How to convince an entire market it needs your product with Eric Santos

Eric Santos, CEO and Co-Founder of Resultados Digitais, the leading marketing automation tool in Brazil and Latin America joins Alex for a conversation about the steps to convincing a market of the value of a product that it doesn’t understand, how to build an audience and develop customer discovery before a single line of code is written, how to create a “Disneyland-like" user conferences.

Eric has been a tech entrepreneur for the past 15 years and founded Resultados Digitais in 2011. The idea behind the company dates back to 10 years ago when he first discovered online marketing and its power. What he found frustrating was that to make the most of it, he had to use a number of disconnected tools. By 2011 he decided to build a product a unified product.

He ran into a problem, though.

Very few marketers in Brazil were familiar with online marketing or its benefits. No one was doing digital. So in order to launch his marketing automation product he first had to educate the entire market about the benefits of online marketing. In the following 18 months, he went on to kickstart a movement and create demand for his offering without writing a single line of code. A lot of content marketing, many speaking gigs and a host of "Mechanical Turk Experiments" followed.

Six years later, Resultados Digitais boasts over 10,000 customers, 1500 channel partners, and 8000 attendees at its yearly user conference, RD Summit, which Sujan Patel rightfully says has a Disneyland effect.

Listen on to learn:

• What were the precise steps he took to prepare the market for his offering?
• How he built a movement?
• What are the core tenets of a successful user conference and why it’s worth the effort and expense?
• How they grew RD Summit from 250 to 8000 attendees in 4 years?
• Why building a channel program before reaching $10 million ARR is fine and how to do it?

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