Building a Content Marketing Flywheel — Fares Ksebati, MySwimPro

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Fares Ksebati, co-founder and CEO of MySwimPro, the leading swim coaching app. On the podcast I talk with Fares about how to build a content marketing flywheel, the importance of content that's inherently valuable, and why you shouldn't give up on content marketing, even if your early attempts only get a few views. Hey, Fares, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Fares Ksebati:

David, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

David Barnard:

We've got so much to talk about. I love your content and how much success you've seen with content marketing, and so we're going to get to that. But to help the listeners understand the context around that, let's just start off with what is MySwimPro?

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah. MySwimPro empowers people to swim for life, and we want to be the one-stop shop app. If someone wants to improve their fitness, their performance through swimming, they come to the app and it's like your personal coach. The difference between our app and actually going to the pool and hiring a coach is that you get a personalized workout at a fraction of the cost of actually hiring the coach. We started this in 2015 and so far we've been really focused on helping swimmers improve their performance and health in the water.

David Barnard:

Fantastic pitch. Number one lesson, if you're building an app, you need to have that good of a 60-second pitch to explain your business to people. That was fantastic. You can tell you've done this a lot and do a lot of content because that was very nailed down. I know you have several co-founders, so tell me just a little bit of the story of why you built the app and who your co-founders are. Just a little bit of the story of how you got to this point.

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, for sure. And today our company is by swimmers for swimmers, and even in the early days when we started the app, it was myself, Adam Oxner and Michael Allon. I actually met Adam, who's our CTO now, through the swimming world, so it was a connection within swimming and we both swam in university. But it was really my experience as a coach which really pushed me to want to take this idea to more than just an idea and actually create an app because I was coaching swimming and I was still swimming myself, but I had people asking me for workouts, for training, for advice.

And what happens when you get out of the system, as I like to call it, where you're no longer on a team, you no longer have a coach, there's this huge gap. And at the time, and even today, really nothing was addressing this gap. The gap is you want to swim, but you go to the pool and you have no idea what to do. So you could just go back and forth and swim mindlessly, which is what a lot of people do. Or you can follow a structured training program, which is what you would do with a team as if you had a coach. So that didn't exist at the time. This was back 2014, 2015.

So the first version of MySwimPro was simply to give someone a workout as simple as that. You couldn't log it, there was no profile, there was no analytics, none of this stuff. The Apple Watch didn't actually exist yet, and that's become a major part of our business. So when it was just Adam, Mike and I, we were basically hacking together different ideas of, "How can we deliver this workout in the most efficient and simple way?" And obviously in the last seven, eight years, it's become a lot more personalized, a lot more granular and powerful as to what it can actually do. But from the very beginning it was always, "How do we help swimmers?" And we use the product ourselves, which I think is a really important component of building a great solution if you're solving your own problem.

David Barnard:

So did y'all raise money or did you just bootstrap? Are you technical or are your co-founders technical and did they kind of write the first app and you were writing the programs and overseeing?

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, a mix of everything. So we're very multi-skilled in the company even from the founding days. So I studied business. I don't have that technical background. I'd like to think I'm self-taught in a lot of things, but not at the level of what we have today obviously. So Adam, our CTO, built the first version of the iPhone app and the Apple Watch integration. Michael did the Android app, but we skipped over an important fun story. When we started the app, it actually was before having an app at all, so we wanted to validate that this was really a problem. And with my technical skills, I basically bought a domain, it was MySwimPal at the time, myswimpal.com, and I created a mockup of what I thought the app would look like and I had four value propositions on the screen.

So I had the mockup of the app and then an email capture, and I used Twitter to drive traffic to this website. The equivalent I think would be on the Instagram DM, but you just kind of look at the keyword swim and I just find people who are tweeting about swimming and I would just message them, favorite their tweets, send them to this URL, and then they'd put in their email to download an app that didn't even exist yet. Still a good way to validate demand. And so after just a couple of weeks, I had 200 people who inputted their email to download this app that didn't even exist yet. And a lot of these people, I had no idea who they were so I was just finding them on social media. And I think the social media landscape has changed, but this principle still technically applies. Here's the screen that we want to test, send traffic to it either paid or free, and then see what the demand actually looks like.

So that was the end of 2014, and then 2015 we had the MySwimPro app. So that was the humble beginnings. It was bootstrapped, we didn't raise any money. We weren't making any money. We can go into that. We didn't charge anything for the app at first. The first year we literally just were listening to feedback from people who used the app. It wasn't that many. And then we just iterated on it over and over and over. And 2016 we actually launched a subscription offering for 10 bucks a month you get basically more workouts. We actually pay walled some of the free workouts that we did have in the app, we had different categories. And then that's when we did our first startup accelerator. So we raised $50,000 through this accelerator. We went through the program and since then we've done a few different rounds of equity crowdfunding. So we've raised about $1.2 million mostly through equity crowdfunding, and it's gotten us to where we are today, but it's been a wild ride, even if as I say that out loud.

David Barnard:

Yeah. How was the accelerator? I've had folks on who did Y Combinator. Generally people have a good experience there, but I haven't talked to somebody who's done a more traditional accelerator. Do you feel like that experience was worth it? Do you think app founders should potentially go through an accelerator or do you think it wasn't as helpful?

Fares Ksebati:

I think it's definitely a case by case basis. So for me, it was beneficial in our team because even I had worked at other startups before launching MySwimPro, so I had a little bit of startup experience and digital marketing, but it wasn't like I had started the company myself, and the rest of our co-founding team was the same thing. So if you're just getting started, even if you have business experience, it can be extremely beneficial to learn the skills of customer discovery and to build a network because you probably don't have a network if you haven't started a company or done something like that before. So I think in that perspective it was very valuable.

Would I do another startup accelerator? At this point, probably not if I were to start another company. But I think it really depends case by case. I don't know if I could recommend it to all app founders, but if there's a program that is in line with what you do, like we did a program, it was through the University of Michigan, and so you don't have to have gone to the university, but I know a lot of universities have a program like this. Some are more geared towards health and wellness, they're partnered with a healthcare company. So if your app is aligned with the initiative of the program, that might make a lot of sense.

David Barnard:

Yeah, no, that's super cool. And I was going to ask you what the top two or three things were from going through the accelerator and it sounds like networking and understanding some of this product market fit and being able to connect with customers. Any other top lessons that you feel like the accelerator really helped with?

Fares Ksebati:

I think refining the pitch. You mentioned the way I presented what we do, but you're presenting all the time and not only when you meet with mentors, they connect you with mentors and you have to explain what you do in a relatively quick fashion. The whole point of the accelerator is at the end of the program, you do a three or five minute pitch to the community, and it could be investors or other folks. And so if you don't have a good pitch, you will be forced to learn how to pitch correctly and you get a lot of feedback and you eliminate the things that don't really matter. And I think doing those repetitions is really valuable, especially when you're still trying to figure out what the heck you're doing. I think if you're a little bit more mature in your business, it's probably not as useful because you've already hopefully put in those reps. But yeah, I think it was a good experience overall.

David Barnard:

All right. So you went through the accelerator, you had collected these emails, you're kind of seeing early traction. What are some of the early marketing things that you experimented with? And once you had that $50,000 in the bank, did you start experimenting with paid or how did you get that early momentum and then keep that momentum going?

Fares Ksebati:

I think from day one, it was a content marketing machine. I can say that now, but at the time I didn't know what I was doing. We had a blog, we had social media accounts, started producing YouTube videos, literally every social media channel, I was on top of it. And at the time I just thought, "We have to be out there. People need to know that we exist. There's a name called MySwimPro and it has this blue icon, the shirt that I'm wearing." But it's, "How do we get people aware of this brand and then educate people about the things that they need to know to be successful in swimming?"

So in retrospect, it all kind of makes sense, but to be honest in the moment, I didn't have as clear of a direction as I think I do now, and part of that is just my own experience that was developed, but also I think the landscape has actually become a lot more mature. Specifically the way that you can leverage social media and build a community digitally is a lot more clear. I think now there's a lot more best practices compared to in 2014, '15, it was still somewhat mature I guess, but it was relatively new compared to where it is today.

So it was creating a lot of content. Adam and Mike were building out the app, and then by 2018 is when we actually hired our first additional team member, and it was Paige, who's now our VP of marketing. So she's been with us for six years and basically I handed off a lot of that content marketing to her. I continued to do a lot of it and eventually became the face of the brand, which was not intended either. So there's a whole bunch of things that were lumped in there.

David Barnard:

When you were first starting out with the content, what kind of stuff were you producing and were you seeing traction with that content? How did that go early on? Because even me, I launched a big update to my weather app recently. We got some press, but once that dies down, it's like you got to get that ball rolling. And I think a lot of founders expect, I fell victim to it as well, like, "Oh, I'll get it out there, it's going to get some attention and that's going to snowball." But actually it takes a lot of deliberation. I mean some apps do just explode out of the gate, but it sounds like y'all just slow roll and built that flywheel that just kept going. But what did that really look like in the early days?

Fares Ksebati:

Sure. In the very beginning it was writing about an article a week and I was just answering basic swimming questions. So if you wanted to learn how to do a flip turn or how to improve your freestyle technique or your efficiency, common search optimize things basically, leveraging the power of Google, biggest search engine in the world, "What are people searching on the internet?" And I knew what people are searching partly because there are tools that tell you this, but also just qualitatively because people are asking us questions. So for example, the whole reason why I started making YouTube videos and it became sort of what it is today, is because we would get the same questions via email every single day. So I would get in the app, people who are not as experienced in swimming would ask a question, and we actually had my phone number in every automated email that came from us.

I was getting WhatsApp messages at all hours of the day, I was getting emails, people asking the same questions. And one day I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to make a video that explains this. Because I've had to copy and paste a macro basically. I'm telling the same people over and over the same thing." So I got up a whiteboard and I just explained swimming terminology, and then I started doing this on a weekly basis and it became known as the Whiteboard Wednesday. So I stand in front of a whiteboard and for 15 minutes I elaborate on something in swimming. And in the very beginning I didn't even have any cool looking footage. It was just me standing in front of a whiteboard, which you think for swimming, why would anyone pay attention to that? Because I was answering their question. So you go to YouTube, which is the second-biggest search engine in the world, people have questions and they want to learn, and I think now that's a little bit more obvious than in 2015.

But by 2018, after three years of consistently doing this, I became even more consistent and then we started to see some compounding traction, but it didn't all of a sudden spike the usage of the app. I think content marketing in general is a very long-term type of thing that you're really building brand and you're building trust. So that way people not only have the awareness that you exist, but they trust whatever it is that you're telling them. So that way if you are to sell them something or come up with an offer, whether it's your app subscription or something else, then they feel that they've already made a connection with you and you know what you're talking about and their conversion to paying for whatever it is that you're offering is going to be that much higher. So in 2015 to 2018, we're talking thousands of social media posts and hundreds of articles that I had written. So it's not like we wrote five articles and then now we're SEO relevant. It's consistently today just a continuous routine in building that pattern of habit.

David Barnard:

And this is where I think a lot of people get discouraged with content marketing is that I imagine in those early days you'd put up a video and you'd get tens of views, or was it just that slow building?

Fares Ksebati:

It was a slow grind. So the very beginning, like I mentioned, I just created the videos not to be a YouTuber, simply to answer the questions people had. So that might only be seven people. Great, now I don't have to write seven emails. I spent a few hours making this video, but I know that there's a compounding effect of this is a better delivery of the information anyway. So in the very beginning, yeah, I mean it was 75 views, 300 views, 4,000. Now we have a few of those videos of me that have millions of views of me standing in front of a whiteboard talking about swimming. That didn't happen overnight, that took years. And at some level it is discouraging. I know I tell people that and they're like, "How do you get half a million followers on Instagram? What's the trick?"

Well, if you look at our account, we have 7,000 posts. It's not like one blew up and then it happened. So I think there is some level of patience that you have to have. I think for us, and I remind our team, if we don't have the patience to be consistent and build the procedures and the best practices, then we shouldn't really be doing it. Because if you're trying to build a brand and trust, that takes a long time. And I don't know who said this quote, but it's the concept of brand is the only thing that transcends technology. So technologies will come and go, products will come and go, the Apple Watch didn't exist when we started the company. The Apple Watch is a majority use case of our business. In five, 10 years, who knows what the thing is, the Apple Vision Pro. We don't know what that is, but if you have a brand and you build trust and you have that community, whatever the thing is, if you can innovate in it, you'll have an audience to purchase and engage with whatever it is that you create.

David Barnard:

What made you stick with it? Because I think a lot of people, again, starting content marketing, they put out a few blog posts, they do a few YouTube videos, they get 75 views like you said, and they're like, "Okay, this is not working. I'm going to pivot and try something else." Was there early signs that it was paying off that made you stick with it? Or you just had this vision that you saw that it would compound over time and just kept at it? What kept you motivated through those 75 view videos to keep going?

Fares Ksebati:

I think there were a few things. One was simple naivety. At the time, I was 23, 24 years old, and I think I was really deep in the hustle culture of, "You just need to work harder. You don't have the right to complain about anything." So I think that was part of it. You're just naive to like, "Well, I'm supposed to work." It's not really work smarter, I was just working hard. That's part of it. The other is you have to love what you do. So I am the one who's the face behind the camera in a lot of this stuff and I love it. So it doesn't really feel like a lot of work to me, even though it might take a certain amount of time.

The mental load I think is what actually inhibits a lot of people because the thought of like, "Okay, I need to prepare what I'm going to write in the article, or if I'm going to make a video, I need to have all my talking points." And even from the very beginning, I was pretty fast at doing a lot of these things because I'm talking about something that I know. I think if someone's trying to be the online expert and create the content or build that flywheel, if they're not interested in the topic, if they don't have the expertise, it's going to feel like a huge mental weight. How do you find the time to do this? It really doesn't take as much time as you think. It just is decision fatigue and that decision fatigue can be very overwhelming.

So I think there's a few variables between my naivety and as well as just I love doing it, and then having some level of vision that I'm not here to pack up tomorrow, I'm here to build a brand. And I think I got a little bit of a taste of success somewhat early on in the sense that, "Hey, wait a second, I created this video, how to do a flip turn", as an example. It did take off and it got 75,000 views. Okay, well why did that work? Because it clearly answered a need in the market. And I think it goes back to more specifically our app, the success that taste of success, it doesn't need to be 75,000 views. All it takes is a few people to say, "This video answered my question."

The most common one that we have, which is the impetus for this is 4 x 50 IM. So if you see that in our app or you see it in swimming, that means you do a 50 of each stroke in the individual medley order. So if you just see it on paper and you don't know anything about swimming, "What does this mean?" So just answering that question in a video and being able to send that to people and getting the, "Oh, this helped a lot. Thank you." As simple as that, that is very gratifying to know, "Oh, okay, this actually delivered value and now they use the app and tying it back to the subscription, they're probably going to keep paying for it because they understand how it works."

David Barnard:

What were the signs that it was starting to pay off and how did you measure the impact? I mean, were you tracking views compared to app downloads and subscribers? Did you have a spreadsheet? That one video you said that did kind of go somewhat viral I guess, 75,000 views is a lot for a video. It's not millions like Marques Brownlee or whatever, but that's pretty good. Were you tracking that impact? Like, "We got 75,000 views and that led to X number of downloads and X number of downloads led to Y number of subscribers"?

Fares Ksebati:

Will say we're a lot better at this now than at the time. At the time it was more about, "I need to make content, let me go write some articles." And I had a weekly cadence of just building stuff and then when Paige joined, we basically built a mini army to compound that. But in terms of tracking, we were tracking everything, but it's hard to measure the direct impact. We have really good metrics around each individual social channel now we use the app store like custom product URLs and we actually measure how many leads we get from YouTube. We have a different URL for Instagram, for YouTube, for Facebook, for our website, and then we can see and attribute revenue directly to that. That's a very recent thing that we actually, I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but that's only in the last few months we literally implemented that.

But in the very beginning it was more just I was willing to take the short-term potential loss in time for the long-term benefit of building a brand. And now I think it's easier to quantify because we have two full-time video editors on our team and most apps don't have something like that. And I can better justify the expense of that and the way our team is set up because we were able to monetize beyond our app subscription through YouTube AdSense, through brand partnerships. And there's a whole story of how we thought about building that. But now it's easier to ROI that because I know how much money that alone is making. So even if the app is not benefiting at all, it's still ROI positive just for this segment of the business.

Now I want to be able to more accurately attribute and the product URLs are one step in that direction, but it is difficult. I'm not going to sit here and say we have the golden bullet of how Instagram view converts to X, Y, Z value in our app. I do think there would be some level of shrinkage if we just all of a sudden disappeared off the internet. So if none of the content exists, if our brand disappeared, we would certainly see some level of hit in organic traffic through the app store and how people are discovering us. We don't do this, but some apps they actually ask you how you came across the app in the first place directly in the onboarding. We've done that through our surveys, so we qualitatively measure to our subscribers and even free users how you learned about the app and we can see some numbers there. So there is some level of measurement, but I don't have the perfect answer.

David Barnard:

It sounds like you really started on YouTube and that's kind of been a mainstay. I hadn't heard anybody say that, but it actually makes a ton of sense that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, that people are looking for answers to their questions and they'll go to Google. But then, I mean, I do this, I go to YouTube, I need to do something with my washer dryer, and it's like, "What do I do?" I go to YouTube and figure it out. So it makes a lot of sense. But how did the channels evolve over time? Did you initially start with YouTube and then slowly move to Instagram and others or did you just blast to all those social media channels? And what does that mix look like today?

Fares Ksebati:

Well, actually we started with Twitter. I don't remember if it was my personal Twitter or MySwimPro Twitter at the time to DM people and get them to that landing page. But it was actually Twitter because it seemed the easiest to get started, tweeting about swimming, or Twitter's more events driven for sports anyway. So when there was a swimming competition happening, it was very easy to jump on that. But very shortly after, I basically created an account for every channel and some have come and gone over the years. So for example, Snapchat was something that I was more engaged with and now we don't do anything with Snapchat. TikTok is a relatively new one. So we didn't start doing TikTok until 2019, which now it sounds like we've been doing it for a while. But relative to the other channels, it was a late comer in that regard.

I think the YouTube focus has really come to where it is now only in the last few years. So I did mention we have all the channels. A few reasons why I choose to focus on YouTube and why I want our company focused on YouTube is because it is the best place for the deeper connection. So you can have a big Twitter following, for example, and now it's a little different because you can have longer threads in conversations like that, but it's a lot different when you're hearing and seeing the person explain something to you. So when it goes back to building trust, there's a reason why YouTubers can charge the highest for any kind of a brand deal because they have the trust of the person that they're communicating with. So even if it's not fully aligned... Right now, I'm not saying, "I have all these subscribers and our company pages, all these subscribers." We don't have that many app subscribers.

So there's a lot of people who are engaging with the content that are maybe not interested in the app because the app has a very specific use case, has a very targeted persona that we're designing the product experience around. Whereas YouTube, it's, "Oh, you want to go swimming?" Anyone who wants to improve swimming in any capacity, competitive, young, old, beginner, advanced, it really doesn't matter. And we have content that can apply to them. So maybe that opens the doors for new features in our app down the road, new apps, new products, new services. There's a lot of different things that we could expand to. But I think there's a lot of moving parts. So it's hard to pick one social channel and that's what you should start with. I think it depends on what kind of a brand you're looking to build and how it fits into your overall marketing acquisition funnel.

David Barnard:

Has TikTok been a good channel for y'all? Have you seen a lot of traction? Have you had some videos go viral on TikTok? Or is it just kind of you're there, it's easy to take the content you're already producing for YouTube, chop it up and throw it on there?

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, I mean it's interesting what works on some channels doesn't really work on other channels. So we can take content on YouTube and chop it up in a few different ways. Some of that will perform on TikTok but it won't perform on Instagram Reels. So in terms of, to answer your question, is TikTok working? I think we have like 300 something thousand followers, but I wouldn't say it's a primary channel of acquisition and awareness for us. We have had some posts that have millions or tens of millions of views, but it's not, "Okay, we got 10 million views on this video and now that gave us 50,000 new downloads." It's like that 1 million view video may have had nothing to do with our app, which could be seen as a problem as like, "Well now you have a bunch of bad traffic." I don't really see it that way.

There are some people who probably did find value and now they went to other content and now they ended up downloading the app. But it goes back to building the brand. In this world we are fighting for attention. So whether it's in the app or in someone's phone, I don't know what the hours are, but people are spending five hours a day in their phone, where are they spending those five hours? They're not spending it in your app unless your app is Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. So because people are spending their time in those apps, you want to make sure that you have a presence. So for us, it's being everywhere all the time no matter what. It's a lot more work and you need more manpower to be able to do that, but it depends on what level you're trying to compete at in that attention game.

David Barnard:

You kind of alluded to this, but now that you do have such a big YouTube following specifically, you kind of mentioned that the content itself is monetized. I thought that was really interesting that most people would view the content as solely content marketing. But tell me about how the content is actually driving revenue and is a second pillar of revenue to the app.

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, that's a great point because when you get to a certain level of viewership, especially on long form content, you can monetize in a few different ways. So YouTube does pay the creator directly and everyone's seeing the ads at the beginning or in the middle of a video. If it's a longer video, you might have several ads. You can go online very easily and see what the CPMs are, but for every thousand views of a video, you could get anywhere from $3-15 depending on your category. So if you have a video with a million views, that could make $10,000. So if you look at one of your favorite YouTubers and you see every video, and let's say they're doing tech reviews like MKBHD, and every video he makes has 5 million views, and his CPM in that category is probably $10-20. So each of those videos, you can do the math on that, he's making maybe $50,000 a video. That pays for his production team.

Now, for him, he's a pure YouTuber, so that's his primary thing. If you're building an app like us, I have my channel, the company's channel, we monetize through YouTube ad sense, which is a nice to have, but also now we can do brand partnerships. So these are the shout-outs in the middle of the video that you've seen on YouTube where the creator is promoting some product that might be relevant that they're actually using in the video or elsewhere. And so those will actually pay even more money than the CPM rate because the brand knows that you're communicating with a very dedicated audience.

So it goes back to that trust factor. So the more trust you have, the more dedicated your viewership, now you can add another layer of monetization, which is the brand deals. We're starting to talk more about the content creator world more than the app world, but I feel like I've stepped into this role now. I didn't really plan on it, but since we're there and there's an opportunity to not only market swimming and then get more audience to the brand, but then also monetize it, this is really the only method of marketing that I know where you can actually do marketing to get more customers and you get paid to get more customers.

David Barnard:

To do the marketing.

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, so it's kind of interesting,

David Barnard:

But I think this goes back to the fact that you're creating content that is super valuable for people, and I think that's where people who think, "I'm going to do content marketing", their content often is overly focused on the app. I watched a few of your YouTube videos, a few of them I watched, you didn't even mention MySwimPro. So it's not like the video is an ad for the app directly. You're just creating really good content, and so it kind of makes sense that by creating that really great content, you're creating multiple flywheels, that you're building this audience that is monetizable through the content itself, which I do think that's really cool and maybe not as directly relevant to this audience in that a lot of folks have not built up that kind of content library that's eventually monetizable.

But I think it's cool that you built it and it's something others can aspire to do is that if you build this up where you are creating great content, it's not just going to drive downloads and subscribers. You can eventually potentially monetize that content directly. So I do think that's relevant and super interesting. So I did want to dive back into the content production itself. I think this is where you started out, just you and a whiteboard. But how did it evolve from there and what does that content production look like today? And then how did it evolve over time?

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, this is a very interesting story on I think just scalability in general. It's applicable to more than just content marketing. So in the very beginning, let's take the Whiteboard Wednesday, which is the weekly video series that had a blog and an email associated to it. So basically it would be Wednesday in the morning, we'd go to a WeWork and I would think, "What video am I going to make today?" So literally it would just be like my Wednesday project and I would think, "Okay, what's the video? I would draft it up, film it, edit it, and ship it all in the same day." Try and keep it as simple as possible. Write the email, write the blog based on what I said in the video, and that was what I did for basically a couple of years.

And then eventually it became a little bit more sophisticated when we had another team member where I basically handed off a few of those responsibilities. So I would still make the video and even edit the video, but then I wouldn't do the blog, I wouldn't do the email. Eventually we hired a video editor to take the editing off my plate, so all I had to do was come up with the concept and then just go and film the video and then upload it, and then I would do a review. Next thing you know it's on the internet.

Along the way, we would take that one long form piece of content and we would split it up into multiple versions. So we would have the shorter form content posts for different social media channels.And what you mentioned a few minutes ago about not having an overly salesy feel to the content, because fundamentally I'm not trying to sell someone our app. I'm trying to help them improve their swimming. So if they came to YouTube to search for a specific skill like how to do a flip turn, they want to learn to do a flip turn. Our app doesn't teach you how to do a flip turn. What it does do is it teaches you how to structure your workout so you get the most out of your time.

So when it is applicable inside the long form and inside the articles, the emails and everything, it makes a lot of sense to answer their question of how to do a flip turn and then also share, "And if you really want to take your swimming to the next level, this is how you can do it with MySwimPro app. And yes, you can do your flip turns inside MySwimPro app." Just as an example. So we did that for a few years and then if you fast-forward to where we are today, it's a little bit more team intensive production in the sense that now we're on location when I filmed some of these things, we might not do it at a whiteboard, I might be standing at a swimming pool, we might be hosting an in-person event, like a swim camp. Our videographer is with me, we're at the pool deck, he's filming me, and then two weeks later it's on YouTube.

There's a few steps I skipped in there, but it's probably not as applicable for this audience because now we have an in-house studio, so we have two full-time video editors. Our VP of marketing manages that team. I have someone who just manages my brand deals that come through myself and the company, and he's part-time, works on commission. And then we have another team member who just does the social media posting. A team of five people is the engine that I was basically doing a fraction of that by myself. So now it's more team, more expense, but we're also making more money through the AdSense, the brand deals, and the app is in a stronger position. So it all works to complement each other.

David Barnard:

That's really cool. When did you post your first YouTube video?

Fares Ksebati:

On this channel, on the stuff that we're talking about, 2015. I've been making videos my whole life. So I have another channel, I call it my uncut channel, like 15 years.

David Barnard:

Wow, okay. So eight years of building to get to the point where hiring five full-time people makes sense to do the content production. So again, I think people get discouraged with content marketing or even think, "If I'm going to do content marketing right, I need five people today." And they go out and hire all these people and they get 75 views and it doesn't work. It's like you got to build this up over time, and I think you building this channel is the perfect example of that, that just continuing to grind away at it and creating that value can snowball into where those five people full-time does make sense.

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, if anything, it's actually much easier now. I know people say "There's so much competition, how do you stand out?" But the barrier to entry is like nothing. So if someone is watching or listening to this video or this podcast, you have a smartphone probably with fast internet that shoots in 4K, you can get on Amazon a microphone, so you have crystal clear audio in 4K, you can record in slow motion, you get CapCut, you have videos that go viral easily. If anything, it's easier now and you don't need five people to scale up really quick. Whereas eight years ago, yes, there were smartphones, but you actually needed a decent camera, otherwise it would look pretty crummy. You needed a very expensive microphone. Now microphone's 20 bucks and you got something, not amazing, but you have something to kick you off. So I think the barrier is definitely lower, which means there's more competition. But if you're adding genuine value and that's part of your long-term vision of brand, if it correlates to your app or whatnot, then yeah, I think you should go for it. You just got to be ready to keep doing it for a long time.

David Barnard:

You kind of touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to go a little deeper on how you think about when to add a CTA to the app and when to not. So how do you think about that?

Fares Ksebati:

There's actually different schools of thought on this. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. So on the one side you have people like Gary Vee and he's all about jab, jab, right hook. So you give away 10,000 pieces of content, you build the ultimate brand trust, and then in one of them you transact. So it's very, very extreme. You also have people like he's a big YouTuber, Ali Abdaal, and it's like I think a 99:1 rule. So you give 99% of the time and only 1% of your audience you actually even expect to transact with you. But the other 99 percentile, they're not going to transact. And the idea is you build an audience so massive and you're so dominant in your category, that 1% is actually huge. But if you sell, sell, sell, well now your audience is going to be a fraction of the size. And yeah, you might get 50% penetration, but you got 50% penetration of seven people. So it's trying to find that balance. I think I'm somewhere in the middle.

In terms of how you think about adding the CTA, this is tricky, but you always want to come back to what is the point of that specific piece of content? Are you truly trying to sell something or are you trying to answer the question of the audience or the viewer or the subscriber or the app user, whoever it is. So if it's a piece of content, going back to my flip turn analogy, if the whole point of the video and why they came to it in the first place is to learn how to do that specific thing, you have to really focus on answering that question because if you do, they're going to continue to want to see stuff that you create and that's how you build a trust. And you could have the call to action in that piece of content, but it might actually make sense to have it in a different piece of content that maybe that first piece is your lead generation, you get them to follow you and pay attention to what you do. And then it makes more sense to actually transact.

I think the best approach is more integrated. I'll give you an example of what we're doing right now. So I'm currently in Dubai and I'm training for the Masters World Championships in Doha. So in this series I'm doing a five part video where I'm showing how I prepare for the World Championships and I'm using MySwimPro app to train for this competition. So every single video I have the app on screen showing the workouts that I'm actually doing. And so I'm not selling the app, I'm just using the app as my tool to achieve the results that I'm trying to show. So if someone's been following along this journey, it's cool they feel like they're making a connection, they're watching this guy train for a big competition. But the way I'm doing it is the ultimate showcase of what the app can do, and I'm showing the true power of it. And I'm never really selling the app, but the app is on the screen for 30% of the time.

So I think that's the perfect method of integration. And I think when we have done that and we've created stories where I did a challenge where I swim every day for 30 days straight, I swam a mile for 100 days in a row, and so we made videos for each of these things. I'm not selling the app per se. I might have some sentences of how you see how I'm doing it in the app and you can follow along or whatever. But it's more about how can I integrate the experience of what I'm teaching, what I'm educating or the story that people are following along and also showcase, "Yes, I'm using the app to be able to do this." And then just one more thing, that's just on how my perspective is. As a company, we do have our own YouTube channel as a company and that we're using to tell stories. Gold Medal Moments, we call them. People who have had success, they lost 100 pounds. They did a crazy amount of swimming at the age of 67, and how do they do the crazy swimming? They used the MySwimPro app. And so it's a very clean way to integrate without just being an advertisement.

David Barnard:

You mentioned that kind of 99:1. Where would you say you end up landing on how many videos do have call to actions versus ones that don't?

Fares Ksebati:

I think at some level I do want every video to have at least a minor call to action. Some might be a sentence that integrates with the storyline pretty well, and it could just be something quick on screen. I think the meat of it is maybe 30% of the videos have a very, very solid insertion, meaning over 60 seconds where it's a very clear, I'm teaching you this thing and the way that I'm teaching you is showing you how it's done in MySwimPro app where the app screen is on the video screen for an extended period of time. So maybe a third of videos have that level. But then you might say, "Well, okay, so 70% of the videos don't have an advertisement in them?" And it is a more subtle approach to it.

I think as a viewer you have to think about it too from your own perspective. If you're following someone on any social media, you don't want to see them just selling you something all the time. You are either following them because one of three things, if someone's listening, you're watching and they take away anything from this content marketing, you have to do one of three things. You either have to educate people, you have to entertain them, or you inspire them. And so if you think about anyone you follow on social media, any platform, they're either teaching you something, they're entertaining you in some way or you feel inspired. Now, if you're really good at any of those, that's great, but if you're amazing, you can do multiple at the same time. And I'm sure people are thinking about individuals they follow on social or brands that are able to connect the entertaining part and the inspiration or the inspiration with the education.

I think for us it's a combination of those. Some videos might be more inspirational. When you hear about a 67-year-old who did some amazing feat in swimming, that's inspirational. It maybe it wasn't the most entertaining thing, but maybe you were educated as well. I think my style is less inspirational. It's more educational with a little bit of entertainment. I don't want to spill the beans. I'm swimming a mile with a certain piece of clothing on, multiple pieces of clothing, so that's going to be more entertainment. But a lot of the content is more educational where I'm teaching you something.

David Barnard:

I do want to move on from content marketing and talk about a few other aspects of the business. Again, not every app is going to succeed with content marketing. I think a lot more could than have maybe tried or have dabbled in it and then not found success and kind of given up. But I wanted to talk about a few other things. What other forms of marketing have you experimented with and/or found success? Or is content marketing really where it's at for MySwimPro?

Fares Ksebati:

Content is the bulk of it, but we have tried paid acquisition. I think we've done three different rounds of paid acquisition at different points of the company life cycle. We're sort of in the middle of the third one right now. And a lot of it, what's the difference between the three? It's who we worked with. We were doing sometimes in-house, working with agencies, the product was in a different spot when it comes to the download conversion rate, the price point is different. So now I'd like to say we're in our third attempt at trying to make it work at scale. This is probably our best attempt and we have the best analytics infrastructure in place to actually assess the effectiveness of the campaigns that we're running on various channels. So I'd like to think that we're moving in the right direction.

But paid acquisition is very tough, and I think depending on the funding of the business, so for us, we don't have a bank account with $17 million in it. So when you're doing ads, you have to be more methodical. Your test budget is not as large, and the algorithms, especially these days, they favor big budgets and they will put a better audience to a bigger budget. As horrible as that sounds, I mean that's the reality of it. So yeah, if you can make it work with a small budget, great. I'd say we're still trying to figure that out. That's one avenue of acquisition that we've experimented with over and over. We talked about content marketing quite a bit.

Another avenue of acquisition that we're looking at is in-person events. We've gone to events, we host swim camps. Now that's one method, but that's not the most scalable because you can only have so many people at an in-person event. We have some other creative ideas that we haven't yet executed on. How can we put ourselves at every swimming pool in America or every pool in the world, right? In the US there's 300,000 commercial pools. There's 10 million or so private pools. So how do we just get some kind of a presence at a swimming pool? So we haven't figured that out yet. Maybe it's through different partnerships. That's one avenue of acquisition that we're pursuing right now.

But it's tricky, especially when you get to a certain scale where you basically tap out your organic traffic, which is kind of where we are right now. There's only so many more organic downloads that we can get that's not going to 5x our growth. So what can we do that's not depending on someone going to the app store and typing in swim that can get us? Another one that we're even testing right now is referral marketing. So in-app, being able to invite someone, getting different promotions and incentivizing why the power user would want to invite someone in the first place. These are some different things that we're testing. No silver bullet yet, but we'll keep trying.

David Barnard:

So you mentioned you're in phase three. I think a lot of folks can learn from failure as much as success. What would you say were the failures of phase one and two? What did you experiment with? What were the results you saw that you had to give up on it?

Fares Ksebati:

The biggest mistake you can make is not having the right analytics in place. So if you don't know, "Okay, you spend $1,500, what happened?" If you don't know what actually ends up happening with that $1,500 and you don't have some level of confidence in the attribution, that's the biggest mistake. So you really can't put any significant budget besides just, "Oh, we'll boost this post and see if we get more app downloads." Right? That's not how you scale something. So I think that was one mistake that we did. We didn't have the right infrastructure in place. Another thing is just making sure you work with the right people and also making sure that you are on top of the analytics. So now that you have the analytics in place, okay, that's good, that's one step. But now are you actually paying attention to the analytics and making improvements and iterations fast enough so that way you can improve and not burn too much money in the process?

Because the reality is, like any AB test, a lot of them are going to fail. You have these ads as different creatives, you don't know which one is going to hit. And so if it takes you a long time to figure out which ones are your winners and which ones are your poor performing ads, then you're just going to end up spending more and more money and you're eventually going to have to stop because you're not able to get results quick enough to justify the amount of money that you're burning. So that's another. And yeah, there's probably quite a bit of smaller little learnings, but yeah, those are the big ones.

David Barnard:

As we're wrapping up, I did want to ask you about one more thing. I know you've done a lot of price testing. I actually saw several reviews complaining about the price. No matter what you price, you're going to get complaints. I priced my weather app at $40 a year, and I got three or four reviews saying, "Oh, that's just way too much money." So you were charging and have been experimenting with $180 a year. Now, totally different. You're replacing a swim coach, I'm just a weather app, there's way more competition. So I probably have more reason to reassess my pricing. But what led you to that $180 price point, and then has that been working for you?

Fares Ksebati:

From the beginning of the app, we have had probably eight different price points at some level of duration, meaning over three months or six months. When we first launched the app, it was free. Then we added a $10 a month option because, like I said in the beginning, naivety that felt right. 10 bucks a month, that's what other apps are. I think at the time most fitness apps were like 79.99 a year, and they had an offering that was 15, 20 bucks a month, 10 bucks a month. So that 10 bucks a month sounded right. And then we added a yearly offering around a hundred bucks. Then it was 120, then it was 180. And what happened is we didn't really see much of a change in conversion rate. So we kept on increasing the price and we kept on making the app better and better.

And here's the key. So we've done AB testing, we continue to do AB testing. The thing is, inside of your segments of people who are paying for the app, there are some segments that are willing to spend way more than others. And I think this is a mistake that we've done recently where we kind of just bundle everyone together. Well, we do the AB test and this is the price that wins. Yes, that's the price that wins for the overall population, but there's a segment, maybe 20% of your paying customers that could pay 10 times what your current offering is, but you're not charging anything else. So the only way to do that is having different pricing packages and different product offerings. And any mature business has these, there's a reason why there's more than one iPhone. There's a reason why there's multiple in a car. The same car could be $40,000 or $90,000. So there's a reason why there's different levels to that.

So I think for us, thing we're looking at doing is how do we continue to test not only the price point, but the way that we're actually packaging the offer to serve different segments of the audience that have different problem sets, but also, and maybe more importantly, different willingness to pay and price sensitivity? Actually, one of the guys that was on this podcast, the founder and CEO of the Ladder app, he actually mentioned there was a price test sensitivity thing that you can do. I actually, after listening to his podcast on this show, I actually went and we did a survey implementing that exact study where you ask four questions to see what people think is too expensive. So this is a qualitative way to assess and you end up with four lines on a graph and then between the two lines is your ideal price point.

So we sent this out for free members, we sent that out for paid members, and it's remarkable to see just how many people are willing and able to spend way more money than we're currently charging. So the actual average ends up being around what our price point is now, 20 a month or 120 or 100 a year. But there are people who are willing to spend $200, $300 per year. We don't have a product offering right now and a packaging that is able to access that kind of a price sensitivity. So I think we're still evolving, and as the business becomes more mature, and I think like any more mature business that's been around for a while, you have to be able to create different offerings and packaging to different segments of the market with different price sensitivity.

David Barnard:

For those who do experiment with higher prices and get those kind of reviews, do you have any advice? Do you just ignore those? Personally when I get those reviews, like, "Oh, $40 is way too much." I'm like, "Dude, come on, that's not that much money and we're doing something really unique." Are you able to just ignore that or how do you put that in perspective?

Fares Ksebati:

I think part of it has to go with the packaging. So one mistake that we've done is, it's not really a mistake, but as we've transitioned, we went from a completely free app to a paying app. An actually, over the years, we've taken away free features, we put them behind a paywall. So some of the complaints are attributed to that. So at some level, yeah, rightfully so, they could do something for free. Now they can't. So you build a level of entitlement with your community because they feel entitled to use the software that you've created for free because that's how they've always done it. So now if you all of a sudden charge for the thing that you spend time and resources on, and now they have a hissy fit. So I think it's just how you package it, that's one area we can definitely improve in. Because if people know that this is a paid offering, then no one has the right to complain because they don't feel entitled to something for free.

But if you advertise, "Yeah, this is the best app for free and you can do all these things." And then they get into the app and they can't do a lot of the things, yes, they can do some things, but the good stuff is behind a paywall, then you're going to have some level of resentment that you create. And I think every company at some level has had to deal with this. What I've noticed though is that the more premium you're offering at a higher price point, and the more you package it in that orientation, you just attract a clientele that are just ready to pay anyway. Because some people will complain at any price point, even if it was 45 cents, they're still going to complain, whereas other people, they won't want to buy a product that is perceived a lower value. So there's a little bit of psychology that plays into this. And I think it's trying to balance the qualitative psychology with the data. This is something we're constantly trying to balance is being data-driven, at the same time looking at how humans behave, which is not in line with what a logical decision would actually be.

David Barnard:

I think we see this kind of industry-wide. I like that you brought up the word entitlement because I think this is something any subscription app practitioner should be aware of and be thinking about in how they do, like you said, the pricing and packaging, how they balance freemium and all that kind of stuff, is that folks are used to getting things for free and paying with attention with their data. And so there is this entitlement nature, I think, to software is that people just kind of expect software to be free. But I think what we've started to see over the last five to even 10 years is just this slow kind of shift of the industry of, "Hey, software can actually create a ton of value in your life and that value is worth paying for." That's what actually makes me really bullish for the next 10 years is that more and more consumers are starting to actually not feel entitled to software, but actually see it as something valuable that they are going to be willing to pay for.

So that person today who would complain about just 45 cents maybe in three or four or five more years, I think the market for people who are actually willing to pay for software that delivers value to them will continue expanding over time. And so it's like we have this dual flywheel going on in the industry of creating more and better software and then attracting more users to that software, and then more and more of those users being willing to pay over time. And so if you are getting those complaints like Fares and myself about people saying, "It's too much money and why should I have to pay?" And all this kind of stuff, I think we can all take a little bit of heart in the fact that that's going to continue to get better and better over time.

Have you seen that? I mean you've been doing it eight years now. People willing to pay more and then now as you're charging even more people being... I mean it's crazy to me in some ways that people will say on a survey that they're willing to spend hundreds of dollars, but it also does speak to your category that a swim coach would be way more expensive than hundreds of dollars a year. And you're delivering a level of value, maybe not quite like having a personal coach, but directionally you're creating a ton of value that would otherwise cost way more money. How have you seen that kind of value perception evolve over the eight years you've been doing this?

Fares Ksebati:

Yeah, and I think one guy that you had on Eric Crowley, he was great showing all the industry data, where he was showing how the wind is in our sails. The market is moving in the direction that more and more people are willing and able to spend money on app subscriptions. That's growing faster than the population. It's growing faster than inflation. It's growing faster than adjusted gross income. So I've seen this in the last eight years. So in 2015, very few apps had a subscription business model at the scale that most apps do today. And even in our category of health and fitness, the big apps of the day were MyFitnessPal, Under Armour acquired them and also MapMyFitness, MapMyRun, all those apps were completely free. They never had any paid offering. The only way they could monetize was they had 20 million people using the thing, so they had sponsors inside of the app and they were basically that attention value. That's how they were able to monetize.

Only recently in the last five years has it become the norm for every health and fitness app to have some level of in-app purchase subscription. And I think the perception is now that people are willing and able to pay at a much higher level, because the consumer behavior has shifted where it is now an expectation at a certain cohort where people will actually spend the money because now it's a line item in their budget. Because they've already spent money somewhere else for an app. And so I think what we're doing in swimming, what you're doing, bringing on all these apps and talking about this, it is pushing the market more and more in the direction because most people who use the MySwimPro app and pay for the subscription, we are not their only subscription. They're probably paying for some other subscription, whether it's Strava or literally any other app they could be using. And we're not the only subscription.

So I think that benefits everyone. There is a little bit of subscription fatigue that I know people have talked about that, where it's like, "I don't want to have 17 different subscriptions". That goes back to competition. So what kind of value are you delivering in your category and is it better than what someone else can deliver in the category? And I think as a capitalistic system, I think that's good. I think it's healthy and it pushes us to deliver the best value no matter what.

David Barnard:

Well, as we wrap up, anything else you wanted to share? Are you hiring? I'm going to put links to the app and your YouTube channel so people can see what kind of content you're producing, see what's going on in all those different channels. But anything else you wanted to share as we wrap up?

Fares Ksebati:

I think that was great. I hope people enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, if anyone wants to get into swimming, we are the app for you. So connect online on LinkedIn and wherever else and hope to see you guys in the pool.

David Barnard:

All right. Thanks so much for joining me.

Fares Ksebati:

Thanks, David.

David Barnard:

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.