Can YouTube really be a substantial source of leads for your business? On today's episode of The Growth Pod, Angela sits down with Sean to learn how he leveraged organic YouTube growth to attract new customers and grow Tyker to over 9,000 customers across 50 countries.

Specifically, Sean shares:

• How to design a content strategy that attracts the right customers
• The #1 thing you can do to make content creation EASY
• The secret to repurposing your content across platforms

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Tykr

About Sean:

Sean Tepper is the founder and CEO of Tykr, a stock screener and education platform all-in-one that helps you manage your own investments with confidence.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

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Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today on the podcast we have Sean Tepper, who is the founder of Tykr, a global platform that helps people confidently manage their own investments.

With over 9,000 customers across 50 countries, Sean knows what does and doesn't work when bootstrapping a successful business. Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Angela, thanks for the invite. Appreciate it.

I am very excited for our chat today.

You're going to be kind of sharing the behind the scenes look of how you've built Tykr, but specifically you're going to be sharing how you, you leveraged YouTube as a lead generator. But before we get started, I'd like to know what led you really to identify YouTube as a place to generate leads when building Tykr.

So our audience with Tykr is the retail investor. So everybody you know hearing about a stock from a friend or hearing something on a podcast or seeing something on YouTube.

And so we had to ask ourselves the question, where are people hanging out that want to learn about investing or learn about XYZ stock, whether it's Apple or Tesla or GameStop or wherever? Well, YouTube is, it's the place everybody's hanging out. So it's pretty obvious.

So I, I had to learn like, how do these quote unquote finfluencers on YouTube, how are they shooting video and, and what are all the tips and tricks with thumbnails and titling and hashtags and all that? So I had to, it was a journey, but was able to figure that out as well. But yeah, essentially you just ask the question, where are people hanging out?

Where's my audience?

I love that.

A common theme that we're finding in conversations with different experts is that you really want to begin with that end in mind and begin with the customer at the heart of everything.

So I think it's so valuable that you started with, you know, who your ideal customer is and where they are online and built your strategy around that.

So you mentioned really making content for these people and breaking down the finfluencers and the different types of educational content already available on YouTube and adapting that for Tykr. What type of content do you post? Is it off? Like that kind of educational content? Take us through your content strategy.

Yeah, so when we first launched, we actually started focusing on stock reviews like I mentioned, you know, Apple and Tesla and there's Gamestop. And unfortunately that strategy is like, it's only an immediate event that's relevant today. It's not evergreen.

You know, people, they want to avoid losing money. You know, stuff that it could be relevant today, it could be relevant next week, two months from now, two years from now, doesn't matter.

So that's how it changed and it's the slow, steady growth. There's no vanity metrics here, but we know we're bringing in the right customers that want to invest on their own.

And then of course, those, you know, views, we hope they convert to leads because our platform is we always, or I always say at the end it's a free platform to download and use on your own free trial at least.

So I love that. I think it's so important that different type of content, evergreen versus the sort of more trendy things that can bring people in.

But it's really just a quick flash and then it drops off like you said. So you're really investing in the educational content now. How much of a time investment is it to get started on YouTube for your business?

And then how much of a time investment is it for you now?

So what I do is to make it less intimidating for your audience out there is people can think, oh gosh, is this like a second job? Or how busy is this?

So what I try to do is I call it time boxing, which is common in the software engineering worlds, is I'll set aside like maybe an hour to two on Monday and just write out bullet point scripts like never use a teleprompter. You never want to be reading. You want to be as natural as possible. So I'll create like bullet point lists.

Like for example, today I worked on a video was the five worst types of stocks to invest in. Not specific stocks like names, but types of stocks. And what I did is I created a bullet point list with a few sub bullets and that was it.

But it gives me enough of a framework to record on. I typically write for two hours on a Monday and then I'll record either on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for about two to three hours.

And sometimes it takes a little less, but I'll again, I'll set aside the time and that's it. I hand it off to my editor, which I find talent on upwork. My team is primarily all overseas and I hand it off to them.

They'll do the editing and then promote posting to YouTube. And we've got a system in place. So my time investment isn't too bad. It's just you got to, you got to block that time out on your calendar.

Got to have the discipline to do that.

Something that you mentioned is that you outsource a lot of the process.

Is that something that you started doing from the get go, or did you kind of figure out a way that you wanted your videos to look and then hand it off? And what was the thought process behind that?

Yeah, so I, I've been building software for about 20 years, so I have a lot of experience managing software engineers all over the globe. And a lot of the talent I've managed has been found through like an upwork or something kind of freelance hiring platform.

So when it came to the media work with YouTube, it was the same process. I knew. Like, I have to ask myself the question, where can I provide the most value to ticker and editing video? Isn't it? And I'm very collaborative.

Like, I like to have people come in and bring their ideas to the table. I'm not always going to be like, it has to look like this.

I'd rather shoot it, hand it off, and then I can go back to other things that are more important to grow the company. So fortunately, my team, I, you know, the hiring process is like, you want to see examples of their work and how good are they?

And that was good enough for me to see their portfolio and then be like, that's what I'm looking for. Let's go. And. And I don't split hairs on every detail of the videos.

It's like, you want it good enough, but you want to, you want to be moving forward with a purpose.

Yeah, done is better than perfect.

So I love how you said that you make sure that you're finding the right talent from the beginning and then you trust them to bring their creative vision or, you know, their talent to the videos themselves. I think that as a business owner, you have so many different moving pieces and it's important to know, like you said, where your time is best spent.

And in your case, it is outsourcing. So building on that, we've talked a little bit about the type of content and how you go about posting it.

What is the best posting cadence in your experience for ticker? And then how does that relate to the leads that you're generating.

Yeah. So we try to aim for between two and four videos posted per week. And it's kind of a mix between long and short.

The difference there is long form videos. It's the widescreen normal videos you see in YouTube and then the short, it's like you flip your phone the other direction and it's vertical.

And those videos should be 60 seconds or less. And then you can repurpose them on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok if they're 60 seconds. So yeah, that's kind of the idea.

On Mondays, I'll try to write an outline for about four videos. Sometimes it's three, sometimes two.

And then I can shoot those during the week and then we'll go into post production, editing and then those won't post next week. It might be the week after. Because we have a backlog that we're always moving forward.

But the idea there is they don't have to be perfect, but get as many out as you can on a cadence that you can manage that doesn't overwhelm you because there's a formula with YouTube. It's like when you hit certain benchmarks of number of videos published equates to number of subscribers.

And again, you want quality content, not vanity metric driven. And we do, because we do track our leads. Like for example, I'll keep this short. When people join Tykr, we ask them, where'd you hear about us?

Whether It's Google or YouTube or podcast or whatever platform. And for context there, about 17% come from Google because we do SEO and 16 come from YouTube.

We also have a high percentage from referrals from friends and then of course channel partners or partnerships. So I was like, okay, so SEO and YouTube are very much head to head. Let's see if we can get YouTube dialed up even more. So we knew it works.

And it's just the more we grow our YouTube channel, the more own platform grows. It's kind of on par with each other. It's kind of cool.

Yeah, I like that. It sounds like you're leveraging multiple channels to advertise for Tykr. One thing I didn't hear is paid advertising.

Are you running any paid ads or are you leveraging just organic?

So we, we really lean into what works best, which is SEO, YouTube and then affiliates aligning with people that are talking about finance already and they can promote ticker and then we pay an ongoing commission for that. So it's a win win. That's the best way to grow the business.

Yeah, I agree.

I think that a lot of people start a business and they're really excited to run ads, but that's not always the best place for your business and they can't, they're not always going to be profitable. So I love you said, you know, you tried it, but you're leaning into instead the things that are actually working and driving that success.

And you've been able to grow ticker to over 9,000 customers across 50 countries.

I know I mentioned that in your intro, but I just want to say that again because you were able to do this organically and I think that a lot of people discredit the type of contribution that organic, meaning that you're not paying for it, can bring to your business.

Right, right. I actually, and I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and organic is, you know, organic SEO partnerships is the big one.

You know, aligning with partner, that, that is actually the easiest way to go. I hear so many new business owners immediately, like you alluded to, there immediately arrive on paid ads, whether it's Facebook, Google or YouTube.

That's really not the end result. It's very hard to, you know, generate even a profit with that strategy.

Yeah. And I think it's natural. Right. You look at maybe some of the more established competitors in your space and you see that they're running ads.

So then you're like, oh, well, I should also be running ads. But I actually have run a lot of paid ads for big companies.

And you'll be surprised how many companies will just blow hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on ads that aren't profitable because they're funded and they have the money to spend.

So just because somebod else in your space is doing it doesn't mean that you need to be doing it and it doesn't mean that it's actually even working for them.

Right? Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so let's get back to YouTube. I took us on a bit of a tangent. Sure.

But let's, let's go through the step by step process, the customer journey, if you will, of somebody finding ticker organically, engaging with your content on YouTube, becoming a lead and a customer. Do you have that journey mapped out and then how do you bring people through that journey and encourage them to take the next step?

Yeah, so with YouTube, you know, we really focus on value going out, you know, providing value to others. And since we're, we're a low touch B2C SaaS. So our model will be very transparent. 14 day free trial, no credit card.

We won't be able to get in with least amount of friction. And then we're 15 bucks a month or 99 a year. So we try to be very in line with Netflix.

And the idea there is with for example YouTube is watch the content.

I always say at the end, if you're interested in giving ticker a test drive, we always say give it a test drive, it's your thing, great, if not, no worries. And then I always say this, that's creates a. It really removes the pressure is I'll say, don't even listen to me.

Like I'll talk about ticker and stocks all day. Don't listen to me. I always say go to our trust pilots to really see what our customers are saying. And that's when I do say, hey, we're 4.9 out of 5.

And that right there is enough for people to say, okay, I'll sign up. So then when they sign up, then the education continues. We send a new educational email every day for over 20 days.

It's a 14 day free trial, but over 20 days you get a new tip. Teaching you like, when do you buy stocks, when do you sell stocks? How do you reduce risk?

The easiest way to invest your first thousand dollars, stuff like that. And that really peppers in the value.

So leading up to the 14 days, there's enough value going to them to encourage people to say, hey, this thing is for me, I can do this on my own, you know, because that's a big thing. It's confidence. It's the number word we AB tested. Crazy. And people want the confidence on their own.

So yes, it's really education over that duration to get them to pull out their credit card and add it to, to ticker. And then, and then from there we continue the education and teaching them how to do the tool, which is all automated with our sequences.

Okay, so you start with this really low barrier to entry. You can try ticker for you for 14 days, no credit card needed.

And then you're going to bolster that or you do bolster it with your trustpilot reviews. You know, don't take my word for it. Take our 4.9 on Trustpilot, all of our reviews, that sort of thing.

And then what you do is you double down on that. So now they're in the platform, you didn't ask for the credit card. So the trust is Being established.

Trustpilot also established a trust and then you're building on top of that with all the educational resources.

And something that I love that you do is most people do like a three to five email welcome sequence, but you're sending out 20 emails in that welcome sequence once they sign up to again further create that value that Tykr can provide and it's not costing them anything. They're learning all of this. So it's really truly a value add.

So now the value that they're getting from Tykr without even having to pay for it is massive.

Nailed it. You can pitch for us now.

Well, I think it's just so important for people who are listening at home to understand that, you know, when somebody's sharing an industry best practice, like maybe three to five emails in your welcome sequence, you don't have to stop there. You can use your own experience and build upon that. And it sounds like what you've shared is people get even more emails beyond those 20 emails.

But really the 20 is kind of like the first sequence maybe that you've put together. I'm curious how often you update that email sequence.

Probably every three to six months. Refining the copy just to make it a little tighter and getting feedback from customers.

You kind of learn what are their pain points and then you address those pain points even better, maybe even adding sequences to it. I have to drill into something there. A lot of entrepreneurs can feel like, well, people may get sick of emails and unsubscribe.

Well, one of my buddies, he went to a conference that was talking about email marketing and how important it was and they had case studies and one of the case studies was Target. You know, big retailer most of us are familiar with here in the States.

And it's like they, that's their number one marketing strategy is ongoing email. Of course, it's promotions and discount on this, that and other thing.

But education on emails, most people actually don't unsubscribe and we're case study to that. People do like it. If you send multiple emails per day and they're asking people to pay, then you're going to see unsubscribing.

But if it's value going to them, they're usually most cases they're opening it and then sending it to some folder they have saved called education or investing or whatever they want. But seriously, don't be afraid to do that. The value going out to them is. It works.

Yes. I think the important thing there is that you're providing value. You're not asking for a sale 20 days in a row.

You're really trying to make sure that people are informed when they're using the platform, helping them use it more efficiently, but also making sure that everything that you're doing is providing value to them at the end of the day.

Yeah. And you hit on a key word earlier. Trust building. Trust is super important.

I love that. I feel like we could have a whole episode just on trust in business alone. But I'm really curious.

It sounds like you've been able to grow such an impressive platform already, but what's next for you, Sean?

Well, we just launched the mobile app, so super excited about that. And we did. Yeah, that, that went well. And then we launched on Product Hunt as well.

I don't know if anybody's talked about that on your show, but learned a lot of lessons there. We, we placed top 10 which gets us promoted to their newsletter. The next big thing we're really focused on are like an easy button.

Like there's pre made like lists of stocks for people. So we're working on that. We're also going to work on a community feature.

So think like Instagram but in ticker so you can talk to other investors and you could like I could follow you and when you buy more shares of XYZ stock, I get notified. Fun stuff like that. Another feature, I'll stop here after this but where you can connect your broker to ticker.

Like for example I use Schwab, but there's people that use Robinhood or Fidelity or whatever. You can you connect it to ticker and then when you buy and sell stocks they automatically update in ticker. So it's everything synced up.

So a bunch of fun stuff like that and we, we want to, you know, make this super easy for people around the globe. That's, that's the, that's the plan at least.

Yeah, I love that. I think that there's so many cool features that you're building into the platform and the community feature as well.

Again, just helps build that community around the product that you're building. If people are interested one, in joining ticker or two, just keeping up with you online. Where's the best place for them to do that?

Three easy places. Number one is you can go to ticker. Just t y k r.com you'll see in the first page there's links to the Apple and Android app.

Second would be my LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. And then third would be you can go to our YouTube channel.

Amazing. And everything that you just mentioned will be linked in the show notes.

So if you're listening at home and you wanted to visit any of those places, it's right there for you. Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. I know I learned a lot and I hope our audience did as well.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Growth Pod. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a review. It helps us reach more entrepreneurs just like you. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.