(00:01) [Music] good morning everybody and welcome to another nacho Tuesday and today I have uh Sandra with me uh with collab writing and without further Ado we'd love if you can introduce yourself and your company what do you guys do over there yeah hi everyone uh I'm Sandra and I'm one of the co-founders of collaborating uh what we're actually working on is a very simple tool that helps you streamline online research and all the knowledge m Knowledge Management that happens around it so what I noticed

(00:33) early on in my marketing career was that we had all these tools for all the other steps in the process but NE not anything for the first one and that was actually collecting the key bits and pieces of information and building that solid base for all the content that we were going to producing in the future so it just seemed like really common sense to be able to pick out those key insights attach my own commented and then easily share it to others but I couldn't find find a tool that matched my needs and

(00:58) that's when I turned to my co-founder who more of a tech person and just ask them you know is this technically possible can we make this and that's kind of how from where we started great and tell us more about your background so you have more of a marketing background I imagine yeah yeah my background is more in marketing uh mostly in marketing but I also worked on NGO projects I worked with stups with early stage companies uh in a completely different different setting to now and I actually worked in a start for four

(01:26) years before founding col of writing so I had a bit of that kind of experience on the inside knowing what I was getting into and all of my experience was with working with smaller budgets smaller teams and being able to deliver an interesting content marketing strategy that was going to bring in people's eyes to what we were doing uh right now we're a funded startup uh but until January of this year we were bootstrapped or we had very little Grand money so we were very limited on our marketing span on our ad

(01:55) span and then what we focused on what we knew how to do best and that was produce relevant content to our Target groups uh do launching platforms and try to make all of our Communications as engaging as possible and that really helped and that really helped us uh especially in those later stage conversations with investors that we weren't just locally relevant uh but we were actually getting users attractions from from different parts of the world which was very significant and it it wasn't really super complex and

(02:25) that's why I always like to talk to other startups and give them that nud so that they know that they can do it too yeah definitely going bootstrapped definitely teaches you a lot and helps you really focus on on what matters right where sometimes if you raise money it's easy to you know try to do too many projects at once or uh lose focus for what really matters when you're building your company yeah the previous company that I worked for was fully bootstrapped up until the DAT the majority stake was

(02:51) sold so we also for those four years worked you know with a very small team and in a very limited budget and really needed to f focus on creting pinpoint content that's kind of where the idea came from I was like 24 25 sitting in Belgrade and Serbia writing content for the Telco industry guys in the US you know people who had completely different interests use completely different language to me and I just really needed to be able to understand their point of view and I cann't do that you know just skimming through a few bits and pieces

(03:21) of information yep that's a good point so I guess you're you're the blog strategy Champion over there um so I guess what would be the best way for startup you know say they're in a similar position like you looking to get their content marketing and especially their blog strategy started from the ground up I think that you need two things you have to look internally so what are we solving what are we doing what is our product capable of doing and then looking externally and find out kind of Common Ground what are people interested

(03:48) in so what makes sense for us to cover based on who we are as a company and then how that matches up to the interest of the people that we're targeting and I think one really important thing for people to do is look at what are jobs and the pain points of the people that they're writing to I know a lot of people go into you know what's the age of the people where do they live you know do they drink coffee or do they drink juice but that's not really what's important it's important for you to see

(04:12) who they are in their professional surroundings what they're tackling every day where they're reading up on those bits and pieces of information so you can be right there where they're looking for information and one thing that's that was for me super valuable was just going through like book reviews of books that are super popular in that industry uh looking at streams from conferences or just small bits of information that people would be sharing in short clips or short videos and that's really made

(04:39) our content marketing strategy more tailored to that Niche because we would just put in that little bit more effort so that's usually what I advise other companies to do try to look through social media through reviews of books uh to the most popular content creators what are they writing about what is your audience already engaging with and then you can try kind of see where you match up with that and all of those resources are you know kind of up for grabs it's you don't have to pay anything you don't

(05:04) have to spend hours and hours doing it you just have to put in that bit of effort not just go straight into writing but learn a bit before so you can see what is actually the the value that you can provide definitely I guess what other content marketing options exist today um obviously blogs kind of the main thing that you guys cover but uh what else would you recommend startups look into for for an effective a cost effective and efficient form of a cont marketing I mean everything kind of needs to fit fit in within a system so

(05:35) while blogging and writing content has been a big part of what we do we also have very active social media like we've been active on LinkedIn that's something where I've also uh where I also was present with the previous company we also use product launching platforms like product T not just for launches but also integrating with the community being able to share some clamp and dare ask questions start discussions uh we used apps and got some some really great user base and then we we started our

(06:00) newsletter that goes by weekly where we share not just things that we write but generally useful information we also have another newsletter that's related just to Industry trends for people who have just unloaded our ebooks they didn't show interest in our product but they showed interest in the topics that we're covering so we try to engage them with useful information too and then another thing that's really important is you as the founder especially in the early if you're a smaller business

(06:27) people are going to look to you so you know your LinkedIn profiles the teams LinkedIn profiles the pages and social media that's most relevant to your audience than the content side that's you know both LinkedIn uh what we're sharing there and blogs are part of that that content strategy and all the all the platforms that are relevant to your audience for us that was prod Account app Sumo Indie hackers at some point but there can be a PL of others that could be relevant to to this to specific business definitely are are you guys

(06:55) doing any form of like a like short form videos or anything like that we started recently L we started doing those recently and we started testing a bit with ads and paid marketing now that we got funding uh but beforehand we were mostly focused on written content and video content was more educational in terms of our product because we were kind of um we were short staffed to really go full into the production of videos that were actually any good but are know more experimenting with it yeah it's always important to put out good

(07:25) quality content right which kind of leads me to next point I guess uh with the Advent of AI you know some some of the blog content marketing strategies have changed over the last year significantly um there's a lot more content that's being pumped out now uh so you know having great content is more relevant than ever to to actually stand out I guess do you see any other blog marketing Trends uh in 2024 and how does AI kind of affect everything in that space I mean I think AI can be a really good helper but people seem to forget

(07:55) that to if you need to know your audience you need to know your space before you can judge whether that piece of content AI is putting out is any good so an educated marketer can use AI to write generally a blog post but if you're not and you just write the blog post with AI you can be pushing out content that makes absolutely no sense to your audience so so that's one important thing that people seem to kind of be missing out on is you still need to learn about your audience you still need to to spend time doing marketing AI

(08:26) can be a great helper it can be really quick to to give you some form of output but the time investment still needs to be there and I feel like with the new updates when it came to like Google Al algorithms and everything that's been happening in September and now uh in August again that unique content that's really helpful to the audience I think it's going to be surfacing more and more yeah definitely and Google's actually has a lot of tools now to to detect AI written content as well uh so you could

(08:57) actually hurt your Google rankings from that uh ultimately there's going to be a lot more push back against AI content as well too right um you know we've had you know link exchange type people as well reach out to us with like you know they want to write a blog but it's like completely written in Ai and everything and it's like no we're not gonna put that on our website you know um so it's definitely proliferating out there but yeah quality trumps uh quantity every day so yeah definitely and I mean um I've

(09:25) always worked in house and completely speaking from the point of someone who's worked in a small business but we've never done the that Outreach for link building we've never written blogs just so we could link to others or vice versa but we've always had good rankings in the end I mean now in the past six months we've we've almost reached half a million of Impressions on Google just by writing content and we write two to three pieces a month so it's not even an absorbent an amount of content that we

(09:53) pushing out and we've already started seeing results and great rankings and people finding us through Google in the past company we were like top of mine for hybrid project management methodology and I was even invited to speak at a PMI conference uh here in Europe in Sophia in Bulgaria and I was like 24 I wasn't even a project manager I was just someone who was writing on a topic and it was because I was just reading so much about about all of those things and being able to make just a few logical connections of how things could

(10:22) be implemented what could be done and it was really a crazy experience because everybody else was 20 years older than me and everybody had so much much more experience but it turned out to be a really useful lectures for everyone who was listening in just because I was able to streamline that that information into something uh that had a bit of an added value and that was also a point of motivation when we were starting collaborating and whenever we were talking with them that you know some something really great can come out of

(10:49) this and even if people are not finding you through this you're learning so much more about your product your audience and the space that you're in definitely what are your thoughts on the whole SEO strategy aspect of it so like I mentioned earlier a lot of people want to do like blog post exchanges all that kind of thing uh what are your thoughts on that like is it an effective strategy or is it kind of is that kind of going away I feel like some things are always going to be present like the quality of

(11:14) content the structure of content it has to be readable you shouldn't have huge paragraphs of text you should think about the speed of of the loading of the page but I think a lot of those kind of half Shady things like if more people link to my page it's going to rank better it might be still case but I don't feel like it's so significant as it was in the past and I feel like it's going to be less and less unless it's a really reputable Source you know if someone who's in industry leader links

(11:38) to your post sure that's probably going to add a boost but just random Pages linking back I don't think that brings in a lot of value as you said we've never done it and we've had success in the past so I don't feel like it's that it brings in enough value for the time that it takes so for you to find like a 100 people to outreach to and for like five people to respond and then to maybe have like two or three links that are directing back to your blog you could have spent that time writing three other

(12:06) posts that are really high in quality and publish that and see what happens with the with the engagement from your audience for a small team I just don't feel like it's worth the investment in some way but as I said the quality of the website of the pages if the structure is good if the content is good I think that's always going to be ever present but anything that's like a quick trick you know I I don't think that that that's going to add value in the long run y yeah definitely so I guess

(12:33) everybody has a Blog but you know a lot of people I talk to a lot of marketers don't really seem to be getting getting any value out of their blog uh so I guess what what tips would you offer them to get more from their blog strategy so they could actually you know actually make it work for them I think that just looking into the data is always a really good good point for a lot of people that I would speak to for us for example a really good tool was this Google Search console it's free and you can dive deeper into the data in

(12:59) terms of how people actually find you so those key kind of points that that we saw what phrases people used to find us were really relevant for us not just in the standpoint of what we're going to write but what are the things we should cover in our newsletters what are interesting posts for our LinkedIn what are things that in our presentations when we're even pitching the the startup should we think be thinking about so going into that type of data can be really really valuable and it can really help you get more out of the content

(13:26) that you're producing another thing is also having those small small reminders to the people that you know learn more about this Interlink your content make make it easy for people to move through the content that you've produced and also try to keep your product or service top of mind but not in ways that are annoying you can have call out boxes you can have smaller things that are going to be referenced to to what you're actually building what you're wanting to offer to people but don't make it super

(13:53) annoying that people just want to leave don't have five pop-ups that are frustrating to people but there's something and when we're talking for example about online research if we have a blog post about that we're going to give an example of how you can do that for your tool or with other similar tools and we feel like that's also bringing in a bit of value because it can help someone get more organized uh but we don't try to make it super flashy so things like that make it practical

(14:18) make it so that your product can be visible in an organic way and also try to dig in the data as much as you possibly can to get some key insights to to implement in other spaces as well Y and do you guys have any do you recommend having any sort of like a planning like a Content calendar planning sheet for for marketers so they could you know look out in the future and plan what what type of blog posts they're going to they're going to make and maybe have like an idea generation you know section so they could throw

(14:44) some ideas in there and then get you know approval maybe from their uh from you know maybe approval from their CEO about which uh you know which uh blog post they should actually write yeah definitely my suggestion aside from having a Content calendar which is something that many teams have is also to have content types so what we have is we have user testimonials we have blogs we have educational PDFs uh we have uh types of content that are like we're showcasing at an event or we're presenting somewhere these are

(15:13) occasional but they're also really important to share and then we also have like partnership posts so we have all these different types of posts and we always know uh what we can rely on if we're like in a pinch with time we can rely on like a testimonial that we have readily available if we haven't had a Blog in a long time then that takes a bit more time and also having like designs and processes prepared for all of those things you know if you have a design for testimonials it's very easy

(15:38) to generate one if you have a template for how you announce Partnerships or when you're discussing around a new client and you want to share their story it's much easier and it becomes much quicker and it makes it easier for the whole team to be able to collaborate on it from the designer to the content marketer to this year they already know what's happening because if my community manager reaches out and she's like hey can we share a just monal I'm going to be like Shar because I know what's

(16:01) getting shared it's just going to be a clip of someone's opinion on the the service that they're using and the whole content calendar can then be much cleaner and much easier to understand for everyone involved in the process so that's kind of a a tip and something that I've learned from my past seven or eight years in marketing now if you can standardize some of those things that don't need a lot of creativity then you can get creative with writing with ideas for for different types of content and

(16:29) you can bring a lot more out of the the resources that you have yeah that's a great Point actually having having those templates already made so you have like a like a theme if you will so consistently you have you know this similar type of content to write about so people know what to expect almost from your H from your blog and we as a team know what to expect workwise so we usually post uh one blog a week so we have two three four depending on how busy the the month is with other things so it's one blog one other type of

(16:58) content so it's either going to be a testimonial either a PF either an announcement and then we know how to plan our time according to accordingly with with what we knew now we have to do and when you get into a habit of doing things they're just much quicker everything that we practice becomes more efficient and content production is also one of those things so I guess what causes most startups to fail at content marketing you know we mentioned quality is obviously a very important one um and having a standardized process also

(17:26) really helps do you have any other tips around that I I think that people not having ownership over content marketing can Al often be a problem we were in a different situation because my my co-founder is a tech person I came from marketing so it was kind of like a natural divide who's going to do what and who's going to be overseeing which part when we started uh but a lot of things I feel like don't really have someone in housee that has worked in the space especially in the early days which is completely normal but when something

(17:52) is nobody's ownership then it's very hard to to keep at it and actually be consistent and it's can also be very hard if you're just working with someone externally to keep them accountable and to really be sure that what they're doing is aligned with your brand and your goals one of our earliest carers was our community manager and for our type of product it made a lot of sense we were present on all sorts of platforms social media writing content we knew we wanted to to go in that direction uh but she's helped us

(18:20) immensely just being the person that owns collab writings presence when it comes to content and I think that that's something that that that a lot of companies seen struggle nobody owns it and then nobody is keeping track of it from week to week to week and improving it on regular basis yeah and that's especially important with a lot of remote teams these days you got to have that communication um you got to have that you know you gotta have that organization otherwise everything's going to fall apart yeah yeah definitely and I mean in

(18:51) a remote game it's not just that but it's also people working in completely different time zones and working completely uh kind of on different different schedules and it can be really hard to communicate just the ideas that you have and if one person is not aggregating all of that it's even more more challenge yeah case in point uh 7 am over here you're ending your day of yeah um so I guess failure comes with any profession especially as an entrepreneur right if you're not failing honestly I believe you know people

(19:21) aren't trying hard enough which I've been through my own failures as well so um I guess can you tell us about a time you filled and what you learned from it I mean there there's been plenty of times I think that from the the initial optimism we had when we applied for some of the the first funding opportunities for for calibrating when we failed miserably in our first application because we were absolutely not ready and then we learned that okay this has to go with a lot more preparation and we need

(19:48) to be a much more established company to be able to do this but also it comes from just how just communication to to the user base that we had I mean early on uh for example example our keyword that we were always using which is online research but then at some point we learn that Knowledge Management might even be something that people relate to us much more uh I had in the past some ad campaigns that I believe would be amazing but then turn out not to be and then once again you learn that preparation learning about who you're

(20:19) talking to and about the product that you're actually talking about is something that has to happen much more in depth than we usually think about it yeah yeah I guess uh what what challenges did you guys face as a company when you were getting started oh I mean there's a lot of specific challenges coming from a really small country that's not um super well known in the funding space uh for many of our investors who were the first company they invested in in Serbia so that was kind of the initial challenge

(20:47) just coming from a small country but you're having to prove your use case on a much bigger audience and that was the first step that we needed to do to prove that what the problem we were solving was not just local and then you have a lot of legislative things that that can hinder you but just making that initial uh decision okay we're going to go for it was the first Challenge and then the next months we're building the product getting to that initial validation and then actually being able to to secure

(21:14) funding but those are very Universal I think it can just feel a bit more enhanced when you're an ecosystem that's just not super developed yeah that's true yeah it's easier in San Francisco if you just go down to a Starbucks you know and bump into a VC down there I guess yeah I mean it's getting better I mean I'm really happy with our community in terms of uh how how active everyone is how supportive everyone is and how how much help they want to provide to anyone who's coming into into the community as

(21:43) as a new company but you know a lot of things need to happen for us to be on the same level as even some of the Western European countries that have had the system in place for much longer but that's also a good tip for anyone who's struggling with marketing just reach out to people and talk to in your situation uh it can feel like you're really stuck in one place whether it's that you're leading a team or you're an entrepreneur or whatever checking in with people who are kind of in the same boat can just

(22:10) mean so much and can give you so many so many good ideas yeah don't assume that you know people won't invest in you too as well so so don't be afraid to reach out you know if you're in Serbia reach out to the Silicon Valley VCS and New York VCS they're always looking for new opportunities so just uh you know don't don't like you said don't keep yourself too hyper localized it's a global world that we live in so um you could find money from anywhere oh yeah and I mean our our

(22:35) friending story was completely insane we we won our we basically won our entire round and a petting competition in Bucharest even though neither my girlfriend or I had ever visited buz before that and had absolutely no connections to the local ecosystem in Romania when it came to VCS or other startups or absolutely anyone and like in three days we we got the funding that we were looking for for the past year and it was just uh very uh it was really a life-changing opportunity for us so my advice is always go for it especially if

(23:06) it's something where it's just a VIN situation you either get some feedback on how you can do better or you actually get what you're looking for and you know the same principle goes for potential clients potential collaborators anyone that you want to work with or you want to do some work for it's much better to to try and you know shoot your shot to see if you can actually do it if you can get in that that space and if if it's a no then it's just something that you can progress from

(23:35) yeah yeah worst case scenario that they say no but usually you'll get advice or at least something from so yeah get a bunch of different uh you know input from people um I guess I've heard a lot about Romania and Bucharest especially for the startup scene what what's it like there is it it seems like it's growing from what I hear oh yeah I mean we were there for just a couple of days but that event was probably the the best one uh in terms of organization that I've ever been to we've had I think like

(24:01) 20 meetings in 20 day in two days and everything was super in time there was a bunch of tables for networking some really great workshops and and people speaking at a conference it's called hot toab and it's been going on I think for 14 years already over 10 years for sure so it's been quite some time and they've had some really great success stories already and for us that was really really great to have investors our lead investors from Poland and then kind of the investor following them second is

(24:31) from Romania and they understood our local contacts but for from ecosystems that were just a bit ahead and had that experience that could really help us get to those next stages of growth so it turned out to be an really perfect match for us but yeah they have some really great experts great people and we we had a really positive experience excellent so I guess uh is there any books that you would recommend for people that are looking to you know learn about content marketing um anything that you've read

(24:59) that you could recommend to people I think just reading in general is super great for Content marketing I think that if you're looking for great ideas uh for Content you should read other things than just on how to produce content because for me my best ideas were industry books that I would read like on project management or now about research research papers anything that I get my hands on uh that was more specific to my industry and to the audience that I'm writing is a much better read probably than anything

(25:26) that's teaching you how to technically do marketing because content marketing is so everchanging that it's very hard to say you know this is the best book for you to learn how to write content or to think about content marketing but anything that's on point with the audience that you're speaking to that's probably the best rate that you can have yeah that's a good point so yeah just staying up with the with with the trends so to speak just seeing what everybody's talking about and then trying to figure

(25:50) out how to you know write your own narrative the kind of lines with the larger Trend yeah I mean a larger Trends can be really great for you to get noed so but you have to give your own spin to whatever the current topic is you know for us at some point you know AI briers were super popular and while we're not in that space we would kind of have to have our own narrative about it so whatever is happening even remotely in your space that's super trending that's you know on top of everyone's Minds can

(26:18) be a great way for you to get to the top to top of mind as well and just kind of weasle in your your own point of view excellent so I guess what's one thing a potential customers should know about collab writing and why they should pick your platform today uh I mean there is a couple of things that we really work hard on enabling our users at color weding the first one is the Simplicity of collecting information uh we want to be our partner wherever you go the simplest way to collect the key insights and the

(26:48) second is that we we really want to make it collaborative we've made it collaborative because we knew that exchanging insights and storing that kind of quick and easy knowledge that that is shared if is probably the biggest value in the long run so for Content marketers it's not just that you can really quickly save a piece of information and then track it back but you can fully understand the context of why you saved it at that moment so nothing starts rinking well in a week or two if something starts drinking really

(27:15) well in six months to a year you have your whole database and all of that knowledge stored in a very simple and easy space for you to access any time you need it and then as you said for those uh content calendars and collaboration with people between people we just make it super easy for people to understand what the other person wanted to share without even needing to go through that back and forth and without people having to wait for six hours to get that b answer that they need for them to continue working on it's very

(27:43) quick easy and we just kind of flow within the the workflow that people have we've integrated with Google Docs with notion with things that we know people use and our browser extension if you know how to use Google Docs or or W you're going to just pick it up in in seconds that's great so I guess where can people learn more about your company uh you can learn more about us either on collaborating tocom our website or our LinkedIn page but anyone on our te is always super happy to to Share info so if you have any questions

(28:14) you can always reach out to me or our community manager card if you're more interested in like the text packs and everything how it was developed and even my co-funder is probably a better person ask but yeah we're and also product H apps you we have a lot of reviews that people's experiences there so if you're if you're curious whether or not you should try it out those can also be a really great spaces that to see how other people have used that and what their opinions were great and I guess

(28:40) what's next for you guys over the next five years got any cool features you're working on that you could share with us oh yeah something that's coming up next week is our integration with slack so that's going to be a really great so that you can talk people directly from slack and share information directly there so we really want to integrate with how people work and then we plan on enabling mobile uh and collecting and saving information on the go which is going to be really a game changer from

(29:06) General of app highlighters that only work on your browser and it can be really hard to save information when you're on a go uh further from that we have a lot of things related to AI like knowledge triggers Next Step suggestions we have our AI co-pilot that we're have alive but we're working on improving which can which can really help you with the early stages of your research to give you that initially input the key highlights from from all across the web uh but yeah the these are kind of the

(29:35) the key highlights for what we have up for for the end of the year in five years we're going to see how how people like our product what they see where we need to goow where we need to go and then we're g to take it from there at the way technology moves today five years is a b it's gonna be a big leap so um well how how habits of users change and how technology changes has been so rapid you know we have a long-term vision of what we want to help people do but how we do it is heavily dependent on all the conversations we're

(30:05) having with our users yeah that's the good thing about startups you can move fast and break things and uh know stay of the curve I guess Sandra thank you so much for coming on today uh for anybody that wants to learn about collab writing you can go to collab writing.com uh she's got a she's got it right there and her name there uh if you need need to know the spelling uh you could also pick it up today in the nacho nacho B2B SAS Marketplace we have a great offer for 25% cash back um we do have the best

(30:32) brands at the best prices um including collaborating here uh you know it's been great working with you guys and we look forward to uh growing Our Brands together and uh seeing what you guys do next yeah thank you so much for having gab and it it's been really amazing uh just working with na Nao theme so super happy to be here thank you