Fast Track Interview

Fast Track Interview

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: I’m talking with Jeff Walker from Product Launch Formula. I’ve known Jeff since 2003 or 2004. He is the brains behind something that’s been very successful in the information marketing community called a product launch, and he is here to talk about it. Jeff, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jeff: In 1996, I had a passion for the stock market and started selling primarily stock market information online to day traders and investors. I had a business degree from Michigan State University but no real knowledge of marketing. I didn’t have selling or real marketing experience. I had never even run a business.

It turned out I had some decent content and was really good at selling online. I gradually started to figure a few things out about selling. I bootstrapped everything, built the business out of my basement, and then stumbled onto something I call the Product Launch Formula.

With this formula I would release new products or re-release current products. My first product launch was $1,400. Then I did one that was $28,000. I began to see sale results where in a week I would make the amount of sales that typically took me a year. It was true profit because I built up a list and literally the only expense I had was merchant fees because it was an information product with digital delivery and no marketing cost.

In 2003, I started talking publicly about this formula of releasing products gradually. Then I started taking on clients in addition to teaching others in the information marketing space. Suddenly, I did $106,000, which back then six figures in seven days seemed like a big deal. Now multiple times we’re seeing $1 million in an hour. Recently when I released a product, we did $1 million in an hour, and over a day period we did almost $4 million. People have used this formula with nearly any type of product, service, niche or market you could imagine.

Adrian: Why don’t you talk about some of the list sizes you’re working with and the sorts of results you’re seeing?

Jeff: If I’m doing an internal launch, which is just a launch to my house list, I’m looking for a minimum of $50 in revenue per e-mail address on the list; I have even achieved close to $150 in some launches. This is with small lists of 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000.

The one with almost $4 million was a list of about 45,000, but it was a full out external launch where we used our house list and also went to joint venture partners who were mailing. It’s impossible to calculate exactly on a per name basis because we don’t know how many of our partners are mailing and the metrics get a little messy.

I’ve done some launches with lists of 1,000 or 2,000, but typically we’re working with a list of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 to get those kinds of metrics.

Adrian: What happens from the start to the finish of a launch?

Jeff: The key is we’re always looking to turn our marketing into an event, and we’re always looking to create conversations with our prospect. It’s a sequence deal. From the very beginning, you’re letting your market know something is coming. This is pure direct marketing.

If we look at direct mail, there’s often been a three-letter sequence where you send a letter and you follow up with another letter to whoever hasn’t bought asking, “Why haven’t you bought?” Then there’s another letter saying, “Just frankly, I’m puzzled. I noticed you still haven’t taken advantage of this.” The problem with this is it costs money, there’s no interaction, and it’s slow.

With the Internet, the speed of communication is obviously faster than we’ve ever had with any other type of publishing media. The cost of that communication is negligible, and there is the interactive component.

If you put together a sequence that is e-mail-driven, blog-driven, Twitter-driven and you’re asking for feedback in the first piece of the sequence, you’ve now opened up the conversation. Basically you’re trying to get people excited and let them know something’s coming.

When people hit a sales page or get into a sales process, their defensive mechanisms and detectors immediately go on full-out red alert. The way we’re doing it is gradually working them into the process by starting with a survey and coming back with some good content around the offer while educating them. We’re gradually taking them into the sales process without turning on all their defensive mechanisms.

Often the way I’ll do it is with a survey or a simple e-mail asking for a response. This happens often three or four weeks in advance of the launch. We’ll do the initial survey or just ask them for feedback and send them to a blogpost where we’re asking, “We’ve got this product. We’re just about to release it. We just want to make sure we have everything covered. Could you tell us what’s the most important feature or the most important thing you want to know?” It doesn’t matter whether it’s an information product, a service or a hard good, we are looking for feedback to get that interaction going.

When they give you the feedback, they’re giving you questions that are really objections. Now your goal is to answer those objections in the pre-launch process. That’s typically done by publishing some special reports, some videos, some audios, blogposts, or PDFs within a few days. A week later you come back with more content. The content is usually educational as well as aspirational and speaks to the underlying want that you’re looking to fulfil. You’re also answering whatever objections they have raised. The whole idea is to get them more excited, and to make them feel engaged in the conversation.

Within the sequence you are using a lot of the standard influence triggers. These are the mental triggers that have worked and will continue to work. Some of them are scarcity, social proof, commitment, consistency, and community. There are probably about 10 of them that we hit, and you don’t have to always hit all of them.

Overall we’re taking them through a three or four-week period where we’re gradually doing a soft sell over time, and getting them more excited. Then typically, we will walk down to launch day and we’ll have some type of a special offer, special pricing, special bonuses, or limited quantity. It’s something that gets them to act right on launch day. Then it’s simply a matter of hit and send, and at launch day the sales come pouring in. Then there’s a whole follow-up process after that launch day.

You can do a launch that’s a day, a week, two weeks long or whatever, but what you end up with is this huge flow of sales coming in. If you do this properly, you also build incredible rapport through the process and end up with extremely happy buyers, which means you end up selling to them again and again and again. Even the prospects that don’t buy tend to be very enthusiastic and happy.

Adrian: Maybe you can talk about the Neil Strauss launch. He’s the author of The Game which has been on the New York Times Bestselling List for a long time.

Jeff: Basically, Neil has an information product on how to meet and pick up women. I didn’t personally work on this launch, but I bounced a few ideas around with Frank Kern, who ran the launch. Neil provides videos at a very high price point. They also had a nice scarcity element because they only had so many available. Since they had a hard limit on the number of copies they would sell, which I think was around $1.5 million, they completely sold out within a few hours. That product was not about how to make money at all; it was just about how to pick up women. He walked right through the whole product launch method, and it was successful.

My clients have had great success in all kinds of weird little niches. John Gallagher sold an educational board game about edible and medicinal plants and herbs. There have been products for carving wooden dolls, massage therapy, and business coaching in Poland. This stuff’s been done all over the world: Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East.

Adrian: The business coaching in Poland worked?

Jeff: This stuff can be so cookie cutter, you can literally drop it into various markets. In my course, I gave a sales letter I had used in a product about day trading. The lady in Poland took that sales letter, pretty much cut-and-pasted it and used it for her business coaching. Obviously, she had to change the offer and the product, but the whole sales letter was essentially my stock trading sales letter. It worked great with business coaching in Poland.

It works in all kinds of markets and niches with online and offline services. Right now, everyone has too much media coming at them. If we look at 10 or 15 years ago, we didn’t have cell phones, e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, 500 channels on TV, satellite radio and advertising on your airplane tray when you fold it down. A year and a half ago, we didn’t have Twitter.

We have so much more media coming at us, but our brains have not expanded their capacity to absorb all of that. There’s this incredible marketing fog and people are not reading or even seeing your messages. At the same time, people are fundamentally bored and disconnected.

In my opinion, people don’t spend much time interacting with other people. They don’t spend as much time building relationships with other people because they’re sitting in front of their computer answering e-mails. They’re sitting with their BlackBerry until all hours of the night. You have this combination of a fog of too much media coming at us and, at the same time, we’re fundamentally bored and looking for a connection.

If you put together one of these launches, you end up cutting through the fog by creating a connection. You create a relationship with thousands of people through this process by collectively walking through a process that leads up to an event with communal feel. It’s where just going through something together with a large group of people at the same time creates excitement.

Adrian: What do you say to people who say it’s a scam?

Jeff: There’re plenty of people that think it’s a bunch of charlatans. All I know is that my clients and students have done well over $100 million in launches in the last couple of years. It’s worked for all kinds of things. It’s basic human influence. Every one of us is trying to influence people as we go through the day. This is just a technique to amplify that influence.

If I said, “On pain of death, you have to go sell this person this product and you have 24 hours to do it,” you would probably drive over to their house, sit in front of them and try to make the sale that way. If you have to make a sale, generally the best way to do it is in a face-to-face environment because then you can read all the cues coming off of someone.

You can see if they’re interested, if their eyes are rolling or whatever. It’s more effective to sell face-to-face than say via magazine advertisement, direct mail or even telemarketing. That one-to-one sale is the most effective way, yet the only problem is that it doesn’t scale. You can’t make tons of sales sitting in front of someone.

With Product Launch Formula, we’ve taken the best of both worlds. You get the scale by publishing but with the interaction that you build with the entire market. Even if it’s not one-on-one interaction, you get a lot of the benefits that you would get from that face-to-face selling. Now the market starts to guide what triggers you need to hit, what you need to say next, and how they want to be sold.

Adrian: What are some of the biggest launches that have happened in the Internet marketing world?

Jeff: There’re two answers to that one. StomperNet did a launch where they put about 1,500 or 1,600 people into a program that cost $800 a month. They built a business that was doing over $1 million a month. In the last couple of years since then, I think their business has done at least $30 million in sales. I think that’s probably the biggest launch, not in terms of launch-day sales but in long-term sales.

When I rolled out my Product Launch Formula course, I did $3.73 million in about 34 hours. After that, Frank Kern’s Mass Control did about $3.5 million, and Rich Schefren had a launch that did about $3.5 million.

A lot of the time people hear these numbers and go into disbelief. They think your product launch is a bunch of hype and you’re going to bankrupt your future by torquing off your market, your niche, your list, your competitors, and your partners.

The reality is the Internet’s a fantastic communication medium, and all you’re doing is using that communication medium to communicate, create relationships and to hopefully form a community. You don’t end up torquing people off. You end up with a really powerful business, a really powerful list, and really happy customers.

This isn’t just a matter of sending a bunch of e-mails. It’s a matter of being interactive, walking people through this process and getting them excited. It’s amazing how creative people have been since I started teaching this stuff. What we’re talking about are mental triggers that work and they’re going to continue to work until basic human psyche changes.

The interaction, the community, the getting people involved, the getting people excited, the positioning, and the market share you can grab for one of these will often go far beyond the dollar sales. I encourage anyone to think about how you can bring what we talked about into your business. You don’t have to do the full out product launch the way I do them. If you only add in 10, 20, or 30 percent of these components in your business, the results can be shocking.

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: We’re here with Scott Tilton, CEO of the Loop’d Network. Scott, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and where you’ve come from?

Scott: I was born and raised in New York. I am a former competitive action sport athlete. At the age of six, I started racing BMX bicycles. When I was 10, I transitioned into motocross, which I did for about ten years.

I got my Masters Degree in Internet Business Systems and had one job out of school. It was pretty miserable, so I tried to find opportunities to work in the action sports space and combine it with the Internet. Nothing really popped out at the time, so I founded a company called SponsorHouse.

In 2003 I moved to San Diego, in a motor home, with SponsorHouse and my business partner. We didn’t know anyone when we showed up, so we started pushing to grow the company. That year we won a business plan competition, which led to our first angel-round funding.

SponsorHouse was around for about five years and was the prequel to Loop’d Network. We essentially used the same technology, the same investors, the same team, and rebranded under the Loop’d Network to expand the business model.

Loop’d Network is an online action sports network where athletes and enthusiasts can register for a profile, interact with others, and attempt to get sponsored from about 400 brands who are on the network. We charge advertising and e-commerce fees to sports equipment companies and mainstream advertisers who are focused on reaching our demographic of primarily young males, mostly in the 12 to 24 year-old age bracket, which is the sweet spot for action sports.

Adrian: Why change the name to Loop’d?

Scott: When we first started as SponsorHouse, we were a sponsorship service. Over the years, we found that we were starting to lose some opportunities to work with some key brands and athletes.

Oakley is an example of a company that was hesitant to work with us as SponsorHouse. We had a great relationship with them and knew we were going to work together at some point. It was understood that while we were SponsorHouse, they didn’t want to put the message out that they were sponsoring athletes. As soon as we launched Loop’d, we did a one-year deal with them, and we launched the Oakley Rider Search program. They actually renewed the deal after that first year. It was implied sponsorship, but the word “sponsorship” never showed up anywhere.

When it comes to sports marketing, brands are very specific and particular about how they get involved with things. On the action sports front, it’s a little bit trickier because you’re taking a risk. If the athlete turns out to be a punk or is a bad image for the company, it taints things for the company and the brand. It’s the same way with sponsorship; companies just keep a really tight wrap on who they will associate their brand with in order to protect the identity of the company.

Adrian: Outside of the sponsorship side, what do users actually do with Loop’d?

Scott: Our members can register on the site, receive a profile and have access to different features such as sponsorship, photos and video applications. We have 400 brands on the network, and we immerse those brands into the experience. With sports, brands are just part of the lifestyle. People in action sports really identify themselves based on the brands: the clothes they wear and the equipment they use, so they don’t view them as advertisers but as active participants in the sport.

The members on the site are looking for sponsors. They’re uploading massive amounts of content, mixing it up, mashing it up and redistributing it to other social networking profiles. They’re getting deals on products and entering contests from the brands to try and get sponsored and win products and incentives. Then they’re using it as a more traditional social network to connect and interact with other members who are into similar sports.

We have a lot of hopefuls on the network who are trying to figure out how to promote themselves, how to get a foot in the door with the different companies for sponsorship and using it as a self-promotion tool to break into the action sports scene.

Adrian: Is that a model that could then be replicated across other verticals where you have a community of people that want to move up, such as actors, writers or people like that?

Scott: Absolutely. We’ve chosen to focus on sports because it’s really what we know and have been most passionate about. We have been approached by a number of people about everything from music to horseracing, rodeo and actors. The biggest categories that come to us on a regular basis and ask if they can use it are musicians, bands, and gamers.

Adrian: Did you originate your concept or did it come from somewhere else?

Scott: We were definitely pioneers with the sponsorship model. Prior to SponsorHouse, there really was no solution for up-and-coming and amateur athletes to get sponsored. Back in 1999 - 2000, the traditional process was an amateur athlete would write a resume, post his competition results, and throw some photos into an envelope. If he was lucky enough, he would put a video in there for sponsor reps or team managers to look at. And he would mail them to a company.

Some of the more popular companies like Oakley and Quiksilver would get tens of thousands of applications for sponsorship, and most of them would never get looked at because no one was designated to sift through all this information nor did they have the time to do it.

When we launched SponsorHouse, it was a community site with profiles where team managers could specify the criteria of what types of athletes they’re looking for. For example, “I’m looking for a 14-year old motocross racer from New York.” If you fit that criteria, then you could contact that company.

It’s a way for them to streamline the whole application process. We were the pioneer in developing that type of concept that really brought the world of sponsorship to a much larger audience of athletes from all over the country at multiple levels beyond just professional.

Adrian: Does a company typically say, “We need to find a 14-year-old guy in New York City” and then your system finds a 14-year-old skateboarder in New York City?

Scott: Correct. It works one of two ways. They can create a sponsorship listing that would enable people to contact them or they could do a search to pull all the people that fit their criteria. They can browse profiles, look at photos and videos, see how many friends they have, what people are saying about them, and what kind of ratings they have. They can get a better gauge of who they’re looking at and what type of person they are based on who they’re friends with. At the end of the day, it’s essentially marrying the effects of social networking with a commercialised process like sponsorship.

Adrian: How does the social networking fit into this then?

Scott: In addition to trying to get sponsored, the members of the site are also out aggregating networks of friends and fans. For them, the more people they have in their network, the more valuable they are to a sponsor. That way when a brand sponsors a particular member, they now get visibility to all of their friends. It’s a very creative grassroots marketing program where the athletes’ online identity is sometimes as valuable, if not more, than their offline identity.

Adrian: If someone signs up, how are they promoting? What types of different tools do you let your guys use?

Scott: During the signup process, you have an option to import your address book and see who’s already on the network. You can invite people that are off the network. You can also do the traditional invite-a-friend.

Where we get more viral is on the sharing and inviting. Let’s say I’m a member with 500 friends in the network and 500 people I can communicate with off the network. I can post an update to my profile that says how I placed at a specific event. When I send the update, it will immediately notify all of my friends on the network as well as send an e-mail to all the people off the network. Then they have a link to visit my profile to see the update. They’re basically promoting themselves, which is helping to pull more people back into the network.

We also have a partnership with a company called MixerCast. Their technology is a mash-up type tool where the user can pull in Flickr photos, YouTube videos, UGC content, and music. Then you can create a mash-up, which is just mashing all this stuff together or essentially a timeline video editor.

For us, the application was perfect because now we offer a solution for a 14-year-old skateboarder to upload all his content of him doing tricks, put it together through the timeline editor, add music to it, and post it to his Loop’d profile. Then he can also share it and post it to his MySpace profile, his Facebook profile, or his Bebo. Anyone that wants to interact with that particular video or create their own has to come back to our network.

Overall, we don’t invest in marketing. We do some PR with our partners, but we don’t invest much in paid search at all. We don’t buy traffic or do print or event marketing. For the most part, everything is organic and word-of-mouth, and we get anywhere from 1,000 users and up a day to register.

Adrian: Why don’t you do something like Ning and be the network for connecting brands to communities?

Scott: Our network does have elements of Ning. For example, if you go to monsterarmy.com, it is the grassroots athlete online community on the Loop’d Network for the energy drink Monster Energy. We went to them two years ago to present the opportunity to build a branded community around the Monster Energy brand and position it as a grassroots community for athletes to connect with the brand. That community works almost identical to Ning where we offer a set of tools to brands to be able to build communities on our network.

Adrian: Why don’t you take that to support any potential vertical and allow all brands to come in?

Scott: We’ve considered it. From a resource perspective, we’re privately and angel-funded so we’ve been focused on making sure we went to action sports as a vertical first. We have actually been approached by several people. We’re now actually pursuing licensing opportunities to have different business teams that are interested in pursuing other verticals, and we’ll do more of a joint-venture/licensing arrangement with those types of companies.

Adrian: Let’s say you have 500 friends, and Monster Energy is sponsoring you. How is that sponsorship done so it’s not turning off those friends?

Scott: Immediately upon entering into an agreement with a company, such as Monster Energy, the logo shows on their profile. Monster now has visibility and real estate on their profile as a sponsor.

It’s then tied to everything the member does, so there’s always an insignia that specifies who the brands are that are sponsoring them. Immediately the member can also share with the rest of his friends and networks that he has just been sponsored by Monster. Also every member has an activity feed, and they can see what is happening with the rest of their friends on the network. That sponsorship will show on their activity feed for everyone else in the network to see.

Adrian: How much does a typical sponsorship agreement go for?

Scott: It really depends on who you are. Typically, the levels start from discounts off retail pricing on the equipment that you need, which ultimately saves a lot of money. That’s where most of the amateur athletes fall. Once you start getting into the very talented, up-and-coming amateur athletes who are on the verge of turning pro, they start getting free products. Then once you turn pro, a lot of those athletes are on straight pay. It’s not a rich man’s sport. Whether it’s surfing, motocross or skateboarding, as a pro you can start out making anywhere from $10,000 up to $10 million depending on who you are.

Adrian: Is the $10 million deal done through your site or do they do that directly?

Scott: They do those deals directly. The pro athletes who have agents and managers use our network strictly as a way to build fan bases and to promote their sponsors. They’re not doing deals on our network. We never wanted to be in the middle of the sponsorship deal or in competition with the agents or the managers of these professional athletes. We’re just the network where people can connect with each other.

Adrian: Given that you’ve got a monetisation model here, how well is it working?

Scott: We’ve actually monetised extremely well. Our site is free for members now. For a brand to get onto our network and be able to interact with our members, they have to buy a profile, buy a community, buy display advertising, or set up a storefront or do e-commerce where we get an affiliate fee.

The profile is very similar to a MySpace or a Facebook profile except brands can use our sponsorships services, interact with members and have visibility to a very targeted demographic.

The community is like a sponsored group, such as the Monster Army concept I mentioned. When you buy a community, you have a whole set of tools to take over the look and feel of our pages and add different modules whether it be a contest, a poll, featured members or featured athletes.

Then we have a traditional display advertising model, which has been our least area of focus. The brands also have the ability to link up with their own stores or create their own storefront on our network, and they can sell products with deals to our members.

Adrian: You actually have a couple of business models all rolled into one. Can you tell me page impressions?

Scott: We view about 12 million to 15 million pages a month and we have 400,000 members right now, most of which are active. In terms of revenue per page, we’re in the $20-plus CPM range for revenue per page which is unheard of when other social networks are in the pennies.

Adrian: The nuances may be different as well because in other areas like in Facebook, advertisers can be often viewed as unwanted intruders whereas in your area, everybody wants the sponsors.

Scott: Correct. We’ve layered the brands into the experience where they’re not positioned as advertisers. They’re positioned as other participants on the network. We have a brand engagement metric where 85 percent of our 400,000 members have engaged with brands on our network. When they have sent sponsorship applications, they’ve entered a contest, and they’ve become a friend of that brand, they interact with them and have a relationship with that brand so the brand can now talk to them on a regular basis.

Fast Track Interview

Adrian: I’m here with Jason Nazar. He is the CEO of Docstoc, a site doing lead-generation through providing free documents and templates. It’s an interesting model I’ve never heard of that actually sounds pretty smart. Before we talk about Docstoc, Jason why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and where you come from.

Jason: Sure. I’m an LA native. I went to college in Santa Barbara, and I have an MBA in law from Pepperdine in Southern California. I’m a serial entrepreneur. Docstoc is the third company I’ve started and the first one on the Web.

I started my first company out of college. For about two years, I went around the country doing motivational speaking to high school and college students in addition to corporate sales training and communication seminars. After that, I was the Director of Marketing and Sales at a non-tech start-up in Southern California.

While I was going through grad school, I started a consulting company with one of my classmates, Michael Sheridan. We were consulting for start-ups and small businesses in the Los Angeles area. That’s really where I got the idea for Docstoc, which had its one-year birthday on October 30, 2008.

I would spend hours a day looking for documents online. I built this really great repository of digital documents on my own personal computer. One night at 1:00 a.m., I thought to myself, “It’s really hard to find quality documents. There should be something like YouTube or Flickr for documents.”

I wanted to build a place where anybody could get any document fast, easy and for free. I started self-financing Docstoc when I was a student in law school and working by myself. Then I met Alon Shwartz; soon afterwards he came on as our CTO and the cofounder of Docstoc. I maxed out my credit cards, took out some student loans, and used all the money I had saved, which wasn’t a lot. I basically tried to build Docstoc with a firm in India. Then to continue it, I raised an angel round of capital as I finished law school.

We are backed by the venture capital firm Rustic Canyon and have a lot of great investors from the LA community including Brett Brewer from Intermix which is the parent company of MySpace, Kamran Pourzanjani from PriceGrabber, Matt Coffin from LowerMyBills, and Robin Richards from MP3.com. Michael Jones who sold Userplane to AOL is also one of our board members.

We now have over 2 million unique visitors a month and are getting close to 10 million page views a month.

Adrian: What’s your opinion of the LA tech scene?

Jason: By pure numbers, over the last year or two Los Angeles has been the fastest-growing segment of venture investment. There’s a really burgeoning tech community down here. It’s obviously different than the Bay, which is all about “the tech community” and Web 2.0 sites.

What you find is a lot of folks here focus more on money and business, and a little bit less on product and user experience. Folks in the Bay focus more on product, user experience, getting traffic and reaching a critical mass with a little less focus on making money. There’s a lot to learn from both, honestly.

Adrian: How does Doctsoc actually work?

Jason: Our goal is to build the largest repository of professional and productivity documents anywhere. The value proposition is that you can get any legal, business, financial, educational, or creative document you need fast, easy and for free.

Conceptually, it’s similar to YouTube in that it’s user-generated content. People all over the world upload their Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. You can preview all those documents on our site, and then you can download them.

The way we monetise this is that we have a lot of professional content so we’re good at capturing what somebody’s intent is. If somebody comes to our site and looks for an LLC operating agreement, a partnership agreement, an invoice template or a set of financials, we know a lot about what’s going on in that person’s life and what they’re looking for.

There’s the opportunity to have really targeted advertising against those documents as well as do lead-generation. We’ve spent most of the first year trying to build a good product with our revenue model in mind and grow the traffic. Now that those two things are going pretty well, we’ve refocused our attention to developing a successful lead-generation model.

Adrian: Let’s say I’m looking at a document on how to form an LLC. How do you capture my information, pass that on as a lead, and sell it?

Jason: We’re working on integrating that aspect now, and it will be on the site in the first of the year. I’ll also defer your question because it is a little confidential in how it will work.

Adrian: Do you become a repository for sites that are being promoted on Digg? Do you then have to deal with the Digg effect?

Jason: Yes, we’ve been on the front page of Digg a lot. I’m a really active Digg user myself and have gone there for years to read and get alternative sources of news. A lot of our content has been highlighted not only on Digg but on reddit, StumbleUpon and other sites.

Because we’re a content aggregator and we deal in so many different topics, not just legal, business and financial, our content has a way of finding itself all over the Web. We also get a lot of people linking to us from blogs, and our content also gets promoted on social media.

A lot of sites even use us to embed documents. Instead of having a link to say, “Click here to see this PDF or this press release,” you can preview that document right on your site. It’s an interesting better-viewing experience for users, and a lot of times it’s a better way to share or promote documents.

If you go to TechCrunch, Huffington Post or Chicago Tribune, they will take documents that are on our site. For example, Huffington Post ran a story on the Senate Bailout Bill that came out with the proposed bill for the United States Congress to bail out $700 billion for private industry, and they embedded the Bailout Bill using Docstoc.

Adrian: How do you get your traffic? If you’re 2 million uniques a month, how did you start from nothing to get to that?

Jason: We basically get traffic from people who come directly to the site. We get traffic from a lot of referral sites and blogs that link back to us. For example, one of our documents is embedded in a TechCrunch post that Erick Schonfeld wrote about whether iPhones are better than BlackBerrys. People see that, and they click through to our site.

A lot of our traffic also comes from natural search as our documents get indexed in search engines. For example if you go to Google and type in LLC operating agreement, we’re the first natural result, not paid result.

Adrian: Are you tied into the Digg network where guys are communicating quite a lot about stories and working to get content up to the front page?

Jason: I’m tied into a lot of networks and social sites. Some people make model airplanes. Other people play basketball, and others go to movies; it’s what you enjoy doing. It’s not the totality of what I do in my free time. The fact is that I am an Internet geek, and I really enjoy diving into other people’s products.

It also gives me a better sense of what builds a good product and a good community. It’s a little hypocritical if I’m asking people to get engaged and use the Docstoc experience if I’m not doing anything like that on the Web myself.

Adrian: Have your ties and connections into the traffic-driving community helped you grow your company?

Jason: Sure. The day Docstoc went live a piece of our content made the front page of Digg. Our site was shut down for 20 minutes because of that. All of a sudden a lot of people saw this site that nobody else had. Right now, Digg is not a really significant portion of our traffic anymore.

The fact that you’re tapped into a social media community and into people who are evangelisers on the Web and blogs, use social media sites, and get the word out virally is really a big deal. When you first start and don’t have a budget, you are trying to figure out how to get people to know about you. I really threw myself into figuring out how people drive traffic on the Web to get as many people knowing about Docstoc as possible.

Adrian: Why do you do that and not have four people on your team focused on doing that?

Jason: I enjoy spending some of my incremental free time at 1 or 2 in the morning, when I’m blurry-eyed from doing work, just playing on Internet sites. It’s also like anything else where you’ve got to do it for the right reasons. If you go on a social site and your only goal is to promote yourself, people figure out your intentions. People are smart and catch on whether it’s in person, over the phone, on IM or in chat. Maybe one time, you can get one story to do well in one social network, but it’s not sustainable over time. My approach is that I like these communities, I like these people, I want to promote Docstoc, and I don’t see any of them as antithetical to each other.

Adrian: Within these communities, do they ever say to you, “You’re asking me to promote this Docstoc story again, but you are the CEO and you’ve obviously got a vested interest in this. We’re doing this for free, and we’re not getting paid. But you’ve got financial incentive here so I can’t promote it.”

Jason: I can honestly tell you I haven’t got that reaction that much. Forget that it is social Web. If you’re always trying to promote yourself and you never try to help other people with their issues or your only interest is in trying to promote yourself, you’re the guy everyone wants to stay away from.

Here is what I do when I’m on Digg or different social sites. I’ll see different people submit stories. Since I like their content, I’ll probably pay more attention to it and check it. Every once in awhile, somebody will send me an e-mail saying “I thought this was a cool story,” or they’ll shoot me an IM. If I think it’s a cool, interesting story and it adds value to the community, I’ll look at it if I have time.

Adrian: Let’s say you had a story you wanted to promote. Let’s assume that it’s not Docstoc-related. How many people are you talking to about that? Are you e-mailing them? Are you using IM with them? How does that actually work?

Jason: When we first launched, I put in one or two things and then drilled on. For what you’re saying, I don’t really submit Docstoc stuff. If people know me and promote my story because they like me personally or they like the company, that’s great. Any help or notoriety that anyone wants to do, I’m very thankful for it, but I don’t put in my own stuff into social media. I just kind of draw the line there. There’s also a little fact that I’ve got a company to run. There are 13 or 14 employees here. I don’t really spend most of my time doing those things.

Adrian: I don’t understand then. How are the relationships you have with the Diggs, the reddits and the other communities helping promote Docstoc? Is it just because they know who you are and give you an extra bump?

Jason: Yes, probably. This isn’t the stuff that I do during the business day. Late in the night when other people are going out, drinking, or partying, I’m here in the office and playing around with those communities.

A lot of times I’ll take those hours to surf the Web and look for other people’s blogs. I’ll leave comments on their blogs, share their posts with others I know or I’ll reblog on my blog about what they’re doing. People will take notice, be thankful, and check out what you do. The fact is also that people will link back to Docstoc because they see me as an active blogger.

Adrian: Is it then almost more about brand recognition and knowing who you are?

Jason: I think a lot of it is authenticity. People take to other people that are good folks and try to help them out. Honestly, I don’t claim to be the smartest or the best CEO. What I can say is I genuinely try to help out whomever I can when I can. I’m not always successful at it, but whether it’s my employees here in the office, people asking me for advice on how to raise money or start a business, or it’s a 15-year old kid that asks me over chat to read some article he wrote, I’m generally trying to be a nice guy.

If you try to be nice and good to most people, it’s eventually a better way to live. You’re happier and it probably comes back on the end. Whether it’s in social media, on the blogosphere, or in trying to raise money, if you’re down-to-earth, humble, and tell people what you think you can and can’t do, it’s not necessarily always going to get what you want but people respond to you a whole lot better.

Adrian: We talked about a lot of stuff. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to tell us?

Jason: We really try to make it as easy as possible to help get your documents online. Think of all the valuable documents you have on your computer. A lot of people ask, “Why would I want to share my documents?” People share their documents because they want to promote their content, they want to promote their business, service or Web site, and they want to contribute to a larger repository. Billions and billions of invaluable assets live and are hidden in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents. They’re trapped on all these computers, and we’re trying to free it all up.