REFERRALS – TAP INTO THE POWER OF ADDRESS BOOKS

Tips on how to tap into the power of address books by Jay Gibb

Our tool lets people select people from an address book without having to leave the website.
5-7% of people who choose to use their address book will generally produce 50% of the referrals that actually get sent. 
We've got a bunch of content on our website around those incentives and how to choose them and how to test them.
So, the most important thing, I think, is to be very careful with what you do with the email addresses that you're being given.
Send the email, do what your user is asking you to do, and then obliterate all memory of that email address.
As soon as people started buying CloudSponge, I wish I had started doing case studies on them.

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REFERRALS - TAP INTO THE POWER OF ADDRESS BOOKS

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REFERRALS - TAP INTO THE POWER OF ADDRESS BOOKS

Our tool lets people select people from an address book without having to leave the website.

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Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're gonna talk about technology and marketing. We're gonna talk about how to engage with your users, contacts, and generate more leads, referrals, and virality or viral referral programs. Our guest today is an expert in this space. Their company works with some of the bigger names, some that you may recognize like Airbnb, Stitch, Hired, as well as GoFundMe and Nextdoor. So I'd like to welcome Jay Gibb.

Jay is the founder and CEO of Cloudspace, which is a B2B SaaS company, and he is also a partner at a distributed software engineering consulting agency called Arizona Bay. He and his team have built hundreds of online businesses with entrepreneurs over the last 20 years and he's an expert at helping nontechnical and quasi-technical entrepreneurs build new software products and management technologies and teams for their ventures. He's also a dad of three young kids and he's gonna share a little bit with us near the end on how he manages to balance, stay focused, run his companies, service his clients, but also make sure that he's got a good time to spend with his kids. So if you're interested in using technology to leverage your business and generate more referrals and get people into your database, I would suggest listening in and I would like welcome Jay to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.

So welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast, Jay. I’m super excited to be talking to you today.

Jay Gibb: Hey Doug, how ya doing?

Doug Morneau: Good. So it's interesting looking and talking a little bit before we got on air about work/life balance, but we're gonna talk about some business and marketing stuff as well. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background in terms of the venture that you're running and how you got that started and manage to run a new entrepreneurial venture and still look after your family?

Jay Gibb: Sure, yeah. So, CloudSponge is a company that's been, we started in 2010, 3 years I guess before I had my first kid. So we got started when it was just my wife and I. It was a little bit easier back then. And the way that that company got started was actually a byproduct of some other work, so we were building some software and one of the features that we needed for the software we were building was the ability to import address books. So we were building integrations with places where people typically store their address books. Gmail and Hotmail, Windows Live, AOL, Yahoo, etc. And as we were doing that, we saw like just a ton of people in places like Stack Overflow and used other development forms like Google Developer Forms and things like that,