TCC Podcast #141: Quizzes for Copywriters with Josh Haynam

Writing quizzes is pretty hot right now. So we asked entrepreneur and Quiz expert, Josh Haynam to join us to share everything he knows about quizzes for the 141st episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. In this episode Kira and Rob asked all their questions about what copywriters need to know before creating great quizzes. Here’s what we covered: •  the story of how Josh and his partner built a business on quizzes •  some of the struggles he faced in starting his own company •  the moment Josh and others knew things were going to work •  why quizzes are such powerful tools for engaging your audience •  how quizzes can change the person who is taking it •  what the best quizzes have in common and why they work •  examples of people and companies that are doing quizzes right •  best practices for following up your quiz to engage your audience •  the tools Interact has created to help writers create a quiz •  the mistakes people make when creating quizzes •  what his ridiculous daily schedule looks like •  what he does to meditate for an hour and a half *really* We also asked Josh about how Interact got traction—the content strategy they followed as they grew, how he listens to customers to figure out what’s next, and what the future holds for Interact. To hear it all, click the play button below, download the episode to your podcast player, or scroll down read a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Interact  <-- sign up here Marie Forleo Jenna Kutcher The Copywriter Club Quiz Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Note: we’ve talked about quizzes before. Click here to hear our interview with Chanti Zak about how she’s built her business around quizzes. Also, that link to Interact is an affiliate link. If you sign up for a paid account, we will earn a dollar or two (at no cost to you).   Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. What if you can hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira:   You are invited to join the club for Episode 141 as we chat with entrepreneur and quiz expert, Josh Haynam, about co-founding Interact, how copywriters are using quiz funnels for their clients and in their own businesses, why quizzes are such powerful marketing tools, and what separates a great quiz from the merely good quizzes. Welcome, Josh. Rob:   Hey, Josh. Josh: Yeah, thanks for having me. Kira:   Yeah, great to have you here. And as a sponsor at our conference for copywriters in Brooklyn this past March, which already feels like a long time ago, was not that long ago, but great to have you and meet you at the event. So, just to start, can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you ended up building Interact? Josh: Yeah, yeah. It's a long story. Interact itself is a long story. It's been in business for almost eight years, which is, like, an eternity in the software world. We're basically, like, grandparents at this point. Yeah, I got my start as an entrepreneur when I was 15, so I've been running companies for 11 years now. And Interact was born out of an agency that myself and my co-founder Matt used to run. We would build websites for people and run all of their digital marketing. And we'd charge them a lot of money, and the end of the day, really all they had any interest in was the size of their email list, so how many contacts were coming in, and could they market to those contacts? And that was, kind of, frustrating for us because we spent all this time building out these interfaces and all this stuff, and they would just want to know the number. So, we actually stumbled across the quiz idea by accident, because one of our clients asked for a quiz to be built, I think, it was, ‘What's Your Sales Persona?’ Which now, everybody builds very similar quizzes to that. But at the time, we did it custom, we put it on his website, and it converted just way, way, way better than our other websites we'd built. And it was much easier. And it was a simple process to create the thing. And then, kind of, digging into that, we just realized this makes sense, like, if you just ask people about themselves, and you give them a personalized product offering or a service offering, then it converts a lot better, and you get a lot more opt-ins because the quiz has an opt-in form in order to reveal your results. So, that's where it started, that was 2011, so a very, very long time ago. And no one really cared at that point. It worked really well when we would do it, and when people would buy into it, but no one bought into it. So, the first 3, 4, 5, 6 years, things were really, really slow for us. The idea of doing a quiz for marketing hadn't caught on, it wasn't interesting. The old stuff was still working, so it was like, ‘Why would we spend all this time and effort doing something new when we can just continue running our ads, continue doing our same newsletter blasts?’ All that type of stuff. But then in the last couple of years, things started to really shift to where a lot of that old school stuff started to die off or become too expensive or new data laws started to make things more difficult, and that's when people started turning to us, and then in the last couple of years, it's really, really taken off to the point where there's like 75,000, 80,000 companies using Interact to this point. So, it's gotten really, really big, and I believe it's like 12 or 13 million leads that have been generated to the platform at this point as well. So, kind of, a very, very slow build, and then all of a sudden, it just started to catch on. And that is the very, very high level view of how Interact came to be. Rob:   That's amazing. And we've got dozens of questions about quizzes and how copywriters can use them, but before we jump into all that stuff, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the entrepreneurial journey. It's something that... I think, a lot of us like to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs, but starting a company is obviously not an easy thing to do. Keeping it going for eight years, like you guys have, is a phenomenal accomplishment. Tell us, maybe some of the hardest things that you've had to deal with as an entrepreneur. Josh: Oh, gosh, how long do we have? Yeah, it's really hard. The first four or five years money was absent, is the way to put it. So, myself and Matt lived off of pretty much nothing: bounced around different apartments, worked out of apartments, worked out of whatever space we could get. Did whatever we had to do, so we did a lot of consulting work for our clients. So, we'd be pulling like 14-hour days and then going home, and just living in the tiniest place imaginable just to scrape by. And, I think, specifically, some of the things that are really hard and weird is, there was a point at which I was actually living in a walk-in closet, which is part of what you get to do as an entrepreneur. But I was being interviewed because we were growing really, really fast. So, I'd go and I would do a podcast about the success of this company, and how it was growing like this... by leaps and bounds, but there's still no margin, we're a bootstrapped company so there's no money. So, I had to go home to my walk-in closet, and I'm like, ‘This is the weirdest life that I just never thought I would be here.’ One minute they're like, ‘Oh, you're amazing, you started this thing.’ And then I'd go home to my closet and like, ‘What is life?’ Rob:   That's so amazing. Josh: Yeah, so... Kira:   I mean, some walk-in closets are quite big, though. Josh: No, no you- Kira:   Was is it in New York City wal- in closet or where were you? Josh: In Oakland, Oakland, California. Yeah, I mean, you had to jump from the end to get into bed, so yeah, it was bad. It's just ridiculous. So yeah, I think, that was the hardest thing was just, like, financial stress on its own is stressful, right? But then when you couple that with you're running something, and then at that point there was people working for us, so then you have to balance that or you have to think about that, it's like, ‘Well, if we go down, then we have to let these people go.’ And then we had lots of initiatives that we tried that involve bringing people in that didn't work, and then we had to let the people go. So, during those years where things were rough, we went through rounds of layoffs, and bringing new people in, and laying off again, and we just couldn't get anything to stick. And that really wears on you when you just keep trying and you keep trying, keep trying. And it's like you're trying to climb up a, like, a rock, but it's just so slick that every time you grab something, you just fall right back down, and that was really what it felt like for years and years, literally. So, that was also really, really hard to, kind of, have that mentality of the long term, you know, I believe in this, I think, it's going to work and to keep going. Rob:   When was the moment where you realized, this is catching on finally, after years and years, this is it? Do you remember where you were and what you were doing? Josh: Yeah, that would have been probably beginning of 2017. We launched a new partnership program, and I sent an email to Marie Forleo, I sent emails to like a bunch of people, but I sent an email to Marie Forleo, and she responded and was like, ‘Oh, I like this idea.’ And I was like,