This is an excerpt from a talk I gave at Trendigital on 1/29/2016 in Sioux Falls, SD.

1. Lead Gen at
A case study on inbound

2. Russ Heddleston
- Co-founder & CEO at
Previously:
- Product Manager at Facebook
- Co-founder and COO at Pursuit
- Also at Dropbox, Microsoft, and Trulia
- BS/MS in CS at Stanford
- MBA at Harvard

3. Product Overview
A little background on
• Started in 2013
• Based in San Francisco
• Went from zero to over 1,000
paying customers in 2015
Trusted by world-class teams

4. Product Overview
tracks and analyzes who views your docs
Completion
rate
Total time
Contact
info
Slide - by - slide snapshot
Time per page
Slide preview

5. …but how do we actually find new customers?

6. Finding customers
is hard…
But it’s not
impossible.

7. Product Overview
Things that didn’t work
Hiring a PR firm. We spent $30k and got nothing.
We spent thousands on online advertising.
Viral marketing that wasn’t relevant enough.
Click me

8. Product Overview
An example of what did work
Publishing a 19 page report on fundraising last June.
Click me

9. Product Overview
Why we did it
People love DocSend for fundraising, so we had data.
Target entrepreneurs and investment firms.
These accounts convert well, but are too small to
target with ads or by directly contacting.
When entrepreneurs use DocSend, they often later
have their sales teams use it as well.

10. Product Overview
What were the results
Over 1MM views in total
182 linking root domains to DocSend.com
12k shares on Facebook
Over 1k companies signed up for DocSend
We still get over 10 new companies each month

11. Product Overview
How we did it - the creation
It’s sensitive data, so we had to be careful how we
surveyed a subset of our users.
After getting opt-in, we crunched all the numbers in-
house.
We spent $4k on a design firm to make it look nice.

12. Product Overview
How we did it - the posting
We gave TechCrunch the exclusive.
After they posted, we hustled and emailed lots of
other reporters (this had a low hit rate).
We reposted on LinkedIn, found their community
manager, and got them to feature us (450k visits).
We posted on our own company blog.

13. Product Overview
What did we do well?
Spoke to a major pain point - fundraising.
We had never-before-seen data to contribute.
We legitimized our brand by co-authoring with Harvard.
We used social proof by including real pitch decks.
Our research was actionable.

18. Product Overview
What would we do differently?
Have a hypothesis you’re trying to prove:
• Don’t boil the ocean. We spent WAY too much time on analysis.
Do PR pre-outreach:
• Pre-pitch while developing it to identify what reporters are interested in.
Include more aggressive up-sell at the end:
• The first version didn’t have any call to action to sign up for DocSend.

19. Thanks for being here!
Russ Heddleston
Co-founder, CEO