 Hi everybody my name is Ilya. I'm the CEO and founder of VanHack. We help tech talent get jobs abroad and today I'll be talking about how we grew a community to over 120,000 members and help you with some very tactical tips tools that you can use that hopefully will help you do the same thing. So first who am I and why am I here? My first memory of my life is immigrating. I was made in the USSR, born in the USSR and left when I was two and a half to go to Israel and then grew up in Canada in Vancouver. I've since lived in many other countries and right now I'm proudly living in Luxembourg where I've been doing a program there with the government and I'm also a digital nomad and something that I think through these tips will show you how to do something similar. So the backstory of what we do or where it all started was when I moved back from Brazil to Vancouver and started getting a lot of questions from friends about how to move to Canada. A lot of developers and before we you know I had this idea before building anything before creating a thing I just thought well I do not test it so this is the first thing is you just need to if you have an idea don't wait just build a landing page this is our first website I'm sure you've all heard of Reid Hoffman's quote if you're not embarrassed by your first MVP you've waited too long so this is actually a very ugly first first website we used unbalanced to create it and then after that we got a couple hundred emails in a few days just post it off on Facebook and we started doing a lot of customer discovery so before you really start coding I didn't write any lines of code I just started talking to potential customers in the beginning and we still are but the beginning the focus was education it wasn't recruiting we teach developers English and soft skills and we started going to events doing Skype calls having meetings with them and this is actually our first meetup and that's really was where we decided in very early days to pivot into what we do now so there's many ways of growing and I'm going to go through a very very practical checklist of how you can actually create the funnel that we have but here just some high-level ideas for Facebook is one of the best channels for B2C I would say so post in Facebook groups do some paid ads we'll talk about that a lot blog posts make videos create content a lot of success videos we use the YouTube a lot but really the most most important thing is email if you don't remember anything else from this talk the value of your remember this the value of your business is exactly related to the size and responsiveness engagement of your email list this is something that almost everyone under values and doesn't think about but really email marketing today is still the best channel so make sure all your advertising all your spend works on getting people into your email list and email them more frequently than you would think we email our list at least two three times a week we'll go into that soon but basically when you're trying to grow community well this is the actual the practical step-by-step part you want to first install the Facebook pixel on your website so for those of you who I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with Facebook ads and we'll talk about this maybe the Q&A but you you want to make sure you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website and there's a really good blogger podcaster named Rick Mulroney who has a guide so you can just Google this complete Rick Mulroney Facebook pixel you can see exactly how to do that practical tip and we also use ad espresso for Facebook ads and then once you do that you create amazing content so think about what the biggest problem that your community is trying to solve and create content a blog post a video something that you can run a Facebook ad to that's on your website that then creates a pixeled a list of pixeled audiences so what what Facebook does everyone who comes to your website they will pixel attach a pixel to them and then you can run ads to those people again so it's kind of like when you're I guess it's not the maybe the best analogy but when you're when you're on a date or you're trying to trying to go out with someone you're not going to go up with them and ask to kiss them right away you're going to give them value value first you're gonna want to have a conversation buy them a drink so that's what this is the online version of that is going to give them for free no no asking for nothing return don't need to ask them for an email or pay anything give them the best content you can so for us it was the top skills that are needed to get hired abroad and very simple and we got 2.9% click through rate on our Facebook ads and it caused two cents a click so very very good stats and this created our warm audience so people who already knew us already got some value from us so kind of that give first mentality the next thing you want to do is create a lead magnet now for those of you who don't know what a lead magnet is it's very simple it's some even better content it could be an e-book can be an online video course can be I mean whatever it might be think about it whatever your problem the ultimate guide to solving X problem that your your community has your target market has and then here is when you want to ask them for the email so here after you've given them value with the free content you're gonna say hey if you want this other content that's even better all I want is your email address and that's that's how it works and this ad you run to all those people that have visited your website so you're retargeting these people so there's a bunch of different lead magnets you can create you know just Google it think about it it doesn't have to be anything special or fancy you can just you can easily make a PDF from a Google Word doc three pages but create something of value for your audience for your community and then the landing page the actual landing page so shout out to type form the amazing company from Barcelona I'm sure you guys have heard of it so we created a we use type form for a landing page why because we get a 33% conversion rate on the landing page so 33% of people that come from a Facebook ad to a landing page sign up and give us their email that's I would say pretty good could be even better but that's what it looks like it's very very simple it took me 10 seconds to write that copy I didn't have to code anything and people just click the sign up button put in their first name their email and boom they're on my email list and there I can have a conversation with them for as long as they stay and don't subscribe so from there you connect type form to whatever email marketing platform you use we use active campaign but there's also Mailchimp HubSpot etc drip there's there's tons we use Zapier another remote company that's doing really well and it's very cheap I think 50 bucks a month or something like that for the pro plan you can use the free plan in the beginning these are just some examples of the zip zaps we have but yeah you just connect your email marketing software type form to that takes five seconds to set up again very straightforward and then from there you create an auto responder so let's just go back so from there I didn't add it here but I'll just quickly say then you create an automatic email course so in all these email marketing software is you can create like a 13 15 however many emails that you want automatic course you don't actually have to write the emails yourself you write it all once and then people just go through it all the time we've sent millions of emails by this point and you know you set it and forget it optimize it of course but creating the autoresponder it's called and there's another really good for anyone is actually into this Google autoresponder madness it's a very very good free course you sign up for the email newsletter and he teaches you how to do it by doing it by doing the autoresponder so it's really cool you kind of see in real life how it works and the way I write my newsletters is I write a personal it's as if it's coming from me it is coming from me but it's not coming from Van hack it's coming from Ilya so the email should come from a person not from the corporation this is really important and also we use plain text email we don't have images or you know sometimes we have gifts and stuff but really it's just it just as if you're receiving an email from a friend and that's much much more effective than large corporation or even small corporation X writing you an email and you also ask people to respond so make sure that you get people to engage by saying hey hit reply if you have any questions and the first it was just me responding now we have a team but that really really drives that personal touch and gets people to you know be part of your community and tell their friends and have a good experience so from from doing this what what do you do next so right now let's say you have this email list you're growing but how do you actually make a business and build a product in the beginning you are the software so this is this is actually our first hire that we ever made we've helped almost 300 people get hired now from people from all over the world get hired in North America and Europe so this is Justin and Pedro and I connected them in a Facebook message together just you know friends with both of them connect them and that's how it was in the beginning there was no magic it's just me connecting people and then from there things grew we made more connections this is a recent connection we made a during the Techstars program in Berlin and it just it's just that you are the software because you want to understand how everything works to then be able to either call it yourself or you know with work with a team to build it and then I guess I'll kind of finish with this no matter what business you're in you are a media company you are not a software company you are a media company Red Bull is not a sugared water drink company Coca-Cola is not they are media companies okay so everything that you're doing all the time you should be recording it you should be creating content this is so key in creating community then I often see this being a huge mistake people don't share their stories enough and this is for example a webinar we did where we walked around with the computer and had a couple hundred developers on the line going to a recruiting fair and this was in Canada we do a virtual hackathon and virtual events so we'd call it the van hackathon we do it twice a year so these are some of our developers working virtually and we also host webinars we use zoom zoom.us a really really good tool if you guys don't use it it's way better than Skype and Hangouts so for video calls it's really good we have members that are all different ages as well and really the most important thing for me is when you see the results of it so this is just two of our success stories Nino moved to Vancouver and Andre moved to Brussels and you can see these people relocate with their families in the airport and starting new lives and that's that's really exciting for me quickly some of the companies we work with it's not that important the more important thing though is what's the future so what what are we trying to do here for me I believe that we're moving towards a borderless world I believe that you know we're all probably all here from all corners of the world and you know why should there be these these barriers that separate us I guess the EU is a really great example of countries coming together and deciding you know that they'll cooperate and share and I think that more and more this is becoming a global phenomenon and we're trying to push things in that direction so with that thank you very much for listening I hope this was helpful and look forward to your questions thanks so much Elias you are the software that's what I'm remembering for sure we're just going to go straight to the questions and guys please go to slido.com hashtag slash 17 choose the startup stage and ask your question right away cool so it's really weird being asked questions online what's your best experience with Facebook leads yeah I don't use Facebook lead ads so the this Facebook lead ads are when people can have basically all their information pre-populated the problem there well actually maybe it's something's good but you can't connect automatically the lead to your email marketing at least I haven't figured out how I don't think I think it only works with MailChimp so we don't do that we just use the type form but I've heard good things I just I'm not an expert in Facebook lead ads best tools to manage remote team I wish I wish I could tell you a better answer um so we use Slack of course and and zoom we have a bot called Standuply that we use that automatically ask my team members what they did today or what did yesterday what they're gonna today and what their challenges are so like a scrum bot it's pretty good but definitely do this one thing that I'm really wanting to improve and learn more is how to manage remote teams so if anyone wants to chat about that or has an advice I would love to hear that um critical to share critical to share professional photos of the company's life or regular ones may work even better yeah yeah I mean doesn't have to be professional like as you guys saw with all my pictures they were just from the iPhone or like whatever camera I guess maybe we'll grow up one day and we will have more professional content but for now we were kind of lean so yeah Roman job article yeah so they're definitely a company doing something similar that us I think we have a different business model they charge per job we charge per hire so but yeah I think they're doing well and they've also raised a lot more money than we have so that's cool but yeah we'll see I think there's a huge market I guess this one thing about the recruiting business so the recruiting market is it's just so big whoever all those people who put up their hands I'd love to chat afterwards but the point is everyone's needs developers and everyone's gonna continue to developers so the way I look at it is if I can keep it do doing a good job or we can keep doing a good job of creating a great community then then doesn't matter what anyone else does that in the market because we'll have the talent that companies want how did you roll up your ad spend by country did you start with one and go to many great question Nicholas nice so yeah at Facebook ad spend I'm guessing you're talking about yeah we focused just in the beginning actually in one country in Brazil everything was in Portuguese from start and then we changed to English to global we focused a lot on Brazil and then we experimented with other countries you know just start with like 20 30 dollars a day and then grow up from there there's no real formula but always experimenting at us Brussels really good for that you can kind of test it and then see where things go but actually right now we're really testing across different different geographies and yeah okay at which point is high conversion the most important well for me the most important conversion is from when I send someone to a company when they get hired but I guess you're talking about the funnel I don't know there's not real one point I think if you can just keep like from the opt-in page to the email list and then from the email list to either buying or applying for a job I don't know there's I haven't found one to be more important than the other is it still worthwhile to search innovative and new strategy for marketing of course all the time yeah Paulus definitely right now kind of year-end doing a lot of brainstorming on what we can do better Paulus good question it's cool to see the actual person asks right and so much more personal yeah so right now we're kind of thinking like a review of where things are we want to use more video that's definitely important and also I'm thinking you know B2B because I think we do a good job of B2C marketing but not such a good job of B2B marketing so that's really going to be the focus now is like getting leads at scale from companies so if anyone has any ideas about B2B marketing I'd love to chat this was much more B2C related although you probably could use some of the principles but yeah always worthwhile to explore and things are always changing right so yeah yeah Instagram as well is coming up a lot now cool good question have you ever experienced with forum software such as discourse yeah good question so we use Slack for our community we have 22,000 people in our Slack community always growing that that's really really important so we don't use discourse we use Slack but I've heard good things about discourse so yeah I think there's a lot of different tools out there honestly the tools aren't the most important thing it's like just you know how you use them and how much energy put into that but yeah Slack another Vancouver company that that we really like to use their product how do you achieve engage with customers physically through newsletters about being spam or blackfire okay this is actually a really good question so a lot of people are kind of timid when it comes to email marketing if I email them too much they're gonna hate me they're gonna put me in spam the person who wants what you have the person whose neck is bleeding and you have the antidote they're gonna listen to you because their pain is so big that if you email them every single day they'll read every single thing maybe not every single one but they will be happy to get more content than less so that's how you have to think the people who who unsubscribe they don't need what you have they you know don't be afraid of offending these people because they're not important to you you want to you want to talk to the person like talk to the person as much as possible and then I think you know it's it'll have a good experience and it kind of weeds out the ones who are who aren't actually interested the ones who might be curious so yeah that's that's something that I think how can we join a Slack community go to vanhack.com create a free profile and you'll see a button to join our Slack community send me a DM I'll let the chat so yeah the second question below so yeah just vanhack.com create a free profile and then there's a link directly to our Slack community there yeah have you done AB testing to figure out the good type of type form because other forms no I haven't honestly I'm pretty happy with the conversion rate that we have and it's like it makes such a small difference that I have to focus on other things and I've kind of put the B2C on autopilot right now on our business much more focused on B2B so if you're hiring or you know anyone who is that's kind of what we're looking for right now but this has been kind of good enough I guess in the startup you can't really optimize every little thing so we're just focusing right now on the biggest return which is getting more hiring partners and getting more matches made and more hires to happen so yeah no we haven't done AB testing on the forms which we should but just only so many hours in the day cool I have two more minutes so if anyone else has any questions would be cool if not we can do we have any more questions or any other questions just raise your hand like in school no yes and if there are no more questions I'll ask you yeah because I as a matter of fact I know it's your first slash right so how you experience how is it because you've been all over the place I can imagine you've been in web summit and all the conferences around yeah we got a lot of conferences at least one a month quality I will say is the one word I describe slush every single conversation I've had here has been deep and we'll have a follow-up I'm sure that is positive and we've also started working with some very exciting Finnish companies to bring developers here so we'll probably hire someone developers developers developers yeah so actually it we're hiring of someone to do sales for Finland if anyone knows any good people in HR or sales in Finland I would like to hire them so then I also have a little bit like a personal question from me no no like a developer steal our jobs like now if you go to the job market if you watch Finland it will be like okay developers developers they're like what about what about other people do they even exist like people like myself for example of course so there's gonna be like what's gonna be two types of marks are mark Mark Andreessen said that there's gonna be two types of people in the world in the future those who tell software what to do or those who tell are told what to do by software I think there's three types of people the first two and those who tell the software developers what to do so I think if you can work well not tell them what to do but collaborate with software engineers you'll always have a position in a place in society and work beautiful I think that's a very good tip so thank you yeah thank you so much we are really happy to have a case show a good evening enjoy the after-party cheers I'll be around for a yeah thank you