[Raised $10.2 million] Ep.101 - The First 100 with Jiaqi Pan, the CEO and Co-founder of Landbot | Tapping into your Network | Product-led Growth Strategies | Product Hunt | "Powered by" Virality

My guest today is Jiaqi Pan, the CEO and Co-founder of Barcelona-based Landbot, a “no-code” chatbot builder, which has raised more than $10.2 million led by Swanlaab, alongside support from Spain’s innovation-focused public agency, CDTI. Previous investors Nauta Capital, Encomenda, and Bankinter also participated in the round.

According to recent public data, it has grown to ~3,500 paying customers, with some 70,000 individuals now using its tool (across both free and paid accounts). 

You can find
Landbot: https://landbot.io/
Jiaqi Pan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiaqipan/

If you like our podcast, please don't forget to subscribe and support us on your favorite podcast players. We also would appreciate your feedback and rating to reach more people.

We recently launched our new newsletter, Principles Friday, where I share one principle that can help you in your life or business, one thought-provoking question, and one call to action toward that principle.

Please subscribe Here.

It is Free and Short (2min).

Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Good to have you on the show, Jackie. How are you doing today? Thanks, man. It's great to be here. Amazing. Let me just start with a quick introduction for our listeners. My guest today is Jackie Pan, the CEO and co-founder of Barcelona based Landbot, which is an no-code chat bot builder. You've raised to date more than 10.2 million from companies like Swan Lab and Citi, T.I., pre-vive investors like Nota Capital and Bag Enter. Tell us. Jackie, how were you inspired to build Landbot and what was the first version like? Yeah, I think our origin was quite maybe unusual versus maybe other companies because when we first started we were actually a consumer oriented business. We were basically a copycat of a personal assistant model in the state that's called GetMagic. They essentially offer personal assistant to get people anything they want. And we replicate that model in Spain and our kind of original name was Yexer, like the combination of between yes and sir, Yexer. And we started operating with that model basically just offering like WhatsApp number to people and then people can just talk to us and then get anything they need. And we'll do anything as long as it's virtually possible, right, and as long as it's legal. With that, we started operating and getting a lot of press coverage. We started appearing in many top presses. And then probably we, in a very short time, started getting a lot of users testing out and tens of thousands of people just sending us messages. With that, we had to start introducing a lot of technology in our own kind of operations to help us to be more efficient, right? We have to handle a lot of chat every day. And that's what kind of helped us to build our initial kind of technology. And over time, we saw that our consumer business was not very scalable because in the end we were acting as an intermediary. And when people want to book a hotel or want to buy some of stuff online, we just go to Amazon or we go to booking and we book that for them, right? And we charge a small commission based on that. And that was like a very low margin. business and we had to employ a lot of people to do all the operational parts. So what we decided is like, Hey, what if we kind of, instead of us offering all that service to people, we offer our technology to other businesses, right. Helping them improving their customer engagement with our technology. And that's when we switched to become a B2B SaaS company. In fact, when we started with the SaaS model. We don't even know what SaaS means, right? We just were saying like we were selling software to businesses and over time, obviously, we started understanding more and more to how SaaS operates. And today what Lambo is, it's a no-code shadow builder. Essentially, we help businesses to automate their customer communication across the entire customer lifecycle, from kind of lead generation to book a meeting, to even like engaging and offering support to customers. whenever you need to have some sort of automated communication with customers, that's where we can help. And probably previous, pre-ChatGPT, that might be something people don't understand very well, but now with ChatGPT, we essentially are helping businesses to build a private version of ChatGPT for them. And that's what we do right now. Amazing. So why no code? Because there's a lot of people that you talk to and you say, yes, no code is a fad. It's a... trend doesn't build complex applications, but you opted to do no code. What's your thoughts on this type of statement? Yeah, I think in our case, it was quite natural right out the gate. One of our core value proposition was trying to simplify and reducing the barrier to a build a chatbot. When we first started, when we switched our business model from consumer to B2B we saw in the market that there was already some chatbot solutions, but most of them were very hard to set up and require a lot of technical expertise to set it up. And the experience that it offers to customers was not so good neither. Right. So our approach was, Hey, let's first make it very simple for businesses to set this type of experience up. And we also, at the same time, want to enable them building frictionless experiences. So their customers end up just being more engaged and more happy with the service that the business is providing. So that was kind of the two core value proposition. And why no-code? Well, in our case, it's because just we think there's a lot more non-technical people than technical people we have in the market. And therefore, if we are able to tailor our solution to the need of those non-technical users, it end up just making their life easier. a lot more people will be benefiting from our solution. And in fact, talking about the latest trend in no-code, which is kind of AI, some people might say AI coding or AI assisted development, where you can even further simplify the complexity of a technical solution to the way where just by saying what you need, right? The AI can build it for you and can set it up. We have already now... AI system that can build, that can design images, that can build entire website for you. And why not? AI can build a chatbot also for you. Right. So you guys have grown to 3,500 paying customers, 70,000 individuals using the tool, both free and paid accounts. What was your early strategy? What was your early acquisition strategy to get your first 100 paying customers? Take us back to that. Yeah, I think maybe here we might have to separate between tactics and strategies. So for me, tactics is something that you do maybe one or a few times, but it's not very repeatable, right? In strategies, what you use in a consistent way and what guides you how to grow. So one of the early tactics that we used, I think it was a unique advantage to us was that we started switching from the B2C to B2B. but we already have a lot of business customers as well in the consumer business. Like when we were doing personal assistants, there were already a lot of business people, like maybe the CEOs or the directors of some companies that were using our personal assistant service. And because they were having such a good experience, some of them naturally just came to us and were asking us, What are you doing to manage all the chats, right? And all the operations. So we already have like maybe 10, 15 initial leads of people that somehow offer it or show interest in our solution. And those were the first people we tried to engage with. Right? We tried to kind of tell them, Hey, you mentioned at some point that you were interested in our solution. This is what we are now kind of starting to offer this tool to help you or to help. businesses like you to engage with your customers. Would you be interested in trying out? So that was like a natural way to get some of the initial leads. And then another tactic we use quite a lot is just leveraging our own network. We kind of went through a startup accelerator program and a lot of the portfolio companies in the kind of a accelerator program kind of were potential target for us as well. We just naturally reach out to them and we were telling them, Hey, we are offering this solution. We have changed our business model and we are now offering this tool. Would you be interested? And that also gave us like maybe 10, 20 leads for us to start testing. There are a few of those tactics that we used and we got kind of a lot of initial, like maybe our first 30, 50 leads that were coming just from those sources. Then in terms of what is the kind of strategy to use to grow our customer base. We focus a lot on what we call product growth. So essentially, right out of the gate, we designed a very easy and simple product experience. And because of our bad, our kind of conviction in the no-code approach, we know that if we can make the product so easy that every people, when they sign up and they can start trying it out without talking to any salespeople, without having to do any sort of demo, they can already start using it, that will already naturally help us to get more users testing the solution. And we design also kind of viral loop into our product, which essentially is when people use R243, all the bots that they build with that will come with our brand. It's kind of like the powered by Lambo thing, and you can see in those chat widgets. That will give us a lot of exposure. to other kind of potential customers. And the more kind of people use our tool and the more end users saw it, it will give us just free kind of exposure and free visitors to our website to try the solution. And with that, I think we already started getting maybe 50 to 100 signups on a weekly basis, just because of the variety loop we have implemented in our product. That gives us quite a lot of initial pushing in grow the business. Then another tactic that we use to give a boost to all the growth was a product hand launch. So product hand is essentially a kind of a platform for early adopters and product and marketing people to discover new solutions that is being launched on a daily basis. A lot of very successful businesses, they used. kind of product hunt to jumpstart their business, like Notion, Airtable, I'm just mentioning a few Slack even, and even like big players like Apple, Google, they are launching product all the time and it will appear on product hunt as well. So one of the things we try is, we did in the beginning when we started is, we try to have a lot of exposure, international audience, right? Because when we first started, we were mostly based in Spain. and mold the customers that we have, all the people we know were in Spain. But we know that for a SaaS company, for a SaaS product, the US market and all the international audience is really critical for our growth. And the easiest way to get access to that is through product hunt, because there's a lot of early adopters naturally interested in trying out a new product. So we basically dedicated a lot of time time and resources to prepare a very well set up product campaign. We probably dedicated almost one month of preparation for our initial product launch. In fact, I remember the day before launching it, at 12 AM in the morning, we were still finishing up the final few sets for the launch. Word of advice, never do any launch that late, right? Because everything can go wrong. And in fact, it went very wrong, but in the end it went good. So basically, something weird happened in our product campaign. We were working with Hunter, which is the person that will kind of publish your product. They will share a few comments. At that time, our Hunter was Chris Messina. He was one of the huge influencer in PradaHand in many kind of digital product space. Right. And he has also a good follower audience. So when he launched something, a lot of his follower will also check it out. So we kind of talk with him and we agreed that he will launch the product. It's, you know, 9 a.m. Central European time, which is when the PradaHand algorithm will kick off the day. and start with the new day. The problem is like, I think he misunderstood the time, right? And instead of launching it in our time, he launched it at 9 AM, like San Francisco time, which was, I think, like 12 PM or 1 AM in the morning. What happens? While we were still finishing off the last few things in our product and our website was still not ready, we started getting people checking out our website. We suddenly getting like a dozens of traffic in our website. We started saying like, who is, who the fuck is visiting our website? It's so weird. Nobody should know this website because it's a private link, right? We realized that the product was already launched ahead of time. So kind of, it was so chaotic. On one hand, we have to kind of just coordinate with product, people. to kind of remove the product because we were not ready. And on the other side, we have to like very quickly finish the last thing and kind of deploy the website and make sure people can see something. Was like such a stressful situation. In the end, we finished kind of the website and we uploaded it. And also we were able to kind of hide our link until kind of the 9 a.m. in the day after. didn't realize is that by just doing that, we secretly were benefited by the algorithm because from the time it was launched to the time it was hidden by product hunting, we already get a few like a boat, like maybe 10, 20 upvotes. And the day after when they kind of released or published our product again, we started right away with like 20 upvotes. And that put us immediately on the first page of Prada Hunt, which gave us like tremendous exposure. Basically, in Prada Hunt, and it's similar to maybe Reddit or Hacker News, those type of platforms, like if you are on the front page of that website, you will get probably like 80% of the traffic and it will give you tremendous boost. And there will be then this kind of like a snowball effect. The longer you stay on the kind of first page, the more upvote you get, and the more upvote you get, the easier is it for you to just to stay there, right? Just simple as that. And in the end, we became kind of the number one product upvoted, the most hundred product of the day. Just by that action alone, we got probably like 10,000 signups that day, comparing it to maybe 50 signups every week, right? So... That exposure combined with our viral traffic is what got us to our kind of initial level of all the customers, right? Because we were talking about mainly maybe signups, but then from all the signups, a lot of them maybe just try out, but also many of them converted in the end to pay customers and then stay with the product and start using it more actively. And this was one of the, I think, huge kind of... secret we have when we first started. This is an amazing story because it combines both skill, hard work, and definitely a bit of luck to benefit from, as you said, the algorithm. Were there any things early on that were not scalable that you had to do just to prove product market fit or to get few of the paying customers into the door? I would say everything we did in the beginning was not scalable. Until the point where we like design our viral loop and we have our product like growth model implemented, right? Until that point, everything in the beginning was not scalable, like talking to previous customer in your previous model, right? That's something not people usually do, or trying to engage with, you know, the portfolio company in of your investors or the portfolio company of your That's something that you just have to hassle and you just have to do to get all the initial leads you can. And then after that, once you start to, you know, having more feedback and once you know, what is the value proposition you have, you start tailoring more to a specific set of audience, you start designing a lot, like a more scalable acquisition model after we started getting a lot of users and then. We invested a lot in, for example, content strategy, because we know that we cannot rely only on paid acquisition or some of the more expensive way of acquiring customers. We wanted to invest in content that then later on can build this type of organic traffic in helping us to get more people to try out our product. So there's a lot of things that we later on have to build on top of the initial... growth engine, but the initial step to reach to that level, I think a lot of them were mostly manual and very not scalable. Amazing. Tell us key lessons from challenges that you faced when you were launching Landbot. Challenges? Well, probably all the challenges you have in the world, right? But I think the number one is not understanding who is the customer. not understanding at the very deep level, like what is moving those customers? What are their true pain? Not the superficial stuff that everybody's saying like, hey, you know, maybe I need more leads or I need to kind of have a chatbot to automate chat. That's a very superficial level. We need to get to the underlying need. We call it the need behind the needs. So like if people comes to us and say, hey, I want to use the bots and generate a better customer experience. The first thing we ask them is, why do you want to generate that customer experience? What is right now not working for you? And then they might be telling us, hey, because I'm using phone, I'm calling my customers, but they're not taking the phone and this is wasting my sales team time and that's very inefficient. Okay, why are you calling them? why don't you email them or email people? It doesn't work neither, right? And we try this dozen of other ways. And because our sales approach require people to fill out with their phone numbers, we naturally want to call them. So you start getting so much more insight on the operational process on how they are doing their work today. And you start unpacking, where are those frictions? With that gives you a lot of insight on how can you really help. For example, one of the new use case we are building, not something back then, but something new, but I think it's also very relevant to illustrate example is we are now realizing a lot of businesses, they're doing poor customer discovery. Basically in the sales process, when they have prospect coming to them and wanting to have a sales meeting in those sales meetings, the sales reps, instead of understanding what the customer needs. they right away start in pitching mode, right away start selling their solution. And this turns off the leads and turns off the prospects so much that they will lose their interests altogether. So a better way should be try to first understand what is really motivating the leads coming to you in the first place. What is driving the urgency for them to talk to you and for them needing to use your product. And then only when you understand those points, you can try to sell your solution, but in very tailored to their pains. If you sell your solution without understanding their pains, then basically you will lose those leads. After that call, they might in the call even say, hey, that's cool. That's interesting. But after the call, they'll never answer back your email, never answer back any of the communications because you lost them. You didn't get their true priorities. And that's so critical. for businesses to do right in the first place. And this is something we are now trying to, for example, automate with an AI system where we gave the AI a clear instruction of how should they navigate those type of situations when customer coming to us, they have the AI need to kind of acting as like a doctor or as a psychologist, right? To understand what is the true underlying need of the prospect. And then getting all the insights so later on a sales rep can then, you know, prepare a proper demo or proper sales meeting with the lead. In fact, if after this conversation, the sales rep see that what is the problem that the customer has, you cannot solve it. It's not a conversation worth your time because you will not able to really convince them if their problem is something you cannot solve. And most of the time it's much easier to tell the customer, Hey, we don't feel like we can help you because your problem is something we are not able to solve. And then just tell them, maybe go to other solutions that may better fit their needs, then trying to kind of just voice your solution and fit into whatever you think the customer needs. Amazing. Thank you for sharing all this advice. What's the principle that you live by that has served you well in your journey? Think always first from the customer perspective. does the other person kind of think? Would that person value, try to understand, truly understand that, and then later on act on it. That's a great principle, Giacchi. Thank you for sharing this. One last question, what's next for Landbot? Well, we have a lot of exciting projects. I already share kind of the AI discovery solution. But we truly believe that the AI technology right now so much of the landscape of how business can interact with customers. There's so many different use cases that people can now apply it. We are kind of dogfooding ourselves, just trying to test different ways to use AI in our own process and see first, where does AI make sense, but also where does it doesn't make sense. For example, one of the experiments we recently launched was just doing an A-B test with an bot versus what we call like a rule-based bot. There is less kind of AI capability, and it's just clicking a few buttons and going through flow in a very linear way. But in the end, we realized that the conversion rate with the rule-based bot to acquire a new lead is like maybe 50% higher than the AI-powered bot in terms of getting people to share. some of the contact information, like some of the basic information with you. So that already a sign of like not everything should be powered by AI. We have to be strategic about where we think AI can provide value and where maybe there is simple solutions and there are more effective solutions and we have to kind of just combine both. And this is where I'm very excited about because we are building a lot of expertise about these type of situations How can we provide them that level of knowledge and that know-how to our own customers and helping them in their journey? Thank you very much, Jackie, for sharing your story. It's been amazing. Where can people reach you? Well, I'm lately quite active on LinkedIn. So if anyone wants to just reach out to me, they can try to search Jackie, right? J-I-A-Q-I, Jackie on LinkedIn. I'm probably one of the first few people appearing. and then just kind of follow me and connect with me. Thank you very much. And we wish you the best of luck, Lantport. We'll put all of this in the show notes. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or Spotify and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.