pages?

Yeah, there's two parts to it. One is the planning side of things, and then the other is social proof on the page and make it feel that there are, first of all, you are more than just a company that's a great asset for you. You can show on the page that this is actually built by Tony and his friends and not just a robot somewhere. I mean right now, AI can basically build those services. So maybe this quote will be something that is outdated very soon, but at least for now it's an asset that people are actually building the services and showing their human side, but also that your customers are part of it, like videos, customer testimonials, short clips. I'm a big fan of adding, or I'd love to add to my page as well, a very short clips of someone like a customer really telling, not a fake testimonial, not a pre-written thing, something that they actually said that would be awesome.
And then the other bit is the planning, starting from the fact that who is this for and who is this customer? One of the things that we are exploring with our customers is that first of all, the page is planned for a certain customer persona. So that's part of the planning process already that you kind of described that what's the exact problem for this specific customer group of segment or so that's part of the planning, but then also using, for example, your calls, transcripts and any other customer research material that would include those sound bites, what people are saying, what they're actually saying in calls and how they talk about you and the products and the services that you provide. So I think the human element is from two ways. As a marketer, we should try to think about it, think about our services, the customer actually experiences them, how they talk about us, how they would describe us, which is incredibly hard when you're building your own thing and you're so focused on all the features and all the things that don't really matter to customers that much, but they matter to you. But when you build a landing page, you really need to take a look back and start looking at it from other person's point of view. So that's the human element one, and then the human element number two is showing who you are and who your customers are. Incredibly powerful part of the landing page.

I love all of, that's quite a bit to unpack there for me because yeah, my company, human Video, obviously one of the things we do is creating customer testimonials. Thanks for that plug. So yeah, you can do that really badly. The really bad version of that is a frustrated marketer can't convince any of their customers or doesn't have time to capture videos maybe with their customers, and the easy way out is just to write a few lines of what they think they might say, send it an email and say, happy enough for me to post this on our website. There's no effort on your side. Just give me the green light and I'll put your name to it. And to me, that is the worst possible type of social. It's not social proof at all, it's just, it's really disingenuous. It's kind of lying that they even said that.
The complete opposite of that is a really authentic conversation on video with your customers and you can dive into all sorts of great stuff. You can talk about the problems that were solved. You can talk about the people they encountered in your company. What was the support? What were the customer success people? How is that ongoing relationship being? What problems, big problems, how they solve when it goes wrong? How did you react as a, there's so much great stuff and from my point of view, seeing really great applications of that in landing pages, particularly in B2B SaaS world, you can present that in a really good way where you just have these short clips, maybe a bit of a carousel of eight of them or six of them. It can maybe start out as just a quote that then has a play button, and that's a really effective way of reinforcing the easily accessible text and image, but then adding the real proof by hearing that person say it or it can be a deeper dive.
If you go into a case study page, top of the case study page should be a really good testimonial video that's maybe just queuing up and humanising the customer and just adding all of that trust through the real conversation and the're super authentic, you're not scripting anything, you're just having a really good conversation with your happy client. And yeah, I think I've seen that done so well. It's a big part of where the content we create for customers should end up is landing pages and on a client's site as well as testimonials can be used as retargeting ads and little clips and things like that in other ways. But for me, the main place is adding up vital social proof to a landing page.

Definitely. And I think there is a place for really well produced in a way that it's scripted already and there's a really good plan, what we're going to say and represent. It's like if you have a great webinar, there's some element of planning to that. But then from social proof point of view, and especially landing pages where the person who's visiting the page will not spend long time and their target is not to learn everything about you and your company, the target is to just get more curious, to learn more and come back next day or maybe even sign up with you, but your goal can't be the whole education. And I think in that case, having short clips, people actually saying something authentic, the best scenario in my mind is someone sharing transformation, like saying something that I really struggled with this one, but whatever the reason is why your software is the better option. And they reveal that, but in their own words, not in a way that is scripted. Yeah, now this platform is able to orchestrate my revenues better or something like that, which you can see in those script marketing speak. Yeah, exactly.

And you see it all the time and it's a completely different thing when you sit down and have that really authentic conversation. And it is generally what I do every day, but it's also wonderful. You should only really be doing it if you have a really great story to tell. You have happy customers and there's often a story of transformation. There's often the story of their previous supplier not being great, and that is quite often a story of pure service or inattentive support, and then you contrast that with the really good experience. Yeah, no, I mean that's a hundred percent what we do. And there's another element to it as well of people often come to us saying it's just too difficult, it's too much to do, it's too many moving parts. It's a big ask and that's where it doesn't necessarily have to be an external agency, but actually having some sort of third party capturing that is really interesting because the customer isn't talking to the supplier about the experience, and that's a little bit of an awkward conversation.
You're not saying, oh, you were great. The third party, the agency is saying, tell me about in your case, tell me about what was achieved or how Landing Rabbit helped you. And you can say, oh, the folks at Landing Rabbit was great, Tony was really helpful. There's a difference there, just a slightly different angle that's really interesting and it changes the context of the content that you get and that's only relevant to a bigger product, probably a bigger SaaS or a bigger service. There's a whole world for self-serve. Smaller testimonials. Absolutely. But yeah, there's a really good way to do that, right? There's a terrible way to do it too.

Yeah, that's true. And also when you're doing it one off, just like when I've been doing it with my team in a way that we reach out to certain clients and it's something that we do just once and then we don't really get good at it. We just try to survive and try to get that task done and then we do it maybe after a few years again when we feel like we really need some more. The product has evolved from these ones, but you really never get good at it in a same way as someone who's spending time with different clients. Also people that I discuss with, I jump in a call with a client that likes our product and is excited about the product, they're not going to tell me the truth. That's the honest sort of part of it. It's like they're going to say really politely and nicely that, Hey, maybe you could do this. In my role, I sometimes need to push them a bit towards a corner saying that, Hey, why isn't this part of your, why aren't, aren't you using this daily or something? Just push them to say something that is a bit more something to improve or something negative in the experience because yeah, otherwise people just like they keep listing the best things and then maybe some really relevant features, but they might tell the truth when they're discussing with a third party might come easier.

No, that's true. That is exactly what happens when I get that all the time. They might say might, I dunno, talk about an onboarding experience, something like that. And there's been times where they're going, do you know what? It wasn't actually that great, but that was a year ago. I know that they've sorted that out now, but I can't really talk to about the onboarding. That definitely happens, but also there's something about the final edits not being just completely glowing. There's a realism to saying this bit was or they didn't have this feature, but actually they listened to us and they were really good about putting that in their roadmap and six months later we have that working that comes with the authenticity of it and builds trust in speeds and just the scripted perfection. There's something about, and that's the same reason why when you're doing founder led content building in public, all that good stuff, it's about the warts and all isn't it Within reason there's a real trust is built by being honest and putting everything out there the good and the not so good.

Yeah, totally. And from founder's point of view, when I'm interviewing clients, and obviously I know how it's on the other side as well because I'm discussing with some of the providers as well and saying, the harder truth is difficult because you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and you try to form your sentences in a way that, oh yeah, this is going to be something that helps them improve the product instead of saying that, hey, it is not a great product at all. So yeah, I think the third party involved will increase the quality of those recordings. Also, I like those testimonials if their videos staying telling the truth. So they might be saying that, Hey, by the way, it doesn't really solve me this and this task, but it solves me these areas. So someone might be sharing in a way that it's part of my workflow is not one single solution that handles, and I think that builds even more credibility and helps the buyer as well to set the right expectations.
Sometimes people, if you follow LinkedIn discusses slightly, people are saying that too many subscriptions I'd like to have all in one tool and this and that instead of multiple tools. But I think often it's more about your expectations and maybe you've set the expectations too high for certain solution because of their marketing or their sales or something else that was convincing you that one solution can fix everything. So sometimes having those honest and that sort of testimonials that also reveal the bad things or so they can build a lot more trust and help you sell. It's just up to you as a founder if you have the skin to thick skin to put them out there and have them online, that's a bigger ask.

Yeah, and the right balance. It can absolutely be helpful. That's all amazing. You in terms of a landing route, are you selling to marketers or are you selling to ad agencies? Who are you going after?

We've built a tool for marketers as marketers, but obviously that in many SaaS teams that means that it's an external company helping them if not the whole process. Then part of the process, quite typical scenarios are that there's a development agency who's helping you to run the website and they might actually build those pages and then you might have ad agencies and marketing agencies, creative agencies that take care of the whole process, anything in between or you have the internal team that can handle everything from copy to design to development. So all sorts. But what has been sort of our go-to quote in a way when we're developing this is like we want to build something that marketers love. So it's mainly for marketers, but we don't want the designers and developers to hate us. So that's the quote that we're trying to follow that in the end, this is a team tool.
When I'm in a chat with the SaaS company today, I had a chat with a company that CMO loves the fact that he can then be more strategic using this tool. So someone who's writing the landing base, another marketer can show their work easy, the CMO can review that, discuss with the leadership team, is this strategically right, do we want to go towards this route or that route? So that's one angle. And then when I discuss with the CEOs and leadership teams, then they see opportunities of how their sales work can be much more easier when they have better materials online instead of creating decks and writing all those emails with the same content that you've already repeated. So giving their marketers tools to really help the sales teams. So in the end it becomes the sort of like a team tool and I'm selling for the whole SaaS team, but similarly, when you take a look at products like linear, linear is saying that their project management tool, they're saying that this is built for the person doing those tasks and they don't do anything, any choices that will slow down the work of that person.
So they don't build reports for management or other things that the leadership would find really interesting. They always focus on that person and that small team. That's what they're talking about all the time and I'm following the similar idea that this is definitely for marketers, but yeah, the others in the team, they need to be involved in this process and yeah, we can't just ignore their existence.

Fab. Yeah, no, that's great. Thinking about I guess how your, it's kind of extension of that, but how you're marketing landing rabbits if you're really pushing adult this point, but I can't remember who found who, but you're obviously really active on LinkedIn. Tell me a little bit about how you're going about promoting Landing Rabbit and are you very much going find led? How's that all going for you?

Yeah, from previous one I learned that the SEO is something that you want to start early and that's been part of the Landing Rapid experience even before we had the product idea. So I started writing content, I had roughly an idea that is going to be something regarding landing Bates optimization, creation, marketing, SaaS marketing. So I started writing some content, set up the domain and then now obviously that content has become much more focused. So I've been upgrading that and creating more content and pages and that brings constant flow of leads for us already, even though we're new domain, not much to go on about very sort of niche focus, but it already gathers some traffic. So that's something that I recommend every founder to start create some content already very early on because that's the long-term investment. And then the shorter term investment has been for me now it's been LinkedIn organic, so posting really actively commenting really actively and then from there, finding the right people.
So in my case, I've been trying to gather as many SaaS founders and SaaS marketers to my followers and connections and then obviously people that are helping them as well, but target audience being the SaaS marketers and founders. And my goal is to get as many discussions started with them instead of trying to sell landing rabbit in LinkedIn message. If I just keep posting about landing pages every day, then no one's going to be interested in that, plus I'm not going to be interested in writing about that. And what I've noticed from LinkedIn dms is that it doesn't really matter how the person got connected, we met there, we don't remember how we got connected. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that okay, something got the connection going on and then if you can get the discussion, if you can start the discussion, that's the harder bit and keep that discussion going, that's the harder bit.
But if you can get that going, then there will be a moment when the person will ask you that, okay, what you're doing or what are you building right now? Or something like that. And then all I need to share is the problem that I'm solving nothing about the actual landing rabbit as a solution and the response to that will tell me that, does it make sense for me to share more about landing Rabbit or is this person not the right person? Write someone working on landing pages or maybe the problem isn't there right now, so maybe it's too early for them, but that's the only thing I need as a business result is the opportunity to share what's the problem that I'm solving. And then those people who are like, yeah, I've been there too, it's like constant hassle then you don't need to sell anything like that after that you're just like, oh yeah, yeah, it's a hassle for me, which it is and this is the solution that I'm thinking, what do you think about this solution? It's a natural conversation between two people who have experienced the same problem instead of a sales straightforward sales message. I'm sure that there are other ways to do it. Some people just send those cold emails and call algorithm messages with the offer. I'm sure it might work, but it's not the way how I run.

No, yeah, I see it a lot. I dunno, it depends on the offer, it depends on the world that you're selling into, but I'm a firm believer in putting a lot of brand stuff out there, putting your content out there and at least that being a warmer or something to warm up the conversation that I'm connecting with people who have seen my content, who have interacted with it in some way and that doesn't even, it needs to be more than just alike or something. People that I'm starting to end up in conversations with. Lots of stuff in the comments is really great, but when you then send a connection, it's a hundred percent success rate because they already know you. They're already having a conversation with you. And I often have amazing conversation fo conversation at dms that really naturally led to, we need to talk about this.
I think for me it was the connection between us both that we potentially could help ad agencies. There was, I'm looking to create video content that could be used in LinkedIn ads. You're looking to particularly work with Google ad agencies or LinkedIn stuff as well. I imagine it's really appropriate in the scaling of Google stuff, the connection between keywords and the end content then on landing pages. But that was a great conversation that came from it and I think that initial, the talk about warm bound, not cold and not roosting, but that there's been something happening there beforehand just makes a world of difference. And taking that even further when you start doing loads of content stuff, particularly podcasts and things like that, you just get these amazing experiences of people coming up to your trade shows going, oh, I know who you are. I know all about your product.
I've been listening to the podcast for a year. Or when you get into big sales conversations and maybe somebody else has brought in further down the line into a sales conversation, maybe somebody else that's actually a decision maker and they go away. I've fully your podcast or seen your content LinkedIn already. I really love what you're doing that makes the world so much easier. The trust that's already built up from putting all that great content out there is invaluable. And it's only realised at that point. You could have somebody quietly listening to a podcast for two years with nothing, and then when they're in market and it comes to the moment, there's no one else they're going to think of. It's so difficult to measure. It takes so much patience, but it really works and it's a wonderful way of selling, I think if it's appropriate and if you can hang on for it, very difficult, easier said than done, but I think it's super valuable.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's two trends right now. One is the AI coming in and everyone can build stuff, but I am thinking at least in my content strategy and in my marketing strategy that relationships are going to matter much more than they did before. So when I was able to build my previous business, just like having that Google ads and SEO without talking

To anybody.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that time might now change when everyone is competing with some sort of a product that they've built and the audience is most likely a bit confused that what product is good, why do I even need AI to begin with? And the only way to find out is to ask people that already and trust the other trend is going towards smaller companies at the moment, we're three people building this landing rabbit, and we could definitely add some people. It's not about that, but I am quite convinced that sooner or later a lot of the coding is going to be handled by agents and the role that we are going to have is more understanding customers and then turning that to a great UX instead of actually building something based on specs and then building or writing or whatever we do today.
I think that's going to change how the businesses are built and how valuable those connections really can be. And like you said, it requires patience and the bigger organisations at the moment don't necessarily have that. The salesperson, the marketing team, they are after the results straight away and they rather burn and opportunity by pushing that person that lead until the decision right now to hit that quota of like, okay, I've got this quarterly quota and I need to hit that so that I can either stay in this company or get a better job somewhere else or get promoted or so. And I think the smaller companies born now using AI has this advantage that maybe we can be smaller, maybe we can build this on top of the profiles. Even if I'm thinking, if you're like a influencer, a real influencer, you would have a great opportunity to build a very small business in terms of how many people work there, but then use all those connections to create something that people trust and buy from you and think about you as the first option, like you said.

What an awesome human note to wrap up on. Tony. I love that. That was really cool. Yeah, thank you so much for this. I really, really enjoyed the chat Again. Hi. How can people find out more about you and connect with you and crucially hugging to find out more about Landing Rabbit?

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me and find me. My surname is so difficult that people need to read it from the notes or I

Did have a couple of goes at it at the start of this podcast, didn't I?

Yeah, so maybe it's easier if you type landing Rabbit in the search Fox in LinkedIn and then you'll find Tony there as well.

I'll connect to you in the show notes of this for anyone listening. Certainly.

Yeah, so LinkedIn and then landing rabbit.com is the way to find more of us. We've got, if you're a SaaS marketer or someone thinking about landing pages, there's loads of content from elsewhere as well. So we've gathered, for example, roughly 150 landing pages that we really like. And then one difference compared to other landing page collections is that we've actually reviewed one section of the landing page. So for example, they can look at benefits section or hero section and then reviewed why it's good and what makes it really powerful. So instead of taking a look at the whole page, which can sometimes be like one part is good, one is not that good, I decided to choose more just individual elements. So it can be really helpful if you're writing your content and not sure what makes a great element, any element basically in a landing base. There's lots of materials regarding that.

I love that. That was really great. Thank you so much. We got all the way through that without even mentioning ice hockey.

That's true.

Your next appearance can be all about our shared level of ice hockey.

Yeah, that needs a different channel, I think, but there's a human element to ice hockey as well.

Oh, sure. Well, I'm definitely going to try and shoehorn it into some content that I create. Definitely, Tony. Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for the invite, and it was great chatting you again.