In this video, learn how the startup Magical turned a simple tool into a big opportunity by buying Text Expander and making it better. Rosie explains how they used this tool to quickly grow their business and why having fans who love your product is so important. She also shares why failing sometimes is part of the process and how it helps improve.
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Rosie Chopra:
And the key for us has always been on just experimenting and iterating. And you know, a lot of the time with UA, experiments are going to fail and you just have to be totally fine with that.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. You've said a couple of times, super fans, right? And the most obvious answer to the question of how do you build super fans?
Rosie Chopra:
I would say that, you know, obviously you want to build a great product that is like, um, totally correct. And like, that's what I noticed on my days at Atlassian as well too. We built like a freaking incredible product that people loved and they became super fans.
Andy Mewborn:
What's up, Rosie? How you doing?
Rosie Chopra:
Doing good, doing good. How are you?
Andy Mewborn:
Hey, doing good. Where are you at right now?
Rosie Chopra:
I am located in Ontario, Canada.
Andy Mewborn:
I'm thinking what you did with Magical. If I understand the story correctly too, y'all bought TextExpander. Yeah. Right. And then you kind of rebranded it and then kind of, I would say, did your own thing with it. And that's what I want to talk about. I was like, well, the thinking behind that, like, why did you not just build something from scratch? Why did you, you know, the obvious answer is, well, distribution. They already had some users. And by the way, I was like an OG text expander user, like OG, OG outreach. We would like, in the early days, you know, things were crazy and everyone was answering support tickets. And I was like, I need something to like say the same response over and over with the hotkey. And I was probably like your number one user. Uh for a while and then something and then I stopped using it and then I couldn't find it anymore And then I learned it was magical and or else they were like, oh, there's this magical thing, which is the same thing Um, so yeah, I just want to kind of go through the story there. Yeah, it would be would be amazing.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah Yeah, let me let me dive right into it. So maybe what I can just do is actually first set the context of like magical sort of like origin story and how that's built into what we kind of did, which was more or less like a user acquisition play that I think was really, really intelligent. And so backing up a little bit, Magical is a SaaS productivity app that helps you save time from mundane, soul crushing tasks. I actually like Absolutely love saying that line. It has a ring to it. Founded in 2020 and four of us co-founders and really the idea came from the fact that Harpal, our CEO, had started a recruiting tech company years and years ago and ended up getting acquired by LinkedIn. So had a really successful outcome, but he found as a founder, like a lot of his work was this like mundane road work that like, you know, you're a founder as well too. You probably have done this all the time. Spending a lot of your time like sourcing and recruiting because there is no recruiter. You're like, Spending your time doing manual sales outreaches, personalizing your emails, doing follow-ups. Spending your time filling in your CRM, if you're lucky enough to have a CRM, because you're scaled. And all of a sudden, it was real work. And that was the origin story of Magical. Despite all these other point tools on the market, there isn't something that really solves for all of this in a very easy way, especially for the most non-technical users. And so when Proposal, this company, over to LinkedIn, he actually observed the recruiters there, the sales folks there, he was like, oh, they must be doing this in a better way, but they really weren't. And so he was in EIR over at Bain, and the idea of Magible really spun on, which was, what if I could have an app that could follow you along and start to like sort of suggest these automations for you while you're actually doing work. And you can use it in a myriad of different ways, whether it's like messaging, data entry, you know, filling in spreadsheets, or doing like prospecting work, etc. And so the idea of Magical was actually born from that. And the way Harpal knew that it was like the best idea was he built an early prototype, he gave it to a couple of the admin folks over at Bain, and by the end of the day, all of them came up and gave him a massive hug because they were like, you just saved us so much time. And so he was like, OK, I'm onto something. So that's the origin story of Magical. And the team of us then came together. We were all really, really excited by it. And your question here was really around build versus buy. And how did we actually make that decision to then just go out and acquire an app. And we did this like really in our very early days. And largely where this came from was one of the features of Magical was always going to be on sending messages and doing some basic levels of text expansion. So, you know, text expansion, simplest form, it's like you have you know, BRB that you code and it'll expand to be right back. That is like the most basic way. That was always going to be one of the basic features of Magical and obviously we do so much more than that. Like we will help personalize your messages, autofill them, we use AI to customize and drop the perfect template. We help you fill your CRM by suggesting audibles. We do way more than just text expansion, but text expansion was one of our first few features, and it's a pretty sticky feature. We had already built the text expansion in our app in the early days when we first started Magical. But one of the things to our early teams thinking in credit was we should be audacious and set big goals as it relates to what's the most important thing for us. And as an early stage startup, as you probably know this as well too, distribution is very top of mind for every founder. It's like, how do I go from zero to one really, really quickly? And so for us, we set a pretty audacious goal. We were like, we should grow this to at least 100,000 users in the next quarter. And so then it's an audacious goal like that. You're like, I have zero users. How am I going to get to 100,000 in a quarter? You start to get really, really creative. And one of the things that we decided to do was you know, why not put an acquisition on the table? So meaning instead of, you know, building, going through the regular UA routes that other founders go through, which is like, you know, building the growth loops in the app, which is incredibly important, you know, going out to where those users are, whether it's like support forums, et cetera, and like seeding magical, spending money on performance marketing. Why don't we consider actually buying the growth? And it was kind of an audacious idea, but we ended up buying an app called Autotext Expander. Really, all it did was basic text expansion. So it was just this one of the very basic features of Magical. We found The app on the Chrome Web Store got it connected to the founder as he happened to be in her pulse network. You know, and it it isn't for the faint of heart. It took a while to actually get that deal over the line. But, you know, overnight we added at least like 50 to 60 thousand users just through that.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. And they weren't like monetizing, I don't think, or at least I don't think so. When I was using it, I was pretty much free, right?
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah. No, no, no. You're absolutely right. They weren't. They were not monetizing at all. And like, again, like if you look at the app and this is no offense to the developer of the app, because, you know, he's phenomenal, phenomenal person, but like the app was really basic, like. You probably remember this as well too because it sounds like you used it, but you know, like you're thinking of like a very basic web page with like an input box where you can add in your Texas standard snippet. So it was, it was, you know, Times New Roman font, like it was, it was really, really like a basic app. But it did have, you know, tens of thousands of users. And that was largely because it still fulfilled a function, a very basic function that was still very useful. And for us, we were like, well, this is going to be one of the functions of our app anyway. So, you know, why not go out and actually hire those users?
Andy Mewborn:
So they weren't monetizing. So like basically zero revenue. So how do you think about like how you were going to acquire this company? Was it for shares in Magical? Was it monetarily? And you don't have to share all the insider details. But yeah, how did you think about that? Because I think that we did something similar at Taplio. We basically looked at a couple extensions called Twimix and some extensions that related to our product. And they didn't have zero. They didn't have really any revenue. Right. Free extensions. And we're like, well, this would be great as our distribution flywheel here. Let's use this. But I would love to hear from you how you thought about kind of doing that acquisition and what was what went into it, because I'm sure people are curious. Right.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah, absolutely. I'd say that without disclosing the information on the mechanics of the deal and stuff, I'd say that in large part when you're doing an acquisition and I'm thinking about my time at Atlassian when we work on deals and you have all the information in the world and you have a corp dev team and I had done some of this in my past life as well too where there was a lot of information at your disposal where you can make a really educated guess on what a valuation price should be and like how much you should be paying and stuff like that and they're complex deals. In this case like you don't have a lot of information we didn't have any data on like the users like these could be folks that are in super low willingness to pay regions as an example like they'd be located in which case like it's you know how much is that really worth right and so you know in this case you are guessing in a lot of ways. And I think there's interesting ways that you can make it a little bit more educated. Like you can look at Chrome store reviews as an example, or you can try to do, you know, if the founder is willing to give up information in this case, they did not have any analytics data, but they did have some very basic Google analytics data. Like that actually started to give us some telemetry on like the region of where some of these users could be located. And so, you know, the, you have to obviously invest in some sleuthing, Reddit forums, reviews, et cetera, to actually like give yourself a sense of, you know, what this could actually be worth. But just to be completely candid with you, we weren't sure if it was worth zero or if it was worth, that's kind of like the, When you're talking about being a founder in general, it's about taking things, and so you're going to miss. So I would say that for anyone that's considering doing something like this, you're not going to have a ton of information unless you're very lucky. And if you don't have a lot of information, you just have to be willing to determine, like, how much are you willing to really lose on here? And is the swing actually worth it if you do manage to kind of hit a home run or not? In our case, I don't know if we necessarily hit a home run per se, but we actually did get a user base that gave us at least that first leg up. And that user base is a fraction of how big our user base actually is today, but it did give us the momentum to kind of get started. And I think that was the important piece for us.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting when you say like the app was so simple and had 60,000 users or either 50 to 60, however many it was. Um, and it, it, it always brings up this point that I always try and tell the friends who are like, I want to build the next space X and I want to build the next thing. And I'm like, dude, you don't need to do that. Like, you know, like honestly, some of the best ideas start as the most simple things, right? Like, like a auto text expander, hockey, boom. expands your text into what at BRB be right back, but for desktop, right? Like, and you can do that on your iPhone, right? You can like set your own hotkeys and all that. But, um, it's just so interesting how some of these best ideas are like just the smallest, the smallest things. Uh, and so for, so today for magical, I would still say like the main use case I have is the text expander. Right. And I know that you'll have a million other things to do, but like, I just use that one use case and I'm like, boom, like that's what I use magical for. It's my auto text expander, you know? And, um, so for you, like, I'm sure, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's probably a common with a lot of people. It's like the most number one use thing is the auto text expander. And you're probably trying to expand other use cases and do all that. So for you, I'm sure a question that you think about is like, do we double down on just being the text expander or do we double down on all these other use cases? And this is a question I always ask myself, too. Right. And so like, how do you think about that? Because you are the strategy master as well, Rosie, the grand strategy at Atlassian.
Rosie Chopra:
So it's actually surprising when we do look at the data, like we do have a myriad of use cases. So I think Whenever we talk to folks that are just using us for text expansion, they're like, I just love it for the text expansion. But when we speak to people that are using us for some of the AI features, they're like, I just use it for the AI features. Or we speak to people that are using us to fill in forms and spreadsheets, they're like, I couldn't live without this. So I think it is actually pretty distributed. Text expansion is obviously something that is so easy because everyone sends a Kali link, everyone sends a Zoom link. And so everyone can use it. And so the TAM for that is just large. But I'd say that our absolute best customers and use cases are the ones where there is that cross-pollination and they're using us for more than just one thing. Because then they're extracting the maximum value out of Magical. And so when we think about double downing on one thing, I don't think that's ever been part of our vision. Our vision has always been, we want to automate mundane tasks for our users. And automation is obviously a very loaded term. If I were to break down the simplest concept, it's basically like we want to do more than one thing for our customers. And ideally those things can be paired. And so if we think about sales, for example, they can leverage Magical to send their Calendly link, which is a very basic use case in the form of text expansion. But what we see from our sales users who are really optimizing Magical is they're using Magical to autofill messages from LinkedIn to send a very personal request or email. And then we have this other use case of sales folks that are using Magical to fill in the CRM directly from LinkedIn. And so that's another example of a use case that we're tapping into. And the more of these use cases that we can unlock from our users and our users are gems, they always provide the best feedback on, hey, we'd love Magical to do this next. you've completed this part of the workflow for me, we'd love for you to do this next thing. That's where we get really, really excited because ultimately speaking, if we can build in features that can solve more of these use cases for our customers, the more that we know that we're obviously accepting as much value as possible.
Andy Mewborn:
And today, so a couple of things. One, this sounds like you got a little bit of Atlassian DNA in you because they have every product known to man. Every time I go to Atlassian, there's a new product. I'm like docs like this, like that. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's everything. Right. Which is awesome. So it sounds like you kind of got some strategy there.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah, I'd say that like definitely for my time at Atlassian, you know, a big a big component of our success was land and expand. And that can be land and expand in terms of users. So meaning like, you know, the way that Magical typically spreads is very similar to Atlassian where someone will download the product, they get hooked, and then they share us with their team and then to, you know, their department. Then it goes cross department. Sometimes it ends up company wide, which is like amazing. And so we talked about land and expand in that, you know, from that perspective. But land and expand also meant like you land in Jira or in Trello, And you expand to other Atlassian use cases and products as well too. Those users were ultimately very, very sticky as well too because they're leveraging it for more than one thing. And so I think it is really important that you do have a land and expand model for use cases as well too. And Magical does have that in various ways. Some people will land on us for text expansion, others will land on us because They heard from their teammate that filling in the CRM was just so much easier using Magical, and then they discover the text expansion. That's actually been something that's been happening a lot more recently, which is really, really exciting. Those users are ultimately going to be just extracting more value from the platform and will stick around longer.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And I mean, you realize how important distribution is, right? And like, what's been, I mean, y'all are at what? 400k users I saw on the Chrome store or something like that. Like 400k, it says like 400k plus or something. I'm sure you have an exact number, but that's wild. Like that's insane. That is a lot of users, like over 400k. What's really been the distribution strategy? And one, what has been and what have you experimented with? I'd love to hear that stuff and see kind of where you've won and then where you failed in experiments because I'm sure you guys have tried a million different things.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah, yeah. This is like a huge hat tip to our marketing team. And just in the level of experimentation that they followed through with, along with, we have a growth product team at Magical as well too. Huge hot tip to them as well. I think both of these teams combined have really invested quite a bit of time in figuring out different. you know, avenues for getting users to try the product. And generally speaking, I think what we tend to do is we experiment, just kind of like how you called out, like there is no shortage of experimentation at Magical. I can give you like a quick example of this, which is like, you know, when our head of marketing first joined Magical, you know, she had kind of had this mandate already of like, hey, I want to experiment with different channels, figure out what sticks. And then if it sticks and the ROI makes sense, let's hire for it. And a good early learning that we had was on influencer marketing. Which, you know, within her first few months, we hired like a contract influencer marketer who kind of came in, built relationships with other influencers who are posting on our behalf. We were also testing our own organic content. We just saw it sticking and working and specifically like, you know, on TikTok. And the mechanics of it actually just worked really well for us when we saw like the ROI. And that was like a very successful experiment. In the end, what that led to was hiring. a full-time influencer marketer on our team, you know, who probably reached out to you and has also worked with other influencers as well too. And so the key for us has always been on just, you know, just experimenting and iterating. And, you know, a lot of the time with UA, experiments are going to fail and you just have to be totally fine with that. You're not going to win everything. And if you are winning everything, something's, you know, something's wrong. Maybe they're not retaining, like these users aren't retaining, as an example. But no, I think what we've done a really nice job at is we pick a couple of things that we want to experiment with every quarter. We go out and we test them. We try to back into the ROI, even if it's super fuzzy, like TikTok does not have the best ROI math because it's hard to track given that, you know, Magical doesn't have a mobile component. A lot of people are watching on mobile. So it is hard to attribute back. But we can take best guesses on like how many users we got from TikTok and like what the ROI of these users actually is. And I'd say that my skill set comes into play with data analysis. That's something I took from my days at Atlassian and I brought over to Magical as well too. And so oftentimes I'll be looking at retention charts and seeing which users are actually sticking around and from what channels, et cetera. And passing those learnings onto our marketing and our growth teams so that we know Yeah, cool. We generated a lot of users from this one channel, but did they stick like a couple of weeks later? That's also part of the equation. If we're just acquiring users that aren't retaining, then obviously it's a poor channel. So that's kind of the methodology that we've kind of used. And I'll say it's been surprisingly successful for us. When I say surprising, it's like it's a lot of work that kind of goes into it because Again, the failure rate is so high, but once you find a channel that actually works, it's probably one of the most exciting things.
Andy Mewborn:
So are y'all still doing TikTok then?
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah. Maybe less so specifically on When I say less so on TikTok, like TikTok is still like, you know, one of the channels that we're going after on social, but we've now expanded as a whole to where, you know, we'll look at like LinkedIn and we'll also look at like, you know, YouTube as an example. And so we, we've actually like probably just added more direct there. Yeah. It's like specifically on TikTok.
Andy Mewborn:
And then... So this is a question a lot of people have right now, especially in B2B, which is like, how do you do this influencer marketing? And I think it's becoming a hot topic, but people are trying to... Even me, I'm like, how? Even being one, I'm like, how do you scale this? Being in that crowd on LinkedIn with a good following or whatever. And so it sounds like you have someone recruiting influencers full time And basically having them post in that video on TikTok is, Hey, I found this crazy app, you know, it does this thing. And, and so someone full time is just recruiting all these people, having them make like one video a week or two videos a week. Like what's the, you know, what are the mechanics like Rosie? And I know this is kind of in the weeds and, and maybe a little, you don't deal with this specifically, but I would personally love to know this and how you do that.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I am, I'm absolutely not the person that does this on a daily basis. And she's amazing. So I'm going to paraphrase. That works too. I would say that, no, I'd say that the way we started this was really, really small potato scale, which was, you know, we'd reach out to influencers directly on, you know, TikTok. We just DM them and we'd say, Hey, look, you know, it looks like you have really interesting content here. you know, perhaps in the space that we think would be, you know, complimentary to Magical, check out Magical and tell us if you're interested. And, you know, some of them would apply, some of them wouldn't, we'd negotiate deals with some of them. And then we track the successes accordingly. And how this has scaled out over time is, you know, now there are actual like Influencer platforms that are available that let you connect with creators and it makes the whole process so much more seamless because you can imagine that she was spending a lot of our influence market was spending a lot of her time actually negotiating these deals. forcing the influencers, that's really time consuming. So working on an actual platform makes it that much more seamless. What we've also done is like, you know, Magical actually benefits a lot because we have a lot of organic traction as well, too. Like word of mouth is one of our biggest drivers of user acquisition and continues to be since our founding. It's been, it still is today. That's awesome. Referrals and word of mouth. And so, you know, oftentimes, you know, our, our, you know, The best influencers are the ones that are actually just posting naturally and organically on behalf of Magical. And we're not even paying them to do so. We'll just step on LinkedIn and we'll just see posts go out that we've never had an interaction with. And I'd say that that actually happens fairly often. And we're obviously very fortunate to actually have that. And in those cases, it's really awesome because we can build relationships with those folks as well too. Yeah, yeah. Super users are obviously the ones that are, I mean, such as yourself, you mentioned that you use Magical all the time, which I'm really excited about. But like, yeah, super users that are actually just organically going out and like they're actually posting on your behalf are some of the best ones because the post is authentic and they're willing to do this, you know, not for any payment, but just because it's it's such a game changer of an app and they're just so excited to tell folks about it. But, you know, going back to specifically on like paid influencer, you know, I'd say that having an influencer platform is like the way to scale it out. Like we, one, one big learning that we've had is like, you know, we, we like to review the content before it goes out just to make sure that it meets like, you know, our brand principles and all that stuff. And we're also continuously learning as well, too. Like we're trying to learn from the best, the best of breed SaaS companies that have actually like, you know, built a real program around this, obviously Magical is still like early stage here.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, like Notion. I think Notion also was a big one on TikTok as well. And I see them everywhere on TikTok, which is so funny because like the most unexpected channel, right?
Rosie Chopra:
I spoke to the folks over at Notion. I think one of the triggers to know whether Influencer is good for you is if you happen to notice that it's happening organically without you even paying. for folks to actually go in. So I think what happened with Notion is they actually did not even invest in influencers. People were just posting organically on TikTok. And then they were like, ooh, let's like fire to this and start a program. And I'd say that that was very similar to Magical in that the reason why we actually had a belief that this could potentially work is because we have so many super fans that go on LinkedIn or on TikTok or on YouTube, and they just talk about Magical organically without, like I said, without any payment. And that's what kind of gave us the goals to say like, hey this actually could be something because we already have an audience of folks that like love us and they're willing to go out of their way and so you know what our head of marketing always says which I love is like if you have channels that are already organically working just like add fire to it and you know that's what we try to do with them.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And I think what y'all have done is like, you've said a couple of times the super fans, right? And it's so true. And the most obvious answer to the question of how do you build super fans, right? Is build a good product. Would you add anything to that? Because that's kind of what I've found is just focus on building an awesome freaking product that people want to use every day.
Rosie Chopra:
It's such basic advice. I used to hate when other founders would tell me this.
Andy Mewborn:
They were like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, okay, duh, you know, that's what I'm doing, dude.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah. So I would say that, you know, obviously you want to build a great product that is like, um, totally correct. Uh, and like, that's what I noticed on my days at Atlassian as well, too. We built like a freaking incredible product that people loved and they, became super fans. But I would say that the whole notion of build it and they will come is actually totally incorrect from a building perspective. And what I basically mean by that is I think oftentimes the mistake that founders make is like, thinking that if they build a great product, they will come. And getting that distribution actually does matter because you do need some momentum to kind of get you off. Because if you build a great product, but you have done zero to get it out into the market and you haven't really invested there, then people will not flock to it because they don't know about it. So I think you actually have to invest a little bit upfront to not a little bit. It's like a lot of your time should be spent thinking about distribution. How do I get this into the hands of my ICP as quickly as possible? And start that conversation, start to get those feedback loops. And there's like a myriad of ways that you could potentially do it. In our case, what we have found is built an awesome product. We were able to get it out into the market. People do love it. And that's why word of mouth and referrals is still one of our strongest acquisition channels is because people really, really enjoy using it. I speak to founders all the time who build really, really awesome products. I'm like, oh, holy shit, this is kick ass. you know, you can't find it. Or like, you know, you don't know enough people that have used it or they haven't gotten into the hands of your ICP. And so, you know, you're not going to get like that referral channel to happen, you know, sort of.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, it's, it's definitely feels twofold. Right. Which is like, Hey, like you need to build that kick ass product, but also you need to build a kick ass distribution system. And if you can do both of those, then I think you're rocking. Right. That's where you're rocking. And that's when, you know, we can, word of mouth is also very much correlated with awesome product, right? Like something awesome word of mouth, which is definitely some of the best marketing I think like that you can, you know, you can do because if your friend next to you is like, Hey, I'm using this awesome thing. That's what happened with auto text expander. It was like, I told the whole team, I was like, they're like, Oh, how do you like get back to people so quickly? And I'm like, dude, all the questions are the same. So I just, I just literally typed this hot key and I got my answer. Oh, cool. I'm going to do that. Right. And so that's definitely one, especially in the workplace. A thought that just came to my head is how that word of mouth has changed since people have not been in the office as much. I wonder if you have data on that. Like, that's interesting, right? Because in the office, you're seeing what are people doing? What are they using? What are they not? And then now that it's remote, like, maybe you put it in your Slack channel. Maybe you just kind of keep it to yourself.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah, it's a great question. I often care for specifically for Magical. And yeah, you're totally right. Like, back, you know, when I was in the office, it was water cooler conversations where it's like, oh, check out this app. This app is awesome. Or you just be peering over someone's computer. Like, what are you using? And like, you find out about things. And now that we're remote, that dramatically shifts. Maybe not so in the sense that where we find how Magical is actually shared. Oftentimes when we speak to our super fans, it's like, oh, I shared in a Slack channel or I brought it up with my manager and we shared it at a training or we did a lunch and learn on Magical. So I think there's still avenues to kind of get the product out there. I think it's just sort of adapted to this virtual world. I'd say even at Magical, the way we share cool apps with each other is through Slack. Someone will just post like, hey, I started using this awesome app. I'm like, you need to check it out. So I'd say that that's kind of like what we've seen qualitatively. I don't really have any data on like, you know, this is how things have been shared previously versus now, but. Um, you know, uh, generally that's like what we hear from, from our users is like slack or like lunch and learns or, you know, just even trainings. It's like, yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. Training.
Rosie Chopra:
I'm curious, like how did you, you mentioned you shared magical with folks and this was maybe like when you were in person, but like even now if you're sharing magical, like is it through slack or.
Andy Mewborn:
Um, honestly, how. I'm trying to think of the last time I shared it. It's this podcast. Yeah, this podcast. Yeah. What are you talking about, Rosie? It's this podcast. I'm trying to think of the last time I shared it. I think it was, um, holy crap. I can't remember, but you know what I think is an underrate, like an amazing channel for y'all is like support teams. And I'm sure you already know this, but like, like more than even salespeople, like owning support teams, because like they're answering the same questions over and over and over again. Like, I doubt they ever get new questions unless it's like a bug after, you know, released to prod or whatever. So like, I think that, I mean, that's how I discovered I was helping run our customer success team at Outreach. And I was like, Oh, guys, I was like, y'all use this because it's going to make you that much faster with your tickets and your answers and da da da. Until we get the product fixed and all that stuff. So I believe that was going back, that was the main way I would share it, right? Is like when I was like, okay, we're going to get, I want to help these people be more productive. And so I was like, don't answer the same thing over and over and over and over. Just use this. Right. Um, so that was, I think the main way that I would share it, right. Was in that use case. Now today, what I, in my, a lot of my questions are different, obviously as a founder. So like, um, you know, back and forth, I've automated my like cold emails and that's a whole different conversation, but, Um, yeah, today when I'm mostly using it for is my calendar link is I would say definitely calendar link, zoom link.
Rosie Chopra:
Um, we've got to give you personalized messages. Yeah, exactly. All founders I talked to that use magical for like auditory personalized messages. Like love it for that reason.
Andy Mewborn:
Oh, okay. Okay. Yes. Okay. Well, I'll have to try that. I'm going to, I'm going to become a pro after this. You know, I, I told you on that too. So, um, but yeah, um, Rosie thing, next question I have for you is, okay, we've talked about distribution. We talked about what are some other experiments that worked for you? Would you say that, that you mentioned that the Tik TOK influencers, um, which is, that's a whole function that you even have right now. for recruiting people, they're using platforms to do that. But what's some other stuff related to a Chrome extension that people can do to like grow it? Right.
Rosie Chopra:
You found this is going to sound really silly, but it actually worked for us was, you know, some level of social proofing the app. And what I mean by social proofing is like more often than not, like even looking at like reviews is the way that people actually determine whether or not And so with Magical, we have just really made it a point. We organically get a lot of five star reviews, which is amazing. So we're very, very fortunate there. But we've actually made it a point where if someone leaves, you know, a review that is below five stars is like, To this day, one of our co-founders, God bless him for doing this. He like responds to one of those reviews almost like immediately and will. Wow. Yes, it's to this day. It's like one of those, you know, those things that they tell you, like do the unscalable things in the beginning and then grow out of it. Like this is one of those unscalable things that we have not grown out of. It's a review and we're like immediately like on it. It's a big kudos to my co-founder who will actually just respond to these and actually like jump on a call or will like, you know, respond to help, you know, respond or resolve via email to help fix their issue. And, you know, oftentimes they go out and they change their review from like one to five stars and then they'll actually like organically go out and talk about us. And so we've seen this happen before where like people will post about like, wow, magical is like customer service is amazing because, you know, they resolved my issue almost like immediately and a founder actually called me to resolve it. So I'd say that like, you know that's another sort of weird avenue where like I think social proofing has really worked in our favor. There's a lot of things as well too that are a little bit more traditional that's why I haven't brought them up like we have a blog as an example but like I know another class has So I'm trying to avoid the ones that are like maybe, you know, the typical growth channels that other companies have sort of exploited. Social proofing has actually worked really well and it's created a lot of goodwill for us. That's kind of like put fire on some of the word of mouth of Magical.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And I'm looking at the reviews right now and you have It says 3.3K ratings, so 3,300 ratings or reviews, about 4.6 star average, which is freaking amazing. Yeah. Out of 3.3, which is a huge sample size. And every one of these is like, oh my gosh, saves me so much time. And like the value is just so clear. Right. It's like save. So save time. Everyone's like save time, save time, save time, save time, which is just amazing. So that's awesome to see. And with these, you can post them all over your site, link to them, use them as social proof. Right. Like this is crazy.
Rosie Chopra:
Like the amount of reviews you have. Yeah, exactly. Like you can you can do so much. You can do so much with that. And then that's like part of the thing as well, too, is like when you think about other apps that you've downloaded in the past, specifically from where reviews are very readily available, you do look at reviews like it's just very natural for people to look at reviews just to see what they're into. And so I think Magical has done a really nice job there.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And these are like in going into this topic, the reviews is like you can almost trust these Chrome reviews a little bit more, I feel like. Because if you look at like, and again, G2 Crowd and these other sites, you knew I was going with this one. Like, I'm just going to be honest. I don't know if I can believe GT Crowd anymore. Right. And like the sites, just because I've done it in the past. I know other companies in the past where they offer a gift card to say give five stars or whatever. Right. And so it's like you kind of I'm like, you're like, okay, are these all gift card reviews or are these like real reviews, you know? So, whereas these Chrome reviews, people are brutally honest. Like we had a Chrome review in the past and I'm like, luckily we still have good reviews, but they're honest. Like they're not.
Rosie Chopra:
No one's getting a gift card.
Andy Mewborn:
No, no one's like, everyone's just like, and God bless them for taking the time to do it, whether it's five stars or one star. Because I've never written a Chrome review myself. I don't know if you have, but maybe I'll do a magical one for y'all. Yeah. Yeah. But like, holy crap. Yeah. I think definitely this Chrome store play really gives you a good sense of if it's a good product or not. And you might have more ratings than any other one.
Rosie Chopra:
Yeah, no, I think we do. And I think like the Chrome store is also really, really awesome. And speaking on distribution, like I think the Chrome store is really, really awesome because it is like the number one browser, right? So you automatically get distribution just by being on Chrome, like building on Chrome, right? It makes your app more discoverable. So people are typing in keywords, productivity apps as an example or whatever. they can find Magical. People do browse the Chrome Web Store for apps, and so we do find that as a channel for us as well, too. Wow. People that are just browsing, they'll come in through search within the Chrome Web Store, and they'll just click on Magical and download us directly from there. So there is obviously pros and cons on building on someone else's backyard, but we do see it as a core benefit for us.
Andy Mewborn:
What percent, because we're about to launch a Chrome extension for video and AI video and all that fun stuff and to distribute pages. Right. And so what percentage of users would you say come through like on a monthly or quarterly basis right through us through like the Chrome store search?
Rosie Chopra:
It's a really good question. I actually don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but what I can tell you is like when we were looking at these numbers, maybe about a year ago is actually like, over time, it's actually increased. And I think that's largely just because we've ranked for more keywords within the Chrome Web Store. So like keywords like productivity or like AI tools, as an example that people are searching for. In the same way that like, you know, if you were to search like video recorder, Loom would probably come up to the top. And, you know, someone that's looking for a video recorder is going to download Loom. Or if you're looking for like grammar checker, like Grammar Loom will probably come to the top. So there's been, you know, over time through natural SEO goodwill that we've kind of created, we're starting to rank for more words. And so as a result, we do, we have seen it increase. I just don't know what the exact percentage is. It's not like a massive percentage by any means, but it's meaningful enough that we're like, we notice it. It's become a more noticeable percentage over time, if that's helpful.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, no, that is. That is because you always wonder. I always said, like, if you want to build something, build a Chrome extension because it's just like it's just always there. You know, it's always there. It's like Outreach. We did that. No, Apollo that I own the same world doing that, you know, and it's just kind of right up front. And you can like kind of put it, for lack of a better term, it can always be in people's faces, you know, like you can like hack your like like getting attention for your app, like in that way once they download it, you know, so. Super interesting. Well, Rosie, this has been amazing. Thank you for jumping on. This has been super great. Where can people find you? LinkedIn?
Rosie Chopra:
Where's the best place? They can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Rosie Chopra. They can also email me directly at rosieatgetmagical.com. If you have any feedback on Magical, if you love the app, reach out to me. We're also always hiring. We're hiring currently. engineering, biz ops, you know, even within like our marketing team as well, too. So if you're interested in a role, reach out to me as well, too. And yeah, no, really appreciate the time today, Andy. This was like so awesome. So great getting to know a user and fellow founder. And yeah, I'm really excited to be on your show.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Thank you. This has been awesome. We'll have some collab stuff coming out soon. So. We're going to do some fun stuff, which is, yeah, we'll do some, our whole brand is like Mexican day of the dad, right? I'm Mexican. I don't know. I know. I don't look Mexican by any means. But yeah, people look at me like, I thought you were Swedish or something, you know? Um, but yeah, we're going to do some, you know, we did, we're launching a thing called taco template Tuesday where, you know, yeah. So we're going to have a new template every Tuesday. Magicals on the 13th, I believe of February. Uh, so we were doing template together, so it's going to be freaking awesome. Yeah. It's going to be amazing.
Rosie Chopra:
So, so, so excited. Thank you so much. You're welcome.
Andy Mewborn:
All right. Well, Rosie, well, Hey, I'll see you soon. If you ever need anything, you know where to find me.
Rosie Chopra:
So we'll chat soon. Thank you. Bye.
