Behind every tool you use, there is a story. And today we’d like to share ours.
In this exclusive interview below, Roberto Popolizio sits down with Vlad Gozman, CEO of involve.me, all-in-one no-code funnel builder.
From the company's humble beginnings as a VR content management system to their pivot to a powerful funnel-building tool, Vlad takes us on a journey through the evolution of involve.me and the driving force behind its success.
But it's not just about the past, Vlad also gives us a glimpse into the future of involve.me. He also shares insights into the company's mission to empower marketing and sales teams to improve the customer experience and collect better customer data.
This interview is not only informative, but also an inspiring story about a startup that identified a problem and found a solution to make a real difference in the industry. So get ready to take notes as Vlad Gozman takes us behind the scenes of involve.me. The full interview is available at Website Planet.
Roberto: Please present involve.me to our audience. What’s your story? What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
Vlad: We started off with a completely different product, trying to develop a VR content management system back in 2016. To fund development of an MVP we started doing agency work and landed a few international brands as big ticket customers, such as Universal Pictures.
They wanted us to develop interactive landing pages with quiz functionality for each movie launch. And even though the look and feel of each page was different, in accordance with every movie, in essence they always ran quiz-based giveaways with the goal of gathering contacts for their prospecting database.
As we wanted to grow efficiency and lower development costs, we started automating parts of this process internally, because when you strip the frontend design, the barebones are the same (database setup, content elements, forms, functionality, etc.). This helped us increase our output and margin, so it got us thinking there might be a product there. We had several customer development sessions where we basically questioned why they don’t use off-the-shelf tools for this. We found out that these brands hadn’t found one to fulfill the taxing design and functionality requirements they had.
This validation was enough to get us to whip up an MVP and test the waters. We set it up as a freemium offering and put up a Google ads campaign. When we saw that the tool started to generate revenue in its first month, we decided to pivot from the VR CMS and dedicate ourselves fully to this new direction. We’ve officially launched involve.me in April 2019 and never looked back.
Roberto: What is your mission?
Vlad: We enable marketing and sales teams from SMBs and Enterprise companies to improve customer experience and gather better customer data. With involve.me they can easily create landing pages, embeddable widgets and pop-ups for the entire customer journey per drag & drop with our no-code funnel builder by using customizable form, survey, calculator and quiz elements.
Roberto: How does your funnel differ from the competition?
Vlad: involve.me’s USPs are both functional, as well as visual. It’s basically the only tool you need to cover all touchpoints in the customer journey.
On the design front, we offer deep customization from overall project design down to customizing the look & feel of each individual content element. Thus, when integrating involve.me funnels into a website or web app, they don’t look like third party tools, but rather blend in seamlessly.
On the functionality side our no-code builder offers an agnostic project type, meaning that you’re not confined to any kind of use case. You can start with a quiz template and transform it into an NPS survey, for example. The multi-page, multi-outcome layout enables our customers to control the customer journey to the extent that they can flexibly configure the segmentation by defining a custom conditional logic for outcomes. It’s as close you can get to scripting your own funnel outcomes.
involve.me also comes with a function-rich formula builder for creating online calculators with use cases such as offering automatic price quotes, ROI calculators, Net Promoter Score, mortgage calculators and more.
The funnels can be standalone landing pages, embedded widgets or pop-ups with custom triggering options. Customers can also invite users to funnels by email and send follow-up conditional emails on completion, all within involve.me.
Data quality is also a clear differentiator as we offer built-in form field validation and several checks for emails and phone numbers. And once you have quality customer data stored in involve.me you can tag contacts and enrich their profiles, so you have a complete view of your customer base.
Last but not least, we offer over 40 native integrations to third party apps, everything ranging from marketing and sales automation, CRMs, tracking, up to payment processors, allowing our customers to accept payments right within their involve.me forms.
Roberto: Who are your typical customers and what are the pain points you help them solve?
Vlad: Our customers range from SMBs to Enterprise, as we cater horizontally to a broad market. Notable customer verticals are e-commerce, where we help increase online sales through product recommendations and review funnels, software companies, where we’re used for onboarding and feedback funnels, agencies, which use involve.me primarily for lead generation and qualification, and publishers, who need to gather better audience insights and increase engagement.
As mentioned, it’s a large surface area, with the common denominator that involve.me helps them create a better customer experience regardless where they are in their journey. And the more touch points they use it on, the better the picture they’ll have about their customer profile.
Also as cookies are being phased out we see businesses increasingly valuing zero-party data. involve.me helps them gather and own zero-party data so they can profit from this shift and create personalized experiences for their customers.
Read the full interview to learn more.
What's Next?
Things are moving fast at involve.me and in the meantime, many upgrades have been released on our end. New features, exciting tool updates and more! Read further information in our recent interview with HostingAdvice about tool upgrades in 2023 and beyond.
