xtensio is a classic story of how a service-based company turned a problem into a product.
The company was working with startups and needed better ways to support buyer personas and other marketing activities
It launched a few templates that resonated and then realized that there was more than enough demand to pivot the business.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, xtensio CEO Alper Cakir talks about the journey and how it has leveraged content marketing to drive brand awareness and inbound traffic.
It is interesting that xtensio doesn't have a marketing department. Instead, it relies on Cakir and in-house employees to create most of the content.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. For the past year, I've mostly interviewed marketers about b to b SaaS marketing. They've offered amazing insight, and I've learned a ton along the way. But going forward, I'm gonna shift the focus of the podcast. While marketing will still be part of the mix, a big part of the mix, I'm looking to interview b to b SaaS executives and entrepreneurs about their journeys. And today, I'm talking to Alper Chukar, the CEO of Exensio. Welcome to the podcast.
Alper Chukar: Thank you for having me, Mark.
Mark Evans: Let's start with Xtencio's origin story. How did the company start? What was the inspiration for it?
Alper Chukar: So, actually, like, your audience and and past experience with this podcast is in line with our past as well. We were originally an agency. We were not particularly a marketing agency. We were more of a UX and UI agency. But we were working with a lot of companies who were trying to go to market. So, like, they need to understand really all the all the details of their own business so that they could get get the most impact out of the gate. So working with these companies, you know, like, we were in service business for a couple of years, we realized that we were actually starting really with all the the marketing basics. Like, what was the ideal persona for you guys? Who is, you know, like, how how do you define your value proposition? What is your brand positioning? For those, we were doing all these exercises. And then at some point, we said, you know what, like, let's build something that that helps us do these things for our clients. And that was basically the MVP for us. And then the the initial product was a couple of templates, a user persona, a landing page, a pitch deck, and I think it was a lean canvas. So those were the initial templates or documents or projects we put in on Extensio. And when there was an interest so, like, first, we were basically trying to solve our problem, helping these clients, which became the MVP for the product. When we saw the interest, we started putting more and more effort into Extensio, and eventually, Extensio took over and that became our main focus.
Mark Evans: Before we go forward, one thing I was remiss in the introduction was telling people exactly what Extensio does. So maybe you can do that for me.
Alper Chukar: Extensio is a collaboration platform for business communications and strategy. So we help companies make better cases internally or externally through collateral. So it's essentially a document builder with a built in template base that enables marketers, salespeople, entrepreneurs, operations, HR, you name it. Like, we're very for example, at this point, we're basically a platform where people create better business content.
Mark Evans: You start off as a service company. You feel this pain or this need or a problem you need to solve, so you start developing these templates. How did you start to attract your first customers and users? Was it clients of yours? Did you was it word-of-mouth? How did those first customers come on board?
Alper Chukar: So the first iteration, right, we we first realized that there was interest around one particular template first, and it was the user persona. This was like, now it's a more, like, more common, but, you know, when we started, like, five, six years ago, it wasn't. So and people were trying to really understand what the user persona is, how they should use it, how should they they go about it. So the initial initial version that we did was just a PDF. It wasn't even a product. It was some some PDF we put on Behance in our own website, and then we put together a how to guide along with it on our website. And then we started seeing that there's interest in this. And so then when we first launched the product, which was about five years ago, it it didn't do, you know, even a fraction of what it does now. But it was just a page builder, and we clearly saw from the from the beginning that we needed to give it a purpose. So just having a, you know, page builder for documents was not good enough at that point for people. So the templates that we already built for in PDF for a user persona became the first template we also built on Extensio, and that match started driving people. So the initial one, we had our own clients and customers that wanted to use it. So, like, that was good interest. Then any anybody who we we put basically a link on the same Behance post on our website saying, hey. Now there's an interactive version of this. Go try it. And we started seeing adoption through there. And then when we in the launch, we went to the usual places like Product Hunt, etcetera. And, like, we were also seeing people just posting in places like Reddit, Reddit, etcetera, and then we were getting also traffic from those resources as well. So it was all inbound pretty much. So, like, we created something that people needed, and and we put it in a couple of places and hoped for the best, and it works.
Mark Evans: Yeah. A lot of companies evolve from services to products, and they launch something. They put it out there, and it it's a hit or it's a miss. And I'm curious about when you knew. What was that moment when you knew that Extensio, this product that you had launched, had evolved from a concept or something that was interesting to a going concern to the point where you knew this was a business? This knew that you knew that you're gonna shift the focus of Extensio from services to product. Was there a moment in time? Was it did something happen that made you realize, okay. This is a business now, and we're gonna this is how we're gonna move forward.
Alper Chukar: We were lucky to have the agency running because when you're doing that and have a side project, there's less risk. So we didn't have investors. To this day, we're still bootstrapped. So, like, we were able to build that product to a point where it was really valuable for people. And when we saw that it got sticky for some people, and now looking back, we've seen that those are the people well, these people need to create something that looks professional. They need to create something that is impactful. They need to create something on brand, and they're not able to do it. So we realized that our competition was not other tools. So, like, these were not people, like, who wouldn't go do it on Photoshop or Illustrator. These were the people who would hire designers. So our competition was mostly actually other design outlets. Mhmm. So we when we realized that, you know, like, then building the additional templates to help that group of people helped us bring more people in. And then, like, we we started building a lot of analytics around the product where we we see that usage. At the moment, one I mean, when we launched on product hunt, it was the most popular second to most popular for that date. So that was, you know, there was something there. But, again, like, it's just a lot of the times data shows you something, but it doesn't reveal the whole story. So you like, if it's data is really good for growing something, but it's not great for innovating something. So, like, you take the data and you're inspired by it. So, like, we said, you know what? Actually, what we built can be utilized for these things as well. So we started building all these additional features and addition. And and also, like, you know, the moment you start putting something out there, you start getting feedback or lack of feedback, which are, you
Mark Evans: know Right.
Alper Chukar: Both good in terms of steering, you know, your your vision. And it's it's a it's a journey. So, like, we started seeing the interest once we saw traffic coming from Reddit, when we start seeing traffic coming from Product Hunt, when we start seeing more people, you know, instead of using the PDF version using this when we started seeing them coming back for doing other stuff. And when we started seeing feedback they were getting saying, oh, you know what? It would be great if we could do this as well on your product. Like, that was the moments or that was the phase where we said, you know what? We should put more effort into this. And having the agency helped us have a smoother, safer transition.
Mark Evans: Here's a softball question or perhaps a loaded question or perhaps a really tough question to answer. When you look back over the last five to six years, the journey that Extensio has been on, what do you think the keys are to its And I ask that because many, many start fail because there's no need for the product. So when you look back at your own journey, is it because it was the right product at the right time? Is it because of the insight that you gained along the way? Was it because you were creating something new and different? Like, what are some of the key elements that you can attribute to the success that you've had?
Alper Chukar: A lot of the times, companies are looking for that silver bullet. And sometimes, some of them are really lucky. They get that silver bullet early on. For us, it was really the whole everything you just mentioned. And on top of that, you know, the encapsulating concept, I think, is persistent. So, like, we were seeing things that worked, seeing things that didn't work. So we were constantly evolving to this day. Like, you know, we're still agile. So every two weeks, you know, like, there's a new push and, like, there's a future that's being improved, a positioning that's being changed, a new piece of content that's being launched. You're a small team, but, like, we are constantly trying to improve things. So being persistent about evolving has been helpful for us. And and that evolution is driven by couple of things. One, the users. Right? So, like, the they they they tell us a lot now, again, with their data, with their feedback, or with with with lack of their data and feedback. So we use that to determine how we should steer this ship. And also, you know, like, we are artist at heart as well. So we also try to look at, you know, the world out there and say, like, you know what? Like, we can do better or we can do this in a different way. So we like, I mean, it wasn't the shortest path that we took. It was really a wind the roads. But the again, the the journey I think one of the things that helped us was not raising funds from from, you know, a VC. Because, like, then, you know, the then we would have less time. Then we would be making promises that would be hard to keep. Mhmm. So, like, we were able to control our destiny a little bit better and and be able to be more flexible throughout this time because we are bootstrapped.
Mark Evans: So you launched something that people like using. It's a product that is sticky. You're seeing inbound demand for it. It's obvious that this is a business that you could move forward with. When did you realize that marketing needed to be part of the mix, and what were the first moves that you made from a marketing perspective? Like, what were the first strategic or tactical decisions that you made to actually get marketing to be part of the DNA of the company?
Alper Chukar: From the beginning. But from the beginning, yeah. Like, it's it's it wasn't in in a very conventional marketing. It was more about, you know, like, this was the time where inbound was becoming more popular, and, you know, everybody started hating banners and, you know, inbound emails and all that stuff more and more, obviously. And, personally, that wasn't in line with who I am. Like, I really wanted to provide something that is valuable, still market it in the right places or put it in front of the right people, and then then, you know, hope that they will use it and then that's gonna turn into an Avalanche. Right? So, like, when so when we first launched, one content was from the get go a big piece of Extensions journey. Like, I mean, we launched it with pretty much with no no templates and nothing happened the first couple of weeks. Then when we started releasing those templates, that was the time where we started seeing interest because, like, now all of a sudden, it's it ties into a more specific need. You know, like, I'm trying to do better marketing or I'm trying to launch this product. I'm trying to, yeah, raise funds for my startup. All those things, they had all those groups had a better need for a product like Extensio. And also from the beginning, we also build some reference referral loops into the product as well. So, like, you would sign up and then you would invite people and they would like, I at that point, about 25% of our own users were coming through other users' referrals. So, like, that all that thing and and again, like, we we for the first year, it it we were not making any money from this or maybe, like, more for the first year and a half. It was more about here's a product, use it, give us feedback, build evolve it, build improve it. And that usage eventually was like, okay. Now, like, we can start monetizing this thing.
Mark Evans: One of the interesting things when it comes to entrepreneurs and marketing is many of them start with product. It's all about the product. They're building a better mousetrap because they have identified a problem or they just see an opportunity. Next is sales. The entrepreneur becomes the head of product, but they also become the head of sales. And eventually, they look towards marketing as being a growth catalyst. In some cases, it's almost a nest a sort of a necessary evil as opposed to something they wanna do. But it sounds like Extensio really embraced saw marketing as a key part of how the company moved forward. Now not not have been traditional marketing. I mean, you're doing some content marketing, but also some user marketing. Did you think about marketing as something as a siloed activity, or is it was it just something that came naturally or something that was just part of growing the community and growing growing the business over time?
Alper Chukar: Mhmm. So we were again, like, the agency being consultancy for startups mostly at that point. We had a really clear understanding everything you just mentioned. Like, we we were also already telling all these clients, look. It's not about the product. It's not about sales. We need to build something that is useful for people. We need to build at a time where they know that they need it, or we will need to educate them. It's gonna be tough, you know. Like, they you know, how do we differentiate you? All those things were built into our DNA even if we're just doing UX or UI, or maybe, like, just an onboarding screen or something for for an app. It was all about, like, are we answering the the right questions for the users? And we always believed in this concept. Every startup or every business stands on three feeds. So there's a problem, there's a group that has that problem, and there's a storytelling that makes these two connect together. Mhmm. So if one of these are lacking, so, like which may be, like, you know, like, the the problem is not valid or there's nobody with that problem or, like, you're not doing a good job telling that story so that the pro the person with the problem is not interested or not aware of your your solution. From the beginning, this was built into our DNA. We we we knew that, you know, we have to build something that targets the problem and then makes a story that will be valuable for the person who has that problem. And in our case, that was the start up who was trying to build a brand. That was the company who was trying to streamline communications internally. That was the VC firm that was trying to source better startups. Whatever it is. Like, they're the and and then you're a lot of the products are way easier to explain. We do this on your warehouse and their data becomes like this. It's great. So, like, it's easier to market as well. One of the ambitions of Extensia is it's very horizontal. Like so, like, you can use it for a lot of things.
Mark Evans: Mhmm.
Alper Chukar: So, like, for that reason, our marketing is very bucketed. So, like, when we talk to an agency, we say certain things because the value we bring for them is very different than the value we bring for, let's say, for a start up. One is maybe for about working better with clients and building their brand. Maybe the other one is, like, about going to market or raising funds. So, like, it's but the the the the core is, you know, like, all these groups, you look at the personas again and say, like, okay. This this group is getting this value. And a lot of the times, we this was also a lesson that we learned along the way. It's not about fixing your problems. It's really about finding your strengths and doubling down on them more than anything else. So in our case, like, we are not trying to be an alternative to PowerPoint. Like, they have a lot of powerful or Prezi or, you know, any anything out there. They have a lot of powerful features. We're not gonna be building building all those. Because if we do, then we would be hurting ourselves. Instead, what are the areas that we are more successful in? Like, making it simple, you know, providing a starting point for these people. Making it so simple that, you know, there's pretty much no learning curve. You can just go in there, get what you need in in in couple of minute.
Mark Evans: Quick question. Does Extensio have marketing people on board?
Alper Chukar: No. Nobody take it. So, like, we have customer success and product and myself. And then we work with well, when we realized that, you know, this inbound is gonna be the main course of action for our marketing, obviously, we started putting more effort into, you know, making sure that Google likes us through SEO. So, like, we are we when we hire, let's say, a web person, we make sure that they they're not only good with code, but they understand all the basics of SEO. And throughout time, like, I got better at, you know, content and and SEO and, like, making the research keywords and all that stuff. But, no, there is no at this point, there is nobody who's solely responsible about marketing.
Mark Evans: So what kind of marketing does Extensio do, and and who does it? Is it all internal? Do you use freelancers and and contractors?
Alper Chukar: So the content gets created by us. And, you know, like, we use the insurance. We use seasonal contractors where we say, okay. Now, like, we're building additional content. To right now, Extensia is about a bit over 50 instructional templates and about a 100 editable examples. So that's and for all of these, we have landing pages and how to guides as well. So all that content, you know, brings up a couple 100 pages on our website that drives most of the traffic. And through good content, we get a lot of so we also don't do SEO just to, you know, trick Google. It doesn't work. It's about really adding value. So we try to create multiple times better content than anybody out there. For example, you know, if you're building, let's say, a sales strategy document, then we we we go do the research, look at everything out there, and try to create something that really helps people perform better. And when that happens, we automatically start seeing this content going to places that we didn't even dream of. Like, you know, sometimes government sites, you know, mention us. Sometime a lot of the universities mention us, and that that has a lot of clouds that that brings us even better positioning as well. So content creation is, like, just distributed inside the company.
Mark Evans: What about other types of marketing? Are you any advertising? Do you go to conferences? Do you do webinars? Do you do ebooks? Or is it all simply about blog posts? I'm just curious about the portfolio or the arsenal that you're using.
Alper Chukar: We have an affiliate program, which, you know, we set it up, I think it was two years ago. We're not really doing anything about it. People sign up and they refer Extensio, and they get 25% of the revenue per life. So if anybody's interested, you can just go to extensio.com/affiliates, at checkout, and that's that's that has been one of the venues, but we don't buy any ads. We're not in conference. This year, actually, there'll be a couple of conferences, but I mean, I go to conferences to to learn and network myself, but, like, Extensio has not done any sponsorships. We didn't get any boots, none of those things. We we haven't tried ads. That that's something we we may try next year. It's been mostly the content. Again, the advantage of being a content creation platform is you create the content in the platform. That's that's been one one advantage that we have over just creating regular blog posts, which is, like, super saturated. We were doing that at the agency and it worked great, but this was, like, 2010.
Mark Evans: Right.
Alper Chukar: So, like, now, like, it's it's it's really hard to get attention because there's so much content out there.
Mark Evans: Looking back, what are the biggest marketing lessons that you've learned along the way? Both good things that you've learned and some of the things that Mhmm. You've learned to avoid that simply doesn't work or it's just not doesn't work for for your company.
Alper Chukar: So, like, when you couple of years like, when you first start, there's no baggage. So you can just do something and then move on to the next thing. But over time, actually, we realize that every decision we make comes with a lot of the things that we support that we did in the past as well. You know? Like, we we can't just, for example, just move on to another affiliate marketing platform because we got a couple of thousand people who are using that already. So, like, the change becomes a little bit harder as you mature. One of the things that we made is, I think, was not realizing the longer term of cost, cost of things. For example, and I'm gonna name this because, you know, like, it's it's been a bad experience for us, Intercom. Mhmm. I see your Intercom using Intercom as well, which is great if you got, you know you know, let's say, thousand people visiting and, like, doing something and then you're sending messages. But at some point, like, our free plan were was bringing about, like, 17,000 people a month. And all of a sudden, Intercom's expense started exploding. So, like, that wasn't a decision that we thought a lot about when we first adapted the tool. And all of a sudden, like, now all our campaigns are in there. Our, you know, like, our support is in there. Like, there's a knowledge base there. All the things they they they built, we were just, you know, taking them and, like, running with it because, like, it's the easier thing to do. But you need to be careful about your model versus the platform you use as model. Like, in in yeah. Intercom's case, for example, they're all about, you know, those user base. But, like, they're not really built for companies like us where there's a freemium model where you would have, like, thousands of people use the platform. And so, like, not and that change changing things and finding the the better options that fits our business model was one of the challenges we went through.
Mark Evans: As far as marketing landscape right now, when you look at the fact that primarily your marketing is being driven by content, which drives inbound, you mentioned that content is becoming more crowded. It's harder to break through. How you see the marketing landscape? As a b to b SaaS entrepreneur, what does the marketing landscape look like to you? Like, what do you see as some of the most interesting trends or or things that you're gonna explore in 2022 as you try to drive growth, bring user new users onto the platform, or conversely, try to keep your users on the platform?
Alper Chukar: I think that, you know, moving forward, a couple of things that is becoming more obvious. One, outbound is getting harder and harder and harder. And so, like, we are a product led growth company, and we like that. So, like, we are gonna we're doubling down on that. So, like, making the product better, targeting the right audience, and being at the places that that that audience exist is our main focus. I get dozens of messages on LinkedIn. My email is at this point, you know, like, I get a lot of inquiries from all sorts of places. And, like, I'm just going, like, marking them as spam, like, deleting them. Like, first sentence, I get it. Like, let's move on. So, like, my morning style is like that. And, obviously, like, marketers are gonna find other places. Now, actually, like, I get SMSs. I get cold calls. You know? Like, it's it's annoying. It's gonna get more annoying. And I don't wanna be part of that annoying part. I wanna be on the good side of the story as much as I can. So, like, we're gonna keep being on that side as much as we can. Some of the trends that I'm seeing moving forward is content is getting harder to get traffic with because everybody's trying it, but it doesn't mean that there's a good content that way. You know, like, there's gonna be always good content, and that's gonna be always performing. One of the main takeaways I've seen the last couple of years is we are all media companies. And I don't mean just the products or the companies. I mean also people as well. It's people as well. Like, everybody is now a media company or a media personality, an media entity. What that means is, you know, like, people are gonna need a reason to believe what you say versus somebody else's. And that doesn't happen, again, with just a couple of sentences you say. It happens over time. So the brand marketing is becoming more of a value in my mind through being a media company again. And that that and, you know, like, some of the things we see explored is obviously podcasts. Right? And video is it become it became so accessible. It's, I think, just a psychological barrier for us. It's just a little harder to be on camera than, you know, like, just writing something that you can fix 20 times, do revisions. But having said that, the thing that performs in my mind most nowadays is is vulnerability. Not being the perfect person out there, but being who you are with all the little errors and faults that you have. Like, that's that's the brand. Just embracing that and, like, being genuine. I think it's it's it's gonna be key moving forward for not only for people, but also for companies.
Mark Evans: If there was one marketing channel or activity that Extensio would embrace in 2022, what would that be?
Alper Chukar: We're we're definitely doubling down on content. Mostly the kind of content that is unique to us, which is templates in our case. So, like, again, like, we we wanna make that library not bloated, but definitely more inclusive. So, like, that's why we're our focus is for the 2022. And then, you know, like, we are seeing a lot of potential again from video. We may go into that. And, also, stepping a little bit away from inbound through search, which has been the main bread and butter for Exensio, we wanna put more focus on the brand itself as well. So, like, we're actually doing a lot of partnerships, a lot of we're supporting the startup ecosystem, marketing ecosystem, sales ecosystem as much as we can through, you know, professional organizations, meetups, through webinars, etcetera. So we wanna be partnering with anybody who is doing anything in those fields and be out of the be a part of their their journey and support them with our, platform as much as possible because we wanna make sure that Extensio is the communications and strategy platform for those groups.
Mark Evans: Alper, this has been an excellent and inspiring conversation. Where can people learn more about you and Extensio?
Alper Chukar: Extensio.com, and then I'm sure you'll include all my links of LinkedIn, Twitter.
Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.