From a Mishmash of Tools to a Highly Automated Agency
Here’s a video interview with Derek Iwasiuk, a long time user of Service Provider Pro. He runs a very impressive and highly automated agency DigitalPush.
They leverage a large network of contacts across various industries to provide outreach services on over 5000 websites (all of them are set up in SPP!).
How long have you been in SEO and how did you start DigitalPush?
My name is Derek Iwasiuk and I’ve been in SEO for 15 years or so. I’m the CEO and owner of DigitalPush and I’m also a co-owner of an agency called SearchTides.
DigitalPush got its legs by basically, me doing outreach for clients. We had a lot of clients and any time you do outreach for a client, we would recycle those leads and use them for different campaigns. I just turned it into a way for DigitalPush to be a collectively affordable solution for other agencies to get their outreach services done.
Basically the offer was – ok we have a new client, and we have this kind of niche. I want to be able to choose from campaigns that I’ve already ran, and give them offers and affordable pricing on that. Because honestly, the cost of true outreach today is a lot more expensive than most people even realize.
Being able to just make it affordable is the whole reason behind DigitalPush.
What was it like before you started using SPP?
Before SPP, it was a lot of random mishmash of products, trying to get things to work. I remember using a lot of WordPress plugins – an ecommerce frontend like Woocommerce, then I would try to use Wufoo for forms but they had horrible integration for the backend.
Nothing was ever really an all-in-one solution, the backend system was never there. Especially order thread management when you have many conversations between the client and the support staff. It was all pieced together so if one thing broke everything was broken.
Since I moved to Service Provider Pro, everything’s gone down to just one thing.
How would you explain the value proposition of SPP?
Being able to offer a simple, but powerful solution for list style offers and services, that’s what I was ultimately looking for.
It’s very easy to do multiple lists, and offer services which don’t need individual landing pages line by line. They’re the most powerful, but simple solution for that right now.
What problems were you trying to address?
The main issues we were having is that we have a large number of services – up to 5000 sometimes – and I don’t want individual landing pages for them, I don’t want to have detailed descriptions and images and all that stuff (like a traditional e-commerce store).
Being able to use order forms on the front end, where you can move things around, drag and drop items – it was super important because I need virtual assistants to handle things and I can’t always set them up by myself.
Collect project information, client data, files, and more.
Just having something simple, that was specifically designed for people offering digital marketing services, it just seemed to fit perfect. Maybe out of the box it wasn’t perfect, but over time it’s evolved so much, especially over the last couple of years.
What made SPP stand out compared to other solutions on the market?
Basically the front end services, the way, things were able to be offered on the front end, building customizable forms. Because like I was saying before, I was doing a lot of Gravity Forms and Wufoo forms and stuff like that, and they just didn’t have anything really to back it up with and didn’t have a backend system.
It was just, you know, a mishmash of things. Anything you had to get to work was just piecing things together.
That’s why I think SPP was basically designed to accommodate businesses like mine; I haven’t found anything even similar or even come close to it yet, outside of building something completely custom.
Was there anything that almost prevented you from switching?
We use a lot of forms and the back end is a little bit different than most people have on SPP. If one form had like 150 products on it, it used to be very hard to sort and find something and the customer would have to scroll down and use Control+F.
Now they have a filterable list front end for us, and hopefully mostly off my design. That’s made it a lot better now than before, it was just a little tedious to work with. But every single option out there was even worse so it didn’t really matter.
What has exceeded your expectations?
Honestly, I think it was the support. You got James, we got Chris and anytime I have an issue, it would literally end up into their workflow of redesigning something. If we had an issue with support tickets getting buried, like we have 2000 support tickets to look at a time we don’t see when people are getting updates. So they customized the system and now we know if something’s been sitting for too long.
You couldn’t do that with a large enterprise solution where they wouldn’t give a damn what your issues are. But SPP has been very pleasant, I could send an email and nighttime, the next morning, I got a detailed answer and already have a solution. So that’s that I think has been the best thing in working with them so far.
If your best friend was on the fence about trying SPP, what would you tell them?
These guys have been amazing. And I think if you’re on the fence about it, just take it for a test run, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Just the Zapier integration and all that kind of stuff has been truly helpful with us because we like to handle a lot of our internal orders with Google Drive, and Google Sheets and stuff like that. Being able to go back and forth between them seamlessly has been amazing for us.
It’s not going to break your bank to try it out. So give it a shot.
Anything else you want to mention?
I think their future is going to be very bright. They have a lot of customization ability just by the fact that they can integrate with many things, right. There’s just so much potential for them so I think they’re onto something really good.
P.S. Thanks to Tyler from Applause Lab for the interview (his new agency also runs on SPP). Check them out if you need case studies and testimonials for your business.
