Jim James (00:00)
Now, if you're listening to this podcast, chances are that you have also realized that content is starting to reach the limits of its utility and its appeal. In fact, there's so much content around and with AI, so much of this content is generated that is not even personal, that we need to look for the next way to engage with our prospects and our clients. And the way that we do that is with
interactivity and with quizzes and other tools. And I'm really excited because my guest today works for a company that has clients, including Forbes, Salesforce.com and Tableau and many of the world's largest companies all rely on this company's quiz and integrated engagement apps to help them to generate leads. And in one case, for example, one company has got over 160 ,000 visits to the website
due to a quiz. We're going to talk to the CMO of a company called Outgrow. Saksham Sharda is joining me from Holland today, although the company itself is registered in New York. Saksham, welcome to the show.
Saksham Sharda (01:11)
Thanks so much for having me, James.
Jim James (01:13)
Well, thank you because as I said in the introduction, content creation has to some degree run its path. And we have to have another way of getting people to have a conversation with us when we can't necessarily be online or in the room with them when they're looking at our website, for example, or even on our social media. Can you explain to me how we can use interactive content and the role that
Outgrow is playing in building these relationships with potential and existing clients.
Saksham Sharda (01:49)
Yeah, right. So I think with the advent of AI static content, static content, like blogs, you know, anything on a website, anything that is not interactive has reached its, the end of its age. The age is over. There's going to be so much of it produced that one might publish an ebook, but who's to say that anyone has the time to read it in this flood of things being produced.
So you really what you need is to learn from what ChatGPT does, for instance, is you need to make things interactive. And the easiest way to do so is by making quizzes, calculators, anything that is not static, quizzes, calculators, polls, chatbots, assessments, you know, recommendations, all of these where, you know, your tool asks your users or website visitors a couple of questions and based on that gives them a couple of recommendations.
And this can be used for like businesses across the board. I'll just give you an example of a quiz that has been hiding in plain sight. For instance, when you walk into a McDonald's, you see this huge screen where they ask you to build your own burger, you know, by selecting a different bun type, a different meat type, vegetables, etc. And that is basically a quiz because what you're doing is you're choosing and there's a question posted to you, you choose one thing, then another question is posted to you based on how you answered the first question and so on and so forth.
And that's a quiz and this is universal. You'd see it on the Tesla website for building your own car. You'll see it on a lawyer's website who's trying to tell you how much money you can save by choosing his legal services over someone else's legal services. That's a calculator. So you just see how universally it's present and we help businesses across the board, 21 different industries, real estate, law, finance, help them build these quizzes and calculators on our website, Outgrow.co,
Without knowing how to code, you can do it all by yourself.
Jim James (03:44)
It's actually fascinating as you say, the impact of AI is kind of exhausting human appetite for static content. You mentioned on Outgrow.co and at the end you're actually gonna kindly give us a coupon which people can use, our listeners can use to get a discount on subscription to Outgrow. You mentioned you've got 21 different industries. Why would you need,
if you like to have different industry types. Aren't all quizzes effectively the same? You know, you're asking people a few questions and giving them a few options and getting the data. What's the difference?
Saksham Sharda (04:27)
I'll give you for instance, and this is like this, I have learned so much by working with all these different industries and making templates for them. One of the things you notice, for instance, is how specific the knowledge everyone in the industry has. And that's the beautiful thing about humankind as general, right? We have kind of become experts at all these different fields. So for instance, in the fashion industry, one of the things you'd learn, we had a client who by themselves made a quiz that helps you pick a makeup set for your face.
Right. And so they had one of the questions in that quiz that said, what colors are the veins in your wrists? And apparently the color of the veins in your wrist determines the foundation that goes on your face before makeup. And so, you know, that is the kind of specific knowledge that would be completely different in the finance industry. That'd be a completely different question that I would have no idea about. So for us, we provide a tool where you can build this quiz by yourself.
But we also provide templates so that it can get your, you know, creativity jogging and you know, you can build something great on top of that template. Modify the questions, you know, tomorrow you might be in the fashion industry and you say, maybe it's not the veins under your wrist. Maybe it's something else that determines the kind of foundation that should go on your face. So, you know, come along and play with the software and you can go in all different directions.
Jim James (05:44)
Yeah, that's really, really interesting. And I have two daughters and they would probably have known the answer by the way, if I asked them, they're experts. So really interesting. So you've got like art and auto beauty and skincare, civil rights construction, really, really diverse. So you're really helping.
Saksham Sharda (05:50)
Hahaha.
Jim James (06:02)
business owner who isn't necessarily a quiz creator with these templates to get started already. What would you say are some of the hallmarks of a successful quiz? You've mentioned, which is interesting that for example, McDonald's or a car configurator are really quizzes. I've never really had that perspective before. In a...
For an entrepreneur, what would you say are some of the hallmarks of a successful quiz?
Saksham Sharda (06:37)
Hmm. So one thing is to like, as like, as I guess, like when you walk into a real world store, right, you walk into a shoe shop or sunglasses store, the person who's behind the counter really has specific knowledge based on which he can recommend you something, but they never bore you with like 300 questions before they recommend you something. So one of the hallmarks is to keep it concise. You don't have to show off your knowledge. You just have to
gain the essential, you have to ask five to 10 questions maximum. Within these questions, I don't know which industry you're in, within 10 questions, I am 100 % certain you'd be able to give a recommendation that is of value. And that's what a quiz is doing, essentially. It is taking in some data that is relevant to the user. And based on that, it is just giving you a particular recommendations. And you can put this on your website. So instead of a salesperson at a shop, you basically have this quiz on your website.
And so that is the main thing. And the other thing you have to understand is that you're basically helping with information exchange. That's all you're doing with a quiz. So you might recommend as a real estate agent to someone that, oh, you should like take this much money or you should, you can only afford a house in this price range. And you do that using a calculator or a quiz. And then you can just before you give them this outcome at the end of the quiz, you ask them for their emails. The quiz should be free on your website to use.
And the user answers like seven, eight questions, and then you're going to give them a valuable recommendation, but you collect their email and then later you follow up with a more detailed, you know, outcome or something. But, but, and then when you have their email, you can obviously send them a newsletter and like, you know, nurture that lead as well. So that's, that's one thing to keep in mind. You don't necessarily have to make the sale at that point. The key thing is A, that you're understanding your audience more and B, that you are providing them with value, which will make them appreciate you.
Jim James (08:28)
That's really useful mindset that it's really part of the customer journey. It's not trying to close the sale. When you ask the questions, Saksham, in Outgrow, you've written those questions. How do you structure the responses? Because you talk about giving people some value in the survey. How do you create the content? So they've answered what color veins, for example, would create a need for certain kind of color palettes. What
What kind of content would you then embed? Is it just a yes, no, you're on a scale of one to five, or do you recommend people should actually provide some content that educates the person who's taken the quiz as well?
Saksham Sharda (09:14)
So you can have like all sorts of quizzes. You can have quizzes on the top of the funnel, in the middle of the funnel, at the bottom of the funnel. So the top of the funnel quiz would be like, what kind of house can you afford? So here you just like give them some options and then they say, oh, maybe I can actually afford that. I didn't even know that I could afford a house in that part of the world. B, then you go into these people who have done this quiz, then you make a more middle of the funnel quiz for them. You know, what kind of
mortgage would you need for the dream house you're looking for? And then from there, you go to the third one, where it's just like, you give them just three options to pick from. So in the case of the quiz about what kind of makeup set you should buy, so if you're like an affiliate of a company that sells makeup products, you can make a quiz that asks them for all these questions like this, the color of the veins, you know, the color of the hair, you know, certain things about the features, and then it recommends, it can directly recommend
three or four makeup products. So you can just basically in the outcome itself, you can have a link to four particular makeup products on Amazon, on eBay, or on the website you're trying to sell. And as an affiliate, you can derive commission from these sales. This is how the affiliate and hire the affiliate ecosystem works. Or if you're, you are the owner of these products, as in you, you're the company or makeup company, then you can just direct them to your own website and then they'll end up there and then they'll just make the sale.
Jim James (10:36)
You know, that integration as we can see on your website and anyone that wants to go to YouTube can see this as well because we're doing a screen share. I can see here that what you're talking about, Saksham, is that you're taking the supply and the sales conversation all the way to actually taking them to the website, to the Shopify, depending on what kind of answers they've got. So you're almost replacing a bot or you're creating an intelligent
workflow, aren't you, for people that want to introduce a product or care. If people have got the quiz and they're not sending them down a sales channel, but they've got the emails, what happens to those emails? This is always the million dollar question, isn't it? Because you end up maybe with the emails. What about integration? What about follow up, adding these emails into a newsletter, for example?
How does that work, Saksham?
Saksham Sharda (11:37)
So we integrate with like over 500 tools natively. So if you want an emailing software, we integrate with MailChimp, we integrate with Mailalight. If you wanna send them to HubSpot, we can send them to HubSpot. We have a lot of CRM tools, Zoho, all of these, you can natively, they're all. So if you go to the partners marketplace here, you'd see all the, in the partnerships here, you'll see all the tools we integrate with us, all sorts.
You can send them to a Slack channel where you have your sales team sitting if you like, you know, it's completely possible to just with a couple of clicks, you can just do it by yourself. You don't need any expert help to transfer this data, but within Outgrow itself as well. Cause we, we allow you to send these emails to all these different softwares and you can do what you like. But if you want to do just one follow up for these people, you can trigger an email to anyone who submits a lead. So that, that one follow up you can do. We don't want to make like a sequence of like three, four follow ups that you can like
do on the other softwares, but like at least one follow up you can automatically do throughout grow and in a lot of businesses, one follow up is all people want to do, right? So someone submits an email and then you just send them a little follow up saying, Hey, we saw that you were interested in buying a house. If you'd like to hop on a call, here are details and we'll not bother you anymore after this. And that's it. Right. And so we don't, you can either choose this path or you can do like several emails, both are possible. Yeah.
Jim James (12:56)
That's wonderful. So it can be, if you'd like a first step, or if you want to have a string of emails, then you could take that into your own CRM. We've talked at the moment about really people that have come to maybe to your website, for example, but the big challenge for many people is the outreach, Saksham. So how would you get your quiz or engaging content away from your website? Because that relies on inbound
Saksham Sharda (13:00)
Hmm.
Jim James (13:26)
and we want to get people that maybe don't know about us. So how do we distribute the survey to get people, if you like, where they might be if they're not necessarily going to be on our website?
Saksham Sharda (13:39)
Yeah, for sure. So we have like a partnership with Facebook and all its platforms. So one of the things you can do is on your Facebook business page, you can embed the quiz itself. So, you know, through that, you can channel some traffic. But in addition to that, you can put these quizzes, the links to these quizzes in your Instagram stories, so people can just swipe up and end up on the quiz directly from Instagram, or on TikTok as well. So, so the possibilities of driving social traffic are endless. And so,
And especially like when you look at like, for instance, we have a lot of fitness influencers on Instagram using quizzes because they use fitness quizzes to help people determine what kind of workout schedule they should have, right? Based on a person's weight, based on a person's, you know, time, how much free time they have. So they, they make a quiz about like, which is the perfect workout routine for you. And, and fitness influencers are like all over Instagram. So they put it in the Instagram stories and then people through the stories and then the quiz
through that these influencers collect more data and they're able to make personalized plans. So the possibilities here are endless. But if you're not doing socials, then instead of that, you can also go to like Quora or like Reddit or these websites. And there you can also post like in threads that are relevant to the particular discussions that your industry is in. You can mention that, hey, here's a quiz that'll help you, you know, check your perfect fitness plan or here's a quiz that will help you,
You know determine the right makeup that you should be putting on your face and this quiz helped me so so on and so forth, right? So you go to the places where people are looking for answers and then you post a quiz because you're not really being salesy. You're really giving information. So you're not gonna get banned or something.
Jim James (15:13)
That's wonderful because so often, if you're, for example, commenting on someone else's post, you're maybe opening a conversation, which then becomes quite a thread. But if you have a quiz, then you can get them to have an interaction with you. And as you say, get much more data as well and get them much more finessed answers too. We've got also on the website about quizzes and giveaways, Saksham.
Saksham Sharda (15:27)
Hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Jim James (15:44)
What kind of giveaways are we talking about? Because it's one thing to interact with the content, but if you want to do, for example, prize draws, which could be really great incentive to get people to enter and know that when it comes to, for example, some FMCG products, early doors, product gifts, and so on are really useful. How would you use Outgrow for that kind of case study?
Saksham Sharda (16:08)
So for instance, the contest template type is very helpful because it has got a timer on top. So you can automatically say that this contest is going to last for a day after which it's going to be disabled. So if you want, you can do now. So what it does is you can say, hey, share a picture of why you like our software. And then based on the number of likes and engagements you get on your post, you might be the winner or not. So we have a contest template type,
which automatically collects the amount of likes your post got. And you can see a leaderboard to see who's winning the contest and who's not going to win the contest. So it creates this hype where everyone is in a competitive mood and the suspense is going to win. So that's a helpful landing page also for advertisements and stuff. So, you know, that is definitely a way in which you can, you know, give away one thing for free, like a shirt of your podcast brand name or like a
or chance to come on your podcast, you can put it on a contest and then several people compete based on whoever gets the most engagement for your podcast is the one who gets to come on your show. So, so the possibilities with interactive content are endless. So instead of like just making a static post about saying, Hey, whoever gets the most engagement comes on my show, you can instead have like a live contest that is actually seeing who's winning.
Jim James (17:27)
That is taking interactive marketing to another level because you're not just doing engagement, but then you're doing competition as well, Saksham, which is amazing. And then it's also embedded in all the different channels that you might have. And presumably you can attach that to a Facebook advert, presumably, so you could run an ad, which is a quiz so that you're doing completely new lead generation. Would that be the case?
Saksham Sharda (17:46)
Yes.
Now you can embed it in eight different types. You can have it as a full page embed on your website. You can have it embedded in your Facebook post. You can have it embedded like, you know, as a little chat bot at the bottom of your website. It's possible, like the possibilities are endless.
Jim James (18:07)
Yeah, it does seem that Outgrow is really covered off so many different feature sets and applications and the website is so rich in content that when I was preparing for this call with Sakshyam I was like, what am I going to ask you because the website Outgrow.co really does explain a great deal. One thing that the site doesn't explain is what makes a bad quiz or engagement. We talked about
What makes a good one? Not too many questions, for example, but in your experience, because you're the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer there, you must have seen some real howlers, some quizzes that just didn't take off. And any observations without naming names, of course, or shaming anyone, of what people tend to get wrong.
Saksham Sharda (18:57)
Uh, so I think the key point is that, uh, you need to ensure that, uh, the questions remain less than 10 questions. It's also what makes it good, but also what makes it bad. The more questions you have, I feel that less, uh, important, uh, people are going to give it less importance depending on that. So, yeah. Uh, so that's one thing. And the other thing to keep in mind is don't get into too much technical knowledge. You always have to understand that you might be an expert in your field
but others are complete novices. So you have to understand that if you post too many technical questions, they would be like, okay, this feels like an exam and I don't want to be sitting in an exam. So that is the main thing to keep in mind.
Jim James (19:37)
Okay, so not to make it too boring, right? I mean, to try and make it lighthearted and amusing. And can one embed video and images presumably in the quizzes as well to lighten this up? It's not all just text and numbers and scales.
Saksham Sharda (19:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Can one embed what? Sorry. Yes, for sure. You can have videos, images, GIFs, which I would highly recommend because GIFs are quite helpful in like, you know, providing a short video. So it's just like a three second video instead of having to watch the entire video. It's just a three second video that is keeping you entertained. So yeah, definitely keep GIFs. You can embed, you can have a video that like explains before the quiz even starts what your company is about. So you can have that all.
Jim James (19:53)
videos or music or images.
Saksham Sharda (20:20)
Another thing is that, you know, if for instance, you are a technology company or any company that wants to give a particular tutorial, right. Or like, for instance, your podcast is a video. So the point is when you recommend a different, someone comes to your website and says, and answers a couple of questions and then goes to the, you can show them different outcomes with different videos, you know, so different outcomes contain different episodes. And that is something that'll be of help. Yeah.
Jim James (20:46)
Yeah, that's a very interesting thing. How does it find the episodes to share? I can see that it's like the quiz with McDonald's in a way. It's you like this, this and this, it'll take you to, how does it decide which inventory to pull? How does it know which show to deliver? Do you have to code that yourself?
Saksham Sharda (21:04)
How does it decide which inventory to pull?
Jim James (21:06)
Yeah, because you said if someone answers a certain set of questions, you could decide which podcast interview they're interested in, or I guess which car product or whatever. How does it decide what to deliver, what to pass back?
Saksham Sharda (21:17)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah, it's just that you build the logic into the quiz. So if someone like answers the first question and chooses option C, and then someone answers the second question, that same person and chooses option A, then based on what choices they made, if most of the answers were C, they get a different and all the questions, if most of the answers were a particular pattern, they get a different outcome. And you can easily map that yourself. It's just a matter of drawing lines automatically in the builder and it does that for you. So yeah.
Jim James (21:52)
Oh, that's very nice.
Saksham Sharda (21:52)
And you can also like have them take different parts. So someone who answers A might be shown completely different questions than someone who answers B. So there are different routes you can take, but it's also, it's basically like making a flow chart. So it's actually quite easy. Sounds more complex than it is.
Jim James (22:04)
Okay. Well, as you say, the theory behind it is sophisticated, but it looks as though it Outgrow, it's been made to be easy and you're going to kindly share a coupon in a little while that people can use to get a significant discount. You are also the CMO, so the Chief Marketing Officer. So you've been building what is basically a brand for a SaaS. You're in Europe, the company's based out in New York.
Saksham Sharda (22:25)
Mm -hmm.
Jim James (22:33)
Plainly it's got clients all over the world. How are you building the brand for Outgrow? Love to hear your expertise there.
Saksham Sharda (22:44)
So the idea is to convince everyone that it is an all-in-one interactive content solution. So unlike the other brands out there that offer you to build a form or like, you know, a quiz, we really allow you to build like eight different types of interactive content. So once you're on your software and you get a hang of it, which is not really hard, you can really like expand the ways in which you can market all over the place. So that is one way that we're trying to really position our brand.
And the second thing that we do is that we go to a lot of events. We have a lot of partnerships with some of the biggest events in the world. And these are also not like monetary partnerships. These are all for free because they really do like our software. So we have been to the web summit. We've been to collision in Toronto. We've been to the next web in Amsterdam and CES, Las Vegas. So all of these mobile world Congress, we have like partnered with a lot of companies like Nokia, Samsung, and all of these people.
What we really try to do is to get a brand noticed by really just showing even at these events how well these quizzes do. So yeah, that's basically what has been our strategy for getting our brand name across.
Jim James (23:57)
Yeah, it is plainly working. I found Outgrow and reached out because I was so excited to see what you're doing. Because as you say, there's a lot of form builder sites, but they're lacking this interactivity and the engagement and also the distribution elements.
Saksham Sharda (24:07)
Hmm.
For sure, because like you can make a form on Google Form itself. You don't really need a special form builder website to make a form. Google Forms is quite adept at making these forms itself. It's just that if you really want to make a good interactive experience, you need to think beyond a form that is a quiz. And a quiz allows you is just a more interactive form with more logic jumps that allows you to give different outcomes. Whereas the form is just collecting data and people don't always just like to give that data.
Jim James (24:40)
Yeah, no, and I think the current sort of data collection is really not a long way off static content, to be honest, and there's not much incentive for people. Speaking of incentives, Saksham, I am going to ask you for your podcast recommendation in just a moment, but you've kindly got an offer for listeners of the Unnoticed. So would you like to share what that is for anyone that wants to find this? It's on Outgrow.co and the pricing is...
Saksham Sharda (24:45)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Jim James (25:08)
Actually, to be honest, very, very reasonable. Do you want to just take us through what it would cost someone and the offer that you've got for them?
Saksham Sharda (25:15)
Yeah, so for sure, to begin with, anyone can just use a seven day free trial from our website to see if the quiz works for them, use a template that's all for free for seven days. If it doesn't work for you in seven days, you'll know already, so you really don't need to get a plan, right? So, so just go and build something and it's all for free for seven days. It won't take you much time. And then if you do see that it works for you, then you can start from any of these plans that you can see there. And if you want a discount, you can just go to the chat bot at the bottom right of our website and just type Unnoticed20%
and claim a discount. And that's it. Like it's as simple as that. See if it works for you. If it does not, then you don't get it. But if it does, which it will, then you can remember this discount that I gave you.
Jim James (25:57)
Okay, there's this Unnoticed20. Do they need to put the percent or just Unnoticed20? Okay, perfect. And just so you know, there's a freelancer package which enables you to have five types. And on the annual plan, it's only $14 a month, which is sort of 11, 12 pounds. So really very, very affordable. And if you pay monthly, it's the best part of 18 pounds. It's really very, very affordable. And you can move up the scale, of course, depending on how many you want to,
Saksham Sharda (25:59)
Yes, I noticed when you should book as well.
Jim James (26:26)
how many different content types you want. But for most people, that entry level would more than suffice. Saksham, I will ask you, as you know, for a podcast or book that you'd recommend to Unnoticed entrepreneurs to help them to find tools and tips to get noticed.
Saksham Sharda (26:26)
Mm -hmm.
For sure, you should listen to the Market of the Month podcast that I host, which really covers like all these diverse range of industries that I've been talking about. Like I've talked to everyone in literally every industry. So definitely give that a look. We have interviews with Nokia, Samsung, Microsoft, the European Union's tech commissioner, the United States employment tech commissioner. All of them have been on the show and
talked about it so definitely get that a listen.
Jim James (27:16)
Okay, just repeat the name of the show for us.
Saksham Sharda (27:19)
Marketer of the Month.
Jim James (27:20)
Marketer of the month and of course, we'll put a link to that in the show So actually, thank you for being you know, my marketer of the month by coming on the show and explaining how really in this day and age of AI We've got to build engagement Not just content. So thank you so much for coming on the show to share that message with me
Saksham Sharda (27:42)
Thanks so much for having me on the show, Jim.
Jim James (27:44)
Well, you know, it's very rare that we get to see technology that enables us across not just the practical implementation, but also across the business. The fact that you can create these quizzes and integrate, for example, your e-commerce or that you can distribute those across your social media makes this such a different platform than the static forms and questionnaires that one sees so often. That's why I was so keen to have Outgrow on the show today. So if you've enjoyed this, do
head over to Outgrow.co. We don't have a relationship. I'm not an affiliate. I just really think that it's a great product. And if you've enjoyed this show, then do please review on your player of choice. And just remember that we don't leave any Unnoticed entrepreneur behind. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to keep on communicating.
