Inside Zipboard: Advanced SEO, Contextual Collaboration, and AI-Driven Content Strategies for SaaS

Thank you, Harshit. It’s been nice chatting with you and I hope this will be a nice conversation.

Yeah, that’s a long story and goes way back. I actually, I’m an aerospace engineer, so I really had nothing to do with tech in the beginning. But interestingly, I was still writing code and I was interestingly always.
doing software for aerospace. My work always took me to figuring out algorithms and software. And I was working in a company called SolidWorks. I don’t know if you the viewers are aware, but it’s a CAD software, very popular. I have always loved that software, so learned a lot about both tech and user experience from there.

Some point, and this was all in the US, and some point of time I decided to move back to India, saying I want to start something of my own. I started a travel company, that didn’t work, so went back to what I know, which was tech again. So I started consulting. I had a QA services and a product management services team.
And we had clients in the U. S. and we had teams distributed some people in Poland, some people in Hyderabad, some people in, in U. S., multiple geographies, again, Florida, California. And I found myself, constantly getting frustrated with, Finding a limited time to work, to find meetings.
And these were days in which it was mostly either Skype. There was not even Slack or Teams or anything like that. And I would find myself, explaining myself with screenshots, putting things, notes, putting them in emails, putting them in Jira, and then finding ways to communicate better, more visually.
And I was like, no, this is not how it should be. Yeah. Let’s see if there’s a product out there. We couldn’t find very many which fit our needs. So that was really the start of the board that, okay, we should have a way to put notes on whatever we are collaborating on. So if you’re building a product, let’s put some notes, visual notes, so that a person can reply to those notes right there in context, rather than having a threaded conversation, screenshot somewhere else, conversation somewhere else, and it just becomes a mess.
So yeah, I think my need for, or my laziness to not want to have a synchronous meeting for every collaboration led me to the board.

Yeah, so I think one of the things in collaborative tools and it’s a broad space is so much collaboration of, there’s the likes of teams and slack where, you know, you can collaborate with a new team, you can talk to them and, just message them and do a whole lot of things. Then there are the likes of visual collaboration like Miro, but where you’re still creating a new asset, but not the thing that the board stands apart on is the fact that, Whatever you’re building, let’s say you’re building a website, you collaborate on top of that.

So your context is what you’re building, right? Your collaboration is on top of that, rather than a collaboration tool separate from what you’re building, right? Because oftentimes 10, 20, 30 people are involved in building that website, that course, that Engineering drawing, but unfortunately that collaboration happens outside.
So then there’s a lot of, Oh, can you show me what you’re talking about here? Or let’s just jump on a call and let’s just share our screen to do it. So it’s just a more contextual way of collaborating because whatever you’re building. You’re getting feedback on that.

Absolutely. So we really, because obviously that was the problem that I knew very well, started with websites and courses like, anybody who’s building websites or products, they needed a visual way to give feedback on that website. So we really started with that. That led to discovering courses, which are even more interactive, which are like, okay, you click on one thing and another thing, the next slide shows up and whatnot.

And those do not even go through that kind of, intense mock. That we do, they directly go into production. So that became a big market for us, like e learning courses, agencies that build e learning courses. So that’s where we started from. Interestingly, as we started, getting more and more traction, we also saw other industries come to us.
So out of that, AEC, like the Architectural Engineering and Construction they collaborate on drawings and the fact that we work in the browser and you’re able to leave comments and notes and can zoom in, zoom out can leave notes and annotations on top of the PDF that made it very friendly for engineering teams as well and architectural teams as well.
Another sector that we have customers in is the technical writing teams or information developers. Our teams that are building manuals, again, they go through this whole process of sharing feedback between stakeholders that are distributed across the world. And again, a lot of it happens on emails or some clunky system that they’ve built
Or just passing PDFs around and that’s where, so it’s been a good journey. It’s interesting that, people come up with these cases, but primarily I would say I would really divide into two main content teams. And I would include websites, courses, manuals, all of that in that, and then architectural engineering and construction teams that could, you know, anybody who’s building on doing building design or ship designs, for example, even that.
All

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, this is close to my heart because again, as I said, I don’t come from a construction background and this was quite eye opening for us to see that the company which manages around 10, documents a year, they were doing a whole lot of printing the documents. This is pre COVID. printing the documents, passing them around and getting feedback and approval.

That’s a lot of paper wastage, first of all. And of course, that’s a lot of time wasted as well. Yeah. So we helped streamline their process in managing the whole document reviews using Zipboard. And the thing that really helped was that It’s not like we asked them to move, lock, stock, and barrel on our product.
The thing, the beauty was that they had documents already on SAP with the scale that they had and they wanted something that worked, easily and pretty quickly with those documents staying in SAP, and that’s where we came in that you can. Keep your management documents and the whole management in SAP, but they could come to Zipboard and be able to get quick approval, sign off stamps, the documents, and get them back.
And that really helped them save almost 50 percent of the time because earlier they were really missing out on their deadlines and, missing SLAs with the with a lot of subcontractors and stuff that has really improved their process.

Marketing is an ever illusionary thing. I don’t know. It’s an also ever involving, evolving, right? I think one thing that we bet early on with SEO, which, and I would not just say SEO, but more content and, more useful content that we feel like our current audience would actually get some benefits from.
So that’s one thing that we’ve really double down on and have. Built into our system in our marketing pipeline building content now that content could use be used for SEO, as well as for your sales pipeline like for the other one is email marketing, at least with campaigns and stuff like that.

One thing that we are still trying to and figure out is the outbound marketing, because I think that’s where we haven’t done a whole lot. But But yeah, I think the whole content development and these useful resources and not necessarily just talking about the product, like we have a we have a checklist for e learning QA, for example which gets us the most amount of users that we can think of because they find it useful, it’s a useful content that they can actually use and take away so that’s been our most useful strategy so far.

True. And it’s not like we get to convert everybody and the intention is also not right. But at least it educates people in a way that they can do things in a better way.

And that’s the whole point. And see that’s another thing with productivity tools, right? Can you show them that this is a better way to do it? There was always email. There are always spreadsheets and that’s our biggest competitor in them. So you’ve got to show them, okay, Hey, you know what, this is a better way to do this.

Yeah, I won’t say again that we have aced it, but I think in the niches that we know, or the audiences that we know, we’ve done a good job. I think one thing that we do is it’s a very pain point focused content. So we try to understand what is a pain point, because that is a pain point that people are going to search for it, right?

So that’s we have a very pain point focus approach. Which also lets us focus on keywords that are not like, Hey, I’m just going to write on collaboration. No, I need to find out how do I get quick feedback from teams not sitting in my office and get my work done. This is not a good example of how a person would search, but maybe, there are these long tail keywords that they would be searching for to get their job done.
So we really start from there. Focusing on the pain points, figuring out what are the pain points that this, these set of people and focusing on bottom of funnel content first. So that’s like we want to exhaust the bottom of funnel content. Then we move to the middle of the funnel. Think about, okay, what else are the other pain points, which we may not be solving, but we can help so that we can build that trust, right?
So it’s been a very pain point focused approach. And then of course we tied to all the keywords. And I know again, it’s all evolving too fast and I’ve not been involved too much into it. I have a content team who does that, but I, at least from a point of view of the very HubSpots hub and spoke model, that’s what we try and follow as well that, okay, you know what, if you’re talking about this keyword.
What else is out there that, that is related and we need to make sure that we, focus on that as

Yes. But I’m sure you will know more. There’s so much more happening. No,

Yeah.

Yes,yes. Yeah. Yeah. It required a lot of reading from scratch. Like I, I think, That was one thing that I had to, I didn’t come from that background at all, but I knew that if I had to do it, you have to read a lot.

Like I was talking to you earlier, one of the things with a product like Zipboard is that it’s a product that is applicable to so many industries, right? When it comes to that, so we are a workflow solution, right? Like we are providing a better way to do a workflow than a previous workflow.

But when it comes to SEO, you have to focus on the specific industry and the keywords that they might be searching for. For example, in construction, they’re not looking for, hey, you know what, I’m going to look for a visual collaboration solution. No, they probably might be saying, oh, I need a better way to.
Markup or get review and approval on my submittals, right? So you need to understand the keywords and the pains again of that industry and niche down and understand and talk that language. So that has been quite a bit of a challenge to how to stay focused. I would say, because then you feel like there are these shiny objects, like these keywords look very interesting.
They have such a huge volume and whatnot. But Trying to stay centered on maybe smaller volume, but good quality content. That’s been one strategy. And also focusing on very industry specific content so that we can first go very deep down and then maybe go broad. Yeah. So some of those things that we’ve implemented that have gone well.

yeah.

Yeah, but I think the challenge still comes, what I realize is if you’re writing good quality content, the traffic starts trickling, but the challenge still for us remains backlinking, which again, I’m sure it’s a pain for a lot of people. You need enough resources to be able to do that to backlinks as well then.
Right.

Yeah. I have to check it out. might be useful.

So the support’s primary customers are in mid size where, mid size companies, maybe 200 or maybe 1000 people. So obviously in that you want to have a touch point where you talk to them, but you also do not want to be too nosy and too much in the face. So the way we try to keep that feedback and that relationship with these customers is we have quarterly check ins and we, if there is a new release, we tell them, we also have discussions with them on our roadmap.
This is what we are thinking of doing. What do you think? How can we help you more? Because that really helps us understand, okay, are we putting in the effort in the right direction where we are actually solving problems for these people, right? So a whole lot of comes from that, but obviously we do also have customers who never want to talk to us.

And they’re happy not talking to us at all. And they’re just happy using the product. And sometimes not happy either. So we use feedback tools inside the product as well. So that feels delighted, I think where they can if they are not happy, they, or they’re happy either way, they can share feedback instantly.
And then we reach out to them and ask them, how else can we improve? So whole lot of that. So it’s trying to, and of course putting some analytics in place to see, right? Like tools like Clarity, tools like Mixpanel helped us understand, okay, hey, you know what we learned this new, is there retention?
Is this feature being used? This is on a very feature based level, of course but Nothing is better than those real conversations with the people who use the product. That’s how we generate a whole lot of our roadmap as well.

Oh, okay. I can talk about, okay. We house everything in HubSpot. Okay. So that’s like our main CRM plus marketing hub. And then we use this tool called n Charge which is connected to our HubSpot.

And then, we primarily do email marketing using N Charge because it lets us do also user analytics and things like that. Other than that, of course, is the Google ads and the Google analytics tools, which is mostly towards understanding the mark yeah, understanding how people are using the tool and so on.
What else? I think it’s pretty lean like that. There are tools we use for SEO. I don’t on a daily basis, of course. Uh, but my content team uses Ubersuggest from what I remember. And of course, SEMrush. And of course, a lot of OpenAI now. ChatGPT now. Because it’s quite useful.

I think, have I missed anything?
Which I should be ?

Yeah, I think so. Pretty much. Yeah. That’s

Yeah, absolutely. So in the past year, in this year itself, we’ve had some new interesting updates in terms of better integration with ecosystem tools. For example, we had an integration with Outlook where you, anything that is written in Outlook can be pushed to support as a project or.
So that you can have a record in one place, right? So we are looking towards building more integrations, but again, we don’t want to create a whole lot of integrations that our customers won’t care about. So we are focusing on more Microsoft, SAP or more core products in each industry those kinds of integrations.

So that’s. A big focus so that the workflows are well integrated. And of course, in that process, you also build our APIs so that custom integrations can be done easily. So that’s one big focus for us. The second one that we’re working on is building templates for different industries. Like again, we are a product that is.
So you use in so many different industries. We want to make sure that we can have templates that support the workflows of that industry so that we give them quick starting points. So that would be a great way for you to, let’s say I’m a content developer and I want a very quick simple workflow, which works with external stakeholders and then a QA integrated QA in it.
You should be able to join, build a template around it. And of course, in all of this, we’re using a bit of AI as well to understand, okay, let me understand from you what you are where you’re coming from and then build that in between. We also have been integrating AI slowly into the product.
Like we’ve launched a few features where you can tell which industry you come from, and then based on that, your statuses for the project will change, which is a journey towards that template, right? But. Let’s say I may again if I’m a design team and architectural design team, my phases or statuses are different that I go through.
Okay, this has gone through a contractor approval. This has gone through so you can really customize them, but you don’t have to use. Your brain, you can use AI to, generate those. So we are building more and more of those features as well, so that we can give you better reporting and make a sense of how your projects are doing.
So some of that is what I’m excited about.

In terms of in terms of marketing, I think we want to be able to do better at again, solving problems, right?
Like I think that is a goal still. And but I think one thing that we don’t do, and I was mentioning to you I really love how Zapier has done their marketing. In terms of making it very product focus and solving problems and showing how you can do things better. So that’s one goal for sure, to be able to cater to these different industries and still be able to tell them this is a better way to do this, right?

So that would be one goal to have. Definitely also looking at keeping an eye open for the programmatic SEO. Because I feel we may lag behind if we don’t invest in it. Maybe not, maybe yes. So I want to invest more time and figure out what else we can do to do that better. Yeah, I think those are the two things.
And of course, um, maybe better thought leadership as well, because I think that’s where we haven’t. We haven’t spent time enough talk to more industry associations and stuff like that.

We’ve done a few webinars and those are really helpful in getting people to see. And in fact, what we’ve also seen that a lot of times people don’t want to come on a one on one call, but they love to see the product in a webinar, but we’ve still done a product focus webinar.
So far, we’ve done a few interviews here and there like these kinds. But yeah, if we had the time and the resources, we would love to do more of more podcasts or webinar, but it hasn’t been a key focus. And on the other side, Conferences is something that we’ve seen that especially for more traditional industries, like construction is very traditional.

Those are where you need to physically be there in events. Not this year, but next year, it’s a big goal to get into a few conferences and meet people face to face for sure.

Okay. I’m scared, but sure.

Get a hamper after that?

What habit holds me back? Overthinking.

Oh, daily tasks that I despise doing social media as a compulsive. Yes, it’s not the, for work.
I’m not a very yeah.

For personal life, Instagram.

All right.

Oh, a lot. Other than, of course, my own work in tech and anything related to tech. A lot about psychology or even like I recently visited Egypt.
So a lot about history now. And travel, anything related to those things. Yeah.

Oh, that’s that’s that goes way back, but I wanted to be a fashion designer as a kid.

Interesting.

What’s my last Gen AI prompt? That was build a LinkedIn newsletter strategy for that was my last so I, as I said, I use AI a lot right now for like quick checks to everything. So yeah, that was what my last prompt was.

Same here, Harshit. This is a lot of fun and it makes me think about a lot of things that I should be doing as well. So that’s good.