EP. 50- FOUNDER of Chili Piper! Startup to Billion Dollar Valuation Journey with Alina Vandenberghe l Expert Quick Tips

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Welcome to do this not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

All right. I am truly excited for this episode of do this, not that.

We have a super special guest here, so before I turn it over to her to let her say hello, I want to tell you who we got. We have Alina Vandenberg here, who is the co. CEO, co founder of Chili Piper.

Now, if you don't know Chili Piper, I don't know what rock you're living under. I recently became a customer. Chili Piper. No, this is not a commercial for that. And I really, I mean, I genuinely love this thing.

It allows you to book meetings. It allows you to increase your inbound conversions. It's awesome. And the amazing thing about Alina is that Chili Piper is a unicorn.

It's like overvalued over a billion dollars. So founding a business like this gives you a ton of experience. The ride that she has been on has been just incredible.

So I'm so excited for me to learn from her, from you all, to hear from her. So, Alina, welcome to do this. Not that day.

The privilege is all mine. So excited to talk to you today.

So before we get into, like, your world, did I nail it with a good description of what Chili Piper does or there's gotta be a better way to describe your business.

Book more meetings, get more pipeline, inbound. They're all good descriptors. We started by optimizing for the B2B buying experience. And meetings are the lifeblood of it.

Routing is the lifeblood of it. Inbound is the lifeblood of it. So there are a lot of products that touch the customer experience to optimize it and that the good descriptor of it.

So I think for a lot of people are listening, especially for me, your. Your journey is inspiring. Right. It just is what you've been able to accomplish.

And I would say the vast majority of people, regardless of what they're doing for a living, they have a dream in their mind about a business that they want to start, that they would always wanted to start it. Or maybe they're trying to figure out when's the right time to start it.

What do you say to people that want to be an entrepreneur, that want to Start a business. Thinking about start a business. What is the one thing that they should do? How do they just get going?

What is that piece of advice that you could give them?

This is my first company, so take that with a grain of salt. I've not done it a hundred times to know whether it's a step that works for everybody. Plus, most people would not enjoy entrepreneurship life.

It's too chaotic, too intense to embrace it fully.

But for those that feel it deeply that they want to get started, the best test for it is whether you have customers that are willing to put a lot of money before you even have a product. And that's how we got off the ground. At the beginning of the first two years, I didn't pay myself a salary, so I didn't have that luxury.

So I wanted to get cash up front.

And the way I would do it is I would take my notebook, piece of paper with a pen, and I would go to events and ask people if they would buy whatever I would do, though, on a piece of paper and whether they would pay a 30k for it, 40k for it. And if they would say yes, sign me up, then that's how we started. I got 10 yeses for 30k. I started building.

That's amazing. Like, how many people did you have to ask, like, ballpark, before you got to the 10? Did you have to ask, like, a hundred, a thousand?

Or you just asked 10 and you went 10 for 10?

So I asked one. One gave me a lot of feedback that I knew what was the second one. So I didn't ask that many. I asked about 20 maximum.

But the first few gave me a lot more insights into how my doodles can transform into a product that sells.

I think the super valuable thing to come out of that is that you didn't go ahead and build a rocket ship and then go and say, do you want to spend money with this rocket ship I just built? You took the idea and you shop the idea.

And when you had people that, yeah, I would pay money for that, then you went ahead and you kind of built the rocket ship. Is that. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Yeah, my first product was super shitty. My first version of it, actually, I designed it by myself, which was a bad idea.

And not only that, there are some parts in our product that are still those early designs that I did, and I feel very ashamed. I don't know if you got to them yet.

Well, it works. Yeah. Let's shift something for a minute.

I saw something I read an article post that you did about a year ago, basically you decided to name yourself cmo, right? Chief Marketing Officer. And how did that come to be? And are you like this incredible marketer and said, no, I can do better.

Like, how did you arrive at becoming your own Chief Marketing Officer?

So I actually knew nothing about marketing when I started Chilly Piper. And so I worked prior to that in leading engineering teams and product management.

That was my expertise and that's something that I knew to do very well. I looked because I was selling to marketers, I felt that I was starting to understand very well marketing it.

I was in every possible marketing community speaking to marketers all day long. But I felt something was not quite right. I could sense their pain. I could see what pains they have.

I could go to their offices and kind of see what they're going through. However, I wasn't quite in tune with it as much as I am right now.

After doing it for 12 months, I've started to get a whole layer of appreciation and understanding of what it's truly like to be a marketer.

What it, what does it truly mean to have to wear so many hats to try to convince so many people of so many things on a topic that everybody has an opinion on and having the both the guts to try things that nobody else has tried before every single month. Because every single month the buyer have changed, they change their habits, they change what they pay attention to.

And in addition, now that we also have some competitors, understanding how to market yourself in a space where a lot of people say that they do similar things has become something that I'm. I feel very excited that I got to experience. And as a result, I'm going to get back to being a better builder as well.

I love that you come at it with a fresh angle because sometimes for those of us who've been marketing a long time, you're setting your ways a little bit. You're like, no, that won't work. There's no way that's going to work. But you come at it like, I don't know, I'm going to try it.

If it works, cool, let's double down. I have no idea if it's going to work, which is. It's almost like, I wish I had a fresh perspective like that.

So now that you're like, in this laboratory, you've tested all this stuff, what do you got? What works? What did you figure out? Tell us what we got to be doing. What is the thing that you figured this is actually how you drive performance?

All right, So I spent 12 months trying and working in every possible channel, both as a manager and as an individual contributor. So I spoke at events, I had a booth at events, we did a lot of dinners, a lot of field work.

We also put out a lot of content because we build out in public. Lots of social work as well. We have a podcast that we put a lot of thought into.

What does customer marketing exactly mean?

So the term is a little bit defined differently in every company that I've seen. Usually it's labeled as life cycle marketing and people throw usually random things in there.

Overall, the way I look at it is customer happiness is everybody's job in business. If customers are not happy, you don't really have a business and as a result, you don't really have a job.

And marketers have this unique lens into knowing what the full experience might look like at every possible touch point.

And they can make sure to make all these touch points a little bit more delightful and a little bit more seamless so that customers and prospects have that VIP experience throughout the process. And then they become your advocates and, and there's no better advocate than your customer. Like, I cannot talk about sleep Piper, as well as you can.

There's no better advocate, there's no better marketer than a customer who's happy.

So you have a lot of customers, right? And not everybody has a lot of customers.

Let's say you only have some customers, but you find, you identify those customers that are like, yeah, they're really happy, they're really enjoying the product. This for anybody listening to that, you have some happy customers, hopefully, and then, then gotta go back to the drawing board. So what do you do?

Do you reach out to them or you say to your salespeople, hey, everybody tell me that you're 10 customers that you think are the happiest people and we're gonna hit them up to include them in all of our marketing and put them on the website.

Like, other than them just going around town talking about how great you are on their own, how do you actually go to market with like testimonials or social proofing or what do you do?

So I don't believe that it's a one off thing where you go into the revenue channel and ask about happy customers. It has to be weaved in, into the full employee onboarding and as part of the values that are part of the company as well.

So in our case, we have the main value at Chili Piper that of help. And we always seek of ways to helping prospects or customers, even though it might be outside of our job description.

So let's say that you're talking to a prospect and the prospect is clearly not a buyer of Chili Piper. You might make sure that they find a solution to their problem somewhere else.

Or if they're a customer and Chili Piper is just one piece of their funnel, that they're struggling and you might see opportunities to optimize their, their processes and it's not part of the customer success job description. We will do it. Or if we observe that somebody has a shitty day, which we send some warm soup. So it's not reactive.

It is weaved into every single touch point.

Wow. So if I don't, if I'm not having a bad day, will you still send me soup? Is that a part? What if I just lie to you?

Basically, I want soup at the end of this podcast.

I think, I think that you need some soup.

Gotta work on me getting soup. But wait, but I don't know. So do you have like the greatest HR department of all time?

Because how do you find all these amazing people to work for you that are able to be like, listen, I know you may not buy our product, but I'm going to send you a teddy bear because you look like you need a hug and you just have like the most amazing people that you're able to hire. Like, how do you pull that off? That's hard.

It's actually a media hire. We hire people that have that desire to help be on their job description. So. So it's not the HR team that screenspred is everybody?

Because we know that that's what the works at Chili Piper. And when we bring in people, we know that that's what's successful.

I have to tell you now, being exposed to the Chili Piper, I call it a community. It's not like, you know, I have other vendors that are SaaS companies and I don't, I don't, I wouldn't call them a community. I just wouldn't.

You know, it's not. I almost feel like the employees of Chili Piper, the customers, the user Chili Piper, they're like a community.

And I guess that stems from what you're saying right out of the gate.

And I think this is really important for marketers or business owners in general, is there's a vibe, there's a culture that you create that will really drive your business, that it's even hard to just put a label on. I mean, is that like ingrained literally in your everyday? Is this kind of like being this vibe?

Oh, I'm so happy to hear that that's what you're feeling.

The reality is that whenever you put good things out into the world, people put them back and they're aware of them and then they get inspired to do similar things.

And as a result, our customers, when they feel that they're being helped, they might help another customer, they might help another prospect, and then they see that something good comes out of it as well from there. And because whenever you're giving and giving and giving, eventually it comes back, even though on the spot it might not appear that that's the case.

Well, I love that. And I'm curious about something which is totally off topic. So anybody listening to this, you're like, okay, she's really successful.

She found this company, there's a lot going on, she's putting out all this content. I'm curious, how do you have time? Like, I'll go on LinkedIn and you'll be like the first thing that pops up on my LinkedIn.

Like, I'm like, how does she have time to do all this? Do you like, not sleep? Literally? What is your day? Do you wake up at 4 in the morning and do 7 billion things?

I'm just curious how you function actually.

Don't wake up early. I wake up whenever my kids wake me up and I get them prepared for school.

I don't start my work day before 9, so I'm not wake up at 4am and hustle type of person. And I do prioritize rest because otherwise I'm no good for anybody on the content front.

The reason why you see a lot of it is because I formed a muscle around posting consistently and it actually takes me very little time creating a post. It takes me less than three minutes. I spend about 15 minutes engaging a lot on LinkedIn because I learn and I enjoy it.

So all in all, I spend about 20 minutes a day on content. But because I've kept going at it and kept going at it, I can produce more in the same amount of time. At the beginning. No, at the beginning.

If I were to locate 20 minutes just to create content in a week, maybe I would have a one post a week. Maybe because it was hard.

Well, I have to tell you, I think that this all may be the most inspiring thing to know that you don't have to get up at 4 in the morning. Right. You don't need to do all that. You could actually prioritize, rest and still do all these amazing things. So everybody's listening.

It's persistent.

Exactly. Just go take a nap right now and then when you wake up, you'll have a great company. That's basically what.

Oh my gosh. I wish, I wish.

It's just that easy. So let me. Okay, I want to transition to the.

We have the segment in this podcast called since you didn't ask, which is stuff that has nothing to do with work. Chaos, whatever, just chaos. I want to ask you a random question. I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that you paint. Is that accurate?

I used to paint when I was a child, not anymore.

So what would be like, like you have like a go to. Dude, I feel like you're probably the world's greatest doodler. You had a notebook used to paint.

You like go in your notebook and be like, I know how to doodle like comics. Are you not. Is that not right that you're not the world's greatest doodler?

Because I feel like if you have an art, you're artistic from like a young age, then you are like, you're like that guy. You could make paintings, whatever you want.

It's a good question. So I love. I'm a very visual person.

So everything gets very strongly depicted in my head of how it would look like the product, how it looks like, the customer experience, what it looks like.

And actually that was a big driver for me to succeed in product and it made it easy for me to be a product manager and work in health, tech and fintech and all these industries and adapt really fast. Even though the industry was very different. But it was a big push down for me in terms of writing.

I had a super hard time with writing and with communication, like verbal communication, I would be the quietest out of everybody. So oral communication and written communication has been a struggle and a challenge for me.

That's why I'm really happy that you're observing that I'm putting out a lot of content because it's something that I struggled with for the longest time.

Wow. It. You know, it's funny because I think from an outsider perspective, I would say she's. She's like a content machine and she's really good at it.

I love the content. You know what I mean?

And then I think that's also important for people to hear because I think that we all, before we hit post on a piece of content or a blog or whatever. We're all like, is this any good or is this like a hot piece of garbage? Right? And to know that you kind of have that insane.

I'm not saying you, you have imposter syndrome, right? You shouldn't, you probably don't. But as it relates to publishing content that you also are like, you have that. I, is it going to be received?

Well, I think that's really important for people to hear because we all feel like, so do you feel that way? Like you're never 100% sure? Like this is the greatest thing I've ever put out there.

At the beginning I used to feel that a lot. I was just looking through my older content. There was a tick tock that I made. It's like how do people click publish?

How do you know the content is good enough? And I was struggling with that. I'm noticing that right now that's not something that I think about anymore.

I just click because it's like, you know, when you go to the gym and you finally create like a good habit around it, you no longer have the, you don't have to think about it. So as a result I no longer have to think about the publish button.

And I found that, that removing that stress makes me more productive as well just by sheer practice and practice and practice and practice and persistence around it.

Well, I, I, I totally agree with you. I, I believe that consistency is the secret to success. And it's like what you're saying with your social just keep going, right? Is that you agree?

I mean, is that what you feel like just putting, you've got to keep going, don't stop.

And I do do have a cheat on the content and that whatever ideas that I have, I put them in my, I have my notes that I put all my ideas on topics and, and then because I go to so many events, I chat about my ideas with people and I get real feedback and then I talk to another person on my idea and then I get real time feedback and by the end of it I have a really strong grasp of how people perceive that piece of content in person and then I publish it.

Well, I will tell you what I'm going to take away from this podcast is the amount of feedback that you have used in your career to drive your business and your career and your content.

Like you're constantly seem like you're seeking input from people and interaction through with people and that is really how you're driving your business and your content. And I love that. And frankly I for that because can't learn anything while you're talking and I need to realize that.

I feel like that's your vibe like interacting with.

I've never thought about it this way but there's a lot of feedback seeking. Yes. In the process for the written words, for the product, for the process. Yes. There's always something that.

There's always something new that I learn and that's the reason why I seek conversations a lot, whether it's in a community, whether it's in a podcast. Because the discussion with you I feel super privileged to have because you have such unique insights into things that I might not have.

And to me it's not the one way discussion where you're asking me a question. I feel like I'm learning a lot from every conversation I have.

Well, I love this all. You've been terrific. I can't thank you enough for being here. Where should everybody Find you? Is LinkedIn the place?

Where should everybody go and follow you?

Right now LinkedIn is my go to. I haven't found a better social network. If you find a better one, tell me its beginnings X has lost their mind.

Yes, Instagram is nice for pictures, but that's about it.

No, LinkedIn is the happy place. Everybody's mostly positive there. It's a truly great place. So follow Alina there. We'll put the link in our show notes and everything.

And she posts amazing content. And check out Chili Piper. I'm a huge fan. And Alina, thank you so much for being here.

That was amazing too. Thank you for being so kind.

You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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