Empower Youth

Growth Marketing Today | Growing a YC-backed Startup BxBlue in Brazil with Roberto Braga (GMT040)

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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

How the BxBlue team were able to get their first customer using SEO within a month
How to rank higher in search engines than a large company like a bank
Accelerating the traction of articles and content that are performing well
The challenges with growing a startup in Brazil

MY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

Really get into the mind of your ideal customer. Find out what they’re asking. Talk to them to find out what questions they’re looking for. This was his first step for doing keyword research. It doesn’t have to be complicated
Do things that don’t scale. I like how their first few customers, they would take their loan and physically walk over to the bank. This reminds of Tony Hsieh with Zappos. He sent cold-emails. These are things that don’t scale. This maximizes learning, which is what’s most valuable in the early stage.
Add fuel to things that already work. I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of guy who when I see something new and shiny I jump to that. For roberto, his team found the articles that were performing well in terms of SEO and running ads to those.

ABOUT ROBERTO BRAGA

Roberto is a co-founder bxblue, a marketplace for personal loans in Brazil backed by Y Combinator (S17). He leads bxblue’s user acquisition, marketing and growth strategy. Before, Roberto founded IPe, anetwork security company.

SHOW NOTES

2:50
Roberto’s career journey (from engineer to 3x founder)
8:46
How was YC for the BxBlue team
13:30
What were their biggest learnings from YC
14:45
How did SEO become BxBlue biggest acquisition channel?
18:20
How they did keyword research
19:44
How did they handle competition for targeting branded search terms
21:12
It only took them 1 month to get their first customer using SEO.
23:41
Early on, they were publishing 2 articles a day. They’ve scaled that up now to 10 articles per week.
23:46
How they are leveraging video to rank higher on search engines
24:46
How they’re distributing their videos right now
25:28
Their process for writing 10 articles a week
26:46
What was their backlink strategy
27:57
What percentage of their traffic is from organic traffic
28:49
They boosted popular articles on Facebook and Instagram
30:24
How they created hyper-specific audiences on Facebook for ads
34:09
What experiment did they run that didn’t work
36:23
Any other channels they are testing out right now.
36:25
What new channel acquisition are they testing out right now
38:04
What are the biggest challenge when growing a startup in Brazil?
40:41
Roberto’s 3 tips for marketers early to mid of their career
44:00
My three takeaways from thi episode