How Snappa Grew By Leveraging The Existing Audience | Christopher Gimmer

Christopher Gimmer is the Co-founder and CEO of Snappa.

In 2014, he left his job as a controller to pursue his passion for entrepreneurship. Since then, he and his co-founder have launched and grown a variety of online businesses.

I had the opportunity to interview him on the 13th march last week.

Time Stamped Keynotes- Christopher Gimmer Interview

[01.30]- Chris has a background in finance and accounting, so he had no experience any experience in tech

[02.16]- His partner knew how to code, so they both started working together

[02.54]- He launched an online dating app for students

[03.14]- Initially they got 1000 signups, but they did not know how to do online marketing

[03.51]- After struggling with business expansion, he realized that he needs to learn online marketing and client acquisition

[04.09]- They launched their second business and drove traffic to their website by doing SEO and content marketing

[04.32]- They published a blog post on “Where to find stock photos for free,” and then launched Snappa

[05.21]- They have sold their bootstrapping marketplace and free stock photos website as well

[06.54]- When they launched the beta version of Snappa in July, they already had 4000-5000 email

[07,16]- They kept the app free, and when they launched it in November, they already had 12000-15000 active users

[08.00]- When they officially launched their website in November, they offered the beta testers lifetime discounts offers if they upgrade within one week

[09.22]- When they were doing content marketing for their previous company, they found that they need a tool that is easy to use and creative as well

[09.42]- When they were running a free stock photo website, they asked its users about the problems they face while creating graphics for their content

[11.15]- They leveraged their existing audience of the free stock website for their new but complementary business

[12.11]- They started their keyword research to find out what could they potentially rank for

[12.44]- They published different guides about sizes of different social media headers which helped them rank for different keywords

[13.14]- In the blog posts they would promote their tool, and they kept creating content around the keywords of their niche

[14.38]- Their marketing manager is responsible for researching keywords they should be creating content around

[15.21]- In the start they only used to post one article a week, which did not work so good

[16.17]- They started focusing on backlinks with content.

[16.44]- Snappa now has great domain authority and great SEO because they focused on quality content and backlinks

[18.12]- If you pitch others to come out and link to your website, and your content is like many other similar posts available, there is no incentive for them to do so

[18.48]- If you have the best piece of content about a topic people will be willing to link out to you

[19.50]- If you are new and not able to build backlinks by creating relations, then guest posting can be the option to consider

[21.03]- SEO works great for some businesses, and not for all of them

[21.23]- As a marketer, you have to find out which channel is going to work out for you the best

[22.27]- Chris loves SEO because it only requires to put some specific content, keep updating it time to time and it will send traffic for a long time

[23.16]- They spent $40,000 on the snappa.com domain

[25.08]- In the beginning, it is not important to have .com domain

[26.16]- Snappa has all the templates and features that anyone serious for content marketing will find useful

[27.13]- They are rebuilding some systems that will help create animations and videos to snappa as well

[27.54]- Chris talks about the power of compounding

[28.53]– Saas business takes a long time to grow, but they grow behemoth with time

[29.33]- Chris wants to do anything that will improve his life for consecutive days

[30.39]– Success does not happen overnight. It takes time to grow a company

[30.56]- Chris recommends reading the book “Traction.”

[31.26]- You should think about marketing from day 1 of building your product

Key Takeaways-

• Snappa’s website
• Book to read