We Create Problems relies on this powerful source of leads and so can you; with Abhishek Kaushik

We Create Problems (WCP) helps technical talent acquisition managers screen applicants by providing coding assignments, projects, and technical questions, before they get to the interview .

In this episode, CEO & Co-Founder, Abhishek Kaushik, shares how WCP acquires their new customers through their existing customers. He also explains how to better position a company to attract better leads, and how in time this will develop better brand for the business.

Abhi also explains how We Create Problems helps companies with their hiring process, why they came up with this pre screening approach, and how he is expanding his brand from India to the USA; a challenge with many issues to overcome for any entrepreneur.

Post-production, transcript and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Today, we're going to Bangalore, India. We've got Abhishek Kaushik, who is the CEO and founder of a technical company called "We Create Problems." Abhi, welcome to the show.

Abhishek Kaushik: 0:13

Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you.

Jim James: 0:16

It's fantastic to have you. Now, you have a company that is building a community. You've got plans for over a million on this community to help your business to grow. I'd love for you to share a little bit about "We Create Problems." And then, let's talk about how and why you're building a community to build your business. So tell us about "We Create Problems."

Abhishek Kaushik: 0:37

Great, so WeCP, which is wecreateproblems.com is a technical hiring software. We help talent acquisition leaders screen them by coding assignments, projects, and technical questions, interview them face-to-face, and onboard them in one click in your operation. So we sort of, you know, streamline their direct technical hiring process. And that's what our software does.

Jim James: 1:00

But when you started this business as students a little while ago, you didn't have the kind of clients, but now you've got people like Microsoft, you've mentioned already, and some other blue-chip companies. Just tell us how have you been building your own brand for WCP.

Abhishek Kaushik: 1:16

So we took a basic approach, initially, when we didn't have marketing funds. And also, we ask a customer here: Why do you trust us? And what do you like in us? And if you like us, can you refer us to, you know, a couple of your other colleagues and your friends who are in the professional network? And that's where we got our second customer. So our second customer came from our first customer. Our third customer came from our second customer, right? And actually, our fourth customer, came from our first customer again. So, that's what I remember so far. And then, most of our customers you know, are keen to referring. And just last year ago, we started spending on a marketing through our marketing budgets, but then, the initial approach was to go to customer and ask for reference to grow.

Jim James: 1:58

Okay, and that's plainly be very successful. But you've also, I think, built a community, and you have your podcasts as well. So would you like to explain the strategy behind that? Because that's quite a big task to build a community rather than just to plug into an existing.

Abhishek Kaushik: 2:14

Yup. We run our community of technical-hiring.com, which is a community of technical hiring leaders, you know, throughout the world. So, the objective behind building this community was to, you know, educate most of the hiring leaders to learn technical, right? So, we engage most of the senior high leaders and share their knowledge and experience to the world, like how great the group, our technical recruiters are hiring. And our reason to build this company community was to empower more people to learn technical hiring. And then this inspiration came to me, you know, from canva.com. So Canva empowered everybody on this planet to design. You no longer depend on a designer to publish. And that's where we think the recruiter's taught me to depend on hiring managers to hire engineers. So if you want to hire an engineer, you don't need to be an engineer on your own; you only need help from an engineer. You can learn how to hire engineer in simple basic method. So that's what technical-hiring.com envisions to do. And that's why we build this community, so to do recognize this cause.

Jim James: 3:21

And why are you doing this? Is it because there aren't enough technical recruitment managers in the market? Or you're just trying to save money because, in effect, you're changing the way that business works for these large multinationals that are hiring. What's the business purpose behind that?

Abhishek Kaushik: 3:38

Yeah, great question, Jim. So, you know, if you look at today's data and then the findings that I have, roughly, nearly 40% of the engineering hours, you know, of a company on average is spent on hiring engineers, not shipping products and not writing code. And that is a massive time, right? Because the hiring manager and his team are interviewing people there, you know, they are sketching the plan for hiring new people in the company. When a company already have a recruitment team, right? But still recruiting, recruiting team is mostly doing sourcing of talent, sourcing of candidate, they don't participate in, they're don't have the right as decision-maker in screening them and in doing them. So that's where we want to break this status quo and we want to say, "Look, to hire engineers, 95% of the work can be done by recruiting teams, and it's just the 5% of the work, which hiring managers and engineers have to do to add on to their teams." And one is about the time, 40% that I said. Nearly 39% of business revenue's lost because the engineers are involved in hiring engineers, right? So these are the two business reasons why we think the cause is very strong and we should do very technical hiring.

Jim James: 4:47

So really, it's a significant loss, isn't it? Then, presumably also, when there's this dearth of talent, as the technology moves on to, for example, the metaverse, there must also be a challenge for the people internally to stay up to speed with all the technologies that their new hires would need to have. Is that another problem, Abhi, as well?

Abhishek Kaushik: 5:07

Yeah, of course, it is a problem. And as technology, you know, a progress as, Jim, what's going to happen is, more and more of the engineering team is expected to try out new things, you know, put on their time and bandwidth on building and competing against different businesses, not like spending a large number of time just to hire new people or acquire new people, right? So, we believe that engineering hiring can deliberate it from juniors and, you know, be handled to recruiting team in a more open manner. So that's why we are building WeCP technical-hiring.com.

Jim James: 5:39

Okay, that's wonderful. I can really see that you're liberating the flow of qualified candidates into the companies. What about this strategy you've had? You talked about referrals, and once the companies got bigger and bigger, referrals may not last forever. Do you have a content strategy as well? I know that you have a podcast. So what else are you doing to spread the word? Because you're on a mission, really, aren't you?

Abhishek Kaushik: 6:03

Yeah, so we do have content strategies as well. Now we were, you know, on to almost all the world's websites where our users and buyers hangs out. We even do HackerNoon, even to HackerNews. We went to all the GitHubs and we've been to, you know, almost Stackoverflows of the world to understand what is the real problem in hiring engineers, and who has to respond to this. We collated all the problems on a simple Google sheet and started writing, you know, the pain points. And on those pain points, we started drafting articles and we started interviewing people, how are they solving? We collated the solutions to, you know, top pain points and started writing our first blogs. So our initial blogs were, you know, done by doing discovery of the problems and asking how they're solving it. Because we've begin a very young team, and then we started learning ourselves, as well, what the technical hiring is. We did a lot of hard work to build our content strategy. And today, I must tell you that we have a massive subscribers on our blog community. And we have been writing... We have written more than 200 blogs so far, you know, about technical hiring and technical recruiting. So, the idea is very simple, pick a problem and go through the solution, fundamentally, and to first principles, and explain in a simple manner to our audience. And that's why we generate a lot of leads for our content. Almost today we generate roughly five to eight, you know, MQLs everyday to our content, hopefully. So I consider that as a decent achievement, but we want to grow five X on top of that now.

Jim James: 7:40

That isn't just helpless. What's an MBL, sorry?

Abhishek Kaushik: 7:43

Five to eight MQLs per day.

Jim James: 7:45

What's an MQL?

Abhishek Kaushik: 7:46

Marketing Qualified Leads.

Jim James: 7:47

Marketing Qualified Leads. Sorry. I probably shouldn't know that, Abhi, but that's great for those of us that didn't as a marketing qualified lead. So you're getting a lot of leads. And are you also engaging in paid advertising and so on, Abhi? Or is it all really a content-led strategy?

Abhishek Kaushik: 8:02

It's mostly content-led strategy right now. But, just a couple of months back, we have started in LinkedIn ads where we've given free e-books to our audience. We've started giving white papers and eBooks to our community. We've started giving checklists a lot of those collaterals, which can help them in technical hiring. So, we have double down and spend on ads, well, in the largest two to three months.

Jim James: 8:28

That's really interesting, Abhi. What about a technology platform. Are you using one of the social media automation platforms? Or are you doing it all yourself? Can you give us some insight into what a technology company uses to manage its marketing content strategy?

Abhishek Kaushik: 8:46

Okay, thank you. So we mostly went effectual in building our entire marketing automation tool doing so, what we do is we've connected LinkedIn to our HubSpot and we are running on a Starter Plan on HubSpot, so we don't feel a lot of support as of now. But then we have launched HubSpot and other tool integration pretty well. So we take input from our product to Entercom, which is again on a free of the much discounted plan. And then we, you know, use HubSpot, reconnected LinkedIn to HubSpot. So at the moment somebody downloads an ebook or, you know, the LinkedIn team sends a notification, and that's how we engage with them after one email campaign through our two phone numbers, et cetera. So that's how we are currently acquiring leads and discovering about them.

Jim James: 9:27

That's wonderful. Well, it's simple, but the idea is an entrepreneur is to build the systems that are integrated, which has that you've done really well. Can I just ask you about the kinds of questions that you're looking for, because you mentioned that you go into, like, GET Hub, for example. You're going into the verticals where your audience lives. What kind of questions are you looking for that become, if you like the kernel of the articles that you're writing on your blog? I think it's a really key point that we should look for the pain in the market to respond to that, but that's a skill set not many people talk about, Abhi. So how are you doing that do you mind sharing a bit more?

Abhishek Kaushik: 10:07

Yeah, yeah, sure. So, one is the initial shortcut that we did. We went to internet and figured out, "Hey, why are our customers are dissatisfied from our competitors?" Right? And do they give a bad review to our competitors on g2.com or on other listing sites? Do they give a bad review? So whenever they're giving a bad review because of certain reasons, and find out the reasons why, you know, they're giving a bad review. What was the problem that our competitors could not solve for our customers. And that's how we started, you know, picking up building our topic clusters and building our most essential topics from that. And we got good traction. You know, we targeted to those companies and those people who actually wrote about those problems, and we say,"Hey, look, actually, this problem was not solved by your previous vendor. Would you mind, you know, coming on a call and we will show you how we can solve this problem for you?" And so we then manually do one by one to each of them. That was a one and a half year ago story. And then what we did was we started understanding technology industrial trends towards hiring angle hiring industry and we started in this, you know, what is the process in a company? And what is that one thing that a user needs, right? Otherwise, if he doesn't accomplish that, he will lose his job. So what is that user is wording that position of acquiring talents will lose, you know, if he doesn't hit his number? And then we started going through his mind. So we started understanding his functional needs, social needs, and emotional needs, right? And then we started creating three categories of articles. You know, articles that can help solve these functional needs, social needs, and emotional needs, and it helps those. So these were the two different strategy that we took. So the second one came later, the first one was just hitting on our computers.

Jim James: 11:48

Abhi, that's brilliant, right? It's like a marketing master class here. So you've got the social, the emotional, and the functional needs. Can you give us maybe one example of each of those three that your avatar, or your ideal customer, is looking for? Can you maybe give us a couple of examples so we know what you talked about?

Abhishek Kaushik: 12:07

Sure, sure. So, for example, if a head of talent acquisition wants to hire engineers, and his functional needs would be that he wants to fill 15 junior positions by the end of this quarter, right? So if that's his functional objective. His social, you know, need is that somebody from his organization, either his boss, or his, shared on LinkedIn that this person, actually achieved his number and should get a pat on the back, should be appreciated for the objective that he achieved, right? And emotional need is all about being happy and not undergoing through frustration, not going through stress while he is trying to achieve his functional needs. So that's where we say, "Look, you can hire being happy. You can sleep peacefully while you we hire for you," right? So articles like these. Innovate WeCP and sleep better. And then we actually build a dashboard for them where we try to identify how they can sleep better while WeCP is hiring for your lead engineers, right? So we were demonstrative with presentation and, you know, real metrics, and that really helped us. So these were the three examples for the job roles, Jim.

Jim James: 13:10

Abhi, I love that. For a bunch of technical experts and wizards, like yourselves, you have such an intuitive grasp of the marketing process, and the avatars, and the customer journey, it's just inspiring. Can I ask you, are you going to open all your offices in America and here in the UK? How are you overcoming some of the marketing challenges? And as you go away from your base.

Abhishek Kaushik: 13:34

Yeah, we want to expand globally now, and we are in the process of expansion. You know, they're about to set up an office in the US, Santa Maria in the UK. And of course, we are pretty much, you know, events happening in India now. So while we're trying to expand, we're trying to hire new people in this demographics. So we want to hire new people in the US, for example. As far as marketing is concerned, we again wanna go through effectuation in marketing because we feel the customer acquisition, a true customer acquisition happens when, you know, a customer brings you customers. So we are relying a lot on our customer's trust to build our customer's channel. But to scale, you know, at a faster rat e right? We have created three simple strategy in marketing via saying that Look, number one is positioning. Can we position ourselves in that industry well? Number two is lead generation. Can we know what kind of leads to do they want? And number three is branding. You know, how are we going to brand ourselves in the world? So we've seen that, you know, better positioning leads to better leads, and better leads leads to better brand, right? So this is the plan as of now, to grow globally, and that therefore we're walking on our positioning. And when I say positioning, we are walking on two again, two approach in positioning: action positioning and visual positioning. Are the text content, right? And is our visuals is right? Are they related and interlinked? And because today we see either visuals or orig content. Similarly, leadgen, are these paid leaves or are these, you know, unpaid leaves, right? And double down on that. And branding is all about, we believe branding is not what we talk about our customers or ourselves."Branding" is what customers talked about us, right? So we are creating a branding strategy with the one of customer to share our story, you know, to their handles. We want our customers to share, you know, benefits of our tool on their handles. So we want to move actually in marketing and go fundamentally and see how it turns out.

Jim James: 15:31

Abhi, that's fantastic. And final question then. How do you get the customers to share on their handles about We Create Problems. Because you don't want them to be saying,"Hey, guess what, We Create Problems." You know, how do you get your customers to reshare your content, to build your brand using their platform?

Abhishek Kaushik: 15:48

So, Jim, many of our customers actually have done in the past and we've learned how they do this. So, happy to share, you know, a couple of examples. So, you know, customers want to be your friend for straight. They want to know a person. They want to work with people who they can actually feel like a friend, they feel like a companion, feel like spoiled that they can reach out to in a way to solve their problems. And they should also share your problem, you know, share their problems with them. So our strategy is very simple. We want to meet friends in our customer's community first to let we get to know each other well, right? A good customer is a great customer when he's sharing your problems with you, you know, without even asking, right? And then that's how we're building relations with our customers. And these relations are done by two ways. People-based relation and productive spend in the relation. So we are there adding emotions in productions, right? We are adding and then we have a playbook for people to go out to the customers and build relations, and we have product to go out to the customers and reflect. So when we build these relations, customers themselves feel that"Wow, you know, these people and these, product is helping us." And it's a matter of triggering them and reminding them, "Hey, can you write a review for us?" And we ask them emotionally, we tell them, you know, "It's been 18 months working with you and we have sweat like 2,400 hours of work and blood and sweat for you." So we tell a story for the last 18 months, how we have achieved what they've achieved. And we sort of make a video, et cetera, and we tell them the real thing behind our hard work, and then they share the story on their handles. And so that's pretty much it.

Jim James: 17:20

Well, Abhi, sounds like everything you're doing very well. Considered that you're also making a video for the client as well. Abhi, if people want to find out more about you as an entrepreneur and also about We Create Problems, where can they come to find out?

Abhishek Kaushik: 17:33

So we are at wecreateproblems.com. The name is pretty simple to remember. If you search in Google, "WeCP," W E C P, which stands for "We Create Problems," you'll find our website and there we are. There you go. Please visit our site and check out and give us feedback, and try out WeCP.

Jim James: 17:51

Thank you so much for joining from Bangalore. And of course, I'll put your contact details in the show. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Sharing how you're building a great brand from Bangalore is becoming a global honor to multinational companies. Thank you.

Abhishek Kaushik: 18:07

Thank you, Jim. It's wonderful talking to you, Jim. Thank you.

Jim James: 18:10

Great. You've been listening to me, Jim James here in the UK, host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur show. Thank you for listening to this episode of the UnNoticed Entrepreneur.