AdEspresso - Massimo Chieruzzi

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Charles Kirkland: Hey! This is Charles Kirkland. Welcome to another exciting podcast over the MBA. I’ve got the behind the scenes legend for the product called AdEspresso. He is Massimo Chieruzzi. Hey! How’s it going?

Massimo Chieruzzi: Great! How are you doing?

Charles: Doing good. Now let me tell you guys, you’ll say Charles, what is AdEspresso? Well, first of all, if you aren’t familiar with it, at the end of the video, or right below the video, end of the podcast, you’ll see a link. But let me tell you, we’ve used everything under the sun. If it’s an ad creation tool, me or my clients have used it, broken it, and usually, you know, a lot of times we’ve been using [Warrior – 00:38] in the past. I like [Warrior]. It’s a great product. I just don’t feel, a thtis time, it really suits the needs for most of my clients, or even myself.

So, I started looking for something else. And I kept hearing AdEsspresso, AdEspresso. And I’m like, okay. I actually stumbled upon it when I found they have a library – literally, an ad library with like, pretty much a gazillion ads. You can go see other ads. And found out about it. And everybody I’ve talked to, they love it. So, with that said, how’s it going?

Massimo: Great. Thank you. It’s an exciting period. I mean there are so many new things going on with Facebook advertising. It’s really exciting.

Charles: Oh, that is good. Now tell us how did you create AdEspresso? Was it like a frustration of, you know, creating ads, or was it that you saw a need in the market and you decided to fill it?

Massimo: Yeah. It was out of frustration, actually. We were running a lot of Facebook advertising campaigns for ourselves and for our customers. And we understood that it was very important to do split testing, to test for pictures, titles, demographic target, etcetera. But back then, basically everyone was playing in enterprise markets. So, very complex products with very high price points. And no one was caring about media business. So, we just decided to go ahead and build one ourselves.

Charles: I tell you, they say necessity is the mother of invention. Now I’ve played with AdEspresso and I actually like it. I can tell you, I usually break stuff pretty quickly, but I actually like it. And from the standpoint of like, a lot of tools I’ve seen are third-party tools. They end up lacking. Like, Facebook comes out with the lead ads or something else. Tools are literally lagging behind months.

So, I’ve noticed when Facebook has something, you guys seem to be right on the spot with that integration to the software.

Massimo: Yeah. That’s something very important. I mean, smart marketers always want the latest features, always want to take advantage of the new stuff that facebooks releasing – that very first month, when it’s super effective and anyone has not jumped on it yet. So, we are trying to have everything from date zero. Usually we succeed. For some features, actually, we have them way before Facebook releases them on the ads manager or power editor. So, that’s pretty good.

And I think the secret is that we are focusing only on Facebook advertising. We are not trying to do everything – Twitter, Bing, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, etcetera. There is so much space to grow on Facebook. There are so many advertisers that are relying on Facebook. We want to do one thing, but we want to do it super good.

Charles: Oh, that’s brilliant. I mean, we play with a lot of tools. And they have that multi-integration. And the problem we find is, you can’t advertise on Twitter the same way you advertise on LinkedIn, or  Facebook, or Google. And it’s kind of like a Swiss Army Knife. You can do a lot of stuff, but you rally can’t do any of them great. And I think, in today’s market, we’re past good. We’re going to the point where you have to be great.

Now, with that said, how are you doing your ads? Now, for one thing I’ll tell you, I absolutely love when I go to AdEspresso, you’ve got the coolest mascot sucking down coffee. And you all know me. I suck down unsweetened tea 24/7 or else I’ll be asleep. So, with that said, how did you come up with the idea of AdEspresso as a name, and as a logo, and as a character? How did all of that come about?

Massimo: You know what? I do’t remember. Basically, we were just- probably, we were just scanning for available domains. I don’t know. But I’ve always been a huge fan of dot com domains. If you want something great it’s more tough to [beat – 04:35] it out of [unclear] domain or stuff like that.

So, actually, we came up with a horrible name initially. And we were near to move to come here to San Francisco for a conference. And some guys in Italy told us, look, you are crazy. That name really sucks. So, we started just tewsting like, okay, what dot com domain can we find available?

And it was like, AdWombat. The Wombat is like a huge rat that lives in Australia, but the name was taken. So, we tried every possible kind of animal from rats down to dinosaurs. And everything was taken. And it was like a light. At some point we said, hey, okay. We are Italian, so why don’t we do AdEspresso? Which was very good, because one of the things that we really care about in a name, after the dot com domain, of course, is that Italians are terrible at speaking English, at speaking every other language.

So, I want something, that even if my pronunciation is really horrible, people will know how to write the domain when they go back home, and they want to check our products. So, we said everyone knows how to write espresso. And then we discovered that half of the Americans think that espresso is written with an “X”. So, we also had to buy all the typos of the spelling of the name. But we managed to secure most of them.

Charles: Hey. That happens. I’ll tell you, my spelling is bad. I’ve actually bought domains, installed the blog, literally had everything, logos made, and my wife goes, you know you misspelled that? Yeah. Yeah. Of course honey, absolutely. Yeah. I’m just- yeah. I meant to do that. I’ve done that kind of stuff before, unfortunately, painfully well.

With that said, now with AdEspresso, where are you looking at going with that? Are you just going to basically be the super ninja of Facebook ads, or are you just looking at creating the new content? How do you plan on moving AdEspresso forward in the future and what kind of things can we look out for?

Massimo: So, two things that are  most important. First of all is training. We are already doing a huge effort with out blog, with our academy, training users. We want to do even more inside the product. So, we are going to launch a full feature Facebook Advertising University with videos, etcetera. You’ll know this better than me, but there’s lots of bullshit going around. Can I say bullshit?

Charles: Oh yeah. Dude! You should hear some of the stuff I talk about. So, it’s all good.

Massimo: Okay. There is lots of bullshit going around, where lots of our competitors that are like, oh use our tool and you will save 20 hours per week, and you are going to save 70 percent of your money. That’s all bullshit. The truth is, that especially when you are dealing with [unclear – 07:33] enterprise, probably. They could do [unclear] learning, where you have so much data where they can optimize and get the most even out of crap.

But when you are a small business, the truth is that a tool like AdEspresso can save you a lot of time. Can I help you save a lot of money improving your campaigns? But, if a user that is using the tool doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, he’s not going to get any benefit from the tool. If we [unclear – 08:04] and you split test- the same picture with [unclear – 08:08] the ground – there is no magic but the tool will make to improve your performance is like 70 percent because you test [unclear – 08:17]. So, since we work with small medium businesses, I really believe that training, helping them understand better – become better advertisers, is really critical to our success.

And I like to feel that that our business is helping small medium businesses succeeed on Facebook advertising not selling them a software. So, we are going to do a lot of training and we are going to make a lot more features. But for now, I think for the next six months, it’s safe to say we are going to be fully focused on Facebook.

It is because it’s the hottest advertising channel right now. It’s huge. It has the scale. It probably- it doesn’t work for everyone if you’re selling, I don’t know, pipes for oil refinery, probably Facebook is not the best channel for you. But for 80 percent of the businesses, I’m confident that they can succeed on Facebook.

So, we are going to stay focused on Facebook and we are going to do a lot of work for the main verticals of our top users. And usually, that’s eCommerce guys, small medium, maybe agencies, and a lot of affiliate marketers as well. So, we are going to introduce a lot of features on this site. And in six months, we will thin it may be another advertising channel.

Maybe it could also be interesting to go higher and lower in the funnel. So, these guys learn how to do Facebook advertising very often they don’t know how to create a landing page or all this kind of stuff. So, we have a lot of options open, but for now, the goal is to really make the best Facebook ads manager.

Charles: And I’ll tell you, I think you all have succeeded, because it absolutely rocks. And when I use it, every time I look at it, I’m like, the colors look good. It’s easy. It makes sense. Because I hate to say it, when you use some of these products, it’s like everything is grey, and it’s boring, and it’s kind of like you’re looking at a rainy day every day. It’s like, get some color in here people. Get some personality.

Now one thing I like about AdEspresso whether you remember the product or not. You guys have a killer newsletter. You’ve got some killer free tools. Tell me about the newsletter and tell me about the free tools.

Massimo: I mean as marketers we are always reading content to keep learning ourselves. We are always producing content. So, it just made sense to start sending out a newsletter every week with both our top content and the best content that we’ve found around. And yeah. The response has just been amazing. You know, every once and a while you’ll hear someone saying [unclear – 11:00] marketing is dead. No. [unclear] marketing works absolutely well, it’s just that you don’t have to send spam or irrelevant content to your users.

As long as you send useful information, users are really going to love newsletters and any kind of education or content. And yeah. When it comes to the tools that we have on our website, I think that the tool is just another form of content. I mean sometime you spend two weeks to create the perfect blog post analyzing a lot of data giving out value with the content. Sometimes, you spend the same two weeks writing a tool that is going to be useful for your users.

So, [unclear – 11:41] the tool we have an awesome team of very senior developers that create rock-solid product because we are managing money. On the website, on the free tool, I can have fun myself. I’m a terrible [quote] but still, I can do a bit of WordPress, [unclear] etc.

So, the website is my sandbox where I can do easy, but very useful stuff like ads gallery, where now we have 7,000 ads, but you can search for your competitors, for other people in your industry. We have [Compass – 12;15] that give you an info-graphic-like analysis of your Facebook campaigns. And these tools just work great. You never know from the beginning how they’re going to perform.

So, some of them like [Compass], don’t generate a lot of traffic, but they generate a lot of inbound links, and very high-quality data, because we ge to see the user campaign so we get useful data to analyze. Other stuff like the galleries- just, boom! We were [first on product] that generated probably 70,000 visits in a week.

Charles: Wow!

Massimo: Yeah. It just exploded. It was so useful.

Charles: And at the end of the day, that’s what people want. You know, and the reality of it is, that you’re introducing people to content which solves a problem. From there, you literally build a relationship. You build that trust. And from there, you’ve got people buying into your subscription service. And at that point, they’ve already been sold. Where most of the people that we look at, they’re like, I’ve got a product- They’re running around like if you go into a circus or go into a fair.

It’s like, they’re carnival barkers going, look at me! I’ll save you a billion dollars. And I think the reality of it is, the carnival barkers appeal to a certain audience –

 who are the audience who buy today and refund tomorrow. You know, they’re not that long-term client who’s smart and sophisticated. And they’re looking at things from a long-term standpoint. So, I’m excited!

With that said, where can we find more out about AdEspresso?

Massimo: On our website, of course. So, just go on AdEspresso.com and you will find all the information about the product. And if you click on our Academy, you will find our eBooks, our webinars, our blog, our Facebook ads gallery, and everything is for free.

Charles: Sweet! With that said, guys, there’s a link. In case you’re like me and you can’t type, there’s a link right below here. And I want to see if we can give us a discount, or a trial, or we can get something that we can introduce my people to you guys.

Massimo: Absolutely. So, we have 14-days free trial for everyone. And on top of this, for everyone who clicks on the link below, we’re going to offer you a 15 percent discount for the first three months of subscription.

Charles: Sweet! And guys, it’s like everything in life. If you get it, and look at it, and don’t do anything – you won’t get any result. It’s a function of getting out there and it’s buying the data. And I tell people everyday, you’re buying the data. If everything worked on the first time, we’d all be living – you know, The Four Hour Work Week – living on a beach, with a laptop, with five models beside us.

But unfortunately, real life, we buy the data. We spend money on ads. And we see what’s working. So at the end of the day, it’s about taking action. And actions get results.

Massimo: No short cuts.

Charles: No doubt. No doubt. Well, I thank you so much. We’ll go ahead and wrap this up. Guys, click the link below and I’ll see you all on the other side.