IAM2284 – Founder and CEO Helps Entrepreneurs Build The Right Products

Title: Transcript - Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:40:20 GMT

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:40:20 GMT, Duration: [00:14:44.20]

[00:00:00.28] - Jay Gibb

Helping companies grow faster, mainly because this is usually a primary part of our customers, like growth machine. It's a key cog in the wheel of growth to get more referrals or to sort of, you know, distribute their content more widely and things like that. And so it's really a key part of tons of, tons of growth in our customer base.

[00:00:23.26] - Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.

[00:00:48.60] - Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gretch from the I Am CEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jay Gibb of Cloud Sponge. Jay, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:57.24] - Jay Gibb

What's up, Gresh?

[00:00:58.10] - Gresham Harkless

Awesome. And what I want to do is read a little bit more about Jay so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jay is a former software engineer, now the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS company, CloudSponge. Together with his team, Jay has helped thousands of business owners drive growth over the last 20 years. With a unique blend of tech expertise and soft skills, Jay is an expert at helping entrepreneurs across all industries build the right products to reach a large customer base and boost growth. Jay, are you ready to speak to the IMCEO community?

[00:01:29.12] - Jay Gibb

Let's do it.

[00:01:29.84] - Gresham Harkless

Let's do it. So first question I had was to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

[00:01:35.84] - Jay Gibb

Sure. So the, the origin story of Cloud Sponge started with consulting. So me being a employee and then partner at an agency like a. Basically like a software development shop. You know, this was, it was a piece of software that we were building that just didn't exist. There was some, there's, there's some source packages that did address book importing, which is what Cloud Sponge does. And I guess we'll get into that next. And there were lots of people, developers mostly out there, sort of searching for answers that we were searching for as well. And we kind of noticed that this thing that we had to build that we felt like should be available as a SaaS tool just wasn't out there. And there was a gap in the market. So we just decided to take what we had built for ourselves and, and put a price tag on it and Put it out there and see if anybody wanted to buy it. And that was about eight years ago. So since then I've sort of learned to be a CEO. I didn't start off as one. And then now eight years later, we're a thriving company that's got tons of customers.

[00:02:45.59] - Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, it's great to hear in true entrepreneurial form where you see an issue, you see something that isn't being created, and rather than just saying, hey, I think somebody should create it, you decide to create it yourself. So definitely happy that you did that. And now I wanted to hear a little bit more on what you touched on is tell us a little bit more about Cloud Sponge and what exactly you guys are doing.

[00:03:03.50] - Jay Gibb

Right. So Cloud Sponge is software that you install on your website. And what it does is it allows your users to access and search and share address book records from their address books with your website without leaving your website. So most of the time that's for, you know, places where you have to create a recipient list. So maybe it's a recipient list for an E card that you're sending to your family or event that you're inviting people to, or a coupon you want to send to your friends or referral programs, those types of things. And you know, the typical user experience that most people see or most of your listeners have certainly experienced is, you know, please enter a comma separated list of email addresses here. Right. Or something really archaic. Not very thoughtful. Right. And it kind of forces your users to switch to a different tab or a different window and copy and paste and sort of manually create a list. Or, you know, for things that are sort of longer recipient lists like event invitations and holiday cards. They'll even have like instructions to teach your user how to go off the website and create a spreadsheet and export as a CSV. And what the heck's a CSV? I mean, it solves that problem. Basically allows people to access through Google Contacts, Yahoo. Contacts, Outlook.com, office, 365, AOL, all the different places where people store their contacts, allows them to access those places without leaving your website so that they can build those recipient lists sort of longer and easier and without getting frustrated.

[00:04:34.98] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think thinking back to the ways that I've done is like seven or eight thousand steps, it seems like where you have to make sure you download it from Gmail, then upload it here and then do that, and then you forget that you didn't put the commas or you're supposed to put semicolons or whatever it is, but it's, it's great that you guys seem to have developed something that is a lot more easy for people to use to accomplish the ultimate goal, which is like you said, to be able to send something to the people in your inbox.

[00:05:00.42] - Jay Gibb

Yeah, right. And that's how we earn. Like what you were, what you said in the intro there, you know, that we're helping companies grow faster mainly because this is usually a primary part of our customers like growth machine. It's a key cog in the wheel of growth to get more referrals or to sort of, you know, distribute their content more widely and things like that. And so, so it's really a key part of tons of growth in our customer base.

[00:05:27.07] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And anytime you can save time, that is of extreme value to anybody that is an entrepreneur and business owner. So definitely appreciate you for doing that. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be what you might have already touched on, but just like kind of your distinguisher or what you feel kind of sets you or your organization apart.

[00:05:43.74] - Jay Gibb

Secret sauce. Well, I mean, I think for us, niching down has been a big part of our secret in terms of, you know, throughout this journey, we've been pulled in those very specific directions that I've already talked about, like the specific direction of referral program or the specific direction of E card recipient list. And I'll have somebody that I want to sell my product to who says, man, like, if only you just also had like a unique link generator and the ability to send these emails, then I could use you for my entire referral program. And we get pulled in the direction of building those things and sort of losing focus by getting too broad and sort of trying to please everybody. For us, like saying no to all that stuff and staying niche down into just, we want to be the best single point of integration for the world's address books, period. And what our customers do with those address books is up to them. And we're not going to get involved in all those really specific use cases. We're just going to make sure that we have something that supports them and then I'll refer that business out. Like if they want to, if they want a referral program platform, then I know a lot about that. I'm happy to tell you all about the different referral program platforms that exist and I'll even mention which ones are already integrated with Cloud Sponge. But I'm not going to build that for. Right. And so I think for us, it's been a really powerful thing, niching down and staying really focused on this because it's allowed us to actually have an appropriate experience or an appropriate product for much bigger organizations that would never buy a referral program platform off the shelf because they're going to build that themselves. But this is one feature of the thing that they're going to build that they definitely don't want to build. They definitely want to outsource this one feature. And so by staying really focused on that, we've allowed ourselves to sort of go up market and break into much bigger companies that have engineering organizations of hundreds of people, and they just realize that this would be a massive waste of resources for them to build this one feature.

[00:07:42.47] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, And I love that you mentioned that, because, you know, this idea of niching down is incredibly huge, because if you do something better than anybody else, then even if they try to, you know, take those resources and try to create it, they might start to scratch the surface. But because you've been doing it for such a strong period of time, and because you've been so successful at it, they usually won't be able to do it at the level that you are. So they might even just say, why don't we just use Cloud Sponge instead? Yep, absolutely. I love that. So now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app, a book or habit that you have, but it's something that you feel like makes you more effective and efficient as an entrepreneur or business owner.

[00:08:16.73] - Jay Gibb

Well, you know, one of the things that I think I've done that Most of the CEOs and founders that I know haven't done is hiring a podcast agent. And that's the reason why I'm talking to you today. That's the reason why I'm able to sort of reach out to your audience and talk about what I do. I think a lot of, especially the founder CEOs like me, you know, the SMBs and the startups and the smaller groups aren't aware that this is a thing. Right. So, you know, for me, I use a service called Interview Valet. There's probably about eight or 10 other ones that I evaluated on my journey to choosing them, and I'm happy with them. But it's. For me, it's great because I get to describe to them who I am and what I do and what kind of people I want to speak to or reach. Reach out to and they do all the work to find guys like you. They do all that. And really what. All I really need to is show up on time, have a good microphone and Internet connection and put myself on the calendar and that's it. They handle everything for me. And it's a really powerful thing. I think more CEOs should do it.

[00:09:18.17] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And as we talked about before, anytime, any way you're able to kind of save any type of time where you don't have to go through and do the research on Google to try to find those people, but you have somebody like Tom and Interview Valet, who was in episode number 11, by the way, has the opportunity of really kind of niching down and helping to save you time so that you can focus again on what you do the best.

[00:09:37.92] - Jay Gibb

Yep.

[00:09:38.36] - Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

[00:09:46.79] - Jay Gibb

You know, I got a, I got a couple of things that fit into that category, but one of them that I think, I think your audience might get value out of is case studies. I feel like if I could go back to when we first started Cloud Sponge and we first got, you know, our first five or ten paying customers that, you know, were getting value out of the service and I was really happy and everybody who worked here, it was really like a relief to get those customers and get some money coming in the door is like that proof, that, proof that we were onto something. I wish I had done, gotten into a routine of doing case studies with those people and reaching out to them and asking them to tell me, like, what was your thought process before you discovered us? Like, what were the problems that you were trying to solve? And why did you start searching for this thing that we sell? And then, you know, getting through unpacking how they're getting value out of our service and from our company and writing all that down, even if it's just to write it all down internally for ourselves and not even to publish it on a website or a blog, although that's, that's the logical outcome. There was so much that we learned from the case studies that we started doing. I wish I had done them sooner. Like, got into pain points and anxieties and value, like where we were actually delivering value wasn't on the, on the growth side or in the time saving side or the ROI calculations and all these things that were sort of opaque for us for a long time became really clear and transparent once we started doing case studies. So I wish I'd started doing those from the get go.

[00:11:19.17] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes sense. And I imagine it probably was instrumental in you kind of building and like you said, niching down and creating and developing even greater product as you been able to do. I imagine those case studies were pivotal for that.

[00:11:31.75] - Jay Gibb

They were. And also they were pivotal for figuring out what we should be writing about on our blog and what words we should be using to describe our product on our homepage. And it informs so much in terms of the rest of the marketing machine that it was a big mistake not to do them sooner.

[00:11:49.99] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Well, that's great insight and a great example of a CEO nugget. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of being a CEO. And we're open to have different quote unquote CEOs on this show. So I wanted to ask you, Jay, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:12:04.02] - Jay Gibb

Well, you know, coming from the perspective of a founder CEO or like an SMB CEO, I think it's different from if you're Talking about like CEOs of giant organizations or very large organizations. But for me it's been about firing myself from every job at the company as quickly as I can. You know, basically as soon as I figure something out and I do it and I repeat a process and I find a way that works for us and I figure out how to answer a question or how to build a thing or how to, you know, you know, do a task. My job as a CEO is to fire myself from doing that and hire somebody else to do it so that I can move on to the next thing, so that I can sort of block and tackle and be like the first person to take on every challenge. And then once we've done that, like get somebody else to do that and find people to do those things that are way better at that than I am, find specialists, find individuals that have a certain passion for those types of things. And every time I fire myself, make sure that I level up that role with somebody who's much better than I was. And that's been working for me.

[00:13:08.12] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I definitely think that's an incredible perspective, especially as you said, as a founder of the company, to be able to do that and understand the long term goal that you have and be able to bring those people in to help you reach that goal. So, Jay, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best they can get a hold of you.

[00:13:31.80] - Jay Gibb

You can reach me on cloudsponge.com, just click the chat bubble and if I don't get it myself, somebody will get it to me. Now the one thing I would ask is for your listeners, like if you're out there using a website and they're making you type in email addresses and create recipient lists using CSV uploads and spreadsheets and comma separated lists, just tell them about us. Like tell them about Cloud Sponge and ask them as a user of their system that you know that we're out there. Make sure they know we're out there. And I'd really appreciate that.

[00:13:59.37] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And I think everybody will appreciate it. Definitely a huge time saver. So Jay, I appreciate you for creating that and obviously I appreciate your time today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:14:08.38] - Jay Gibb

Very good. Thanks Gresham.

[00:14:09.59] - Intro

Thank you for listening to the IMCEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at Imceo Co. I Am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Check out the latest and greatest apps, books and habits to level up your business at CEOHacks co. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.