Lead Gen at

A case study on inbound

Russ Heddleston - Co-founder & CEO at

Previously: - Product Manager at Facebook - Co-founder and COO at Pursuit - Also at Dropbox, Microsoft, and Trulia - BS/MS in CS at Stanford - MBA at Harvard

Product Overview

A little background on

• Started in 2013 • Based in San Francisco • Went from zero to over 1,000

paying customers in 2015

Trusted by world-class teams

Product Overview

tracks and analyzes who views your docs

Completion rate

Total timeContact

info

Slide - by - slide snapshot

Time per page

Slide preview

…but how do we actually find new customers?

Finding customers is hard…

But it’s not impossible.

Product Overview

Things that didn’t work

Hiring a PR firm. We spent $30k and got nothing.

We spent thousands on online advertising.

Viral marketing that wasn’t relevant enough.

Click me

Product Overview

An example of what did work

Publishing a 19 page report on fundraising last June.

Click me

Product Overview

Why we did it

People love DocSend for fundraising, so we had data.

Target entrepreneurs and investment firms.

These accounts convert well, but are too small to target with ads or by directly contacting.

When entrepreneurs use DocSend, they often later have their sales teams use it as well.

Product Overview

What were the results

Over 1MM views in total

182 linking root domains to DocSend.com

12k shares on Facebook

Over 1k companies signed up for DocSend

We still get over 10 new companies each month

Product Overview

How we did it - the creation

It’s sensitive data, so we had to be careful how we surveyed a subset of our users.

After getting opt-in, we crunched all the numbers in-house.

We spent $4k on a design firm to make it look nice.

Product Overview

How we did it - the posting

We gave TechCrunch the exclusive.

After they posted, we hustled and emailed lots of other reporters (this had a low hit rate).

We reposted on LinkedIn, found their community manager, and got them to feature us (450k visits).

We posted on our own company blog.

Product Overview

What did we do well?

Spoke to a major pain point - fundraising.

We had never-before-seen data to contribute.

We legitimized our brand by co-authoring with Harvard.

We used social proof by including real pitch decks.

Our research was actionable.

Product Overview

What would we do differently?

Have a hypothesis you’re trying to prove: • Don’t boil the ocean. We spent WAY too much time on analysis.

Do PR pre-outreach: • Pre-pitch while developing it to identify what reporters are interested in.

Include more aggressive up-sell at the end: • The first version didn’t have any call to action to sign up for DocSend.

Thanks for being here!

Russ Heddleston Co-founder, CEO