Our Zoom & Google Meet Plugin Just Hit 250K Users

Nick Nikolaiev

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Published: April 14th, 2022

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Nick Nikolaiev

Founder, Tactiq

Founders

Employees

Tactiq

tactiq.io

from Sydney NSW, Australia

started August 2020

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Nick recommends to grow your business!

platform

Webflow

Figma

SendGrid

customer service tool-icon

Intercom

social media

Twitter

productivity tool-icon

Notion

Slack

analytics

MixPanel

Google Forms

design

Figma

other

Github

Miro

Discover what books Nick recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Tactiq? Check out these stories:

Hello! I’m Nick Nikolaiev and I’m the co-founder of Tactiq. io, a B2C2B (business to consumer to business) productivity SaaS startup. Tactiq is a B2B productivity SaaS browser extension driven by product-led growth - we have a freemium pricing model with paid pro and team accounts. Think Loom or Grammarly, with a similar B2B + B2C distribution, but monetization predominantly through B2B customers.

Our main and only product is our Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge browser extension Tactiq.io, which integrates with Google Meet and Zoom. Our application transcribes remote meetings, extracts insights (highlights, keywords), and lets you share them with your team. The product essentially takes notes for you and captures all the crucial meeting outputs whilst you engage in conversation. Product, engineering, sales, and design teams at organizations like Netflix & Salesforce are customers. So are micro-agencies, freelancers, and accessibility organizations - we find that effectively anyone who engages in virtual meetings has a use case for Tactiq.io.

We’ve grown 20 x Year-on-Year over the last year, and grew from 0 - 150,000+ users in our first year.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Before Tactiq, I was working on AI products across Europe and the US, with a focus on IT productivity solutions. I came to Australia to complete my MBA at UNSW and founded my previous startup, TaskPace AI, an AI management assistant for Salesforce users. Operating as CEO at TaskPace was what led me to Tactiq.

I say this because whilst operating Taskpace as CEO, I lived in Silicon Valley, San Francisco but my engineering team was based in New Zealand. As you can imagine, this meant many remote meetings across time zones. I noticed my team’s meeting productivity was directly correlated to the information captured, shared, and then implemented from our meetings.

Put something out there before you feel it’s ready because the only validation that matters is the market.

At the same time, my co-founder Ksenia was at Atlassian working on team productivity solutions and saw a similar trend.

We both experienced the same problems when it came to remote working environments. We both observed that meeting productivity is highly related to the amount of information captured during the meeting. Meetings are tremendously more productive if the insights aren’t lost or action items are forgotten.

Initially, I thought that a transcription tool could be the solution. If you could record and document meeting discussions to ensure no action items or essential insights were forgotten, that would solve the problem. But as we worked through this solution, we realized that real-time transcription only scrapes the surface of the problem with remote meeting productivity.

Beyond capturing critical information, I recognized that teams need to be able to extract all the important details and insights from meetings, then push that data into Calendars, CRMs, Customer databases, slack channels, etc for it to have an impact. The problem space expanded with an epiphany that it wasn’t just about documentation but making meeting outcomes seamless.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

I would say our process followed the lean-startup method very closely. First, we defined the problem space, as “not capturing important information and insights during meetings creates unproductivity and wastes time when meeting action items aren’t implemented or important insights are lost”.

Next, we looked for the simplest possible solution to the problem. We landed on real-time transcription of meetings to document the conversation, action items, and insights for implementation. However, this posed a serious challenge - real-time transcription of audio requires a powerful AI engine for voice-to-text interpretation.

For context, the only competent voice-to-text engines are created by the likes of Apple (Siri), Baidu, and Google, companies with billions in R&D to throw at training their AI/ML algorithms. So we sort of stumbled on a solution - to build on voice-to-text infrastructure created by google in Google Meets (closed-captioning). In hindsight, I think this was a smart decision, as we drastically reduced development time and costs by building on this infrastructure. It’s a lesson I’d like to impart to other founders - if there’s a way to build your MVP on an existing foundation/infrastructure, do it. You will drastically de-risk the development process and increase your speed to validation.

My co-founder Ksenia mocked up some wireframes of the UI and product interface in Figma, and together we agreed on the critical functionality we’d need to validate the product.

Ksenia Svechnikova- any inputs around your process for this? how you :

designed the Tactiq services/offerings,
designed the initial features,
the early user interfaces,
MVP, etc

Describe the process of launching the business.

We launched our MVP on the Google Chrome store in March of 2020. On launch day my co-founder and I promoted our launch to all our socials, then shared the link to a few other channels (Reddit, quora, etc). Over the next few months, my co-founder Ksenia spent hours each day sharing a link to our extension everywhere people were asking for this solution online - Reddit, Twitter, Quora, youtube, you name it.

Within the first 3 months, we had our first 10,000 users.

There are three factors I attribute to our early traction. One - product-market fit and a real need for our service, evidenced by hundreds of quora/Reddit/Twitter threads about the problem (transcribing google meets). This made it easy to acquire initial users, as we were solving a problem for users who were already seeking a solution. Solving a problem people already experience is much easier than one they don’t understand yet.

For other founders, I believe it’s worthwhile gauging market demand by searching for people asking for a solution on Reddit, Twitter, Quora, and other similar channels as a way to pre-validate your solution.

The second factor was the timing of the pandemic which caused remote work, online classes, and virtual meetings to explode. And the third was tenacity. The volume of comments, replies, and output from my co-founder and me to promote Tactiq with zero dollars in marketing. We must have published over a thousand replies in those first few months.

To finance the business, our initial inputs were only time. We bootstrapped the MVP, with my co-founder building, designing, and launching the product, then together we worked on marketing to free channels. So it was almost zero cost outside of our hours and paying for a few tools.

One such tool was Webflow to build our website, Tactiq.io (screenshot of the initial website below).

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

One of the most effective tactics for our growth has been sponsoring Tiktok creators. Our strategy was covered in depth by IndieHackers and DemandCurve. With TikTok, we were able to acquire ~150,000+ new users for our extension by spending USD 1820 working with creators. Over a few months between Oct 2020 and Feb 21, we reached out to creators via Instagram and email to create 22 sponsored TikToks posts.

These videos generated 7,363,561 TikTok impressions, 920,426 likes on TikTok, and over 150,000 new users (our tracking wasn't 100% accurate). We even had a few sponsored posts that went viral, generating millions of views, 10-20x spikes in website traffic, and leading to tens of thousands in new sign-ups. Organic Tiktok content is a viral channel, and we capitalized on this by working with talented creators to produce content.

Our process is pretty straightforward - we research creators on TikTok via relevant hashtags (#student #productdesigner #meetings etc), look for influencers with between 10k - 200k followers, then cross-check engagement on their last 20 videos to get an approximate measure of engagement vs followers. If a creator ticks these boxes and they have several videos with above 100,000 views in the last 20, we reach out via Instagram direct message with an offer.

Another strategy that has worked very well for us has been producing content targeting trending search terms alongside our brand. For example, this medium blog and the youtube video below. Tying together the SEO/keyword benefits of a trending search “transcribe google meet” or “save google meet live captions” and your brand name, eg “Tactiq”, ensures you capture traffic for both and create brand/solution awareness. These two pieces of content drove a few thousand visitors to our site.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We’ve grown 20x Year-on-Year, with a monthly revenue growth rate of over 20%. We have over 190,000 users on the platform after starting with 0 in March 2020. Because we’re at such an early stage and as our GTM is Product-led growth, I am focused on scaling our userbase and reaching adoption targets over monetization goals. Our site receives over 30,000 monthly visitors, and we see similar volumes on our chrome webstore listing.

As a SaaS product and browser extension, we distribute our product through our website, chrome webstore listing, and Microsoft edge listing. We acquire traffic for these shopfronts through organic channels (Tiktok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, and our blog), paid sponsorship with Tiktok creators (which has been one of our most successful marketing efforts), Product-led growth mechanisms (emails, WoM, incentives) and content distribution (Reddit, Facebook groups, Indiehackers, and other channels).

Moving forward, we are expanding our product breadth with more functionality for teams and collaborative use cases across organizations. We are also expanding our marketing team to extend growth efforts across more channels, with a focus on channels that align with our Jobs-to-be-done personas and their related communities.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The one thing that has probably served me the most is taking an approach to testing everything on a small scale before committing to anything. Especially in environments with unpredictable outcomes. If you onboard freelancers/contractors, start with a 1-day project. For all new features/functions, run beta tests to probe for user churn. With new growth tactics/channels, look for the smallest possible investment (ideally under $100) to test for outcomes.

I have learned about the power and impact of content channels for distribution and growth. This may seem obvious but I think is still underappreciated by other founders. For example, one of our blog posts has generated thousands of new users, the same with a youtube video we released. We’ve also worked with Tiktok creators to generate over 150,000 new users on a very minimal outlay (can read more about that here). We are currently doubling down on effective content distribution and new content channels.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We use Webflow as our CMS/website hosting platform and lean on Google Analytics, Mixpanel, to understand traffic, and users, and growth. For communicating with customers, we use Intercom as our help desk/in-app communication tool, and Sendgrid for transactional/product emails and marketing campaigns.

For productivity, we document and plan our marketing/growth operations in Notion, our product roadmap and development lives in Github, documents in Google Workspace, and all comms via Slack. We also use Figma and Miro for UI/UX design/wireframing/planning. All the usual suspects.

Oh, and Tactiq.io every day for every meeting. You have to drink your champagne.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

For books, I’m a big fan of the classic Zero to One by Peter Thiel. It helped clarify my thinking and ideation process. My co-founder and I also find the “How I built this with Guy Raz” podcast very useful and inspiring as founders, hearing lessons from other founders about their experiences often sparks new ideas.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Put something out there before you feel it’s ready because the only validation that matters is the market. Our biggest hurdle was fighting the internal drive to overpolish our MVP before launching. It is only natural - you want to put out a product you’re proud of. But I think if spent another 2 - 3 months perfecting the UI, we would have missed the window of opportunity. I know this because a few months later competitors emerged, but by then we already had the first-mover advantage for Google Meets.

If you wait until your product/service is perfect, you might miss your window of opportunity. You will also miss the best source of iteration there is - user/customer feedback. I think this is a big mistake many founders make because it is emotionally difficult to ship before you feel it’s ready. But I believe ripping this band-aid off is crucial to your success.

Would you rather be Uber or the 11th rideshare app but with the best-looking UI?

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re currently looking to hire a full-time growth marketer, ideally someone with product-led growth experience or who understands the go-to-market motions of the product-led growth and who isn’t afraid of experimental channels (eg Tiktok, Pinterest).

Where can we go to learn more?

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