Gerard Compte: Matic is an amazing friend and we met for the first time in Milano, Italy for Growth Conference Europe when he just sold his previous business, Support Hero and I decided to invite you to this interview.

Well, Matic thank you very much I love to have friends on the show and let’s enjoy let’s inspire and let us know what about you and what you do to everybody in the world.

Matic Uzmah: Thanks for inviting me, so when we met first time in Milano it was in June. We already sold Support Hero, so we were working on a new product – ContactDome. I don’t want to do too much of promotion but just go into the product that we are building right now.

Gerard Compte: Please go as much as you want, if you give value man. Go all the way, it’s not promoting it’s giving value.

Matic Uzmah: Okay yeah it’s a tool, that’ll help you manage your business connections and it gives you the sense which are the opportunities that you’re missing, were the most valuable people and when is the right time to reach out. So it’s a combination of crystal nose and full contact.

I also co-founded referral tracking tool for developers, ReferralMagic together with David Henzel, Mert and Cem Hurturk. These are two projects. I’m also involved in the SaaS conferences and meetups, helping SaaStr in Paris for SaaStrEuropa, Vasil Azarov for Growth Conference Europe and some small events, such as Founders Talk in Ljubljana and Workshop with Sean Ellis also in Ljubljana.

Gerard Compte: Unhappy about that SaaStr, Alex Themuma wouldn’t be happy about it… 🙂

Matic Uzmah: Yeah definitely happy to help Alex as well. I love SaaStock! For me, it’s all about bringing together good speakers and good content into Paris, and since we were based in Paris for five years and it was just an amazing experience to basically to learn from SaaStock, how they do conferences, how they treat speakers and attendees that stuff like that, so it was a good learning experience.

Gerard Compte: I have never been so well looked after as a speaker in SaaStock. Alex is such an amazing, so inspiring and good at growing SaaStock community now also globally.

Going back to your previous company, tell me what is Support Hero and what inspired you to build it?

Matic Uzmah: Yeah, it took us more than two years to from earning first $ to exit. This is a funny story! I moved to France five years ago and I was part of Codable.io which is number one outsourcing platform for WordPress developers and at that time I did a lot of support and also the CEO did a lot of support. At one time, at dinner in Paris, I was discussing support problems with one of my mentors, Emeric Ernoult CEO at Agorapulse, on how the Zendesk is doing the job properly, but you don’t know exactly what your users or even customers are searching, where they have problems, and what happened if they are not reading FAQs. Most likely, the customer will churn. So, we build a widget that brings the articles from their FAQs to your customers at the right time at the right place. For example, inside the app, you have problems and how to integrate. And we showed this project to KissMetrics and they said, yeah guys that’s okay, but you know what, we need is the data. We need data that our customers are searching. Thus, we need a kind of analytics like Google Analytics for support. Anyway, we went back, we had a good amount of data about what customers are searching and if they’re satisfied with the FAQs, so that’s how to support hero was born.

Yeah guys that’s okay, but you know what, we need is the data. We need data that our customers are searching. Thus, we need a kind of analytics like Google Analytics for support.

First customers were KissMetrics and Agorapulse which is great because you have good customers to start with. This was actually my first company, my first serious company that went from idea, product, product-market fit and then to sell it. With a lot of help from my co-founder Florian Ernoult, a CTO and hero behind Support Hero, and an early investor and mentor, Emeric Ernoult.

That’s the brief story of Support Hero.

Gerard Compte: Oh! it’s Emeric! They’re brothers exactly, okay that helps math it’s a pedigree already it’s run for success.

Gerard Compte: And you saw that you started in like in less than three years you sell it company. That sounds amazing, congratulations on that. Okay, now new stuff you are on ContactDome and ReferralMagic, which I want to know a little bit more, what do you do in ContacDome.

How do you acquire customers? Just tell us a little bit, what is it for? Who is it for?

Matic Uzmah: Contact Dome is basically idea from my personal problem, you know I have a lot of connections on LinkedIn, on Facebook and you get kind of losing the all of the contacts and then somehow you forget about people that really bring you value and you also can help them so I was thinking what can I do to solve this problem. Thus, I created a spreadsheet and I gave the nodes into the spreadsheet and imagine, I mean you cannot put more than 100 people in the spreadsheet because it will be a mess. So, I was looking for tools like FullContact that merges all of your connections, but still, if I’m going to Spain and I want to meet with you, but you know there are a lot of people in Spain that you can meet so how to find most valuable connections in your contact list? So basically create some sort of scoring like a lead scoring, but partnership scoring based on mutual interactions, friends, industry, age, ever met, have you ever been to the same conference? It’s easier to reconnect and this is what we want to solve. I think it’s a hot trend out to YC companies just came out of the YCombinator this summer with the same idea but our idea is more towards business people and these two companies are more to friends. Basically to remember when somebody has a birthday, anniversary or an event, so we try to go more into the b2b as soon as possible.

Gerard Compte: Why I want to use ContactDome instead of using says FullContact or CRM?

Matic Uzmah: Yes, FullContact is definitely a good CRM tool for checking sales and these are just opportunities, it’s not tracking sales. You cannot track your friendship in the same way you track sales leads. I don’t want to call it leads to our partner, friends or peers, so it’s not the same space it’s more personal relationship management tool. Basically, the idea is to build better relationships and you can never close this lead. This can never become a customer because it can grow trust. The KPI is the trust rate.

Gerard Compte: I love it and I want to test it because I am very active, I am building relations every day. It is the quickest way of building relationships and I have Kat who’s helping me, but it’s a lot of work and I think it’s your business. This is in fact, this pays in five years this doesn’t pay today or tomorrow you and I probably may never make business directly but someone I can recommend you and better businesses meet like this. Probably one of the secrets that you saw Saul support here on I’m sure it was amazing, probably was because it’s a connection. It’s something you know could it be possible?

Matic Uzmah: It was based on trust at the beginning me as a foreigner in France definitely I had to have a lot of trust in my co-founder and the mentor. It was totally worth it.

Gerard Compte: You said you had two customers gonna players and KissMetrics. This is so beautiful that in spatial relationships and companies are growing based on relationships not just on baby ice and I think such a do you think in a way ContactDome will be acquiring the future of by FullContact?

Matic Uzmah: Yeah, they’re acquiring a lot of companies, but I don’t think about FullContact at the moment I’m thinking how can I solve the problem, get people to love the product and use the product and try to grow it and spread the love and then see what will happen at the end. Maybe we will buy a FullContact. 

Gerard Compte: Tell me more about Referral Magic.

Matic Uzmah: That’s the relationship that happened, so I met with David I think it was two years ago in London at the small conference hosted by Thomas Smale from FE International and we had a nice chat, and this is how we partner up for ReferralMagiche. David invited me to help him with a couple of ideas on ReferralMagic and some other companies that they’re building…

I like to work with them and it’s an amazing product, people love it we are not losing customers.

Gerard Compte: That’s very important. But why Referral Magic? 

Matic Uzmah: It’s easy to use, even if you’re not a developer you need one minute to set up the campaign and install it on the website so that’s a huge deal-breaker for our customers. 

Gerard Compte: Does it actually pay for the reference?

Matic Uzmah: Yeah, you can pay, you can get the rewards, discounts, Amazon cards, iPads, or general monetary reward. (Which I rarely recommend)

Gerard Compte: You did an AppSumo launch with Support Hero, right? Are you killing your brand by launching on AppSumo?

Matic Uzmah: Yes and no, I mean you don’t kill a brand on the long run definitely not. You can lose some existing customers they will go from monthly to lifetime that’s obviously easy to do, but in the long run, nobody will remember. I mean I don’t remember that you were on AppSumo so you know the brand is much more than just once you connect Sumo. So I am not afraid of killing the brand on the long run maybe for a month or two but launch you can have sumo gives you a lot of feedback from potential customers and you have to take it with a grain of salt because sometimes users on app sumo they use your product because it was cheaper almost free and their feedback is not always really relevant for you. You have to be careful which customers are you attracting. Speaking about churn you don’t want to attract wrong customers because they will churn and you know it’s a huge problem along the line. so I think you have to have a plan why are you launching on AppSumo. If you are in early-stage getting the words out PR getting feedback system analysis and you will get a lot of good customers as well so yeah there are pros and cons with a launch on AppSumo and I think it was a great experience. We were working 14 days on support non-stop.

Gerard Compte: How much did you sell? $150k?

Matic Uzmah: We did $140k in revenue, yes.

Gerard Compte: Just my experience for everyone listening and we do love AppSumo and we used to do product launches every time we have the feature noodle program. Great my problem is just to bring us 1000 registers but we didn’t get any money because you know what for free. What about if we launch every year at all in optional that’s what we’re doing I’m never going to go and we’re going to do another upstream very soon. Every tool that we have it’s going to be launched. I’m sure that’s it and it’s very cheap for us. Instead of promoting it somehow we it’s like hard people giving the feedback just like my point on that is grateful.

Matic Uzmah: Yeah! I think it’s a good tactic to combine AppSumo and then Product Hunt. When you launch on AppSumo you have a lot of users and launch on Product Hunt you’d have better chance us to get upvoted, so you can do both and not the same time but maybe with the one month or maybe two months after AppSumo, you go to product hunt. If anyone missed, before the launch of Sumo and Product Hunt, it was that we didn’t have the referral program set, as obviously do you have a lot of users and a lot of traffic and you should have the referral program so this was a huge mistake. So anyone doing AppSumo on any other launch, think about the reward and what’s the right incentive for your customers.

Gerard Compte: I said it’s ReferralMagic and you just have to launch AppSumo and make sure you have your referral because a lot of people are going to come inside and create amazing products. I want to share it and I think sharing is caring and they pay for it.

What’s a good percentage for paying for referrals that work?

Matic Uzmah: Oh! that’s a good question. We pay for referrals like 20-25% of the profit. 

Gerard Compte: That’s actually it’s something that we can talk a lot because we say 10% for you and 10% for the person who’s coming. Then if not, it’s just going to jump to their own link and then if they come with your link then it ends up to 20%.

Matic Uzmah: Just one example I had two calls yesterday with one real estate company and one e-commerce so we’ll do a step company they have for each converted referral they give away an iPad, but they can afford an iPad. For e-commerce, if you’re selling phone bumpers or something that it’s a band something that costs $50 you cannot afford to give so you can give 10-20% off it depends on your margin. Still, it totally depends on the business you’re in what it was selling and what’s the right incentives. Ecommerce they usually go with Amazon cards. 

Gerard Compte: I love it. I’m certainly going to be implementing ReferralMagic. Hopefully, my co-founder loves me and we’re going to put on running today, also ContactDome, I want to download it and see how it works. 

Matic, when is the book for what are you going to learn to put man she did the first exit now you’re like a successful entrepreneur you need to have you book out.

Matic Uzmah: I never thought about writing a book. I’m just a heavy reader for now. The more I read the more I know that I don’t know about a lot so I will wait maybe for 10 or 20 years. I love to write short articles and thoughts about business, philosophy and relationships in general but yeah I’m not a professional writer.

Gerard Compte: I remember the day that we meet we actually you know Sean Ellie’s never answered my messages damn and we send messages to everyone when you’re such a well-connected Matic which I love it to the doctor we had there with of insurance and I think it’s so magic and Matic thank you very much for being in the show I see you in a few days on Dublin and I’m sure we’re going to have amazing fun.

Matic Uzmah: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

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