The Company

Translation management for global brands

Behind every successful global business is a marketing manager, product manager, or writer tasked with the challenge of translating every document, webpage, and piece of content so that it can be consumed in any language, anywhere. Those who know know how painfully slow moving and expensive the translation process is – or was, until Redokun came along.

From his home in Montebelluna, Veneto, Italy, Stefano Bernardi saw this need for a faster, easier way to translate important business documents and in 2016, launched Redokun with partner Paolo Agostinetto. Despite the small size of their team, they made a big splash with translation process management software that could actually replace tedious spreadsheets and expensive agencies.

But after several months of slow, sluggish growth, Stefano found himself wondering, “What are the most critical growth levers for us to pull to reach our goals?”

After signing on for a growth audit with DemandMaven, and through a series of conversations, analysis, and customer interviews, Stefano and Paolo walked away with priorities and plans to guide a complete overhaul of Redokun’s onboarding experience, acquisition strategy, and internal growth operations.

Even better — the way Stefano thinks about his business has been completely transformed. Now that he can see what’s possible with a growth mindset, he and Paolo are ready to take Redokun to new heights.

“After working with DemandMaven, of course the number one outcome [we saw] was the return on our investment. But it’s not just that – it’s really the switch in our mindset…. So we’re pushing and trying to do better. It’s been very cool to see that what we’re building is useful and that drives all the decisions that we’re making right now,” Stefano said.

The Challenge

Throwing darts at the wall without a clear ideal customer profile

Facing difficult challenges is par for the course for startup founders. Stefano had pushed through his fair share since launching Redokun in 2016, but in January of 2023 he found himself at a standstill, unsure of what direction to go next. Over the years, he and his founding team tried a bevy of silver-bullet solutions for growing the business, but their impact was short-term and unreplicable.

“We built a product and then we started cold calling people. Then we started sending emails. Then I started posting online, ‘Hey, we built this. Do you want to try it?’ We invested in SEO. We grew a little bit, and when we reached a certain dimension, we started trying to do Google Ads because we had a little bit of money. We tried to do Facebook Ads…

I was the classic founder that heard about something working for someone and had to try that immediately without even thinking twice about it, because I was so hungry to see this product grow. [Eventually] I figured out that that was not the right way to do it,” Stefano explained.

What was particularly hard was knowing what initiatives and experiments to take on, especially given their small size and limited resources.

“At the end of the day you can improve everything. You can improve your website. You can improve your product. You can improve the customer service. You can improve how you speak. You can improve everything, but we have limited time. We have a limited number of people. We have limited resources. So understanding where we had to grow was the most complex question that we had to solve – and the how,” Stefano said.

Like many other first-time founders, Stefano also struggled with knowing which information to pay attention to versus what was ultimately a distraction.

Redokun was also missing critical customer insights that could help drive future product decisions. They could grow faster, smarter, if they knew when and where to reach potential users AND they could reliably extract their desires and needs. And they had to be sure they were targeting the right people to begin with.

“Even though we knew our target customer very well – because I was the target customer! – we didn’t really know who they were. I talked to everybody who subscribed to Redokun but even though I knew them by name, I never asked, ‘How did you find us? What do you think of us? How can I find more people like you?’” Stefano explained.

While the Redokun team considered a wide variety of marketing strategies and solutions, they knew their best bet was to step back and go into “learning mode” by bringing on an expert like DemandMaven to troubleshoot their growth and lead them through the fog.

“We needed to find a framework to decide what challenges [made sense] to take on. That was probably the biggest problem that we had to solve and the reason why we asked DemandMaven to help us,” Stefano went on to say.

The Solution

Deep customer insights and a new strategy for growth

When it came to leveling up their business, Stefano and Paolo knew they needed help from a team who truly understood the challenges they were facing as first-time SaaS founders. In a video Paolo shared from MicroConf, Stefano heard Asia articulating his struggles in a way that no one else had been able to.

“In a way, the things that Asia was saying [in her MicroConf presentation] really aligned with what I thought we needed to do, and then we had a conversation together, and I immediately realized that we needed DemandMaven’s help. After we had the first chat together, we were like, ‘Okay, where do we sign?’ It was one of the first few times that I was talking to someone that actually understood what I was going through,” Stefano described.

DemandMaven is a strategic growth consulting firm designed to help PLG SaaS businesses like Redokun find their growth blockers and get unstuck.

“At the end of the day, we didn’t want to do marketing just to look fancy. We wanted to be effective; we wanted to grow. So we had to go with someone who had the same state of mind, who is thinking 24/7 about growth,” Stefano said.

First, we performed a Growth Audit to understand all of the KPIs and metrics that specifically influenced Redokun’s growth. We analyzed everything from marketing channel performance to net revenue cohort retention to activation performance. The Growth Audit also covered the team’s processes and operations when it came to growth.

What we found were a few things:

• Marketing was doing a great job of creating content, but there wasn’t a clear enough definition of a “marketing qualified lead”
• The team was relatively new to growing SaaS companies, so there was often a lot of debate about which projects and experiments would move the needle that would end with inaction
• While Redokun did a good job of generating leads, the volume of leads didn’t increase over time indicating some program and process inefficiencies
• There was also activation — Redokun needed to convert trialists at a higher rate in order to create sustainable growth
• Finally, long-term retention needed improvement in order to create more sustainable growth

On top of this, there also seemed to be a general understanding of what made a great paying customer, but there wasn’t any definition around the key segments or personas for Marketing to leverage in their work (or for Product to prioritize).

After gathering existing data and conducting the Growth Audit, our strategy was to use a Jobs-To-Be-Done approach to interview customers and get the full context of why customers “hire” certain solutions and “fire” others in their quest to translate their documents.

Once the DemandMaven team identified the “jobs” that Redokun filled, we could reverse-engineer customer segments around the job along with growth opportunities and recommended messaging.

During this process, we confirmed a clear gap in the customer experience: the onboarding experience was lacking. In a quest to improve this experience, Stefano and his team spent the last year improving their user interface.

“We needed to fix the onboarding of our products. Last year when we started working with DemandMaven, we were only activating 40% of people. We started looking at it around May 2023. [Ultimately] we decided to not just fix the onboarding, but fix the entire platform. So we started building a design system and transitioning to a different infrastructure. And although it took us a year to get to the end of the project, in just one month since publishing the new interface we’ve seen double the activation rate on the onboarding. It’s pretty awesome when you see that,” Stefano exclaimed.

After the initial Growth Audit and JTBD Research, DemandMaven worked with the Redokun team on a retainer-basis for about 5 months to help them refine their OKRs, facilitate discussion between Marketing and Product and the founding team about growth, and prioritize the projects that emerged every week.

The Result

Double the MRR just one year after working with DemandMaven

Not only was Redokun able to 2x their monthly recurring revenue, but they have watched the company grow in other ways, too. They’re bringing on a few new marketing hires and have witnessed firsthand the power of their new-and-improved in-product onboarding experience.

But, according to Stefano, the most important takeaway they got from their work with DemandMaven had nothing to do with numbers. It’s all in the mind.

“What happens with consultants generally is that you go in, they do the project, and then [that’s it], but what happened with DemandMaven was that every week I was learning something. So it was not just a growth project, but it was also mentorship along with the growth project. It was soaking in a lot of information and [getting a better] understanding of what I was doing.

So I would say Asia exceeded our expectations, both for the outcomes that we had – because we doubled our business – and, the thing that brings even more value, the change of mindset that happened with the mentorship, which will hopefully [lead us] to more growth,” Stefano said.

And how will they know where to grow next? Stefano now sees that Redokun’s customers hold the answers.

“The most important thing that we learned, and it’s what I tell to everybody I know who has a business, is look at the database of customers that you have. Look at the ones that you want to [target], and go out and talk to them. Understand why they hire you as a solution, if they evaluate something else, why they like you, where they spend time online. Try to understand who they are, where to find people like them, why they want to work with you, what they like, what they don’t like, and so on. That was the key that helped us start to crack this huge puzzle that we have in front of us,” Stefano explained.

Such a critical shift in his thinking couldn’t have happened without DemandMaven.

“I was always learning something [from Asia] – not just from her mindset, but also how we analyze data, how we handle this specific problem that we have… There was always something that I could learn, so we could improve and do better,” said Stefano.

Now, Stefano and his team feel more confident than ever about the direction of Redokun and the rockstar team they’re building around them.

Want to find out what a growth mindset can do for your bottom-line? Work with DemandMaven and start unlocking your path to growth today.