Understanding Marketing Automation with Mike Korba, CCO and Co-Founder of User.com

Thank you for having me here. I’m very happy for this invitation.

Actually, I grew up in Poland, in Lublin. It’s a small, not-so-small, but not such a big city. I’m currently living in Warsaw, but for almost my whole life, I was in Lublin, near the eastern border of Poland.

Me, my sister and like my parents, yes. So not a big, big family.

Younger, five years younger.

Yeah. Like right now, I have a daughter. There’s a saying: if you have a daughter, you basically become aware of all the guys in the city.

I started working at a very young age. My first job was in hotels and restaurants—as a waiter, a bartender, the person who’d work in a nightclub, deciding who’s coming in and who’s not, or bouncer-like stuff. So I’ve had a lot of interesting jobs at a young age—some years ago, or maybe not so few, because it’s been like 17 or 18 years since then.

Then I started working in marketing. My first job in marketing was as a special marketing specialist, but it was a really long time ago. Then I worked with politicians in public relations. So as a student, I was writing speeches that they have, given in our government. It was really, really a long time ago.

After that, I worked in an advertising agency for several years—more than seven. When I reached my 30s, I decided I wanted to start my own business. I became a CEO of my own startup. It didn’t do well, so I have that experience—I still have the website, but I have to do something with it.

For the last four years, I’ve been at user.com. I joined as the first sales guy; then I became the first guy responsible for implementation. Currently, I’m the CMO—like a chief marketing officer—but still, the whole customer support and customer success side is under me, so I’m responsible for that as well.

Major, I was working, I was studying marketing and management.

Yes, like before the introduction, we said a couple of sentences about that. I’ve been doing online marketing for a couple of years. For four years, I’m in user.com—I’m one of the co-founders. I joined when the company existed as “user engage.io” before the Product Hunt launch. So I was like the first sales guy—yeah, kind of like the main CEO. Greg is a tech person, a developer, but at some point he thought, “OK, I have a product, so let’s go to market and hire a first sales person.” That was me. But before user.com, I was a CEO at another startup.

Before that, I worked seven years in an advertising agency, and before that, I was a marketing specialist. Yeah, it’s funny to think about—13 years ago, I was a marketing specialist, and now I do a lot of strange things. I was a bartender, a waiter… I’ve done a lot of things, but for the last 17 years, I’ve worked in marketing, and for more than 10 years, I’ve specialized in online marketing. And for four years, my focus has been marketing automation.

I was the first sales guy at user.com, then I was the first person responsible for implementation. Currently, I’m kind of the chief of customer support and success and chief of marketing. Because there’s no specific name for it, I’m called CCO—Chief Commercial Officer or Chief Client Officer.

Four years, yeah, like in September. I started in September 2016. So the company was like this side project at the beginning. It was founded on the first of January 2017, but the Product Hunt launch was in December 2016. In these early days, you don’t have a specific date when you say, “We started the company on this day,” right? Like, yeah, the first invoice, I believe, was in June or May 2016. So when I joined the team, we had maybe 12 or 20 customers, not a big number. Monthly subscription costs at that point, I believe, were $19. We didn’t stop the trials, so I was the first sales guy, and my goal was to close sales, but you didn’t have to pay if you didn’t want to. You could use it without adding a payment card—never. But I closed 10 deals in the first month, so that was a really great experience. People wanted to pay for this technology, for this solution. If I were them, maybe I wouldn’t have to do it, but if they’re not aware of it, they don’t have to do it, yeah?

Currently, we’re close to 40 people. Maybe we’ll hire two new SDRs, so maybe more than 40. We’re currently at about 100k MRR—maybe a bit more—so that’s over $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Yeah, we’re still at a very early stage, at least that’s how I feel.

Yes. So, we have a mission and value statements. We believe we can create technology that does all those repetitive, boring tasks, so people can focus on the important stuff. Currently, we’re doing it in marketing, sales, and support, like in the MarTech industry. But maybe our mission statement is even bigger. We believe we can create a technology that handles all those tedious tasks so people can focus on truly important ones.

We’re doing marketing, sales, and support. In terms of vision, we want to be the standard for marketing automation. So, if you’re thinking about a CRM, you might think of HubSpot or Salesforce. If you’re thinking about email marketing, you might think of MailChimp. If you’re thinking about live chat, there’s Intercom or Drift. There are several brands that are top of mind, and we believe user.com can be like that in marketing automation. So, it’s all in one tool, doing this marketing automation.

Yeah, yeah, we believe that. If we had started a couple of years earlier, many tools were beginning with one solution and then expanding. For example, I don’t know if Zendesk started with just a ticketing system, but right now they have Zendesk Sell, Desk, Chat—same with Freshdesk. Freshdesk began with a ticketing system, but now there’s Fresh Sales, Fresh Support, Fresh Chat, Fresh Works, so Mailchimp started with email, but if you enter their site now, it’s not just email anywhere—it’s a marketing solution.

So, right now, we believe the market is going toward everybody wanting to be the one source of truth. For instance, in the chat industry, switching from one chat solution is not too difficult—like moving from LiveChat to, I don’t know, Olark or something similar. But if you’re changing your CRM solution or your marketing automation solution, you’ll think about it a couple of times because all your processes and customer data live in that solution. It’s hard to sell that kind of solution because when you’re all in one, you have to compete with those specialized tools.

But once customers implement our solution for good—if they have all their processes and data in it—we know they’ll stay with us for a long time. Because changing your CRM or marketing automation is a big deal. The market’s still growing, and people still use multiple tools, lacking one source of truth about their marketing and sales efforts.

Yeah, it’s cheaper because you can buy several tools, but an all-in-one solution might look more expensive. However, when you add up separate subscriptions, it’s actually cheaper. Plus, it’s easier because you don’t have to think about integrations—like segment integrations or Zapier—or building your own APIs. You have marketing, sales, and support working with the same user, from their first site visit, to becoming a trial user, to eventually becoming your brand ambassador. You see that entire journey; you can optimize all your marketing support and sales efforts in a more precise way. Because it’s still the same Shane Barker, it’s still the same Mike Korba—so if I’m your client for several years, you can scroll my timeline and see, “Oh, first time he entered my website was through this podcast,” or something like that. This is really valuable for understanding your customers better.

Okay. So in my understanding, it’s reaching the right audience with the right message at the right moment. It’s great if you can also reach out via the right channel, and that message is personalized—but at scale—so you’re getting the right message to the right audience.

For example, when you have a new visitor, maybe you try to generate a lead from them. If someone has already been a customer for a long time, you don’t show them the same lead-generation popup. Instead, maybe you say, “Hi Mike, nice to see you again. Let’s check this out.” So that’s my definition: reaching your user base properly—and with personalization—so you can serve up the right message at the right audience, at the right time.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And it doesn’t matter—marketing automation, by definition, is often about drip campaigns and sequences of emails. But I think email is only one channel. It can be live chat, SMS, or a push notification. It can be HTML content, so dynamically changing part of your website can become a pop-up layer. Those are just channels, but two sides of this marketing automation are data—covering all the touchpoints of your customers—and messaging. He visited this page, he entered to create this event, he saw this mobile view screen or something like that. So we have data about those users, and of course this data can be enriched in many ways, but based on it, you can reach out through the right channel. If you know he’s using your mobile app a lot, send him a push notification. If you see he likes opening his emails, send emails. Those are just channels, but the message and the right moment are crucial.