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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

👗 Beginnings at Garment Valet & challenges

🚬 Smoke-testing and how it helps startups

✍️ The practicality of a smoke-test

👘 Referral marketing with Talkable

🛠 How to gamify referral mechanics

👟 The best point in a customer journey for a referral

🌻 How to ensure your referral plan is lucrative

🧘🏻‍♀️ How tapping into communities can help your referral’s success

🍯What kind of companies should not opt for referral strategies?

🤳🏽 Airtable, Uber & Airbnb – some companies with good referral mechanics

🤽‍♂️ Common mistakes that companies make with referral programs

🏐 How the referral behavior changes outside the US market

KEY QUOTES

The ups and downs of new business ventures

When you start a business, you either realize that you’re pushing a boulder off a cliff, which is a good thing, or you’re pushing a rock up a hill. And this was definitely a rock-up-a-hill type of thing. The margins were bad in the laundry business, nobody wanted to fund it because there was a recent, large company called Zooks in the area that was started by two very senior guys, Todd Krasner, and Tom Stemberg. They had a massive failure in the laundry business and nobody wanted to touch it.

There is no substitute for a good product

Referral programs work, first and foremost, if you have a product that people love. That’s one of the things that people forget. You can’t just tack on virality to a crappy product, because nobody’s going to share something that they’re not really passionate about. First and foremost, referral programs work when the product is good.

The importance of a contest element

We used to do programs several times a year where it was a tiered reward program. And we would say, “Invite your friends, when they make their first purchase, you get $25 and you’re giving them $25 to make their first purchase.” Whoever refers three or more friends during this short period of time is going to get an additional $50 bonus. And then whoever refers the most friends gets something free. It was kind of a contest tied to that. At Grabr also there was a contest. I liked the idea of adding in this contest element, or competition with the referral programs. It gives people talking points about entering for a chance to win, but it has the referral mechanics tied in and people earn points, dollars or rewards incentives somehow just for participating in many different ways.

Immediate incentives gurantees a successful referral program

 

I was volunteering at a dog shelter. I learned a lot about behavior by doing that, during the time when I was working at Talkable. You don’t train a dog to lie down in one fell swoop. You do little motions, and you get them to sit with little incentives. And eventually, they learn to lie down. I think referral marketing is actually very similar to that.  Where you have to make the user very successful early on with little bits of feedback and rewards for just doing positive actions, like sharing, because their first share might not be successful. If with that first share they’ve taken the time to share your brand and there’s no feedback that’s positive from that, even if it’s just showing them like their friends are clicking, and other friends are interested, then they’re never going to do it again. Because they’re afraid that they have done something that might damage their network. It’s very important if you instrument a referral program to make sure that people who share feel the success immediately after they share in some capacity,

A great user experience always converts to sales

 When somebody checks out, and you show them an overlay that covers the receipt page and asks them to invite their friends, you have a lot of people in the UX camp who say, “Well, that’s a terrible user experience.” Because what happens to a new customer that hasn’t actually tried the product yet? We’re asking them to share, maybe they want to see the receipt page, etc. If you look at the numbers, though, programs that have that overlay, in my experience, have a 5x to 10x higher referral rate than programs where they just put it in line on the receipt page. That makes a huge difference.So this means you can’t really measure the damage that you’re doing, though. It’s just annoying people. But the numbers in sales really speak for themselves. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth Rao

Dom, I’m excited to have you here today. 

Dominic Coryell 

Thanks so much for having me. 

Shamanth Rao 

Let’s dive right in. Your first business was Garment Valet. What inspired you to start this?

Dominic Coryell 

The funny thing here is I’ve actually been a co-founder of multiple businesses and I was not the very person with the idea. In this case, it almost happened accidentally. I was at college at Northeastern, and I was really strapped for cash. I saw a piece of paper that said, drive for Husky Express. I expected that this was some giant bus that I was going to get to drive around campus or something and get paid $10 an hour. I met this guy who had this very small delivery route for laundry that he had just started. And it was basically picking up laundry for college kids, and then dropping it off the next day.  He and I really hit it off. We talked for about eight hours the first day and within the first week, he said “It would be good if I had more customers.” 

I took that into my heart and started to work on finding more customers.  About six months later that summer, we started a new business called Garment Valet. I was a 50% owner and the CEO for whatever that’s worth in a small laundry company. We took a tech angle and within a few years, we went from $10,000 a year in revenue to over $1.2 million.  It really did become a company which was a lot of fun. But it was completely accidental in the beginning.

Shamanth Rao

That’s such a wonderful story. I did not know that even though I’ve known you for a long time. And I know you grew it to a seven-figure business and expanded it to multiple cities. I’m sure it had its challenges. Can you tell me about a challenging time that you face at Garment Valet?

Dominic Coryell 

Pretty much the whole time was an uphill battle. It wasn’t until my co-founder in the later company really explained things to me.

When you start a business, you either realize that you’re pushing a boulder off a cliff, which is a good thing, or you’re pushing a rock up a hill. And this was definitely a rock up a hill type of thing. The margins were bad in the laundry business, nobody wanted to fund it because there was a recent, large company called Zooks in the area that was started by two very senior guys, Todd Krasner, and Tom Stemberg. They had a massive failure in the laundry business and nobody wanted to touch it. 

But the biggest challenge that we had was that we couldn’t get funding, and we were losing $30,000 a month and we really couldn’t figure it out. It was all on our credit cards. We were in massive amounts of debt as two young guys. And what happened was, we mapped all of our orders, and we saw that we were losing money on the majority of the orders that we were doing that were not in certain regions, then we drilled down to those regions. 

It sounds like a no-brainer now, but the reason why we weren’t making money was, in condo buildings the delivery expense of picking up and dropping off was evenly applied to 20 orders, as opposed to dropping off one order at a random Brownstone on Beacon Street. We had this plan to nix all of the customers. It was a three-month plan or we’re going to be out of business in three months if we didn’t act that night. So what we basically did, we just sent an email out to all the customers in the other areas and said, “Hey, we’re sorry, we can no longer serve you.” And for all of the high-rise buildings, we added a refer a neighbor program where we just gave people credit if they referred somebody in their buildings. Within about 45 to 60 days, we had positive $10,000 cash flow, and it completely saved the business. That was really the biggest challenge and that was how we got past it.

Shamanth Rao

Wow! I don’t think it could have been easy when you’re staring down a ton of credit card debt and you’re still in college, and you didn’t have a ton of business or life experience. And I think it is incredible how you turn this situation around. 

The concept you’re best known for is what you call smoke testing. Can you tell us what smoke testing is and why it matters for startups?

Dominic Coryell 

Of all the topics that I’ve spoken on, smoke testing seems to be the one that is most popular, and people really respond to it and it resonates well with them. I think it’s because it applies so widely across the board from people who want to start a business all the way to execs at big companies who want to validate or test an idea very quickly.  Smoke testing essentially is when you have an idea for a new feature or a new business, and you’re not sure if it’s going to work. It will take you lots of time and potentially resources like money and engineers in order to build it to figure it out. So you find it a much shorter way to validate it. It’s very similar to what was popularized in the lean startup with a 404 test. 

The difference is just that it’s done in a way where you actually gain a customer list rather than just sending people to a blank page. So it’s really just stringing systems together to see if something is going to work. And it’s critical for startups to do that. Because you don’t have a lot of time. And when you hide behind the product roadmap waiting for growth, oftentimes, growth never comes in, and it can get hijacked, and your business is out of business before you had a chance to build your customer list.

Shamanth Rao

Got it. What you mean by a smoke test is that you build a low-fidelity prototype with very minimal engineering resources. Is that a fair understanding?

Dominic Coryell 

That is a much better definition than I just gave. Yes.

Shamanth Rao

Great. 

I was wondering if you had an example of a company that you worked with that used the smoke test that saw a tremendous impact from a smoke test just to help our listeners understand the concept in a little more detail.

Dominic Coryell 

One fantastic example that I can more clearly outline is the Pigeon Box one where they sold to parents of college students, subscription boxes of goodies that would arrive monthly for the students. Profitability on boxes is very hard.  Lots of boxes were doing this “add the box”,  which is a feature where at the very last minute you are going to add an item to the box which of course increases profit because the shipping has already been paid for. 

Adding this feature was going to take at least several weeks because it had to be designed, and in the systems, and the problem was that it was already April. Finals were around the corner. If we didn’t get this out in a few days, we were going to miss the last box of the year and we wouldn’t be able to test it all summer. 

So we basically just sent an email out to all of the people who had a box going out and said, “Would you like to add the surprise item to your box? click here.” When they clicked, it opened up a browser that then just passed the email as a parameter through the URL into a type form. That typeform had a hidden field that did not look like a form at all, it just said, “Success. we’re adding this to your box for $5.” 

We had a list of people who actually did this. We then just sent that list to the supplier and then they knew to just add extra items to that box. We manually charged those people in Stripe. The result was that  40% of the people added the boxes and increased gross profit per box by 80%. That became a built-in feature that was part of their product moving forward.

Shamanth Rao 

Actually building the addition to the product would probably take weeks, you guys found a lightweight way to send out emails that offered pretty much the same functionality, almost as a way of validating and proving that people actually wanted to add an extra item to their boxes before you actually built it out.

Dominic Coryell 

Yes. That’s exactly what we did. Through the years there have been countless ways. It’s just become a mentality, the most critical path to getting the information or the result that will lead you to take the next step.

Shamanth Rao

I think that was such a great way to understand whether something even worked before you actually built it into the product. When you smoke-test and move that quickly, surprising things can also happen. I remember you telling me about this time when you started the food delivery business. You did that almost nonchalantly, can you tell me more about that experience?

Dominic Coryell 

We were hanging out at my friend’s house and we were really hungry. We kept looking over all the menus. We couldn’t decide on what we wanted to eat. My friend just said, “wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app that just knew what we didn’t like, and we could just press surprise, and they just send us a surprise meal?” We were like, “yeah, that’s actually a great idea.” 

Needless to say, we never went kayaking the next day. Instead, we bought the domain surprizr.com. We built a really quick webpage. We went through a series of different little smoke tests that day using Facebook ads. About a week later, we had a working prototype just

stringing systems together. The smoke test there was we basically sent people to a webpage or mobile web page that said, “Are you hungry?” “Enter your zip code.” 

To get started, people would enter their zip code. On the next page, we’d say, “Surprise!” or “What a surprise, we don’t serve your area.” This was presumably okay because it was in people under their zip code, and nobody was going to go back and enter every zip code in the US to see whether or not we actually were a real business. That had great results. 

Then we decided, “How do we take the next step?” and we thought, “Do we get space in a kitchen?” “Do we build a delivery network and go work with restaurants?” The answer was that we just didn’t have time, we all had full-time jobs. What we did was hire a team in Pakistan to work with us. Every time an order request would go in, they would go on Eat 24 and they would just match something that would match the dietary restrictions. 

We then told them, “The food we put in the delivery box is a surprise order please take off the receipt.”  We of course had to do a little bit of an upcharge. If somebody was spending $20 a meal we would only spend 14 or 16. We requested “Please say “Surprise” when the person opens the door too.” 

We thought that there was no chance in hell that this is ever going to work. But when we asked customers what their favorite thing about Surprizr was, overwhelmingly people said we love the way all your delivery drivers say “Surprise” when we opened the door. That was just an idea of stringing together different things and it was ramping up to close to 100 orders before we decided it was just not profitable and it was a distraction.

Shamanth Rao

This is exactly the reason I enjoy talking to you so much. So much of what you do almost nonchalantly just blows my mind.  After Garment Valet, you started your next company, Talkable. For those who don’t know, it is one of the leading referral marketing companies in the world with clients like Bonobos, Hotels.com, Gap and many more. 

So Dom, what is referral marketing? And how does it impact the company’s growth?

Dominic Coryell

For this type of referral marketing, we were focused on peer-to-peer referrals. That’s when you invite your friends and you’re both incentivized in some capacity to use the business. We were not focused on the affiliate style, which is like one-to-many, it was really more focused on many-to-many. We really hit the peak when this was all starting. This was a business that had the right time, because it was when all of this was becoming popularized, after Dropbox and Paypal etc. and everybody wanted that type of model for their business.

Shamanth Rao 

Just to jump in, can you just tell people about Dropbox and Paypal very briefly?

Dominic Coryell

The full story here is very greatly illustrated by Sean Ellis in Hacking Growth. Everybody knows Dropbox, the file storage service, and one of the ways that they skyrocketed to fast customer growth was through their invite-a-friend where it was like, “Give space and get space.” 

It worked so well because there’s implicit virality baked into the product. In order to use the product, there’s a great network effect, because your photos become better when you can share them with other people and other people can contribute to them. Adding an incentive to do that as well on top of it really added fuel to the fire. 

People looked at that and think Dropbox was an instant success, because of the referral program. We wanted to add that to our business. If you listen to Sean’s story in Hacking Growth, it illustrates how they didn’t just build a referral program and throw it up. It didn’t work overnight. There were tons of iterations just like any for a referral program. But nonetheless, that mindset really helped us. It meant that people started to search for referral programs. We were open to having conversations about referral programs, and that landed itself quite nicely to us being able to market our business.

Shamanth Rao

Talkable had companies set up referral programs of their own similar to PayPal and Dropbox and everything. I’m fascinated by referral programs, simply because the refer-a-friend box is very ubiquitous. But it continues to be very, very effective for companies. Why do you think referral programs work?

Dominic Coryell 

Referral programs work, first and foremost, if you have a product that people love. That’s one of the things that people forget. You can’t just tack on virality to a crappy product, because nobody’s going to share something that they’re not really passionate about. First and foremost, referral programs work when the product is good. 

The other thing that blocks referral programs from working a lot of times is that there are not enough relevant tasks in the customer journey. You really have to find the right times to ask the customer where it doesn’t interrupt their experience, but it’s actually complimentary to their experience. And of course, keeping the program fresh, where you are constantly changing the incentives, and maybe you actually are using referral mechanics. But people don’t necessarily know that it’s just a strict refer-a-friend. Most people don’t really like to “refer a friend” because it feels a little dirty. If the invite mechanics can be a little bit more gamified I found that that works well.

Shamanth Rao

Help me understand what that means when you say gamify the invite mechanics. 

Dominic Coryell

I think that the most successful campaigns are just that, they are campaigns. Back when I was working with Bonobos many years ago,

We used to do programs several times a year where it was a tiered reward program. And we would say, “Invite your friends, when they make their first purchase, you get $25 and you’re giving them $25 to make their first purchase.” Whoever refers three or more friends during this short period of time is going to get an additional $50 bonus. And then whoever refers the most friends gets something free. It was kind of a contest tied to that. At Grabr also there was a contest. I liked the idea of adding in this contest element, or competition with the referral programs. It gives people talking points about entering for a chance to win, but it has the referral mechanics tied in and people earn points, dollars or rewards incentives somehow just for participating in many different ways.

Shamanth Rao

In many ways, it satisfies people’s need for competition, as well as progression. It’s not just, “Hey, invite a friend.” As you pointed out, it can feel kind of in your face and dirty. It’s interesting that you can structure a referral program, almost by sort of messaging it very carefully. 

You also said it works best if you surface referrals in the right area for the customer journey. Can you elaborate on that? And what might the right areas be?

Dominic Coryell 

For repeat purchasers, sometimes even first-time customers I love post checkout because essentially people are very excited when they make a purchase. I’m sure there are some products where people are not excited like utility bills. But anytime after somebody’s made a purchase, it’s exciting. 

Anytime after somebody’s left a good review, anytime after you’ve given something for free to a user. For example, experimenting with something like a boosted listing, and then giving them a listing for free, and then asking them to invite their friends after that usually increases share rates. Then, of course, just making it frictionless. 

The typical email invite programs are usually rigorous for the user, because there’s a little box that says, enter your friends emails separated by a comma. I don’t know any of my friend’s emails by heart. But if you just send me an email that is worded for myself and for my friends so that email itself is like a referral ad that I can just forward from my inbox, where all the contacts are stored, that type of thing increases the likelihood that people are going to share. 

It was interesting, because I was volunteering at a dog shelter. I learned a lot about behavior by doing that, during the time when I was working at Talkable. You don’t train a dog to lie down in one fell swoop. You do little motions, and you get them to sit with little incentives. And eventually, they learn to lie down. 

I think referral marketing is actually very similar to that.  Where you have to make the user very successful early on with little bits of feedback and rewards for just doing positive actions, like sharing, because their first share might not be successful. If with that first share they’ve taken the time to share your brand and there’s no feedback that’s positive from that, even if it’s just showing them like their friends are clicking, and other friends are interested, then they’re never going to do it again. Because they’re afraid that they have done something that might damage their network. It’s very important if you instrument a referral program to make sure that people who share feel the success immediately after they share in some capacity.

Shamanth Rao 

So you build a positive reinforcement loop. When users take an action that is helping you as a brand, they get some kind of reward, even if it’s small. In a referral program, you’re paying people to refer their friends. 

I remember reading that one of the big worries of PayPal at the time was they were paying real money to people. They were just afraid they might go broke because they were paying out so much money just to get users to start using PayPal. So my question to you is when you’re instrumenting a referral program for a brand, how do you make sure you don’t go broke?

Dominic Coryell  

That’s a very real concern. All referral programs are prone to be gamed. Just like any other channel, there’s going to be fraud, but specifically in referral programs, there’s more of an incentive usually for the fraudsters to stick their head out. So it’s extremely important that you have the right tool to track as much of that as you possibly can. 

The best way to block referral fraud and prevent going out of business or going broke is to align your incentives with those that a good user would want. For example, don’t give away like PayPal did give away free money. I have no insight as to how that worked for them, it seems like it worked. 

I’ve had some horror stories of companies just giving away money. If the incentive for the friend is not an incentive that would only attract your customer, then you probably should not give that as an incentive, because you’re going to bring in a lot of people who are not potentially talking to your customers. 

You want to just make sure that that first incentive for the friend is something that actually is bringing in good customers with great retention. It would be like a percentage off of a large order. There’s always the lever that you can pull, where it’s like, well, do we just need more revenue? Or do you need more profitable revenue? If you just need more revenue, then you can be more aggressive with your deal if you want the right types of customers, and you can be a little bit more refined.

Shamanth Rao 

You clearly saw a lot of companies that implied referral marketing, what was a company that nailed referral programs that was a total surprise to you?

Dominic Coryell 

There was actually a company that signed up. We had a self-service product at Talkable. We had a lot of companies on the platform that we never really were very high touch with. But we would always pay attention to one metric, which was the percentage of sales from referrals. That was always a very healthy indicator that the company was running a good referral program. 

Then we would look at total sales from that too. One of the companies was a sex toy company and it had ridiculously high referral rates, of course, only through email. But when you send the link, nobody was posting on Facebook. That totally blew my mind because I would not think that that would be something that people would be sharing.

Shamanth Rao

I wouldn’t expect people to share about sex toys, especially via email, or do you have any hypothesis for why this happened?

Dominic Coryell 

It was probably just that there was a community around that. That people were very passionate. It was probably a lot of people who are friends and enthusiasts were communicating with each other about that anyway. And then they’re just like, “Oh, my God, look what I found.”  It was a time and a place where it worked well, for them.

Shamanth Rao

Yes. That makes a lot of sense. I think there was a time and a place and a community where it actually worked. 

Speaking of unlikely customers that you had that talk about, what sort of companies do you think should never do referral marketing?

Dominic Coryell 

There are two types of companies. Companies where their main competitive advantage is price. Meaning that they are competing on price. Also, people buy companies where there’s just a general distaste for user experience or the product.  I would equate that to utility companies. That’s probably pretty obvious. I’ll talk about the first one. 

Online retailers, who are actually just retailers have a very hard time acquiring real customers, they’re really acquiring just transactions. That’s because they don’t own the brand, they don’t have the value chain that’s their own. For example, Bonobos did really well because they own the entire value chain and it was their brand. They had visibility as the only place that you could buy Bonobos. 

When you transacted you were in their customer funnel and you were actually a customer. Whereas there are a lot of electronic stores online, where they’re selling a commodity, and giving people an incentive off their first purchase or reward is most likely not going to encourage a repeat transaction. We found that that was very challenging, even though they were very big companies, especially internationally. We found that what was very challenging for them was that the retention from referred customers was nowhere near the ones that own their value chain.

Shamanth Rao

Yes. If you have to make referral marketing work, you have to be able to own that customer relationship for the long term because otherwise, you can’t be giving money away to get a one-time transaction. The other category you said was utility companies, why do you think referral marketing does not work for them?

Dominic Coryell  

One reason is that it seems like a monopoly, you have to have it so that you don’t really have an acquisition problem. Just trying to think of companies that you transact with where you’re not happy to do it. Anytime you feel upset that you’re spending money on something, it’s probably not a good time to ask people for a referral incentive. 

Shamanth Rao 

That goes back to what you said earlier, about asking for a referral when a customer has had a good experience. Your customer has just made a purchase, she’s very happy, and that’s when you ask, “Hey, would you like to invite a friend?” If a customer is just annoyed, it’s probably not a good thing to ask.

Dominic Coryell 

This topic of post-checkout is a very debated topic in the referral community. There’s not a very big community there.

When somebody checks out, and you show them an overlay that covers the receipt page and asks them to invite their friends, you have a lot of people in the UX camp who say, “Well, that’s a terrible user experience.” Because what happens to a new customer that hasn’t actually tried the product yet? We’re asking them to share, maybe they want to see the receipt page, etc. If you look at the numbers, though, programs that have that overlay, in my experience, have a 5x to 10x higher referral rate than programs where they just put it in line on the receipt page. That makes a huge difference. So this means you can’t really measure the damage that you’re doing, though. It’s just annoying people. But the numbers in sales really speak for themselves. 

Shamanth Rao 

I think that dynamic is aesthetics versus business. I think that’s always an ongoing debate in any field in any space. What do you think separates a good referral program from a great one?

Dominic Coryell 

I think you have to separate what your definition of good is. Is it good because it performs so well, or good because it has all of the correct mechanics? A referral program that I think performs amazingly, is Airtable. 

I think the team is amazing and using their product is a joy. That’s why their referral program works so well. And it has that same Dropbox ask where like, using Airtable improves as you have more people in your sheets. You get incentives for all of that. I have so many incentives wrapped up in my Airtable account, that I don’t think I’ll ever pay for it. I think the mechanics of the program are actually quite not so great, like the landing page, mobile is not optimized, but somehow the product is just so that it works. 

Shamanth Rao 

What does Airtable make? 

Dominic Coryell 

It’s like smart spreadsheets. You take the dynamics of the base, and you make it a user interface. 

When you look at mechanics, the most refined best in class referral program I’ve ever seen is Uber’s. They’ve just done such a fantastic job of really using the data that they have and customizing the entire experience putting it into the customer journey in the right way. Knowing which of your friends are actually on the platform versus not on the platform. So you don’t spam people who are already there. 

There’s room for improvement, I’m sure, but those are perfect mechanics, and I’m sure it also has really good performance for them too.

Shamanth Rao 

In terms of the mechanics, Uber just customizes that referral experience so that referrals reach people who are most likely to want it.

Dominic Coryell

That’s definitely one part of it. Also, the experience for the person who’s coming in is very customized. Airbnb is really doing a good job of that too where the friend’s landing experience is very customized. It’s very clear, the incentives that you get for referring a host versus referring a guest. It didn’t use to be that way, it used to be very confusing. So they put a lot of light into that. 

I forget some of the gaming companies that have done this, but there are lots of really great ways to use it. I’m sure you’d probably be more familiar with this using the cell phone, look at the cell phone data of the contact list. For example, there was an app called Down to Lunch.

They showed me the people who I should invite, and Dave McClure would always show up at the top, probably because his number was on so many more people’s phones. They knew that he was an influencer in some capacity. So they were prompting everybody to invite the person whose phone number was showing up in the most number of records on their database because they wanted them to expand. There are interesting dynamics that you can do.

Shamanth Rao 

It’s almost like you can mine the social graph just to understand who is the most likely to respond positively. It also sounds like a company like Uber and Airbnb, looking at every single touch point for their customers and just optimizing the hell out of it. 

What are some of the common mistakes that companies make with referral programs?

Dominic Coryell 

Probably not having things optimized for mobile, not understanding the empathetic part of when a customer really wants to share your product, showing the referral program in the wrong places, and not having the incentives correct. That’s one of the biggest ones. If you’re going to just incentivize one party, based on the data that I’ve seen across tons of programs, it usually makes sense to incentivize just the friend, because people who are earning an incentive tend to be spammy.  

Also, when it comes to incentives, understand the lifetime value of your customer, because if you have a very high lifetime value of your customer, you can afford to give a really great incentive. There’s a direct correlation usually, the higher the incentive, the higher the performance of the program. 

Then the last thing is that people think that referrals are just a customer acquisition channel, because you can use referrals to activate customers, to re-engage customers etc. 

And of course, the retention mechanics of referral programs. Referral programs can really boost value and increase the retention of the existing user. Referrals really touch the entire part of the funnel. That will be one of the larger mistakes that I think people forget when building out their growth model.

Shamanth Rao 

Another aspect of Talkable that I’m so interested in is that I know that you guys saw quite a bit of international growth. How did you see referral behavior change outside the US, compared to the US market?

Dominic Coryell 

The thing that we noticed the most was that people were using the link share, copying this link a lot more than they were using your typical email share, or your typical Facebook share. 

I think that’s because there are a lot of localized social networks, boards, forums and things like that, that we were not privy to, to build into the referral program. People were using that. 

It was always interesting to track those on landing pages from those URLs, the initial referral URL, and then see if we can slice this and make this a better experience for people who are landing.

Shamanth Rao 

They were local social networks that were hard for you guys to see sitting in San Francisco. And I would think that’s a hard problem to solve.

Dominic Coryell

It’s very challenging when it’s so international. Our first international client was a company called Market VIP. And we were very excited to have such a big client at such a young age. But everything was in Arabic. So our first localization was in Arabic. 

I will not recommend to anybody who’s not a native Arabic speaker to do your localization in a language that is different.

Shamanth Rao 

That you also go from right to left. Very confusing. 

We are reaching the end of our time together. Before we sign off, can you tell people what you’re up to now? 

Dominic Coryell

Grabr is a fascinating company that has completely taken over my mind space. It’s a global shopping platform that helps people all around the world find products that they love, but they can’t easily find locally, which is really a huge problem. 

We match travelers, to those shoppers who are going their way who earn a small reward from the shopper to bring it in their suitcase. Think of Airbnb for suitcase space essentially. This is a behavior that’s been happening globally for years. We’re just trying to make it more transparent, safer, and easier for people to find the products that they love.  

It’s a super fast-growing, and really great team, and just really enjoy working on that project.

Shamanth Rao  

That’s such an interesting business model. That makes so much sense when I think about it because that kind of behavior happens with expats all the time. People go back to India, taking electronics, chocolates, stuff like that, and will bring back food from India, and local artifacts as well. 

You guys are definitely tapping into something that’s very prominent as a cultural trend. Hopefully, you guys are able to crack it and you’re able to magnify it even more. Can you tell people more about how they can find out more about you? 

Dominic Coryell 

Yep, totally. So I have lots of free courses on distrodom.com. And I have another program called Gimme Growth, in which you have graciously taught a lesson on mobile retention. 

Shamanth Rao

I can tell everyone that Dom is very generous with his advice. I’ve sat around the dinner table with him with a couple of people and he’s basically unlocked a whole lot of ideas for businesses that he’s just heard about. He is very open to all of this. This has been wonderful Dom as always, and we have to catch up, when we are on the same Coast next. 

Dominic Coryell 

Thank you so much for doing this.