Interviews
Interview with Mailbutler’s UX/UI designers Magda and Yadira
We spoke with Mailbutler UX/UI designers Magda and Yadira to find out more about the process of implementing the Tags feature.
In this interview we talk to co-founder of Encharge Kalo Yankulov about his career and experiences.
Tiffany studied Language and Economics, and now likes to write about business topics and conduct interviews with interesting people. She spends her free time looking after her plants and with her dog.
Kalo Yankulov is a growth marketer and the co-founder of "Encharge" – a marketing automation software built for SaaS companies. "Encharge" helps early-stage and middle SaaS companies convert more free trial users to paying customers through targeted automated emails. Already back in 2016, Kalo founded his first SaaS, HeadReach, which he grew to 7,000 users and more than 300 customers. Today he's with us and we have the chance to ask him some questions about his career and experiences.
From an early age, I knew I wanted to work with computers. When I was 8 or 9, I made make-believe laptops from cardboard and cut paper sheets in a circular shape, pretending I have a massive collection of game CDs that I can run on my imaginary computer. Bear in mind, that was in the early 2000s, and there wasn't a lot of technology circulating in Eastern Europe at that time. When I was 11, I designed my first website, still remember it to that day.
I wouldn't get through the day without my morning routine. I usually get up around 5 AM, have a quick breakfast, and continue with my morning routine, which consists of reading my affirmations, recording my daily audio journal, 10 minutes of meditation, and an hour of gym workout.
I get to put on many different hats and expand my skillset daily. I like that I get to face new challenges regularly. It keeps me grounded, focused, and excited to get on with my work.
My close friends know that I love playing Dungeons & Dragons. If I wasn't working on tech startups, I'd probably be a professional writer of tabletop roleplaying adventures.
Sales calls.
Great question! My career started in web and graphic design. I always wanted to work for one of the top design/marketing agencies, so I went to study abroad as a graphic designer. During my second year in university, I had the chance to work for a leading London-based agency named Elvis. I did design tasks for big brands like Virgin, NBA, Sky. The people in the agency were nice, but the job was boring as hell. If you're starting out in one of these places, it takes years until you get to work on meaningful projects.
Disappointed from my experience in the advertising world, I embarked on my startup journey to build and work on my own products. Design is important when it comes to great products, but marketing brings the customers, so I had to learn how to promote and sell my products. The rest is history...
I still use my web design skills when creating new products, but I find the marketing skillset much more valuable.
It has its own challenges and benefits. The biggest challenge is the lack of a local startup network and access to customers. This is especially difficult if you're starting out and need to do customer development and talk to potential customers.
That said, it's much cheaper to do business in Bulgaria than in other more developed countries. Plenty of tax incentives and cheap labor are available that can help you kickstart your business here.
It's a tough question because our tool does many different (and should I say complex) things! Encharge helps startups send more relevant and targeted emails to their users automatically in order to turn free users into paying customers.
It really depends on the business model, the complexity of the product, and the value of the customers. As a startup founder, I believe product-led growth is here to stay, and more sales-driven companies will turn to the model of offering free trials. As a customer, I wish that all products had a free trial. It just makes the whole evaluation process so much easier.
All the time. We also make these mistakes often. One of the biggest misbeliefs of growth marketing is that you can fix a leaky marketing funnel by doing more. I've experienced that first-hand. Bringing more website traffic to a product with poor positioning will simply result in that: more website traffic or even worse — more untargeted leads. Marketing is not a fix for foundational business problems.
Have a hypothesis. Launch your experiments quickly. Measure results. Collect data and build the next hypothesis.
We're helping one of the leading chatbot builders, Landbot.io, convert users to paying customers. We're happy to have Landbot as one of our first customers and provide a better onboarding experience to more than 80,000 people that like to create intuitive conversational chatbots.
I wish for a less crazy year, growth for all tech products, and health for everybody. I know it sounds cheesy, but what more there is to ask for?
Have you already read our interview with Jeff Sanders? Jeff is the founder of "The Rockin’ Productivity Academy" and host of the super successful podcast „5 AM Miracle“. In our interview, he tells us how important it is to live healthily in order to work at full productivity.