Summary
Company: Interact
Product: Quiz-based lead generation software
Revenue: $3.000.000/ARR
Funding: Bootstrapped
Intro
One of the reasons startups fail is that they often address problems that don’t actually exist.
Founders might conceive an idea without having personally experienced a real problem or without any market evidence to support their concept.
On the other side, it’s a good sign when the initial idea for your startup comes from a real situation, with real people, paying real money and not just from “idealand” (that space in your mind that comes up with random stuff at 3 am in the morning).
This was exactly the case with Josh Haynam, co-founder of Interact. The company was established in 2013, has been bootstrapped from the start, and currently generates $3M annually.
Before Interact
Before launching Interact, Josh and his co-founder were designing and developing custom websites for clients.
Around 2009/2010, platforms like SquareSpace or Wix hadn’t yet gained their current popularity or feature-rich development.
Through conversations with various clients, Josh realized that once websites were online, the primary concern for most was how effectively they could capture leads.
Essentially, unless you make money from ads, having tons of traffic is just a vanity metric and is useless if it isn’t captured in the right way.
The idea for Interact
The initial idea for Interact was born when a client requested that Josh create a custom online quiz for his own website.
The client, a sales coach, aimed to offer his website visitors a tool to assess their “sales personality,” which would serve dual purposes: generating leads for the website owner and providing valuable feedback to the visitors.
This approach was very different from traditional outbound marketing and proved successful immediately. Before implementing the “quiz experiment,” the client’s website conversion rate hovered around 3-4%; after the quiz went live, the conversion rate skyrocketed to 40%!
This win shows just why online quizzes works so well than the usual marketing stuff and other ways to get leads.
Think about how many times you’ve grabbed a free eBook and left it unread on your desktop, or signed up for an email drip campagin and then totally ignored your inbox a few days later.
A key reason online quizzes are so effective is that they actively engage participants by involving them in answering questions and then presenting them with personalized results.
Keep in mind: this was happening in 2013, a time when online quiz makers were scarce. We will come back to this later.
Once the custom quiz was complete, Josh recognized the potential for a product.
He decided to explore this idea further by offering quiz-building as a service on Freelance.com (now Upwork), charging about $200 for a custom quiz. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a miscalculation as the development of a custom quiz was highly time-consuming.
Personal Note: despite the setback, I believe this approach is an effective way to pretotype ideas.
Instead of investing months in designing and coding an entire product from scratch, testing market demand through a service offering can provide immediate insights into whether people are willing to pay, while still delivering the same result—a quiz embedded on their website.
After continuing to develop Interact alongside their agency work for five years, they amassed only a few hundred users. The path to significant product growth was lengthy.
Getting traction
By 2013, the company catered to a diverse clientele, spanning various industries and sizes. As Josh remarked, “Unless you have a lot of resources, you can’t serve everyone.
This realization led them to refine their focus on a specific ideal customer profile;
“We probably did around 3000-4000 calls to really understand our customers and make the perfect product for them”.
They discovered that their most successful customers shared two common characteristics:
- They knew how to attract traffic.
- They had a clear understanding of their target audience.
In other words: Interact’s best customers knew with their audience and simply needed an effective method to convert them.
Josh tried a bunch of ways to get more customers, from handing out flyers to sending cold emails, but none of it really paid off.
Then, Josh wrote a blog post called “How to Create an Online Quiz.” Since there weren’t many other quiz makers online at the time, his post quickly climbed to the top of search engine rankings.
Josh’s article quickly ascended to the number one spot on Google. “Within two days, we were the top result; the traffic was minimal, averaging about 10 visitors a day, but it was highly targeted. Of those 10 visitors, 2 became customers.”
There are a few lessons here.
First: do not dismiss SEO because you think there’s not enough traffic for your keywords.
Second: I think this is a perfect example of focusing on something that’s small now but will grow in the future. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see a market today for your product. After all, there was no Airbnb before Airbnb.
Once they’ve nailed their ICP and understood how to get customers, they double down on producing useful content and pre-built quizzes (personally…I feel like I have to check the “Parent Burnout” quiz!)
To this day, Josh’s content strategy remains effective; Interact has replicated a similar approach on YouTube, where one of their most successful videos is a tutorial on how to transform a PDF into a quiz using ChatGPT.
Leveraging AI
One factor that has significantly contributed to Interact’s growth in recent years is their ability to assist customers in creating quizzes using AI.
While most people are familiar with the concept of a quiz, they often struggle with specifics, such as the right questions to ask, choosing an appropriate topic, or even deciding on a suitable title for the quiz.
Leveraging their extensive experience and insights gained from numerous customer interactions over the years, Interact has been providing guidance and support in these areas.
Revenue
Here’s the evolution of Interact’s revenue (MRR):
2014: $10.7k
2015: $22k
2016: $28k
2017: $42k
2018: $63k
2019: $103K
2020: $181k
2021: $214k
2022: $227k
2023: $254K
Today, Interact boasts over 6,000 customers and facilitates the completion of over 9 million quizzes each month, generating an equivalent number of leads for its customers.
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