Struggling to convert website visitors into paying customers?

Jim James: 0:21

Welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me here, Jim James. Mikael Dia, I should say he's here with me, he's on the mic. He's over in Niagara, on the lake in Toronto. , welcome to the show.

Mikael Dia: 0:34

Thank you for having me.

Jim James: 0:35

Well, it's my pleasure because this is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to learn from other entrepreneurs how they can market their business and how to build a brand. And we've got a bit of a double win with you, because you help companies with their customer journeys. You help them to map and understand how effective their marketing is across multiple platforms. So that's one part of the customer journey that I'm excited you can help us to understand. But secondly, you used a Facebook group to launch Funnelytics in January 2018. Within two months, generate over $200,000 worth of new customers. So we've got you on a couple of counts plus. Also, I think we're going to talk about issues that you faced in product market fit and building a system, why you've got a pair of custom made Nike's sitting there behind you a one off pair of Nike's.

Mikael Dia: 1:31

So yeah, right there.

Jim James: 1:32

Yeah, welcome to the show. Tell us about yourself and about Funneletics, and about what problem you're solving on customer journeys.

Mikael Dia: 1:40

Yeah, no, no problem. So thank you for having me and thank you for the introduction. I'm very excited to share as much as I can over over the next little while. So, yeah, I've been doing this digital marketing stuff for over a decade now. We started learning. I started learning how to sell things online back in 2008 ish, somewhere around there, right around universities. I started with t-shirts and the old fashioned, trying to build a t-shirt business in university days, and then I went and started learning and there's a whole story behind this t-shirt thing, but what it did is it led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out how do you actually sell stuff online. I then went into affiliate marketing. I went into SEO. I went into email marketing. I started learning about paid advertising. I started then learning about funnels and automation and email follow ups and copywriting and sales pages and basically all these different pieces of this complex puzzle that we call kind of digital marketing. And over the years, I started multiple businesses. I had a Mandarin language school while I lived in London in the UK, so I was on your side of the pond for about three years and I ran a Mandarin language school. I exited that business. I started a digital marketing company and we were helping people with customer journeys, with funnels and helping them convert strangers into customers for their business, and that led me to build a software for my own personal use really at the time called Funnelytics, and we launched that business and it started to take off. So now my entire focus, everything that I do, is centered around Funnelytics.

Jim James: 3:43

Tell us just a little bit about Funnelytics, because customer journeys seem very complicated, especially in this digital world where we've got Google, we've got Facebook, we've got LinkedIn, so many places Mikael aren't there for us to track. Can you just tell us about the customer journey, because you're an expert in this as a discipline? Tell us, how does it work? What do people have to look for?

Mikael Dia: 4:15

Yeah. So I think you need to take it back to the very, very basic and you have to understand what is a customer journey. Well, a customer journey is fundamentally the different touch points that you have when it comes to trying to convert a stranger into a customer. So, before somebody knows anything about your business, they find out through whether it's an ad or referral, a video, whatever it may be they find out about your business and then they start on a journey towards becoming a customer. So what we want to understand is what are the different touch points, what are the different pages, the different traffic sources, the different videos or actions that these customers take that non customers don't take? So, in other words, what is the path that creates the most profit for us as a business so that we can replicate that, we can send more people through this same path, so that we can get more strangers to become customers. Fundamentally, that is what we're trying to solve when it comes to customer journeys.

Jim James: 5:28

I have a question for you, though, Mikael Dia, the founder of Funalytics what about the part of the customer journey that's offline, this sort of need for an on-ramp, because otherwise you don't know? Someone just walked in the store, for example. How do you track that? How do you integrate the offline and the online world?

Mikael Dia: 5:49

Yeah, so it's very tough, right, it's very, very challenging to integrate both online and offline. But regardless, you have to realize that a customer journey, online or offline, is the same. Let's assume I'm walking down the street in our town here in Niagara on the lake. It's a tourist town. Many, many people come here every single year. They just visit our little town and they start walking down the street. Something catches their eye in terms of a store. Maybe it's the sign at the front, maybe it's the yellow house or something. Then they decide, okay, I'm going to deviate from my path and I'm going to go inside of this store. As they browse the store, it's laid out a specific way. Maybe they decide I'm going to go and pick up this particular thing. Or potentially there's a representative in the store that says how can I help you? And they guide them towards the right thing. That journey is still. All these different touch points that you can trace is what drove that person to become a customer for that. Now, there are some touch points that are just fundamentally very difficult to track, for example, that one that I just said. Fundamentally, it's not easy to track right. We don't know who these people are. We don't know what are those touch points, etc. But whenever we send people back onto our website, that's when technology allows us and enables us to start understanding and identifying who are these people.

Jim James: 7:25

Michael, I have to ask you about technology there. Do you want to show us and tell us how does funlitics work, and we can maybe touch on the impact of AI, if there is something in there as well? Once people have got a potential client onto their website or maybe onto their chat board or Facebook, why don't you take us through that journey? And this is fascinating For those people that want to. You can look at the YouTube channel where I'm filming this and we'll put this video there and you can watch do a demo, but Michael's also going to chat us through what is explaining on the screen, so don't worry, you won't be left out if you're just listening to this.

Mikael Dia: 8:05

No problem. So I'm sharing right here a very simple canvas and I'm zoomed out right now to kind of show all of these various touch points. So there's a touch point over here on the far left and that leads to one, two, three, four, five different pages. So, for example, this touch point here could be a Google ad. So I've got a Google ad and I'm sending traffic to five different landing pages. Now on my homepage, which is one of those five pages, there's different navigation, there's different buttons, there's different things that people can go to right. So there's five possible outcomes. In that way, one of those outcomes gets people to actually create an account for our business and from there, once they create an account, depending on what they answer when they create an account so some people say their agencies, some people say their businesses there's three possible landing pages once they create an account. So they'll go either as a business, as an agency, a small business, etc. Our goal is to drive as many people to a very specific destination. We know that if they get to that step, it means they've made a purchase or they filled out a form or whatever it is that we're trying to drive, whether it's them becoming a lead or becoming a customer. So what we're trying to understand is what path did people take in order to get to that end outcome, which pages did they visit, which touchpoints do they have, etc. So with Funnelytics, I can look at that, I can look at my data so I can basically turn on this cool little flow mode right here and, for those listening in through audio, basically we're just showing you exactly how are people moving through all of these different assets. You can kind of see very easily where most of your traffic is flowing from. Where there's very little traffic Oops, I zoomed in maybe a little too much there when there's very little traffic, like over here, for example, and it just gives us a very clear indication of what are the paths that our most profitable customers are taking in order to become that customer that we're trying to drive. And fundamentally, that is what Funnelytics allows you to do.

Jim James: 10:25

Okay, that's wonderful. And what the diagram has is some animation to it as well, so that it is showing up. Some lines are red, some are green, some are blue, some are yellow, and you can sort of see the flow. And it's wonderful. You can see how that initial on ramp, if you like, the Google ad leads through to another page, maybe a download or some kind of, then to an account. Okay, from a practical point of view, how difficult is it for someone to use Funnelytics? Because many of these tools sound brilliant, but for most entrepreneurs, the technology, the barrier to the adoption of this is something to hold them back.

Mikael Dia: 11:12

Yeah, and that's. That's a fair point. Fundamentally, any tool when it comes to data analytics is not simple. Right, we are trying to understand and make sense of numbers. The problem that we face with traditional tools is we're looking at spreadsheets, we're looking at rows and columns, we're looking at charts, graphs, and, fundamentally, it's hard for our brains to wrap around when it comes to, well, what does this mean in terms of how somebody is moving through these pages that I've designed, or these ads that I've set up, or these emails that I've written, and and you kind of try to connect a strategy with data. However, what we've done with Funnelytics is we've basically said let's take this data and let's put it on a drag and drop visual canvas. This canvas allows us to just literally connect anything we want in this visual diagram. So the reason I built Funnelytics and we started it is when I was running my agency. What we would do with all of our clients is we would take a whiteboard and we would show them the strategy that we are going to implement implement for them in order to convert these kind of strangers into customers, right? So Facebook ad will go over to this page and they're going to put in their name and email and then they're going to receive a series of 10 emails and they're going to go to a sales page and that sales page is going to send them and make them do a purchase. And we visualize that into a nice little diagram and People would then sit there and say, okay, I understand, I get what we're going to be doing, I get how it all fits together. Then the question came to well, how do you know it's working? What is working? Where are the drop-offs, what are the different things that we have to look at to try to tweak, to improve? And that's where we'd have to look at charts and graphs. What we really are trying to do is to simplify that entire process by overlaying your numbers on top of that same diagram, on top of that same picture. Most of us are visual, right? We're about I think 65% of the population is visual. So how do we still stay data-driven, so that we can make real decisions, but do so in a way that we can all kind of understand? That is what, fundamentally, finalx is trying to solve.

Jim James: 13:40

Wonderful. I can see that, and I can also see how this is then dynamic, whereas when you draw things up on wall charts it's not real-time right, and presumably FinalX is accessing your data in real-time, a bit like Tableau platform, where you can take mass data but and illustrate it into ways that are easy to understand and make decisions from as well. That's fantastic. I have to ask you, is it super expensive, Mikael?

Mikael Dia: 14:06

Is it something only MNCs can afford, or can smaller so, fundamentally, you have to be careful when it comes to data. Many, many businesses think that they need data right away. If you're just getting started, you don't need to look at this intricate amount of data. What you need to basically do is understand how much money did I spend and did I make any dollars back? Do those fundamental economics work right? Only once you start to see some traction is it now important to look at your flows, look at these customer journeys to basically say, okay, what can I tweak, what can I optimize, what can I improve in order to increase that return on ad spend or that return on my investment? Many people try to jump into analytics when they have 10 people coming to their website. Well, you can't make any decisions off of 10 people, right? So we really cater to businesses that have some traffic. That said, our entry point is $199 a month, so relatively accessible for anyone who is looking to optimize, and then we have plans that scale up to about $1,000 a month.

Jim James: 15:51

Yeah, great, and this is all on the website at finaleticsio as well, and we'll put that in the show notes. , that's fantastic and I really love the way that you've illustrated the customer journey and you're taking the real-time data from all of these potential touchpoints and helping us show where the final purchase takes place, because that's really, really valuable. You're an entrepreneur in your own right and this show. We love to find out from people how they've built their businesses. You had this amazing launch, you know, and to get $200,000 in 24 months, really for any product category, but for a $199 a month product, a SaaS product, that's a good number of early customers through the door. Tell us, have you done that?

Mikael Dia: 16:42

Yeah, yeah. So it was $208,000. We did it in 48 hours, after two months of launching our first initial version of our product, and the way that we did this was through a Facebook group. So when I first started Funneletics, I had no idea if people wanted this thing. You know, I really built it for myself and for my own agency. Now, one of the things that was very interesting is when I showed it to a friend of mine I'll give him all credit for this I showed him kind of the mapping tool, the ability to kind of map these touchpoints without overlaying any data, without looking at the data, just being able to have a canvas that allows you to map your pages, your traffic sources, et cetera, and just visually show it to somebody. And he looked at it and he said man, this mapping tool is very, very cool. You should. I understand that you're trying to build the analytics thing on top of it and all that stuff, but you should give away this mapping tool if the analytics is really the thing that you want to make money from. And at first I wasn't really thinking that. I was just thinking that I'm going to release everything all at once. But I was like, okay, fine, you know what we're going to do that. So I invested, over the course of two full months, $5,000 a month on Facebook ads, so $10,000 total. And what we did is I advertised this mapping tool and I started seeing that people were signing up very quickly. The cost to sign up was very low and as soon as people created their account as in, they put in their name and email and password and created their account to the mapping tool. On the thank you page I invited them to a community, to a group, and that was our Facebook group. So what we did is we basically said come and join this group to learn about digital marketing strategies, to learn about, you know, customer journeys, funnels, et cetera. So, as I posted and I pushed people into this group, we would post on a consistent basis and we would post all about five different types of posts throughout the process, but we would post almost every day, build engagement and show them little sneak peeks of what we were building within the platform right, the analytics, the idea, the concept, the vision of what Fondalytics was all about. After about two months of doing this. So we started in December 7th, we launched in February 7th, so two months to the day I had 6,000 people would signed up to the mapping tool. I had 3,000 people in my Facebook group and I decided to sell a founding members license to our analytics product. I had no idea whether or not it would work. I just created a bunch of different posts and a few sales videos and used kind of my marketing tricks and I expected to get maybe a hundred people to buy. Maybe in a month, two months I really had no idea. I basically made the post and I had 300 people by in 48 hours. We made 200, collected $200,000. And we were off to the races and, with that same strategy for the next 12 months, we did about 1.5 million and that was how we kind of got Fondalytics off the ground.

Jim James: 20:27

Wow, that is a case study. Thanks for sharing that. That's brilliant. So many things in there about pre-launch and building public and the sort of the teasing. Now, unfortunately, we don't have that much time with you, Mikael, because there's plainly a huge amount that we could learn from you, but has there been something that you've done that hasn't gone quite according to plan From a marketing point of view? Of course, I'm not trying to embarrass you, but a learning that you've got you could share with us.

Mikael Dia: 20:57

Oh man, many, many, many mistakes, many challenges. Building a business is not easy. I don't care what anybody says. If you feel like you're struggling and then you see somebody on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on Instagram saying how easy it is, or you hear me talk about this I can tell you that for all of the many successes that I've had, I've been punched in the face 10 times more. So it is not simple by any means. One of the biggest things that we made a mistake around was just trying to grow too quickly. Sometimes you have to realize that early traction does not mean scale. It means that there's something there. It doesn't mean that it's necessarily fine-tuned. And what we've realized with Finalytics was we had a nice concept of a product during that first year, during that launch, but then when we started to really look at whether people were using the product, how they were adopting it, et cetera, we started to realize that that was very low. But the problem is we kept spending money on our operations, we kept growing, we took all of that money that we made and we really started trying to grow and build up. And biggest lesson for me, there is really focus in on product market fit. Make sure that you get to a stage where you know precisely who is it that you're serving and what is your product or your service doing for them. One really cool way to think about this as a takeaway is are your customers giving you the exact same testimonial over and over and over again? Are they using the exact same words across each of them? If one person saying, oh man, jim's was great, the way he's helped me was amazing, and then another person saying the service was fantastic and very on time, and then another person saying they got me 30 leads in 50 days or whatever, all of a sudden you've got three very different perception of what your product or your service is. So you've got to get to a stage where you can say this is the exact same customer who's saying the exact same thing about the exact same outcome, and if we can get those ingredients correct, then we know we have a product market fit and our job is now to go find those customers and to advertise those testimonials so we can get more of those types of people. But we weren't doing that. We had all sorts of people coming in saying this mapping tool is really good. Oh, the analytics is really cool for presentation purposes. I wanna use this for reporting. I wanna use this for analysis oh, I'm trying to do this and show my clients this and it created this big distraction and this mess. We didn't know who we were going after, yet we kept investing in operations and we kept investing in growth, and it created chaos.

Jim James: 24:13

Well, I love that. I've never had anyone articulate in that way, , , the idea that every customer review should really be. The only thing differences is the name of the customer, exactly Not at the position on your proposition, and that's really insightful. Now, as a final question, which I'll be sorry to end our conversation, because I've got so much already from you which you've kindly shared, but is there one piece of advice that you'd give to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about how to get noticed? You've had Funalytics now for over five years. It's grown successfully. You've got a pair of shoes behind which I'd love you to just share, which you've got your name on them. Yeah, the one of one shoes here, Funalytics.

Mikael Dia: 25:03

He's got a pair of Nike's with Funalytics, customized Nike. This one, this one.

Jim James: 25:08

Air Force ones.

Mikael Dia: 25:10

Take action. And then this one here says this is my kind of little modern entrepreneur framework and this one is one of my sayings, which is get shit done. I have it right here on the wall. So you know, we like to take action here.

Jim James: 25:27

So so you got that, I believe, because someone has a lot of respect for you, and you gave a presentation actually about your Facebook strategy, which is great. So is there one piece of final advice, Dia, over there in Niagara on the lake, that you'd like to share with us on Notice Entrepreneurs?

Mikael Dia: 25:47

Yeah, there's so much happening in the world of digital marketing and just in digital in general. You've got influencers, you've got Instagram, you've got, basically, people trying to start their businesses. How do you get noticed? The biggest way to get noticed is to just keep giving value as for free. The more you can give value and the more you're focused in on who you are giving value to, the more you will start to get noticed. A very good example of that is how Alex Hermosi completely took off right. It's nobody knew who he was and then, all of a sudden, he became a sensation and it's because of how much value he's putting out into the market very authentic in terms of what he's trying to do and why he's giving out all this value. When it came to funnel it, I gave away a free mapping tool. It was something that most people would want to pay for and would be willing to pay for. Yet here we are and we gave this away for free, and then in my Facebook group, I just shared a lot of value to a very clear audience. It was maybe a bit broad at the very beginning, but that is fundamentally what will help you get noticed in this world right now.

Jim James: 27:09

Well, you've done that. You shared a huge amount with us just in 25 or so minutes. Mikkel, if we want to get hold of you and find out more about Funnelytics, how can they do that?

Mikael Dia: 27:19

Yeah, easiest is go to funnelyticsio and sign up to our mapping tool and start playing with it, start mapping your journeys. You can join one of our communities as well, and all the information is there.

Jim James: 27:34

Mikkel, thank you so much for joining us and sharing it. It's a great story and I personally love all the visuals and how you can help plan that customer journey. Thank you so much for joining us today my pleasure.

Mikael Dia: 27:45

Thanks for having me.

Jim James: 27:46

Well, it's been another illuminating and insightful chat with another entrepreneur who really deserves to get noticed for what he's done and also what he's helping us to do in terms of tracking our customer journeys. If you've enjoyed this show, do please review it. Then people like Mikael can see what they've done in terms of the value they're delivered and how much we appreciate that. So leave a review on your player, whichever one you're using, and also follow the show, because I want you to miss another great show about real marketing strategies from true life entrepreneurs like you and I who are building businesses one day at a time. So thank you for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, jim James, here in the UK, and until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.