Sujan Patel of WhenIWork Discusses Growth Hacking, Product Market Fit


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Sujan Patel is a digital marketing pro with over a decade of experience and is the VP of Marketing at WhenIWork.com. In his spare time he created ContentMarketer.io, a tool to help automate content marketing, which launched on July 14.

Sujan is also the author of “100 Days of Growth,” an actionable growth hacking eBook.

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Small Business Trends: You’ve done so much in your time as an entrepreneur, including making helpful small business tools. Can you tell us about your journey?

Sujan Patel: I come from a family of small businesses owners, so it’s a central part of our lives. I’ve seen the pain points and difficulties my parents and other family members went through, so I understand the solution we’re providing. When I Work helps small businesses manage their employees through easy-to-use time-tracking and management. I’m proud of our team and how the software serves our customers.

Small Business Trends: What are some the favorite features in When I Work that users give you feedback on, and can you talk about some of its integrations?

Sujan Patel: Our users say they love the time-saving benefits of simplified and automated communication. With shift workers and hotel employees, changes in schedule and availability are common, but it can also cause way too much back and forth and breakdowns in communication. If you have 10-20 employees, what we’ve seen is that many repetitive tasks that waste 4-8 hours a week get condensed into as little as 15 minutes, after the initial set-up and learning curve.

We’re integrated with QuickBooks and ZenDesk, and if you have our timeclock software, you can export the data into your payroll software. With our new integration with Square, you can manage your employees and schedules right from your Square POS. Making the lives of small business owners easier is what drives us.

Small Business Trends: How do users get support if they need it?

Sujan Patel: Support is done through email or live chat, meaning you can ping us right through the interface. With around 3-4,000 support tickets per month, our satisfaction rate is 97 percent.

Word-of-mouth marketing has really helped us. I’m a marketer, so while I’d love to take credit for our YoY growth and other KPIs, the real credit goes to the awesome product Chad and the “dev” team built.

Then, factor in our support team providing a great experience, and our reviews become not just about the product itself, but about us helping customers maximize all the cool functions they might not have known about.

Small Business Trends: How much will it cost?

Sujan Patel: The cost is around $1 per user. Mom and pop retail stores and even Burger King and Uber use When I Work to manage their workforces’ schedules. We have a 30-day trial and there’s no credit card required. We have a tons of people and tools to help with the onboarding process, and we’ll hook you up with the format you prefer to learn with, whether it’s video or even a printed guide.

Small Business Trends: What is the 100 Days of Growth eBook about?

Sujan Patel: I broke down 100 different tactics businesses can test and try for growth hacking, that’s where the name came from. We intentionally made it a simple, light read, and it’s designed to be a reference point for future use. After years in the agency business, we’ve seen these tactics in action, all the way from basic tactics to advanced ones. We’ve taken what we’ve learned and created a book which lets a reader jump to the table of contents and immediately dive into action, if that’s what they want. We had a few different methods for validation ahead of the book, but even so, we tried to include something for everyone in the target audience, being mindful that not everyone’s a sophisticated marketer, so it’s up to each reader to pick which tactics in the book to use.

Small Business Trends: Tell us the backstory of ContentMarketer.io and what problems it solves

Sujan Patel: I wanted to build a tool for marketers, so I ran surveys to find out the main problems they were having. Outreach was the weakest link because it’s a necessary area, yet so many marketers weren’t doing it. ContentMarketer.io helps you promote your content through email outreach and Twitter.

Reaching out to influencers in the space you’re in is very powerful, and even more so if you can mention them in your content. Content Marketer allows you to find what those influencers are tweeting and sharing and build outreach lists off of that data. It also has well-written templates, and agencies can use it too. You can think of it as “semi-automation”, because it removes a lot of heavy lifting. It launches on Tuesday, July 14th and we’re going to reward early adopters with great pricing – just email me for details.

Small Business Trends: How else can people reach you and what’s your favorite social media?

Sujan Patel: Visit my blog, find my email and reach out. Social media, too. My favorite social media is Twitter. I do a lot of relationship-building on it, and I like that it’s public. I like the way I can curate with Twitter lists. I try to connect with one new person a day there.

Image: Sujan Patel/Twitter

This is part of the Small Business Trends Livestreamed Livelihoods interview series featuring sessions with today's movers and shakers in the livestreaming world.

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Alex Yong Alex Yong is a staff writer and host of the Small Business Trends Livestreamed Livelihoods interview series featuring sessions with today's movers and shakers in the livestreaming world. Alex was named a must-follow PR resource in Cision North America’s list of the top 50 Twitter influencers utilizing rich media tweets, alongside Guy Kawasaki and Lee Odden.

2 Reactions
  1. How exactly does it automate content marketing? I have seen so many automated tools that recycle content that I began to stop liking them. Is this another one of those?

  2. It’s always interesting to hear some thoughts of people who run a company. I checked when i work and it really seems valuable and helpful!