Outgrow is a New York-based SaaS startup that helps marketers foster engagement with their readers through interactive marketing. The platform allows users to create quizzes, calculators, assessments, recommendations, and polls.
Randy Rayess (right) and Pratham Mittal (left) founded Outgrow in 2016 as part of VenturePact, a service that helps businesses build and manage software products. We caught up with them about their experience founding a SaaS business in today’s age.
Idea
Outgrow was born out of a successful marketing experience. While creating a calculator for VenturePact to help customers better estimate the cost of building a mobile app, we realized how powerful calculators are in generating qualified leads. We built Outgrow to help marketers and business owners easily create a range of interactive experiences, such as quizzes, calculators, recommendations and polls. Normally, when people think of building interactive and personalized tools, they think it will require a team of designers and engineers. We wanted to change this mindset. Outgrow’s DIY platform enables anyone to create professional interactive experiences, without any coding or design skills.
Imagine you’re a tax accountant who has her own website. Now, what do you think will convert better – a Contact Me form on your website or a calculator that says, “Find out how much I can save you in taxes every year.” The second option is focused on helping the customer. And that is the power of quizzes, calculators, recommendations, and interactive experiences. They create value by providing personalized answers to your users’ most pressing questions.
Product
If you want to put a graded test on your blog to engage your audience, or a grader/calculator on your homepage, or a fun quiz on Facebook/LinkedIn or if you wanted to send a poll to your email list, you can build and launch the experience with Outgrow. The product allows you to use conditional messaging, logic jump and our integrations to easily segment and personalize the content you show each user. From there, you can use your Google Analytics, Facebook pixel or another pixel to consolidate your analytics.
A new feature we’re really excited about is the ability for companies to easily build advanced mortgage calculators and powerful recommendation tools with Outgrow.
Early days
When we first built Outgrow, personalized and interactive content was a new category. Though marketers didn’t have this idea on their minds, they were looking to acquire more qualified leads and better help their customer. We started with early adopters — companies that were comfortable experimenting with ideas and testing out different types of calculators, quizzes, polls and recommendations along with different promotion strategies. For example, TAG Livros, an e-commerce company, created a quiz on Outgrow that generated more than 90,000 leads.
Culture of experimentation and optimization in marketing
One of the key components we highlight with our customers and internally at Outgrow is the importance of creating a culture of decision-making through data. Data decides the marketing channels we focus on, the calculators and quizzes that we build to interact with our customers, as well as the features we prioritize in our product roadmap.
Looking ahead
We will continue to add more functionality and controls to our core products. Our goal is to expand into different areas of personalized and interactive content and make building this type of content as easy as creating a blog post. The vision is for marketers with an idea for a personalized or interactive tool that would create value for their customer to be able to create one easily on their own via Outgrow, without involving an engineering and design team.
