Founders Everywhere: Andres Glusman
Andres Glusman is the co-founder & CEO of DoWhatWorks, a startup helping growth, marketing, and product teams accelerate their conversion rates.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
User experience (UX) is a cornerstone of web design; it encompasses every interaction a visitor has with a website, from the initial landing page to the final click of a button. In today's highly competitive online landscape, the ways in which web pages are designed can make or break a business. It is the key to engaging visitors, retaining their interest, and ultimately converting them into loyal customers. How do you do that? You DoWhatWorks; they are a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) software with patented technology that detects experiments that are being run by 1000s of companies (similar to the way Google crawls the web).
Co-founders Andres Glusman, CEO, and Will Howard, CTO, worked together at Meetup for over a decade, pioneering many of the early ideas around the lean startup movement and working on experiments. Andres helped launch Meetup (making their first $14 of revenue) and held senior level positions in product, strategy and business development. Will worked as an engineer, rising in the ranks to become the director. At the beginning of 2019, they left Meetup to build DoWhatWorks to help growth, marketing, and product teams accelerate their conversion rates.
What's DoWhatWorks’ North Star?
Our North Star centers on “wins.” We have 3 measures that really define our mission:
Are customers winning more often?
Are customers winning faster?
Are customers winning with less effort?
We’ve come to understand that we are in the “win” business. Our clients aren't necessarily interested in data, they want to improve their conversion rates quickly and efficiently. Everything we do is about being as smart as possible using our data to make it easier for people to win.
Why is DoWhatWorks going to win?
Number one, we’re the only people in the world who have this unique data set and can have this data set because of our patent. Our engine is analyzing 1600 companies every single day, looking at millions of data points, so our clients use that to stop guessing and start doing what works. We really see ourselves as building the “AutoCorrect” or “Grammarly” of website UX and copy.
Two, we are just so laser focused on solving this in a way that no one else is. We've felt this pain before. We're solving it for ourselves, our friends, and the people we care about. And we're doing it in a really methodical and disciplined way. We have such a great team and I thank my lucky stars for my co-founder Will; he’s absolutely brilliant.
What will define the next generation of great companies with AI is the training set, and then the workflow. We have this incredibly unique training set of data on what actually works and we’re building a workflow in a way that’s dead simple for people. It can change the game and way in which everyone optimizes their website.
Who are your customers and how do you inspire “customer love”?
We tend to work with enterprise and mid-market companies, since they’re the ones that have the most ability to benefit from conversion optimization. Our customers include 6 of the top streaming brands, major Fortune 500 SaaS brands, folks in banking, learning, DTC health and more. They love us because we’ve helped them get significant lifts in conversion rates. One just reported a $4M lift in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Others tell us they’re getting double digit percentage increases in key stats like sign-ups. We know what wins and loses by specific sector, time, and place across over 17,000 experiments.
Any favorite books or podcasts?
My top 5 books are:
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by 37signals, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Matthew Linderman
Some of my favorite podcasts right now are:
Paddle’s Protect the Hustle.
Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
Startups for the Rest of Us, hosted by TinySeed founder, Rob Walling
How do you recharge and maintain work-life balance?
It's essential to find ways to recharge and stay energized. I used to go to the gym everyday, but COVID knocked that out, so I started walking. I prioritize daily hikes, averaging 3-5 miles, where I often come up with my best ideas. Fun fact, since the start of COVID, I’ve walked over 2,000 miles.
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