The Bright Ideas eCommerce Business Podcast | Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories
BI 308: The Viral Launch Growth Story with Casey Gauss
April 7, 2020
How do you keep your customers? That’s a million dollar question for most businesses. There are other business providers who can offer better rates than yours or better services than yours, so what makes yours different?  In this episode, listen as Casey Gauss, Founder and CEO of Viral Launch, discusses how customer experience changes the game when it comes to retaining and expanding your customer base. Viral Launch offers innovative software and creative services to Amazon sellers.  Viral Launch originally catered to third party sellers on Amazon when it was launched in 2014. Now with 70 employees, they’ve expanded their scope of service and began providing a suite of tools, software, and services to Amazon first party sellers who serve Fortune 100 clients worldwide. The SaaS solution helps sellers figure out what market to after, optimize listings, and manage overall Amazon advertising to name a few. Viral Launch offers these services in monthly or annual terms, and customers can personalize which feature they want to have for their business.  Casey shared that while it’s good to initially bootstrap your business from ground up, nothing beats having access to capital to accelerate your business sooner. This allows you to have more resources allocated for the things that really matter for your company to grow. While Casey mentioned that having a long term goal is a great common practice, one also needs to pay attention to their company’s short term goals as it then has a ripple effect when it comes to measuring how far along are you on hitting your long term goals. In terms of marketing, Viral Launch were able to grow their customer base organically through word-of-mouth and sole website-sales conversions. Despite this, Casey recommends investing in a marketing team and a good marketing strategy to make sure that your team is developing products that are really needed and demanded by your chosen niche. This way, you’re sure that all your invested resources are well spent. Hiring people who can really do the job and those that are the best of the best in their fields is always a good practice as you strive to reach your goals. Taking a non-conventional approach to interviewing candidates can help you assess them as a person and not as a job-hunting individual. “I will walk into Starbucks. Which is like two blocks away. We'll grab coffee and we'll talk.. And you know, you get to learn a lot about the people that complain about having to walk two blocks.. And sometimes that's great because you really get to see, wow, this person isn't an amazing fit.”  Having a really good support team and customer success team who’s there to take care of your customers 24/7 can really make you stand among your competitors. Closely monitoring your customer service metrics and hiring the right people to lead your customer service team are two important factors to help a business keep their customers. There are many tools and solutions you can use out there for this. You can never go wrong with providing a great customer experience! Listen to the podcast to hear more tips. Resources links can be found at https://brightideas.co/308/